Hollywood Station

SEVEN

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY evening saw throngs on Hollywood Boulevard at another of the endless red carpet ceremonies, this one at the Kodak Theatre, where show business backslaps and hugs itself before returning to everyday backbiting and seething in never-ending bouts of jealousy over a colleague’s getting a job that should have been given to Me! Show business’s unmentioned prayer: Please, God, let me succeed and let them… fail.

The midwatch was in terrible shape as far as deployment was concerned. Fausto was on days off and so was Benny Brewster. Budgie Polk saw the Oracle working at his desk and found it reassuring to see all those hash marks on his left sleeve, all the way up to his elbow. He wore not his heart on his sleeve, but his life. Forty-six years. Nine service stripes. Who could push him around? The Oracle had said he was going to break the record of the detective from Robbery-Homicide Division who’d retired in February with fifty years of service. But sometimes, like now, he looked tired. And old.

The Oracle would be sixty-nine years old in August, and it was all there around his eyes and furrowed brow, all the years with the LAPD. He’d served seven chiefs. He’d seen chiefs and mayors come and go and die. But in those old glory days of LAPD, he couldn’t have imagined he’d be serving under a federal consent decree that was choking the life out of the police department he loved. Proactive police work had given way to police paranoia, and he seemed to internalize it more than anyone else. Budgie watched him unscrew a bottle of antacid liquid and swallow a large dose.

Budgie had been hoping to team up with Mag Takara, but after Budgie walked into the watch commander’s office and had a look at the lineup, she took the Oracle aside in the corridor, where she said privately, “Did the lieutenant decide on the assignments tonight, Sarge?”

“No, I did,” he told her, but he stopped talking when Hollywood Nate interrupted by bounding in the back door with three rolls of paper, carrying them like they were treasure maps.

“Wait’ll you see these, Sarge,” he said to the Oracle.

He handed two to Budgie while he carefully unrolled the third, revealing a movie one-sheet for Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson.

“Don’t we have enough movie posters around the station?” the Oracle said.

“But this one’s in great shape! It’s a copy, but it’s a pretty old copy. And in beautiful condition. I’m getting the frames donated tomorrow.”

“All right, put them up in the roll-call room with the others,” the Oracle said, running his hand over his gray crew cut. “I guess anything’s better than looking at all these inmate green walls. Whoever designed our stations must’ve got his training in Albania during the cold war.”

“Way cool, Sarge,” Nate said. “We’ll decide where to put the others later. One’s for Double Indemnity, and the other’s for Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean’s face right under the title. Lots of great shots of Hollywood in those movies.”

“Okay, but pick places where citizens can’t see them from the lobby,” the Oracle said. “Don’t turn this station into a casting office.”

After Hollywood Nate had sprinted up the stairs, the Oracle said to Budgie, “I’m a sucker for young cops who respect old things. And speaking of old things, with Fausto off I thought you wouldn’t mind working with Hank Driscoll for a few days.”

Budgie rolled her eyes then. Hank aka “B.M.” Driscoll was someone nobody liked working with, especially young officers. It wasn’t that he was old like Fausto-he had nineteen years on the Job and was only a little over forty-but it was like working with your whiny aunt Martha. The B.M. sobriquet that the other cops hung on him was for Baron Münchhausen, whose invented illnesses resulted in medical treatment and hospitalization, a disorder that came to be known in the psychiatric community as Munchausen syndrome.

B.M. Driscoll probably had more sick days than the rest of the midwatch combined. If they had to arrest a junkie with hepatitis, B.M. Driscoll would go to his doctor with symptoms within forty-eight hours and would listen doubtfully when assured that his claims were medically impossible.

The ten-hour shift of Watch 5 crawled by when you had to work with him. Older cops said that if you felt that life was flying by too quickly, you could bring time almost to a standstill just by working a whole twenty-eight-day deployment period with B.M. Driscoll.

