Hollywood Station

TEN

ON SATURDAY, JUNE 3, Officer Kristina Ripatti of Southwest Division was shot by an ex-con who had just robbed a gas station. Her partner killed the robber but got harassed by homies while he was trying to help the wounded officer, whose spinal injury paralyzed her from the waist down. When Fausto learned that Officer Ripatti, age thirty-three, also had a baby girl, he began to agonize over his partner’s upcoming assignment.

When Saturday night arrived, Budgie and Mag got whistles from one end of the station to the other. Budgie grinned and flipped them off and tried not to look too self-conscious. She was wearing a push-up bra that wasn’t comfortable given her condition, a lime-green jersey with a plunging neck under a short vest to hide the wire and mike, and the tightest skirt she’d ever worn, which the teenager next door had let her borrow.

The neighbor kid had gotten into the spirit of the masquerade by insisting that Budgie try on a pair of her mother’s three-inch stilettos, and they fit, for despite being so tall, Budgie had small feet. A green purse with a shoulder strap completed the ensemble. And she wore plenty of pancake and the brightest creamiest gloss she owned, and she didn’t spare the eyeliner. Her braided blond ponytail was combed out and sprinkled with glitter.

Flotsam checked her out and said to Jetsam, “Man, talk about bling!”

Fausto looked at her with disapproval, then took a five-shot, two-inch Smith & Wesson revolver from his pocket and said, “Put this in your purse.”

“I don’t need it, Fausto,” Budgie said. “My security team’ll be watching me at all times.”

“Do like I say, please,” Fausto said.

Because it was the first time he’d ever said please to her, she took the gun and noticed him looking at her throat and chest. She reached up and unfastened the delicate gold chain and handed the chain and medal to him, saying, “What kind of whore wears one of these? Hold it for me.”

Fausto took the medal in his hand and said, “Who is this, anyways?”

“Saint Michael, patron saint of police officers.”

Handing it back to her, he said, “Keep him in your purse right alongside the hideout gun.”

Mag, who wasn’t thin like Budgie and was nearly a foot shorter, had all the curves she needed without enhancement, and came off as more of a bondage bitch. She wore a black jersey turtleneck, black shorts, black plastic knee boots that she had bought for this occasion, and dangling plastic earrings. She’d tied back her glossy blunt cut in a severe bun.

Her look said, “I will hurt you but not too much.”

When the rest of the midwatch gave Mag the same catcalls and whistles, she just struck a pose and slapped her right hip and shot them a steaming look, saying, “How would you like me to whip you with a licorice rope?”

During the regular roll call, the vice cops escorted their borrowed undercover operators to their office to get them wired and briefed about the elements of 647b of the penal code, which criminalized an offer of sex for money. The decoys had to remain passive without engaging in an entrapment offer, while the cagier of the tricks would try to make them do it, knowing that entrapment would vitiate an arrest if it turned out that the hookers were cops.

After roll call, the Oracle took Fausto Gamboa aside and said privately, “Stay away from Budgie tonight, Fausto. I mean it. You start hovering around the boulevard in a black-and-white, you’ll screw it up for everybody.”

“Nobody should be giving that job to a new mother is all I got to say,” Fausto grumbled and then turned and went to partner with Benny Brewster for the night.

When Budgie and Mag were sitting in the backseat of a vice car being driven out onto east Sunset Boulevard, Mag, who had been loaned to the Trick Task Force on one other occasion, and Budgie, who had never worked as an undercover operator, kept their energy up with a lot of nervous chatter. After all, they were about to step out onto the stage, find their marks, and wait for the vice cop director to say “Action!” All the time knowing that the part they were playing brought with it an element of danger that higher-paid Hollywood performers never had to face. But both women were eager and wanted to do well. They were smart, ambitious young cops.

Budgie noticed that her hands were trembling, and she hid them under the green plastic purse. She wondered if Mag was as nervous and said to her, “I wanted to wear a little halter top but I figured if I did, they wouldn’t be able to hide the wire.”

