A little before ten, Casey brought Robin to the parking lot in back of the McDonald’s on Highland. Everyone was under a light by a cinderblock wall, and when Rancher saw Robin he yelled, “Nice fucking job!”
Robin smiled. “I guess.”
“No guess—you did it—you’re the Fountain dragon slayer!”
“Dragon slayer,” Casey said to Robin, “man, that’s exactly what you did!”
She looked at Jumper. “Know what I’m thinking, Jump?”
Jumper turned to Robin. “It’s perfect if you want it—Dragon Slayer.”
“Or Dragon,” Casey said.
“Dragon.” Robin rolled the word slowly off her tongue. And then again, “Dragon … Dragon.” She smiled.
From then on, nobody ever called Robin anything but Dragon.
Casey looked at the clock on the Asahi beer billboard down on Wilshire: eleven on the nose. The back door of the McDonald’s swung open, right on time. The manager, a young, fat guy with slicked back hair, and a black tie that lay on a white shirt stretched out over his paunch, came out holding a big, open cardboard box. The kids watched him as he quickly walked across the lot. He threw a fast look at them, and then tossed the box into the dumpster. And knowing twenty pairs of eyes were on him, he hurried back. As soon as he slipped inside, the kids raced across the lot and pulled out the box. In it was the night’s unsold food—Big Macs, quarter-pounders, fries, fruit pies. Everything.
It was a great haul. Some nights there wasn’t enough for everyone, and fights would break out. Casey had seen more than one nose broken or tooth knocked out over the shit in that box. But tonight, there was plenty for everybody.
Casey and Dragon sat with Jumper and Tulip on a small grass hill at the side of the McDonalds. The grass was wet and cold, but Casey didn’t mind—the food was what counted. Just below them, Rancher and Mary were sharing a Big Mac. Jumper finished his burger, crumpled the paper into ball and said, “Mickey D’s—it’s the greatest.”
“What do you think?” Casey said to Dragon.
“It’s great … but …” Dragon said.
“But?”
“It sucks …” June Bug said rolling a stick between her palms, “when you first get here you say—hey, I’m on my own—awesome! All the freedom in the world, and no parent ruling over you … but then, you see the shit—live the shit—and you say, I should have a parent looking out for me. I got—we all got—the greatest friends a person could ever want, but still, sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge I’m even here.”
After she escaped from Dennis, Casey told herself she was tough, really tough, and no matter what shit was thrown at her, she would make it. But what was she doing? Eating out of a dumpster on Highland. She missed Paul. Missed his hand slowly running through her hair, sleeping beside him and feeling his breath on the back of her neck. Every time she thought of him, she ached more.
19
Jimmy
It was getting harder and harder for Jimmy to get out of bed in the morning. He’d open his eyes, and the first four words into his head were I hate my life. As the morning went on—a cup of coffee, reading about a Dodgers win in the Times, a joke from Charles—and the feeling would gradually go away. Until tomorrow morning. But the thought of working with Erin these nights actually made him want to go in.
He looked over at her, the lights of the police radio casting a faint orange glow up at her as they slipped down Sunset. They rode in silence. Erin pulled out a Marlboro Light, then put it back in the pack. A minute later she pulled it out again, cracked her window and lit it.
“Everything okay?” Jimmy said.
She nodded. But not like she meant it.
“You know Rick?” Erin said.
“Sure.”
“He’s a great guy. No one would argue with that, right?”
In truth, Jimmy didn’t know anyone who would.
“When we had the baby, Rick never wanted any pictures of him around. But you saw the pictures. He was a beautiful boy. After he died, I took two of my favorite pictures to get framed. They did a great job, and last night I hung them in our bedroom. I sat on the bed and looked up at them and thought about what a great boy he was. When Rick came home from his shift, as soon as he saw the pictures he took them down. He said that every picture reminded him of the pain he went through. But for me, it was something sweet to remember him by.”
“Sounds rough.”
