Hollywood Station

EIGHT

AFTER STOPPING AT the Gulag for a happy hour drink, Cosmo Betrossian was driving his eighteen-year-old Cadillac east on Sunset to Korea Town, where he was living temporarily, and thinking of how impressed Dmitri had been with him during their meeting last week. This was where he belonged, with people like Dmitri. Cosmo was forty-three years old, too old to be dealing with people addicted to crystal meth. Too old to be buying the paper they’d stolen from mailboxes or from purses left in cars and then shopping the credit-card information to the other freaks at the public libraries and cybercafés, where they sold stolen information and dealt drugs on the Internet.

Cosmo and Ilya had never committed an armed robbery prior to the jewelry store job. The hand grenade idea came from something he had heard from one of the addicts who had read about it in a San Diego newspaper. The reason the addict had mentioned it to Cosmo at all was that the robbers who did it were Armenians who were supposed to be connected with Russian Mafia. Cosmo had to laugh. He had stolen their idea and their modus operandi, and it had been easy. And it had all come to him because he was an Armenian émigré.

The knowledge about the diamonds’ arriving on the premises had come to him by way of another of the addicts he had been dealing with for several months. It was information from an invoice receipt acknowledging delivery, sent by the jewelry store to a Hong Kong supplier. Along with that stolen letter had been another one, also bearing the jewelry store’s return address, sent to a customer in San Francisco, telling the customer that an “exciting delivery” of stones had arrived and were just what the customer had in mind when last he’d visited the Los Angeles store. The letters had been stolen from a mailbox by an addict who traded a bag full of credit-card and check information along with the letters in question for four teeners of crystal meth that Cosmo had bought for two hundred fifty dollars and used as trade bait.

He’d been doing business with tweakers for over a year and only on one occasion did he and Ilya smoke some crystal with them, but neither had liked the high, although it did sexually arouse them. They preferred cocaine and vodka. Cosmo had told the addicts that he and Ilya were more normal, old-fashioned people.

The thing that really had him excited now was that the robbery had been easy. It gave him a great thrill to make that jeweler weep and piss all over himself. Cosmo had fucked Ilya all night after they had done the robbery. And she too admitted that it had been sexually stimulating. Though she said that she would not participate in any more armed robberies, he thought that he could persuade her.

Ilya was waiting for him when he got back to their apartment. As soon as they sold the diamonds, they would be moving, maybe to a nicer apartment in Little Armenia. Their two-room hovel over a residential garage had been rented to them by a Korean who never asked questions about the men, both white and Asian, who visited Ilya in that apartment for a “massage” and left within an hour or so. Ilya had formerly done a lot of out-call work, until she got arrested in a hotel room on a sting by a handsome vice cop who had flash money and nice clothes and rings on his fingers. Ilya wept when he showed his badge that night. She had been naive enough then to think that the handsome stranger had possibilities beyond a quick blow job.

Ilya was thirty-six years old and without a lot of years left for this kind of life, which is how she got teamed up with Cosmo. He’d promised to take care of her, promising that she’d never get arrested again and that he’d make enough money that she’d seldom have to sell her ass. But so far, she was making more money with her ass than he was making with the addicts who brought him things to trade for drugs.

Cosmo saw the outside light on after he’d parked half a block away and walked through the alley to the garage apartment with its termite-eaten stairway leading up. He was puzzled because she did not have a massage scheduled. He had specifically asked her about that. He felt a rush of fear through his bowels because it could mean a warning from her. But no, he could see her moving past the window. If cops were there, she’d be sitting, probably handcuffed. He took the stairs two at a time stealthily and opened the door without announcing his presence.

“Hi, Cosmo!” Olive Oyl said, with a gap-toothed smile, sitting on the small settee.

“Evening, Cosmo,” Farley said with his usual smirk, sitting next to Olive.

“Hello to you, Olive. Hello to you, Farley,” Cosmo said. “You did not call me. I am not expecting you to come here tonight.”

“They called me,” Ilya said, “after you went to Dmitri’s.”

Cosmo shot her a look. Stupid woman. She mentioned Dmitri in front of these addicts. He turned to Farley and said, “What is it you bring for me?”

“A business proposition,” Farley said, still smirking.

Puzzled, Cosmo looked at Ilya. Her blond hair was pulled straight back in a tight bun, which she would never do if she was expecting guests, even addict customers like these. And her makeup was haphazardly applied, and there were dark lines under her eyes. He guessed that she had been taking one of her long afternoon naps when the freaks called, and hadn’t really pulled herself together before their arrival. Ilya showed Cosmo a very worried face.

“What business?” Cosmo asked.

