“See?” Jetsam said. “There’s all, like, bad juju going on here. I’m not down with this program.”
“Don’t go aggro, dude,” Flotsam said to his partner. “He ain’t asking for a kidney.”
“And we’re not looking for a misdemeanor prostitution arrest on an individual masseuse,” Sergeant Hawthorne said quickly, pleased to have Flotsam as an ally. “This is an intelligence-gathering mission, nothing more. We’re hoping that any masseuse who meets you will gossip about you to the collector, about an amputee client who tipped well and talked about having had his foot surgically removed in Tijuana by Dr. Maurice. We hope the collector might get curious enough about you to wonder if you could be a brother-in-fantasy to the big Russian. You being a somebody who had actually gone the distance with an amputation of a healthy foot. And if so, his very important Russian client might be burning with curiosity to meet you and hear all about how your Tijuana amputation went down. And if that works and you get inside, who knows what information and evidence you might be able to gather from these people?”
“That’s a lotta ifs you got going here,” Jetsam said.
“What’s Cozzo look like?” Flotsam asked.
Sergeant Hawthorne produced a six-year-old mug shot, put it on the table, and said, “White male, thirty-two, five-six, a hundred forty soaking wet, black hair cut in a mullet, brown eyes, teeth like a ferret, and flamboyant in the clothes he wears.”
The surfer cops barely glanced at the photo, and Jetsam said dismissively, “Everybody in fucking Hollywood’s flamboyant, so what’s that mean? Half the male population uses Johnny Depp guy-liner, for chrissake. And who the hell but the lamest of low-life skateboarders that wear their baseball caps sideways would have a mullet haircut in the twenty-first century?”
“How do you know this ain’t just get-out-of-jail-free bullshit from your Vegas snitch?” Flotsam said, piling on.
“We’ve been able to corroborate some of it,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. Then he added, “I’ll bet I could get your watch commander to let me borrow you both for the occasional nights we’d be needing you.”
“What the hell would I do?” Flotsam said.
“Maybe you could kind of act like security for your partner, sort of like his muscle. If he gets a foot in the door.”
“It’s my stump that’s gonna get me in the door,” Jetsam reminded him.
Sergeant Hawthorne managed a polite guffaw at the amputation humor and said, “Maybe a good cover story would be that you’re a seller of illegal video poker machines, the kind that’s springing up in residential casinos all over L.A. They’re brought from Arizona and can rake in between one and two thousand per machine per week, no problem. With your highlighted blond hair and permanent suntans, you resemble each other enough for you to claim you’re brothers, and I think Hector Cozzo would buy that. If he accepts the amputee, he’ll accept the brother with no worries that this might be a police sting.”
“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.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint in chapter 22 lines from the song “Sunny,” Words and Music by Bobby Hebb, copyright © 1965, 1966, Portable Music Company, Inc., All rights reserved.
copyright © 1984 by Joseph Wambaugh
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
EPILOGUE
An Exclusive First Look at Nocturne Harbor
Copyright Page
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