So here she was, Budgie thought, riding shotgun on Sunset Boulevard with this cranky geezer, easily older than her father, who would have been fifty-two years old had he lived. By the number of hash marks on Fausto’s sleeve, he’d been a cop for more than thirty years, almost all of it in Hollywood.
To break the ice on that first night, she’d said, “How long you been on the Job, Fausto?”
“Thirty-four years,” he said. “Came on when cops wore hats and you had to by god wear it when you were outta the car. And sap pockets were for saps, not cell phones.” Then he paused and said, “Before you were on this planet.”
“I’ve been on this planet twenty-seven years,” she said. “I’ve been on the Job just over five.”
The way he cocked his right eyebrow at her for a second and then looked away, he appeared to be saying, So who gives a shit about your history?
Well, fuck him, she thought, but just as night fell and she was hoping that somehow the pain in her breasts would subside, he decided to make a little small talk. He said, “Budgie, huh? That’s a weird name.”
Trying not to sound defensive, she said, “My mother was Australian. A budgie is an Australian parakeet. It’s a nickname that stuck. She thought it was cute, I guess.”
Fausto, who was driving, stopped at a red light, looked Budgie up and down, from her blond French-braided ponytail, pinned up per LAPD regulations, to her brightly shined shoes, and said, “You’re what? Five eleven, maybe six feet tall in your socks? And weigh what? About as much as my left leg? She shoulda called you ‘Storkie.’”
Budgie felt it right then. Worse breast pain. These days a dog barks, a cat meows, a baby cries, she lactates. This bastard’s gruff voice was doing it!
“Take me to the substation on Cherokee,” she said.
“What for?” Fausto said.
“I’m hurting like hell. I got a breast pump in my war bag. I can do it in there and store the milk.”
“Oh, shit!” Fausto said. “I don’t believe it! Twenty-eight days of this?”
When they were halfway to the storefront, Fausto said, “Why don’t we just go back to the station? You can do it in the women’s locker room, for chrissake.”
“I don’t want anyone to know I’m doing this, Fausto,” she said. “Not even any of the women. Somebody’ll say something, and then I’ll have to hear all the wise-ass remarks from the men. I’m trusting you on this.”
“I gotta pull the pin,” Fausto said rhetorically. “Over a thousand females on the Job? Pretty soon the freaking chief’ll have double-X chromosomes. Thirty-four years is long enough. I gotta pull the pin.”
After Fausto parked the black-and-white at the darkened storefront substation by Musso & Frank’s restaurant, Budgie grabbed the carryall and breast pump from her war bag in the trunk, unlocked the door with her 999 key, and ran inside. It was a rather empty space with a few tables and chairs where parents could get information about the Police Activity League or sign up the kids for the Police Explorer Program. Sometimes there was LAPD literature lying around, in English, Spanish, Thai, Korean, Farsi, and other languages for the polyglot citizenry of the Los Angeles melting pot.
Budgie opened the fridge, intending to put her blue ice packs in the freezer, and left her little thermal bag beside the fridge, where she could pick it up after going off duty. She turned on the light in the john, deciding to pump in there sitting on the toilet lid instead of in the main room, in case Fausto got tired of waiting in the car and decided to stroll inside. But the smell of mildew was nauseating.
She removed the rover from her Sam Browne, then took off the gun belt itself and her uniform shirt, vest, and T-shirt. She draped everything on a little table in the bathroom and put the key on the sink. The table teetered under the weight, so she removed her pistol from the gun belt and laid it on the floor beside her rover and flashlight. After she’d been pumping for a minute, the pain started subsiding. The pump was noisy, and she hoped that Fausto wouldn’t enter the storefront. Without a doubt he’d make some wisecrack when he heard the sucking noise coming from the bathroom.
Fausto had clicked onto the car’s keyboard that they were code 6 at the storefront, out for investigation, so that they wouldn’t get any calls until this freaking ordeal was over. And he was almost dozing when the hotshot call went out to 6-A-77 of Watch 3.
The PSR’s urgent voice said, “All units in the vicinity and Six-Adam-Seventy-seven, shots fired in the parking lot, Western and Romaine. Possibly an officer involved. Six-A-Seventy-seven, handle code three.”
Budgie was buttoning her shirt, just having stored the milk in the freezer beside her blue ice packs. She had slid the rover inside its sheath when Fausto threw open the front door and yelled, “OIS, Western and Romaine! Are you through?”
“Coming!” she yelled, grabbing the Sam Browne and flashlight while still buttoning her shirt, placing the milk and the freezer bags in the insulated carryall, and running for the door, almost tripping on a chair in the darkened office as she was fastening the Sam Browne around her waspish waist.
There were few things more urgent than an officer-involved shooting, and Fausto was revving the engine when she got to the car and she just had time to close the door before he was ripping out from the curb. She was rattled and sweating and when he slid the patrol car around a corner, she almost toppled and grabbed her seat belt and… oh, god!
Since the current chief had arrived, he’d decided to curtail traffic collisions involving officers busting through red lights and stop signs minus lights and siren while racing to urgent calls that didn’t rate a code 3 status. So henceforth, the calls that in the old days would have rated only a code 2 status were upgraded to code 3. That meant that in Los Angeles today the citizens were always hearing sirens. The street cops figured it reminded the chief of his days as New York’s police commissioner, all those sirens howling. The cops didn’t mind a bit. It was a blast getting to drive code 3 all the time.
Because the call wasn’t assigned to them, Fausto couldn’t drive code 3, but neither the transplanted easterner who headed the Department nor the risen Christ could keep LAPD street cops from racing to an OIS call. Fausto would slow at an intersection and then roar through, green light or not, making cars brake and yield for the black-and-white. But by the time they got to Western and Romaine, five units were there ahead of them and all officers were out of their cars, aiming shotguns or nines at the lone car in the parking lot, where they could see someone ducking down on the front seat.
Fausto grabbed the shotgun and advanced to the car closest to the action, seeing it belonged to the surfers, Flotsam and Jetsam. When he looked over at Budgie trailing beside him, he wondered why she wasn’t aiming hers.
“Where’s your gun?” he said, then added, “Please don’t tell me it’s with the milk!”
“No, I have the milk,” Budgie said.
“Just point your finger,” he said and was stunned to see that, with a sick look on her face, she did it!
After a pause, he said, “I have a two-inch Smith in my war bag. Wanna borrow it?”
Still pointing her long, slender index finger, Budgie said, “Two-inch wheel guns can’t hit shit. I’m better off this way.”
Fausto came as close to a guffaw as he had in a long time. She had balls. And she was quick, he had to give her that. Then he saw the car door open, and two teenage Latino boys got out with their hands up and were quickly proned-out and cuffed.
The code 4 was broadcast by the PSR, meaning there was sufficient help at the scene. And to keep other eager cops from coming anyway, she added, “No officer involved.”