He was tall and wiry, the grandson of Wisconsin farmers who came to California during the Great Depression, which he claimed kept his parents from eating properly, so they passed unhealthy genes down to him. He kept his sparse brown hair clipped almost as close as the Oracle’s because he believed it was more hygienic. And he was twice divorced, the mystery being how he found anyone but a psychiatrist to marry him in the first place.

However, there was one event in his career that made him a bit of a police legend. Several years earlier, when he was working patrol in the barrio of Hollenbeck Division, he became involved in a standoff with a drug-crazed, facially tattooed homeboy who was threatening to cut his girlfriend’s throat with a Buck knife.

Several cops were there in the middle of the street, pointing shotguns and handguns and cajoling and threatening to no avail. Officer Driscoll was holding a Taser gun, and at one point during the standoff when the homie lowered the blade long enough to wave it during his incoherent rant, B.M. Driscoll fired. The dart struck the homeboy in the left chest area, penetrating the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket as well as his butane lighter. Which was ignited by a lit cigarette. Which caused the guy to burst into flames. Which ended the standoff.

They got the shirt off the homeboy before he was seriously burned and threw him into a rescue ambulance, and B.M. Driscoll became something of a celebrity, especially among the Latino cruisers where he was known as “the dude with the flame thrower.”

But whether he was a legend or not, Budgie Polk was very unhappy about her assignment. She said to the Oracle, “Just tell me one thing, Sarge. Tell me that you’re not keeping me and Mag apart because I’m just back from maternity leave and she’s a little munchkin. I can’t explain to you how degrading it is when that happens to us women. When male supervisors say stuff like ‘We’re splitting you up for your own safety.’ After all the shit we women have gone through to get where we are on this Job.”

The Oracle said, “Budgie, I promise you that’s not why I put you with Driscoll instead of Mag. I don’t think of you in those terms. You’re a cop. Period.”

“And that’s not why you put me with Fausto? So the old war horse could look after me?”

“Haven’t you caught on by now, Budgie?” the Oracle said. “Fausto Gamboa has been a bitter and depressed man since he lost his wife to colon cancer two years ago. And both their sons are losers, so they don’t help him any. When Ron LeCroix had to get his hemorrhoids zapped, it looked like a perfect time to team up Fausto with somebody young and alive. Preferably a woman, to soften him up a little bit. So I didn’t assign him to you for your benefit. I did it for him.”

They didn’t call him the Oracle for nothing, Budgie thought. She was painted into a corner now with nowhere to go. “Hoisted by my own ponytail” was all she could mutter.

The Oracle said, “Put some cotton in your ears for a few days. Driscoll’s actually a decent copper and he’s generous. He’ll buy your cappuccino and biscotti every chance he gets. And not because you’re a woman. That’s the way he is.”

“I hope I don’t catch bird flu or mad cow just listening to him,” Budgie said.

When they got to their patrol unit, Budgie driving, B.M. Driscoll threw his war bag into the trunk and said, “Try not to get in my breathing zone if you can help it, Budgie. I know you’ve got a baby, and I wouldn’t want to infect you. I think I could be coming down with something. I’m not sure, but I’ve got muscle pain and sort of feel chills down my back. I had the flu in October and again in January. This has been a bad year for my health.”

The rest was lost in radio chatter. Budgie tried to concentrate on the PSR’s voice and tune his out. She was reminded of an event she’d first heard about when she transferred to Hollywood Division and met Detective Andi McCrea. Other women officers particularly enjoyed the story.

It seemed that several years ago an LAPD officer from a neighboring division was shot by a motorist he’d pulled over for a ticket. Andi McCrea was a uniformed cop in Hollywood Division at that time, and several night-watch units were assigned to patrol their eastern border, where the suspect was last seen abandoning his car after a short pursuit.

It was past end of watch, and cars were working overtime, in communication with one another and checking alleys, storage yards, and vacant buildings, with no sign of the shooter. Then Andi got the word who the officer was: an academy classmate of hers, and he was badly wounded. She’d been relentless that night, shining her spotlight beam onto rooftops, even into trees, and her older male partner, like B.M. Driscoll, was a complainer. Not about imaginary illnesses, but about his need for rest and sleep. He was an unreliable shiftless cop.

