All that mattered to Lucky was that she saw him for who he was: her T.O.—or Training Officer. For the next five months, he would be her boss, sensei, guru, and closest ally on earth were she to get herself into a shit storm. And working out of the Compton Station, there was guaranteed to be plenty of opportunity for that.
“What do I call you?” asked Shia, her head slightly cocked into a question mark. It was as if she was really asking, did you really forget to introduce yourself? “T.O. Dey?”
“Lucky,” he answered in a simple monotone. “Luck if you want to save on the syllables.”
“Lucky works,” said Shia, taking her cue as he circled around to the driver’s side door.
“You up to speed on The Box?” asked Lucky upon his slide behind the wheel. The Box he referred to was the touchscreen laptop that was standard in every patrol car and mounted on a swivel for both the driver and passenger to operate.
“Top of my class, sir,” answered Shia.
“That’s good,” said Lucky. “Because I’m a moron with machines.”
The comment earned him a sideways look from his trainee.
“Been fourteen years since I was in a patrol unit,” volunteered Lucky. “So in a way we’re both rookies.”
Shia, her whip-smart brain beneath efficient cornrows pulled neatly into a decorative knot at the back of her skull, appeared wisely skeptical at Lucky’s rookie remark. She’d likely heard tales of training officer shenanigans, hazing, and the general head wrecking of trainees. And this Monday night would be day one of a nearly half-year journey to full street-cop status.
“No reply,” grinned Lucky. “Smart girl… But I wasn’t lyin’ about how long since I’d been in a black-and-white. Wouldn’t worry though. Seatbelt?”
“Oh yeah. Right,” said Shia, slinging the belt across her torso until the tongue clicked into the receptacle. However, as Lucky gassed the unit forward toward the steel-reinforced gate leading out of the motor yard, she noticed her T.O. hadn’t made a move to secure his own restraint. Nor would he as he eased the Interceptor onto South Willowbrook. Shia’s eyes briefly landed on the yellow and black warning decaled on the dashboard of each and every Sheriff’s patrol car:
ALL VEHICLE PASSENGERS
MUST WEAR SEATBELT!
“Something wrong?” asked Lucky without even glancing at her. With his right hand he double-clicked the power button on his tactical flashlight, testing the penetrating beam before resting it between his legs. The phallic appearance of the gesture wasn’t lost on Shia.
“No, sir,” braved Shia. “I’m good to go.”
3
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” harped Andre, better known in the neighborhood as Mush Man—or simply Mush. His customized shopping cart, outfitted with polyurethane skateboard wheels and a two-by-four plank for a riding step, had nearly tipped sideways on the tight street corner.
“That was almost a double bad-bad,” announced Mush Man aloud to nobody but his dogs, four big mutts he’d harnessed to the front of the cart with an organized tangle of found rope and plastic crate strapping. Each of the quartet of street mongrels was named for one of his favorite African-American heroes.
“Oprah, baby? We lose us anything?”
The black lab mix with the white whiskers at the front of the pack perked at her name, panting, then licking her lips.
“No snacks till we cash our cargo,” reminded Mush Man. He circled the stuffed cart, examining his haul of aluminum cans and bottles, mostly gathered from a warm weekend of Compton-wide partying. “Shit-fuck-shit-fuck,” he involuntarily ticked. “Gotta slow us down some before we make them turns. You hearin’ me, Rosa? Hank? Yeah, I’m talkin’ at you, mutt-bags. Oprah, she the lead dog. That mean you gotta follow how she does it. Crap, crap, crap.”
The fourth dog, a shoulder-strong pup Mush Man named Thurgood, after the late great Supreme Court justice, sat obediently and wiggled his body for attention.
“Lookit Thurgood there. He not makin’ a fuss of nothin’ and he’s way newer than the two of y’all.”
Mush Man checked his harnesses. “Now we got four blocks up Poinsettia—ass-cracker shit shit!” he ticked again, chin jerking left with each nervy syllable. “Then right turn on Rosecrans. Cross the boulevard and we back north on Bullis Road. Everybody got that?”
The dogs didn’t need to answer. Their faces spoke up with every adoring tone from their savior and master. They lived for the little Mush Man, a skin and bones character who barely topped a defiant five-foot-five. His dirty curls were screwed under a black USC cotton beanie he’d long ago swiped off a chain-link fence.
“Ready, Oprah? Let’s—suck me, suck me, suck me—Damn it all. Mush it, girl!”
Mush Man wished like hell that it wasn’t so damned hot. Just a degree or two cooler and he might have been able to feel a breeze on his flushed cheeks, a perk of the self-made sport he’d coined as Urban Dog Sledding. Of which, Mush Man would inform any inquirer, he was a five-time world champion.
Tough sledding tonight, said Mush Man to himself. Simply and succinct. It was weird to him that the words between his ears were always clean and curse-free. Inside his own brain, there were no awkward, verbal ticks like the ones he suffered when speaking aloud. No bursts of slurs or ugly invectives. But for the mental disorder the local V.A. had diagnosed as Tourette’s Syndrome, Mush Man imagined himself cleaner than Bill Cosby.
Well, the old Bill Cosby.
“Dr. Motherfucker-shit-crack-Huxtable,” Mush Man said aloud.
The Compton sidewalks Mush called sled trails were cracked from age, decades of disrepair, and tree roots inching shallower in search of available water. It wasn’t much of an issue for the dogs. But for Mush Man, the wrong bump could spill him and his valuable payload into a splash of Tecate cans and Magnum 40 bottles. On top of the challenges posed by the irregular surface, it was nearly too dark to see. Poinsettia, like most residential streets in the zip code, was poorly lit due to a lack of working streetlamps and unpaid electric bills.
Stucco-faced homes flanked the street. Domicile boxes, mostly. The houses averaged barely a thousand square feet and most were fit with burglar-proofing over the windows—otherwise known as ghetto bars.
“Whoaaaaaaaaa,” Mush commanded and braked before taking two long looks up and down the tree-lined street. There were no cars in sight. Safe for humans to cross. It was the dogs, though, who made Mush Man so careful. His mutts were trained as well as a vagrant could instruct. It was his own marginal schizophrenia that Mush couldn’t trust. Unmedicated and untreated for eight years, mental illness was Mush Man’s cross to bear. But it was his cross and damn anyone else who wanted to change him.
A backyard dog barked. A big, bully of a beast who’d gotten a whiff of the dog team. All the mutts’ ears swerved in unison. Thurgood barked back. Rosa joined in with a lunar howl.
“Eaaaaaasssy now,” warned Mush Man as he coaxed his team onto the street. The defined and familiar sound of sixteen padded dog feet slapping the pavement was replaced by a cacophony of shallow splashes. A wetness spritzed Mush Man’s face. In what scant light there was, he could make out a low wake left behind his rickety shopping card.
The cart began to drag.
“Shitter-shitter-shit!” Mush Man complained, before adding a new command. “Drive hard, Oprah! Drive HARD!”
The blacktop underneath him was covered by a four-inch deep river of water, silently coating the surface before getting sucked back into the storm drains. But as far as Mush was concerned, he might as well have been fording roaring rapids in a hydroplane pulled by a team of thoroughbreds.
Then he missed the opposite driveway.
Though the four mutts cleared the curb easily, the shopping cart’s front wheels stopped dead. The rear of the cart pitched forward, rotating over the fulcrum and twisting. Mush Man smartly bailed right while the cart spun left and emptied in a spray of recyclables. The clatter of cans and bouncing and shattering bottles shocked the neighborhood’s si
lence and alerted nearly every chained or fenced dog for a square block.
Mush Man crawled onto the sidewalk. If he was bleeding he couldn’t tell. Most of him was soaked to the skin. Feeling little more than bruised—and disappointed for having tossed his haul—he allowed his pups to gather around to lick him back into reality.
“Musta lost half our shit,” Mush Man confessed to his team.
Indeed, it appeared a good portion of his load had tumbled into the street and was rushing away, carried by the blackened river lit by the low hanging moon, nearly full, and magnified in a sky atmospherically tinged with summer hues of amber and yellow. A magical river where there had been none, appearing out of the darkness and flowing like a moving belt of black gelatin.
“Beautiful,” grinned Mush Man.
4
Lucky hadn’t a set plan for his trainee’s first loop in a black-and-white. Other training officers surely had a formula or technique for breaking in their charges. To hell with that, he decided. Working patrol is about dealing with what came. The streets would provide their own baptismal rite. Lucky’s job was to make sure she survived the monsters that were certain to crawl from the night.
Or whatever shit I might get her into.
Despite the time away from commanding a black-and-white, Lucky’s muscle memory was intact. And though Torres had advised they spend their initial shift assisting other units, the moment Lucky had put rubber to the road he was back in what he’d always referred to as street sweeping. His cop job, no matter the stripe or assignment, was to solve a simple axiom: identify and bag anybody within his authority who posed a risk to the public safety.
His trainee would have a different perspective.
Prepared as Shia was to take on whatever came her way, she’d already catalogued a potential red flag with her training officer. It was that phallus of a flashlight Lucky kept propped between his legs. She wondered if it was some kind of sexual test. Would the trainee take offense? Or dish out some kind of probative comment, joking or otherwise? Or maybe her T.O. was just trying to remind her that he was the man in all matter of reference, gender or otherwise—and she was the weaker sex in all and equal measure.
Within a matter of minutes, though, Shia was corrected. She quickly observed that when Lucky spotted a suspicious oncoming vehicle—a potential stolen car or a ride preferred by gang bangers—he’d snatch that flashlight between his legs and use the concentrated beam to cut through the headlight glare and ignite the face of the driver as the unit rolled past. In that one second of clarity, he could read the occupant’s sex, age, or even attitude. The flashlight would then be returned, ready for the next drive-by. Sex or power had nothing to do with it.
Shia wondered if the passing driver being “flashlighted” felt harassed. Yet she marveled at the simplicity and succinctness of Lucky’s trick. Especially when, minutes into their shift, he’d initiated a traffic stop on a beat up Honda with a broken taillight, and illuminated a pair of male Hispanics with shaved heads. With the black-and-white’s overhead lights on full spin, the Honda pulled to the curb. Lucky was out of the unit in a heartbeat, pistol un-skinned from his holster and tucked against his ribcage.
He gave no order for Shia to either stay in the car or assist.
“Shit!” Shia mouthed to herself, unhitching her seatbelt and nearly face-planting upon stumbling out of the car. By the time she’d found her wits and balance, Lucky had already holstered and locked his pistol and was asking both men for their IDs. He ordered his trainee back to the car to work The Box and run the head-shaved duo for wants and warrants. Lucky then cut them loose with only a warning.
The traffic stops continued at a feverish pace until Shia became accustomed to the timing. It didn’t take long for her to lose her zeal for the seatbelt. In their first two hours Lucky and Shia stopped and walked on eight cars without citing a single one.
“Having fun yet?” Those were Lucky’s first non-instructive words since they’d departed the station parking lot. He wheeled the Interceptor up a residential street overgrown on both sides with over-arching shade trees.
“Better ’n Disneyland,” replied Shia.
“Mmmm hmmm,” Lucky nodded, switching on his post-mounted floodlight and sweeping it across the tree trunks on both sides of the street.
“May I?” she began to ask.
“Ask.”
“Your approach on a stopped vehicle,” she continued.
“What about it?”
“Your weapon is out of the holster before you exit the unit.”
“And yours isn’t?” asked Lucky, though clearly he already knew the answer to the question.
“Not long outta the Academy, sir, so forgive the question.”
“I said ask.”
“Isn’t it out of policy?”
“To unskin my gun?”
“Unless you perceive a reasonable threat.”
“Exactly.”
“Yes, sir. I understand—”
“Call me anything but sir.”
“Lucky. Okay,” stammered Shia. And she wasn’t at all used to stumbling over words. “I’ve counted eight traffic stops.”
“And my gun came out every time,” Lucky confirmed.
“Yes. My question concerns practice versus policy. If eight out of eight would be considered perceived threats? I ask this understanding that traffic stops are, by their nature, a potentially dangerous situation. But does say a broken taillight warrant—”
“Each stop is its own situation.”
