Praise for Don Winslow’s
The Dawn Patrol
“The action revs up to a pulsating pace.… A rousing thriller with a sense of morality.”
—The Oregonian
“A great book.… Winslow fills his prose with a staccato, manic energy, stitching words into paragraphs like an expert surfer riding the waves. The Dawn Patrol is that smooth and seemingly effortless, a book that deserves to be a bestseller if ever there was one.”
—The Providence Journal
“Entertaining.… Finds seamy secrets lurk even in idyllic places.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune Review
“I’m hoping this changes things for Don Winslow, that this is a huge success, and that he is hereafter mentioned in the same breath as modern giants such as Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos, because this new book is one of the best private-eye novels I’ve read in years.”
—Cameron Hughes, January Magazine
“Winslow peels back the layers, showing the corrupt soul of a city paying the price for paradise.”
—Crimespree Magazine
“A high-octane tale [and] a stellar meditation on one of California’s favorite pastimes: surfing. Winslow’s measured pitch-perfect sentences bring to life the aching dreams and disappointments, both causal and devastating, that befall Boone and his close-knit circle of wave-riding friends.”
—Newsday
“A powerful, elbow-in-the-throat book.… Pounds its story forward like a relentless surf.”
—The Plain Dealer
“Don Winslow is like a wave-riding Elmore Leonard.”
—Outside
“The perfect summer hybrid novel.… Can’t make it to the beach? No worries. Don Winslow brings the beach right to you.”
—Dayton Daily News
“A tasty combo plate of laid-back surfing, Southern California weirdness and motley ethnic groups—plus passionate love songs to the monster ocean waves and bitchin’ fish tacos.”
—The Seattle Times
DON WINSLOW
The Dawn Patrol
Don Winslow is a former private investigator and consultant. He lives in California.
www.donwinslow.com
ALSO BY DON WINSLOW
The Winter of Frankie Machine
The Power of the Dog
California Fire and Life
The Death and Life of Bobby Z
While Drowning in the Desert
A Long Walk up the Water Slide
Way Down on the High Lonely
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JUNE 2009
Copyright © 2008 by Don Winslow
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2008.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Winslow, Don.
The dawn patrol / by Don Winslow. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Surfers—Fiction. 2. Private Investigators—Fiction. 3. California—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3573.I5326D38 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008006531
eISBN: 978-0-307-79379-9
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
wave (n): a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.
Let me take you down, cos I’m going to, Strawberry Fields.…
Lennon/McCartney
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
1
The marine layer wraps a soft silver blanket over the coast.
The sun is just coming over the hills to the east, and Pacific Beach is still asleep.
The ocean is a color that is not quite blue, not quite green, not quite black, but something somewhere between all three.
Out on the line, Boone Daniels straddles his old longboard like a cowboy on his pony.
He’s on The Dawn Patrol.
2
The girls look like ghosts.
Coming out of the early-morning mist, their silver forms emerge from a thin line of trees as the girls pad through the wet grass that edges the field. The dampness muffles their footsteps, so they approach silently, and the mist that wraps around their legs makes them look as if they’re floating.
Like spirits who died as children.
There are eight of them and they are children; the oldest is fourteen, the youngest ten. They walk toward the waiting men in unconscious lockstep.
The men bend over the mist like giants over clouds, peering down into their universe. But the men aren’t giants; they’re workers, and their universe is the seemingly endless strawberry field that they do not rule, but that rules them. They’re glad for the cool mist—it will burn off soon enough and leave them to the sun’s indifferent mercy.
The men are stoop laborers, bent at the waist for hours at a time, tending to the plants. They’ve made the dangerous odyssey up from Mexico to work in these fields, to send money back to their families south of the border.
They live in primitive camps of corrugated tin shacks, jerry-rigged tents, and lean-tos hidden deep in the narrow canyons above the fields. There are no women in the camps, and the men are lonely. Now they look up to sneak guilty glances at the wraithlike girls coming out of the mist. Glances of need, even though many of these men are fathers, with daughters the ages of these girls.
Between the edge of the field and the banks of the river stands a thick bed of reeds, into which the men have hacked little dugouts, almost caves. Now some of the men go into the reeds and pray that the dawn will not come too soon or burn too brightly and expose their shame to the eyes of God.
3
It’s dawn at the Crest Motel, too.
Sunrise isn’t a sight that a lot of the residents see, unless it’s from the other side—unless they’re just going to bed instead of just getting up.
Only two people are awake now, and neither of them is the desk clerk, who’s catching forty in the office, his butt settled into the chair, his feet propped on the counter. Doesn’t matter. Even if he were awake, he couldn’t see the little balcony of room 342, where the woman is going over the railing.
Her nightgown flutters above her.
An inadequate parachute.
She misses the pool by a couple of feet and her body lands on the concrete with a dull thump.
Not loud enough to wake anyone up.
The guy who tossed her looks down just long enough to make sure she’s dead. He sees her neck at the funny angle, like a broken doll. Watches her blood, black in the faint light, spread toward the pool.
Water seeking water.
4
“Epic macking crunchy.”
That’s how Hang Twelve describes the imminent big swell to Boone Daniels, who actually understands what Hang Twelve is saying, because Boone speaks fluent Surfbonics. Indeed, off to Boone’s right, just to the south, waves are smacking the pilings beneath Crystal Pier. The ocean feels heavy, swollen, pregnant with promise.
