Hollywood Station (2006)

by Wambaugh, Joseph - Hollywood Station 01

  Cosmo shot her a look. Stupid woman. She mentioned Dmitri in front of these addicts. He turned to Farley and said, "What is it you bring for me?"

  "A business proposition," Farley said, still smirking.

  Puzzled, Cosmo looked at Ilya. Her blond hair was pulled straight back in a tight bun, which she would never do if she was expecting guests, even addict customers like these. And her makeup was haphazardly applied, and there were dark lines under her eyes. He guessed that she had been taking one of her long afternoon naps when the freaks called, and hadn't really pulled herself together before their arrival. Ilya showed Cosmo a very worried face.

  "What business?" Cosmo asked.

  "Sort of a partnership," Farley said.

  "I do not understand."

  "We figure that the last stuff we brought you was worth more than the few teeners you gave us. A whole lot more."

  "It is very hard thing to sell credit-card information and the banking paper today. Everyone who do crystal can make many deals today. Everybody know about-how they call it?"

  "Identity theft," Farley said.

  "Yes," Cosmo said. "So I do not make enough money to pay me back for crystal I give to you, Farley."

  "Four lousy teeners," Farley reminded him. "That's one-quarter of an ounce. In your country maybe seven grams, right? What'd you pay, sixty bucks a teener?"

  Cosmo was getting angry and said, "We do a deal. It is done. Too late for to complain, Farley. It is done. You go someplace else next time, you don't like us."

  Cosmo's tone disturbed Olive, who said, "Oh, we like you, Cosmo, and we like Ilya too! Don't we, Farley?"

  "Shut up, Olive," Farley said. "I'm a smart man, Cosmo. A very smart man."

  Olive was about to verbally agree, but Farley elbowed her into silence. "Cosmo, I read every fucking thing that I bring to people I deal with. I read those letters from a certain jewelry store. I thought maybe you could do something with it. Like maybe sell the information to some experienced burglar who might tunnel in through the roof when the store was closed and steal the stones. It never occurred to me that somebody might go in with guns and take over the place like Bonnie and Clyde. See, I'm not a violent man and I didn't think you were."

  Now Ilya looked like she was about ready to cry, and Cosmo glowered at her. "You talk shit, Farley," he said.

  "I watch lots of TV, Cosmo. Smoking glass does that to you. Maybe I don't read the papers much anymore but I watch lots of TV. That hand grenade trick made all the local news shows the night you did it. Shortly after I'd brought the jewelry store's letters to you."

  All Cosmo could say was "You talk shit, Farley."

  "The description they gave on the news was you." Then he looked at Ilya, saying, "And you, Ilya. I been thinking this over. I can hardly think of anything else."

  Cosmo was now glancing wildly from Farley to Ilya and back again. "I do not like this talk," he said.

  "There's one more letter you should have," Farley said. "But I didn't bring it with me. I left it with a friend." Farley felt a pang of fear shoot through him when he added, "If I don't get home safe and sound tonight, he's going to deliver the letter to the Hollywood police station."

  Olive looked quizzically at Farley and said, "Me too, Farley. Safe and sound, right?"

  "Shut up, Olive," Farley said, smelling his own perspiration now, thinking how the TV news bunny said the guy was waving around a pistol on the night of the robbery.

  After a long silence, Cosmo said, "You want from me what?"

  "Oh, about fifteen thousand," Farley said.

  Cosmo jumped to his feet and yelled, "You crazy! You crazy man!"

  "Don't touch me!" Farley cried. "Don't touch me! I gotta arrive home safe and sound or you're toast!"

  Olive put her arms around Farley to calm him down and stop his shaking. Cosmo sat back down, sighed, ran his fingers through his heavy black hair, and said, "I give you ten. I give you ten thousands sometime next month. Money will come in the month of June. I have nothing today. Nothing."

  Farley figured he'd better settle for the ten, and he was trembling when he and Olive stood. He took her hand. Violence was not his gig. A man like this looking at him with murder in his face? All this was new to Farley Ramsdale.

  Farley said, "Okay, but don't try to sneak outta town. I got somebody watching the house twenty-four-seven."

  Then, before Cosmo could reply and frighten him again, Farley and Olive scuttled down the staircase, Farley yelping out loud when he almost stepped on a half-eaten rat by the bottom step. A black feral cat hissed at him.

