Hollywood Station

THREE

THERE WERE HAPPIER partners than the pair in 6-X-76 on Sunday of that May weekend. Fausto Gamboa, one of the most senior patrol officers at Hollywood Station, had long since surrendered his P3 status, needing a break from being a training officer to rookies still on probation. He had been happily working as a P2 with another Hollywood old-timer named Ron LeCroix, who was at home healing up from painful hemorrhoid surgery that he’d avoided too long and was probably just going to retire.

Fausto was always being mistaken for a Hawaiian or Samoan. Though the Vietnam veteran wasn’t tall, only five foot nine, he was very big. The bridge of his nose had been flattened in teenage street fights, and his wrists, hands, and shoulders belonged on a guy tall enough to easily dunk a basketball. His legs were so massive he probably could have dunked one if he’d uncoiled those calf and thigh muscles in a vertical leap. His wavy hair was steel-gray and his face was lined and saddle leather-brown, as though he’d spent years picking cotton and grapes in the Central Valley as his father had done after arriving in California with a truckload of other illegal Mexican immigrants. Fausto had never set eyes on a cotton crop but somehow had inherited his father’s weathered face.

Fausto was in a particularly foul mood lately, sick and tired of telling every cop at Hollywood Station how he’d lost in court to Darth Vader. The story of that loss had traveled fast on the concrete jungle wireless.

It wasn’t every day that you get to write Darth Vader a ticket, even in Hollywood, and everyone agreed it could only happen there. Fausto Gamboa and his partner Ron LeCroix had been on patrol on an uneventful early evening when they got a call on their MDT computer that Darth Vader was exposing himself near the corner of Hollywood and Highland. They drove to that location and spotted the man in black cycling down Hollywood Boulevard on an old Schwinn three-speed bike. But there was often more than one Darth Vader hanging around Grauman’s, Darths of different ethnicity. This one was a diminutive black Darth Vader.

They weren’t sure they had the right Darth until they saw what had obviously prompted the call. Darth wasn’t wearing his black tights under his black shorts that evening, and his manhood was dangling off the front of the bike saddle. A motorist had spotted the exposed trekker’s meat and had called the cops.

Fausto was driving and he pulled the car behind Darth Vader and tooted the horn, which had no effect in slowing down the cyclist. He tooted again. Same result. Then he turned on the siren and blasted him. Twice. No response.

“Fuck this,” Ron LeCroix said. “Pull beside him.”

When Fausto drew up next to the cyclist, his partner leaned out the window and got Darth’s attention by waving him to the curb. Once there, Darth put down the kickstand, got off the bike, and took off his mask and helmet. Then they saw why their attempts to stop him had been ineffective. He was wearing a headset and listening to music.

It was Fausto’s turn to write a ticket, so he got out the book and took Darth’s ID.

Darth Vader, aka Henry Louis Mossman, said, “Wait a minute here. Why you writing me?”

“It’s a vehicle code violation to operate a bike on the streets wearing a headset,” Fausto said. “And in the future, I’d advise you to wear underwear or tights under those short shorts.”

“Ain’t this some shit?” Darth Vader said.

“You couldn’t even hear our siren,” Fausto said to the littlest Darth.

“Bullshit!” Darth said. “I’ll see you in court, gud-damnit! This is a humbug!”

“Up to you.” Fausto finished writing the ticket.

When the two cops got back in their car that evening and resumed patrol, Fausto said to Ron LeCroix, “That little panhandler will never take me to court. He’ll tear up the ticket, and when it goes to warrant, we’ll be throwing his ass in the slam.”

Fausto Gamboa didn’t know Darth Vader.

After several weeks had passed, Fausto found himself in traffic court on Hill Street in downtown L.A. with about a hundred other cops and as many miscreants awaiting their turn before the judge.

Before his case was called, Fausto turned to a cop in uniform next to him and said, “My guy’s a loony-tune panhandler. He’ll never show up.”

Fausto Gamboa didn’t know Darth Vader.

Not only did he show up, but he showed up in costume, this time wearing black tights under the short shorts. All courtroom business came to a standstill when he entered after his name was called. And the sleepy-eyed judge perked up a bit. In fact, everyone in the courtroom-cops, scofflaws, court clerk, even the bailiff-was watching with interest.