“Sort of a partnership,” Farley said.

“I do not understand.”

“We figure that the last stuff we brought you was worth more than the few teeners you gave us. A whole lot more.”

“It is very hard thing to sell credit-card information and the banking paper today. Everyone who do crystal can make many deals today. Everybody know about-how they call it?”

“Identity theft,” Farley said.

“Yes,” Cosmo said. “So I do not make enough money to pay me back for crystal I give to you, Farley.”

“Four lousy teeners,” Farley reminded him. “That’s one-quarter of an ounce. In your country maybe seven grams, right? What’d you pay, sixty bucks a teener?”

Cosmo was getting angry and said, “We do a deal. It is done. Too late for to complain, Farley. It is done. You go someplace else next time, you don’t like us.”

Cosmo’s tone disturbed Olive, who said, “Oh, we like you, Cosmo, and we like Ilya too! Don’t we, Farley?”

“Shut up, Olive,” Farley said. “I’m a smart man, Cosmo. A very smart man.”

Olive was about to verbally agree, but Farley elbowed her into silence. “Cosmo, I read every fucking thing that I bring to people I deal with. I read those letters from a certain jewelry store. I thought maybe you could do something with it. Like maybe sell the information to some experienced burglar who might tunnel in through the roof when the store was closed and steal the stones. It never occurred to me that somebody might go in with guns and take over the place like Bonnie and Clyde. See, I’m not a violent man and I didn’t think you were.”

Now Ilya looked like she was about ready to cry, and Cosmo glowered at her. “You talk shit, Farley,” he said.

“I watch lots of TV, Cosmo. Smoking glass does that to you. Maybe I don’t read the papers much anymore but I watch lots of TV. That hand grenade trick made all the local news shows the night you did it. Shortly after I’d brought the jewelry store’s letters to you.”

All Cosmo could say was “You talk shit, Farley.”

“The description they gave on the news was you.” Then he looked at Ilya, saying, “And you, Ilya. I been thinking this over. I can hardly think of anything else.”

Cosmo was now glancing wildly from Farley to Ilya and back again. “I do not like this talk,” he said.

“There’s one more letter you should have,” Farley said. “But I didn’t bring it with me. I left it with a friend.” Farley felt a pang of fear shoot through him when he added, “If I don’t get home safe and sound tonight, he’s going to deliver the letter to the Hollywood police station.”

Olive looked quizzically at Farley and said, “Me too, Farley. Safe and sound, right?”

“Shut up, Olive,” Farley said, smelling his own perspiration now, thinking how the TV news bunny said the guy was waving around a pistol on the night of the robbery.

After a long silence, Cosmo said, “You want from me what?”

“Oh, about fifteen thousand,” Farley said.

Cosmo jumped to his feet and yelled, “You crazy! You crazy man!”

“Don’t touch me!” Farley cried. “Don’t touch me! I gotta arrive home safe and sound or you’re toast!”

Olive put her arms around Farley to calm him down and stop his shaking. Cosmo sat back down, sighed, ran his fingers through his heavy black hair, and said, “I give you ten. I give you ten thousands sometime next month. Money will come in the month of June. I have nothing today. Nothing.”

Farley figured he’d better settle for the ten, and he was trembling when he and Olive stood. He took her hand. Violence was not his gig. A man like this looking at him with murder in his face? All this was new to Farley Ramsdale.

Farley said, “Okay, but don’t try to sneak outta town. I got somebody watching the house twenty-four-seven.”

Then, before Cosmo could reply and frighten him again, Farley and Olive scuttled down the staircase, Farley yelping out loud when he almost stepped on a half-eaten rat by the bottom step. A black feral cat hissed at him.

By the time they reached the doughnut shop on Santa Monica where the tweakers hung out, Farley had recovered somewhat. In fact, he was feeling downright macho thinking about the ten large that would be theirs next month.

“I hope you don’t think that goat eater had me scared,” he said to Olive, even though he’d been so shaky he’d had to pull over and let her take the wheel.

“Of course not, Farley,” Olive said. “You were very brave.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he said. “Shit, they used a phony hand grenade, didn’t they? I’ll bet their gun was phony, too. What’d that news reader with the tits call it? A ‘semiautomatic pistol’? I’ll bet it was a fucking toy gun dressed up to look bad.”

“It’s hard to believe Cosmo and Ilya would shoot anybody,” Olive agreed.

“Trouble is,” Farley reminded her, “we ain’t got enough glass to last till next month. We gotta get to the cybercafé and do some business. Like, right away.”

“Right away, Farley.” She wished they had some money for a good meal. Farley was looking more like a ghost than he ever had.