  By the time they reached the doughnut shop on Santa Monica where the tweakers hung out, Farley had recovered somewhat. In fact, he was feeling downright macho thinking about the ten large that would be theirs next month.

  "I hope you don't think that goat eater had me scared," he said to Olive, even though he'd been so shaky he'd had to pull over and let her take the wheel.

  "Of course not, Farley," Olive said. "You were very brave."

  "There's nothing to be scared of," he said. "Shit, they used a phony hand grenade, didn't they? I'll bet their gun was phony, too. What'd that news reader with the tits call it? A `semiautomatic pistol'? I'll bet it was a fucking toy gun dressed up to look bad."

  "It's hard to believe Cosmo and Ilya would shoot anybody," Olive agreed.

  "Trouble is," Farley reminded her, "we ain't got enough glass to last till next month. We gotta get to the cybercaf, and do some business. Like, right away."

  "Right away, Farley." She wished they had some money for a good meal. Farley was looking more like a ghost than he ever had.

  The cybercaf, they chose was in a strip mall. It was a large two-story commercial building with at least a hundred computers going day and night. There was lots of business that could be done on the Internet. A tweaker could buy drugs from an on-line bulletin board or maybe do a little whoring on the Internet-male or female, take your choice. Money could be wired from one account to another. Or a tweaker could just sit there phishing for PIN numbers and credit-card information. The computers were cheap and could be rented by the hour. Just like the dragons working the corner by the cybercaf,.

  One of the dragons, a six-foot-tall black queen in full drag with a blond wig, short red sheath, three-inch yellow spikes, red plastic bracelets, and yellow ear loops, spotted Farley and Olive and approached them, saying, "You holding any crystal tonight?" The dragon had scored from Farley on a few occasions when he was dealing crack.

  "No, I need some," Farley said.

  The dragon was about to return to the corner to hustle tricks in passing cars, when a very tall teenage crackhead, also African American, with his baseball cap on sideways, wearing a numbered jersey and baggy knee-length jams and high-top black sneakers, looking goofy enough to be shooting hoops for a living in the NBA, approached the dragon and said, "Hey, Momma, where can I get me some? I needs it bad, know what I'm sayin'?"

  "Uh-huh," the dragon said. "I know what you're sayin', doodle-bug."

  "Well, whatchoo gonna do about it, Momma? I got somethin' to trade, know what I'm sayin'?"

  "And what is that?"

  He took several rocks wrapped in plastic from his pocket and said, "This'll take you on a trip to paradise, know what I'm sayin'?"

  Pointing to the computer center, the dragon said, "Go in there and sell it, then. Get some United States legal tender and come back and we'll talk."

  "I come back and show you tender, I make you do more than talk. I make you scream, know what I'm sayin'?"

  "Uh-huh," said the dragon, and when the kid went strutting into the cybercaf,, the dragon said to Farley and Olive, "Don't see too many black folk around Hollywood these days 'cept for jive-ass cracked-out niggers like that, come up here from south L. A. to hustle and steal. Jist havin' them around is bad for my bidness. Fuck things up for everyone." Then the dragon grinned and added, "Know what I'm sayin'?"

  "If we get any crystal tonight, we'll share with you," Oli
ve said to the drag queen. "I remember when you shared with us."

  Farley shot Olive his shut-the-fuck-up look, and the dragon caught it. "That's okay, honey, your old man needs tweak a lot more than I do, from the looks of him."

  Before Olive, which Farley referred to as B. O., he used to do lots of business here. He'd steal a car stereo and sell it at the cybercaf, on a rented computer. The money was wired on eBay to the Western Union office, where Farley would pick it up and cash it. Then he was back to the cybercaf, to buy his glass. It was hard for him to imagine life away from this place.

  They entered and Farley began looking for someone he could work. He saw a dude he'd been arrested with in a drug sweep a few years back, sitting at one of the computers by the door. Farley stood behind the guy for a minute to see if the guy had it going.

  The e-mail message said, "Need tickets to Tina Turner concert. And want to sit in 8th row. Have teenager with me."

  "That's a fucking cop," Farley said to the tweaker, who jumped and spun around on his chair. "Dude, you are doing e-mail with a fucking cop." He couldn't remember the tweaker's name.

