Dawn Patrol Read Online Free Page B

upstairs looking for you. And Cheerful’s way aggro.”
    “Cheerful’s
always
aggravated,” Boone replies. “That’s what makes him Cheerful. Who’s the woman?”
    “Dunno.” Hang Twelve shrugs. “But, Boone, she’s
smokin’
hot.”
    Boone goes upstairs. The woman isn’t smokin’ hot; she’s smokin’
cold
. But she is definitely smokin’.
    “Mr. Daniels?” Petra says.
    “Guilty.”
    She offers her hand, and Boone is about to shake it, when he realizes that she’s handing him her card.
    “Petra Hall,” she says. “From the law firm Burke, Spitz and Culver.”
    Boone knows the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver. They have an office in one of the glass castles in downtown San Diego and have sent him a lot of work over the past few years.
    And Alan Burke surfs.
    Not every day, but a lot of weekends, and sometimes Boone sees him out on the line during the Gentlemen’s Hour. So he knows Alan Burke, but he doesn’t know this small, beautiful woman with the midnight hair and the blue eyes.
    Or are they gray?
    “You must be new with the firm,” Boone says.
    Petra’s appalled as she watches Boone reach behind his back and pull the cord that’s connected to a zipper. The back of the wet suit opens, and then Boone gently peels the suit off his right arm, then his left, then rolls it down his chest. She starts to turn away as he rolls the suit down over his waist, and then she sees the flower pattern of his North Shore board trunks appear.
    She’s looking at a man who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but it’s hard to tell because he has a somewhat boyish face, made all the more so by his slightly too long, unkempt, sun-streaked brown hair, which is either intentionally unstylishly long or has simply not been cut recently. He’s tall, just an inch or two shorter than the saturnine old man still banging away on the adding machine, and he has the wide shoulders and long arm muscles of a swimmer.
    Boone’s oblivious to her observation.
    He’s all about the swell.
    “There’s a swell rolling down from the Aleutians,” he says as he finishes rolling the wet suit over his ankles. “It’s going to hit sometime in the next two days and High Tide says it’s only going to last a few hours. Biggest swell of the last four years and maybe the next four. Humongous waves.”
    “Real BBM,” Hang Twelve says from the staircase.
    “Is anyone watching the store?” Cheerful asks.
    “There’s no one down there,” Hang Twelve says.
    “ ‘BBM’?” Petra asks.
    “Brown boardshorts material,” Hang Twelve says helpfully.
    “Lovely,” Petra says, wishing she hadn’t asked. “Thank you.”
    “Anyway,” Boone says as he steps into the small bathroom, turns on the shower, and carefully rinses not himself but the wet suit, “everyone’s going out. Johnny Banzai’s going to take a mental-health day, High Tide’s calling in sick, Dave the Love God’s on the beach anyway, and Sunny, well, you know Sunny’s going to be out. Everyone is
stoked
.”
    Petra delivers the bad news.
    She has work for him to do.
    “Our firm,” Petra says, “is defending Coastal Insurance Company in asuit against it by one Daniel Silvieri, aka Dan Silver, owner of a strip club called Silver Dan’s.”
    “Don’t know the place,” Boone says.
    “Yeah you do, Boone,” Hang Twelve says. “You and Dave took me there for my birthday.”
    “We took you to Chuck E. Cheese’s,” Boone snaps. “Back-paddle.”
    “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”
    It’s amazing, Boone thinks, how Hang Twelve can suddenly speak actual English when there’s an attractive woman involved. He says, “Petra Hall, Hang Twelve.”
    “Another nom de idiot?” Petra asks.
    “He has twelve toes,” Boone says.
    “He does not,” says Petra. Then she looks down at his sandals. “He has twelve toes.”
    “Six on each foot,” says Boone.
    “Gives me sick traction on the board,” Hang Twelve says.
    “The strip club is