"I can look very bad very easily," Budgie said.
"Won't that mess up our play?" Mag asked. "If we get made by some hooker?"
"No," he said. "They'll just catch a ride ten blocks farther east and stay away from you. They know if you're cop decoys, we're close by watching out for you."
Lane said, "Most tricks're sick scum, but this early in the evening you might catch some ordinary businessmen driving west from the office buildings downtown. They know that better-class whores work the Sunset track and once in a while they look for a quickie."
Budgie said, "I haven't been in Hollywood all that long, but I've been in on some drug busts as transporting officer for trannies and dragons. One of them might recognize me."
"The trannies mostly work Santa Monica Boulevard," Simmons explained. "They do good business with all those parolees-at-large who like that track because they got a taste for dick and ass when they were in the joint. They're disease-ridden. They avoid needles for fear of AIDS, then smoke ice and take it up the toboggan run. Does that make sense? Meth is an erotic drug. Don't even shake hands with trannies or dragons without wearing gloves."
Knowing it was Budgie's first show, Lane said to her, "If you should see an Asian hooker on the Sunset track you can figure she might be a transsexual. Sometimes Asian trannies make good money up here because they can fool the straight tricks. Goose bumps from shaving don't show as much on them. They might arrive just before the bars close, when the tricks're too drunk to see straight. But all trannies and dragons should be considered violent felons in dresses. They like to steal a trick's car when they can, and most tricks don't like to admit how the car got stolen, so the tranny or dragon never ends up on the stolen report as a suspect."
Simmons said, "Just avoid all the other hookers if possible-straights, dragons, and trannies."
"Other hookers?" said Budgie.
He said, "Sorry, you're starting to look so convincing I got confused."
When the women were dropped off half a block from the boulevard, Simmons said, "If a black trick hits on you, go ahead and talk but look for a too-cool manner and a cool ride. He may be one of the pimps from a Wilshire track checking out the competition, or trying to muscle in. He may talk shit and try to pimp you out and we would love that to happen, but keep both feet on the sidewalk. You never load up. Never get in a car. And remember, sometimes there's interference on the wire and we can't always make out exactly what the tricks're saying to you, so we take our cues from what you say. The wires have been known to fail completely. If you ever get in trouble, the code word is `slick.' Use it in a sentence and we'll all come running. If necessary yell it out. Remember: `slick.'"
After all that, they were both back to being nervous when they got out. Each spoke in a normal voice into their bras and then heard the cover unit say to Simmons and Lane on their radio band, "Got them loud and clear."
The older vice cop seemed clearly more safety conscious, and he said, "Don't take this wrong. I hope I'm not being sexist, but I always tell new operators, don't take foolish chances for a misdemeanor violation like this. You're competent cops but you're still women."
"Hear me roar," Budgie said without conviction.
The younger vice cop said, "Showtime!"
Both women had some twilight action within the first ten minutes. Budgie traded looks with a blue-collar white guy in a GMC pickup. He circled the block only once, then pulled off Sunset and parked. She walked over to his car, mentally rehearsing the lines she might use to avoid an accusation of entrapment. She needn't have worried.
When she bent down and looked at him through the passenger window, he said, "I don't have time for anything but a very sweet head job. I don't want to go to a motel. If you're willing to get in and do it in the alley behind the next corner, I'll pay forty bucks. If you're not, see you later."
It was so fast and so easy that Budgie was stunned. There was no parrying back and forth, no wordplay to see if she might be a cop. Nothing. She didn't quite know how to respond other than to say, "Okay, stop a block down Sunset by the parking lot and I'll come to you."
And that was all she had to do, other than signal to her security team by scratching her knee that the deal was done. Within a minute a black-and-white chase unit from Watch 3 squealed in behind the guy, lit him up with their light bar and a horn toot, and in ten minutes it was over. The trick was taken back to the mobile command post, a big RV parked two blocks from the action taking place on Sunset Boulevard.
At the CP were benches for the tricks, some folding party tables for the arrest reports, and a computerized gadget to digitally fingerprint and photograph the shell-shocked trick, after which he might be released. If he failed the attitude test or if there were other factors such as serious priors or drug possession, he would be taken to Hollywood Station for booking.
If it turned out to be a field release, the trick would find his car outside the command post, having been driven there by one of the uniformed cops, but the trick wouldn't be driving it home. The cars were usually impounded, the city attorney's office believing that impound is a big deterrent to prostitution.
Budgie was taken in a vice car to the command post, where she completed a short arrest report after telling the guy who wired her that she didn't need to hear the tape of her conversation with the trick. He was sitting there glaring at her.
He said, "Thanks a lot." And mouthed the word "cunt."
Budgie said to a vice cop, "Maybe it's just a hormonal funk I'm in, but I'm starting to hate his guts."
The vice cop said to Budgie, "He's the kind of shit kicker that spent his happiest days line dancing and blowing up mailboxes." Then to the glowering trick he said, "This is Hollywood, dude. Let's do this cinema v,rit,."
The trick scowled and said, "What the fuck's that?"
The vice cop said, "You just keep mouthing off, and pretend we're not in your face with a hidden video camera for a scene maybe you can later interpret for momma and the kiddies."
Mag's first came a few minutes after Budgie's. He was a white guy driving a Lexus, and from the looks of him, one of those downtown businessmen on his way home to the west side. He was more cautious than Budgie's trick and circled the block twice. But Mag was a trick magnet. He pulled around the corner after his second pass and parked.
The vice cops had said that they expected long tall Budgie to get some suspicious questions about being a police decoy, but Mag was so small, so exotic, and so sexy that she should reassure anybody. And indeed, the businessman was not interested in her bona fides.
He said, "You look like a very clean girl. Are you?"
"Yes, I am," she said, tempted to try a Japanese accent but changing her mind. "Very clean."
"I think you're quite beautiful," he said. Then he looked around warily and said, "But I have to know you're clean and safe."
"I'm a very clean girl," Mag said.
"I have a family," he said. "Three children. I don't want to bring any diseases into my home."
To calm him down, Mag said, "No, of course not. Where do you live?"
"Bel-Air," he said. Then he added, "I've never done anything like this before."
"No, of course not," she said. Then came the games.
"How much do you charge?"
"What're you looking for?"
"That depends on how much you charge."
"That depends on what you're looking for."
"You're truly lovely," he said. "Your legs are so shapely yet strong."
"Thank you, sir," she said, figuring that matching his good manners was the way to go.
"You should always wear shorts."
"I often do."
"You seem intelligent. So obliging. I'll bet you know how to cater to a man."
"Yes, sir," she said, thinking, Jesus, does he want a geisha or what?
"I'm old enough to be your father," he said. "Does that trouble you?"
"Not at all."
"Excite you?"
"Well . . .
maybe."
And with that, he unzipped his fly and withdrew his erect penis and began masturbating as he cried out, "You're so young and lovely!"
For the benefit of the cover team and because of her genuine surprise, Mag yelled into her bra, "Holy shit! You're spanking the monkey! Get outta here!"
For a minute she forgot to scratch her knee.
Within two minutes the uniformed chase team lit up and stopped the Lexus, and when her vice cop security team pulled up, Mag said, "Damn, he just jizzed all over his seventy-five-thousand-dollar car!"
After arriving back at the mobile CP, where the guy was booked for 647a of the penal code, lewd conduct in a public place, Mag was feeling a little bit sorry for the sick bastard.
Until after his digital photographing and fingerprinting, when he turned to Mag and said, "The truth is, you have fat thighs. And I'll just bet you have father issues."
"Oh, so you're a psychologist," Mag said. "From looking at my thighs you have me all figured out. So long, Daddy dearest."
Then she turned to leave and noticed a handsome young vice cop named Turner looking at her. She blushed and involuntarily glanced at her thighs.
"They're gorgeous like the rest of you," Turner said. "Father issues or not."
