Hollywood Station (5 page)

There was applause and chortling in the courtroom until the bailiff silenced it, and when business was concluded, Darth Vader put on his helmet and with every eye still on him said to all, "May the force be with you."

Now Ron LeCroix and his hemorrhoids were gone, and Fausto Gamboa, still smarting from having his ass kicked by Darth Vader, gave the Oracle a big argument the moment he learned that he was being teamed with Officer Budgie Polk. When Fausto was a young cop, women didn't work regular patrol assignments at the LAPD, and he sneered when he said to the Oracle, "Is she one of them who maybe trades badges with a boyfriend copper like they used to do class rings in my day?"

"She's a good officer," the Oracle said. "Give her a chance."

"Or is she the kind who gets to partner with her boyfriend and hooks her pinkie through his belt loop when they walk the boulevard beat?"

"Come on, Fausto," the Oracle said. "It's only for the May deployment period."

Like the Oracle, Fausto still carried an old six-inch Smith & Wesson revolver, and the first night he was paired with this new partner, he'd pissed her off after she asked him why he carried a wheel gun when the magazine of her Beretta 9-millimeter held fifteen rounds, with one in the pipe.

"If you need more than six rounds to win a gunfight, you deserve to lose," he'd said to her that night, without a hint of a smile.

Fausto never wore body armor, and when she asked him about that too, he had said, "Fifty-four cops were shot and killed in the United States last year. Thirty-one were wearing a vest. What good did it do them?"

He'd caught her looking at his bulging chest that first night and said, "It's all me. No vest. I measure more around the chest than you do." Then he'd looked at her chest and said, "Way more."

That really pissed her off because the fact was, Budgie Polk's ordinarily small breasts were swollen at the moment. Very swollen. She had a four-month-old daughter at home being watched by Budgie's mother, and having just returned to duty from maternity leave, Budgie was actually a few pounds lighter than she had been before the pregnancy. She didn't need thinly veiled cracks about her breast size from this old geezer, not when her tits were killing her.

Her former husband, a detective working out of West L. A. Division, had left home three months before his daughter was born, explaining that their two-year marriage had been a "regrettable mistake." And that they were "two mature people." She felt like whacking him across the teeth with her baton, as well as half of his cop friends whom she'd run into since she came back to work. How could they still be pals with that dirtbag? She had handed him the keys to her heart, and he had entered and kicked over the furniture and ransacked the drawers like a goddamn crack-smoking burglar.

And why do women officers marry other cops in the first place? She'd asked herself the question a hundred times since that asshole dumped her and his only child, with his shit-eating promise to be prompt with child-support payments and to visit his daughter often "when she was old enough." Of course, with five years on the Job, Budgie knew in her heart the answer to the why-do-women-officers-marry-other-cops question.

When she got home at night and needed to talk to somebody about all the crap she'd had to cope with on the streets, who else would understand but another cop? What if she'd married an insurance adjuster? What would he say when she came home as she had one night last September after answering a call in the Hollywood Hills, where the owner of a three-million-dollar hillside home had freaked on ecstasy and crack and strangled his ten-year-old step-daughter, maybe because she'd refused his sexual advances, or so the detectives had deduced. Nobody would ever know for sure, because the son of a bitch blew half his head away with a four-inch Colt magnum while Budgie and her partner were standing on the porch of the home next door with a neighbor who said she was sure she'd heard a child screaming.

After hearing the gunshot, Budgie and her partner had run next door, pistols drawn, she calling for help into the keyed mike at her shoulder. And while help was arriving and cops were leaping out of their black-and-whites with shotguns, Budgie was in the house gaping at the body of the pajama-clad child on the master bedroom floor, ligature marks already darkening, eyes hemorrhaging, pajamas urine-soaked and feces-stained. The step-father was sprawled across the living room sofa, the back cushion soaked with blood and brains and slivers of bone.

And a woman there, the child's crack-smoking mother, was screaming at Budgie, "Help her! Resuscitate her! Do something!"