“Yeah …”
The car slipped past the Chateau where an enormous line of kids stood behind a velvet rope waiting to get into Bar Marmont. Over the radio, the dispatcher was putting out a call on a domestic violence in progress. A cruiser on Fountain took it and Jimmy could hear the distant siren.
“Taking you away from all that,” Jimmy said. “Hate me for it?”
“A weekend without seeing some woman with her face pummeled? It’s a vacation.”
“What percent of guys out here think it’s their God-given right to smack around their wives or girlfriends?”
“Some nights it feels like a hundred.” Erin said.
“I never got it,” Jimmy said. “I grew up in a rough neighborhood. Guys who worked hard. Putting up iron, working the docks, that sort of thing. And they beat the shit out of their wives like it was nothing. My old man—no saint, believe me—he always said ‘never, ever, hit a woman’. He was obsessed with it. ‘Never hit a woman’. He said it to me and my brother constantly. His father used to pound on his mother whenever he got drunk, which was basically all the time. He never did it once to my mother, and he wanted to make damn sure we didn’t either.”
“Worked.”
“It did. And on the job—he was a New York City cop—woe to the wife-beater who was collared by my old man. It’s not like I got a million good memories of him—but he trained us right on that.”
“It makes me crazy. Guys going off on girls half their size. My Lamaze helps.”
“Lamaze?”
“It’s the breathing training they give you before you give birth.”
“Oh yeah, my wife did it.”
“Most people do. They teach you how to breathe deeply, stay in control. Be real focused and stay calm. Before I went on leave, we got an abuse call at this motorcycle guy’s place on Stanley. He’d taken his girlfriend and her sister, drugged both of them up, and tied them to the bed with clothesline. They try to get away and he beats them up bad, and then rapes them. But, while he’s sleeping the sister somehow got out of the rope and made it to a neighbor’s. I get there, and she was hard to look at. She only twenty, twenty-one. I’m sure she was real pretty, and now she had three or four teeth knocked out, and her whole face is covered in blood. I call for the paramedics, do her report, and now me and Cooper gotta go into the house and take this guy. We get in there and he’s acting like the girls somehow deserved it, and who the hell are we to get involved in his personal business. I tell him put his arms on the wall while Coop’s gonna frisk and cuff him. Of course that pisses him off even more. Now he’s screaming, and I’m trying to talk him down. I can’t stand him. He’s an animal, there’s no other way to describe him. And that’s where the Lamaze kicks in … I tell myself, stay calm … all I have to do is just get him to the car without him going crazy. He’s screaming away—cunt cop, you fucking assholes, that sort of thing, and Coop’s starting to give it back. And you know how Coop is. He’s an inch away from going off on him, and then it’s really gonna be a mess. But I just breathe deep and calm, talk soft and nice to everybody. Just get him calm enough for Coop to cuff him … breathe deep … talk nice … Coop cuffs him. I get him to the car. It works out fine.”
“How about later?” Jimmy said, “With her face beaten like that, I’ll bet you thought about it.”
Jimmy knew he was entering a place most cops don’t want to go. His buddies would say what they saw on the streets didn’t bother them at all. Show up at a horrendous car accident, and a cop will be eating a sandwich while the paramedics are removing the body.
There was a huge effort put into acting like whatever it was, they were cops and nothing was going to get to them. But it does. He knew it as well as anyone.
“I thought about her a lot,” Erin said. “All the way home. When I got into bed. I had dreams about her. It went on for weeks. I couldn’t shake her. You know what I mean?”
Here it was, his call—play the usual cop game, and say, part of being a cop is not letting the stuff get to you, you just gotta push it aside and move on. Or he could tell her the truth.
