Now the helicopter was hovering right above them, lighting the life-or-death struggle with an aerial spotlight, and Sarah Messinger resumed her battle with cerebral contusion and the law of gravity, managing to get to her knees. And when she looked up, there in a literal spotlight, she was uncertain if this was reality or just another Hollywood production. Then she began vomiting all over her uniform shirt while voices were still screaming at her, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”
But Officer Sarah Messinger just had to ignore them all, and she lay back down, her cheek pressed to the concrete, and in a moment went into the deepest slumber of her young life, one from which she would not awaken for ten days.
In agony, Leon Calloway tried to muscle the gun down, but Rupert Moore kept bending his wrist inexorably, and the muzzle kept moving back, back toward the face of the cop, who felt Rupert Moore’s powerful fingers gouging, prying his own away from the trigger guard. And then there was nothing he could do to stop this powerful force.
During those last seconds, Leon Calloway was certain he would die, and he tried to remember the words he’d learned at catechism: “O my God, I am sorry for having offended…”
One blast, one fireball, one echoing.40 caliber round ringing in their ears, and it stopped the praying, the shouting, the Hollywood fantasy, everything.
It came from the yard next door, also fenced off with wrought iron, which Dana Vaughn and her male partner had entered from three properties away during all the screaming. By climbing the fences, they’d managed to get to the adjoining yard of a stucco triplex, where they had a better view. They were right in the kill zone, with Rupert Moore lying at an angle where one of them could risk a head shot. Maybe.
And that’s what Dana Vaughn had done. While her partner was unholstering his nine, she was already at the fence, aiming her Glock with both hands as the airship’s spotlight bounced and the crisscrossing beams from flashlights danced over the two men, making her dizzy. She took a long breath, held it, and squeezed off the only shot she’d ever fired outside the police pistol range.
The.40 caliber round did not strike the intended target, which was the skull of Rupert Moore, but was close enough, entering the side of his throat, ripping apart the carotid arteries and bathing Leon Calloway first in spatter, then in spurt, when he fell face forward onto the gurgling killer, who began quickly to drown in his own blood.
The first rescue ambulance that roared into the alley whisked Sarah Messinger from the scene, followed by a second. One of the cops waiting outside the now-open security gate worried that Rupert Moore hadn’t bled out yet and said to the paramedics, “Did you happen to hear the Dodgers game? Did they win tonight? Who was pitching?”
The paramedics declined the invitation to discuss Dodgers box scores and instead ran to the side of Rupert Moore, who might not have finished bleeding out but who was very dead nonetheless.
At that point in the story, Dana said to Hollywood Nate, “The watch commander sent me downtown to the BSS shrink, and I had to show up without a weapon and sit around with a bunch of other cops who were supposed to talk about emotional trauma they were supposed to’ve experienced. Nobody had much to say, and when it was my turn, I had nothing to say. So I had to go for a private session, where the shrink said, ‘Tell me about your childhood.’ And ‘Tell me about your relationship with your parents.’ I said to him, ‘A cop was about to get killed. What do my parents have to do with it?’ He said, ‘Well, then, tell me what you felt when you pulled that trigger.’ I said, ‘First of all, I didn’t pull, I squeezed. And I felt the Glock buck in my hand. And I also felt an acrylic nail snap off when my finger got snagged on the wire fence. And I felt pissed off because I paid forty bucks for those acrylics. Those are the things I felt.’ Finally, he seemed to think I was hopeless and gave up.”
“What happened to the young boot?” Nate asked.
“She’s okay,” Dana said. “She was in a coma for ten days, but she’s in physical therapy and doing fine now. She was brand-new to Watch Three when it happened, so I didn’t know her at all and had never spoken to her, not even in the locker room.”
“And that was Calloway in the black-and-white?”
“He’s the main reason I requested to come to Watch Five. I thought that if he didn’t see me at roll call every day, he might stop dogging me.”
“So he’s your guardian angel,” Nate said.
“On Watch Three, whenever he was clear, he’d roll on every call of mine that he figured had the slightest element of danger involved. I’m sure it drove his partners crazy. I know it drove me crazy.”
