“This James Bond shit is wearin’ me down, man,” Jerzy grumbled. “How we’re gonna make money from this is — ”
“He’s going to the cyber café,” Tristan said.
“So what?” Jerzy said as Tristan drove toward the strip mall. “I still think that ain’t him in that car.”
Tristan got stopped at the next light, but there was no need for concern. He could see the Honda catch a parking place by the donut shop after a car pulled out. Tristan turned south and parked half a block from the strip mall.
“Let’s go for a walk, wood,” Tristan said.
The strip mall was busy. Lots of customers were at the 7-Eleven, and the donut shop was doing a brisk business. But the summer foot traffic coming and going from the cyber café was amazing even at this hour. Later, the tweakers and baseheads would be out in numbers, working the rented computers and meeting one another for surreptitious exchanges of money, drugs, stolen merchandise, and identity information.
There was a coffee-colored drag queen in an extravagant pink wig, a rhinestone-studded jersey, and second-skin shorts sashaying along the sidewalk beside the cyber café, hoping to catch a trick on his way home from work.
As they walked past the dragon, Jerzy leered and said, “Howdy, sweetness.”
The dragon took one look at Jerzy, tossed her do, and said, “Fuck off.”
When they were standing outside the donut shop, concealed behind an SUV, Tristan said, “Take a good look through the window. Is it him or not?”
Dewey was standing in line behind an agitated tweaker, and Jerzy said, “That dude’s jonesin’ bad. He needs a sugar fix.”
“Forget the tweaker,” Tristan said. “Is it Kessler or not?”
“That guy limps,” Jerzy said. “And he’s shorter than Kessler and younger. And his glasses have thick black frames.”
“Is it him?”
“Yeah, it’s him,” Jerzy said grudgingly.
“I told you,” Tristan said.
“That don’t prove nothin’,” Jerzy said. “The guy’s a thief and also an actor, so what? Half the people in this fuckin’ lot are probably actors or wannabes. And they’re all thieves.”
“We’re gonna hang around a little while and see what role he’s playin’ tonight,” Tristan said.
After Dewey got his coffee, he walked to a small table to wait for the arrival of Clark. Tristan and Jerzy strolled across the parking lot, where Jerzy had a cigarette and checked out the parade of hungry hustlers while Tristan kept an eye on the donut shop. Every time a customer went inside, Tristan would return to the same place behind the SUV to see if the customer was meeting with the man he knew as Jakob Kessler. Twenty minutes passed before Tristan saw a young Latino wearing some kind of employee work shirt and jeans enter the donut shop and head straight to the small table in the back. Tristan took a closer peek and saw the newcomer talking to their man.
“I’m so glad you called, Clark,” Dewey Gleason said, shaking hands with Malcolm Rojas, who sat down at the table. “Would you like a cup of coffee? A donut maybe? They’re pretty good.”
“No, thanks, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said.
“I’d like to talk to you about the business we do, Clark,” Dewey said.
“We have lots of venues to explore in order to find out how you might work best for us.”
“I’m a hard worker,” Malcolm said.
“I’m sure you are, but it’s a matter of where you’d fit in. Let’s go for a ride in my car and chat awhile about a few simple jobs.”
Tristan and Jerzy scurried to the Chevy Caprice when they saw their man and the young guy leave the donut shop and head for the Honda. Tristan was in an all-out sprint to get to the car in time, and Jerzy cursed and puffed all the way, trying to keep up.
There was a moment when Tristan feared that they’d lost their target in the stream of cars on Santa Monica Boulevard, but they managed to catch up, and twenty minutes later they pulled into the shopping center’s lot and parked three rows away.
When Dewey and Malcolm emerged from the Honda, Tristan said to Jerzy, “He’s forgettin’ to limp.”
And then it was almost as though their man could hear them, because Dewey suddenly got into his Bernie Graham limp on his right leg, all the way to the store entrance.
Jerzy said to Tristan, “You wearin’ a wire, or what? He musta heard you.”
“He’s takin’ that kid to school, that’s what he’s up to, wood.”
