Jetsam put his flashlight in his sap pocket, nowadays a cell-phone pocket, since saps had become LAPD artifacts, extended his pistol in both hands, and said to the Indian, “Happy trails, pard. Enjoy your dirt nap.”
That did it. The Indian dropped the bayonet and Flotsam said, “Turn and face the wall and interlace your fingers behind your head!”
The Indian turned and faced the wall, but he obviously did not understand “interlace.”
Jetsam said, “Cross your fingers behind your head!”
The Indian crossed his middle fingers over his index fingers and held them up behind his head.
“No, dude!” Flotsam said. “I didn’t ask you to make a fucking wish, for chrissake!”
“Never mind!” Jetsam said, pulling the Indian’s hands down and cuffing them behind his back.
Finally the Indian spoke. He said, “Do you guys have a candy bar I could buy from you? I’ll give you five dollars for a candy bar.”
When Jetsam was walking the Indian to their car, the prisoner said, “Ten. I’ll give you ten bucks. I’ll pay you when I get outta jail.”
After stopping at a liquor store to buy their meth-addled, candy-craving arrestee a Nutter Butter, they drove him to Hollywood Station and put him in an interview room, cuffing one wrist to a chair so he could still eat his candy. The night-watch D2, a lazy sensitivity-challenged detective known as “Compassionate” Charlie Gilford, was annoyed at being pulled away from shows like American Idol, which he watched on a little TV he kept concealed in the warren of work cubicles the size of airline restrooms, where he sat for hours on a rubber donut. He loved to watch the panels brutalize the hapless contestants.
The detective was wearing a short-sleeved, wrinkled white shirt and one of his discount neckties, a dizzying checkerboard of blues and yellows. Everyone said his ties were louder than Mötley Crüe, and even older. Charlie got fatigued listening to the story of the window smash on Melrose, the serenade to the guard at Paramount Studios’ main gate, the foot chase by the surfer cops, and the subsequent eerie confrontation, all of which Flotsam described as “weird.”
He said to them, “Weird? This ain’t weird.” And then he uttered the phrase that one heard every night around the station when things seemed too surreal to be true: “Man, this is fucking Hollywood!” After that, there was usually no need for further comment.
But Charlie decided to elaborate: “Last year the midwatch busted a goony tweaker totally naked except for a pink tutu. He was waving a samurai sword on Sunset Boulevard when they took him down. That was weird. This ain’t shit.”
When he spotted the acronym for American Indian Movement tattooed on the prisoner’s shoulder, he touched it with a pencil and said, “What’s that mean, chief? Assholes in Moccasins?”
The Indian just sat munching on the Nutter Butter, eyes shut in utter bliss.
Then the cranky detective sucked his teeth and said to the arresting officers, “And by the way, you just had to feed him chocolate, huh? This tweaker don’t have enough speed bumps?”
To the Indian he said, “Next time you feel like breaking into show business, take a look in the mirror. With that mug, you only got one option. Buy a hockey mask and try singing ‘Music of the Night.’”
“I’ll give you twenty bucks for another Nutter Butter,” the Indian finally said to Compassionate Charlie Gilford. “And I’ll confess to any crime you got.”
Nathan Weiss, called Hollywood Nate by the other cops because of his obsession, recently waning, to break into the movie business, had left Watch 5, the midwatch, eight months earlier, shortly after the very senior sergeant known as the Oracle had died of a massive heart attack there on the police Walk of Fame in front of Hollywood Station. Nothing was the same on the midwatch after they lost the Oracle. Hollywood Nate had been pulled out of trouble, usually involving women, and spared from disciplinary action more than once by the grizzled forty-six-year veteran supervisor, who had died just short of his sixty-ninth birthday.
Everyone said it was fitting that the Oracle had died on that Walk, where stars honoring Hollywood Division officers killed on duty were embedded in marble and brass just as they were for movie stars on Hollywood Boulevard. The Oracle had been their star, an anachronism from another era of policing, from long before the Rodney King riots and Rampart Division evidence-planting scandal. Long before the LAPD had agreed to a Department of Justice “consent decree” and gotten invaded by federal judges and lawyers and politicians and auditors and overseers and media critics. Back when the cops could be guided by proactive leaders, not reactive bureaucrats more fearful of the federal overseers and local politicians than of the street criminals. The day after the Oracle died, Nathan Weiss had gone to temple, the first time in fifteen years, to say Kaddish for the old sergeant.
All of them, street cops and supervisors, were now smothered in paperwork designed to prove that they were “reforming” a police force of more than ninety-five hundred souls who ostensibly needed reforming because of the actions of half a dozen convicted cops from both incidents combined. Hundreds of sworn officers had been taken from street duties to manage the paper hurricane resulting from the massive “reformation.” The consent decree hanging over the LAPD was to expire in two more years, but they’d heard that before and knew it could be extended. Like the war in Iraq, it seemed that it would never end.
The Oracle had been replaced by a university-educated twenty-eight-year-old with a degree in political science who’d rocketed almost to the top of the promotion list with little more than six years of experience, not to mention overcoming disadvantages of race and gender. Sergeant Jason Treakle was a white male, and that wasn’t helpful in the diversity-obsessed city of Los Angeles, where fifty-five languages were spoken by students in the school district.
Hollywood Nate called Sergeant Treakle’s roll call speeches a perfect meld of George Bush’s garbled syntax and the tin ear of Al Gore. During those sessions Nate could hear cartilage crackling from all the chins bouncing off chests as the troops failed to stay awake and upright. He’d hated the rookie sergeant’s guts the first time they’d met, when Sergeant Treakle criticized Nate in front of the entire assembly for referring to Officer Ronnie Sinclair as a “very cool chick.” Ronnie took it as a compliment, but Sergeant Treakle found it demeaning and sexist.
Then, during an impromptu inspection, he’d frowned upon Hollywood Nate’s scuffed shoes. He’d pointed at Nate’s feet with an arm that didn’t look long enough for his body, saying the shoes made Nate look “unkempt,” and suggested that Nate try spit-shining them. Sergeant Treakle was big on spit shines, having spent six months in the ROTC at his university. Because of his knife-blade mouth, the cops soon referred to him as “Chickenlips.”
Hollywood Nate, like his idol, the Oracle, had always worn ordinary black rubber-soled shoes with his uniform. He liked to needle the cops who wore expensive over-the-ankle boots to look more paramilitary but then experienced sweaty feet, foot fungus, and diminished running speed. Nate would ask them if their spit-shined boots made it easier to slog through all the snow and ice storms on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.
And Hollywood Nate had given up suggesting that field training officers stop making the new P1 probationers call them sir or ma’am, as most did. The more rigid and GI of the FTOs seemed to be those who’d never served in the military and they wouldn’t think of letting their probies wear the gung-ho boots before finishing their eighteen-month probation. Nate would privately tell the rookies to forget about boots, that their feet would thank them for it. And Nate never forgot that the Oracle had never spit-shined his shoes.
Before the midwatch hit the streets, every cop would ritually touch the picture of the Oracle for luck, even new officers who’d never known him. It hung on the wall by the door of the roll call room. In the photo their late sergeant was in uniform, his retro gray crew cut freshly trimmed, smiling the way he’d always done, more with his smart blue eyes than with his mouth. The brass plate on the frame simply said: