Hollywood Station (2006)

by Wambaugh, Joseph - Hollywood Station 01

  Hollywood Nate glanced again at his partner, who looked spring-loaded, and Nate said, "Yeah, I see. You got more tatts than Angelina Jolie, but you ain't her. So we're not driving you anywhere." Then he uttered the Hollywood Station mantra, "Stay real, dude."

  Those eyes. Nate looked again with his flashlight beam under the guy's chin. Where did he find those eyes? They didn't fit his face somehow. They looked like they belonged to somebody else. Or something else.

  Nate looked at Wesley, who didn't know what the hell to do. The man hadn't broken any laws. Wesley didn't know if he should ask the guy for ID or what. He waited for a cue from Nate. This was getting very spooky. An unhinged 5150 mental case for sure. Still, all he'd done was ask for a ride. Wesley remembered his academy instructor saying as long as they weren't a danger to themselves or others, they couldn't be taken to the USC Medical Center, formerly the old county hospital, for a seventy-two-hour hold.

  Nate said to the man, "The only place this car goes is jail. Why don't you walk home and sleep it off, whatever it is gave you those eyes."

  The man said, "War gave me these eyes. War."

  Cautiously, Nate said, "I think we're gonna say good night to you, soldier. Go home. Right now."

  Nate nodded to his partner and backed toward the police car, but when he got in and closed the door and Wesley got in on the driver's side and started the engine, the transmission still in park, the man ran to the car and kicked the right rear door with those studded boots, howling like a wolf.

  "Goddamn!" Nate yelled, keying the mike and yelling, "Six-X-Seventy-two, officers need help!" He gave the location, then threw open his door and jumped out with his baton, which he lost during the first thirty seconds of the fight.

  Wesley jumped from the driver's side, not removing the keys, not even turning off the engine, ran around the car, and leaped onto the back of the madman who had Nate's baton with one hand and Nate in a headlock.

  All those muscles that Hollywood Nate had found in his gym, that had impressed badge bunnies in the Director's Chair saloon, weren't impressing this lunatic one bit. And even when Wesley hurled his 210-pound body onto the guy, he still kept fighting and kicking and trying to bite like a rabid dog.

  Wesley tried the Liquid Jesus on him but the OC can was clogged and it created a pepper-spray mist in front of his own face that almost blinded him. Then he tried again but got more on Hollywood Nate than on the suspect, so he gave up and dropped the canister.

  And pretty soon they had tussled, tumbled, and rolled across the lawn of a sagging two-story residence belonging to Honduran immigrants, into the side yard, and then clear into the backyard, where Hollywood Nate was starting to panic as he felt his strength waning. And he thought he might have to shoot this fucking lunatic after he felt the guy trying to grab his sidearm.

  And while the battle was raging, some of the Eighteenth Street cruisers from another two-story house looked out the window, and a few of them came out to get a better look and root for the guy to kick some LAPD ass. When their pit bulls tried to follow, they leashed them, knowing that lots of other cops would be coming soon.

  The dogs seemed to enjoy the fight even more than the crew did and began snarling and barking, and whenever the leather-clad madman growled and kicked at Wesley Drubb, who was administering LAPD-approved baton strikes, the dogs would bark louder. And then Loco Lennie happened on the scene.

  Loco Lennie was not a member of Eighteenth Street but he was oh, such a wannabe. He was too young, too stupid, and too impulsive even for the cruisers to use him as a low-level drug delivery boy. Loco Lennie wasn't watching the fight with the five members of the crew and their crazed dogs. Loco Lennie couldn't take his eyes off the black-and-white that Wesley Drubb had left in gear, engine running, key in the ignition, in his haste to help Hollywood Nate. And Loco Lennie saw a chance to make a name for himself that would live forever in the minds and hearts of these cruisers who had so far rejected him.

  Loco Lennie ran to the police car, jumped in, and took off, yelling, "Viva Eighteenth Street!"

  Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb didn't even know that their shop had been stolen. By now they had the guy pinned against the single-car garage of the ramshackle house, and young Wesley was learning that all of the leg and arm strikes he'd been taught at the academy weren't worth a shit when battling a powerful guy who was maybe cooked on PCP or just plain psychotic.