“And now you have someone to watch over you, just like in the song.”
“Much to my discomfort,” Dana said. “I tried talking to him about it, but he claims he backs up everyone like this. I finally talked confidentially to the watch commander and got to come to Watch Five.”
It was close to midnight when Dana Vaughn and Nate Weiss got a “man with a gun” call to the parking lot near the border with West Hollywood. It involved an elderly resident shooting at feral cats with a pellet gun. The pensioner explained that the cats were keeping him awake with their cries at night.
After giving the appropriate warnings and hearing promises from the old guy’s daughter that it would never happen again, Dana and Nate were walking to their car, and there it was again: 6-A-79 parked a few houses away, lights out, watching.
“Okay, that’s it!” Dana Vaughn said.
While Nate waited beside their shop, she crossed the street and approached the driver’s side, saying, “Leon, can I talk to you for a minute?”
The hulking cop said something to his partner, got out of the black-and-white, and trudged off with Dana Vaughn until they were alone.
She said to him, “Leon, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that you think you’re taking care of me, and I know why, but you gotta stop.”
“I back up everyone on code two and code three calls if I can,” he said, avoiding her eyes.
“Not like this, you don’t,” Dana said. “And it’s embarrassing.”
Leon Calloway, looking in the direction of his shoes, said, “You saved my life, Dana. I was two seconds from having my face blown apart. When I go home at night and peek in at my son sleeping, I think, I get to do this because of Dana Vaughn. When I wake up in the morning after a bad dream-and I have lots of bad dreams now-I think, I get to wake up this morning because of what Dana Vaughn did for me. That’s what I think.”
“Have you talked to our BSS guy?” Dana asked, referring to the Behavioral Science Services shrink who was assigned to the officers of Hollywood Station, a man with a lonely job, because cops, being members of a macho tribe, feared a stigma of being soft and needy.
“That’s for sick people,” the big cop said. “I’m not sick.”
“Leon, this is over, hear me?” Dana said. “You’ve gotta move on with your life. Leave it behind. Let it go. If you do this again, I’m gonna have to complain to the captain.”
Leon Calloway kept his head bowed for several seconds and finally turned and shuffled toward his waiting black-and-white.
“Roger that,” he said without looking back. “But I’ll never forget. And if you need anything, you just call Six-Adam-Seventy-nine. I’ll be all over it.”
When Dana got back to their shop and they resumed patrol, she said to Hollywood Nate, “There was one thing about the BSS shrink that I didn’t tell you about. He said that women aren’t so afraid to admit it when we can use a little help. I told him for the third time that I had no regrets about capping that guy, and that he did lots of bad things in his life, and I had no choice and no remorse. The shrink said, nevertheless, I killed a human being, and that means something to me in a certain part of my brain. He predicted that I might have night sweats and recurring dreams about trying to fire my gun and having the round dribble out and fall on the ground. He said that kind of dream is common to cops, especially after a fatal OIS.” She paused, looked over at Nate,
and said, “Do you ever have dreams like that?”
Nate studied Dana Vaughn as she drove, observing that the wisecracking veteran had morphed. Now her mouth was pulled down at the corners, and her voice had lost some of its timbre, and in a peculiar way she looked younger. He liked being with this Dana more but thought it was time to bring his partner back from that other place.
Hollywood Nate cocked an eyebrow and said to Dana, “My gun never dribbles, partner. It’s always locked and loaded and ready for action.”
That did it. The tension faded, and she grinned mischievously, saying, “Ah, so all the Hollywood Nate gossip I hear from the girls in the locker room is true? Well, when you’re ready for show ’n’ tell, be sure to drop a dime, honey!”
TWO
A red flag up on a mailbox is like a party invitation,” Tristan Hawkins said to the man he called his apprentice, Jerzy Szarpowicz. “Outgoing mail. Come and get it.”
His passenger flipped down the car’s visor when the afternoon sun hit him in the eyes, surprisingly harsh rays given the layer of summertime smog they had to penetrate, smog lying low over the Hollywood Hills.
