Hollywood Station (17 page)

"What happened?"

"You know that IA sting they did down in Southeast-when was it, last year? Year before? The one where they put the gun in the fucking phone booth?"

"I sorta remember the gist of it," Flotsam said while Jetsam waxed the old ten-foot board as he talked.

"On that one, the fucking incompetents working the sting detail at IA leave a gun by a phone booth with one of their undercover guys standing nearby. They put out some kinda phony call to get a patrol unit there. Deal is, a patrol unit they're interested in is gonna come by, see the dude, do an FI, and see the gun there in plain view. The patrol unit's gonna ask what he knows about the gun and the dude's gonna say, `Who, me?' like the brothers always say down there. Then IA, who's watching from ambush, hope the coppers are gonna arrest the brother and claim he was carrying the gun. And if they're real lucky, maybe slap the brother around after he mouths off to them. And if they hit the jackpot, call him a nigger, which of course will get them a death row sentence and a lethal injection. And then maybe they can have a party for a job well done. But not that time. It goes sideways."

"What happened? A shooting, right?"

"Some homies happen to be cruising by before the black-and-white shows up. These cruisers see a strange brother there who ain't one of their crew and they pop a cap at him. And then the IA cover team comes to the rescue and they fire back but don't really engage. I thought cops're supposed to engage hostile fire, but this is the rat squad. They see life different from regular coppers. So the homies get away, and what does IA do? They grab their sting gun and they get the hell out, and they don't hang around for an FID investigation. So they break every fucking rule the rest of us have to play by during these times. Their excuse was they had to protect the identity of their undercover officer."

"That is bullshit, dude," Flotsam said. "When you apply seven-pound pull on a six-pound trigger, you stay and talk to the Man and make the reports. Undercover is over when the muzzle flashes."

"Except for those rat bastards."

"So how did they sting you Thursday night?"

"That's what makes me so mad. They used the same fucking gag, the unimaginative assholes! I thought at first they must be after B. M. Driscoll. He told me he was involved in a shaky shooting before he transferred to Hollywood and was worried about it. One of those deals where he capped a Mexican illegal who drove his car straight at him when the guy was trying to escape after a long car pursuit. The next day, he gets a phone call at the station from an irate citizen who says, `You gotta come mow my lawn now. You shot my gardener.'"

Flotsam said, "Yeah, our chief says we're supposed to just jump out of the way of cars coming at us, maybe wave a cape like a matador. Then start chasing again, long as we don't endanger anybody but ourselves. Anything but shooting a thief who might be a minor. Or an ethnic. I wish somebody'd make a chart about which ethnics are unshootable nowadays and have Governor Arnold give them a sticker for their license plates. So we'd know."

Jetsam said, "Retreat goes against a copper's personality traits. Maybe they want us to just go back to the drive-and-wave policy, like we did under Lord Voldemort."

"Maybe they should just put trigger locks on all our guns."

"Anyways, B. M. Driscoll's convinced himself he's targeted by IA," Jetsam said. "Checks his house for listening devices every couple weeks. But you know him, he gets a hay fever cough and thinks it's cancer."

"So how about Thursday night's sting? Are you saying they dropped a gun by a phone booth?"

"Purse," Jetsam said.

Jetsam said it was a phone booth on Hollywood Boulevard of course, where lots of tourists might do something dumb like that. A phone booth by the subway station. He remembered how it had annoyed him when it popped on their computer screen. No big deal. An unnamed person had called in to say that there was a purse left in the phone booth. And the call was assigned to 6-X-32, on a night when B. M. Driscoll was Flotsam's stand-in.

B. M. Driscoll, who was riding shotgun, said, "Shit. Found property to book. What a drag. Oh well, it'll give me a chance to get my inhaler outta my locker. I'm getting wheezy."

"You ain't wheezy," Jetsam said. The guy's imagined health issues were wearing Jetsam down to the ground. "My ex was wheezy. Got an asthma attack every time I put a move on her in bed. That was about once every deployment period. Little did I know that her and the plumber down the street were laying pipe twice a week."