“I wanted my belly ring showing,” Mag said. “But I thought the same thing about concealing the mike. I still like my ring but I’m glad I resisted the impulse to get the little butterfly above the tailbone when it was so popular.”

“Me too,” Budgie said, finding that just doing girl talk calmed her. “Tramp stamps are out. And I’m even thinking of losing my belly ring. My gun belt rubs on it. Took almost a year to heal.”

“Mine used to rub,” Mag said, “but now I put a layer of cotton over it and some tape before I go on duty.”

“I got mine right after work one day,” Budgie said. “I wore my uniform to work in those days to save time for a biology class I was taking at City College. You should’ve seen the guy when I walked in and took off my Sam Browne. He gawked at me like, I’m putting a belly ring on a cop? His hands were shaking the whole time.”

Both women chuckled, and Simmons, the older vice cop, who was driving, turned to his partner Lane in the passenger seat and said, “Popular culture has definitely caught up with the LAPD.”

Before they were dropped off at separate busy blocks on Sunset Boulevard, the older vice cop said to Mag, “The order of desirability is Asian hookers first, followed by white.”

“Sorry, Budgie,” Mag said with a tense grin.

“Bet I’ll catch more,” Budgie said also with a tense grin. “I’ll get all the midgets with a tall blonde fantasy.”

“For now I want you just one block apart,” Simmons said. “There’s two chase teams of blue suits to pull over the tricks after you get the offer, and two security teams including us who’ll be covering you. One is already there watching both corners. You might have some competition who’ll walk up to you and ask questions, suspecting you’re cops. You’re both too healthy looking.”

“I can look very bad very easily,” Budgie said.

“Won’t that mess up our play?” Mag asked. “If we get made by some hooker?”

“No,” he said. “They’ll just catch a ride ten blocks farther east and stay away from you. They know if you’re cop decoys, we’re close by watching out for you.”

Lane said, “Most tricks’re sick scum, but this early in the evening you might catch some ordinary businessmen driving west from the office buildings downtown. They know that better-class whores work the Sunset track and once in a while they look for a quickie.”

Budgie said, “I haven’t been in Hollywood all that long, but I’ve been in on some drug busts as transporting officer for trannies and dragons. One of them might recognize me.”

“The trannies mostly work Santa Monica Boulevard,” Simmons explained. “They do good business with all those parolees-at-large who like that track because they got a taste for dick and ass when they were in the joint. They’re disease-ridden. They avoid needles for fear of AIDS, then smoke ice and take it up the toboggan run. Does that make sense? Meth is an erotic drug. Don’t even shake hands with trannies or dragons without wearing gloves.”

Knowing it was Budgie’s first show, Lane said to her, “If you should see an Asian hooker on the Sunset track you can figure she might be a transsexual. Sometimes Asian trannies make good money up here because they can fool the straight tricks. Goose bumps from shaving don’t show as much on them. They might arrive just before the bars close, when the tricks’re too drunk to see straight. But all trannies and dragons should be considered violent felons in dresses. They like to steal a trick’s car when they can, and most tricks don’t like to admit how the car got stolen, so the tranny or dragon never ends up on the stolen report as a suspect.”

Simmons said, “Just avoid all the other hookers if possible-straights, dragons, and trannies.”

“Other hookers?” said Budgie.

He said, “Sorry, you’re starting to look so convincing I got confused.”

When the women were dropped off half a block from the boulevard, Simmons said, “If a black trick hits on you, go ahead and talk but look for a too-cool manner and a cool ride. He may be one of the pimps from a Wilshire track checking out the competition, or trying to muscle in. He may talk shit and try to pimp you out and we would love that to happen, but keep both feet on the sidewalk. You never load up. Never get in a car. And remember, sometimes there’s interference on the wire and we can’t always make out exactly what the tricks’re saying to you, so we take our cues from what you say. The wires have been known to fail completely. If you ever get in trouble, the code word is ‘slick.’ Use it in a sentence and we’ll all come running. If necessary yell it out. Remember: ‘slick.’”

