Free Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow Page B

because of the odd hours, and also because women who aren’t strippers usually don’t want to have friends who are because they’re afraid the dancers will steal their boyfriends.
    So he’s playing the odds that say the Jane Doe is a stripper.
    “I need to ID a dancer,” Boone says. “Redhead, an off-the-rack rack, an angel tattoo on her left wrist.”
    “Gimme putt,” Dave says. “Angela Hart.”
    “Angel
Heart
?”
    “A nom de strip,” Dave says. “What about her?”
    “She a … uh,
friend
of yours?”
    “A gentleman doesn’t tell, BD,” says Dave. “But that’s a serious tone you’ve adopted. What’s underneath it?”
    “She’s dead.”
    Dave stares out over the ocean. The waves are starting to get bigger, and choppy, and the color of the water is a dark gray.
    “Dead how?” Dave asks.
    “Maybe suicide.”
    Dave shakes his head. “Not Angela. She was a force of nature.”
    “She ever work at Silver Dan’s?”
    “Didn’t they all?”
    “Was she friends with a girl named Tammy?”
    “They were tight,” Dave says. “What’s she got to do with this?”
    “I don’t know yet.”
    Dave nods.
    He and Boone sit and look at the water together. Boone doesn’t rush things. He knows his friend is working through it. And the ocean never gets boring—it’s always the same and always different.
    Then Dave says, “Angela was pure nectar. You need any help finding out who killed her, you give me a shout.”
    “No worries.”
    Dave’s back on the ’nocs, scoping the Flatland Barbies back to their hotel room.
    Boone knows that he’s looking but he
isn’t
, you know.
22
    Boone doesn’t get far from the lifeguard tower.
    He’s on the boardwalk, heading back toward his ride, when who should he see, on a kid’s dirt bike with tires thicker than a Kansas prom queen, than—
    Red Eddie.
    Red Eddie is a Harvard-educated, Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Portuguese-Anglo-Californian with traffic-cone red hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah—traffic cones aren’t red, they’re orange, and Eddie’s first name isn’t Eddie, it’s Julius. But there isn’t a soul on this earth who has the stones to call the dude “Orange Julius.”
    Not Boone, not Dave the Love God, not Johnny Banzai, not even High Tide, because Red Eddie is usually surrounded by at least a six-pack of super size Hawaiian
moke
guys and Eddie don’t think nothing about letting the dogs out.
    Red Eddie deals
pakololo
.
    His old man, who owned a few dozen grocery stores in Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island, sent Eddie from the north shore of Oahu to Harvard and then to Wharton Business School, and Eddie returned to the island with a sound business plan. It was Eddie who put the Wowie in Maui, the high in hydro. He brings massive amounts of the stuff in by boat. They drop it offshore in watertight plastic wrap, and Eddie’s guys go out at night in Zodiacs, the small double-pontoon motorboats, and bring it in.
    “I’m a missionary,” Eddie said to Boone one night at The Sundowner. “Remember how missionaries sailed from America to Hawaii to spread the good word and totally fuck up the culture? I’m returning the favor. Except my good news is benevolent and your culture
needs
fucking up.”
    Benevolence has been good to Red Eddie, giving him an ocean-viewmansion in La Jolla, a house on the beach in Waimea, and a 110-foot motor yacht docked in San Diego Harbor.
    Red Eddie is totally Pacific Rim, the epitome of the current West Coast economic and cultural scene, which is a mélange of Cali-Asian-Polynesian. Like a good salsa, Boone thinks, with a little mango and pineapple mixed in.
    Boone and Eddie go back.
    Like a lot of stories in this part of the world, it starts in the water.
    Eddie has a kid from a high school indiscretion.
    The kid doesn’t live with Eddie—he lives with his mother in Oahu—but Keiki Eddie comes for visits. He was about three years old on one of these visits, when a big swell hit the coast and Keiki Eddie’s idiot nanny