Officer Fausto Gamboa, standing before the bench as is the custom in traffic court, told his story of how he’d gotten the call, spotted Darth Vader, and realized that Darth didn’t know his unit was waving in the breeze. And that he couldn’t be made to pull over because he was wearing a headset and listening to music, which the cops discovered after they finally stopped the spaceman.

When it was Darth’s turn, he removed the helmet and mask, displaying the headset that he said he wore on the day in question. He did a recitation of the vehicle code section that prohibits the wearing of a headset while operating a bike on city streets.

Then he said, “Your Honor, I would like the court to observe that this headset contains only one earpiece. The vehicle code section clearly refers to both ears being blocked. This officer did not know the vehicle code section then and he don’t know it now. The fact is, I did hear the officer’s horn and siren but I did not think that it was for me. I wasn’t doing nothing illegal, so why should I get all goosey and pull over jist because I hear a siren?”

When he was finished, the judge said to Fausto, “Officer, did you examine the headset that Mr. Mossman was wearing that day?”

“I saw it, Your Honor,” Fausto said.

“Does this look like the headset?” the judge asked.

“Well… it looks… similar.”

“Officer, can you say for sure that the headset you saw that day had two earpieces, or did it have only one, like the headset you are looking at now?”

“Your Honor, I hit the siren twice and he failed to yield to a police vehicle. It was obvious he couldn’t hear me.”

“I see,” the judge said. “In this case I think we should give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Mossman. We find him not guilty of the offense cited.”

There was applause and chortling in the courtroom until the bailiff silenced it, and when business was concluded, Darth Vader put on his helmet and with every eye still on him said to all, “May the force be with you.”

Now Ron LeCroix and his hemorrhoids were gone, and Fausto Gamboa, still smarting from having his ass kicked by Darth Vader, gave the Oracle a big argument the moment he learned that he was being teamed with Officer Budgie Polk. When Fausto was a young cop, women didn’t work regular patrol assignments at the LAPD, and he sneered when he said to the Oracle, “Is she one of them who maybe trades badges with a boyfriend copper like they used to do class rings in my day?”

“She’s a good officer,” the Oracle said. “Give her a chance.”

“Or is she the kind who gets to partner with her boyfriend and hooks her pinkie through his belt loop when they walk the boulevard beat?”

“Come on, Fausto,” the Oracle said. “It’s only for the May deployment period.”

Like the Oracle, Fausto still carried an old six-inch Smith & Wesson revolver, and the first night he was paired with this new partner, he’d pissed her off after she asked him why he carried a wheel gun when the magazine of her Beretta 9-millimeter held fifteen rounds, with one in the pipe.

“If you need more than six rounds to win a gunfight, you deserve to lose,” he’d said to her that night, without a hint of a smile.

Fausto never wore body armor, and when she asked him about that too, he had said, “Fifty-four cops were shot and killed in the United States last year. Thirty-one were wearing a vest. What good did it do them?”

He’d caught her looking at his bulging chest that first night and said, “It’s all me. No vest. I measure more around the chest than you do.” Then he’d looked at her chest and said, “Way more.”

That really pissed her off because the fact was, Budgie Polk’s ordinarily small breasts were swollen at the moment. Very swollen. She had a four-month-old daughter at home being watched by Budgie’s mother, and having just returned to duty from maternity leave, Budgie was actually a few pounds lighter than she had been before the pregnancy. She didn’t need thinly veiled cracks about her breast size from this old geezer, not when her tits were killing her.

Her former husband, a detective working out of West L.A. Division, had left home three months before his daughter was born, explaining that their two-year marriage had been a “regrettable mistake.” And that they were “two mature people.” She felt like whacking him across the teeth with her baton, as well as half of his cop friends whom she’d run into since she came back to work. How could they still be pals with that dirtbag? She had handed him the keys to her heart, and he had entered and kicked over the furniture and ransacked the drawers like a goddamn crack-smoking burglar.

And why do women officers marry other cops in the first place? She’d asked herself the question a hundred times since that asshole dumped her and his only child, with his shit-eating promise to be prompt with child-support payments and to visit his daughter often “when she was old enough.” Of course, with five years on the Job, Budgie knew in her heart the answer to the why-do-women-officers-marry-other-cops question.

