“Only two work as undercover operators and they’re both off sick,” the vice sergeant said. “This isn’t going to be a real task force. No motor cops as chase units. No big deal. We only wanna run a couple operators and cover units for a few hours.”
“Why can’t you put your uniformed women on it?”
“We have three. One’s on vacation, one’s on light duty, one’s pregnant.”
“Why not use her?” the Oracle said. “It’s a known fact that there’s a whole lotta tricks out there who prefer pregnant hookers. Something about a mommy fixation. I guess they want to be spanked.”
“She’s not pregnant enough to notice, but she’s throwing up like our office is a trawler in a perfect storm. I ask her to walk the boulevard, she’ll start blowing chunks on my shoes.”
“Aw shit,” the Oracle said. “How’re we supposed to police a city when we spend half the time policing ourselves and proving in writing that we did it?”
“I don’t answer trick questions,” the vice sergeant said. “How about it? Just for one night.”
When the Oracle asked Budgie Polk and Mag Takara if they’d like to be boulevard street whores on Saturday night, they said okay. He only got an argument from Budgie’s partner, Fausto Gamboa.
Fausto walked into the office, where three supervisors were doing paperwork, and being one of the few patrol officers at Hollywood Station old enough to call the sixty-eight-year-old sergeant by his given name, he said to the Oracle, “I don’t like it, Merv.”
“What don’t you like, Fausto?” the Oracle asked, knowing the answer.
“Budgie’s got a baby at home.”
“So what’s that got to do with it?”
“Sometimes she lactates. And it’s painful.”
“She’ll deal with it, Fausto. She’s a cop,” the Oracle said, while the other sergeants pretended to not be listening.
“What if she gets herself hurt? Who’s gonna feed her baby?”
“The cover teams won’t let her get hurt. And babies don’t have to have mother’s milk.”
“Aw shit,” Fausto said, echoing the Oracle’s sentiments about the whole deal.
After he’d gone the Oracle said to the other two sergeants, “Sometimes my ideas work too well. Fausto’s not only gotten out of his funk, I think he’s about to adopt Budgie Polk. Her kid’ll probably be calling him Grandpa Fausto in a couple years.”
Cosmo Betrossian was a whole lot unhappier than Fausto Gamboa. He had diamonds to deliver to Dmitri at the Gulag soon and he had to kill that miserable addict Farley Ramsdale and his stupid girlfriend, Olive, sometime before then. Farley’s claim that he had someone watching Cosmo and Ilya’s apartment was so ridiculous Cosmo hadn’t given it a thought. And as to Farley’s other claim, that he had a letter that would be delivered to the police if something happened to him, well, the addict had seen too many movies. Even if there was a letter, let the police try to prove the truth of it without the writer and his girlfriend alive to attest to its veracity.
Cosmo was going to make them disappear, and he would have liked to talk to Dmitri about that. Dmitri would have some good ideas about how to make someone vanish, but if Dmitri learned about the tweakers, he might see them as potential trouble and back out of the arrangement. No, Cosmo would have to deal with them with only Ilya to help. And it would not be easy. Other than a gang rival back in Armenia whom he had shot to death when he was a kid of eighteen, Cosmo had never killed anyone. Here in America he had never even committed violent crime until the jewelry store robbery. His criminal life had been relegated to the smuggling of drugs, which he did not use himself, fencing stolen property, and in recent years, identity theft, which he’d learned from a Gypsy.
He’d met the Gypsy in a nightclub on the Sunset Strip. Cosmo had been frequenting the Strip then, doing low-level cocaine sales. But the Gypsy introduced him to a new world. He showed Cosmo how easy it was to walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, armed with a bit of personal data stolen by common mail thieves like Farley Ramsdale, and tell a DMV employee that he needed a new driver’s license because he’d changed his address and misplaced his license. At first the DMV employees would ask for a Social Security number but seldom if ever bothered to pull up the photo of the legitimate license holder to compare it with the face before them. They’d just take a new photo and change the address to the location where the license would be sent, and business would be concluded.
Cosmo and the Gypsy normally used an address of a house or apartment in their neighborhood where the occupant worked during the day. And either Cosmo or the Gypsy would check their neighbor’s mailbox every day until the driver’s license arrived. Later, when the DMV started asking for a birth certificate, Cosmo learned that with the information from the stolen mail, it was a simple matter for the Gypsy to make a credible birth certificate that would satisfy most DMV employees.
Cosmo and the Gypsy got so lazy that instead of going to the DMV, they started using a CD template that was making the rounds among all the identity thieves. It showed how to make driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, auto insurance certificates, and other documents.
Stealing credit-card numbers became a bonanza. They could buy just about anything. They could even buy automobiles, and since car dealers were all covered by insurance, they were the easiest. By the time the legitimate card owners got their statements, Cosmo and the Gypsy would be off that card and on to another. Sometimes the credit-card statements went to bogus addresses supplied by Cosmo and the Gypsy, so legitimate card owners wouldn’t discover the account was delinquent until they tried to buy something of value.
The Gypsy had an interior decorator working with them at that time. She said it was amazing how many people on the affluent west side of town kept their old cards, even ATM cards, thrown into a drawer somewhere. Nobody seemed to care much. The credit-card company only took a hit if the card was presented in person by the thief. If the business was done on the Internet or by phone, the credit-card company was not liable. Banks and credit-card companies had long delays in catching up, and identity thefts were so paper intensive the police were overwhelmed.
For a while Cosmo and the Gypsy had gotten so successful they were hoping to deal with the Russians whose eastern European contacts hacked into U.S. banks and lending institutions for card numbers, then ordered high-quality embossing and encoding strips from China. As it was, they just did their business online in the cybercafés or by phone and ordered merchandise to be sent to addresses they’d cased. FedEx would drop the parcels on the porch while the resident was at work, and they would be picked up by Cosmo while the Gypsy waited in their car. The resident would be shocked when, after a few months of this, the police showed up at the home with a search warrant for all that stolen property.
Then one day without warning the Gypsy and the interior decorator moved to New York without notifying Cosmo until they were there. And that was that. Cosmo continued limping through the world that the Gypsy had sailed through, and now Cosmo was dealing with tweaker mail thieves and doing cybercafé networking as best he could. He had almost been arrested twice and was losing confidence now that everybody was doing identity theft.
The big break had come in the batch of mail stolen by Farley Ramsdale, when he had found the letter about the diamonds, and Cosmo had committed his first violent crime in America. He was stunned to learn that he liked it. It had thrilled him, that feeling of power over the jewelry store proprietor. Seeing the fear in his eyes. Hearing him weep. Cosmo had had complete control over everything, including that man’s life. The feeling was something he could never put into words, but he believed that Ilya felt some of it too. If another chance at a safe and profitable armed robbery came up, he knew he would take it.