The Tin Collector

BUILDING 132 MACHINE SHOP PIPE AND COPPER

They crept across Avenue D and found cover behind a two-story-high cylindrical tank. When they looked around the rusting tank, Shane and Alexa could see directly into the mouth of the warehouse through the raised loading door.

A party with more than thirty people was going on inside. Some tables had been set up full of food and buckets of beer. Men and women were dancing on the cold concrete floor, which was lit by lights from two gray police plainwraps that had been pulled inside. Both Crown Vies had the doors open; stereo music was coming from the car radios tuned to the same FM station.

Shane was looking through his telescopic lens at the partyers.

"Most of these guys are copsI know some of the girls. I busted a few when I was in West Valley Vice."

"Hookers?" Alexa asked. "Gimme it."

He handed her the zoom-lens camera, and she squinted through the eyepiece, panning around inside the lit building. "You're right, it's a regular coyote convention in there," she murmured. "Those are Beverly Hills pros thousand-dollar girls Angelica DeBravo, Deborah Kline, Donna Fleister, plus the rest of our police-department cast of characters." She was referring to Ray's den: Joe Church, Lee Ayers, John Samansky, Don Drucker, and Shane's blown tail, "Bongo" Kono. Calvin Sheets and Coy Love were not there, but the other guys he'd photographed up at Arrowhead were. Alexa identified them as ex-cops terminated from "Dream" Sheets's Coliseum detail. Then she caught her breath. "Shit don't like this," she said, her eye pinned to the camera viewfinder.

"What?"

"There're two guys from the mayor's staff in there his legislative assistant, Mark somebody, in the suit by the door; and Rob Lavetta, his press-relations guy, the one standing next to Drucker." She handed the camera back to Shane, who took a picture of both men.

The party was in full swing, everybody drinking beer and dancing to the music, although "dancing" was a conservative description of what was going on. It was more like a group grope in 4/4 time. Dress was optional, with the thousand-dollar girls opting for maximum exposure.

Shane wanted to photograph everyone, keeping a mental count of whom he had already shot and whom he still needed, waiting for the right moment when the dancers would spin, giving him a good angle of one or both. When he finished, he sat next to Alexa, leaning back against the rusting cylindrical tank.

"They oughta put these shots in the departmental brochure," he finally said. "We'd end our recruiting problem."

Alexa volunteered a slogan: "Not just long hours and cold coffee. Police work a changing profession."

"Whatta you wanna do?" he asked.

"I don't know…" She winced, then pulled something out from under her. It was a sign she'd been sitting on. They both read it: