The Gentlemen's Hour

Sit silently and savor it.

When they finish eating Dave asks, “So how’s it with Pete?”

“Yeah, good.”

“You close the deal yet?”

Boone doesn’t answer and they both laugh. It’s an old joke between them. For all the lineup talk about sex, when it comes down to individual women, no one talks. It’s just something you don’t do.

“When and if you do close the deal,” Dave says, “it’s over anyway.”

“Thanks for the good wishes.”

“No,” Dave says, “I mean, right now you have that whole opposites-attract,

Moonlighting

sexual tension thing going for you. Once that’s released . . . adios, my friend.”

“I don’t know,” Boone says.

“Get real,” Dave says. “You and the Brit are totally SEI.”

“SEI?”

“Socio-Economically Incompatible,” Dave explains. “She’s downtown, you’re Pacific Beach. She likes to dine out in great restaurants, you hit Jeff’s Burger or Wahoo’s. She’s all foodie, the next great chef, tasting menu, fusion; you’re fish tacos, grilled yellowtail, and peanut butter and jelly on a tortilla. She likes getting dressed up and going out, you like dressing down and staying in.”

“I get it.”

“That’s just the Socio, I haven’t even hit the Economic,” Dave says. “She makes more a day than you do a month.”

“There are months when I make zero.”

“There aren’t months when

she

makes zero,” Dave says. “You don’t have the jack to take her to the places she likes to go, and you’re not going to accept her picking up the check time after time, gender-enlightened as you like to think you are. Right now she thinks it’s all liberated and postfem, but shortly after the first time your board and her wave slap together she’s going to start wondering—and all her professional friends are going to tell her to wonder—if you’re SEI.”

Boone pops open two more beers and hands one to Dave.

“Mahalo,” Dave says. Then, “And I guarantee you that one night you’re going to be lying there postcoit, she’s going to gently bring up the possibility . . . No, I can’t.”

“Jump.”

“She’s going to ask if you wouldn’t really be happier going to law school.”

“Jesus, Dave.”

“On that day, my friend,” Dave says, “you bail. You don’t even stop to get dressed or pick up your clothes— you can always get a new T-shirt. You backpaddle, flailing your arms like a drowning barney. We will all come racing to your rescue.”

“Can’t happen,” Boone says.

“Uh-huh.”

Law school?

Law school?

Boone thinks. The first step to becoming a

lawyer

? Show up at an office every day at nine in a suit and tie? Spend your time shuffling documents and arguing with people. People who

like

to argue?

Hideous.

They sit quietly for a few minutes, drinking in the night and the warm salt air.

Summer was slowly coming to an end, and with it the torpid sea and the days of lassitude. The Santa Ana winds would be blowing in, with bigger surf-and-fire danger, and then the swells of autumn and the colder weather, and the air would be cool and clear again.

Still, there’s a certain sadness to the coming end of summer.

The two friends sit and talk bullshit.

Boone doesn’t tell Dave that he’s working on the Corey Blasingame case.

28

The case that Boone

still

works on is the Rain Sweeny case.

Rain was six years old and Boone was a cop when she disappeared from the front yard of her house.

The chief suspect was a short-eyes named Russ Rasmussen. Boone and his then partner, Steve Harrington, found Rasmussen. Harrington wanted to beat the answers out of the suspect, but Boone hadn’t let him do it. Boone left the force shortly after that but Harrington stayed and worked his way up to sergeant in the Homicide Division.

Rasmussen never told what he did with Rain Sweeny.

He walked and went off the radar.

Rain Sweeny was never found.

Boone became a pariah on the SDPD and pulled the pin shortly after.

That was five years ago, and Boone hasn’t stopped trying to find Rain Sweeny, even though he knows that she’s almost certainly dead.

Now he sits at his computer and checks a special e-mail file for any updates on the list of Jane Does that would match Rain’s age and description. He pays annually for computer constructions of what Rain would look like at her current age, and now he compares her eleven-year-old “photo” with pictures from morgues in Oregon and Indiana.

Neither of the poor girls is Rain.

Boone’s relieved. Every time a photo pops up, it stops his heart; every time it’s not Rain, Boone feels a bittersweet contradiction of emotions. Glad, of course, that the girl has not been confirmed dead; sad that he can’t give her parents closure.

Next he goes to another address and checks for messages about Russ Rasmussen.

Through Johnny Banzai and his own connections, Boone has reached out to the sex crimes units in most major cities and state police forces. Creeps like Rasmussen don’t strike just once, and sooner or later he’s going to get picked up strolling a park or a schoolyard.

When he does, Boone is going to be there soon after.

He keeps a .38 in a drawer just for the occasion.

Tonight, like all the other nights, there’s nothing.

Rasmussen has disappeared.

With Rain.

Gone.

Nevertheless, Boone writes to three more police forces, e-mailing photos of Rain and Rasmussen, the latter in case the skell has managed to change identities and is in custody under a different name.

Then Boone hits the sack and tries to sleep.

It doesn’t always come easily.