“Yeah,” he said, “I do. My first year on the force, in Brooklyn, I get a call where a little kid’s been raped. Six years old, by her cousin who was nineteen. He confessed to me right there. She was this adorable little girl and he’s as big an asshole who ever walked. And while I’m making the arrest, the asshole’s mother, who was also the little girl’s aunt, tells me the perp had gonorrhea. So he’s not only raped her, but he’s given her that too. I was twenty-three, and I don’t think anything had ever bothered me like that. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I get home, my wife’s asleep. I wake her up. I didn’t mean to wake her up, but I kinda had to. I tell her about the little girl and what happened to her, and she looks at me like I’m from Mars—she doesn’t want to hear about it. And she’s not wrong—I mean, who wants to hear about a child rape at two-thirty in the morning. Or anytime for that matter. After that, all the things I would see in the streets, I would never tell her.”
“What would you do?”
“One guess.”
“Choir practice,” Erin said.
“Yeah. Every night.” Jimmy thought about what a waste it was—night in and night out, finishing up the shift and going to the bar with the guys from the precinct. But he needed it. Who else can you talk to about the shit you see? No one else but a cop knows what’s out there. And even at choir practice, the amount of time they talked about real stuff was small. Most of the time it was other things—the union contract, the Giants, bitching about the brass, fishing at the shore. But knocking down the beers chased away the street for a couple of hours and made it easier going home. For a few years it worked, but then he got sick of it—too many nights drinking, too many hangovers. What good did it do? Rolling Rock against the street?—the street always wins.
“I saw that little girl for a long time,” Jimmy said. “I still see her.”
Erin looked over at him. He wanted to say more, but all he could feel were his ghosts. The faces, the dead bodies, the screaming—the things he saw would never leave him.
Jimmy hit the brakes. Ahead of them, on La Cienega was a flatbed truck ringed by orange cones which closed off the right-hand lane; the bottleneck reduced the other lane to a crawl. On the truck’s bed, a crane lifted a huge yellow board that twirled slowly in the wind, high above the street. Three hardhats stood on an enormous steel frame and positioned the board next to four other pieces, already in place. It completed the billboard, which read, Yes On 120—We Need It.
“What exactly do we need?” Jimmy asked as they crept past the crane truck.
“I think it’s the prop’ for legalizing card tables and slots in West Hollywood.”
“That’s gonna make a buddy of mine very happy.”
“Big gambler?” Erin asked.
“Trying to stop. Now he’ll be able to lose in the comfort of his very own neighborhood.”
“But we need it?”
“Hey. What do I know? Maybe we do need it. It’s not like we’re in paradise now.”
A couple of blocks later, they were driving through the heart of Boys Town. Definitely not paradise. The hustlers were out in full. So were the johns. Near La Brea, a Land Rover in front of them pulled to the curb and dropped off Gina, the baby transvestite, who was wearing a fluorescent green miniskirt. She skipped over to a pack of other baby trannys hanging out in the Carl’s Jr. lot.
Erin watched the Land Rover’s driver, a young guy, pull back into traffic. “Where you think that guy told his family he was going?” she said.
In that moment, Jimmy realized something else was different about Erin—to ninety-nine percent of the cops he knew, a guy in a Rover dropping off a thirteen-year-old boy-playing-girl at one a.m. wouldn’t be a guy—he’d be an asshole. Stone asshole at that. Most cops divided the world between assholes and everyone else. When you first come on the force, the people you think are okay are the public, other cops, your family, friends, and really, just about everyone; only the perps were the assholes. As time goes on, you start crossing people off the okay category and put them into the asshole category. It doesn’t take long before the public slides onto the asshole side, and then your captain goes in there too, and soon the only people who aren’t assholes are you, your partner, and other street cops. Then, even other cops become assholes, and the only ones who aren’t, are you and your partner. And here was Erin, looking at this guy in the Rover, who was clearly as big an asshole as anyone in Hollywood, and to her, he was still just a guy. He had to admire that.
Jimmy glanced back at Gina through the rear-view mirror. She was lighting a smoke and getting back in position for her next date. When he looked forward again, he saw a scuffle in the 7-11 parking lot. A couple of kids and an older asshole were going at it—no guns or knives that he could see—but he knew the way these things went.
