“Is it gonna look better when the bandage comes off?” Nate asked.
“It can’t look worse than it’s looked all my life,” Snuffy said.
“Dude, I didn’t think you were ever coming back,” Flotsam said to Jetsam, on duty together in unit 6-X-32 for the first time since the battle at Goth House.
“Bro, I learned a few things about neck injuries,” Jetsam said. “I learned you don’t wanna have one. They hurt.”
Flotsam had insisted on driving so that Jetsam didn’t have to do too much craning at intersections. In fact, he was so solicitous that Jetsam finally said, “Bro, I ain’t an invalid.”
“I missed my li’l pard,” Flotsam said. “Of course, Hollywood Nate’s a cool dude, but he don’t know shit about the beach and briny. After a while I couldn’t think of what to talk about.”
The surfer cops had taken a crime report just after dark from a Gallup, New Mexico, tourist who had had her purse picked while she was taking photos of the marble-and-brass stars on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. They drove to the station to get a DR number on the report as required, and to have it signed by a supervisor, but they didn’t find Sergeant Murillo in the sergeant’s room. The troops, especially the surfer cops, always tried to avoid the nitpicking watch commander.
Jetsam said to Flotsam, “I hate taking our report to the kinda guy that would wear a ring on his index finger and make us call him ‘His Excellency’ if he had his way.”
Flotsam said, “If he’s in there, let’s hold the report till later and get Murillo to sign it.”
But at that moment Lieutenant O’Reilly wasn’t in his office and Sergeant Murillo was, so Flotsam and Jetsam thought it was safe to enter.
“What’s the air like?” Sergeant Murillo asked, meaning the airwaves.
“Quiet,” Jetsam said. “A few calls going out to south-end units, and a prowler call in the Hollywood Hills that turned out to be a raccoon.”
Much to the surfer cops’ consternation, the watch commander swept into the room just then, but not with his usual look of intensity and purpose. He was actually smiling. In fact, he was unable to contain his excitement.
He said to Sergeant Murillo, “The captain’s finished with the citizens meeting at the Community Relations Office and he wants me to join him for code seven at El Cholo.”
“I’m surprised he still has an appetite,” Sergeant Murillo said, trying to concentrate on the report that the surfer cops had handed to him.
“Yeah,” Flotsam agreed. “There ain’t been a rational citizen walk into the Hollywood Crows Office since Hitler was still hanging wallpaper.”
Ignoring both surfer cops, Lieutenant O’Reilly said to Sergeant Murillo, “The captain said he loves the green corn tamales at El Cholo. Tell me, are green tamales different from regular tamales?”
Sergeant Murillo looked up from the report and said, deadpan, “How would I know, Lieutenant?”
The young watch commander, who was nothing if not politically correct, was disconcerted by the sergeant’s unexpected reply and said, “I just… well, I assumed…”
“That I’m Mexican?” Sergeant Murillo said.
“Well, your name and you… you look Hispanic, sort of, and I thought you would know Hispanic food.”
“What’s a Hispanic look like? And what in the world is Hispanic food?” Sergeant Murillo said, and now the surfer cops were grinning like hyenas, watching the lieutenant squirm and sputter.
“Damn, Murillo, you know what I mean,” the watch commander said, genuinely angry that his sergeant was showing him up like this in front of two officers, especially these two.
Jetsam only made things worse when he said artlessly to the watch commander, “The sarge is just hacking on you, sir. He does that to us all the time. One time he pretended he was giving us serious roll call training and he goes, ‘Listen up. Orders from the bureau commander. Officers are forbidden to wear any off-duty clothing that reveals body ink portraying one of our female senators doing fellatio on the president of the United States.’ ” Jetsam chuckled and said, “He keeps our morale up with funny stuff like that.”
Lieutenant O’Reilly stared icily at Jetsam for a long moment and said, “Yes, I’m certain you would find something like that amusing.”
Sergeant Murillo winked at the surfer cops and said to the watch commander, “Okay, Lieutenant, I confess, I’m Mexican. Or at least my grandparents are. And I can promise you that El Cholo’s green tamales will make the captain as happy as a drunken mariachi on Cinco de Mayo. You can order yourself a margarita manqué, and by the end of the meal you two will be real compadres.”
