The sack was yanked from his head, and he coughed on the sudden oxygen, blinking his eyes against hard fluorescents.
“Here.”
A wiry man with a tonsure of gray hair, eyes hidden by green-tinted aviator sunglasses, placed a water bottle in front of him.
Park nodded. He tried to pick up the bottle but couldn’t get his hands to close around it.
The man twisted the cap from the bottle and held it to Park’s lips, slowly tilting it upward as Park swallowed.
“Enough?”
Park coughed, and the man lowered the bottle and set it back on the table. He took Park’s hands in his own and started rubbing them.
“When were you picked up?”
Park looked for his watch, forgetting for the moment that he had stashed it before the bust.
“I don’t know. Last night? What time is it?”
The needles in his hands were turning to pins, and he found he could flex them on his own.
The man let go and took a cell from a plastic clip on the belt of his navy blue Dickies.
“Little after midnight.”
“I should call my wife.”
The man put the phone back on his belt.
“Later.”
From the corner of the table he picked up a wrinkled and stained manila envelope, names and numbers scrawled across it in long rows, each crossed out in turn, except for one: HAAS, PARKER, T./A330H-4-40
The man untwisted a frayed brown thread from a round tab, opened the envelope, looked inside, and then dumped the contents onto the table.
“What the hell is this?”
Park looked at the baggies of brown, seedy ditch weed.
“Not mine.”
The man looked at the uncrossed name on the outside of the envelope.
“Says it is.”
“It’s not.”
The man nodded.
“ Lot of trouble to be in for a couple ounces of Mexican brown.”
Park made fists; just the tips of his fingers tingled now. He looked at the door.
“Can we talk?”
The man folded his arms across the Dodgers jersey he wore open over a white tank.
“That’s why we’re here.”
Park flicked one of the bags with his index finger.
“That’s what they planted on me.”
The man pointed at the bag.
“Because this isn’t what I expected to find on you.”
Park nodded.
“And it’s not what I had on me.”
“Hounds and Kleiner took what you had on you?”
“Yes.”
“And planted this?”
“Yes.”
The man folded his arms a little tighter.
“And what did the arresting officers take off you?”
Park looked at the man’s cellphone.
“I should really call my wife. She’ll worry.”
The man shook his head.
“Later. Tell me what they took off you.”
Park drank from the water bottle, draining what was left.
“Demerol. Valium. X.”
The man nodded and unfolded his arms and picked up one of the baggies.
“Because this will get you nowhere.”
Park touched the ear that had been punched while the black sack was over his head.
“I know. And it’s not what I had. It’s not what I’ve been doing.”
The man waved a hand.
“I know what you’ve been doing.”
Park shrugged.
“Well, then?”
The man stared at him, shook his head, and sat in the chair opposite.
“I want to hear it.”
Park looked at the door again.
“We can talk?”
The man took off his sunglasses, revealing bagged eyes, bloodshot, sunk in deeply wrinkled sockets.
“We can talk.”
Park pointed at the sack on the floor.
“Then can you tell me who the hell is running things here, Captain?”
The man with the worried eyes shrugged.
“We are.”
Park didn’t want the duty at first.
It wasn’t what he’d joined for. He’d joined to help. He’d joined to do service. When asked by his friends what the hell he was going to do, he told them he was going to protect and to serve.
None of them laughed, knowing that Parker Thomas Haas did not joke about such things. He had, in fact, no sense of humor at all when it came to matters of justice and ethics.
Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to be joked about.
Not by him, in any case.
And so he’d wanted to stay in uniform.
Long before he had finished at the academy, he had resolved for himself that justice within the courts did not often live up to the standards it should and must. Long, hot afternoons spent between classes in the downtown courthouses, watching the wheels of justice squeal and creak, had settled that case.
But street justice was another matter.
It could be applied directly. In the face of injustice, a man with a badge on the street could actually do something. What happened after the point of interdiction could be a mystery, but in the moment of arrest, leniency, summons, unexpected tolerance, no-BS takedown, comfort, lecture, or application of force, a cop on the beat could enact true justice.
A matter of setting a standard and applying it always, without exception, to everyone.
Including oneself.
For Park, that was as easy as breathing.
But hard as hell for anyone working with him.
Which was one of the arguments Captain Bartolome had used on him.
“No one likes you.”
Standing in his office, in front of the autographed picture of himself as a boy with a smiling Vin Scully, Bartolome had shrugged.
“Not saying it to make you feel bad, it’s just true.”
Park had looked at the LAPD ball cap in his own hands.
“It doesn’t make me feel bad.”
“I didn’t think it did. Another reason I think you’d be good for this. Helps not to care if people don’t like you.”
Park ran a hand up the back of his neck, felt the sharp horizontal hairline that his barber had carved at the bottom of his buzz cut.
“It’s not that I don’t care in general, Captain. Depends on why they don’t like me.”
Bartolome stuck the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, then pulled it back, sucking his teeth.
“So it’s just you don’t care that they don’t like you because you’re a pain in the ass to work with? Other reasons people don’t like you might bother you, that it?”
Park stopped playing with his hair.
“I don’t care if they don’t want to work with me, because I know I’m right.”
The captain from narcotics raised both eyebrows.
“Jesus, Haas. No wonder they don’t like you.”
Park brushed something from the leg of his blues.
“May I go now?”
Bartolome pointed at the door.
“Can you leave my office now? Yes.”
Park started to rise.
Bartolome pointed at the window.
“Can you go back out on the streets? No.”
Park, half out of the hard plastic chair, stalled and looked at his superior.
“Sir?”
Bartolome looked at his desk, frowned at the headline on the L.A. Times sports section spread there:
MLB ENDS SEASONPlay Not to Resume Until SLP Pandemic Has Been Contained
He looked at the officer across the desk.
“There will be no more solo acts, Haas. Everyone rides with a partner. Department can’t afford the gas to put enough vehicles on the street. Until we see some more stimulus cash miraculously filling the motor pool with electrics and hybrids, all patrol cars roll with two, three, four officers.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“And no one, absolutely no one, wants to ride with you anymore.”
Park straightened.
“They never have.”
“Uh-huh, but things weren’t this bad before. Things weren’t as dangerous as they’re getting out there. The department wants maximum morale in the face of this shit. Maximum morale means we don’t have to worry about the kind of desertions they got when Katrina hit. Cops losing faith in the system and just disappearing.”