  And before the first help came screeching around the corner, siren yelping louder than the homie dogs and even louder than this howling mental case who was trying desperately to bite Hollywood Nate, the cop locked his forearm and biceps in a V around the man's throat. Nate applied all the pressure he could manage to the carotid arteries while Wesley exhausted himself, whacking the guy everywhere from the guy's wingspan on down to his lower legs with little effect.

  Flotsam and Mag, Budgie and B. M. Driscoll, and four officers from Watch 3 all came running to the rescue just as the guy was almost choked out, his brain oxygen starved from the infamous choke hold, the carotid restraint that had killed several people over the decades but had saved the lives of more cops than all the Tasers and beanbag guns and side-handle batons and Liquid Jesus and the rest of the nonlethal weapons in their arsenal put together. A form of nonlethal force that, in this era of DOJ oversight and racial politics and political correctness, was treated exactly the same as an officer-involved shooting. And that would require almost as much investigation and as many reports as if Hollywood Nate had shot the guy in defense of his life with a load of double-aught buckshot.

  When it looked as though the situation was in hand, one of the dogs belonging to the cruisers did what guard dogs do, after he saw the cops piling out of their black-and-whites and running in the direction of his homeboys. He sprang forward, breaking free of the leash, and raced directly at B. M. Driscoll, who had barely set foot on the sidewalk. When B. M. Driscoll saw those slobbering jaws and those bared fangs and malevolent eyes coming at him, he bellowed, drew his nine, and fired twice, missing once but then killing the dog instantly with a head shot.

  The gunfire seemed to stop all action. Hollywood Nate realized that the maniac was choked out, and he let the guy fall to the ground, unconscious. Wesley Drubb looked toward the street for the first time and said, "Where's our shop?"

  Now that the entertainment had ended, the homies and their still-living dogs turned and retreated to their house without complaint about the unlicensed animal they'd lost. And there was lots of talk among them about how Loco Lennie had pelotas made of stainless steel. Maybe they should reconsider Loco Lennie as a cruiser, they agreed, if he didn't get himself dusted by some cop who spotted him in the stolen police car.

  When Flotsam saw the leather-clad lunatic lying on the ground, he said to Mag, "Let's do rock-paper-scissors to see who gets the mouth on CPR."

  But as Mag was running to the car to look for her personal CPR mask, the unconscious man started breathing again on his own. He moaned and tried to get up but was quickly handcuffed by Hollywood Nate, who then collapsed beside him, his face bruised and swollen.

  It was then that Flotsam noticed something clinging to the guy's bald head. He shined his light on it and saw "Weiss." Hollywood Nate's name tag had been pulled off and was sticking to the guy's bare scalp.

  "Get me a Polaroid!" Flotsam yelled.

  By the time the Oracle had arrived and instructed Flotsam and Mag to ride with him and to give their car to Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb, the handcuffed man was alert, and he said to Hollywood Nate, "You can only hurt me in a physical state."

  And Nate, who was still trying to get his own breathing back to normal, rolled his aching shoulders and answered, "That's the only state we live in, you psycho motherfucker."

  The Oracle warned that now they might have two FID teams out there: one on the dog shooting and another because Hollywood Nate had applied the dreaded choke hold. Force Investigation Division would have to be convinced that B. M. Driscoll had acted in fear of gre
at bodily injury and that Hollywood Nate had choked out the madman as a last resort in the immediate defense of a life, namely his own.

  "Not one but two FID roll-outs on the same freaking incident," the Oracle moaned.

  Flotsam said sympathetically, "LAPD can't get enough layers of oversight, Boss. Somebody flipped the pyramid and we're under the pointy tip. We got more layers than a mafia wedding cake."

  When a plain-wrapper detective unit pulled up in front and parked, the Oracle wondered how FID could have gotten there so fast but then saw that it was only the night-watch detective Compassionate Charlie, as usual experiencing morbid curiosity. He was wearing one of his Taiwanese checked sport coats that made people ask if it was flame retardant. Charlie got out, picked some food from his teeth, and surveyed the scene for one of his sage pronouncements.

