Hollywood Crows (26 page)

“Don’t flare on me, dawg!” the tweaker said. “You don’t gotta do nothing but drop me off on a street. That’s it. Drive me around till I see what I’m looking for and drop me off. You don’t even gotta pick me back up at the scene of the crime.”

“At the scene of the…” Leonard rolled his eyes and said, “Why don’t you just call a taxi?”

“We might have to drive around awhile till we spot him. And if something ain’t right, we may have to follow him for a little ways. I can’t have a cab driver witness.”

“A witness to what? You’re gonna chalk a guy with a fucking starter pistol?”

“I ain’t gonna dump the chump. I’m gonna jack his truck. And afterwards, I’m gonna meet you in the truck and give you two Ben Franklins. You won’t even be there when I jack it.”

“Lemme track. You saying I’m gonna get fucking chump change for a hijacking?”

“Man, I ain’t jacking a Brinks truck.”

“What’re you jacking?”

“An ice-cream truck.”

“There ain’t a fucking sane human being left in all of Hollywood,” Leonard said to the steering wheel as he gripped it tight.

The tweaker said, “See, this greaser that drives the truck, he brings his cash payment every other week to some other greaser that lent him the money to buy the truck.”

“How much cash is he carrying?”

“That’s my business.”

“Get outta my car.”

“I’ll give you three Franklins.”

“Out.”

“Three-fifty, and that’s it.”

“Three-fifty,” Leonard said. “I risk, what? Maybe five years in the joint for chump change?”

“Later, man,” the tweaker said, opening the door.

“I’m good with it,” Leonard said quickly. “These are hard times.”

“Okay,” the tweaker said with a gap-toothed grin. “There ain’t no risk to you at all. I cased this good. You just drop me near where the guy’s selling ice cream. The cash is in the metal box he keeps behind the seat of the truck. I scare the fuck outta him and jump in his truck and drive it maybe six blocks away to some safe place where you’re waiting for me. I jump in your car, and you drive me back here to the cyber café.”

“Dude, I want my three-fifty no matter what you end up getting from him.”

“I’m cool with that,” the tweaker said.

“So when do we do it?”

“In one hour,” the tweaker said. “In the meantime, could you buy me a Baby Ruth bar? I got the craves so bad I could eat a fishbone sandwich if they’d dip it in chocolate.”

Leonard stared for a moment at the “Help Wanted” sign in the window of the coffee shop. He wanted to tell this lowlife slacker to get a fucking job. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Three-fifty would buy enough rock to tide him over until the fucking Ay-rab called him for the housebreaking job.

He looked at the tweaker and pulled a dollar bill from his pocket. “Go in there and buy yourself a chocolate donut. Tell them to dip it in powdered sugar. It’ll get you by for a couple hours.”

The hijacking was to occur on a residential street in East Hollywood, one of the few neighborhoods where a vendor could make a few dollars. Rogelio Montez was the driver of the little white truck, which played nursery tunes from a large outdoor speaker attached to the roof as he cruised the streets. He was an immigrant from the Yucatán, and this was the best job he’d ever had in his life.

Rita Kravitz, the Crow who oversaw quality-of-life complaints in that neighborhood, had contacted 6-X-66 at midwatch roll call to help her out with this ice-cream vendor. Rita Kravitz briefed the patrol officers about a chronic complainer who lived on the street, a woman who had nine school-age grandchildren and saw pedophiles everywhere.

“The alleged suspect drives one of those Good Humor sort of trucks,” Rita Kravitz had told them, “and he comes by pretty late on summer evenings. Maybe seven o’clock. Just write a shake on the guy and make sure he’s not driving the truck with Mister Wiggly exposed. The old lady’s already accused her mailman, the meter reader, and one of the presidential contenders of being a willie wagger. Although she’s probably right about the presidential contender.”

Gert Von Braun said, “Okay, but you should call
Dateline
for this kinda deal. They’re the ones with all the hidden cameras and lotsa time to set up on these guys.”

Gert Von Braun and Dan Applewhite had gotten teamed again because Doomsday Dan requested it, now that Gil Ponce was just about off probation. Gert told the senior sergeant that she didn’t mind at all working with Doomsday Dan, and the astonished sergeant later told his fellow supervisors that there truly is someone for everyone in this world.

