The Gentlemen's Hour by Don Winslow

train is pulling out of the station. There’s a big difference between a witness and an accessory, kid. The former gets to go home, the latter gets to take showers with the Mexican Mafia. Then he slides a pad of paper and a pen across the table and tells Trevor to start writing.
    Write for his life.
    Then the cops buzz back and forth like bees, cross-pollinating Trevor Bodin with Billy and Dean Knowles. Have them toss as much shit as they can at each other, but especially on Corey. A little expository writing workshop, there in the precinct house. Pencils up, students, be sure to use vivid verbs and lively adjectives. Tell it in your own words, find your inner voice.
    The one kid who didn’t get a tutorial was Corey. They just handed him the suicide pen and told him to write. “Just stick the point in your belly, son, and slash up and across. And try not to leak your bloody entrails on our furniture, kid.”
    The investigating officers on the file were Steve Harrington and John Kodani.
    Johnny Banzai.
    A slight problem there.
    Even with the jump-in rule.
    Boone and Johnny established the jump-in rule shortly after Boone got his PI card and they realized that their lines were going to clash from time to time. So the rule is just an understanding that their business lives are sometimes going to conflict with their friendship—that sometimes one of them is going to have to jump in on the other guy’s wave, and it’s nothing personal.
    Yeah, but . . .
    This threatens to get real personal, because for Boone to do his jobhe’s going to have to attack Johnny’s work, his professional ethics. Which is not something you do to a friend and, no mistake, Boone and Johnny Banzai are friends.
    They’ve been boys since they were freshmen law enforcement majors at San Diego State. In those days, Johnny used to surf down in Ocean Beach, and it was Boone who told him that he should check out PB Pier, Boone who made sure that he didn’t catch any locie aggro as a newbie. Yeah, that didn’t take long—when the PB boys saw Johnny shred that wave like he was born in it, when they caught how cool a guy he was, they took him right in.
    Yeah, Boone and JB are friends, as in . . .
    Boone was the best man at Johnny’s wedding (and studied for weeks to learn enough Japanese to properly greet Johnny’s grandparents). As in . . .
    If Johnny and his wife both had to work a weekend day, they’d leave their boys with Boone and Dave at the beach and never give it a second thought because they knew that Boone and Dave would die before they’d let anything happen to those kids. As in . . .
    One of those kids, the younger son, is named James Boone Kodani. As in . . . The normally ultrapeaceful Boone clocked some clown who called Johnny a “slant” right here in this same Sundowner. As in . . .
    When Boone had his problems over the Rain Sweeny case, when he was a pariah on the force, it was J Banzai—and only J Banzai—who stood by him, who’d be seen talking to him, who’d sit down and have lunch with him. And although Boone never knew it, after he pulled the pin, it was Johnny B who whipped out his judo and put an epic ass-kicking on three—count them, three —cops who bad-mouthed Boone in the locker room. As in . . .
    JB came to visit Boone in his crib almost every day during Boone’s long months of lying around feeling sorry for himself. It was JB who kicked his ass to get off the sofa, JB who commiserated with him whenSunny couldn’t stand it anymore and threw him out, Johnny Banzai who told him, “Get back to the ocean, bro. Get back in the water.” As in . . .
    They’re friends.
    So this ain’t gonna be fun.

20
    Boone ponders this as he gets into the Deuce to meet Pete over at the central jail downtown. That he’s going to have to take a chunk out of one of his