Jetsam parked in a red zone by the intersection of Hollywood and Highland while B. M. Driscoll said, "I don't like steroid inhalers but there's nothing more fundamental than breathing."

When Jetsam was getting out of the car, B. M. Driscoll said, "Be sure to lock it."

He wasn't worried about their shotgun rack getting pried open or their car getting hot-wired. He was worried about his two uniforms they'd just picked up from the cleaners, which were hanging over the backseat.

After locking the car, Jetsam took his baton and ambled toward the phone booth, letting B. M. Driscoll lag behind and finish his medical monologue on the treatment of asthma with steroid inhalers at a distance where Jetsam could hardly hear him.

It was the kind of early summer evening when the layer of smog burnished the glow from the setting sun and threw a golden light over the Los Angeles basin, and somehow over Hollywood in particular. That light said to people: There are wondrous possibilities here.

Feeling the dry heat on his face, looking at the colorful creatures surrounding him, Jetsam saw tweakers and hooks, panhandlers and ordinary Hollywood crazies, all mingling with tourists. He saw Mickey Mouse and Barney the dinosaur and Darth Vader (only one tonight) and a couple of King Kongs.

But the guys inside the gorilla costumes weren't tall enough to successfully play the great ape, and he saw a guy he recognized as Untouchable Al walk up to one of them and say, "King Kong, my ass. You look more like Cheetah."

Jetsam turned away quickly because if there was a disturbance, he wanted no part of Untouchable Al, especially not here on Hollywood Boulevard where the multitudes would witness the dreadful inevitable outcome.

A team of bike cops, one man and one woman whom Jetsam knew from Watch 3, pedaled by slowly on the sidewalk, over those very famous three-hundred-pound slabs of marble and brass dedicated to Hollywood magic and the glamour of the past.

The bike cops nodded to him but continued on their way when he shook his head, indicating that nothing important had brought him here. He thought they looked very uncool in their bike helmets and those funny blue outfits that the other cops called pajamas.

When B. M. Driscoll caught up with him, he said, "Don't this look a little bit strange? I mean, a purse is left here by an unknown person-reporting?"

Jetsam said, "Whaddaya mean?"

B. M. Driscoll said, "They're out to get me."

"Who?"

"Internal Affairs Group. In fact, the whole goddamn Professional Standards Bureau. I got grilled like an Al-Qaeda terrorist by a Force Investigation Team when I popped the cap at the goddamn crackhead that tried to run over me. I tell you, IA's out to get me."

"Man, you gotta go visit the Department shrink," Jetsam said. "You're soaring way out there, bro. You're sounding unhinged."

But B. M. Driscoll said, "I'll tell you something, if that purse is still there in the midst of this goddamn boulevard carnival, it means one thing. An undercover team has chased away every tweaker that's tried to pick it up during the last ten minutes."

And now Jetsam started getting paranoid. He began looking hard at every tourist nearby. Could that one be a cop? That one over there looks like he could be. And that babe pretending to be reading the name on one of the marble stars down on the sidewalk. Shit, her purse is bulging like maybe there's a Glock nine and handcuffs in there.

When they were standing at the phone booth and saw a woman's brown leather handbag on the phone booth tray, B. M. Driscoll said, "The purse is still there. Nobody's picked it up. No tweaker. No do-gooder. It's still there. If there's money in it, you can bet your ass this is a sting."

"If there's money in it, I gotta admit you might have a point here," Jetsam said, looking behind him for the babe with the bulge in her handbag. And goddamnit, she was looking right at him! Then she gave him a little flirtatious wave and walked away. Shit, just a badge bunny.

B. M. Driscoll picked up the purse and opened it as though he was expecting a trick snake to jump out, removed the thick leather wallet, and handed it to Jetsam, saying, "Tell me I'm wrong."