Andi McCrea, according to all accounts, endured it for two hours, but after listening to him say, “We ain’t gonna find nobody, let’s get the hell outta here and go end of watch-this is bullshit,” she grimly turned north to the Hollywood Freeway, pulled onto the ramp, and stopped.

When her partner said, “What’re we stopping here for?” Andi said, “Something’s wrong. Get out and look at the right front tire.”

He griped about that too, but complied, and when he was out of the car shining his beam onto the tire, he said, “There’s nothing wrong here.”

“There sure as hell is something wrong here, you worthless asshole,” Andi said and drove off, leaving him on the freeway ramp, his rover still on the seat and his cell phone in his locker at the station.

Andi continued searching for another hour and only stopped when the search was called off, after which she drove to the station, still hacked off and ready to take her medicine.

The Oracle was waiting for her, and as she was unloading her war bag from the trunk, he said, “Your partner arrived about a half hour ago. Flagged down a car. He’s torqued. Stay away from him.”

“Sarge, we were hunting a maggot who shot a police officer!” Andi said.

“I understand that,” the Oracle said. “And knowing him, I can imagine what you had to put up with. But you don’t dump a body on the freeway unless it’s dead and you’re a serial killer.”

“Is he making his complaint official?”

“He wanted to but I talked him out of it. Told him it would be more embarrassing for him than for you. Anyway, he’s getting his long-awaited transfer to West L.A., so he’ll be gone at the end of the deployment period.”

That’s how it had ended, except that it was a favorite story of cops at Hollywood Station who knew Andi McCrea. And B.M. Driscoll’s whining about his flu symptoms reminded Budgie Polk of the story. It put a little smile on her face, and she thought, How far does he have to push me? Could I get away with it like Andi did? After all, there is precedent here.

And though Budgie was starting to enjoy certain things about working with Fausto now that he’d mellowed a little, wouldn’t it be great to be teamed with Mag Takara? Just for girl talk if nothing else. During code 7, when they were eating salads at Soup Plantation, they could kid around about eye candy on the midwatch, saying things like, “Would you consider doing Hollywood Nate if you thought he could ever keep his big mouth shut about it?” Or, “How much would it take for you to do either of those two logheads, Flotsam or Jetsam, if you could shoot him afterward?” Girl talk cop-style.

Mag was a cool and gutsy little chick with a quiet sense of humor that Budgie liked. And being of Japanese ethnicity, Mag would no doubt be down for code 7 at the sushi bar on Melrose that Budgie couldn’t persuade any of the male officers to set foot in. Of course, two women as short and tall as Mag and Budgie would be butts of stupid male remarks, along with the usual sexist ones that all women officers have to live with unless they want to get a rat jacket by complaining about it. The lamest: What do you call a black-and-white with two females in it? Answer: a tuna boat.

And while Budgie was thinking of ways to trade B.M. Driscoll for Mag Takara without pissing off the Oracle, Mag was thinking of ways to trade Flotsam for anybody at all. With Jetsam on days off, they were teamed for the first time, short and tall, quiet and mouthy. And oh god! He kept sliding his sight line over onto her every time she was looking out at the streets, and if this kept up, he’d be rear-ending a bus or something.

“Where shall we go for code seven?” he asked when they hadn’t been on patrol for twenty minutes. “And don’t say the sushi bar on Melrose, where I’ve seen your shop parked on numerous occasions.”

“I won’t, then,” she said, punching in a license plate on a low rider in the number two lane, figuring this surfer probably takes his dates to places with paper napkins and tap water.

Hoping for a smile, he said, “For me an order of sushi is a dish containing unretouched, recently dead mollusks. Stuff like that lays all over the beach in low tide. You like to surf?”

“No,” Mag said, unamused.

“I bet you’d look great shooting a barrel. All that gorgeous dark hair flowing in the wind.”

“A barrel?”

“Yeah, a tube? A pipe? Riding through as the wave breaks over you?”

“Yeah, a barrel.” This loghead’s had too many wipeouts, she thought. He’s gone surfboard-simple, that’s what.