Jerzy Szarpowicz was the second Jerzy who’d worked for the boss, Jakob Kessler. The boss told Tristan that he liked to hire people of Eastern European ethnicity and also said that he was born and raised in the former East Germany and believed that Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, and those from other former Soviet-bloc countries were more reliable than Americans. He said, however, that he never hired Russians or Armenians, who were too ambitious and dangerous, too given to extortion and violence.
But the only thing Polish about Jerzy Szarpowicz was his name, thanks to a Polish great-grandfather who’d immigrated to America from just outside of Radom, Poland. On one of his meetings with Tristan, Jakob Kessler admitted that he was sorry to learn that he hadn’t hired a real Pole, but he’d decided to give Jerzy a chance anyway.
Until the older Jerzy, whose surname was Krakowski, failed to show up on a scheduled job and was not seen again, having two Jerzys in the group confused some of the other runners. So Krakowski was called Old Jerzy, and Szarpowicz New Jerzy. When Tristan inquired after the fate of Old Jerzy, Jakob Kessler simply said that his employment had been terminated.
New Jerzy seldom spoke to Tristan, communicating with grunts and mumbles in response to the running commentary from the loquacious driver of the battered sixteen-year-old Chevy Caprice. Jerzy knew his partner only as Creole. When the car slowed and stopped at the next street mailbox with the flag up, Jerzy opened the box and scooped all of the outgoing mail through the open car window into his own lap.
Tristan said, “Man, I knew a crew of tweakers that used to steal the blue mailboxes right off the street corners. Took some tools, a pickup truck, and lots of sweat, but they’d do it. Or they’d break into a mail truck and steal keys and mail. I knew one street whore that was blowin’ a mail carrier, and she made her own key from his and sold that to the tweakers.”
“So what happened to the tweakers?” Jerzy muttered.
“What always happens to tweakers? Their teeth fall out and they end up in the joint. They’re doin’ federal time. How about you? Smokin’ much crystal these days?”
The fucking nerve of this dude, interrogating him, Jerzy thought, but he said, “I do pot and booze. And maybe I do a little crack or crystal once in a while.”
“Mr. Kessler will let you go if he thinks you’re a tweaker,” Tristan said. “He don’t like tweakers.”
Jerzy gave a noncommittal grunt while eyeing the multimillion-dollar homes on both sides as the car snaked its way along the residential streets overlooking Hollywood. As he saw it, the problem with stealing mail was that down in the flats, there weren’t street mailboxes. Most down there were attached to the walls of homes or businesses, and mail thieves would have to get out of the car and run to the box, taking a chance of being gang-tackled by some fucking neighborhood heroes or of giving some nosy neighbor enough time to take down their license number. That’s why they were cruising these fancy streets in the Hollywood Hills, but it was risky because the only people who drove crap cars like this one were Mexican gardeners or housekeepers. And since neither of them was a greaser, Jerzy didn’t like it a bit. Any cop who took a close look would jack them up for sure.
Jerzy Szarpowicz had been in Los Angeles for twenty years, having drifted in at the age of nineteen after receiving a bad-conduct discharge from the US Navy for grand theft. He’d thought about returning home to Arkansas but decided that with his dicey discharge and the several runins he’d had with LAPD narcs that got him three trips to L.A. County Jail for selling meth and crack, he wouldn’t even be able to get a shitty construction job like his father and both his brothers. Besides, he liked the climate in L.A.
What he didn’t like were all the goddamn nonwhite foreigners who lived in the city, and what he especially didn’t like was this dude next to him, who said Creole was his “nom de guerre” instead of just his street name. Creole seemed to think he was some kind of master criminal and Jerzy was his lackey. What Jerzy said behind Creole’s back to the few other runners he’d met was that Creole seemed to forget which one of them was the nigger.
Creole, who was nine years younger than Jerzy, wore his hair in dreads to his shoulders, and Jerzy thought his skin was the color of a buckskin mare his uncle used to own. Creole had delicate, almost feminine features and could nearly pass if he shaved his head. Jerzy decided that Creole’s momma was fucking white men and that’s how she ended up with a buckskin boy.