Jetsam opened it and found a driver's license, credit cards, and other ID belonging to a Mary R. Rollins of Seattle, Washington. Along with $367 dollars in currency.

"Bro, I think you ain't paranoid," Jetsam said. "Forget what I said about the shrink."

"Let's take this straight to the station and make a ten-ten," B. M. Driscoll said, referring to a property report.

"Let's take this to the Oracle," Jetsam said. "Let's call information for a phone number on Mary Rollins. Let's check and see if this ID is legit. I don't like to be set up like I'm a fucking thief."

"It's not you," B. M. Driscoll said, and now he was twitching and blinking. "It's me. I'm a marked man!"

When they got to the station, they found the Oracle in the john, reading a paper. Jetsam stood outside the toilet stall and said, "You in there, Boss?"

Recognizing the voice, the Oracle replied, "This better be more important than your overwhelming excitement that surf's up tomorrow. At my age, taking a dump is serious business."

"Can you meet Driscoll and me in the roll-call room?"

"In due time," the Oracle said. "There's a time for everything."

They chose the roll-call room for privacy. The Oracle examined the purse and contents, and as he looked at this angry suntanned surfer cop with his short hair gelled up like a bed of spikes, and at his older partner twitching his nose like a rabbit, he said to them, "You're right. This has to be a sting. This is unadulterated bullshit!"

Flotsam and Jetsam were lying in the sand next to their boards, by their towels and water, when Jetsam, reaching this part of the story, stopped to take a long pull from his water bottle.

Flotsam said, "Don't stop, dude. Get to the final reel. What the fuck happened?"

Jetsam said, "What happened was the Oracle came on like El Ni\$?o, and everybody stayed outta his way. The Oracle was hacked off, bro. And I got to see what all those hash marks give you."

"What besides death before your time?"

"Humongous prunes and no fear, bro. The Oracle jumped their shit till the story came out. It was a sting, but as usual, Ethics Enforcement Section fucked up. It wasn't meant for B. M. Driscoll. He's so straight he won't even remove mattress tags, but they wouldn't say who it was meant for. Maybe somebody on Watch three. We think communications just gave the call to the wrong unit."

Flotsam said, "EES should stick to catching cops who work off-duty jobs when they're supposed to be home with bad backs. That's all they're good for."

"Being an LAPD cop today is like playing a game of dodgeball, but the balls are coming at us from every-fucking-where," Jetsam said.

Flotsam looked at his partner's thousand-yard stare, saying, "Your display is on screen saver, dude. Get the hard drive buzzing and stay real."

"Okay, but I don't like being treated like a thief," Jetsam said.

Flotsam said, "They gotta play their little games so they can say, `Look, Mr. Attorney General, we're enforcing the consent decree against the formerly cocky LAPD.' Just forget about it."

"But we got sideswiped, bro."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"They burned us."

"For what?"

"The undercover team saw B. M. Driscoll's uniforms hanging in the car. They had to nail us for something after we didn't fall for their stupid sting, so we're getting an official reprimand for doing personal business on duty."

"Stopping at the cleaners?"

"You got it, bro."

"What'd the Oracle say about that?"

"He wasn't there at the time. He'd already headed out for Alfonso's Tex Mex when a rat from PSB showed up. One of those that can't stop scratching all the insect bites on his candy ass. And the watch commander informed us we were getting burned."

"That is way fucked, dude. You know how many man hours were wasted on that chickenshit sting? And here we are, with half the bodies we need to patrol the streets."

"That is life in today's LAPD, bro."

"How's your morale?"

"It sucks."

"How would it be if I got you laid Thursday night?"

"Improved."

"There's this badge bunny I heard about at the Director's Chair. Likes midnight swims at the beach, I hear."

"I thought you said you'd fallen in love with Mag Takara?"

"I am in love, but it ain't working too good."

"You said it was hopeful."

"Let's hit it, dude," Flotsam said to change the subject, grabbing his board and sprinting for the surf. He plunged into a cold morning breaker and came up grinning in the boiling ocean foam.