When she got home at night and needed to talk to somebody about all the crap she’d had to cope with on the streets, who else would understand but another cop? What if she’d married an insurance adjuster? What would he say when she came home as she had one night last September after answering a call in the Hollywood Hills, where the owner of a three-million-dollar hillside home had freaked on ecstasy and crack and strangled his ten-year-old step-daughter, maybe because she’d refused his sexual advances, or so the detectives had deduced. Nobody would ever know for sure, because the son of a bitch blew half his head away with a four-inch Colt magnum while Budgie and her partner were standing on the porch of the home next door with a neighbor who said she was sure she’d heard a child screaming.

After hearing the gunshot, Budgie and her partner had run next door, pistols drawn, she calling for help into the keyed mike at her shoulder. And while help was arriving and cops were leaping out of their black-and-whites with shotguns, Budgie was in the house gaping at the body of the pajama-clad child on the master bedroom floor, ligature marks already darkening, eyes hemorrhaging, pajamas urine-soaked and feces-stained. The step-father was sprawled across the living room sofa, the back cushion soaked with blood and brains and slivers of bone.

And a woman there, the child’s crack-smoking mother, was screaming at Budgie, “Help her! Resuscitate her! Do something!”

Over and over she yelled, until Budgie grabbed her by the shoulder and yelled back, “Shut the fuck up! She’s dead!”

And that’s why women officers seemed to always marry other cops. As poor as the marital success rate was, they figured it would be worse married to a civilian. Who would they talk to after seeing a murdered child in the Hollywood Hills? Maybe male cops didn’t have to talk about such things when they got home, but women cops did.

Budgie had hoped that when she returned to duty, she might get teamed with a woman, at least until she stopped lactating. But the Oracle had said everything was screwed during this deployment period, with people off IOD from an unexpected rash of on-duty injuries, vacations, and so forth. He had said, she could work with Fausto until the next deployment period, couldn’t she? All of LAPD life revolved around deployment periods, and Fausto was a reliable old pro who would never let a partner down, the Oracle said. But shit, twenty-eight days of this?

Fausto longed for the old days at Hollywood Station when, after working the night watch, they used to gather in the upper parking lot of the John Anson Ford Theater, across from the Hollywood Bowl, at a spot they called the Tree and have a few brews and commiserate. Sometimes badge bunnies would show up, and if one of them was sitting in a car, sucking face with some cop, you always could be sure that another copper would sneak up, look in the window, and yell, “Crime in progress!”

On one of those balmy summer nights under what the Oracle always called a Hollywood moon, Fausto and the Oracle had sat alone at the Tree on the hood of Fausto’s VW bug, Fausto, a young cop back from Vietnam, and the Oracle, a seasoned sergeant but less than forty years old.

He’d surprised Fausto by saying, “Kid, look up there,” referring to the lighted cross on top of the hill behind them. “That’d be a great place to have your ashes spread when it’s your turn. Up there, looking out over the Bowl. But there’s even a better place than that.” And then the Oracle told young Fausto Gamboa about the better place, and Fausto never forgot.

Those were the grand old days at Hollywood Station. But after the last chief’s “Reign of Terror,” nobody dared to drive within a mile of the Tree. Nobody gathered to drink good Mexican brew. And in fact, this young generation of granola-crunching coppers probably worried about E. coli in their Evian. Fausto had actually seen them drinking organic milk. Through a freaking straw!

So here she was, Budgie thought, riding shotgun on Sunset Boulevard with this cranky geezer, easily older than her father, who would have been fifty-two years old had he lived. By the number of hash marks on Fausto’s sleeve, he’d been a cop for more than thirty years, almost all of it in Hollywood.

To break the ice on that first night, she’d said, “How long you been on the Job, Fausto?”

“Thirty-four years,” he said. “Came on when cops wore hats and you had to by god wear it when you were outta the car. And sap pockets were for saps, not cell phones.” Then he paused and said, “Before you were on this planet.”

“I’ve been on this planet twenty-seven years,” she said. “I’ve been on the Job just over five.”

The way he cocked his right eyebrow at her for a second and then looked away, he appeared to be saying, So who gives a shit about your history?