“What, like credit-card shit?”
“Yeah, what else? Let’s take a look.”
“Listen to me, Creole,” Jerzy said. “I’m hungry and I’m tired and I’d really like to smoke a little glass right now, but I’ll go along because I already come this far. But then you’re gonna tell me what the fuck you got in your head.”
It was a huge supermarket, one of many in the chain where Malcolm’s mother always shopped. They walked to the long queues of shoppers pushing carts toward the dozen checkout counters, and Dewey said, “Clark, are you good with text messaging, like most young people these days?”
“Whadda you mean, Mr. Graham?” Malcolm asked.
“When you were in high school, were you able to sit at your desk and look at your teacher with your cell in your hand and text a girlfriend in another class without getting caught? That kind of thing?”
Malcolm Rojas hesitated to answer that one, the truth being that there was no girlfriend in that Boyle Heights barrio school, where he’d never belonged. Nor any boys whom he could call his friends either. Nobody ever had the back of the half-Honduran loner whom the other kids called Hondoo when they spat on his shoes.
Malcolm simply said, “I can handle a cell phone, if that’s what you mean.”
“Watch, Clark,” Dewey said, gesturing toward a woman who’d reached the checkout and was loading her groceries onto the merchandise belt as the cashier rang them up. “She’s the one I’d want to work on.”
The woman was fortyish, well dressed, the only one in line wearing pearls, along with a tailored blazer, matching skirt, and sensible heels.
“Watch her purse,” Dewey said.
“I’m not into snatching purses,” Malcolm said.
“Nobody wants you to. Watch and learn,” Dewey said.
While her purchases were being rung up, the woman opened her purse and removed her checkbook, placing it on the counter. She opened it as though to write a check, then, changing her mind, removed her wallet, took a credit card out, and ran it through the card reader. Then she put the card down beside the wallet and checkbook, not looking at them while she chatted with the bag boy and the cashier.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn here,” Malcolm said, his frustration growing, wondering if he’d made a mistake trying to hook up with this man.
“See the guy standing behind her?” Dewey said. “Imagine if you were standing there shoulder surfing.”
“What?”
“That’s what it’s called. The Colombians are really good at it. They can look at a checkbook and memorize an account number in a few seconds.”
“I could never do anything like that, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said. “I don’t have that kind of brain. I have to be honest with you.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Dewey said. “There’s a better way. You could just stand there with your camera phone and pretend you’re text messaging. But you’d really be taking pictures of the credit-card number, the checkbook, even the driver’s license sometimes. A good shoulder surfer could’ve gotten all three photos from that woman, later pushed the send button, and downloaded the JPEG photos on his computer. Everything you could want is lying there in plain view. You don’t have to snatch anything from anyone in this business, Clark. People will give their money to you. Why? Because you’re smarter than they are.”
“Is that what you want me to do, Mr. Graham? Shoulder surfing?”
“I’m just showing you one of the many possibilities that’re open to you,” Dewey said. “You’l
l start out doing more simple jobs.”
Dewey and Malcolm returned to the car and headed for Mel’s Drive-In on the Sunset Strip, where Malcolm Rojas was treated to a meal and thirty minutes of schooling that Dewey conducted like a game.
When Malcolm was halfway finished, Dewey tested him by suddenly saying, “What’re the first numbers of an American Express card, Clark?”
With his mouth full, Malcolm said, “Three-seven.”
“Visa?”
“Four.”
MasterCard?”
Malcolm swallowed his food and said, “Five.”
“Diners?”
“ Six-oh-one.”
“That’s my boy!” Dewey said, toasting Malcolm with his soda. “You are a very fast learner. You should see some of the employees I’ve had to teach. My secretary, Ethel, would be impressed by you.”
Sometime later, Dewey Gleason was to remember that impromptu comment to Malcolm Rojas, and it would then seem incredibly prescient.
TWELVE
Sitting outside in the Chevy Caprice and watching the parking lot of Mel’s Drive-In were Tristan Hawkins and Jerzy Szarpowicz, who was extremely pissed off at his partner.