  Flotsam talked for a few minutes to one of the Eighteenth Street crew who had lingered to be sure the dog was dead, and after the short conversation, the surfer jogged up to the Oracle and said, "Boss, I think we have some extenuating circumstances in this shooting that might help you with those rat bastards from FID."

  "Yeah, what's that?"

  Pointing to the deceased pit bull, Flotsam said, "A homie told me the dog was just ghetto elk when they found him."

  "What?"

  "You know, one of those stray dogs that roam around the 'hood? One of the cruisers found the dog down in Watts, brought him here and let him in their pack. But last month the dog came down with terminal cancer and they were just going to put him down any day now."

  "So?"

  Compassionate Charlie butted into the conversation, saying to the Oracle, "Don't you get it? Haven't you read about dogs that can smell malignant tumors?"

  "Now, what in hell is your point, Charlie?" the Oracle wanted to know. He didn't have time for this goofy surfer or for one of Charlie's on-scene analyses.

  Compassionate Charlie shook his head sadly, sucked his teeth, and said, "You can call this just another touching drama among the many that occur nightly on the streets of Hollywood. The fucking mutt knew he had cancer, so he decided to do honor to his crew and commit suicide-by-cop."

  Young Wesley Drubb felt sort of dazed for the remainder of the watch. His mind kept wandering away from the issues at hand. For instance, when they drove their prisoner to Central Jail at Parker Center, where medical treatment was available for him, all Wesley could think about when they drove past the parking lot was, Why is the entrance gate blocked with a steel barrier, and the exit gate is wide open with no metal spikes? A terrorist could just drive in the exit. Are we stupid, or what? His mind was wandering like that.

  After the prisoner was treated prior to being booked for battery on a police officer, Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb decided to go to Cedars for treatment of contusions and abrasions, and in Nate's case muscle spasms. As to the prisoner, Nate told Wesley it would be up to the DA's office to decide if the arrestee was permanently nuts or only temporarily nuts from PCP or whatever a blood test might reveal. Drug-induced craziness would not be a defense in a criminal case, but life-induced craziness like his war experiences might keep him from a jail sentence and put him in a mental ward for a short vacation.

  Wesley Drubb's mind remained unfocused for more than an hour. He got alarmed by remarks made by a jail employee who had taken his sweet time returning from the long lunch break that their union had recently won for them.

  When their prisoner was strip-searched, the black detention officer studied the darkening welts all over the guy's body and said, "He looks like a zebra."

  Wesley Drubb had never dreamed a man fifty-seven years old could fight like that and was still trying to sort his feelings about the first act of violence he'd ever committed on another human being in his entire life. And sick from the worry and stress of having lost his police car, he tried to explain the prisoner's bruises by saying, "We had no choice."

  The jailor chuckled at the shaken young cop and said, "Boy, lucky for you he's a peckerwood. If this cat was black, you would be facing the wrath of the city council, the United States Department of Justice, and the motherfuckin' ghost of Johnnie Cochran."

  Loco Lennie may or may not have heard the PSR's voice informing all units that 6-X-72's car had been stolen, and he may or may not have opened the text messages sent by other units to 6-X-72 after they'd learned of the incident.

  One message said, "When we see you, you are dead meat."

  Another said, "We will shoot you and burn your body."

  Another, apparently from a K-9 unit, said, "Trooper will eat on your sorry ass for as long as he wants. Before you die."

  In any case, Loco Lennie figured he had made his point to the crew, so he abandoned the police car only ten blocks from his house. He found a rock lying beside a chain-link fence, picked it up, and threw it at the windshield, just as a parting shot. Then Loco Lennie sprinted home in glory.

  When, at the end of their long and awful duty tour, they were painfully walking to their personal cars, Wesley Drubb, who had been silent most of the night, said to Hollywood Nate, "I don't care what they taught me in my years at USC. I don't care how unscientific it is. All I know is that since coming on this Job, I no longer believe in evolution. I believe in Creationism."

  "And why is that?" Nate asked.