Well, fuck him, she thought, but just as night fell and she was hoping that somehow the pain in her breasts would subside, he decided to make a little small talk. He said, “Budgie, huh? That’s a weird name.”

Trying not to sound defensive, she said, “My mother was Australian. A budgie is an Australian parakeet. It’s a nickname that stuck. She thought it was cute, I guess.”

Fausto, who was driving, stopped at a red light, looked Budgie up and down, from her blond French-braided ponytail, pinned up per LAPD regulations, to her brightly shined shoes, and said, “You’re what? Five eleven, maybe six feet tall in your socks? And weigh what? About as much as my left leg? She shoulda called you ‘Storkie.’”

Budgie felt it right then. Worse breast pain. These days a dog barks, a cat meows, a baby cries, she lactates. This bastard’s gruff voice was doing it!

“Take me to the substation on Cherokee,” she said.

“What for?” Fausto said.

“I’m hurting like hell. I got a breast pump in my war bag. I can do it in there and store the milk.”

“Oh, shit!” Fausto said. “I don’t believe it! Twenty-eight days of this?”

When they were halfway to the storefront, Fausto said, “Why don’t we just go back to the station? You can do it in the women’s locker room, for chrissake.”

“I don’t want anyone to know I’m doing this, Fausto,” she said. “Not even any of the women. Somebody’ll say something, and then I’ll have to hear all the wise-ass remarks from the men. I’m trusting you on this.”

“I gotta pull the pin,” Fausto said rhetorically. “Over a thousand females on the Job? Pretty soon the freaking chief’ll have double-X chromosomes. Thirty-four years is long enough. I gotta pull the pin.”

After Fausto parked the black-and-white at the darkened storefront substation by Musso & Frank’s restaurant, Budgie grabbed the carryall and breast pump from her war bag in the trunk, unlocked the door with her 999 key, and ran inside. It was a rather empty space with a few tables and chairs where parents could get information about the Police Activity League or sign up the kids for the Police Explorer Program. Sometimes there was LAPD literature lying around, in English, Spanish, Thai, Korean, Farsi, and other languages for the polyglot citizenry of the Los Angeles melting pot.

Budgie opened the fridge, intending to put her blue ice packs in the freezer, and left her little thermal bag beside the fridge, where she could pick it up after going off duty. She turned on the light in the john, deciding to pump in there sitting on the toilet lid instead of in the main room, in case Fausto got tired of waiting in the car and decided to stroll inside. But the smell of mildew was nauseating.

She removed the rover from her Sam Browne, then took off the gun belt itself and her uniform shirt, vest, and T-shirt. She draped everything on a little table in the bathroom and put the key on the sink. The table teetered under the weight, so she removed her pistol from the gun belt and laid it on the floor beside her rover and flashlight. After she’d been pumping for a minute, the pain started subsiding. The pump was noisy, and she hoped that Fausto wouldn’t enter the storefront. Without a doubt he’d make some wisecrack when he heard the sucking noise coming from the bathroom.

Fausto had clicked onto the car’s keyboard that they were code 6 at the storefront, out for investigation, so that they wouldn’t get any calls until this freaking ordeal was over. And he was almost dozing when the hotshot call went out to 6-A-77 of Watch 3.

The PSR’s urgent voice said, “All units in the vicinity and Six-Adam-Seventy-seven, shots fired in the parking lot, Western and Romaine. Possibly an officer involved. Six-A-Seventy-seven, handle code three.”

Budgie was buttoning her shirt, just having stored the milk in the freezer beside her blue ice packs. She had slid the rover inside its sheath when Fausto threw open the front door and yelled, “OIS, Western and Romaine! Are you through?”

“Coming!” she yelled, grabbing the Sam Browne and flashlight while still buttoning her shirt, placing the milk and the freezer bags in the insulated carryall, and running for the door, almost tripping on a chair in the darkened office as she was fastening the Sam Browne around her waspish waist.

There were few things more urgent than an officer-involved shooting, and Fausto was revving the engine when she got to the car and she just had time to close the door before he was ripping out from the curb. She was rattled and sweating and when he slid the patrol car around a corner, she almost toppled and grabbed her seat belt and… oh, god!