“I’m outta here, Creole,” Jerzy said. “You can follow Kessler and his little pal home and peep at them while they put on leather underwear with the easy-access zipper in front. But me, I’m outta here.”
“This ain’t what’s goin’ on here, wood,” Tristan said. “This ain’t no sissy pickup. Kessler’s workin’ this kid like he worked me.”
“Okay, so what’s that got to do with us gettin’ rich behind it?”
“It’s gonna take a little time to explain.”
“Gimme the Reader’s Digest version. I ain’t got all night.”
“Okay, so let’s look at this Kessler, or whatever his name is. A big crime boss? Shit, he never made me, not one time, and I been followin’ him all over town. He’s nothin’ but another little cyber café identity thief with a gimmick. Except he’s in business with somebody smarter than him, somebody who’s makin’ those bogus driver’s licenses and credit cards and writin’ phony paper for the purchases we hauled to the storage yard. Where there was lotsa other goods squirreled away, you might remember. Kessler’s jist a recruiter of runners like us, and a money collector. We gotta find out who his boss is and then we make our move.”
“What move?”
“We’re gonna become the junior partners.”
“Take me home, man. Now.”
“No, wait, dawg! We know where Kessler keeps the TVs and other shit he steals. We saw how he does that part of his game, and we know the address of the guy who’s gonna get the bill for all that stuff we delivered. We know Kessler dresses up in disguises. We lean on him and let him know what we know, he’ll faint tits-up like the bitch he is and either let us in or else buy us out. Think about it.”
“We can’t blackmail him. We been on jobs with him!”
“I’m jist sayin’, we could tell him we’ll rat him out to the cops about that house in Los Feliz, and where we took the stuff to his storage locker and all the other shit. He can’t take a chance that we’re runnin’ a game on him, because he don’t know nothin’ about us, and we know lots about him. Especially we know where he lives.”
“Maybe his boss ain’t a bitch like him,” Jerzy said. “What if he’s partnered up with some bad motherfucker that don’t want no junior partners?”
“That’s why we need a little bit of patience. Maybe we do another job or two with him and we find out more, like who does he work for and where is that partner. Shit, it might be that whoever runs him works the business right outta his crib on Franklin. Then we got him. He won’t be able to bounce on out in the middle of the night. We gotta know a little more about how it all works.”
Tristan stopped talking then and looked at Jerzy. He figured the Polack must be burning up every little brain cell he had. The silence went on for nearly a minute and then Jerzy said, “Okay, let’s get him to give us a job tomorrow. I ain’t gonna play along forever, man. And one other thing you gotta know about me right now.”
“What’s that?”
“I ain’t into violence unless…” He gave an ambiguous shrug.
“Unless what?”
“There’s real money to be had.”
Tristan held out his palm, and Jerzy slapped it without enthusiasm, saying, “Man, this could be a big fuckin’ mistake.”
Late in the evening, Officer Harris Triplett, the young patrol officer who’d recently completed his probation, was on temporary loan to the vice unit as a UC operator. He was posing as a trick and not having a good time so far. Harris wore his sandy hair so short and looked so youthful that the vice sergeant thought the young cop could easily pass for a sailor or Marine on liberty. The plan was to borrow a few cops to use as operators to get as many hookers as possible off the streets ASAP, because one of the local TV stations had been regularly featuring a spokesperson for the Restore Hollywood project who claimed that the LAPD was ignoring vice problems on the boulevards.
It was an informal three-day operation to quiet the critics, so Harris Triplett was not wearing a wire under his Aloha shirt, as a female UC operator would if she were posing as a hooker on the boulevard. Under the front seat of the Mercury Sable that he was driving were a rover and his service weapon.
The first drag queen he encountered on the Santa Monica track, aka the “fruit loop,” was a mixed-race addict. The dragon, wearing a short gold dress and platforms, looked at him through the window and said, “So whatchoo lookin’ for, dope or pussy?”
“What’ve you got?” Harris Triplett said, figuring if a good drug bust came his way, he shouldn’t say no. He started sniffling and acting twitchy, his version of an addict, but he was far too hale and hearty to pull it off.