The cybercafé they chose was in a strip mall. It was a large two-story commercial building with at least a hundred computers going day and night. There was lots of business that could be done on the Internet. A tweaker could buy drugs from an on-line bulletin board or maybe do a little whoring on the Internet-male or female, take your choice. Money could be wired from one account to another. Or a tweaker could just sit there phishing for PIN numbers and credit-card information. The computers were cheap and could be rented by the hour. Just like the dragons working the corner by the cybercafé.

One of the dragons, a six-foot-tall black queen in full drag with a blond wig, short red sheath, three-inch yellow spikes, red plastic bracelets, and yellow ear loops, spotted Farley and Olive and approached them, saying, “You holding any crystal tonight?” The dragon had scored from Farley on a few occasions when he was dealing crack.

“No, I need some,” Farley said.

The dragon was about to return to the corner to hustle tricks in passing cars, when a very tall teenage crackhead, also African American, with his baseball cap on sideways, wearing a numbered jersey and baggy knee-length jams and high-top black sneakers, looking goofy enough to be shooting hoops for a living in the NBA, approached the dragon and said, “Hey, Momma, where can I get me some? I needs it bad, know what I’m sayin’?”

“Uh-huh,” the dragon said. “I know what you’re sayin’, doodle-bug.”

“Well, whatchoo gonna do about it, Momma? I got somethin’ to trade, know what I’m sayin’?”

“And what is that?”

He took several rocks wrapped in plastic from his pocket and said, “This’ll take you on a trip to paradise, know what I’m sayin’?”

Pointing to the computer center, the dragon said, “Go in there and sell it, then. Get some United States legal tender and come back and we’ll talk.”

“I come back and show you tender, I make you do more than talk. I make you scream, know what I’m sayin’?”

“Uh-huh,” said the dragon, and when the kid went strutting into the cybercafé, the dragon said to Farley and Olive, “Don’t see too many black folk around Hollywood these days ’cept for jive-ass cracked-out niggers like that, come up here from south L.A. to hustle and steal. Jist havin’ them around is bad for my bidness. Fuck things up for everyone.” Then the dragon grinned and added, “Know what I’m sayin’?”

“If we get any crystal tonight, we’ll share with you,” Olive said to the drag queen. “I remember when you shared with us.”

Farley shot Olive his shut-the-fuck-up look, and the dragon caught it. “That’s okay, honey, your old man needs tweak a lot more than I do, from the looks of him.”

Before Olive, which Farley referred to as B.O., he used to do lots of business here. He’d steal a car stereo and sell it at the cybercafé on a rented computer. The money was wired on eBay to the Western Union office, where Farley would pick it up and cash it. Then he was back to the cybercafé to buy his glass. It was hard for him to imagine life away from this place.

They entered and Farley began looking for someone he could work. He saw a dude he’d been arrested with in a drug sweep a few years back, sitting at one of the computers by the door. Farley stood behind the guy for a minute to see if the guy had it going.

The e-mail message said, “Need tickets to Tina Turner concert. And want to sit in 8th row. Have teenager with me.”

“That’s a fucking cop,” Farley said to the tweaker, who jumped and spun around on his chair. “Dude, you are doing e-mail with a fucking cop.” He couldn’t remember the tweaker’s name.

“Yo, Farley,” the tweaker said. “What makes you think?”

“Every fucking cop on the planet knows Tina Turner is code for tweak. And eighth row? Dude, think about it. What else could it be but an eight ball, right? And teenager means teener, very fucking obviously. So you’re either dealing with the stupidest tweaker in cyberspace or a fucking narc. He’s using dopey code that nobody uses anymore ’cause anybody can figure it out.”

“Maybe you’re right,” the tweaker said. “Thanks, man.”

“So if I just did you a favor, how about doing me one?”

“I got no ice to share and no cash to loan, Farley. Catch you later.”

“Ungrateful, simpleminded motherfucker,” Farley said to Olive when he rejoined her. “When we got busted down at Pablo’s Tacos two years ago and taken to Hollywood Station in handcuffs, we had to drop our pants and bend over and spread. And crystal went flying out his ass. He told the cop it didn’t belong to him. Said he was just holding it for some parolee who pulled a knife and made him put the ice in his ass when the cops surrounded the taco joint.”

“Did you see it happen?” Olive asked.

“What?”

“The parolee with the knife, making him put the crystal up there! God, I’ll bet your friend was scared!”

Farley Ramsdale was speechless at times like this and thought that she’d be better off dead. Except that she was so stupendously stupid she actually seemed to enjoy living. Maybe that’s the way to cope with life, Farley thought. Get as brain-cooked as Olive and just enjoy the ride as long as it lasts.