When 6-X-66 cleared, they went straight to the neighborhood, found the vendor, and flagged him down, using the excuse that he had only one functioning brake light. Instead of writing him a ticket, they wrote an FI card from the information on his driver’s license.

He spoke very little English and seemed contrite about the brake light, and grateful not to be getting a citation. He looked so threadbare and poor that Dan Applewhite insisted on paying for the ice-cream bars that the guy wanted to give to them. Then the cops remained parked at the curb while he drove off, his truck playing merry tunes enticing Latino children from their homes with coins and dollar bills in their fists, all jabbering happily in Spanglish.

Gert and Dan sat, contentedly licking their ice cream and chatting. They were growing ever more comfortable with each other, and the real bonding of police partners had begun. And of course, they’d never heard of Leonard Stilwell and knew nothing of how his life was intersecting the lives of Crow officers. It was quite pleasant to eat ice cream on that hot and dry summer evening when twilight rays of the setting sun cast a magical aura over the land of make-believe, with not a smudge of dark cloud above Sunset Boulevard.

Leonard Stilwell knew he was making a very bad mistake as he drove the tweaker toward the residential streets in East Hollywood, where the ice-cream driver was supposed to be working. First of all, the tweaker kept playing with the starter pistol, twirling it, putting it under his T-shirt inside the waistband of his jeans, and then doing quick draws.

When they were passing L. Ron Hubbard Way, a short street off Sunset Boulevard that fed into the Dianetics Building, Leonard said, “I know you need to smoke some ice real bad, but could you, like, try to chill? You’re making me nervous.”

The tweaker put the gun inside his jeans again and said, “Get over yourself, dawg, and stay in the game. For my pickup, you look for me one block south of Santa Monica, two blocks east of the Hollywood cemetery. Whatever that fucking street is.”

“Kee-rist, dude,” Leonard said, “that’s the third time you told me. Your short-term memory’s gone!”

“Okay, okay, I’m just sayin’. Don’t I gotta, like, keep you dialed in and make sure you got your mind in the day?”

“
My
mind?” Leonard said. “You’re worrying about
my
mind?”

They were a block away from the ice-cream truck when the tweaker spotted it. “There it is, man!” he said. “Burn a right!”

“I see it,” Leonard said, driving slowly, keeping an eye on the tweaker, who looked like he’d jump out and start running, given half a chance.

When he was six houses away from the truck, Leonard pulled around the corner and stopped.

The tweaker said, “Remember, you gotta meet me at—”

Unable to bear another repeated direction, Leonard interrupted, saying, “Dude, keep this in your fucked-up memory bank. If the cops get onto you, you’re gonna have to outrun them in a vehicle that moves at about the speed of prostate cancer. But if you live through it and you bring me less than three-fifty, I’m gonna knock that last corn nut you call a tooth right outta your grille!”

“Chill, Phil!” the tweaker said. “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you. Now bang a U-ee and split.”

With that, Leonard drove off, making a U-turn and watching the tweaker in his side-view mirror. The tweaker immediately began slouching toward the ice-cream truck. The last Leonard saw was the scarecrow jogging, then sprinting, in full attack mode.

Gert and Doomsday Dan were just finishing their ice-cream bars and Dan said, “Okay, we observed the vendor’s normal activity and there’s nothing abnormal about it. Let’s log this and get on with the rest of our lives.”

“Yeah, he’s clean,” Gert said, “but when you think about it, this would be a good job for a pedophile. Selling Eskimo Pies, Push-Ups, and Big Sticks all day long. Like, Hello, little girl, would you like to lick a big stick? Know what I mean?”

“You got a point,” Dan said as Gert started the car.

“Man, there’s a guy that needs ice cream bad,” Gert said.

The tweaker was in an all-out sprint when they saw him in the next block. He ran straight at the vendor, who was giving two ice-cream bars to a girl about ten years old who held a younger girl by the hand. The truck’s engine was running and “It’s a Small World” was playing noisily.

The tweaker hit the driver hard with his shoulder, sending him sprawling. The children screamed, dropped their ice cream, and started to run. The tweaker pulled his starter pistol, pointed it at the face of the supine Mexican, and said, “Stay down or die!”

Then the tweaker leaped into the truck and drove away.

“Goddamn!” Gert Von Braun said, squealing out from the curb, turning on her light bar as Dan Applewhite got on the radio and said, “Six-X-Sixty-six is in pursuit of a two-eleven vehicle!”