After all that, they were both back to being nervous when they got out. Each spoke in a normal voice into their bras and then heard the cover unit say to Simmons and Lane on their radio band, “Got them loud and clear.”

The older vice cop seemed clearly more safety conscious, and he said, “Don’t take this wrong. I hope I’m not being sexist, but I always tell new operators, don’t take foolish chances for a misdemeanor violation like this. You’re competent cops but you’re still women.”

“Hear me roar,” Budgie said without conviction.

The younger vice cop said, “Showtime!”

Both women had some twilight action within the first ten minutes. Budgie traded looks with a blue-collar white guy in a GMC pickup. He circled the block only once, then pulled off Sunset and parked. She walked over to his car, mentally rehearsing the lines she might use to avoid an accusation of entrapment. She needn’t have worried.

When she bent down and looked at him through the passenger window, he said, “I don’t have time for anything but a very sweet head job. I don’t want to go to a motel. If you’re willing to get in and do it in the alley behind the next corner, I’ll pay forty bucks. If you’re not, see you later.”

It was so fast and so easy that Budgie was stunned. There was no parrying back and forth, no wordplay to see if she might be a cop. Nothing. She didn’t quite know how to respond other than to say, “Okay, stop a block down Sunset by the parking lot and I’ll come to you.”

And that was all she had to do, other than signal to her security team by scratching her knee that the deal was done. Within a minute a black-and-white chase unit from Watch 3 squealed in behind the guy, lit him up with their light bar and a horn toot, and in ten minutes it was over. The trick was taken back to the mobile command post, a big RV parked two blocks from the action taking place on Sunset Boulevard.

At the CP were benches for the tricks, some folding party tables for the arrest reports, and a computerized gadget to digitally fingerprint and photograph the shell-shocked trick, after which he might be released. If he failed the attitude test or if there were other factors such as serious priors or drug possession, he would be taken to Hollywood Station for booking.

If it turned out to be a field release, the trick would find his car outside the command post, having been driven there by one of the uniformed cops, but the trick wouldn’t be driving it home. The cars were usually impounded, the city attorney’s office believing that impound is a big deterrent to prostitution.

Budgie was taken in a vice car to the command post, where she completed a short arrest report after telling the guy who wired her that she didn’t need to hear the tape of her conversation with the trick. He was sitting there glaring at her.

He said, “Thanks a lot.” And mouthed the word “cunt.”

Budgie said to a vice cop, “Maybe it’s just a hormonal funk I’m in, but I’m starting to hate his guts.”

The vice cop said to Budgie, “He’s the kind of shit kicker that spent his happiest days line dancing and blowing up mailboxes.” Then to the glowering trick he said, “This is Hollywood, dude. Let’s do this cinema vérité.”

The trick scowled and said, “What the fuck’s that?”

The vice cop said, “You just keep mouthing off, and pretend we’re not in your face with a hidden video camera for a scene maybe you can later interpret for momma and the kiddies.”

Mag’s first came a few minutes after Budgie’s. He was a white guy driving a Lexus, and from the looks of him, one of those downtown businessmen on his way home to the west side. He was more cautious than Budgie’s trick and circled the block twice. But Mag was a trick magnet. He pulled around the corner after his second pass and parked.

The vice cops had said that they expected long tall Budgie to get some suspicious questions about being a police decoy, but Mag was so small, so exotic, and so sexy that she should reassure anybody. And indeed, the businessman was not interested in her bona fides.

He said, “You look like a very clean girl. Are you?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, tempted to try a Japanese accent but changing her mind. “Very clean.”

“I think you’re quite beautiful,” he said. Then he looked around warily and said, “But I have to know you’re clean and safe.”

“I’m a very clean girl,” Mag said.

“I have a family,” he said. “Three children. I don’t want to bring any diseases into my home.”

To calm him down, Mag said, “No, of course not. Where do you live?”

“Bel-Air,” he said. Then he added, “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“No, of course not,” she said. Then came the games.

“How much do you charge?”

“What’re you looking for?”

“That depends on how much you charge.”

“That depends on what you’re looking for.”