  "For instance, that guy tonight? An evolved form of life could not resemble something like that."

  Chapter EIGHT

  AFTER STOPPING AT the Gulag for a happy hour drink, Cosmo Betrossian was driving his eighteen-year-old Cadillac east on Sunset to Korea Town, where he was living temporarily, and thinking of how impressed Dmitri had been with him during their meeting last week. This was where he belonged, with people like Dmitri. Cosmo was forty-three years old, too old to be dealing with people addicted to crystal meth. Too old to be buying the paper they'd stolen from mailboxes or from purses left in cars and then shopping the credit-card information to the other freaks at the public libraries and cybercaf,s, where they sold stolen information and dealt drugs on the Internet.

  Cosmo and Ilya had never committed an armed robbery prior to the jewelry store job. The hand grenade idea came from something he had heard from one of the addicts who had read about it in a San Diego newspaper. The reason the addict had mentioned it to Cosmo at all was that the robbers who did it were Armenians who were supposed to be connected with Russian Mafia. Cosmo had to laugh. He had stolen their idea and their modus operandi, and it had been easy. And it had all come to him because he was an Armenian ,migr,.

  The knowledge about the diamonds' arriving on the premises had come to him by way of another of the addicts he had been dealing with for several months. It was information from an invoice receipt acknowledging delivery, sent by the jewelry store to a Hong Kong supplier. Along with that stolen letter had been another one, also bearing the jewelry store's return address, sent to a customer in San Francisco, telling the customer that an "exciting delivery" of stones had arrived and were just what the customer had in mind when last he'd visited the Los Angeles store. The letters had been stolen from a mailbox by an addict who traded a bag full of credit-card and check information along with the letters in question for four teeners of crystal meth that Cosmo had bought for two hundred fifty dollars and used as trade bait.

  He'd been doing business with tweakers for over a year and only on one occasion did he and Ilya smoke some crystal with them, but neither had liked the high, although it did sexually arouse them. They preferred cocaine and vodka. Cosmo had told the addicts that he and Ilya were more normal, old-fashioned people.

  The thing that really had him excited now was that the robbery had been easy. It gave him a great thrill to make that jeweler weep and piss all over himself. Cosmo had fucked Ilya all night after they had done the robbery. And she too admitted that it had been sexually stimulating. Though she said that she would not participate in any more armed robberies, he thought that he could persuade her.

  Ilya was waiting for him when he go
t back to their apartment. As soon as they sold the diamonds, they would be moving, maybe to a nicer apartment in Little Armenia. Their two-room hovel over a residential garage had been rented to them by a Korean who never asked questions about the men, both white and Asian, who visited Ilya in that apartment for a "massage" and left within an hour or so. Ilya had formerly done a lot of out-call work, until she got arrested in a hotel room on a sting by a handsome vice cop who had flash money and nice clothes and rings on his fingers. Ilya wept when he showed his badge that night. She had been naive enough then to think that the handsome stranger had possibilities beyond a quick blow job.

  Ilya was thirty-six years old and without a lot of years left for this kind of life, which is how she got teamed up with Cosmo. He'd promised to take care of her, promising that she'd never get arrested again and that he'd make enough money that she'd seldom have to sell her ass. But so far, she was making more money with her ass than he was making with the addicts who brought him things to trade for drugs.

  Cosmo saw the outside light on after he'd parked half a block away and walked through the alley to the garage apartment with its termite-eaten stairway leading up. He was puzzled because she did not have a massage scheduled. He had specifically asked her about that. He felt a rush of fear through his bowels because it could mean a warning from her. But no, he could see her moving past the window. If cops were there, she'd be sitting, probably handcuffed. He took the stairs two at a time stealthily and opened the door without announcing his presence.

  "Hi, Cosmo!" Olive Oyl said, with a gap-toothed smile, sitting on the small settee.

  "Evening, Cosmo," Farley said with his usual smirk, sitting next to Olive.

  "Hello to you, Olive. Hello to you, Farley," Cosmo said. "You did not call me. I am not expecting you to come here tonight."

  "They called me," Ilya said, "after you went to Dmitri's."