“Exactly.”
“And what is the situation?” Lucky asked.
“’Kay. First stop. Broken taillight. You light ’em up. I run the tags. No wants or warrants.”
“So in your opinion, there’s no perceived threat?” Lucky pressed.
“Enough to unskin my weapon?” asked Shia.
“Your situation is incomplete.”
“Two young men—teens to twenties—in a Honda?” she guessed. And Shia hated herself for guessing. “Two Hispanic males? But that would be profiling.”
“And we wouldn’t want to do that,” said Lucky, his voice so flat she couldn’t gather if it was sarcasm or something else. “Situation?”
“I’m blank, sir,” said Shia, her voice giving away in a hint of frustration.
“Eight out of eight cars.”
“I don’t see the common thread, sir.”
“Is that an opinion or a surrender to the question?”
“Neither? Both?” Shia crossed her arms.
“Situation?”
“Training officer and trainee on first night patrol in a black-and-white.”
“Are we in West Hollywood?”
“No, sir.”
“Santa Clarita? Calabasas?”
“No, sir.”
“Stop with the sirs.”
“No, Lucky.”
“We’re in fucking Compton?”
“Yes.”
“And that is our situation. Every minute of every day we’re in this radio car in the City of Compton. And based on crime stats alone, could I argue that any approach on any car at any time in Compton is a reasonable threat?”
“I see your point.”
Lucky ended the discussion. Abruptly. It left Shia to stew on her own assumptions, actions, and arguments. If Lucky’s design was to leave his trainee off balance, it had been a successful exercise.
The following two hours were dedicated to assisting other Sheriff’s units on what Lucky dubbed “garden variety” calls. The conversation between training officer and his charge remained sparse yet polite. Lucky learned Shia had spent barely a year working duty at the County Jail, a requirement for every deputy after graduating from the Academy. Depending on new hires and retirement rates, it could take up to eight years for a rookie cop to matriculate out any one of the LA Sheriff’s jails. Yet Shia had escaped the downtown dungeon in less than a year. Lucky’s affirmative action calculator ticked the probabilities. Shia was clearly beautiful, arti
culate, and intellectually adept. Rising stars tended to shoot upward at an exponential rate. Ambition was rewarded, especially for minority women who could solve the political Rubik’s cube.
“Finished high school at sixteen. Undergrad at Cal Poly,” she’d answered when he asked about her schooling. “After growing up in the Valley, had to have me some beach years. Then grad school at UCLA and another pair at CSUN.”
“Just because,” said Lucky.
“Had this notion I wanted to be a shrink. So I took the G.R.E., scored high enough for a two-year ride,” finished Shia, not so much wearing her education on her sleeve, but more so as if she was accustomed to reciting her university curriculum vitae to superior officers.
“Bright girl,” teased Lucky, curious to see if her pupils would swivel left or even roll from the feminine slight. Instead, Shia’s eyes remained fixed and forward, which in Lucky’s opinion was equally demerit-worthy.
During her recitation, Shia hadn’t noticed Lucky buckling his seatbelt. He crawled the black-and-white onto Lime Street, a sleepy nondescript strip.
“When did you psych yourself out of the psych biz?” Lucky semi-joked.
“Funny and apt,” she replied. “I think it might’ve been—”
Lucky stomped on the brakes, turning Shia into a low-speed projectile. Lucky’s right hand reached across to retard her momentum. Then with his left, he twisted and hooked the back of Shia’s neck, pulling her down, practically folding her at the waist.
“SHOTS FIRED!” Lucky barked. “I’M HIT AND NEED MEDICAL. RADIO YOUR LOCATION!”
Shia’s instinct was to wrench herself from Lucky’s grip. She strained upward.
“You wanna get shot?” pretended Lucky. “They’re still shootin’! Radio our twenty!”
“So lemme look,” she leveled.
“Look up and you’re shot,” said Lucky. “Radio! Your! Twenty!”
“The Box,” she argued. “I can see on The Box.”
“You’re betting my life on a machine?”
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 64