“You’re truly lovely,” he said. “Your legs are so shapely yet strong.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, figuring that matching his good manners was the way to go.

“You should always wear shorts.”

“I often do.”

“You seem intelligent. So obliging. I’ll bet you know how to cater to a man.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, thinking, Jesus, does he want a geisha or what?

“I’m old enough to be your father,” he said. “Does that trouble you?”

“Not at all.”

“Excite you?”

“Well… maybe.”

And with that, he unzipped his fly and withdrew his erect penis and began masturbating as he cried out, “You’re so young and lovely!”

For the benefit of the cover team and because of her genuine surprise, Mag yelled into her bra, “Holy shit! You’re spanking the monkey! Get outta here!”

For a minute she forgot to scratch her knee.

Within two minutes the uniformed chase team lit up and stopped the Lexus, and when her vice cop security team pulled up, Mag said, “Damn, he just jizzed all over his seventy-five-thousand-dollar car!”

After arriving back at the mobile CP, where the guy was booked for 647a of the penal code, lewd conduct in a public place, Mag was feeling a little bit sorry for the sick bastard.

Until after his digital photographing and fingerprinting, when he turned to Mag and said, “The truth is, you have fat thighs. And I’ll just bet you have father issues.”

“Oh, so you’re a psychologist,” Mag said. “From looking at my thighs you have me all figured out. So long, Daddy dearest.”

Then she turned to leave and noticed a handsome young vice cop named Turner looking at her. She blushed and involuntarily glanced at her thighs.

“They’re gorgeous like the rest of you,” Turner said. “Father issues or not.”

Mag Takara hooked three tricks in two hours, and Budgie Polk got two. When Budgie’s third trick, a lowlife in a battered Pontiac, offered her crystal for pussy, Budgie popped him for drug possession.

“How’s that? Felony prostitution,” she said, grinning at Simmons when she arrived back at the CP.

“You’re doing great, Budgie,” Simmons said. “Have fun, but stay alert. There’s lotsa real weird people out here.”

Mag met one of them ten minutes later. He was a jug-eared guy in his early forties. He drove a late-model Audi and wore clothes that Mag recognized as coming from Banana. He was the kind of guy she’d probably have danced with if he’d asked her at one of the nightclubs on the Strip that she and her girlfriends sometimes visited.

He’d been hanging back when other tricks flitted around her, making nervous small talk for a moment but then driving away in fear. Fear of cops, or fear of robbery, or fear of disease-there was plenty of fear out there mingling with the lust and sometimes enhancing it. There were plenty of neuroses.

When the guy in the Audi took his turn and talked to Mag, broaching the subject of sex for money very tentatively, he became the second guy of the evening to get so excited so fast that he unzipped his pants and exposed himself.

Mag said into her bra, “Oh my! You’re masturbating! How exciting!”

“It’s you!” he said. “It’s you! I’d pay you for a blow job, but I’m tapped out. And I can’t get old Jonesy stiff, goddamnit!”

And while the chase team was speeding toward the corner, the headlights from a large van lit up the interior of the Audi. Mag looked more closely, and it was true: Jonesy was not stiff. But it was bright crimson!

“Good god!” Mag said. “Are you bleeding down there?”

He stopped and looked at her. Then he released his flaccid member and said, “Oh, that. It’s just lipstick from the other three whores that sucked it tonight. That’s where all my money went.”

A bit later, Budgie violated an order from Simmons by not keeping her feet on the pavement. She couldn’t believe it when a big three-axle box truck hauling calves pulled around the corner and parked in the only place he could, in the first alley north.

She couldn’t resist this one, approaching the cab of the truck, even though it was very dark in the alley. She climbed up on the step and listened nervously when the scar-faced trucker in a wife beater and cowboy hat said, “Fifty bucks. Here. Now. Climb on up and suck me off, honey.”

This one was so bizarre that when the second cover team showed up, one of the vice cops said to the guy, “Wonder what your boss would say if we booked you into jail and impounded your vehicle.”

Budgie said to the cowboy, “Are they going to be slaughtered?”

