He drunkenly slouched toward the deputies, full of booze and bravado, holding the neck of an empty beer bottle like a hammer, and the young deputy drew his Taser and pointed it at him. The female deputy immediately talked into her rover and requested backup while she kept her eyes on the increasingly rowdy mob, at the same time trying to decide which of the half dozen nonsurfing sand maggots could be a real threat.
She didn’t realize that backup was much closer than she thought, and it arrived in a violent explosion of energy that stunned everybody. The tall blond surfer and his shorter partner issued no warnings, but running full speed, the taller one surged in low like a blitzing linebacker and slammed his shoulder into the lower spine of the guy with the beer bottle, who sailed forward, back bowed, and crashed hard against two surfers, knocking both of them flat on the sand. One of the other sleazed-out beach lice in ragged jeans instantly leaped on the back of the tall surfer as he was getting to his feet and tried for a stranglehold. He let go when the shorter surfer grabbed his hair, jerked his head back, and dug three piston punches into the guy’s kidneys, which made him drop to the sand, howling louder than his wounded mate.
“Get him to your car fast!” the tall surfer yelled to the deputies.
He picked up and brandished the beer bottle, standing shoulder to shoulder with his partner, facing off the jeering gaggle of now-hesitant surfers as the deputies continued dragging their handcuffed prisoner across the warm white sand of Malibu Beach.
The remainder of the surfing crowd suddenly had to rethink the whole business after seeing the two beach rats get cranked by the dynamic duo, whoever the fuck they were. And besides, since the wicked wahini and her crew were scampering to their SUV, the sexy rush was over. They figured that pretty soon there’d be more cops.
And anyway, they’d been out of the water too long. Adrenaline started gushing and synapses snapping when they saw half a dozen other surfers digging through the breakers. The surf was peaky and a young ripper came slicing in on a hugangus juicy while other surfers hooted him on. So what the fuck were they doing on dry land dicking around with these cops anyway?
Suddenly, as though on command, they all turned and began scrambling toward the ocean like a raft of clumsy sea lions, but once in the water and on their boards, they were transformed, and they darted, sleek as otters, through the shore break, with cops and even the redhead utterly forgotten. Their only concern was not getting cut off as they paddled from break to break in waves punchy and raw, waiting for a big one because this… this was what it was all about. They had discovered the meaning of life.
After the deputies got their handcuffed prisoner strapped into the backseat of the caged patrol unit, the tall surfer and his shorter partner heard the yelp of sirens as the LASD black-and-white units came roaring into the parking lot.
“Dude, I mighta rearranged a few disks in that sand maggot’s back,” the tall surfer said to his partner. “If we don’t wanna get bogged to the ass in paperwork and lawsuits and shit, I think we should, like, fade out at this point and maybe frequent Bolsa Chica Beach for the next few weeks.”
“I hear ya, bro,” his partner said. “The sleazed-out surf rat that I nailed is gonna be pissing blood for a few days, so I ain’t ready to answer a bunch of questions about why we didn’t ID ourselves and advise them of their rights and give them all a chance to kick the shit outta the deputies and us, too. I say, let’s bounce.”
The younger, Latino deputy was busy corralling the photo crew as witnesses for his reports, and the older, female deputy was gingerly touching her injured head and scanning the growing crowd of looky-loos, but she couldn’t find the surfing pair who’d decked the beach rats. She definitely needed them for the arrest and crime reports now that they were going to book their prisoner for the felony assault on a peace officer, but the arriving backup units caused a traffic snarl and she had to direct cars out of their way. This allowed the tall blond surfer and his shorter blond partner, hiding behind the throngs of beachgoers, to slip away, collect their boards, and scurry unobserved to their pickup truck in the parking lot.
They drove off and headed for the closest In-N-Out Burger, where they each devoured two cheeseburgers and fries. They arrived at work in time for a shower, a shave, an allowable application of hair gel, and a quick change into uniforms, ready for the 5:15 P.M. midwatch roll call.
All of the other police officers at Hollywood Station referred to this team of surfer cops as Flotsam and Jetsam.
TWO
For years, he had been dubbed “Hollywood Nate” because he carried a Screen Actors Guild card and was forever seeking stardom, as were thousands of Los Angeles bartenders, waiters, parking attendants, receptionists, window washers, dog walkers, and even people with vocations and professions, all nurturing similar hopes and dreams. Hollywood Nate’s mother and older sister had always maintained that if only he had not been cast in a couple of TV movies early in his police career-back when Hollywood still made TV movies-the bug might not have bitten him so hard. Lots of cops from Hollywood and other police divisions worked the red carpet events or were hired as off-duty technical advisers on feature movies or TV shows, and that was the end of their emotional involvement with show business. But Nate was different.
Hollywood Nate’s handsome hawkish profile and wavy dark hair, now going gray at the temples, along with his penetrating liquid brown eyes and iron-pumping build, had gotten him more than just sleepovers from below-the-line female employees on nearly every production he’d worked. Nate had also been given lots of paying jobs as an on-camera extra, and he’d even gotten those few speaking parts in TV productions, soon gathering enough credits to get a SAG card, which he proudly kept in his badge wallet beneath his police ID card. The “Hollywood” moniker would be his for the rest of his police days because the LAPD had always loved having a “Hollywood Lou” or a “Hollywood Bill” among its ranks, and since the seventeen-year LAPD veteran “Hollywood Nate” even had a SAG card, that made it better.
The thirty-eight-year-old cop had been somewhat indulged for a few months by his fellow coppers on the midwatch during a time of deep sadness for all of them. It came after Nate’s partner, Dana Vaughn, had been shot dead by a thief whom Nate then killed with return fire. Nate had grieved intensely for Dana Vaughn and had needed to surmount overwhelming feelings of survivor guilt and deep regret for never having told her certain intimate things, like how she had touched his heart and what she had meant to him in the short time they had worked together as patrol partners. Now he had recurring dreams of telling her those things, and in the dreams, she never answered him but would smile and chuckle in that special way of hers that always made him think of wind chimes.
It was during that mournful and restless period that Hollywood Nate had been offered an audition that came from working the red carpet on a warm summer night at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. There were thirty cops there that night, all happily drawing overtime pay. Rudy Ressler, a second-rate director and producer who once had coproduced an Oscar-nominated movie, attended that affair with an up-and-coming pair of young beauties known only to people who spent their lives watching nighttime TV designed for Gen X-ers. Ressler’s personal escort that evening was a UCLA theater major skinnier than Victoria Beckham and younger than his own daughter. When the event ended and the Kodak was disgorging the multitudes, Nate had occasion to apply some muscle to the stampeding paparazzi that had crowded in on the foursome as they walked to the director’s rented limo.