“You mind?”
“We should,” Erin said.
20
Casey
Casey, Dragon, and the triplets were throwing a small blue, plastic Gap bag back and forth, around the parked cars in the 7-11 lot as a john was trying like crazy to grab it away. He was probably fifty, but he was strong and tough, and had a full head of thick black hair. He was pissed, and charged after them for his bag.
“Give it back,” the john yelled, “or you’re gonna regret it!”
“Regret this, man!” Tracy said laughing and throwing it to Timmy.
“I’d give him what he wants, if I were you,” Casey half-yelled, half-razzed.
Timmy tossed the bag to Casey, and she passed it to Dragon, who threw it to Terry, who gave it back to her. But the next second, the john grabbed Timmy and pushed him hard against the wall. He pulled Timmy’s arm behind him and twisted it up high behind his back. Timmy yelled in pain.
“Okay. Game’s over. Lemme have it,” the john said, glaring at Casey, who was the last kid with the bag. Timmy screamed again. The john looked like he was ready to break his arm and enjoy it.
“Here!” Casey said.
She extended her arm with the bag—when a car’s headlights blasted the john and Timmy, showing them bright against the cinderblock wall. The car doors jerked open. Casey didn’t know what was going on.
“Shit,” the john said.
It took Casey a second to catch up.
Oh, God, she thought. Oh, fuck.
The cop driving was out in a flash with a girl cop right behind him. Casey felt her heart pounding against her skin. This was it. Jumper was right—everybody fucks up. She couldn’t run. Not now, anyway. Could she fake her way through? No way. She had to run—it was the only thing to do. But the cop moved past her, towards the john. Like she wasn’t there.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“You’re a cop, right?” Timmy said.
“It’s Jimmy. We know him,” Tracy said.
“You busted us?” Timmy said.
“I bust everybody sooner or later.”
Casey wondered if this was a cop trick, before they got to the real business. She watched the cop carefully. He was a good-looking guy. Not too old. He was calm and not doing the attitude stuff. The girl cop—Casey was sure she had seen her before, in a uniform, cruising the Boulevard. When she was in the uniform, with her hair tucked under her hat, she was like every other woman cop: tough, like they had to prove something. But now, she looked different. She had long blonde hair pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip. She was wearing jeans, cool-looking black boots, and a white button-down shirt. She was pretty, and without the uniform,
she seemed friendly, like someone’s older sister.
Jimmy turned to Casey. The pounding in her heart came back. Stronger than before.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Casey.” She could barely get it out.
“And you?”
“Dragon.”
“Nice company girls.”
Casey stole a glance at Dragon. She looked as if she was shaking inside. If they called her stepfather back in Boston, it was game over.
The girl cop walked up to the john. He was looking away.
“Who’s the date?” she asked Timmy.
“Jerkoff took a bunch of pictures, and then wanted to pay us like it was only head.”
“Too bad.”
She turned to Casey. Casey thought, play it right—they go. Play it right—they go …
“I think I’ve talked with you before. Right? I’m Erin.”
“I don’t remember,” Casey said. “Sorry.”
“What do you have that everyone wants so badly?”
Casey passed Erin the bag. She took out a small, yellow, disposable camera.
“This yours?” she asked the john.
He was silent. But Timmy jumped in. “Fucking right it’s his.”
“They say it’s yours. They lying?”
The john still wasn’t talking. Erin shook her head and passed the camera to Jimmy.
“What’s the big deal?” Jimmy said. “Just a camera. Anything on here you wouldn’t wanna show at a family reunion?”
The john stayed silent.
“Hey, asshole,” Jimmy said, “you were real talky before we got here. You know how old these boys are? … Tell him Timmy, or are you Tracy?”
“You got it right the first time,” Timmy said.
“Tell him.”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen. Hey. Look at me, john.”
He looked away.
“I said look at me! … Shy? Weren’t shy before we came. Which car’s yours?”
“The Suburban,” Tracy said with a grin.
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