The cowboy was so pissed off he didn’t answer at first but then said, “I suppose you don’t eat veal? I suppose you shoot your goddamn lobsters before you put them in boiling water? Gimme a break, lady.”

This one presented so many logistical problems that after a field release the cowboy was allowed to continue on his way with his cargo.

When Budgie was finished at the CP and taken back to her corner on Sunset Boulevard, she tried not to remember the doomed calves bawling. It was the first time that evening that she was truly sad.

Budgie wasn’t standing on Sunset Boulevard for three minutes when a Hyundai with Arkansas plates pulled up with two teenagers inside. She was still feeling depressed about the calves and about the pathetically reckless husbands and fathers she and Mag had hooked tonight, and she wondered what diseases all these losers would bring home to their wives. Maybe the fatal one. Maybe the Big A.

She could see right away what she was dealing with here: a pair of Marines. Both had tan lines from the middle of their foreheads down, and skinned whitewalls with an inch or two of hair on top. Both were wearing cheap T-shirts with glittery names of rock groups across the front, shirts that they’d probably just bought from a souvenir shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Both had dopey nervous smiles on their dopey young faces, and after being inexplicably sad, Budgie was now inexplicably mad.

The passenger said to her, “Hey, good-lookin’!”

Budgie walked to the car and said, “If you say, ‘Whatchya got cookin’?’ I might have to shoot you.”

The word “shoot” changed the dynamic at once. The kid said, “I hope you’re not carrying a gun or something?”

“Why?” Budgie said. “Can’t a girl protect herself out here?”

The kid tried to recover some of his bravado and said, “Know where we could get some action?”

“Action,” Budgie said. “And what do you mean by that?”

The passenger glanced at the driver, who was even more nervous, and said, “Well, we’d like to party. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Budgie said. “I know what you mean.”

“If it’s not too expensive,” he said.

“And what do you mean by that?” Budgie said.

“We can pay seventy bucks,” the kid said. “But you have to do both of us, okay?”

“Where’re you stationed?” Budgie asked, figuring a chase or cover team was getting ready.

“Whadda you mean?” the passenger said.

“I was born at night, but not last night.” They’re no more than eighteen, she thought.

“Camp Pendleton,” the kid said, losing his grin.

“When’re you leaving for Iraq?”

The kid was really confused now, and he looked at the driver and back to Budgie and trying to retrieve some of the machismo said, “In three weeks. Why, are you going to give us a free one out of patriotism?”

“No, you dumb little jarhead asshole,” Budgie said. “I’m gonna give you a pass so you can go to Iraq and get your dumb little ass blown up. I’m a police officer and there’s a team of vice cops one minute away, and if you’re still here when they arrive you’ll have some explaining to do to your CO. Now, get the fuck outta Hollywood and don’t ever come back!”

“Yes, ma’am!” the kid said. “Thank you, ma’am!”

And they were gone before her cover team drove slowly past the corner, and Budgie saw that cute vice cop named Turner shake his head at her, then shrug his shoulders as if to say, It’s okay to throw one back, but don’t make a habit of it.

The vice cops knew that their operators would need a break about now, so they suggested code 7 at a nearby Burger King, but Mag and Budgie asked to be dropped at a Japanese restaurant farther west on Sunset. They figured that the male officers wouldn’t eat raw fish, and they’d had enough of that gender for a while. Thirty minutes to rest their feet and talk about their night’s work would be a blessing. The vice cops dropped them and said they’d pick them up for one more hour and then call it a night.

Turner said, all the time looking at Mag, “Another hour and it’s a wrap.”

When Budgie and Mag got inside the restaurant, Budgie said, “Jesus, in this division all the coppers use movie expressions.”

Mag ordered a plate of mixed sashimi, and Budgie a less courageous sushi plate, trying to observe protocol and not blatantly scrape the wooden chopsticks together, as so many round-eyes did at sushi joints. She lowered them to her lap and did it, dislodging a few splinters from the cheap disposable utensils.

