The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,90
Schering?”
“I need this job.”
“You could get a job in any one of a hundred offices, Nicole.”
She shakes her head. “He won’t let me leave—won’t give me a reference.”
“Tell him to go fuck himself.” Boone turns left onto Torrey Pines.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “He’s blackmailing me to stay.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looks away from him, out the passenger window. “Three years ago . . . I had a drug problem. I took some money from him to buy coke—”
“And now you pay him back or he goes to the police,” Boone says.
Nicole nods.
She probably hasn’t had a raise in those three years either, Boone thinks. Works overtime without compensation, and who knows what other services she performs? And he won’t call the cops—he knows they won’t give a shit about a three-year-old case—but she doesn’t know that, and if she tries to leave, he’ll hang the drug tag around her neck. In the closed world of La Jolla, that will bar every door for her.
Nice.
She’s crying now. In the reflection of the window glass he can see mascara running down her face.
“Nicole,” he says, “someone killed Schering and an innocent man is getting blamed. If you know anything, you need to tell it.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll get you started,” he says. “Phil was what you call a geo-whore. Bill used his services. They were going to meet the other day at the La Jolla sinkhole.”
She nods.
He plays a hunch.
“Does Paradise Homes mean anything to you?”
She keeps looking out the window.
Then she nods again.
117
Monkey sits at his computer at home and looks at Sunny’s Web site.
It’s a satisfying encounter, but all it does in the end is piss him off.
Why should guys like Boone Daniels get all the hot women?
Monkey goes through the checklist of possible answers.
Looks.
Okay, nothing he can do about that. Well, he could shave, get a haircut, brush his teeth, eat something other than processed sugar and pastry items, and hit the personal hygiene section at Sav-on every once in a while, but it isn’t going to make him look like Boone, so fuck it.
Sexy job.
A brainless PI? Forget it.
Become a surfer.
Involves deep, cold, moving water and physical exertion beyond the . . . never mind.
What else attracts women?
Money.
But you don’t have money, he tells himself, looking around his shithole one-bedroom east of the Lamp, a building that will soon go condo, which he can’t afford.
But you could get money, couldn’t you?
What was Neanderthal Daniels sniffing after?
Paradise Homes?
Monkey wipes the keyboard off, logs into his database, and goes hunting. I may not have looks, a sexy job, a surfboard, or money (yet), but I have access to information, and information is power, and power is money and . . .
An hour later he has his answer.
He picks up the phone, waits for someone to answer, and says, “You don’t know me, asshole, but my name is Marvin. You have a problem, and I’m the solution.”
Thinking . . . How do you turn Monkey into money?
Just drop the k, baby.
Invigorated, he goes back to Sunny’s Web site.
118
Boone turns on La Jolla Shores Drive, then takes a left on La Playa, then a right, and pulls into the parking lot at La Jolla Shores beach.
Nicole looks at him funny.
“You want to take a walk on the beach?” he asks.
“A walk on the beach?”
“Great time of day for it.” Well, any time is a great time for it. But early evening on a hot August day, with the sky just starting to soften into a gentle pink and the temperature starting to drop: perfection. And dusk is a great time for confession—give your sins to the setting sun and watch them go over the horizon together. Put your past in the past.
So why don’t you do it? he asks himself.
No answer.
She flips down the sunshade and looks at herself in the mirror. “I’m a mess.”
“It’s the beach, nobody cares. Come on.”
“You’re nuts.” But she goes with him.
They don’t say anything for a long time, just walk and watch the sky change color, and think about what she told him.
Bill used Schering as a geo-engineer on a lot of development projects over the years. Schering would go out, do a report on the suitability of a site for construction, and Bill would use that report to take to the county for approval. Most of Schering’s reports were legitimate, but sometimes . . .
Sometimes he would shade the report a little, maybe overlook a weakness, a flaw, a potential danger. And