And why are you so pissed off about it? he asks himself as he drives south on the PCH, back toward PB. Because they turned to surfing, like you did, and found something different than you did? An aggressive localism? A crew? A tribe?
You have your crew, he tells himself, you have your tribe.
Dave, Johnny, Tide, even Hang.
Sunny, in absentia. And face it—it’s everything to you. Probably more than it should be.
Yeah, but you don’t go out killing people. You just go out and surf, talk some bullshit, have some laughs, bolt some fish tacos. Watch the sun set.
Good times.
So why didn’t Corey find
Maybe because you find what you look for.
What Boyd said about Corey Blasingame? Even in his own circle, the kid didn’t quite cut it. It was like he was trying to fill in this silhouette of what he thought he should be, but he couldn’t color inside the lines.
Boone’s cell phone rings.
Hang set it to play the first bar of Dick Dale’s “Misirlou.”
“S’Boone.”
“Cool,” Boone says. “Meet me on the pier.”
“Sounds right.”
Boone makes the rest of the drive back to Crystal Pier, parks the Deuce in the narrow slot by his cottage, and walks out to the end of the pier. Dan Nichols is already out there, leaning against the railing, staring out at the ocean. Something you probably do a lot, Boone thinks, if you suspect your wife is cheating on you.
Dan hands him the phone record and e-mail printouts.
“Did you look at them?” Boone asks.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Nothing jumps out,” Dan says. “No repeated calls to the same number, except to Melissa.”
“Who’s—”
“Her best friend.”
“Do me a favor?” Boone says. “Cross out
of these you can explain.”
“You could run the numbers, couldn’t you?”
“Yup,” Boone says, “any you don’t cross out. Trying to save me some time and you some cash.”
“Money isn’t my problem in life, Boone.” Dan looks sad, really beaten down. He runs down the sheet of phone numbers, crossing out line after line.
Boone says, “Dan, maybe this means you’re wrong about this. Which is, like, a
thing, you know?”
“I just
it.”
“Okay.” He takes the records from Dan. “I’ll shout you.”
“Thanks.”
Boone walks back to the office, hands the phone records to Hang. “Want to make a little extra jack?”
“Deeds.”
Surfbonics for “yes.”
“Run these phone numbers,” Boone says. “Names and addresses.”
“Moly.”
Momentarily.
Boone goes upstairs. Hang Twelve can not only make a computer sing, he can also make it perform Puccini arias standing on a basketball while juggling burning torches.
Cheerful is banging the adding machine.
“Didn’t have a chance to tell you,” Boone says. He shoves some old mags off his chair and sits down. “I took the Corey Blasingame gig.”
Cheerful doesn’t look happy. Which, of course, is his default setting anyway, but now he turns the color up on the unhappy dial. “I’m not sure that’s such a smart move.”
“It’s a macking dumb move,” Boone says. “Why I’m qualified.”
“Petra talk you into it?”
“Sorta.”
“It’s not going to make you very popular around here,” Cheerful says.
Boone shrugs. “Keep it to yourself for a while.”
Hang Twelve bounds up the stairs. “I zipped the Arabics, got tags and cribs for every sat reach-out—totally squeezy, tube blast—and went Amish for you. Foffed?”
Translation: I ran the numbers, Boone dude, and got names and addresses for every cell-phone call—it was really easy and very fast—and I printed out a hard copy for you. Happy?
“Nurries.”
No worries.
“Late, yah?”
“Latrons.”
Hang bounces back down the stairs.
Boone looks at the printout. It has nothing to offer—calls to grocery stores, her masseuse, a boutique in Solana Beach . . . routine stuff with very few repeats. So if Donna Nichols has a lover, she isn’t communicating with him over the phone.
Sucks.
Now he’ll have to wait for Dan to go out of town and then follow her.
24
Boone’s place is the last cottage on the north side of Crystal Pier.
It’s worth a freaking fortune and Boone couldn’t have come close to affording it, but Cheerful insisted on giving it to him as a reward for helping disentangle him from a marriage with a twenty-five-year-old alimony hunter.
Despite its more than prime location, it’s a simple place. A small living room with a kitchen area, one bedroom, one bath. All the plank boards painted white. The very cool thing for Boone is that it sits literally right over the water. He can even open a window, stick a pole out, and fish right from his bedroom.
Boone comes in, goes to the fridge for a cold Dos Equis, and sits down at the kitchen table with a fresh notepad, a pen, and the Blasingame file.
The two remaining eyewitness statements are key. Alan Burke can knock some of the sting out of the Rockpile Crew testimony because the other members have something to gain, but two objective eyewitnesses are far more damaging.
Jill Thompson is twenty-one years old, a part-time student at SDSU, and a
at Starbucks. The night of the killing, she and a friend of hers, Marissa Lopez, had been club-hopping along