Since the current chief had arrived, he’d decided to curtail traffic collisions involving officers busting through red lights and stop signs minus lights and siren while racing to urgent calls that didn’t rate a code 3 status. So henceforth, the calls that in the old days would have rated only a code 2 status were upgraded to code 3. That meant that in Los Angeles today the citizens were always hearing sirens. The street cops figured it reminded the chief of his days as New York’s police commissioner, all those sirens howling. The cops didn’t mind a bit. It was a blast getting to drive code 3 all the time.

Because the call wasn’t assigned to them, Fausto couldn’t drive code 3, but neither the transplanted easterner who headed the Department nor the risen Christ could keep LAPD street cops from racing to an OIS call. Fausto would slow at an intersection and then roar through, green light or not, making cars brake and yield for the black-and-white. But by the time they got to Western and Romaine, five units were there ahead of them and all officers were out of their cars, aiming shotguns or nines at the lone car in the parking lot, where they could see someone ducking down on the front seat.

Fausto grabbed the shotgun and advanced to the car closest to the action, seeing it belonged to the surfers, Flotsam and Jetsam. When he looked over at Budgie trailing beside him, he wondered why she wasn’t aiming hers.

“Where’s your gun?” he said, then added, “Please don’t tell me it’s with the milk!”

“No, I have the milk,” Budgie said.

“Just point your finger,” he said and was stunned to see that, with a sick look on her face, she did it!

After a pause, he said, “I have a two-inch Smith in my war bag. Wanna borrow it?”

Still pointing her long, slender index finger, Budgie said, “Two-inch wheel guns can’t hit shit. I’m better off this way.”

Fausto came as close to a guffaw as he had in a long time. She had balls. And she was quick, he had to give her that. Then he saw the car door open, and two teenage Latino boys got out with their hands up and were quickly proned-out and cuffed.

The code 4 was broadcast by the PSR, meaning there was sufficient help at the scene. And to keep other eager cops from coming anyway, she added, “No officer involved.”

Fausto saw one of those surfers, Flotsam, heading their way. Fausto thought about how back when he was a young copper, there was no way in hell bleached hair would be allowed. And what about his partner, Jetsam, swaggering along beside him with his dark blond hair all gelled in little spikes two inches long? What kind of shit was that? It was time to retire, Fausto thought again. Time to pull the pin.

Flotsam approached Fausto and said, “Security guard at the big building there got hassled by some homies when he caught them jacking up a car to steal the rims. Dumb ass capped one off in the air to scare them away. They jumped in the car and hid, afraid to come out.”

“Sky shooting,” Fausto snorted. “Guy’s seen too many cowboy movies. Shouldn’t allow those door shakers to carry anything more than a bag of stones and a slingshot.”

“You should see the ride they were working on,” Jetsam said, joining his partner. “Nineteen thirty-nine Chevy. Completely restored. Cherry. Bro, it is sweet!”

“Yeah?” Fausto was interested now. “I used to own an old ’thirty-nine when I was in high school.” Turning to Budgie, he said, “Let’s take a look for a minute.” Then he remembered her empty holster and thought they’d better get away before somebody spotted it.

He said to Flotsam and Jetsam, “Just remembered something. Gotta go.”

Budgie was thrown back in her seat as they sped away. When she shot him a guilty look, he said, “Please tell me that you didn’t forget your key too.”

“Oh shit,” she said. “Don’t you have your nine-nine-nine key?”

“Where’s your freaking keys?”

“On the table in the john.”

“And where is your freaking gun, may I ask?”

“On the floor in the john. By the keys.”

“And what if my nine-nine-nine key’s in my locker with the rest of my keys?” he said. “Figuring I didn’t have to bother, since I have an eager young partner.”

“You wouldn’t leave your keys in your locker,” Budgie said without looking at him. “Not you. You wouldn’t trust a young partner, an old partner, or your family dog.”

He looked at her then and seeing a tiny upturn at the corner of her lips thought, She really has some balls, this one. And some smart mouth. And of course she was right about him-he would never forget his keys.

Fausto just kept shaking his head as he drove back to the storefront substation. Then he grumbled more to himself than to her, “Freaking surfers. You see that gelled hair? Not in my day.”

“That isn’t gel,” Budgie said. “Their hair is stiff and sticky from all the mai tai mix getting dumped on their heads in the beach bars they frequent. They’re always sniffing around like a pair of poodles and getting rejected. And please don’t tell me it wouldn’t be like that if there weren’t so many women officers around. Like in your day.”