The Dawn Patrol—Boone, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God, Johnny Banzai, High Tide, and Sunny Day—sits out there on the line, talking while they wait for the next set to come in. They all wear black winter wet suits that cover them from their wrists to their ankles, because the early-morning water is cold, especially now that it’s stirred up by the approaching storm.
This morning’s interstitial conversation revolves around the big swell, a once-every-twenty-years burgeoning of the surf now rolling toward the San Diego coast like an out-of-control freight train. It’s due in two days, and with it the gray winter sky, some rain, and the biggest waves that any of The Dawn Patrol have seen in their adult lives.
It’s going to be, as Hang Twelve puts it, “epic macking crunchy.”
Which, roughly translated from Surfbonics, is a term of approbation.
It’s going to be good, Boone knows. They might even see twenty-foot peaks coming in every thirty seconds or so. Double overheads, tubes like tunnels, real thunder crushers that could easily take you over the falls and dump you into the washing machine.
Only the best surfers need apply.
Boone qualifies.
While it’s an exaggeration to say that Boone could surf before he could walk, it’s the dead flat truth that he could surf before he could run. Boone is the ultimate “locie”—he was conceived on the beach, born half a mile away, and raised three blocks from where the surf breaks at high tide. His dad surfed; his mom surfed—hence the conceptual session on the sand. In fact, his mom surfed well into the sixth month of her pregnancy, so maybe it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Boone could surf before he could walk.
So Boone’s been a waterman all his life, and then some.
The ocean is his backyard, his haven, his playground, his refuge, his church. He goes into the ocean to get well, to get clean, to remind himself that life is a ride. Boone believes that a wave is God’s tangible message that all the great things in life are free. Boone gets free every day, usually two or three times a day, but always, always, out on The Dawn Patrol.
Boone Daniels lives to surf.
He doesn’t want to talk about the big swell right now, because talking about it might jinx it, cause the swell to lie down and die into the deep recesses of the north Pacific. So even though Hang Twelve is looking at him with his usual expression of unabashed hero worship, Boone changes the subject to an old standard out on the Pacific Beach Dawn Patrol line.
The List of Things That Are Good.
They started the List of Things That Are Good about fifteen years ago, back when they were in high school, when Boone and Dave’s social studies teacher challenged them to “get their priorities straight.”
The list is flexible—items are added or deleted; the rankings change—but the current List of Things That Are Good would read as follows, if, that is, it were written down, which it isn’t:
Double overheads.
Reef break.
The tube.
Girls who will sit on the beach and watch you ride double overheads, reef break, and the tube. (Inspiring Sunny’s remark that “Girls watch—women ride.”)
Free stuff.
Longboards.
Anything made by O’Neill.
All-female outrigger canoe teams.
Fish tacos.
Big Wednesday.
“I propose,” Boone says to the line at large, “moving fish tacos over all-female outrigger canoe teams.”
“From ninth to eighth?” Johnny Banzai asks, his broad, generally serious face breaking into a smile. Johnny Banzai’s real name isn’t Banzai, of course. It’s Kodani, but if you’re a Japanese-American and a seriously radical, nose-first, balls-out, hard-charging surfer, you’re just going to get glossed either “Kamikaze” or “Banzai,” you just are. But as Boone and Dave the Love
God decided that Johnny is just too rational to be suicidal, they decided on Banzai.
When Johnny Banzai isn’t banzaiing, he’s a homicide detective with the San Diego Police Department, and Boone knows that he welcomes the opportunity to argue about things that aren’t grim. So he’s on it. “Basically flip-flopping them?” Johnny Banzai asks. “Based on what?”
“Deep thought and careful consideration,” Boone replies.
Hang Twelve is shocked. The young soul surfer stares at Boone with a look of hurt innocence, his wet goatee dropping to the black neoprene of his winter wet suit, his light brown dreadlocks falling on his shoulder as he cocks his head. “But, Boone—all-female outrigger canoe teams?”
Hang Twelve loves the women of the all-female outrigger canoe teams. Whenever they paddle by, he just sits on his board and stares.
“Listen,” Boone says, “most of those women play for the other team.”
“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks.
“He’s so young,” Johnny observes, and as usual, his observation is accurate. Hang Twelve is a dozen years younger than the rest of The Dawn Patrol. They tolerate him because he’s such an enthusiastic surfer and sort of Boone’s puppy; plus, he gives them the locals’ discount at the surf shop he works at.
“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks urgently.
Sunny Day leans over her board and whispers to him.
Sunny looks just like her name. Her blond hair glows like sunshine. A force of nature—tall, long-legged—Sunny is exactly what Brian Wilson meant when he wrote that he wished they all could be California girls.
Except that Brian’s dream girl usually sat on the beach, whereas Sunny surfs. She’s the best surfer on The Dawn Patrol, better than Boone, and the coming big swell could lift her from waitress to full-time professional surfer. One good photo of Sunny shredding a big wave could get her a sponsorship from one of the major surf-clothing companies, and then there’ll be no stopping her. Now she takes it upon herself to explain to Hang Twelve that most of the females on the all-female outrigger canoe teams are rigged out for females.
Hang Twelve lets out a devastated groan.
“You just ripped a boy’s dreams,” Boone tells Sunny.
“Not necessarily,” Dave the Love God says with a smug smile.