  "Yo, Farley," the tweaker said. "What makes you think?"

  "Every fucking cop on the planet knows Tina Turner is code for tweak. And eighth row? Dude, think about it. What else could it be but an eight ball, right? And teenager means teener, very fucking obviously. So you're either dealing with the stupidest tweaker in cyberspace or a fucking narc. He's using dopey code that nobody uses anymore 'cause anybody can figure it out."

  "Maybe you're right," the tweaker said. "Thanks, man."

  "So if I just did you a favor, how about doing me one?"

  "I got no ice to share and no cash to loan, Farley. Catch you later."

  "Ungrateful, simpleminded motherfucker," Farley said to Olive when he rejoined her. "When we got busted down at Pablo's Tacos two years ago and taken to Hollywood Station in handcuffs, we had to drop our pants and bend over and spread. And crystal went flying out his ass. He told the cop it didn't belong to him. Said he was just holding it for some parolee who pulled a knife and made him put the ice in his ass when the cops surrounded the taco joint."

  "Did you see it happen?" Olive asked.

  "What?"

  "The parolee with the knife, making him put the crystal up there! God, I'll bet your friend was scared!"

  Farley Ramsdale was speechless at times like this and thought that she'd be better off dead. Except that she was so stupendously stupid she actually seemed to enjoy living. Maybe that's the way to cope with life, Farley thought. Get as brain-cooked as Olive and just enjoy the ride as long as it lasts.

  When he looked at her, she smiled at him, showing her gums, and a tiny bubble popped out from the left gap in her grille when she said, "I think there's a little bit of pot left at home. And we could boost you some candy and a bottle of vodka from the liquor store on Melrose. The old Persian man that works nights is almost blind, they say."

  "Persian is a fucking cat, Olive," Farley said. "He's an Iranian. They're everywhere, like cockroaches. This is Iran-geles, California, for chrissake!"

  "We'll get by, Farley. You should eat something. And you should not get discouraged, and try to always remember that tomorrow's another day."

  "Jesus Christ," Farley said, staring at her. "Gone with the Fucking Wind!"

  "What, Farley?"

  Farley, who, like most tweakers, stayed up for days watching movie after movie on the tube, said, "You're what woulda happened to Scarlett O'Hara in later life if she'd smoked a chuck wagon load of Maui ice. She'd have turned into you! `Tomorrow is another fucking day'!"

  Olive didn't know what in the world he was raving about. He needed to go to bed whether he could sleep or not. It had been a terrible day for him. "Come on, Farley," she said. "Let's go home and I'll make you a delicious toasted cheese sandwich. With mayonnaise on it!"

  Nobody on the beach or in the whole state of California was madder than Jetsam that early morning of June 1. That's what he said to Flotsam when he met him at Malibu and unloaded his log from the Bronco and stopped to stare at the ocean. Both were wearing black wet suits.

  The sky was a glare of gold rising up, and smudges of gray scudded low over the horizon. Looking away, Jetsam stared at the smog lying low in wispy veils, and at the bruised, glowering clouds that were curdling down onto all the fucking places where people lived in despair. Jetsam turned and looked out to sea, to the hopeful horizon glistening like an endless ribbon of silver, and for a long moment he didn't speak.

  "What's wrong, dude?" Flotsam asked.

  "I got stung Thursday night, bro!" Jetsam said.

  "Stung?"

  "A fucking IA sting! If you'da been on duty, you'da got stung with me. I was working with B. M. Driscoll. Poor fucker might as well set fire to homies and shoot dogs. He's always in trouble."

  "What happened?"

  "You know that IA sting they did down in Southeast-when was it, last year? Year before? The one where they put the gun in the fucking phone booth?"

  "I sorta remember the gist of it," Flotsam said while Jetsam waxed the old ten-foot board as he talked.

  "On that one, the fucking incompetents working the sting detail at IA leave a gun by a phone booth with one of their undercover guys standing nearby. They put out some kinda phony call to get a patrol unit there. Deal is, a patrol unit they're interested in is gonna come by, see the dude, do an FI, and see the gun there in plain view. The patrol unit's gonna ask what he knows about the gun and the dude's gonna say, `Who, me?' like the brothers always say down there. Then IA, who's watching from ambush, hope the coppers are gonna arrest the brother and claim he was carrying the gun. And if they're real lucky, maybe slap the brother around after he mouths off to them. And if they hit the jackpot, call him a nigger, which of course will get them a death row sentence and a lethal injection. And then maybe they can have a party for a job well done. But not that time. It goes sideways."

