Hollywood Crows (23 page)

There was trouble in Southeast Hollywood that evening involving more than fifty Filipino and Mexican men. They had gathered in a warehouse that closed its doors for the day at 6
P.M
. but whose back door had been left unlocked by an employee who’d made secretive arrangements with all the other sporting men who worked in the warehouse. One of the storage bays had been roped off, and tattooed workers in company shirts or wife beaters were drinking beer and tequila as they gathered around a fighting pit made of plywood that had been temporarily nailed in place to provide an arena for the grisly spectacle about to take place.

Several trucks arrived and very soon steel cages were being carried into the warehouse and stacked against the wall. Each of twelve cages contained a fighting cock, and every bird was squawking in terror from the commotion. Mexican music was blaring from an old boom box, and voices of drinking men shouted bets to one another in Spanish, Tagalog, and Spanglish prior to prepping the birds for the bloody fights to the death, scheduled to begin at 8:30
P.M
.

It might have gone off as planned except for one young Mexican forklift operator named Raul, who had made the mistake of telling his wife, Carolina, a Mexican American girl born and raised in East L.A., that he would be busy that evening and would be coming home late.

“Busy doing what?” she said.

“I cannot tell you,” he said.

“Whadda you mean you can’t tell me?” she said.

“I swore a secret,” he said.

“You better unswear it, dude,” she said. “I wanna know where you’re going.”

It was always like this. The forklift operator had wished a thousand times that he’d married a real Mexican girl. These brown coconuts, milky white on the inside, were nothing but nagging
gringas
with Hispanic names.

“I have made a promise to my friends,” he said.

“I think maybe you’re gonna be visiting your old squeeze,” she said. “That bitch Rosa with the big
chi-chis
. Well, you can forget about coming home afterwards.”

He sat down on the kitchen chair and hung his head and surrendered as he always did and told her the truth. “We are having a bird fight at the warehouse.”

“A bird fight?” Carolina said. “You mean you’re making roosters kill each other? Like that kinda bird fight?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am only going to bet twenty dollars. No more.”

“You ain’t betting shit,” she said. “Because you ain’t going to no bird fight. It’s against the law in this state, in case you didn’t know.”

“All my friends will be there, Carolina!” he pleaded.

“You go out this door and I’ll call the cops about the bird fight,” she said. “It’s cruel and disgusting!”

Her husband went into the bedroom and slammed the door. Ten minutes later, while he was in there pouting, his wife picked up the phone and quietly dialed 9-1-1.

One hour before the 8:30
P.M
. cockfight was about to commence, a hastily gathered raiding party had been put together by the assistant watch commander at Hollywood Station. Three patrol units from Watch 3, and two from Watch 5, were assigned to the raid, accompanied by the two teams of vice cops who were available on short notice. A pair of Animal Control employees were to be dispatched to meet the LAPD officers thirty minutes after the raid began, in order to impound the fighting cocks. Everyone was expecting to be writing a lot of citations and maybe booking the event organizers. The animal cruelty code section carried a $20,000 fine and/or one year in county jail.

The Watch 5 midwatch officers tasked were Cat Song and Gil Ponce, along with Dan Applewhite and Gert Von Braun. Most of the cops thought it might be an interesting assignment. There hadn’t been many cockfighting raids conducted in the heart of the city, and none of the cops had ever seen a fighting bird.

On their way to the staging area parking lot, from where they would converge on the warehouse, Gert Von Braun made a startling confession to Dan Applewhite.

“As far as big birds’re concerned, I look at them like they’re nothing but snakes with wings. Thinking of those roosters is creeping me out.”

Doomsday Dan was stunned. He didn’t think Gert Von Braun was afraid of anything. At that moment, she stopped being this intimidating mass of angry female cop and seemed like nothing more than a sweet and vulnerable girl!

He was absolutely tender when he said, “Don’t worry, Gert. If anything should go wrong with the killer birds, I’ll be there for you. One summer when I was a kid in Chino, I worked on a chicken farm, culling eggs. I’m a rooster wrangler, is what I am. You just get my back and deal with the drunk Mexicans and Filipinos, I’ll do the rest.”

“Oh, yeah,” she scoffed, “I can just see you there with your pepper spray, telling an insane rooster with knife blades on its feet, ‘Okay, birdbrain,
bring
it!’ Sure, you will. My hero.”