Budgie said, “Do I ever regret borrowing these stilettos.”

“My canines are barking too,” Mag said, looking down.

“How many you hooked so far?”

“Three,” she said.

“Hey, I pulled ahead by one,” Budgie said. “And I threw a pair back. Jarheads from Camp Pendleton. I was the righteous bitch from hell they’ll always remember.”

“I haven’t found any worth throwing back,” Mag said. “Lowest kind of scum is what I’ve met. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the S &M wardrobe.”

“You still into competitive shooting?” Budgie asked. “I read about you in the Blue Line when I worked Central.”

“Kinda losing interest,” Mag said. “Guys don’t like to shoot with me. Afraid I’ll beat them. I even stopped wearing the distinguished expert badge on my uniform.”

“Know what you mean,” Budgie said. “If we girls even talk about guns, we’re gay, right?”

“U.S. Customs had a recent shoot that I was asked to compete in. Until I saw it was called ‘Ladies’ Pistol Shoot.’ Can you believe that? When I got asked, I said, ‘Oh, goody. With high tea and cotillion?’ The guy from Customs didn’t get it.”

Budgie said, “I had three guys tonight ask me if I was a cop. I was tempted to say, ‘Would you like to ask that again with your dick in my mouth?’”

Both laughed, and Mag said, “I got a feeling Simmons would call that entrapment. Did you get a good look at Turner? Mr. Eye Candy?”

“I got a good look at him getting a good look at you,” Budgie said.

“Maybe he’s into bondage bitches,” Mag said.

“I got a feeling he’d be interested if you wore overalls and combat boots.”

“Wonder if he’s married.”

“God, why do we inbreed with other cops?” Budgie said. “Why not cross-pollinate with firemen or something?”

“Yeah, there must be other ways to fuck up our lives,” Mag said. “But he sure is cute.”

“Probably lousy in bed,” Budgie said. “The cute ones often are.”

Mag said, “Couldn’t be as bad as a twisted detective from Seventy-seventh Street I used to date. The kind that buys you two drinks and expects to mate in his rape room within the hour. He actually stole one of my thongs, the creep.”

Budgie said, “I hooked a drunk tonight who could hardly drive the car. When the cover team called a shop to take him to jail, he asked me if I was seeing someone. Then he asked me if I could get him out of jail. He asked me a dozen questions. When they took him away I had to tell him, ‘Yes, I’m seeing someone. No, I can’t get you out of jail. No, I can’t help it that you have strong feelings for me. And no, this encounter was not caused by fate, it was caused by Compstat.’ Christ, I just turn on my dumb-blonde switch and they can’t let go. The guy tried to hug me when they were writing the citation! He said he forgave me.”

Mag said, “One trick wanted to really hurt me when they badged him, I could tell. He was eye-fucking me the whole time they were writing him up, and he said, ‘Maybe I’ll see you out on the street sometime, Officer.’”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, I know you’re bigger than me. I know you can kick my ass. But if I ever run into you and you ever try it, I will shoot you until you are dead. I will shoot you in the face, and you’ll have a closed-casket funeral.’”

Budgie said, “When I was a boot I used to say to creepy vermin like that, ‘You don’t get any status points for hitting a girl. But if you try it, my partners will pepper-spray you and kick your ass big time.’”

“Whadda you tell them these days?”

“I don’t. If nobody’s looking, I just take out the OC spray and give them a shot of Liquid Jesus. For a while my partners were calling me ‘OC Polk.’”

Mag said, “The only really scary moment I had tonight was when one trick pulled a little too far off Sunset, and I had to walk past the parking lot. And a big rat ran right across my foot!”

“Oh, my god!” Budgie said. “What’d you do, girl?”

“I screamed. And then I had to quick tell the cover team that everything was okay. I didn’t want to admit it was only a rat.”

Budgie said, “I’m terrified of rats. Spiders too. I would’ve cried.”

“I almost did,” Mag said. “I just had to hang on.”

“How’s your sashimi?”

“Not as fresh as I like it. How’s your sushi?”

