Flotsam talked for a few minutes to one of the Eighteenth Street crew who had lingered to be sure the dog was dead, and after the short conversation, the surfer jogged up to the Oracle and said, “Boss, I think we have some extenuating circumstances in this shooting that might help you with those rat bastards from FID.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
Pointing to the deceased pit bull, Flotsam said, “A homie told me the dog was just ghetto elk when they found him.”
“What?”
“You know, one of those stray dogs that roam around the ’hood? One of the cruisers found the dog down in Watts, brought him here and let him in their pack. But last month the dog came down with terminal cancer and they were just going to put him down any day now.”
“So?”
Compassionate Charlie butted into the conversation, saying to the Oracle, “Don’t you get it? Haven’t you read about dogs that can smell malignant tumors?”
“Now, what in hell is your point, Charlie?” the Oracle wanted to know. He didn’t have time for this goofy surfer or for one of Charlie’s on-scene analyses.
Compassionate Charlie shook his head sadly, sucked his teeth, and said, “You can call this just another touching drama among the many that occur nightly on the streets of Hollywood. The fucking mutt knew he had cancer, so he decided to do honor to his crew and commit suicide-by-cop.”
Young Wesley Drubb felt sort of dazed for the remainder of the watch. His mind kept wandering away from the issues at hand. For instance, when they drove their prisoner to Central Jail at Parker Center, where medical treatment was available for him, all Wesley could think about when they drove past the parking lot was, Why is the entrance gate blocked with a steel barrier, and the exit gate is wide open with no metal spikes? A terrorist could just drive in the exit. Are we stupid, or what? His mind was wandering like that.
After the prisoner was treated prior to being booked for battery on a police officer, Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb decided to go to Cedars for treatment of contusions and abrasions, and in Nate’s case muscle spasms. As to the prisoner, Nate told Wesley it would be up to the DA’s office to decide if the arrestee was permanently nuts or only temporarily nuts from PCP or whatever a blood test might reveal. Drug-induced craziness would not be a defense in a criminal case, but life-induced craziness like his war experiences might keep him from a jail sentence and put him in a mental ward for a short vacation.
Wesley Drubb’s mind remained unfocused for more than an hour. He got alarmed by remarks made by a jail employee who had taken his sweet time returning from the long lunch break that their union had recently won for them.
When their prisoner was strip-searched, the black detention officer studied the darkening welts all over the guy’s body and said, “He looks like a zebra.”
Wesley Drubb had never dreamed a man fifty-seven years old could fight like that and was still trying to sort his feelings about the first act of violence he’d ever committed on another human being in his entire life. And sick from the worry and stress of having lost his police car, he tried to explain the prisoner’s bruises by saying, “We had no choice.”
The jailor chuckled at the shaken young cop and said, “Boy, lucky for you he’s a peckerwood. If this cat was black, you would be facing the wrath of the city council, the United States Department of Justice, and the motherfuckin’ ghost of Johnnie Cochran.”
Loco Lennie may or may not have heard the PSR’s voice informing all units that 6-X-72’s car had been stolen, and he may or may not have opened the text messages sent by other units to 6-X-72 after they’d learned of the incident.
One message said, “When we see you, you are dead meat.”
Another said, “We will shoot you and burn your body.”
Another, apparently from a K-9 unit, said, “Trooper will eat on your sorry ass for as long as he wants. Before you die.”
In any case, Loco Lennie figured he had made his point to the crew, so he abandoned the police car only ten blocks from his house. He found a rock lying beside a chain-link fence, picked it up, and threw it at the windshield, just as a parting shot. Then Loco Lennie sprinted home in glory.
When, at the end of their long and awful duty tour, they were painfully walking to their personal cars, Wesley Drubb, who had been silent most of the night, said to Hollywood Nate, “I don’t care what they taught me in my years at USC. I don’t care how unscientific it is. All I know is that since coming on this Job, I no longer believe in evolution. I believe in Creationism.”
“And why is that?” Nate asked.
“For instance, that guy tonight? An evolved form of life could not resemble something like that.”
EIGHT
AFTER STOPPING AT the Gulag for a happy hour drink, Cosmo Betrossian was driving his eighteen-year-old Cadillac east on Sunset to Korea Town, where he was living temporarily, and thinking of how impressed Dmitri had been with him during their meeting last week. This was where he belonged, with people like Dmitri. Cosmo was forty-three years old, too old to be dealing with people addicted to crystal meth. Too old to be buying the paper they’d stolen from mailboxes or from purses left in cars and then shopping the credit-card information to the other freaks at the public libraries and cybercafés, where they sold stolen information and dealt drugs on the Internet.
Cosmo and Ilya had never committed an armed robbery prior to the jewelry store job. The hand grenade idea came from something he had heard from one of the addicts who had read about it in a San Diego newspaper. The reason the addict had mentioned it to Cosmo at all was that the robbers who did it were Armenians who were supposed to be connected with Russian Mafia. Cosmo had to laugh. He had stolen their idea and their modus operandi, and it had been easy. And it had all come to him because he was an Armenian émigré.
The knowledge about the diamonds’ arriving on the premises had come to him by way of another of the addicts he had been dealing with for several months. It was information from an invoice receipt acknowledging delivery, sent by the jewelry store to a Hong Kong supplier. Along with that stolen letter had been another one, also bearing the jewelry store’s return address, sent to a customer in San Francisco, telling the customer that an “exciting delivery” of stones had arrived and were just what the customer had in mind when last he’d visited the Los Angeles store. The letters had been stolen from a mailbox by an addict who traded a bag full of credit-card and check information along with the letters in question for four teeners of crystal meth that Cosmo had bought for two hundred fifty dollars and used as trade bait.
He’d been doing business with tweakers for over a year and only on one occasion did he and Ilya smoke some crystal with them, but neither had liked the high, although it did sexually arouse them. They preferred cocaine and vodka. Cosmo had told the addicts that he and Ilya were more normal, old-fashioned people.
The thing that really had him excited now was that the robbery had been easy. It gave him a great thrill to make that jeweler weep and piss all over himself. Cosmo had fucked Ilya all night after they had done the robbery. And she too admitted that it had been sexually stimulating. Though she said that she would not participate in any more armed robberies, he thought that he could persuade her.
Ilya was waiting for him when he got back to their apartment. As soon as they sold the diamonds, they would be moving, maybe to a nicer apartment in Little Armenia. Their two-room hovel over a residential garage had been rented to them by a Korean who never asked questions about the men, both white and Asian, who visited Ilya in that apartment for a “massage” and left within an hour or so. Ilya had formerly done a lot of out-call work, until she got arrested in a hotel room on a sting by a handsome vice cop who had flash money and nice clothes and rings on his fingers. Ilya wept when he showed his badge that night. She had been naive enough then to think that the handsome stranger had possibilities beyond a quick blow job.