Creole claimed he’d lived for a time in New Orleans, long before Hurricane Katrina, and seemed to think he was some kind of artiste, always going on about some dance or other he’d choreographed back when he worked in a dance studio part-time. That’s when he wasn’t yapping about something he’d learned “back in college.” Jerzy figured him for a closet faggot that never got out of high school. His dance studio was probably a three-room rat hole he shared with streetwalking dragons, and the only dancing he did was when he got a ten-inch cucumber up his ass.
Tristan Hawkins didn’t like Jerzy Szarpowicz any more than Jerzy liked him, but he was under orders to train the surly redneck, and that’s what he was doing. Tristan looked at the pile of mail accumulating at his partner’s feet and said, “Okay, let’s call it a day up here. We gotta get our other job done and head back to the office.”
That’s another thing that made Jerzy sneer. The “office” was what he called the duplex apartment in east Hollywood where meetings were held with the boss in order to trade loot for pay.
“About time,” Jerzy said. “This is way stupid to be cruisin’ up here.” And he waved his hand to indicate the hills of Hollywood with all the multimillion-dollar homes. “Maybe you figure to outrun any cops that might come after this piece-of-shit car of yours?”
Tristan couldn’t contain his own sneer. This biker-ugly cracker calling him stupid? Tristan looked at Jerzy’s belly, hanging in two blubber rolls under his sweaty black T-shirt. Jerzy was tatted-out on both arms, Navy shit and women’s tits. And of course the dumb Polack wore a baseball cap backward on his football-shaped skull, with tufts of rhubarb-red hair sticking out over his wing-nut ears, and with eyebrows like balls of rust clinging to his lumpy forehead under the cap band. And those faded blue eyes of his, Tristan thought they looked too shallow to drown an ant, but the grungy little teeth were the worst, like you’d see on the pancaked carcass of roadkill that spent its life eating grubs, insects, and worms. When they went on certain jobs, Jerzy wore a long-sleeve shirt to cover the ink and turned the bill to the front, but it didn’t help at all, and Tristan hated to be seen with him and always walked several paces ahead.
“Never fear, my Polish apprentice,” Tristan said with a smirk. “I won’t try to get away in this piece-of-shit car. I’ll bail and get away on my two feet. You can try it too. You can waddle up one of them steep streets fast as you can and see how far you get. You’ll drop dead o
f a heart attack and the cops won’t end up with nothin’ but a pile of mail and a car that’s registered to a dude that died two years ago. And three bills of dead goober coolin’ out on the curb. So I don’t see no problem with this here car, wood.”
“You’re gonna woof on me once too often,” Jerzy said. “I ain’t no goober. And I don’t weigh no three bills.”
“Hey, if it don’t apply, let it fly,” Tristan said.
“And I warned you before, I don’t like bein’ called a peckerwood.”
Tristan’s mouth smiled and he said, “I dropped the pecker. You okay with that, wood?”
Jerzy glared with watery blue eyes at the brazen little nigger, the scar across Jerzy’s eyebrow flushing through the frown, and said, “Someday, Mr. Bojangles, you’re gonna dance too far.”
“Somehow I get the idea that us two ain’t never gonna get all ‘Kum Bay Ya,’ ” said Tristan Hawkins.
The next and final job of their long working day was at a popular Gym-and-Swim in the San Fernando Valley. It boasted an enormous workout room with state-of-the-art equipment and an indoor pool, and Jakob Kessler had arranged a membership card for Tristan under a fictitious name. This kind of job was not for Jerzy, who looked too much like street trash to get through the door without someone grabbing weapons of self-defense. Tristan, on the other hand, was clean-shaven and untatted, wore wire-rim glasses even though he didn’t really need them, and always dressed in a clean Polo shirt and Banana Republic jeans and the kind of Nike sneaks that white men wore. He figured that his dreads even enhanced his aura of respectability, making him look more like the sensitive artistic type he felt he was.
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