“Healthy,” Budgie said. “With Fausto I eat burritos and get more fat grams than the whole female population of Laurel Canyon consumes in a week.”

“But they burn calories shopping for plastic surgeons and prepping their meals,” Mag said. “Imagine laying out a weekly diet of celery stalks and carrot strips according to feng shui.”

Budgie thought about how pleasant and restful it was just to sit there and drink tea and talk to another girl.

During the last hour, Budgie hooked one more trick, and Mag wanted to soar past her with two, but business was slowing. They had only thirty minutes to go when Mag saw a cherry-red Mercedes SUV with chrome wheels drive slowly past. The driver was a young black man in a three-hundred-dollar warm-up suit and pricey Adidas. He made one pass, then another.

Mag didn’t return his smile the way she had been doing to other tricks that night, including two who were black. This guy made her think one word: “pimp.” Then she realized that if she was right, this could be the topper of the evening. A felony bust for pimping. So on his next pass, she returned the smile and he pointed just around the corner and parked the SUV. A hip-hop album was blasting out, and he turned it down to talk.

When she approached cautiously, he said, “What’s a matter, Momma, ain’t you into chocolate delight?”

Yeah, he’s a pimp, she thought, saying, “I like all kind of delights.”

“I bet you do,” he said. “Jump on in here and le’s talk bidness.”

“I’m okay out here.”

“What’s wrong?” he said. “You a cop or somethin’?”

He smiled big when he said it, and she knew he didn’t believe it. She said, “I can talk out here.”

“Come on in, baby,” he said, and his pupils looked dilated. “I might got somethin’ for you.”

“What?” she said.

“Somethin’.”

“What something?”

“Get in,” he said, and she didn’t like the way he said it this time. He was amped, all right. Maybe crack, maybe crystal.

“I don’t think so,” she said and started to walk away. This wasn’t going right.

He opened the door of the SUV and jumped out, striding around the back and standing between her and Sunset Boulevard.

She was about to use the code word “slick” but thought about what it would mean if she brought down a pimp. She said, “You better talk fast because I don’t have time for bullshit.”

And he said, “You think you gonna come and work this corner? You ain’t, not without somebody lookin’ out for you. And that ain’t no bullshit. That is righteous.”

“Whadda you mean?” Mag said.

“I’m gonna be your protector,” he said.

“Like my old man?” she said. “I don’t need one.”

“Yes, you do, bitch,” he said. “And the protection has started. So how much you made tonight so far? Workin’ on my corner. On my boulevard.”

“I think you better get outta the way, Slick,” Mag said. And now she was definitely scared and could see one of the vice cops running across Sunset Boulevard in her direction.

She was still looking for her mobile cover team when he said, “I’m gonna show you what is slick.”

And she was shocked when his fist struck. She hadn’t seen it coming at all. Her face had been turned toward the boulevard while she waited for her security, thinking, Hurry up. Her head hit the pavement when she fell. Mag felt dizzy and sick to her stomach and tried to get up, but he was sitting on top of her, big hands all over her, looking for her money stash.

“In yo pussy?” he said, and she felt his hands down there. Felt his fingers exploring inside her.

Then she heard car doors slam and voices shouting and the pimp screaming, and she got so sick she vomited all over her bondage bitch costume. And the curtain descended on the last performance of the evening.

Fausto Gamboa was driving when he heard the gut-churning “Officer down” and that an ambulance was racing code 3 to the Sunset Boulevard whore track. He almost gave Benny Brewster whiplash cranking the steering wheel hard left and blowing a stop sign like it wasn’t there. Speeding toward Sunset Boulevard.

“Oh, god!” he said. “It’s one of the girls. I knew it. I knew it.”

Benny Brewster, who had worked with Mag Takara for most of the deployment period, said, “I hope it’s not Mag.”

Fausto glanced sharply at him and felt a rush of anger but then thought, I can’t blame Benny for hoping it’s Budgie. I’m hoping it’s Mag. That was an awful feeling, but there was no time to sort it out. When he made the next left he felt two wheels almost lifting.