When they arrived at the staging area, the cops turned off their headlights and got out to talk to one another. It was then that they learned of an awful turn of events: The vice sergeant who was supposed to lead the raid was unavailable and had been replaced by a patrol sergeant from the midwatch.

“Chickenlips Treakle!” Cat Song moaned when she got the word.

“Appropriate choice, considering the nature of the event,” young Gil Ponce noted.

“He’ll find a way to fuck it up totally,” Gert Von Braun said. “If a rooster fight can get any more fucked up than they are to begin with.”

“I hear
that
,” Doomsday Dan concurred. “Treakle in command makes me wanna have a sudden back attack.”

And to make matters worse, Sergeant Treakle, shining his new mini-flashlight beam on the raiding party until he spotted his Watch 5 officers, approached Dan Applewhite and said, “I’ll be riding in with you and Von Braun.”

“Sergeant, don’t you wanna drive your own car in case we need extra shops to transport prisoners?” Gert said.

“No, Von Braun,” he said curtly. “I want you to drop me fifty yards from the warehouse for a very quick reconnoiter before I give the go command on my rover.”

Sergeant Treakle was especially nervous. He kept obsessively rubbing lip balm across his mouth, but he turned his back when he did it. Like he was sniffing coke.

Dan Applewhite whispered to Gert, “Why’s he need ChapStick? He’s got no lips!”

A bearded Latino vice cop, wearing an Ace Hardware work shirt and kneeless jeans, spoke up then, saying, “Wouldn’t it be better if I do the reconnoiter, Sergeant? Your uniform is a tad conspicuous.”

“Thanks for the input,” Sergeant Treakle said icily. “I’ll manage.”

“Okay,” the vice cop said, “but I hope this caper don’t get ‘fowled’ up.” He looked around at the other silent cops and said, “‘Fowled’ up? F-o-w-l?”

The others groaned or guffawed, and Sergeant Treakle made a mental note to find out the name of this smart-ass vice cop. He looked at his watch and said, “Applewhite and Von Braun, let’s roll!”

“Let’s roll?” the vice cop said after Sergeant Treakle was gone. “Christ almighty. That fucking attack gerbil thinks he’s on United flight ninety-three!”

Another midwatch unit, one that had not been assigned to the raid, happened by at that moment after hearing the radio communication setting up the rendezvous. Jetsam was driving, and Flotsam, who had had a very strenuous morning at Malibu, was riding shotgun and nursing an injured shoulder. He was relating the entire tale to his partner.

“Dude, I was ripping on that juicy when I got shut down,” Flotsam informed him.

“A total wipeout inside the barrel?” Jetsam said.

“I got pitchpoled, dude. The nose went vertical and I went horizontal, and the board snapped the leash and catapulted straight up in the air. And I’m talking my U-boat. See, I’d pulled the old longboard from my quiver this morning, and there I was, waiting for nine feet of glass to come down on me like a mortar round!”

“Shit, why is there radical surf every time I gotta go to the dentist or something?” Jetsam said.

“The worst part of it is, I swallowed maybe half a gallon of foamy and I’m all coughing and gagging, and what happens? This totally awesome dudette in a white thong bikini comes up and she says, ‘Are you okay?’ I look at her and I see the most excellent Betty I’ve ever seen at Malibu. Remember the salty sister we seen at that midnight rager last month? The one that was jumping over the fire pit topless with a tequila bottle in each hand? That one?”

“Are you telling me this one was as cooleo as
that
one?”

“Mint, dude. Totally prime.”

“Did you get her number?”

“Dude, I could hardly breathe. I’m all gasping. I’m all choking. Then I’m, like, feeling the IHOP waffles come chugging up my throat.”

“Oh, no!” Jetsam said. “You barked the dog?”

“I lunched it,” Flotsam said, nodding. “Barfola.”

“Don’t tell me more!” Jetsam cried but wanted to hear it all.

Flotsam said, “Dude, I blew chunks all over her. She screamed and jumped in the surf to wash off the spooge and I never saw her again. I was soooo bleak.”

“Bro,” Jetsam said softly. “That is, like, one of the saddest stories I ever heard.”

Cat Song and Gil Ponce were the last team to leave the staging area parking lot, when 6-X-46 drove up, flashing headlights at them.

