“First of all, we don’t use tanning parlors,” Flotsam said, his eyes narrowing.
“And we don’t highlight neither,” Jetsam said, equally resentful. He touched his lightly gelled hair and said, “These streaks’re what the sun does to hard-core kahunas that surf year-round.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest anything untoward,” the sergeant apologized.
Flotsam grunted and turned to Jetsam, saying, “Untoward?” Then, to their host: “If we work for you, Sarge, we might need a translator.”
Sergeant Hawthorne, who was thinking exactly the same thing about them, said, “You can ask any of the night-watch vice officers about me. I’m a forgiving supervisor, and I’m easy to get along with. Maybe I don’t look or sound the part, but I’m a pretty good street copper as well.”
Doubting that, Flotsam told his partner, “Dude, it could be nectar-neat to catch an occasional break from these bluesuits and, like, go all Mission Impossible for a night or two.”
“Easy for you to say, bro,” Jetsam said. “You ain’t the one that’d have to get your mind into a ghoulish game of show-and-tell where some psycho pervert wants to hump your stump.”
Sergeant Hawthorne said, “It’s not like that. Cozzo is basically a grifter with a rich foreign client who has a very strange Achilles’ heel, that’s all.”
“If he ever decides to go the distance himself, the geek won’t even have a heel,” Jetsam reminded them with a perceptible sneer.
“We could try it once and see how it goes,” the vice sergeant said. Then: “Whoops!” as another dollop of ketchup obliterated the A in UCLA.
Jetsam shook his head. “Sarge, your sweatshirt now just says UC, as in ‘undercover,’ with two blobs of red beside it. So you just managed to out yourself. Any denizens of the dark out there can read that you’re UC, and you did it with your own ketchup.”
Sergeant Hawthorne managed an embarrassed smile and began wiping ketchup off the sweatshirt and off his face, until scraps of shredded napkin clung to his chin.
Jetsam looked at the vice sergeant and said, “What’s the thread count on these things anyways? You got pieces of it hanging off your face.”
Flotsam said, “Sarge, if we let you dial us in, you gotta learn how to eat a fucking hamburger. You’re making us, like, way nervous here.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
An excerpt from this book has appeared in the February, 1983 issue of PLAYBOY MAGAZINE
copyright © 1983 by Joseph Wambaugh
cover design by Jason Gabbert
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