Over and over she yelled, until Budgie grabbed her by the shoulder and yelled back, "Shut the fuck up! She's dead!"

And that's why women officers seemed to always marry other cops. As poor as the marital success rate was, they figured it would be worse married to a civilian. Who would they talk to after seeing a murdered child in the Hollywood Hills? Maybe male cops didn't have to talk about such things when they got home, but women cops did.

Budgie had hoped that when she returned to duty, she might get teamed with a woman, at least until she stopped lactating. But the Oracle had said everything was screwed during this deployment period, with people off IOD from an unexpected rash of on-duty injuries, vacations, and so forth. He had said, she could work with Fausto until the next deployment period, couldn't she? All of LAPD life revolved around deployment periods, and Fausto was a reliable old pro who would never let a partner down, the Oracle said. But shit, twenty-eight days of this?

Fausto longed for the old days at Hollywood Station when, after working the night watch, they used to gather in the upper parking lot of the John Anson Ford Theater, across from the Hollywood Bowl, at a spot they called the Tree and have a few brews and commiserate. Sometimes badge bunnies would show up, and if one of them was sitting in a car, sucking face with some cop, you always could be sure that another copper would sneak up, look in the window, and yell, "Crime in progress!"

On one of those balmy summer nights under what the Oracle always called a Hollywood moon, Fausto and the Oracle had sat alone at the Tree on the hood of Fausto's VW bug, Fausto, a young cop back from Vietnam, and the Oracle, a seasoned sergeant but less than forty years old.

He'd surprised Fausto by saying, "Kid, look up there," referring to the lighted cross on top of the hill behind them. "That'd be a great place to have your ashes spread when it's your turn. Up there, looking out over the Bowl. But there's even a better place than that." And then the Oracle told young Fausto Gamboa about the better place, and Fausto never forgot.

Those were the grand old days at Hollywood Station. But after the last chief's "Reign of Terror," nobody dared to drive within a mile of the Tree. Nobody gathered to drink good Mexican brew. And in fact, this young generation of granola-crunching coppers probably worried about E. coli in their Evian. Fausto had actually seen them drinking organic milk. Through a freaking straw!

So here she was, Budgie thought, riding shotgun on Sunset Boulevard with this cranky geezer, easily older than her father, who would have been fifty-two years old had he lived. By the number of hash marks on Fausto's sleeve, he'd been a cop for more than thirty years, almost all of it in Hollywood.

To break the ice on that first night, she'd said, "How long you been on the Job, Fausto?"

"Thirty-four years," he said. "Came on when cops wore hats and you had to by god wear it when you were outta the car. And sap pockets were for saps, not cell phones." Then he paused and said, "Before you were on this planet."

"I've been on this planet twenty-seven years," she said. "I've been on the Job just over five."

The way he cocked his right eyebrow at her for a second and then looked away, he appeared to be saying, So who gives a shit about your history?

Well, fuck him, she thought, but just as night fell and she was hoping that somehow the pain in her breasts would subside, he decided to make a little small talk. He said, "Budgie, huh? That's a weird name."

Trying not to sound defensive, she said, "My mother was Australian. A budgie is an Australian parakeet. It's a nickname that stuck. She thought it was cute, I guess."

Fausto, who was driving, stopped at a red light, looked Budgie up and down, from her blond French-braided ponytail, pinned up per LAPD regulations, to her brightly shined shoes, and said, "You're what? Five eleven, maybe six feet tall in your socks? And weigh what? About as much as my left leg? She shoulda called you `Storkie.'"

Budgie felt it right then. Worse breast pain. These days a dog barks, a cat meows, a baby cries, she lactates. This bastard's gruff voice was doing it!

"Take me to the substation on Cherokee," she said.

"What for?" Fausto said.

"I'm hurting like hell. I got a breast pump in my war bag. I can do it in there and store the milk."

"Oh, shit!" Fausto said. "I don't believe it! Twenty-eight days of this?"

