The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,41

to pull it out. You don’t tell the client that you have it, because most of them can’t resist the temptation to listen to it, even though you advise them against it.

But you have it if you need it. It’s for your client’s protection and your own.

So Boone puts the eavesdropping technology on his own card so Dan doesn’t see the expense, ask about it, and end up with the sounds of his wife’s illicit lovemaking on his mental playlist.

Nick runs the item across the scanner and says, “You got the software for this?”

“Hang hooked me up.”

“Cool,” Nick says. “This new version of this tracker? You can set it for one-, five-, or ten-second blings, it has a motion alarm and a detachable motion alert. And it keeps a record of every place the vehicle goes. One eighty-one and sixty-three cents, please.”

Boone pays cash, takes the receipt, and gets out of there before he has to listen to a conversation about how the Venusians are systematically injecting truth serum into your Quaker Instant Oatmeal packages.

He’s back in the parking lot when two guys come up to him and one of them sticks a gun in his ribs.

43

“Hello, Rabbit,” Boone says.

“Howzit, Boone?” Rabbit says. “Red Eddie, he wants to see you.”

“Wants to see you,” Echo says.

The origin of Echo’s name is pretty obvious. So is Rabbit’s, actually, but no one likes to talk about it. Rabbit and Echo are sort of the Mutt and Jeff, the Abbott and Costello, the Cheney and Bush, of Red Eddie’s squadron of thugs. Rabbit is tall and thin, Echo is short and thick. Both the Hawaiian gangsters wear flower-print shirts over baggy shorts and sandals. The shirts run about three bills each and come from a store in Lahaina. Red Eddie pays his muscle well.

“I don’t want to see him,” Boone says.

He knows it’s useless to refuse, but he just feels he has to give them a little aggro anyway. Besides, his ribs already hurt from when Mike Boyd tried to enfossilize them into the canvas.

“We have our instructions,” Rabbit says.

“Our instructions.”

“That’s really annoying, Echo.”

“Get in the ride,” Rabbit says.

“In the—”

“Shut up.” But Boone goes with them and gets into the black Escalade. Rabbit gets behind the wheel and turns the ignition. Fijian surf reggae music comes blasting out of the speakers.

“You think you have enough bass?!” Boone yells.

“Not enough?!” Rabbit yells back. “I didn’t think so!”

“Didn’t think so!”

The Escalade goes throbbing down the street.

All the way to La Jolla.

44

Red Eddie stands on his skateboard, perched at the lip of the twenty-foot-high half pipe he had built in his backyard.

One of the many reasons his stuffy La Jolla neighbors love having Eddie in the hood.

Red Eddie is shirtless over black hui board trunks, the black being a symbol of extreme localism back in the islands. If you’re a haole and you pull up to a break full of guys with black trunks on, pull out. What Eddie isn’t wearing is a helmet, or elbow or knee pads, because he thinks they make him look stupid.

Now he points to the bracelet attached to his right ankle.

“You see this?” he says as Rabbit and Echo usher Boone into the backyard. “This is your bad.”

Boone isn’t exactly eaten up with guilt. For one thing, if you had to be under house arrest, Red Eddie’s is a pretty nice crib to do it in. His little nest is seven thousand square feet overlooking Bird Rock Beach, with a horizon pool, Jacuzzi, skateboard half pipe, four bedrooms, a living room with a 260-degree view of the Pacific, a state-of-the-art kitchen where Eddie’s personal chef does new and progressive things with Spam, and a home theater with its enormous flat-screen-plasma, Bose sound system and every piece of video-game techno known to postmodern man.

Second, Eddie should be in an eight-by-seven hole in a FedMax facility on some cold, rainy stretch of northern coast instead of his sunny mansion in La Jolla, because the Harvard-educated, Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Portuguese-Anglo-Californian pakololo magnate was importing underage Mexican girls along with his usual marijuana shipments, and Boone is more than happy to accept responsibility for busting him.

Therefore, third, Red Eddie is damn lucky to be under house arrest as his lawyers drag out the criminal proceedings against him while persuading the judge that Red Eddie, who owns houses in Kauai, Honolulu, the Big Island, Puerto Vallarta, Costa Rica, and Lucerne, is no flight risk because of his ties to the community. “Ties to the community”—no shit, Boone thinks. Eddie’s