What he’s going to need is a little unit that will fit under the bumper of Donna’s car.
“What does Donna usually drive?” Boone asks. “A white Lexus SUV,” Dan said. “Birthday present.”
Nice, Boone thinks. For his last birthday he got some sex wax from Hang, some two-fer coupons for Jeff’s Burger from Tide, and a card from Dave expressing the sentiment “Go Fuck Yourself.”
“Who’s the car registered to?” Boone asks.
“Me,” Dan answers. “Well, the corporation.”
“Natch.”
Tax stuff, Boone thinks. People with corporations don’t buy anything personally if they can help it. Anything that even tangentially touches the business is a write-off. But your wife’s birthday present?
Dan says, “Donna’s an officer.”
Doesn’t matter, Boone thinks—it would still be perfectly kosher for Dan to put a tracking device on a car his corporation owns, and he wouldn’t have to disclose it to Donna, even if she were an officer. Boone describes the little tracker device that’s attached to a small but powerful magnet. “You just put it under the rear bumper.”
“Without her seeing me,” Dan says.
“That would be better, yeah.”
And the tracking device would be better than following her because this could be a long job, and it would be too easy to get made.
“I’ll pick up the stuff and meet you somewhere to hand it over,” Boone says.
“Cool.”
No, uncool, Boone thinks, already feeling like a sleaze.
Very uncool.
They paddle in.
Boone skips The Sundowner because he’s in a hurry.
He now has one clear day to explore the life and times of Corey Blasingame.
31
He drives over to Corey’s “place of work,” as they say in the police reports.
Corey delivered pizzas.
Drove around in one of those little cars with the sign on top, carting twelve-dollar extra-large specials to college kids, slackers, and parents too busy on a given night to get supper together for the kids.
Yeah, okay, but what was rich kid Corey doing delivering pizzas for minimum wage and minimum tips? Tip money is good money if you’re waiting tables at Mille Fleurs on a Saturday night, but not when you’re pushing the pepperoni in dorms. Corey’s daddy is slapping up half the luxury homes infesting the coastline, but the kid is driving around wearing a funny hat and taking shit for not getting there in twenty minutes?
Turns out Corey was about to lose even that job.
“Why?” Boone asks the franchise owner, Mr. McKay.
“The job was delivering pizzas,” Mr. McKay says. “And he wasn’t delivering them.”
Worse, he was stealing them. McKay suspected that Corey had his friends call up, order pizzas, and then deny it when Corey went to “deliver.” Then Corey ate the “spoilage.” It got to the point where McKay insisted that Corey bring the spurned extra-large-with-everything-except-anchovies back to the store to be officially thrown away.
“Anyway, I think he was stoned,” McKay says.
“On what?”
McKay shrugs. “I don’t know anything about drugs, but he seemed like he was hopped up on speed or something. Really, I was about to terminate him when . . .”
He lets it trail off.
Nobody liked talking about the Kuhio killing.
Depressing, Boone thinks as he drives over to Corey’s old high school. The guy had a gig hauling pizzas and jacks his own product. Like, if you were around pizza all the time, is that really what you’d want for dinner?
Boone checks himself. Are you feeling sorry for this kid now?
Yeah, sort of, especially after he leaves the school.
32
LJPA.
La Jolla Prep.
More properly, La Jolla Preparatory Academy.
Prep for what? Boone thinks as he approaches the security shack that flanks the gated driveway. The students were born on third base, so it must be prep for getting them that last ninety feet. Not that these kids start with a foot on the bag. No, they take a nice long lead, secure in the knowledge that no one is going to even try to pick them off.
The guard isn’t too enthused about the Deuce.
It’s a funny thing about security guys, Boone thinks as he sees the uniformed man step out of the shack with that “Turn it around, buddy” look already on his face. They stay in one spot long enough, they get to thinking that they own the place. They actually take a protective pride in guarding a group of people who are very polite, even warm, as they’re going in and out, but are never, ever going to ask them inside to the Christmas party. Boone can never understand why people will man the gates that keep them out.
And, since Columbine, getting into a school is hard, especially when the school is one of the most exclusive on the West Coast. Boone rolls down the window.
“Can I help you?” the guard asks, meaning, “Can I help you
?”
Because the guard already knows. He takes one look inside the Deuce at the mess of wet suits, board trunks, fast-food wrappers, Styrofoam coffee cups, towels, and blankets, and
that Boone doesn’t belong here. Now he has to make sure that Boone knows he doesn’t belong here.
While the guard was checking out the van, Boone took a quick glance of the little nameplate pinned on his shirt pocket. “You’re Jim Nerburn, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Any relation to Ken Nerburn?”
“He’s my kid.”
“He’s a good guy, Ken.”
“You know him?”
“We’ve surfed together a little.” Boone sticks his hand out the window. “Boone Daniels.”
“Jim Nerburn.”
“We met at a Padres game, didn’t we?” Boone asks. “You were with Ken and some of his friends?”
“That’s right,” Nerburn says. “That Cardinal rookie threw a no-hitter.”
“I remember that. Dollar hot dog night, too.”
Nerburn pats his belly. “Yes, it was. What brings you here today, Boone?” Boone takes out his PI card and shows it to Nerburn. “I’m on the clock. I need to talk to some folks about Corey Blasingame.”
Nerburn’s face darkens. Funny, Boone thinks, how faces tend to do that when you bring up Corey’s name. “They’d like to forget about Corey around here.”
I’ll bet they would, Boone thinks. LJPA students go on to Stanford, UCLA, Princeton, and Duke, or maybe closer to home at UCSD. They don’t go to jail. Boone seriously doubts that Corey is going to make the holiday