When he looked at her, she smiled at him, showing her gums, and a tiny bubble popped out from the left gap in her grille when she said, “I think there’s a little bit of pot left at home. And we could boost you some candy and a bottle of vodka from the liquor store on Melrose. The old Persian man that works nights is almost blind, they say.”

“Persian is a fucking cat, Olive,” Farley said. “He’s an Iranian. They’re everywhere, like cockroaches. This is Iran-geles, California, for chrissake!”

“We’ll get by, Farley. You should eat something. And you should not get discouraged, and try to always remember that tomorrow’s another day.”

“Jesus Christ,” Farley said, staring at her. “Gone with the Fucking Wind!”

“What, Farley?”

Farley, who, like most tweakers, stayed up for days watching movie after movie on the tube, said, “You’re what woulda happened to Scarlett O’Hara in later life if she’d smoked a chuck wagon load of Maui ice. She’d have turned into you! ‘Tomorrow is another fucking day’!”

Olive didn’t know what in the world he was raving about. He needed to go to bed whether he could sleep or not. It had been a terrible day for him. “Come on, Farley,” she said. “Let’s go home and I’ll make you a delicious toasted cheese sandwich. With mayonnaise on it!”

Nobody on the beach or in the whole state of California was madder than Jetsam that early morning of June 1. That’s what he said to Flotsam when he met him at Malibu and unloaded his log from the Bronco and stopped to stare at the ocean. Both were wearing black wet suits.

The sky was a glare of gold rising up, and smudges of gray scudded low over the horizon. Looking away, Jetsam stared at the smog lying low in wispy veils, and at the bruised, glowering clouds that were curdling down onto all the fucking places where people lived in despair. Jetsam turned and looked out to sea, to the hopeful horizon glistening like an endless ribbon of silver, and for a long moment he didn’t speak.

“What’s wrong, dude?” Flotsam asked.

“I got stung Thursday night, bro!” Jetsam said.

“Stung?”

“A fucking IA sting! If you’da been on duty, you’da got stung with me. I was working with B.M. Driscoll. Poor fucker might as well set fire to homies and shoot dogs. He’s always in trouble.”

“What happened?”

“You know that IA sting they did down in Southeast-when was it, last year? Year before? The one where they put the gun in the fucking phone booth?”

“I sorta remember the gist of it,” Flotsam said while Jetsam waxed the old ten-foot board as he talked.

“On that one, the fucking incompetents working the sting detail at IA leave a gun by a phone booth with one of their undercover guys standing nearby. They put out some kinda phony call to get a patrol unit there. Deal is, a patrol unit they’re interested in is gonna come by, see the dude, do an FI, and see the gun there in plain view. The patrol unit’s gonna ask what he knows about the gun and the dude’s gonna say, ‘Who, me?’ like the brothers always say down there. Then IA, who’s watching from ambush, hope the coppers are gonna arrest the brother and claim he was carrying the gun. And if they’re real lucky, maybe slap the brother around after he mouths off to them. And if they hit the jackpot, call him a nigger, which of course will get them a death row sentence and a lethal injection. And then maybe they can have a party for a job well done. But not that time. It goes sideways.”

“What happened? A shooting, right?”

“Some homies happen to be cruising by before the black-and-white shows up. These cruisers see a strange brother there who ain’t one of their crew and they pop a cap at him. And then the IA cover team comes to the rescue and they fire back but don’t really engage. I thought cops’re supposed to engage hostile fire, but this is the rat squad. They see life different from regular coppers. So the homies get away, and what does IA do? They grab their sting gun and they get the hell out, and they don’t hang around for an FID investigation. So they break every fucking rule the rest of us have to play by during these times. Their excuse was they had to protect the identity of their undercover officer.”

“That is bullshit, dude,” Flotsam said. “When you apply seven-pound pull on a six-pound trigger, you stay and talk to the Man and make the reports. Undercover is over when the muzzle flashes.”

“Except for those rat bastards.”

“So how did they sting you Thursday night?”

“That’s what makes me so mad. They used the same fucking gag, the unimaginative assholes! I thought at first they must be after B.M. Driscoll. He told me he was involved in a shaky shooting before he transferred to Hollywood and was worried about it. One of those deals where he capped a Mexican illegal who drove his car straight at him when the guy was trying to escape after a long car pursuit. The next day, he gets a phone call at the station from an irate citizen who says, ‘You gotta come mow my lawn now. You shot my gardener.’”

