123
Johnny says.
Boone’s not too surprised—he knows that Johnny’s royally pissed about the Blasingame case and probably shouldn’t even be talking to him outside the office about the Schering murder. “Johnny, I—”
“
friend,
“Don’t,” Boone says. “I have a break in the Schering murder.”
“Can’t.”
“Johnny, this will make the case for you.”
“No.”
The line goes dead. He walks back over to Nicole.
“Is your cop friend going to meet us?” she asks him.
“Not yet,” Boone says. “You hungry?”
“I could eat.”
He walks her over to Jeff’s Burgers.
They’ve spruced the tiny place up a little bit. Its two long narrow rooms have a fresh coat of white paint and murals of the Coronado Bridge with little sailboats gliding underneath. Nicole stands at the counter and looks up at the menu printed on the board above.
“What’s good?” she asks.
“At Jeff’s Burgers?”
“Well, yes.”
“A Jeff’s Burger,” he says.
She asks for a Jeff’s with everything, fries, and a chocolate shake. Boone doubles the order, then they go sit in a booth. The food is ready in a couple of minutes, and she digs into it like it might be her last meal.
“S’good,” she says.
“Stick with me,” Boone answers. “I know all the good places.”
She keeps wolfing it down. Doesn’t say a word until she’s finished the whole thing and then says to him, “Okay.”
“Okay, you’re done?”
“Okay, I trust you.”
“Because of a
She nods and tells him that’s pretty much it. If he was a slime bucket on Bill’s payroll he would have taken her to the nearby Marine Room, bought her an expensive meal, and plied her with wine. Only a genuine surf bum chump would be dumb enough to take her to Jeff’s Burgers.
Well, Boone thinks, you work with what you got.
124
“He has a girlfriend,” Monkey says with a gasp. “British.”
“Name?” Jones asks.
“Pete.”
“Come again?”
“Petra, I think.”
“Surname?”
Monkey shakes his head.
“Oh, dear.”
“Hall,” Monkey says quickly.
“Good,” Jones says. He turns to the Crazy Boys. “Wrap this up and take him with you. We might have more questions to ask him later.”
They take Monkey down from the pipe.
125
Nicole drives Boone to a storage locker in Solana Beach and tells him to wait in the car. Comes out five minutes later with a box and puts it on his lap, then drives him back to her office parking lot and drops him off at the Deuce.
“That’s quite some ride you have there,” she says. “The PI business booming?”
“Like real estate,” he says. “What are you going to do now?”
“Go home, I guess.”
“You have a friend or a relative you could stay with?” Boone asks. “Someone Bill doesn’t know about?”
She has her grandmother up in Escondido, and Boone suggests she stay there for a few days. She gets it, tells him she will, and they exchange cell phone numbers.
“You did the right thing,” Boone says.
“The right thing,” she says, “won’t pay my mortgage.”
Too true, Boone thinks.
126
They have the papers spread out all over Petra’s living-room floor as they create piles of related records and documents that link one to another.
“Do you know what we have here?” Petra asks him.
Boone knows. Freaking dynamite, enough to blow the lid off the city and shake it to its foundations. Bribes to city, county, and state officials for approvals for building projects on dangerous ground; cover-ups of shoddy construction practices; real-estate development partnerships that connect to half the big businesspeople in the county. And this is from just one developer, Bill Blasingame. He can’t be the only pitcher working the corners of the plate; there must be dozens. Where would those connections lead?
Yeah, Boone knows what they have there.
“This might be more wave than we want,” he says.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
Boone explains that sometimes you get into a wave that’s too big for you to handle. It isn’t a matter of pride or ego or even your skill level, it’s just physics—the wave is too tall, heavy, and fast for your board and your body, and it will crush you.
He has that sense here. The individuals and businesses listed in Nicole’s records are connected, and the