Fausto just grunted and they rode without speaking for a while, pretending to be scanning the streets as the moon was rising over Hollywood.

Budgie broke the silence when she said, “You won’t snitch me off to the Oracle, will you? Or for a big laugh to the other guys?”

With his eyes focused on the streets, he said, “Yeah, I go around ratting out partners all the time. For laughs.”

“Is there a bathroom window in that place?” she asked. “I didn’t notice.”

“I don’t think there’s any windows,” he said. “I hardly ever been in there. Why?”

“Well, if I’m wrong about you and you don’t have a key, and if there’s a window, you could boost me up and I could pry it open and climb in.”

His words laden with sarcasm, Fausto said, “Oh, well, why not just ask me if I’d climb in the window because you’re a new mommy and can’t risk hurting yourself?”

“No,” she said, “you could never get your big ass through any window, but I could if you’d boost me up. Sometimes it pays to look like a stork.”

“I got my keys,” he said.

“I figured,” she said.

For the first time, Budgie saw Fausto nearly smile, and he said, “It hasn’t been a total loss. At least we got the milk.”

At about the same time that Fausto Gamboa and Budgie Polk were gathering her equipment at the substation on Cherokee, Farley Ramsdale and Olive Oyl were home at Farley’s bungalow, sitting on the floor, having smoked some of the small amount of crystal they had left. Scattered all around them on the floor were letters they had fished out of seven blue mailboxes on that very busy evening of work.

Olive was wearing the glasses Farley had stolen for her at the drugstore and was laboriously reading through business mail, job applications, notices of unpaid bills, detached portions of paid bills, and various other correspondence. Whenever she came across something they could use, she would pass it to Farley, who was in a better mood now, sorting some checks they could possibly trade and nibbling on a saltine because it was time to put something in his stomach.

The crystal was getting to him, Olive thought. He was blinking more often than usual and getting flushed. Sometimes it worried her when his pulse rate would shoot up to 150 and higher, but if she mentioned it, he just yelled at her, so she didn’t say anything.

“This is a lot of work, Farley,” she said when her eyes were getting tired. “Sometimes I wonder why we don’t just make our own meth. Ten years ago I used to go with a guy who had his own meth lab and we always had enough without working so hard. Till the chemicals blew up one day and burned him real bad.”

“Ten years ago you could walk in a drugstore and buy all the goddamn ephedrine you wanted,” Farley said. “Nowadays a checkout clerk’ll send you to a counter where they ask for ID if you try to buy a couple boxes of Sudafed. Life ain’t easy anymore. But you’re lucky, Olive. You get to live in my house. If you were living in a ratty hotel room, it’d be real dangerous to do the work we do. Like, if you used a hot credit card or a phony name to get your room like you always did before, you’d lose your protection against search and seizure. The law says you have no expectation of privacy when you do that. So the cops could kick your door down without a search warrant. But you’re lucky. You live in my house. They need a search warrant to come in here.”

“I’m real lucky,” Olive agreed. “You know so much about the law and everything.” She grinned at him and he thought, Kee-rist, those fucking teeth!

Olive thought it was nice when she and Farley were at home like this, working in front of the TV. Really nice when Farley wasn’t all paranoid from the tweak, thinking the FBI and the CIA were coming down the chimney. A couple times when he’d hallucinated, Olive really got scared. They’d had a long talk then about how much to smoke and when they should do it. But lately she thought that Farley was breaking his own rules when she wasn’t looking. She thought he was into that ice a whole lot more than she was.

“We got quite a few credit-card numbers,” he said. “Lots of SS numbers and driver’s license info and plenty of checks. We can trade for some serious glass when we take this stuff to Sam.”

“Any cash, Farley?”

“Ten bucks in a card addressed to ‘my darling grandchild.’ What kinda cheap asshole only gives ten bucks to a grandchild? Where’s the fucking family values?”

“That’s all?”

“One other birthday card, ‘to Linda from Uncle Pete.’ Twenty bucks.” He looked up at Olive and added, “Uncle Pete’s probably a pedophile, and Linda’s probably his neighbor’s ten-year-old. Hollywood’s full of freaks. Someday I’m getting outta here.”