Flotsam said, “Yeah, our chief says we’re supposed to just jump out of the way of cars coming at us, maybe wave a cape like a matador. Then start chasing again, long as we don’t endanger anybody but ourselves. Anything but shooting a thief who might be a minor. Or an ethnic. I wish somebody’d make a chart about which ethnics are unshootable nowadays and have Governor Arnold give them a sticker for their license plates. So we’d know.”

Jetsam said, “Retreat goes against a copper’s personality traits. Maybe they want us to just go back to the drive-and-wave policy, like we did under Lord Voldemort.”

“Maybe they should just put trigger locks on all our guns.”

“Anyways, B.M. Driscoll’s convinced himself he’s targeted by IA,” Jetsam said. “Checks his house for listening devices every couple weeks. But you know him, he gets a hay fever cough and thinks it’s cancer.”

“So how about Thursday night’s sting? Are you saying they dropped a gun by a phone booth?”

“Purse,” Jetsam said.

Jetsam said it was a phone booth on Hollywood Boulevard of course, where lots of tourists might do something dumb like that. A phone booth by the subway station. He remembered how it had annoyed him when it popped on their computer screen. No big deal. An unnamed person had called in to say that there was a purse left in the phone booth. And the call was assigned to 6-X-32, on a night when B.M. Driscoll was Flotsam’s stand-in.

B.M. Driscoll, who was riding shotgun, said, “Shit. Found property to book. What a drag. Oh well, it’ll give me a chance to get my inhaler outta my locker. I’m getting wheezy.”

“You ain’t wheezy,” Jetsam said. The guy’s imagined health issues were wearing Jetsam down to the ground. “My ex was wheezy. Got an asthma attack every time I put a move on her in bed. That was about once every deployment period. Little did I know that her and the plumber down the street were laying pipe twice a week.”

Jetsam parked in a red zone by the intersection of Hollywood and Highland while B.M. Driscoll said, “I don’t like steroid inhalers but there’s nothing more fundamental than breathing.”

When Jetsam was getting out of the car, B.M. Driscoll said, “Be sure to lock it.”

He wasn’t worried about their shotgun rack getting pried open or their car getting hot-wired. He was worried about his two uniforms they’d just picked up from the cleaners, which were hanging over the backseat.

After locking the car, Jetsam took his baton and ambled toward the phone booth, letting B.M. Driscoll lag behind and finish his medical monologue on the treatment of asthma with steroid inhalers at a distance where Jetsam could hardly hear him.

It was the kind of early summer evening when the layer of smog burnished the glow from the setting sun and threw a golden light over the Los Angeles basin, and somehow over Hollywood in particular. That light said to people: There are wondrous possibilities here.

Feeling the dry heat on his face, looking at the colorful creatures surrounding him, Jetsam saw tweakers and hooks, panhandlers and ordinary Hollywood crazies, all mingling with tourists. He saw Mickey Mouse and Barney the dinosaur and Darth Vader (only one tonight) and a couple of King Kongs.

But the guys inside the gorilla costumes weren’t tall enough to successfully play the great ape, and he saw a guy he recognized as Untouchable Al walk up to one of them and say, “King Kong, my ass. You look more like Cheetah.”

Jetsam turned away quickly because if there was a disturbance, he wanted no part of Untouchable Al, especially not here on Hollywood Boulevard where the multitudes would witness the dreadful inevitable outcome.

A team of bike cops, one man and one woman whom Jetsam knew from Watch 3, pedaled by slowly on the sidewalk, over those very famous three-hundred-pound slabs of marble and brass dedicated to Hollywood magic and the glamour of the past.

The bike cops nodded to him but continued on their way when he shook his head, indicating that nothing important had brought him here. He thought they looked very uncool in their bike helmets and those funny blue outfits that the other cops called pajamas.

When B.M. Driscoll caught up with him, he said, “Don’t this look a little bit strange? I mean, a purse is left here by an unknown person-reporting?”

Jetsam said, “Whaddaya mean?”

B.M. Driscoll said, “They’re out to get me.”

“Who?”

“Internal Affairs Group. In fact, the whole goddamn Professional Standards Bureau. I got grilled like an Al-Qaeda terrorist by a Force Investigation Team when I popped the cap at the goddamn crackhead that tried to run over me. I tell you, IA’s out to get me.”

“Man, you gotta go visit the Department shrink,” Jetsam said. “You’re soaring way out there, bro. You’re sounding unhinged.”

But B.M. Driscoll said, “I’ll tell you something, if that purse is still there in the midst of this goddamn boulevard carnival, it means one thing. An undercover team has chased away every tweaker that’s tried to pick it up during the last ten minutes.”

