The Gentlemen's Hour Read Online Free PDF

like everyone was a surfer these days, and the water was crowded. The weekends were freaking ridiculous, and Boone was tempted sometimes to take Saturdays and Sundays off, there were so many (mostly bad) surfers hitting the waves.
    It didn’t matter, though; it was just something you had to tolerate. You couldn’t stake out a piece of water like it was land you’d bought. The great thing about the ocean was that it wasn’t for sale, you couldn’t buy it, own it, fence it off—hard as the new luxury hotels that were appearing on the waterside like skin lesions tried to block off paths to the beaches and keep them “private.” The ocean, in Boone’s opinion, was the last stand of pure democracy. Anyone—regardless of race, color, creed, economic status, or the lack thereof—could partake of it.
    So he found localism understandable but ultimately wrong.
    A bad thing.
    A malignantly bad thing, because more and more often, over the past few years, Boone, Dave, Tide, and Johnny all found themselves playing peacemaker, intervening in disputes out on the water that threatened to break into fights. What had been a rare event became commonplace: preventing some locies from hammering an interloper.
    There was that time right at PB. It wasn’t the Dawn Patrol, it was a Saturday afternoon so the water was crowded with locals and newcomers. It was tense out on the line, too many surfers trying to get in the same waves, and then one of the locals just went off. This newbie had cut him off on his line, forcing him to bail, and he sloshed through the whitewater and went after the guy. Worse, his buddies came in behind him.
    It would have been serious, a bad beat-down, except Dave was on the tower and Johnny was in the shallows playing with his kids. Johnny got there first and got between the aggro locies and the dumb newbie and tried to talk some sense. But the locies weren’t having it, and it looked like it was on when Dave came up, and then Boone and Tide, and the Dawn Patrol combo plate got things settled down.
    But Boone and the other sheriffs from the Dawn Patrol weren’t at every break, and the ugly face of localism started to scowl at a lot of places. You started to see bumper stickers proclaiming “This Is Protected Territory,” and the owners of those cars—too often fueled by meth and beer—felt entitled to enforce the edict. Certain breaks up and down the California coast became virtual “no go” zones—even the surf reports warned “foreigners” to stay clear of those breaks.
    What evolved were virtual gangs claiming ocean turf.
    It was ridiculous, Boone thought. Stupid. Everything that surfing isn’t. Yeah, but it was. A scar on the body oceanic, even if Boone didn’t want to look at it.
    But he never expected to see it in The Sundowner.
    The Sundowner is old school. Go in there, you’ll find guys from theDawn Patrol, from the Gentlemen’s Hour, surfers from the pro tour, out-of-towners on a pilgrimage to a surf mecca. Everyone is welcome at The Sundowner.
    Maybe Boone should have seen it coming. The signs were all there, literally, because he started to see them in the windows of other joints in Pacific Beach, reading “No Caps. No Gang Colors.”
    Gang colors?!
    Freaking gang colors on Garnet Avenue?
    Yeah, and it was a problem. The past few years, gangs started to come to PB. Gangs from Barrio Logan and City Heights, but also local gangs, surf gangs— surf freaking gangs —claimed clubs and whole blocks as their partying turf and defended them against other gangs. More and more bars began to hire full-time professional bouncers and security, and the streets of laid-back, surf-happy PB got sketchy at night.
    But that couldn’t happen at The Sundowner.
    Yeah, except it did.

11
    Petra slides into the booth across from Boone.
    He pretends to study the menu, which is ridiculous because Boone has had