“In one of those bikinis that’s just a piece of Lycra the size of a Toll House cookie.”

Just get me through the night and away from this hormone monster, Mag thought. Then she did some serious eye rolling when Flotsam said, “A surfer might predict that this could be the beginning of a choiceamundo friendship.”

Wesley Drubb got to drive, and he liked that. Hollywood Nate was sitting back doing what he did best, talking show business to his young partner, who didn’t give a shit about the movie theater that Nate pointed out there at Fairfax and Melrose, one that showed silent films.

“There was a famous murder there in the nineties,” Nate informed him, “involving former owners. One got set up by a business partner who hired a hit on him. The hit man is now doing life without. ‘The Silent Movie Murder,’ the press called it.”

“Really,” Wesley said, without enthusiasm.

“I can give you a show-business education,” Nate said. “Never know when it could come in handy working this division. I know you’re rich and all, but would you ever consider doing extra work in the movies? I could introduce you to an agent.”

Wesley Drubb hated it when other officers talked about his family wealth and said, “I’m not rich. My father’s rich.”

“I’d like to meet your dad sometime,” Nate said. “Does he have any interest in movies?”

Wesley shrugged and said, “He and my mom go to movies sometimes.”

“I mean in filmmaking.”

“His hobby is skeet shooting,” Wesley said. “And he’s done a little pistol shooting with me since I came on the Department.”

“Guns don’t have it going on, far as I’m concerned,” Nate said. “When I talk millimeters, it’s not about guns and ammo, it’s about celluloid. Thirty-five millimeters. Twenty-four frames per second. I have a thousand-dollar digital video camera. Panavision model. Sweet.”

“Uh-huh,” Wesley said.

“I know a guy, him and me, we’re into filmmaking. One of these days when we find the right kind of investor, we’re gonna make a little indie film and show it at the festivals. We have a script and we’re very close. All we need is the right investor. We can’t accept just anybody.”

They were stopped at a residential intersection in east Hollywood, a street that Wesley remembered hearing about. He looked at a two-story house, home of some Eighteenth Street crew members.

Hollywood Nate was just about to pop the question to Wesley about whether he thought that Franklin Drubb would ever consider including a start-up production company in his investment portfolio, when a head-shaven white guy in faux-leather pants, studded boots, and a leather vest over a swelling bare chest completely covered by body art walked up to the passenger side of the patrol car and tapped loudly on Nate’s window.

It startled both of them, and Nate rolled down the window and said, “What can I do for you?” keeping it polite but wary.

The man said in a voice soft and low, “Take me to Santa Monica and La Brea.”

Hollywood Nate glanced quickly at Wesley, then back to the guy, shining his flashlight up under the chin, seeing those dilated cavernous eyes, and said to him, “Step back away from the car.” Nate got out and Wesley quickly informed communications that 6-X-72 was code 6 at that location. Then he put the car in park, turned off the engine, tucked the keys in the buckle of his Sam Browne and got out on the driver’s side, walking quickly around the front of the car, flashlight in one hand, the other on the butt of his Beretta.

The man was a lot older than he looked at first when Nate walked him to the sidewalk and had a good look, but he was wide shouldered, with thick veins on his well-muscled arms, and full-sleeve tatts. It was very dark and the street lamp on the corner was out. An occasional car passed and nobody was walking on the residential street.

Then the guy said, “I’m a Vietnam vet. You’re a public servant. Take me to Santa Monica and La Brea.”

Hollywood Nate looked from the guy to his partner in disbelief and said, “Yeah, you’re a Vietnam vet and you got napalm eyes to prove it, but we’re not a taxi. What’re you fried on, man? X, maybe?”

The man smiled then, a sly and secretive smile locked in place just this side of madness. He opened his vest, showing his bare torso, and ran his hands over his own waist and buttocks and groin under the tight imitation-leather pants and said, “See, no weapons. No nothing. Just beautiful tattoos. Let’s go to Santa Monica and La Brea.”