And now Jetsam started getting paranoid. He began looking hard at every tourist nearby. Could that one be a cop? That one over there looks like he could be. And that babe pretending to be reading the name on one of the marble stars down on the sidewalk. Shit, her purse is bulging like maybe there’s a Glock nine and handcuffs in there.

When they were standing at the phone booth and saw a woman’s brown leather handbag on the phone booth tray, B.M. Driscoll said, “The purse is still there. Nobody’s picked it up. No tweaker. No do-gooder. It’s still there. If there’s money in it, you can bet your ass this is a sting.”

“If there’s money in it, I gotta admit you might have a point here,” Jetsam said, looking behind him for the babe with the bulge in her handbag. And goddamnit, she was looking right at him! Then she gave him a little flirtatious wave and walked away. Shit, just a badge bunny.

B.M. Driscoll picked up the purse and opened it as though he was expecting a trick snake to jump out, removed the thick leather wallet, and handed it to Jetsam, saying, “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Jetsam opened it and found a driver’s license, credit cards, and other ID belonging to a Mary R. Rollins of Seattle, Washington. Along with $367 dollars in currency.

“Bro, I think you ain’t paranoid,” Jetsam said. “Forget what I said about the shrink.”

“Let’s take this straight to the station and make a ten-ten,” B.M. Driscoll said, referring to a property report.

“Let’s take this to the Oracle,” Jetsam said. “Let’s call information for a phone number on Mary Rollins. Let’s check and see if this ID is legit. I don’t like to be set up like I’m a fucking thief.”

“It’s not you,” B.M. Driscoll said, and now he was twitching and blinking. “It’s me. I’m a marked man!”

When they got to the station, they found the Oracle in the john, reading a paper. Jetsam stood outside the toilet stall and said, “You in there, Boss?”

Recognizing the voice, the Oracle replied, “This better be more important than your overwhelming excitement that surf’s up tomorrow. At my age, taking a dump is serious business.”

“Can you meet Driscoll and me in the roll-call room?”

“In due time,” the Oracle said. “There’s a time for everything.”

They chose the roll-call room for privacy. The Oracle examined the purse and contents, and as he looked at this angry suntanned surfer cop with his short hair gelled up like a bed of spikes, and at his older partner twitching his nose like a rabbit, he said to them, “You’re right. This has to be a sting. This is unadulterated bullshit!”

Flotsam and Jetsam were lying in the sand next to their boards, by their towels and water, when Jetsam, reaching this part of the story, stopped to take a long pull from his water bottle.

Flotsam said, “Don’t stop, dude. Get to the final reel. What the fuck happened?”

Jetsam said, “What happened was the Oracle came on like El Niño, and everybody stayed outta his way. The Oracle was hacked off, bro. And I got to see what all those hash marks give you.”

“What besides death before your time?”

“Humongous prunes and no fear, bro. The Oracle jumped their shit till the story came out. It was a sting, but as usual, Ethics Enforcement Section fucked up. It wasn’t meant for B.M. Driscoll. He’s so straight he won’t even remove mattress tags, but they wouldn’t say who it was meant for. Maybe somebody on Watch three. We think communications just gave the call to the wrong unit.”

Flotsam said, “EES should stick to catching cops who work off-duty jobs when they’re supposed to be home with bad backs. That’s all they’re good for.”

“Being an LAPD cop today is like playing a game of dodgeball, but the balls are coming at us from every-fucking-where,” Jetsam said.

Flotsam looked at his partner’s thousand-yard stare, saying, “Your display is on screen saver, dude. Get the hard drive buzzing and stay real.”

“Okay, but I don’t like being treated like a thief,” Jetsam said.

Flotsam said, “They gotta play their little games so they can say, ‘Look, Mr. Attorney General, we’re enforcing the consent decree against the formerly cocky LAPD.’ Just forget about it.”

“But we got sideswiped, bro.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“They burned us.”

“For what?”

“The undercover team saw B.M. Driscoll’s uniforms hanging in the car. They had to nail us for something after we didn’t fall for their stupid sting, so we’re getting an official reprimand for doing personal business on duty.”

“Stopping at the cleaners?”

“You got it, bro.”

“What’d the Oracle say about that?”

“He wasn’t there at the time. He’d already headed out for Alfonso’s Tex Mex when a rat from PSB showed up. One of those that can’t stop scratching all the insect bites on his candy ass. And the watch commander informed us we were getting burned.”

“That is way fucked, dude. You know how many man hours were wasted on that chickenshit sting? And here we are, with half the bodies we need to patrol the streets.”

“That is life in today’s LAPD, bro.”

“How’s your morale?”

“It sucks.”