Mag Takara hooked three tricks in two hours, and Budgie Polk got two. When Budgie's third trick, a lowlife in a battered Pontiac, offered her crystal for pussy, Budgie popped him for drug possession.
"How's that? Felony prostitution," she said, grinning at Simmons when she arrived back at the CP.
"You're doing great, Budgie," Simmons said. "Have fun, but stay alert. There's lotsa real weird people out here."
Mag met one of them ten minutes later. He was a jug-eared guy in his early forties. He drove a late-model Audi and wore clothes that Mag recognized as coming from Banana. He was the kind of guy she'd probably have danced with if he'd asked her at one of the nightclubs on the Strip that she and her girlfriends sometimes visited.
He'd been hanging back when other tricks flitted around her, making nervous small talk for a moment but then driving away in fear. Fear of cops, or fear of robbery, or fear of disease-there was plenty of fear out there mingling with the lust and sometimes enhancing it. There were plenty of neuroses.
When the guy in the Audi took his turn and talked to Mag, broaching the subject of sex for money very tentatively, he became the second guy of the evening to get so excited so fast that he unzipped his pants and exposed himself.
Mag said into her bra, "Oh my! You're masturbating! How exciting!"
"It's you!" he said. "It's you! I'd pay you for a blow job, but I'm tapped out. And I can't get old Jonesy stiff, goddamnit!"
And while the chase team was speeding toward the corner, the headlights from a large van lit up the interior of the Audi. Mag looked more closely, and it was true: Jonesy was not stiff. But it was bright crimson!
"Good god!" Mag said. "Are you bleeding down there?"
He stopped and looked at her. Then he released his flaccid member and said, "Oh, that. It's just lipstick from the other three whores that sucked it tonight. That's where all my money went."
A bit later, Budgie violated an order from Simmons by not keeping her feet on the pavement. She couldn't believe it when a big three-axle box truck hauling calves pulled around the corner and parked in the only place he could, in the first alley north.
She couldn't resist this one, approaching the cab of the truck, even though it was very dark in the alley. She climbed up on the step and listened nervously when the scar-faced trucker in a wife beater and cowboy hat said, "Fifty bucks. Here. Now. Climb on up and suck me off, honey."
This one was so bizarre that when the second cover team showed up, one of the vice cops said to the guy, "Wonder what your boss would say if we booked you into jail and impounded your vehicle."
Budgie said to the cowboy, "Are they going to be slaughtered?"
The cowboy was so pissed off he didn't answer at first but then said, "I suppose you don't eat veal? I suppose you shoot your goddamn lobsters before you put them in boiling water? Gimme a break, lady."
This one presented so many logistical problems that after a field release the cowboy was allowed to continue on his way with his cargo.
When Budgie was finished at the CP and taken back to her corner on Sunset Boulevard, she tried not to remember the doomed calves bawling. It was the first time that evening that she was truly sad.
Budgie wasn't standing on Sunset Boulevard for three minutes when a Hyundai with Arkansas plates pulled up with two teenagers inside. She was still feeling depressed about the calves and about the pathetically reckless husbands and fathers she and Mag had hooked tonight, and she wondered what diseases all these losers would bring home to their wives. Maybe the fatal one. Maybe the Big A.
She could see right away what she was dealing with here: a pair of Marines. Both had tan lines from the middle of their foreheads down, and skinned whitewalls with an inch or two of hair on top. Both were wearing cheap T-shirts with glittery names of rock groups across the front, shirts that they'd probably just bought from a souvenir shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Both had dopey nervous smiles on their dopey young faces, and after being inexplicably sad, Budgie was now inexplicably mad.
The passenger said to her, "Hey, good-lookin'!"
Budgie walked to the car and said, "If you say, `Whatchya got cookin'?' I might have to shoot you."
The word "shoot" changed the dynamic at once. The kid said, "I hope you're not carrying a gun or something?"
"Why?" Budgie said. "Can't a girl protect herself out here?"