“You look like you could use some black,” the dragon said with a knowing smile.
“Yeah,” he said, figuring that “black” was tar heroin.
“Well, I ain’t got no black,” the dragon said. “Maybe I can get some liquid, though. I know somebody with a vial. That’s sixty doses. You got that kind of sugar?”
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” Harris Triplett said, figuring that “liquid” was LSD or PCP.
The dragon let out a raspy chuckle and said, “You switched up on me to the other dope way too fast, baby. That means you’re a cop. But you’re a cute little puppy. Come back when you’re a big dog.”
The dragon laughed again and walked away.
The next streetwalker he encountered was a tall white transsexual, well known to the vice unit who’d arrested her in the past. And now that she was post-op, she could not be booked into a male facility. The tranny stopped on the sidewalk, holding back her shoulder-length natural-red hair and bent forward to look inside the car.
“This is a pool car,” she said, “and you’re a cop.”
“What?” Harris Triplett said. “Me, a cop? I’m a Marine from Twenty-nine Palms.”
“Kiss me if you’re not a cop,” the tranny said.
Harris Triplett hesitated and said, “I don’t even kiss my wife.”
“You only got one key in the ignition, sweetie,” the tranny said before turning to walk away. “You should always use a key ring with at least a house key on it. I wish you weren’t a cop. You’re cute as a button.”
Harris Triplett was starting to think that he was cute enough to clean up the streets of Hollywood single-handed if he just knew his ass from lamb chops. He put the vice unit’s Mercury key on his own key ring and hoped he could manage to pop at least one hooker before his three-night loan to the vice unit ended.
He got on the rover to ask for permission from his cover team to try the Sunset Boulevard track, and permission was granted. And that did the trick. The first streetwalker he spotted on Sunset Boulevard was neither a dragon nor a tranny. She had real double-X chromosomes, and she appeared to be very young. And as it turned out, she was only fifteen years old. She was full-
figured, bulging out of her little black dress, and wore her white-blonde hair in a bob, with blood-red gloss on her plump lips that made her look like a child playing dress-up.
She was only slightly more experienced than Harris Triplett at this game, and she smiled brightly when she saw his dewy grin, smooth, chiseled features, and short chestnut hair.
“Hi!” she said.
“Hi,” Harris Triplett said. “What’s up tonight?”
“Whatcha looking for?”
“Whatcha got?” he said.
“Do you have, like, a hundred bucks to spend?” she said.
“On what?” he said.
“I don’t wanna, like, make you mad or anything,” she said, “but I been told that I shouldn’t negotiate until we get where we’re going.”
“So where we going?”
“My apartment. It’s just up the street. I’ll walk and you can follow me.”
“How do I know you aren’t taking me someplace where I’ll get mugged?”
“There’s a whole lot going on up in my apartment house, but it ain’t got nothing to do with mugging,” she said.
Harris Triplett didn’t have enough for his violation yet, since she hadn’t defined negotiate by offering sex for money, so he said, “Okay, start walking. I’ll be right behind you.”
When the girl had walked half a block north on the dark and quiet residential street, Harris picked up the rover and talked to his cover team, making the vice cops in charge of his security wish he’d been wired.
After some intense conversation between two teams of vice cops, the senior officer came on the radio and said, “Okay, Harris, we think we know where she’s taking you. Go ahead and walk to the door with her, but try to get the violation outside. And take your gun. If she spots it and you lose the arrest, that’s fine, it’s only a misdemeanor. The second you get your violation, scratch your head. We’ll be on the street, watching you through glasses.”
Whispering into the radio, Harris Triplett said, “What if she won’t talk unless I go inside?”
There was more uncertain conversation among the vice cops, and then the voice came back on and said, “Step inside if you have to, but for no more than one minute. If you don’t get the offer that quick, open the door and walk away. If something goes wrong in there, yell loud, or throw something through the window if you have to. Sixty seconds after you close that door, you better come out, or we’re coming in like the cavalry. Understand?”
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