The Gentlemen's Hour

“I’m begging you, Phil.”

“And I thought you loved me.”

A short, cynical laugh.

“If it’s money,”

Donna says,

“we can pay you whatever . . .”

The nifty LiveWire Fast Track Ultrathin Real-Time GPS tracking device keeps a record of every place where the target vehicle went. Boone types in the command for the program to do just that and watches it for the night when Schering was murdered.

You didn’t follow Donna Nichols that morning, Boone tells himself. You followed Phil. You assumed Donna went straight home, but . . .

The record says she didn’t. The record says that she went to a house down in Point Loma, was there for an hour, and then she went home.

Boone scrolls the tracking record. Donna Nichols made three more visits to the same house over the past two days. She—or at least her cool white Lexus—went to that house just after you left her at the party at the Prado. Just a little while before you were bagged and thrown into the water, then interrogated.

To find out what you did with the records.

He turns the GPS device onto “active” and watches the screen.

Donna Nichols is at the same house now.

156

It’s a modest house at the end of a cul-de-sac on a nondescript street.

There’s nothing special about it if you don’t know what you are seeing.

Boone does.

He spots the two cars—a soccer mom–style van and a preowned sedan—parked out on the street with men sitting in them.

Sicarios, as they’re known in the narcotics trade. Gunmen, bodyguards.

Donna’s car is in the driveway.

Boone knows he can’t get closer—the sicarios in the cars would be watching and they’d shake him down before he got anywhere near the house where Cruz Iglesias is hiding. He turns around in the shallow opening of the street and does a U-turn, goes back down the avenue, and turns into the parallel street.

The rear of the house is visible, set behind a high stone wall. Sicarios will be on guard in the backyard, but he doesn’t see any on this street, so he parks the Deuce a house away, turns off the motor, and gets out the parabolic sound detector. He trains it at Iglesias’s safe house, praying that it has the range advertised.

It takes a few minutes, but he picks up the sound of her voice.

Begging for her husband’s future, begging for his life. Telling Iglesias that Dan knew nothing,

nothing

about Blasingame’s scam originally, and that he told the drug lord as soon as he found out. He wouldn’t cheat his partners that way, Don Iglesias. Their families have been in business together for generations.

“We came to you, didn’t we?”

she says.

“We came to you.”

“But what,”

Iglesias asks,

“if this scandal reaches you? How long before it reaches the rest of us?”

“It won’t,” she says. “Please, por favor, please. I beg you. What can I do?”

He tells her.

Boone listens to the sound of their lovemaking, if it can be called that, for only a minute or so, and then he drives away.

157

The Dawn Patrol, or what’s left of it, is already out, paddling toward the small break, their bodies silver in the gathering light. They are mercurial and fluid, timeless and of the moment. Boone watches, admiring their strength and grace, then turns away and walks outside.

He opens the stand-up locker and takes out a long paddle board and a paddle, walks to the edge of the pier opposite the Dawn Patrol, tosses the board over, and jumps in behind it. He climbs up onto the board, balances the paddle, stands up, and rows out, to give himself distance from his former friends, before he turns north and rows parallel to the coast.

Boone has always loved this coastline, each of its distinctive beaches and coves, points and cliffs and bluffs, its black rock, red earth, and green chaparral, but now, as he takes it in, he sees it differently.

It’s his home, will always be his home, but is it fundamentally flawed, built on cracks and faults, on shifting ground that will fall and slide and collapse? And the culture built on top of this unstable earth—the Southern California free, easy, casual, rich, poor, crazy, beautiful life—is it also fundamentally corrupt? Will its cracks and rifts widen to the point where it can no longer stand, its own weight pulling it down?

Boone feels strong, standing and rowing. It’s good to stand on a board, instead of lying or sitting; it gives him literally a different perspective, a longer view. He looks back to where his old friends sit on the line, small now in the vast ocean, dots against the pylons of the pier. What about those friends, the Dawn Patrol? Were those friendships, too, built on a cracked and flawed foundation? Was it inevitable that the fissures of race and sex, ambitions and dreams, would separate them like continents that were once joined and now are oceans apart?

And what about you? he asks himself as he rows on, sweating with the fine exertion of powerful strokes against the current. What’s your life been built on? Uncertain, shifting ground . . . unsteady tides? Has it all come apart now? And if so, can you rebuild it?

Has your life always been based on shaky foundations? Everything you believed been false?

He keeps rowing and only turns around when he has just enough strength to make it back to shore.

By that time, the Dawn Patrol has ended.

It’s the Gentlemen’s Hour.

158

He waits on the beach for Dan Nichols to come in.

Dan looks good, strong and refreshed, and a little out of breath as he picks his board up from the water, walks onto the sand, and gives Boone a big wave.

“Boone!” he says. “I thought you were coming out.”

“Changed my mind.”

“Have you had a chance to think about my offer?”

“Yeah?”

“And?”

“You set me up, Dan.”

Boone lays it out.

How Dan was a silent partner in Paradise Homes, partners with Cruz Iglesias and his Baja Cartel. When the