“How would it be if I got you laid Thursday night?”

“Improved.”

“There’s this badge bunny I heard about at the Director’s Chair. Likes midnight swims at the beach, I hear.”

“I thought you said you’d fallen in love with Mag Takara?”

“I am in love, but it ain’t working too good.”

“You said it was hopeful.”

“Let’s hit it, dude,” Flotsam said to change the subject, grabbing his board and sprinting for the surf. He plunged into a cold morning breaker and came up grinning in the boiling ocean foam.

After Jetsam paddled out to his partner, he looked at Flotsam and said, “So what happened between you and Mag? Too painful to talk about?”

“She’s got it all, dude. The most perfect chick I ever met,” Flotsam said. “Do you know what the Oracle told me? When he walked a beat in Little Tokyo a hundred years ago, he got to know the Takara family. They own a couple of small hotels, three restaurants, and I don’t know how much rental property. That little honey might have some serious assets of her own someday.”

“No wonder you’re in love.”

“And she is such a robo-babe. You ever see more beautiful lips? And the way she walks like a little panther? And her skin like ivory and the way her silky hair falls against her gracefully curving neck?”

Sitting astride his surfboard, Jetsam said, “‘Gracefully curving’… bro, you are way goony! Stay real! This could just be false enchantment because she grabbed that dummy hand grenade and tossed it that time.”

Flotsam said, “Then I got way pumped the last night we worked together. I knew after my days off, you and me would be teamed for the rest of the deployment period, so I took the bit in my teeth and I went for it. I said something like, ‘Mag, I hope I can persuade you to grab a bikini and surf with me on the twilight ocean with the molten sun setting into the darkling sea.’”

“No, bro!” Jetsam said. “No darkling sea! That is sooo nonbitchin’!” He paused. “What’d she say to that?”

“Nothing at first. She’s a very reserved girl, you know. Finally, she said, ‘I think I would rather stuff pork chops in my bikini and swim in a tank full of piranhas than go surfing with you at sunset, sunrise, or anytime in between.’”

“That is like, way discouraging, bro,” Jetsam said somberly. “Can’t you see that?”

Flotsam and Jetsam weren’t the only ones complaining about the LAPD watchers that day. One of the watchers, D2 Brant Hinkle, had been biding his time at Internal Affairs Group. He was on the lieutenant’s list but was afraid that the list was going to run out of time before an opening came for him. He was optimistic now that all of the black males and females of any race who’d finished lower on the written and oral exam than he had but got preference had already been selected. Even though he wasn’t a D3 supervisor, he’d had enough prior supervisory experience in his package to qualify for the lieutenant’s exam, and he’d done pretty well on it. He didn’t think anyone else could leapfrog over him before the list expired.

It had been an interesting two-year assignment at IAG, good for his personnel package but not so good for the stomach. He was experiencing acid reflux lately and was staring down the barrel at his fifty-third birthday. With twenty-nine years on the Job this was his last realistic chance to make lieutenant before pulling the pin and retiring to… well, he wasn’t sure where. Somewhere out of L.A. before the city imploded.

Brantley Hinkle was long divorced, with two married daughters but no grandchildren yet, and he tried for a date maybe twice a month after he heard a colleague his age say, “Shit, Charles Manson gets a dozen marriage proposals a year, and I can’t get a date.”

It made him realize how seldom he had a real date, let alone a sleepover, so he’d been making more of an effort lately. There was a forty-year-old divorced PSR whose honeyed tones over the police radio could trigger an incipient erection. There was an assistant district attorney he’d met at a retirement party for one of the detectives at Robbery-Homicide Division. There was even a court reporter, a Pilates instructor in her spare time, who was forty-six years old but looked ten years younger and had never been married. She’d whipped him into better shape with a diet and as much Pilates as he could stand. His waistband got so loose he couldn’t feel his cell phone vibrating.

So he was in decent condition and still had most of his hair, though it was as gray as pewter now, and he didn’t need glasses, except for reading. He could usually connect with one of the three women when he was lonely and the need arose, but he hadn’t been trying lately. He was more focused on leaving Professional Standards Bureau and getting back to a detective job somewhere to await the promotion to lieutenant. If it came.

At IAG Brant Hinkle had seen complaints obsessively investigated for allegations that would have been subjects of fun and needling at retirement parties back in the days before the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal. Back before the federal consent decree.

And they weren’t just coming from citizens; they were coming from other cops. He’d had to oversee one where a patrol sergeant his age looked at a woman officer in a halter bra and low-ride shorts who had just come from working out. Staring at her sweaty belly, the sergeant had sighed. That was it, he’d sighed. The woman officer beefed the sergeant, and that very expensive sigh got him a five-day suspension for workplace harassment.