Hollywood Nate glanced again at his partner, who looked spring-loaded, and Nate said, “Yeah, I see. You got more tatts than Angelina Jolie, but you ain’t her. So we’re not driving you anywhere.” Then he uttered the Hollywood Station mantra, “Stay real, dude.”

Those eyes. Nate looked again with his flashlight beam under the guy’s chin. Where did he find those eyes? They didn’t fit his face somehow. They looked like they belonged to somebody else. Or something else.

Nate looked at Wesley, who didn’t know what the hell to do. The man hadn’t broken any laws. Wesley didn’t know if he should ask the guy for ID or what. He waited for a cue from Nate. This was getting very spooky. An unhinged 5150 mental case for sure. Still, all he’d done was ask for a ride. Wesley remembered his academy instructor saying as long as they weren’t a danger to themselves or others, they couldn’t be taken to the USC Medical Center, formerly the old county hospital, for a seventy-two-hour hold.

Nate said to the man, “The only place this car goes is jail. Why don’t you walk home and sleep it off, whatever it is gave you those eyes.”

The man said, “War gave me these eyes. War.”

Cautiously, Nate said, “I think we’re gonna say good night to you, soldier. Go home. Right now.”

Nate nodded to his partner and backed toward the police car, but when he got in and closed the door and Wesley got in on the driver’s side and started the engine, the transmission still in park, the man ran to the car and kicked the right rear door with those studded boots, howling like a wolf.

“Goddamn!” Nate yelled, keying the mike and yelling, “Six-X-Seventy-two, officers need help!” He gave the location, then threw open his door and jumped out with his baton, which he lost during the first thirty seconds of the fight.

Wesley jumped from the driver’s side, not removing the keys, not even turning off the engine, ran around the car, and leaped onto the back of the madman who had Nate’s baton with one hand and Nate in a headlock.

All those muscles that Hollywood Nate had found in his gym, that had impressed badge bunnies in the Director’s Chair saloon, weren’t impressing this lunatic one bit. And even when Wesley hurled his 210-pound body onto the guy, he still kept fighting and kicking and trying to bite like a rabid dog.

Wesley tried the Liquid Jesus on him but the OC can was clogged and it created a pepper-spray mist in front of his own face that almost blinded him. Then he tried again but got more on Hollywood Nate than on the suspect, so he gave up and dropped the canister.

And pretty soon they had tussled, tumbled, and rolled across the lawn of a sagging two-story residence belonging to Honduran immigrants, into the side yard, and then clear into the backyard, where Hollywood Nate was starting to panic as he felt his strength waning. And he thought he might have to shoot this fucking lunatic after he felt the guy trying to grab his sidearm.

And while the battle was raging, some of the Eighteenth Street cruisers from another two-story house looked out the window, and a few of them came out to get a better look and root for the guy to kick some LAPD ass. When their pit bulls tried to follow, they leashed them, knowing that lots of other cops would be coming soon.

The dogs seemed to enjoy the fight even more than the crew did and began snarling and barking, and whenever the leather-clad madman growled and kicked at Wesley Drubb, who was administering LAPD-approved baton strikes, the dogs would bark louder. And then Loco Lennie happened on the scene.

Loco Lennie was not a member of Eighteenth Street but he was oh, such a wannabe. He was too young, too stupid, and too impulsive even for the cruisers to use him as a low-level drug delivery boy. Loco Lennie wasn’t watching the fight with the five members of the crew and their crazed dogs. Loco Lennie couldn’t take his eyes off the black-and-white that Wesley Drubb had left in gear, engine running, key in the ignition, in his haste to help Hollywood Nate. And Loco Lennie saw a chance to make a name for himself that would live forever in the minds and hearts of these cruisers who had so far rejected him.

Loco Lennie ran to the police car, jumped in, and took off, yelling, “Viva Eighteenth Street!”

Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb didn’t even know that their shop had been stolen. By now they had the guy pinned against the single-car garage of the ramshackle house, and young Wesley was learning that all of the leg and arm strikes he’d been taught at the academy weren’t worth a shit when battling a powerful guy who was maybe cooked on PCP or just plain psychotic.

