“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.