Dawn Patrol Read Online Free

which I don’t understand a word that is said.” He turns back to Hang Twelve. “You’re what I have instead of a cat. Don’t make me get a cat.”
    He disappears back up the stairs with a single word, “Follow.”
    Petra goes up the stairs, where Cheerful—a tall man, probably six-six, very thin, wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into khaki trousers—is already hunched over a desk. Well, she takes it on faith that it’s a desk because she can’t actually see the surface underneath the clutter of papers, coffee cups, ball hats, taco wrappers, newspapers, and magazines. But the saturnine man is punching buttons on an old-fashioned adding machine, so she decides that it is, indeed, a desk.
    The “office,” if you can grace it with that name, is a mess, a hovel, a bedlam, except for the back wall, which is neat and ordered. Several black wet suits hang neatly from a steel coatrack, and a variety of surfboards lean against the wall, sorted and ordered by size and shape.
    “Forty-some years ago,” Cheerful says, “a bra was something I tried with trembling fingers and little success to unsnap. Now I find that I
am
a brah. Such are the insults of aging. What can I do for you?”
    “Would you be Mr. Daniels?” Petra asks.
    “I
would
be Sean Connery,” Cheerful replies, “but he’s already taken. So is Boone, but I wouldn’t be him even if I could.”
    “Do you know when Mr. Daniels will be in?”
    “No. Do you?”
    Petra shakes her head. “Which is why I asked.”
    Cheerful looks up from his calculations. This girl doesn’t take any crap. Cheerful likes that, so he says, “Let me explain something to you: Boone doesn’t wear a watch; he wears a sundial.”
    “I take it Mr. Daniels is somewhat laid-back?”
    “If Boone was any more laid-back,” Cheerful says, “he’d be horizontal.”
8
    Boone walks up Garnet Avenue from the beach in the company of Sunny.
    Nothing unusual about that—they’ve been in and out of each other’s company for coming on ten years.
    Sunny originally flashed onto The Dawn Patrol like daytime lightning. Paddled out, took her place in the lineup like she’d been born there. Boone was about to launch into a six-foot right break when Sunny jumped in and took it from him. Boone was still poised on the lip when this blond image zipped past him as if he were a buoy.
    Dave laughed. “Man, that babe just ripped your heart out and fed it to you.”
    Boone wasn’t so freaking amused. He caught the next wave in and found her coming back out through the white water.
    “Yo, Blondie,” Boone said. “You jumped my wave.”
    “My name isn’t ‘Blondie,’ ” Sunny said. “And when did you buy the beach?”
    “I was lined up.”
    “You were late.”
    “My ass I was.”
    “Your ass was late,” Sunny said. “What’s the matter, the big man can’t take getting beat by a girl?”
    “I can take it,” Boone said. Even to himself, it sounded lame.
    “Apparently not,” Sunny said.
    Boone took a closer look at her. “Do I know you?”
    “I don’t know,” Sunny said. “Do you?”
    She lay out on her board and started to paddle back out. Boone had no choice but to follow. Catching up with her wasn’t easy.
    “You go to Pac High?” Boone asked when he got alongside.
    “Used to,” Sunny said. “I’m at SDSU now.”
    “I went to Pac High,” Boone said.
    “I know.”
    “You do?”
    “I remember you,” Sunny said.
    “Uh, I guess I don’t remember you.”
    “I know.”
    She kicked it up and paddled away from him. Then she spent the rest of the session kicking his ass. She took over the water like she owned it, which she did, that afternoon.
    “She’s a specimen,” Dave said as he and Boone watched her from the lineup.
    “Eyes off,” Boone said. “She’s mine.”
    “If she’ll have you.” Dave snorted.
    Turned out she would. She outsurfed him until the sun went down, then waited for him on the beach until he dragged his ass in.
    “I could get used to