  "What happened? A shooting, right?"

  "Some homies happen to be cruising by before the black-and-white shows up. These cruisers see a strange brother there who ain't one of their crew and they pop a cap at him. And then the IA cover team comes to the rescue and they fire back but don't really engage. I thought cops're supposed to engage hostile fire, but this is the rat squad. They see life different from regular coppers. So the homies get away, and what does IA do? They grab their sting gun and they get the hell out, and they don't hang around for an FID investigation. So they break every fucking rule the rest of us have to play by during these times. Their excuse was they had to protect the identity of their undercover officer."

  "That is bullshit, dude," Flotsam said. "When you apply seven-pound pull on a six-pound trigger, you stay and talk to the Man and make the reports. Undercover is over when the muzzle flashes."

  "Except for those rat bastards."

  "So how did they sting you Thursday night?"

  "That's what makes me so mad. They used the same fucking gag, the unimaginative assholes! I thought at first they must be after B. M. Driscoll. He told me he was involved in a shaky shooting before he transferred to Hollywood and was worried about it. One of those deals where he capped a Mexican illegal who drove his car straight at him when the guy was trying to escape after a long car pursuit. The next day, he gets a phone call at the station from an irate citizen who says, `You gotta come mow my lawn now. You shot my gardener.'"

  Flotsam said, "Yeah, our chief says we're supposed to just jump out of the way of cars coming at us, maybe wave a cape like a matador. Then start chasing again, long as we don't endanger anybody but ourselves. Anything but shooting a thief who might be a minor. Or an ethnic. I wish somebody'd make a chart about which ethnics are unshootable nowadays and have Governor Arnold give them a sticker for their license plates. So we'd know."

  Jetsam said, "Retreat goes against a copper's personality traits. Maybe they want us to just go back to the drive-and-wave policy, like we did under Lord Voldemort."


  "Maybe they should just put trigger locks on all our guns."

  "Anyways, B. M. Driscoll's convinced himself he's targeted by IA," Jetsam said. "Checks his house for listening devices every couple weeks. But you know him, he gets a hay fever cough and thinks it's cancer."

  "So how about Thursday night's sting? Are you saying they dropped a gun by a phone booth?"

  "Purse," Jetsam said.

  Jetsam said it was a phone booth on Hollywood Boulevard of course, where lots of tourists might do something dumb like that. A phone booth by the subway station. He remembered how it had annoyed him when it popped on their computer screen. No big deal. An unnamed person had called in to say that there was a purse left in the phone booth. And the call was assigned to 6-X-32, on a night when B. M. Driscoll was Flotsam's stand-in.

  B. M. Driscoll, who was riding shotgun, said, "Shit. Found property to book. What a drag. Oh well, it'll give me a chance to get my inhaler outta my locker. I'm getting wheezy."

  "You ain't wheezy," Jetsam said. The guy's imagined health issues were wearing Jetsam down to the ground. "My ex was wheezy. Got an asthma attack every time I put a move on her in bed. That was about once every deployment period. Little did I know that her and the plumber down the street were laying pipe twice a week."

  Jetsam parked in a red zone by the intersection of Hollywood and Highland while B. M. Driscoll said, "I don't like steroid inhalers but there's nothing more fundamental than breathing."

  When Jetsam was getting out of the car, B. M. Driscoll said, "Be sure to lock it."

  He wasn't worried about their shotgun rack getting pried open or their car getting hot-wired. He was worried about his two uniforms they'd just picked up from the cleaners, which were hanging over the backseat.

  After locking the car, Jetsam took his baton and ambled toward the phone booth, letting B. M. Driscoll lag behind and finish his medical monologue on the treatment of asthma with steroid inhalers at a distance where Jetsam could hardly hear him.

  It was the kind of early summer evening when the layer of smog burnished the glow from the setting sun and threw a golden light over the Los Angeles basin, and somehow over Hollywood in particular. That light said to people: There are wondrous possibilities here.