And before the first help came screeching around the corner, siren yelping louder than the homie dogs and even louder than this howling mental case who was trying desperately to bite Hollywood Nate, the cop locked his forearm and biceps in a V around the man’s throat. Nate applied all the pressure he could manage to the carotid arteries while Wesley exhausted himself, whacking the guy everywhere from the guy’s wingspan on down to his lower legs with little effect.

Flotsam and Mag, Budgie and B.M. Driscoll, and four officers from Watch 3 all came running to the rescue just as the guy was almost choked out, his brain oxygen starved from the infamous choke hold, the carotid restraint that had killed several people over the decades but had saved the lives of more cops than all the Tasers and beanbag guns and side-handle batons and Liquid Jesus and the rest of the nonlethal weapons in their arsenal put together. A form of nonlethal force that, in this era of DOJ oversight and racial politics and political correctness, was treated exactly the same as an officer-involved shooting. And that would require almost as much investigation and as many reports as if Hollywood Nate had shot the guy in defense of his life with a load of double-aught buckshot.

When it looked as though the situation was in hand, one of the dogs belonging to the cruisers did what guard dogs do, after he saw the cops piling out of their black-and-whites and running in the direction of his homeboys. He sprang forward, breaking free of the leash, and raced directly at B.M. Driscoll, who had barely set foot on the sidewalk. When B.M. Driscoll saw those slobbering jaws and those bared fangs and malevolent eyes coming at him, he bellowed, drew his nine, and fired twice, missing once but then killing the dog instantly with a head shot.

The gunfire seemed to stop all action. Hollywood Nate realized that the maniac was choked out, and he let the guy fall to the ground, unconscious. Wesley Drubb looked toward the street for the first time and said, “Where’s our shop?”

Now that the entertainment had ended, the homies and their still-living dogs turned and retreated to their house without complaint about the unlicensed animal they’d lost. And there was lots of talk among them about how Loco Lennie had pelotas made of stainless steel. Maybe they should reconsider Loco Lennie as a cruiser, they agreed, if he didn’t get himself dusted by some cop who spotted him in the stolen police car.

When Flotsam saw the leather-clad lunatic lying on the ground, he said to Mag, “Let’s do rock-paper-scissors to see who gets the mouth on CPR.”

But as Mag was running to the car to look for her personal CPR mask, the unconscious man started breathing again on his own. He moaned and tried to get up but was quickly handcuffed by Hollywood Nate, who then collapsed beside him, his face bruised and swollen.

It was then that Flotsam noticed something clinging to the guy’s bald head. He shined his light on it and saw “Weiss.” Hollywood Nate’s name tag had been pulled off and was sticking to the guy’s bare scalp.

“Get me a Polaroid!” Flotsam yelled.

By the time the Oracle had arrived and instructed Flotsam and Mag to ride with him and to give their car to Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb, the handcuffed man was alert, and he said to Hollywood Nate, “You can only hurt me in a physical state.”

And Nate, who was still trying to get his own breathing back to normal, rolled his aching shoulders and answered, “That’s the only state we live in, you psycho motherfucker.”

The Oracle warned that now they might have two FID teams out there: one on the dog shooting and another because Hollywood Nate had applied the dreaded choke hold. Force Investigation Division would have to be convinced that B.M. Driscoll had acted in fear of great bodily injury and that Hollywood Nate had choked out the madman as a last resort in the immediate defense of a life, namely his own.

“Not one but two FID roll-outs on the same freaking incident,” the Oracle moaned.

Flotsam said sympathetically, “LAPD can’t get enough layers of oversight, Boss. Somebody flipped the pyramid and we’re under the pointy tip. We got more layers than a mafia wedding cake.”

When a plain-wrapper detective unit pulled up in front and parked, the Oracle wondered how FID could have gotten there so fast but then saw that it was only the night-watch detective Compassionate Charlie, as usual experiencing morbid curiosity. He was wearing one of his Taiwanese checked sport coats that made people ask if it was flame retardant. Charlie got out, picked some food from his teeth, and surveyed the scene for one of his sage pronouncements.