Jetsam pulled close to the other car, facing the opposite direction, and said, “The game’s afoot, huh?”

“Yeah, and we gotta go now,” Cat said. “Treakle’s in charge.”

“Aw, shit,” Jetsam said. “Sorry for you.”

Flotsam looked at the cageless old black-and-white parked in the lot and said, “Which supervisor belongs to that piece of shit?”

“Chickenlips,” Cat said. “He’s on a sneak-and-peek mission, checking out the target. We can’t talk. Gotta go.”

“Catch you later,” Jetsam said while Cat drove away, following the caravan of police units ready to swoop into the warehouse parking lot.

Flotsam massaged his aching shoulder while Jetsam switched from the Hollywood base frequency to the tactical frequency just in time to hear Sergeant Treakle’s high-pitched radio voice.

“All units converge on target!” Sergeant Treakle said, spraying saliva on his rover. “Converge, converge, converge!”

“He gets pretty excited about a bunch of chickens, don’t he?” Jetsam said.

“I bet that dude’s got women’s tits,” Flotsam said. “Let’s go get a burrito.”

While the surfer cops were sitting in their car on Sunset Boulevard enjoying some Tex-Mex, one of the cars that was checked out to the Community Relations Office drove up the hill to Mt. Olympus and into the driveway of Margot Aziz. The driver got out of the car but didn’t close the door. He tried to will himself to get back into the car but could not. Then he closed the car door quietly, walked to the front door of the house, and rang the bell. He heard footsteps on the inside marble foyer and knew she was looking through the brass-enclosed peephole.

When the door opened, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him repeatedly on the mouth, cheeks, and neck as he tried to push her away. Her eyes were bright and wet in the moonlight streaming down, drops clinging to her eyelashes. He felt wetness on her cheekbones, and could taste it when she kissed him, and he wondered why her tears were not salty.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t show up,” she said. “I was afraid you’d never come again. I left four messages on your cell today.”

“You’ve gotta stop doing that, Margot,” said Bix Ramstead. “My partner might pick up my calls sometime.”

“But I haven’t seen you in twenty-nine days and twenty-nine nights!” She pulled him forward into the foyer and closed the door. She wanted to smell his breath for alcohol, but he kept pulling back when she tried to kiss him again.

“I can’t stay, Margot,” he said. “I’ve got a police car here. I’ve gotta get it back to the station.”

“Do it and hurry back,” she said. “I’ll make some supper for you.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I just stopped by to tell you that you gotta stop calling me. You’re gonna get me in trouble.”

“Trouble, Bix?” she said. “Trouble? I’m the one in trouble. I’m crazy in love with you. I can’t sleep, I can’t think. We have something, Bix, and you can’t throw it away. I’m almost free of Ali now. Then I’m all yours. Me and everything I have!”

“I can’t. I’ve been going crazy too. Thinking of you. Thinking of my family. I’m no good for you. We’re no good for each other.”

“You’re the best man I’ve ever known,” she said, and then she put her face against his badge and held him hard with both arms.

“I gotta go,” he said again, but he wasn’t pulling away from her now.

“I’ve tried to be patient,” she said. “The only thing that’s held me together is knowing that your family went to your in-laws’ for a visit. You see, I’ve marked my calendar, Bix. You’re all I think about. I’m selfish. I want you here with me every night while they’re gone. I want the chance to convince you how right we are for each other.”

“I can’t think straight tonight,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ve gotta get the car back to the station.”

She released him and he looked at her. Then he kissed her, and for certain she smelled the booze on his breath.

“Tomorrow, darling,” Margot said, smiling hopefully. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

When Bix Ramstead backed out of the driveway and turned back down the hill, he didn’t see the Mustang parked a block farther up. Hollywood Nate had waited since Friday for her call that never came. He too had had a few drinks that evening after getting off duty. And impetuously, he had driven up to Mt. Olympus, intending to knock on her door. Intending to find out just what the hell was going on in that woman’s head. But as Nate had approached her driveway, he’d seen a police vehicle. He’d driven past the driveway, turned around, parked, and waited.

Nate didn’t have to tail him very long to be sure that the driver was Bix Ramstead. He was tempted to follow Bix to the station for a friendly face-off, to compare notes on Margot Aziz. But he decided that he’d better wait until he was completely sober before trying something like that.