The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,53

blame you for an acquittal. You were handcuffed by a shoddy investigation and a rush to judgment, what could you do? I’m sure Marcia Clark would—”

“I’d go second degree,” Mary Lou says. “My best and final offer.”

“That’s fifteen to life.”

“Yeah, I’ve read the statute,” she says.

“Sentence recommendation?”

She sits back down. “It would have to be somewhere in the midrange, Alan. I won’t push for max, but I can’t go minimum, I just can’t.”

Alan nods. “He serves ten on sixteen?”

“We’re in the same ballpark.”

“I’ll have to take it to my client,” Alan says.

“Of course.”

Alan stands up and shakes her hand. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mary Lou.”

“Always, Alan.”

The Gentlemen’s Hour.

63

The women finally come out of the restaurant. Kisses on the cheek all around, promises to do this again “sooner,” and then Donna starts walking back toward the parking lot. Boone gives her a good head start, then catches up, passes her, and is in his van waiting when she pulls out of the lot. He gives her a lot of time, watching her progress on the screen as she drives west on Laurel Street through the park, down toward the airport, then gets on the 5 north.

She could be heading home, but she takes the exit for Solana Beach and parks on Cedros Street. Boone is just a couple of minutes behind her as she parks and then walks from store to store on this block of expensive furniture stores. Then she goes into a clothing boutique and spends forty-five minutes. And some money, apparently, because she comes out with a couple of dresses on hangers and goes back to her car.

Now she drives home and pulls into the garage.

Boone sits a block away. Ten minutes later, a car pulls into the driveway. A young man in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, bicycling shorts, and muscles gets out and rings the bell. Donna lets him in.

She wouldn’t, Boone thinks. She wouldn’t have the nerve or the bad taste to do this right in her own home. Doesn’t happen. He takes his binoculars, scopes the license plate, and calls Dan.

“That’s Tony,” Dan says. “Personal trainer.”

“Uhhh, Dan, I know this would be really cliché, but—”

“Tony also dances in an all-boy nude dance review in Hillcrest,” Dan says, naming San Diego’s preeminent gay neighborhood. “Unless he’s swapped jerseys—”

“Okay, then.”

Tony comes out an hour later. Donna, red-faced and sweating, waves good-bye and goes back in.

So it’s good being Donna Nichols, Boone decides. A little spa treatment, a nice lunch, some high-end shopping, a customized workout, hopefully a quiet dinner at home. And, just as hopefully, Dan is wrong about his wife’s infidelity. Just a little premature midlife insecurity on his part. Has probably happened to half the guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour.

Yeah, no.

Because it’s August, and August blows.

There’s no surf, K2 is gone because some stupid kid has to belong to something, women reach into your insides and rip them out, and Donna Nichols comes out of her house dressed to kill.

64

Boone watches the little pings head toward Del Mar.

His route takes him past Torrey Pines Beach and that beautiful stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that he loves so dearly. It’s just summertime dusk, with the sun setting fat and hot over the horizon, and plenty of people are still lazing on the beach.

Boone never drives this stretch without feeling this little tug at his heart. The place is just ineffably beautiful, and he feels lucky to live there. It cheers him up a bit, makes him forget for a moment that he’s about to do something that he really doesn’t want to do.

North on Torrey Pines Road, then up Camino Del Mar—the town of Del Mar’s rechristening of the Pacific Coast Highway—then a left up the steep hill away from the ocean. Donna passes “Go,” collects two hundred dollars, and lands on the square marked 1457 Cuchara Drive.

Her car is parked in the driveway when Boone catches up to the flashing red dots on the GPS screen and slowly drives down the expensive suburban street. You have to have bucks to live in this neighborhood—not necessarily Dan Nichols’s kind of bucks, but bucks. Not a lot of on-street parking here, and Boone doesn’t want Donna to notice the van, so he’s happy to find a spot about halfway down the block and across the street.

He can see Donna through the living room window, sitting on a sofa, having a drink. A guy sits next to her, but Boone doesn’t get a good view of