Lieutenant O’Reilly noticed that the surfer cops were smiling fondly at their smart-ass sergeant, and it made the lieutenant angrier. He redirected his pique toward Flotsam, saying, “Don’t any of the sergeants around this station ever tell you people that gelled-up surfer hairstyles are unfit for police officers?”
Flotsam looked down at the watch commander, whose nose almost touched the tall cop’s badge number, and he stopped smiling.
Jetsam again tried a show of goodwill and said, “Actually, sir, only the barneys wear gel or hairspray on the beach. The real kahunas go au naturel, so to speak.”
That made the lieutenant turn on Jetsam and say, “I also think the so-called sun streaks in your hair look like highlighting. It’s vaguely effeminate for male police officers to highlight their hair. Didn’t Sergeant Murillo ever mention that to you?”
Neither surfer cop was smiling now, and both were shooting hate beams at the watch commander, when Sergeant Murillo stood up and said to them, “Okay, we’re through here. You can go back to work.”
Flotsam and Jetsam were grim and silent when they strode across the parking lot to their shop. After they were in the car, Flotsam said, “Dude, I think we should drop by Yerevan Tow Service. I got an idea.”
Jetsam, who was angrily alliterative, said, “I hope it’s a real brain bleacher, bro, cuz I got, like, the image of that slithering snarky slime-sucker stuck in my cerebrum. Feel me?”
“I feel ya, dude,” Flotsam said.
Yerevan Tow Service was known to many of the cops at Hollywood Station as a kind of outlaw one-man tow service that picked up scraps that LAPD’s official tow garages left behind or couldn’t handle. Sarkis, the owner, was a happy-go-lucky Armenian, always eager to impound any vehicles at the scene of traffic collisions or radio calls, which he picked up on his police scanner.
He usually had some of his wife’s stuffed grape leaves in his tow truck, and on a couple of occasions he shared them with the surfer cops. And one night he was rewarded for his generosity. On that occasion, 6-X-32 had stopped Sarkis while he was in his private car, driving home from a bar in Little Armenia, absolutely hammered.
As soon as Flotsam and Jetsam saw whom they’d stopped, Flotsam said to Sarkis, “Dude, when you get your swill on, try to remember, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
They locked up Sarkis’s five-year-old Lincoln and drove him home in their black-and-white. Sarkis tried to invite them into his house for some leftover shish kebab, but Jetsam said to him, “We gotta get back to our beat, bro, but we got your marker. Someday we may need to collect on it.”
And now was the time. Sarkis was working late at his tow garage and was happy to see his LAPD friends. He was good at bodywork and had been reassembling a damaged Ford pickup with junkyard parts. After hugs and greetings, he listened intently to what Flotsam and Jetsam had to say about a major problem at Hollywood Station.
Thirty minutes before Lieutenant O’Reilly left his office to join the captain at El Cholo, 6-X-32 received a confidential cell phone message from one of the desk officers at Hollywood Station. It concerned the approximate arrival time for the watch commander’s code 7 rendezvous with the station captain.
Lieutenant O’Reilly had a marvelous time at El Cholo that evening, going well over the allotted time for his code 7 meal break. He told the captain of the many things wrong with the personnel at Hollywood Station. He was especially critical of the midwatch troops, who worked from 5:15 P.M. until 4 A.M. four days a week. He admitted that the officers liked the four-ten shift, but he had many reasons for why the watch hours were inefficient. He said that he wished they could go back to the old eight-hour-and-forty-five-minute work shift five days a week, because efficiency trumped morale. And he told the captain how he wished he had more authority when it came to overtime being granted. He had a strong belief that many officers were padding the books with phony “greenies,” as they called the OT slips, and he was planning to put a stop to it. He said that he was working on ways to make supervisors-and he mentioned Sergeant Murillo by name-more responsive to orders and roll call training from the bureau level and less attuned to all of the petty gripes and special requests from the officers on his watch, especially certain officers who flouted good discipline.