“I better check on the money,” Olive said.

“Yeah, don’t cook it to death,” Farley said, thinking that the saltine was making him sick. Maybe he should try some vegetable soup if there was a can left.

The money was in the tub that Farley had placed on the screened back porch. Eighteen five-dollar bills were soaking in Easy-Off, almost bleached clean. Olive used a wooden spoon to poke a few of them or flip them over to look at the other side. She hoped this would work better than the last time they tried passing bogus money.

That time Olive almost got arrested, and it scared her to even think about that day two months ago when Farley told her to buy a certain light green bonded paper at Office Depot. And then they took it to Sam, the guy who rented them his car from time to time, and Sam worked for two days cutting the paper and printing twenty-dollar bills on his very expensive laser printer. After Sam was satisfied, he told Olive to spray the stack of bogus twenties with laundry starch and let them dry thoroughly. Olive did it, and when she and Farley checked the bills, he thought they were perfect.

They stayed away from the stores like the mini-market chains that have the pen they run over large bills. Farley wasn’t sure if they’d bother with twenties, but he was afraid to take a chance. A mini-market clerk had told Farley that if the clerk sees brown under the pen, it’s good; black or no color is bad. Or something like that. So they’d gone to a Target store on that day two months ago to try out the bogus money.

In front of the store was a buff young guy with a mullet passing out gay pride leaflets for a parade that was being organized the following weekend. The guy wore a tight yellow T-shirt with purple letters across the front that said “Queer Pervert.”

He’d offered a handbill to Farley, who pointed at the words on the T-shirt and said to Olive, “That’s redundant.”

The guy flexed his deltoids and pecs, saying to Farley, “And it could say ‘Kick Boxer’ too. Want a demonstration?”

“Don’t come near me!” Farley cried. “Olive, you’re a witness!”

“What’s redundant, Farley?” Olive asked, but he said, “Just get the fuck inside the store.”

Olive could see that Farley was in a bad mood then, and when they were entering, they were partially blocked by six women and girls completely covered in chadors and burkas, two of them talking on cells and two others raising their veils to drink from large Starbucks cups.

Farley brushed past them, saying, “Why don’t you take those Halloween rags back to Western Costume.” Then to Olive, “Wannabe sand niggers. Or maybe Gypsies boosting merchandise under those fucking muumuus.”

One of the women said something angrily in Arabic, and Farley muttered, “Hasta lasagna to you too. Bitch.”

There were lots of things that Olive had wanted to buy, but Farley said they were going to maintain control until they tested the money once or twice with small purchases. Farley kept looking at a CD player for $69.50 that he said he could sell in five minutes at Ruby’s Donuts on Santa Monica Boulevard, where a lot of tranny streetwalkers hung out.

Olive had always been tenderhearted and she felt sorry for all those transsexuals trapped between two genders. Some of those she’d talked to had had partial gender-changing operations, and a couple of them had endured the complete change, Adam’s apple surgery and all. But Olive could still tell they hadn’t been born as women. They seemed sad to Olive and they were always nice to her long before she’d met Farley, when she was panhandling and selling ecstasy for a guy named Willard, who was way mean. Many times a tranny who’d just turned a good trick would give Olive five or ten dollars and tell her to go get something to eat.

“You look nervous,” Farley said to Olive as they wandered around the Target store.

“I’m only a little nervous,” Olive said.

“Well, stop it. You gotta look like a normal person, if that’s possible.” Farley eyed a very nice twenty-one-inch TV set but shook his head, saying, “We gotta start small.”

“Can we just do it now, Farley?” Olive said. “I just wanna get it over with.”

Farley left the store and Olive took the CD player to the checkout counter, the most crowded one so that she’d encounter a clerk who was too busy to be looking for bogus money. Except that just as the shopper ahead of her was paying for a purchase of blankets and sheets, a manager stepped over and offered to relieve the harried young checkout clerk. He glanced at Olive when he was taking care of the other customer, and Olive had a bad feeling.

She had a real bad feeling when it was her turn and he said suspiciously, “Will you be paying by check?”

“No, cash,” Olive said innocently, just as a roving store employee walked up to the manager and nodded toward Olive.

The roving guy said, “Where’s your friend?”

“Friend?” Olive said.

“Yes, the man who insulted the Muslim ladies,” he said. “They complained and wanted me to throw him out of the store.”

Olive was so shaken, she didn’t notice that she’d dropped the three twenties on the counter until the manager picked them up and held them up to the light and ran them through his fingers. And Olive panicked. She bolted and ran past shoppers with loaded carts, through the doors to the parking lot, and didn’t stop until she was on the sidewalk in front.

When Farley found her walking on the sidewalk and picked her up, she didn’t tell him about the guy and the complaint from the Muslim women. She knew it would just make him madder and get him in a terrible mood, so she said that the checkout clerk felt the money and said, “This paper is wrong.” And that’s why Farley went back to Sam, who told him to try to get good paper by bleaching real money with Easy-Off.

So today they were trying it again but with real money. She wore her cleanest cotton sweater and some low-rise jeans that were too big, even though Farley had shoplifted them from the juniors section at Nordstrom. And she wore tennis shoes for running, in case things went bad again.

“This time it won’t go bad,” Farley promised Olive while he parked in front of RadioShack, seemingly determined to buy a CD player.

When they were out and standing beside the car, he said, “This time you got real paper from real money, so don’t sweat it. And it wasn’t easy to get hold of all those five-dollar bills, so don’t blow this.”

“I don’t know if they look quite right,” Olive said doubtfully.

“Stop worrying,” Farley said. “You remember what Sam told you about the strip and the watermark?”

“Sort of,” Olive said.

“The strip on the left side of a five says five, right? But it’s small, very hard to see. The president’s image on the right-side watermark is bigger but also hard to see. So if they hold the bill up to the light and their eyes start looking left to right or right to left, whadda you do?”

“I run to you.”

“No, you don’t run to me, goddamnit!” He yelled it, then looked around, but none of the passing shoppers were paying any attention to them. He continued with as much patience as he could muster. “These dumb shits won’t even notice that the strip ain’t for a twenty-dollar bill and that the watermark has a picture of Lincoln instead of Jackson. They just go through the motions and look, but they don’t see. So don’t panic.”

“Until I’m sure he’s onto me. Then I run out to you.”

Farley looked at the low, smog-laden sky and thought, Maintain. Just fucking maintain. This woman is dumb as a clump of dog hair. Slowly he said, “You do not run to me. You never run to me. You do not know me. I am a fucking stranger. You just walk fast out of the store and head for the street. I’ll pick you up there after I make sure nobody’s coming after you.”

“Can we do it now, Farley?” Olive said. “Pretty soon I’ll have to go to the bathroom.”

The store was bustling when they entered. As usual, there were a few street people lurking around the parking lot begging for change.

One of the street people recognized Farley and Olive. In fact, he had their license number written down on a card, saving it for a rainy day, so to speak. Farley and Olive never noticed the old homeless guy who was eyeballing them as they entered. Nor did they see him enter the store and approach a man with a “Manager” tag on his shirt.

The homeless guy whispered something to the manager, who kept his eye on Farley and Olive for the whole ten minutes that they browsed. When Farley walked out of the store, the manager still watched him, until he was sure that Farley wasn’t coming back in. Then the manager reentered the store and watched Olive at the checkout counter.

Slick, Olive thought. It’s working real slick. The kid at the checkout took the four bogus twenties from Olive’s hand and began ringing up the purchase. But then it happened.

“Let me see those bills.”

The manager was talking to the kid, not to Olive. She hadn’t seen him standing behind her, and she was too startled by his arrival to do anything but freeze.

He held the bills up to the late-afternoon light pouring through the plate glass, and she saw his eyes moving left to right and right to left, and she didn’t care if Farley said they’re too dumb to match up strips and watermarks and all that Farley Ramsdale goddamn bullshit! Olive knew exactly what to do and did it right at that instant.

Three minutes later Farley picked her up sprinting across the street against a red light, and he was amazed that Olive Oyl could move that fast, given her emaciated condition. A few minutes after that, Trombone Teddy walked into RadioShack and the manager told him that yes, they were crooks and had tried to pass bogus twenties. He handed Teddy several dollars from his pocket and thanked him for the tip. All in all, Teddy thought that his day was beginning quite fortuitously. He wished he could run into those two tweakers more often.