“I wanted to be the best cop on the force,” Newkirk said. “I didn’t have notions like I was gonna change the world or anything, but I wanted to do my job the best I could, and take care of my family. But mainly I wanted to be a great cop. I wanted to look in the mirror every night when I got home and say, ‘Man, you are a good fucking policeman.’ ”
Villatoro nodded as he scaled back the fan of the defroster.
“I was like everybody, I tried too hard at first. When I saw a crack baby or human beings who treated other human beings like pieces of shit, I let it get to me. I thought I could reason with those people, show ’em somebody cared. But you know what I learned? I learned that the best thing you could do, overall, was arrest as many of ’em as you could and follow through, make sure they went to prison. I learned that maybe, maybe, ten percent of ’em might go straight, and ten percent was all I could hope for. I didn’t even care what ten percent it was, or if it was five percent, as long as I was doing my job. Just fill the prisons, keep those scumbags away from the good people, that’s what I wanted to do. And I did a damned good job of it, even though it was a war zone out on the streets. You have no idea what it was like.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But you can’t talk about this stuff with anybody except other cops,” Newkirk said, talking over Villatoro. “You can’t come home for dinner, and say, ‘Gee, Maggie dear, how was your day? Did you go shopping? How was first grade, Josh? Dad had an interesting day today. I found the corpse of an eleven-month-old baby in a Dumpster with cigarette burns all over her body.’ ”
Villatoro shot him a look. Newkirk’s eyes reflected green from the dashboard lights. He was staring straight ahead, talking as much to himself as to Villatoro.
“You know what it’s like trying to raise a family with kids on a cop’s salary. The wife had to work, and my kids were babies. Day care, the whole stupid thing. Day-care workers who were not much better than the assholes I was arresting out on the streets. In fact, some of them I saw on the street. I started thinking I needed to get my little boys and my daughter away from a place like that. So I started applying for jobs in places I thought I’d like to live-you know, Montana, Wyoming, places with space. But the cop jobs out here paid less than what I was making. I started thinking I’d never get out of there, you know? That I’d turn into one of those lifers, one of those guys who can tell you how much pension they’ve got built up to the penny if you wake ’em up in the middle of the night.”
Villatoro didn’t say, You knew what the job paid when you applied for it. He wanted Newkirk to keep talking.
“So that’s when I discovered the world of off-duty security work.” Newkirk smiled. “I found out I could just about double my income if I was willing to wear the uniform and be a rent-a-cop. It was a lot of extra hours, but damn, we started to swim out from under it. The debts, I mean. See, my wife likes to live beyond our means, and I can’t say no when it comes to the kids. So I worked security a lot.”
“At Santa Anita,” Villatoro said.
“Among other places. But yeah, Santa Anita was the most steady. In the counting room, but you knew that.” The way he said it made the hairs stand up on Villatoro’s neck. He began to believe that Newkirk thought he knew more than he did. In order not to dispel the notion, Villatoro told himself to keep his comments to a minimum.
Newkirk took a long swallow, then rubbed his eyes. “At that point, I was still damned proud to be a cop. I was proud of the LAPD. Despite what you see here in front of you,” he said, gesturing to himself, “I still think they’re one of the best departments in the country. There are thousands of dedicated men and women, risking their lives every day they go out. They’re good people, man. They’re tough and honest, with a couple of exceptions. Too bad everybody points out the few bad ones and makes us all out to be fucking criminals. They say it’s better now, too. That the new chief is cleaning things up. That’d be good if it’s true. But the city’s still a fucking cesspool, and the department needs twice as many cops. Hell, we need three times as many cops. But the taxpayers don’t want to pay the bill for them.”
Villatoro waited a moment, then said, “Santa Anita.”
“Is that all you care about?” Newkirk sneered.
“No, it’s not all,” Villatoro said, trying to sound conversational. “But I’ve spent the last eight years trying to figure out what happened there.”
Newkirk laughed. “Me too.”
Villatoro started to think they were getting nowhere, when Newkirk sighed and said, “It was a pretty good gig, basically just standing around, like so much copwork. We didn’t even open the doors until the security truck got there. Then we just stepped aside and guarded the perimeter while they loaded the trucks. We stuck around until all of the paying customers cleared out, then went home. A good gig, me and Rodale. We worked it all the time together. They liked us, we liked them.
“Gonzalez was our sergeant,” Newkirk said. “Everybody respected and feared the guy. He used to give us a lot of shit about working security at Santa Anita, saying we must have a couple of dollies out there to want to work it so much.”
Villatoro made the connection without saying anything. Gonzalez was one of the names on the list, one of the officers of the 501(c)3, one of the volunteers helping the county sheriff.
“Gonzo was great because he didn’t give a shit about anything. He always did what was righteous, whether it was PC or not. I could tell you stories about Gonzo that would curl your hair if you had any. You ever hear of a ‘guilty smile’?”
Villatoro said, “No.”
“Remind me to tell you about it later. Let’s just say when he took some scumbag into the Justice Ranch, the scumbag deserved whatever he got, okay?”
Villatoro had read something about an investigation into a place called the Justice House, but had never heard the results of the inquiry.
“Singer was our commanding officer, over Gonzo,” Newkirk said. “Singer was the toughest motherfucker in the department, even though he never shouts, never yells. He defended his officers to the death, though. He’d go to the mat for them, and he was so cool under pressure that the brass would always come get him whenever the situation was too hot to handle. There wasn’t a guy in our division who wouldn’t take a bullet for Lieutenant Singer or Gonzo. They were, like, mythical.
“So when Gonzo invited me and Rodale for beers at a cop bar one night, after we’d been working security at Santa Anita for a year or so, we thought that was pretty cool, so we went. Swann was there, too-it was the first time we met him. After a few cocktails, Gonzo started asking us how we would rob the place if we were bad guys-you know, what the best scenario would be to take the place down.”
Villatoro found himself looking over.
Newkirk curled his lip. “It’s not like that, man. It was just a conversation. You know how cops do it all the time, try to figure out how bad guys would do a job, so they can prevent it, you know? Sometimes you’ve got to think like a criminal to stop a criminal. Besides, it wasn’t like it was real money out there, like people needed it to feed their families. It was gambling losses. The idiots had already lost it, so it couldn’t have been all that important to them. Gambling money, you know, like all of that cash the state collects from lotteries and shit like that.”
“But it belonged to someone,” Villatoro heard himself say. “It belonged to the owners of the track.”
Newkirk laughed. “Like they didn’t have insurance? You expect me to give a shit about an insurance company? Everybody hates those guys. Turn here.”
“Where are we going?” Villatoro asked, taking another dark two-lane highway.