“Yeah?” Johnny says. “Well, I don’t want to be collateral damage when your do-gooder, misplaced, pussy- whipped meddling goes off.”
He walks over to the bar and sits down, his back to Boone.
A shaft of sunlight pierces the room as the door opens and High Tide comes in for his End of the Workday Beer, a ritual that he practices with religious devotion. He sits down at the table with Boone and then notices Johnny sitting by himself at the bar.
“What’s with Johnny B?” Tide asks.
“We had a spat.”
“Over a boy?” Tide asks, raising a fat finger to the waiter. “Tell you what, why don’t you girls come over tonight, we’ll make popcorn, put on a nice, goopy movie, and the two of you can have a good cry and make up. We could even make brownies.”
“I’m helping defend Corey Blasingame.”
Tide looks at him in disbelief, sees he’s serious, and then says, “Maybe I’ll have my beer at the bar.”
“You know where it is.”
“Late.”
“Late.”
Tide lifts his bulk out of the chair, shakes his head, walks away, and settles himself on a stool next to Johnny.
Well, Boone thinks, this has been a good day.
48
Well, it has been for Jones.
Nothing not to like, moving from one fine hotel to another, checking in twice a day to see if they want him to interview someone, with or without a terminal conclusion.
Jones prefers to be active. He enjoys his work, but a little leisure doesn’t go down so hard, either. Apparently his employer and the powers that be are trying to work this particular problem out “amicably.” If so, Jones gets a free vacation in San Diego; if not, he does a job of work and takes a fatter envelope home with him.
In the meantime he strolls the beach boardwalk, slathers himself with sunblock, observes the lovely young ladies in their swimsuits, and imagines them grimacing in pain.
All in all, a good day.
49
Boone goes home.
Pulls a yellowtail steak out of the fridge, gets it ready, and tosses it on the grill.
Sunny always used to bust him for his ability to eat the same thing over and over again, day after day, but Boone never got what the problem was. His logic was simple: if something is good on Tuesday, why isn’t it good on Wednesday? All that’s changed is the day, not the food.
“But what about variety?” Sunny pressed.
“Overrated,” Boone answered. “We surf every day, don’t we?”
“Yeah, but we change up the place sometimes.”
He steps outside, turns the fish over, and sees High Tide coming up the pier. Boone goes outside to meet him.
“Big man,” Boone says. “S’up?”
“We need to talk.”
Boone unlocks his door and says, “Come on in.”
He’s known Tide since college days, when the big man was a star lineman at SDSU, headed for the pros. He was there to pick him back up when a knee injury ended that career. Boone didn’t know him in his gangbanging days, when Tide was the lord of the Samoan gangs in O’Side, before he found Jesus and gave all that up. He’s heard the stories, though—not from Tide but from other people.
They go into Boone’s. Tide gently lets himself down on the sofa.
“You want anything?” Boone asks.
Tide shakes his big head. “I’m good.”
Boone sits in a chair across from him. “What’s up?”
High Tide is usually a pretty funny guy. Not now. Now he’s dead serious. “You’re on the wrong side of this, Boone.”
“The Blasingame case.”
“See, we don’t look at it as ‘the Blasingame case,’” Tide says. “We look at it as the ‘Kuhio murder.’”
“‘We’ being the island community?” Bundling together the Hawaiians, Samoans, Fijians, and Tongans who have moved in greater numbers to California.
Tide nods. “We fight among ourselves, but when an outsider attacks the
, the community, we bond together.”
“I get that.”
“No,” Tide says, “if you got that, you wouldn’t be lining up on the other side. We’re talking about Kelly Kuhio . . . K2. You know how many islanders the kids have to look up to? A few football players, a couple of surfers. You remember when the Samoan gangs were going at each other?”
“Sure.”
“K2 went street to street, block to block, with me,” Tide says. “He put himself on the line to bring the peace.”
“He was a hero, Tide, I’m not arguing that.”
Tide looks bewildered. “Then—”
“They’re out to lynch that kid,” Boone says. “It’s not right.”
“Let the system work it out.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“
you,” Tide says. “Burke can hire any PI he wants. It doesn’t have to be you. I’m telling you, it’s personally hurtful to me that you took this case. I’m asking you, as your friend, to step out of it.”
High Tide is not only a friend, but also one of the most fundamentally decent people whom Boone has ever known. He’s a man who rebuilt his life—not once, but twice—a family man whose view of family extends to his whole community. He’s gone back and worked with the gangs he used to lead in fights, he’s created peace and a little hope. An intelligent, sensitive man who wouldn’t have come with this request unless he’d given it a lot of thought.
But he’s wrong, Boone thinks. Every lawyer, every investigator in town, could take a pass on this case on the same basis, and even the Coreys of the world—especially the Coreys of the world—need help. If Kelly taught us anything, he taught us that.
“I’m sorry, Joshua, I can’t do that.”
Tide gets up.
Boone says, “We’re still friends, right?”
“I don’t know, B,” Tide says. “I’ll have to think about that.”
First Johnny, now Tide, Boone thinks after the big man has left. How many friendships do I have to put on the line for piece-of-shit Corey Blasingame?
Then he smells his fish burning.