The kid tried to recover some of his bravado and said, "Know where we could get some action?"
"Action," Budgie said. "And what do you mean by that?"
The passenger glanced at the driver, who was even more nervous, and said, "Well, we'd like to party. Know what I mean?"
"Yeah," Budgie said. "I know what you mean."
"If it's not too expensive," he said.
"And what do you mean by that?" Budgie said.
"We can pay seventy bucks," the kid said. "But you have to do both of us, okay?"
"Where're you stationed?" Budgie asked, figuring a chase or cover team was getting ready.
"Whadda you mean?" the passenger said.
"I was born at night, but not last night." They're no more than eighteen, she thought.
"Camp Pendleton," the kid said, losing his grin.
"When're you leaving for Iraq?"
The kid was really confused now, and he looked at the driver and back to Budgie and trying to retrieve some of the machismo said, "In three weeks. Why, are you going to give us a free one out of patriotism?"
"No, you dumb little jarhead asshole," Budgie said. "I'm gonna give you a pass so you can go to Iraq and get your dumb little ass blown up. I'm a police officer and there's a team of vice cops one minute away, and if you're still here when they arrive you'll have some explaining to do to your CO. Now, get the fuck outta Hollywood and don't ever come back!"
"Yes, ma'am!" the kid said. "Thank you, ma'am!"
And they were gone before her cover team drove slowly past the corner, and Budgie saw that cute vice cop named Turner shake his head at her, then shrug his shoulders as if to say, It's okay to throw one back, but don't make a habit of it.
The vice cops knew that their operators would need a break about now, so they suggested code 7 at a nearby Burger King, but Mag and Budgie asked to be dropped at a Japanese restaurant farther west on Sunset. They figured that the male officers wouldn't eat raw fish, and they'd had enough of that gender for a while. Thirty minutes to rest their feet and talk about their night's work would be a blessing. The vice cops dropped them and said they'd pick them up for one more hour and then call it a night.
Turner said, all the time looking at Mag, "Another hour and it's a wrap."
When Budgie and Mag got inside the restaurant, Budgie said, "Jesus, in this division all the coppers use movie exp
ressions."
Mag ordered a plate of mixed sashimi, and Budgie a less courageous sushi plate, trying to observe protocol and not blatantly scrape the wooden chopsticks together, as so many round-eyes did at sushi joints. She lowered them to her lap and did it, dislodging a few splinters from the cheap disposable utensils.
Budgie said, "Do I ever regret borrowing these stilettos."
"My canines are barking too," Mag said, looking down.
"How many you hooked so far?"
"Three," she said.
"Hey, I pulled ahead by one," Budgie said. "And I threw a pair back. Jarheads from Camp Pendleton. I was the righteous bitch from hell they'll always remember."
"I haven't found any worth throwing back," Mag said. "Lowest kind of scum is what I've met. Maybe I shouldn't have worn the S&M wardrobe."
"You still into competitive shooting?" Budgie asked. "I read about you in the Blue Line when I worked Central."
"Kinda losing interest," Mag said. "Guys don't like to shoot with me. Afraid I'll beat them. I even stopped wearing the distinguished expert badge on my uniform."
"Know what you mean," Budgie said. "If we girls even talk about guns, we're gay, right?"
"U. S. Customs had a recent shoot that I was asked to compete in. Until I saw it was called `Ladies' Pistol Shoot.' Can you believe that? When I got asked, I said, `Oh, goody. With high tea and cotillion?' The guy from Customs didn't get it."
Budgie said, "I had three guys tonight ask me if I was a cop. I was tempted to say, `Would you like to ask that again with your dick in my mouth?'"
Both laughed, and Mag said, "I got a feeling Simmons would call that entrapment. Did you get a good look at Turner? Mr. Eye Candy?"
"I got a good look at him getting a good look at you," Budgie said.
"Maybe he's into bondage bitches," Mag said.
"I got a feeling he'd be interested if you wore overalls and combat boots."
Hollywood Station (2006) Page 16