The location and description of the pursued vehicle got garbled by the howling of the siren, and after clearing the frequency for the pursuit car, the radio PSR said, “Six-X-Sixty-six, repeat the location! And did you say an ice-cream truck?”

That was enough to alert a television news crew who monitored police calls. Within minutes, there was a crew speeding toward East Hollywood. Nobody wanted to miss
this
pursuit. An ice-cream truck?

Leonard Stilwell had been sitting with his engine turned off and was worried that it might not start. That would be just his luck. After a few minutes he started it. But then he got worried about overheating the old Honda and switched off the ignition again.

When the police unit was two blocks away but speeding toward him, he heard the siren. It was coming from the direction of the Hollywood cemetery. He figured it might be an ambulance. Yeah, he thought, probably an ambulance. But thirty seconds later, he said, “Fuck this!” started the car, and pulled away from the curb. No matter who that siren belonged to, Leonard Stilwell had just resigned from the hijacking business.

The tweaker was gunning the engine of the ice-cream truck for all it was worth, but it wasn’t worth much. The truck was sputtering and the transmission was slipping as the truck headed north on Van Ness Avenue. Driving south on Van Ness in his direction was the tweaker’s wheelman, fleeing in his Honda.

The tweaker almost swerved into him head-on and yelled out the window, “You bastard! You chickenshit asshole! Don’t leave me!”

The pursued and pursuers, with 6-X-66 still the primary, blew right past Leonard in the opposite direction, and he wheeled west on Melrose, heading anywhere but to the cyber café, where there would no doubt be cops looking for him as soon as the tweaker got busted and spilled his guts. But the tweaker didn’t know his name and certainly hadn’t written down his license number, and anyway, the loser was so brain fried he probably wouldn’t even remember what kind of car Leonard owned. As soon as Leonard got safely back to his apartment, he intended to call Ali Aziz. He needed that job. He needed money
now
.

The pursuit was coming to an end after the ice-cream truck rumbled north on the east side of Paramount Studios, then passed the Hollywood cemetery and turned west on Santa Monica Boulevard. There it caused a traffic collision when a Toyota SUV, trying to avoid broadsiding the ice-cream truck, swerved into the rear of an MTA bus. The tweaker nearly caused a second collision when he pulled a hard left onto Gower Street, nearly rolling the ice-cream truck, and slammed to a stop on the west side of the Hollywood cemetery, abandoning the truck.

Gert Von Braun had almost gotten in a TC of her own at Santa Monica and Gower, where she was stopped cold by a pair of elderly motorists who couldn’t tell where in the hell the siren was coming from in the fading twilight and just stopped, completely blocking the intersection. When Gert, red faced and fuming, got around them and squealed south onto Gower Street, the cops spotted the abandoned truck.

A man walking a dog waved at them and yelled, “The guy climbed the fence and ran into the cemetery!”

The mausoleums and tombs on the cemetery grounds contained the mortal remains of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. DeMille, and many other Hollywood immortals. A pair of security guards opened a gate for Gert Von Braun and Dan Applewhite, and now there were three other Hollywood night-watch and midwatch cars wheeling into the cemetery.

The tweaker had been running frantically through the park, and for no reason anyone could later determine, he ran to the obelisk rising into the blue-black sky with the Hollywood sign visible in the background, to the north on Mt. Lee. He waited while cops and security guards searched the cemetery grounds on foot with flashlights, and with spotlights from the police vehicles. It was there at the obelisk that the tweaker made his last mistake of the day, after being spotted by Gil Ponce, who was teamed with Cat Song.

The tweaker later told a paramedic on their way to the ER that he’d been hanging on to the starter pistol only because he wanted the police to have it if he wasn’t able to get away. This, in order to prove that he hadn’t used a real gun in the hijacking. The tweaker said that when he saw about two tons of blue running his way, and when a young cop spotted him and began shouting commands, he got worried about the starter pistol in his waistband, scared that the rookie would see it and panic. He said he tried to draw it out with only three fingers, like in the cowboy movies, and drop it on the ground.

But the LAPD hadn’t taught Gil Ponce with cowboy-movie training films, and it was too dark to see a three-fingered draw. When the tweaker pulled the gun from his waistband, he saw orange balls of flame and was jolted back against the obelisk, struck in the upper body by two of three rounds fired by Gil Ponce.