Flotsam talked for a few minutes to one of the Eighteenth Street crew who had lingered to be sure the dog was dead, and after the short conversation, the surfer jogged up to the Oracle and said, “Boss, I think we have some extenuating circumstances in this shooting that might help you with those rat bastards from FID.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

Pointing to the deceased pit bull, Flotsam said, “A homie told me the dog was just ghetto elk when they found him.”

“What?”

“You know, one of those stray dogs that roam around the ’hood? One of the cruisers found the dog down in Watts, brought him here and let him in their pack. But last month the dog came down with terminal cancer and they were just going to put him down any day now.”

“So?”

Compassionate Charlie butted into the conversation, saying to the Oracle, “Don’t you get it? Haven’t you read about dogs that can smell malignant tumors?”

“Now, what in hell is your point, Charlie?” the Oracle wanted to know. He didn’t have time for this goofy surfer or for one of Charlie’s on-scene analyses.

Compassionate Charlie shook his head sadly, sucked his teeth, and said, “You can call this just another touching drama among the many that occur nightly on the streets of Hollywood. The fucking mutt knew he had cancer, so he decided to do honor to his crew and commit suicide-by-cop.”

Young Wesley Drubb felt sort of dazed for the remainder of the watch. His mind kept wandering away from the issues at hand. For instance, when they drove their prisoner to Central Jail at Parker Center, where medical treatment was available for him, all Wesley could think about when they drove past the parking lot was, Why is the entrance gate blocked with a steel barrier, and the exit gate is wide open with no metal spikes? A terrorist could just drive in the exit. Are we stupid, or what? His mind was wandering like that.

After the prisoner was treated prior to being booked for battery on a police officer, Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb decided to go to Cedars for treatment of contusions and abrasions, and in Nate’s case muscle spasms. As to the prisoner, Nate told Wesley it would be up to the DA’s office to decide if the arrestee was permanently nuts or only temporarily nuts from PCP or whatever a blood test might reveal. Drug-induced craziness would not be a defense in a criminal case, but life-induced craziness like his war experiences might keep him from a jail sentence and put him in a mental ward for a short vacation.

Wesley Drubb’s mind remained unfocused for more than an hour. He got alarmed by remarks made by a jail employee who had taken his sweet time returning from the long lunch break that their union had recently won for them.

When their prisoner was strip-searched, the black detention officer studied the darkening welts all over the guy’s body and said, “He looks like a zebra.”

Wesley Drubb had never dreamed a man fifty-seven years old could fight like that and was still trying to sort his feelings about the first act of violence he’d ever committed on another human being in his entire life. And sick from the worry and stress of having lost his police car, he tried to explain the prisoner’s bruises by saying, “We had no choice.”

The jailor chuckled at the shaken young cop and said, “Boy, lucky for you he’s a peckerwood. If this cat was black, you would be facing the wrath of the city council, the United States Department of Justice, and the motherfuckin’ ghost of Johnnie Cochran.”

Loco Lennie may or may not have heard the PSR’s voice informing all units that 6-X-72’s car had been stolen, and he may or may not have opened the text messages sent by other units to 6-X-72 after they’d learned of the incident.

One message said, “When we see you, you are dead meat.”

Another said, “We will shoot you and burn your body.”

Another, apparently from a K-9 unit, said, “Trooper will eat on your sorry ass for as long as he wants. Before you die.”

In any case, Loco Lennie figured he had made his point to the crew, so he abandoned the police car only ten blocks from his house. He found a rock lying beside a chain-link fence, picked it up, and threw it at the windshield, just as a parting shot. Then Loco Lennie sprinted home in glory.

When, at the end of their long and awful duty tour, they were painfully walking to their personal cars, Wesley Drubb, who had been silent most of the night, said to Hollywood Nate, “I don’t care what they taught me in my years at USC. I don’t care how unscientific it is. All I know is that since coming on this Job, I no longer believe in evolution. I believe in Creationism.”

“And why is that?” Nate asked.

“For instance, that guy tonight? An evolved form of life could not resemble something like that.”