Then there was the wrestling match at arrest-and-control school, where a male officer was assigned to wrestle with a woman officer in order to learn certain holds. The male cop said aloud to his classmates, “I can’t believe I get paid for this.”

She’d beefed him, and he’d gotten five days also.

Yet another involved a brand-new sergeant who, on his way to his first duty assignment as a sergeant, happened to spot one of the patrol units blow a stop sign on their way to a hot call that the unit had not been assigned. The sergeant arrived at his new post, and immediately he wrote a 1.28 personnel complaint.

Within his first month, that sergeant, a man who wore his new stripes with gusto, called one of the officers on his watch a “dumbbell.” The officer made an official complaint against him. The sergeant got a five-day suspension. The troops cheered.

Under the federal consent decree with the legions of LAPD overseers, the cops were turning on each other and eating their own. It was a different life from the one he’d lived when he’d joined the world-famous LAPD, uncontested leader in big-city law enforcement. In Brant Hinkle’s present world, even IAG investigators were subjected to random urine tests conducted by Scientific Investigation Division.

The IAG investigators who had preceded him said that during Lord Voldemort’s Reign of Terror, they sometimes had six Boards of Rights-the LAPD equivalent of a military court martial-going on at one time, even though there were only five boardrooms. People had to wait in the corridors for a room to clear. It was an assembly line of fear, and it brought about the phenomenon of cops lawyering up with attorneys hired for them by their union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

The more senior investigators told him that at that time, everyone had joked grimly that they expected a cop to walk out of his Board of Rights after losing his career and pension and leap over the wrought-iron railing of the Bradbury Building into the courtyard five stories down.

The Bradbury Building, at 304 South Broadway, was an incongruous place in which to house the dreaded Professional Standards Bureau, with its three hundred sergeants and detectives, including the Internal Affairs Group, all of whom had to handle seven thousand complaints a year, both internally and externally generated against a police force of nine thousand officers. The restored 1893 masterpiece, with its open-cage elevators, marble staircases, and five-story glass roof, was probably the most photographed interior in all of Los Angeles.

Many a film noir classic had been shot inside that Mexican-tile courtyard flooded with natural light. He could easily imagine the ghosts of Robert Mitchum and Bogart exiting any one of the balcony offices in trench coats and fedoras as ferns in planter pots cast ominous shadows across their faces when they lit their inevitable smokes. Brant knew that nobody dared light a cigarette in the Bradbury Building today, this being twenty-first-century Los Angeles, where smoking cigarettes is a PC misdemeanor, if not an actual one.

Brant Hinkle was currently investigating a complaint against a female training officer in a patrol division whose job it had been to bring a checklist every day for a sergeant to sign off. After a year of this bureaucratic widget counting, where half the time she couldn’t find a sergeant, she’d just decided to create one with a fictitious name and fictitious serial number.

But then the “fraud” was discovered, and no check forger had ever been so actively pursued. IAG sent handwriting exemplars downtown to cement the case against the hapless woman whom the brass was determined to fire. But as it turned out, there was a one-year statute on such offenses, and they couldn’t fire her. In fact, they couldn’t do anything except transfer her to a division that might cause her a long drive and make her miserable, this veteran cop who had had an unblemished record but had finally succumbed to the deluge of audits and paperwork.

Brant Hinkle and his team were secretly happy that she’d kept her job. Like Brant, just about all of them were using IA experience as a stepping-stone to promotion and weren’t the rats that street cops imagined them to be.

As Brant Hinkle put it, “We’re just scared little mice stuck in a glue trap.”

Once when they were all bemoaning the avalanche of worthless and demoralizing complaints that the oppressive oversight armies had invited, Brant said to his colleagues, “When I was a kid and Dragnet was one of the biggest hits on TV, Jack Webb’s opening voice-over used to say, ‘This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here… I’m a cop.’ Today all we can say is, ‘This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here… I’m an auditor.’”

Probably the most talked-about investigation handled by Brant Hinkle during these we-investigate-every-complaint years was the one involving a woman who had become obsessed with a certain cop and made an official complaint against him, signed and dated, maintaining, “He stole my ovaries.”

It had to be investigated in full, including with lengthy interviews. There had to be an on-the-record denial by the police officer in question, who said to Brant, “Well, I’m glad IA is taking her complaint seriously. There could be something to this ovary theft. After all, you guys are trying real hard to steal my balls, and you’ve just about done it.”

It was probably at that moment that Brant Hinkle spoke to his boss about a transfer back to a divisional detective squad.