When they were halfway to the storefront, Fausto said, "Why don't we just go back to the station? You can do it in the women's locker room, for chrissake."

"I don't want anyone to know I'm doing this, Fausto," she said. "Not even any of the women. Somebody'll say something, and then I'll have to hear all the wise-ass remarks from the men. I'm trusting you on this."

"I gotta pull the pin," Fausto said rhetorically. "Over a thousand females on the Job? Pretty soon the freaking chief'll have double-X chromosomes. Thirty-four years is long enough. I gotta pull the pin."

After Fausto parked the black-and-white at the darkened storefront substation by Musso & Frank's restaurant, Budgie grabbed the carryall and breast pump from her war bag in the trunk, unlocked the door with her 999 key, and ran inside. It was a rather empty space with a few tables and chairs where parents could get information about the Police Activity League or sign up the kids for the Police Explorer Program. Sometimes there was LAPD literature lying around, in English, Spanish, Thai, Korean, Farsi, and other languages for the polyglot citizenry of the Los Angeles melting pot.

Budgie opened the fridge, intending to put her blue ice packs in the freezer, and left her little thermal bag beside the fridge, where she could pick it up after going off duty. She turned on the light in the john, deciding to pump in there sitting on the toilet lid instead of in the main room, in case Fausto got tired of waiting in the car and decided to stroll inside. But the smell of mildew was nauseating.

She removed the rover from her Sam Browne, then took off the gun belt itself and her uniform shirt, vest, and T-shirt. She draped everything on a little table in the bathroom and put the key on the sink. The table teetered under the weight, so she removed her pistol from the gun belt and laid it on the floor beside her rover and flashlight. After she'd been pumping for a minute, the pain started subsiding. The pump was noisy, and she hoped that Fausto wouldn't enter the storefront. Without a doubt he'd make some wisecrack when he heard the sucking noise coming from the bathroom.

Fausto had clicked onto the car's keyboard that they were code 6 at the storefront, out for investigation, so that they wouldn't get any calls until this freaking ordeal was over. And he was almost dozing when the hotshot call went out to 6-A-77 of Watch 3.

The PSR's urgent voice said, "All units in the vicinity and Six-Adam-Seventy-seven, shots fired in the parking lot, Western and Romaine. Possibly an officer involved. Six-A-Seventy-seven, handle code three."

Budgie was buttoning her shirt, just having stored the milk in the freezer beside her blue ice packs. She had slid the rover inside its sheath when Fausto threw open the front door and yelled, "OIS, Western and Romaine! Are you through?"

"Coming!" she yelled, grabbing the Sam Browne and flashlight while still buttoning her shirt, placing the milk and the freezer bags in the insulated carryall, and running for the door, almost tripping on a chair in the darkened office as she was fastening the Sam Browne around her waspish waist.

There were few things more urgent than an officer-involved shooting, and Fausto was revving the engine when she got to the car and she just had time to close the door before he was ripping out from the curb. She was rattled and sweating and when he slid the patrol car around a corner, she almost toppled and grabbed her seat belt and . . . oh, god!

Since the current chief had arrived, he'd decided to curtail traffic collisions involving officers busting through red lights and stop signs minus lights and siren while racing to urgent calls that didn't rate a code 3 status. So henceforth, the calls that in the old days would have rated only a code 2 status were upgraded to code 3. That meant that in Los Angeles today the citizens were always hearing sirens. The street cops figured it reminded the chief of his days as New York's police commissioner, all those sirens howling. The cops didn't mind a bit. It was a blast getting to drive code 3 all the time.

Because the call wasn't assigned to them, Fausto couldn't drive code 3, but neither the transplanted easterner who headed the Department nor the risen Christ could keep LAPD street cops from racing to an OIS call. Fausto would slow at an intersection and then roar through, green light or not, making cars brake and yield for the black-and-white. But by the time they got to Western and Romaine, five units were there ahead of them and all officers were out of their cars, aiming shotguns or nines at the lone car in the parking lot, where they could see someone ducking down on the front seat.