The Oracle had been taking code 7 at his favorite taco joint on Hollywood Boulevard when the call came out. He was standing beside his car, working on his second carne asada taco and sucking down an enormous cup of horchata, Mexican rice water and cinnamon, when he heard “Officer down.”

He was the first one at the scene other than all the security teams and the paramedics loading Mag into the ambulance. Budgie was sitting in the backseat of a vice car, weeping, and the pimp was handcuffed and lying on the sidewalk near the alley, crying out in pain.

Simmons, the oldest of the vice cops, said to the Oracle, “We got another ambulance coming.”

“How’s Mag?”

“Pretty bad, Sarge,” Simmons said. “Her left eye was lying out on her cheek. The bones around the eye socket were just about crushed, from what I could see.”

“Oh no,” the Oracle said.

“He hit her once and she fell back and her head bounced off the sidewalk. I think she was awake sort of when we first rolled up, but not now.”

The Oracle pointed to the pimp and said, “How about him?” And then he saw it in the vice cop’s face when Simmons hesitated and said, “He resisted.”

“Do you know if FID has been notified?”

“Yeah, we called our boss,” Simmons said. “They’ll all be here soon.”

The vice cop’s eyes didn’t meet the Oracle’s when he finally said, “There’s a guy in the liquor store might want to make a complaint about… how we handled the arrest. He was yammering about it. I told him to wait until Force Investigation Division arrives. I’m hoping he’ll change his mind before then.”

“I’ll talk to him,” the Oracle said. “Maybe I can calm him down.”

When the Oracle was walking toward the liquor store, he saw a young vice cop pacing nervously and being spoken to very earnestly by one of the other vice cops. The second ambulance arrived, and the Oracle heard the pimp moan when they put him on the litter.

In the liquor store, the elderly Pakistani proprietor completed a transaction for a customer, then turned to the Oracle and said, “Are you here for my report?”

“What did you see?” the Oracle asked.

“I hear car doors slam. I hear a man scream. Loud. I hear shouts. Curses. A man screams more. I run out. I see a young white man kicking a black man on the ground. Kick kick kick. Curses and kicks. I see other white men grab the young man and pull him away. The black man continues the screams. Plenty of screams. I see handcuffs. I know these are policemen. I know they come to this block to arrest the women of the street. That is my report.”

“There will be some investigators coming to talk to you,” the Oracle said, leaving the liquor store.

Budgie and one vice car were gone. Four vice cops and two cars were still there. The young cop who had been pacing when the Oracle arrived walked up to him and said, “I know I’m in trouble here, Sarge. I know there’s a civilian witness.”

“Maybe you want to call the Protective League’s hotline and get lawyered up before making any statements,” the Oracle said.

“I will,” the vice cop said.

“What’s your name, son?” the Oracle asked. “I can’t remember anybody’s name anymore.”

“Turner,” he said. “Rob Turner. I never worked your watch when I was in patrol.”

“Rob,” the Oracle said, “I don’t want you making any statements to me. Call the League. You have rights, so don’t be afraid to exercise them.”

It was obvious that Turner trusted the Oracle by reputation, and he said, “I only want you to know… everybody to know… that when I arrived, that fucking pimp was sitting on her with his hands down inside her pants. That beautiful girl, her face was a horrible sight. I want all the coppers to know what I saw when I arrived. And that I’m not sorry for anything except losing my badge. I’m real sorry about that.”

“That’s enough talking, son,” the Oracle said. “Go sit in your car and get your thoughts together. Get lawyered up. You’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

When the Oracle returned to his car to make his notifications, he saw Fausto and Benny Brewster parked across the street, talking to a vice cop. They looked grim. Fausto crossed the street, coming toward him, and the Oracle hoped this wasn’t going to be an I-told-you-so, because he wasn’t in the mood, not a bit.

But all Fausto said to him before he and Benny Brewster left the scene was “This is a crummy job, Merv.”

The Oracle opened a packet of antacid tablets, and said, “Old dogs like you and me, Fausto? It’s all we got. Semper cop.”