“I’m not hungry anyway,” Dewey said with an affable smile, “but thanks for the tip.”
Malcolm looked at him curiously. In Hollywood, when a middle-aged white stranger started being friendly, Malcolm figured he was probably gay. This guy looked straight enough, but you never knew, especially on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Dewey said to Malcolm, “I’m looking for ambitious young college students who’re interested in some very profitable part-time work. Would you be a student by any chance?”
Malcolm, who hadn’t taken a single course even at a community college since graduating from high school, now figured the guy for some kind of pervert and said guardedly, “What kind of work?”
“Just some easy jobs to help with tuition and books, with a lot of money left over.”
Even more curious now, Malcolm lied and said, “I’m only a part-time student at City College. Does that work for you?”
“Certainly,” Dewey said. “If I told you that you could make between five hundred and a thousand dollars working just a couple of days a week, would you be interested?”
Now Malcolm was sure the guy was a perv. He said, “I don’t do fuck films, man.”
Dewey chuckled and said, “You wouldn’t make such easy money in such a short time doing fuck films.” He broke off a piece of the fried taco shell and said, “Are you willing to work with cards?”
“How do you mean?” Malcolm asked.
“Do you have a debit card?”
“No,” Malcolm said.
“How old’re you?”
“Nineteen,” Malcolm said truthfully.
“That’s fine,” Dewey said. “You can pass for twenty-one, no problem.”
“Whadda you mean, ‘pass’?”
“If I gave you a debit card, a PIN number, and good ID with your picture on it, but with a bogus name, would you be willing to use it to draw out money at certain places that’re very safe? Or would you be willing to go on a fun shopping trip and buy all kinds of great things with a credit card that has someone else’s name on it?”
“I don’t know,” Malcolm said. “I got a job. I never done anything with debit cards or credit cards.”
“I’ll bet your job pays minimum wage,” Dewey said.
A bit offended, Malcolm said, “It’s a living.”
There was something about this young man. He had a straightforward sincerity about him that Dewey seldom found in young people these days. Something told him that he could use this forthright young Latino to great advantage. He drew a business card from his wallet with the name Bernie Graham on it along with the number of one of his GoPhones, and slid it across the table to Malcolm.
“Think about a shopping trip as a starter,” Dewey said. “Buying great merchandise is what it amounts to. You’d buy things at places I send you to, and you’d deliver the items to a place that I select. Call me tomorrow at five P.M. if you’re interested. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll figure it’s a no-go.”
“I work till five,” Malcolm said. “Can I call you at five thirty?”
“Certainly,” Dewey said, confident that he’d hooked his fish. “I’m Bernie Graham. What’s your name?”
“You can call me Clark,” said Malcolm, standing up to leave. “Clark Jones.”
“I hope to hear from you, Clark Jones,” said Dewey as the young man exited the taco shop.
Six-X-Thirty-two was driven by Flotsam, whose partner had gotten permission from Sergeant Murillo to go home early after telling the supervisor that his dog had disappeared from the yard and his landlady was in a panic. It was a lie hastily dreamed up by the surfer cop after his waitress du jour at IHOP agreed to go surfing with him the next morning at Malibu but only if the surfer cop could get to the beach by 8 A.M. Because Watch 5 didn’t end until 0400 hours, Jetsam had been in a tizzy, worrying about sleep deprivation that might make him less than magnificent the next day. So he concocted the dog story for Sergeant Murillo, even though the only pet he had was a turtle.
Flotsam, who of course was privy to his partner’s scheme, asked the sergeant what he should do for the remainder of the watch, and it turned out that P1 rookie Harris Triplett’s usual field training officer was on a special day off. The probationer had been assigned to assist the desk officer that night, just to give him something to do, so Sergeant Murillo decided to let him work with Flotsam for the remainder of the watch. The sergeant would ordinarily have been reluctant to put even a last-phase probationer like Harris Triplett with either of the surfer cops, but being down to five cars on the midwatch, he thought he’d take a chance.
Young Harris Triplett found himself riding the rest of the watch with Flotsam, and they happened to be cruising past Pablo’s Tacos when Malcolm Rojas was walking away from the strip mall. Malcolm didn’t interest Flotsam at all. What interested Flotsam was a portly black man driving an old Toyota who’d managed to find a parking place in the mall and who emerged from his car with a small paper-wrapped parcel in his hand, which he tucked under his jacket before approaching the entry door.
“First thing, dude,” Flotsam said. “That year Toyota you can start with a screwdriver or a pair of scissors. Anything will turn the ignition on. So we’re suspicious right away that the car could be hot, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said the unsuspicious boot.
“And we know from long experience that Pablo’s is a place where tweakers, baseheads, and every other kind of doper hangs out and does deals, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said the rookie, who had no long experience about anything but who agreed with everything a P2 or P3 said.
“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ It makes me feel like a shoobie.”
“A what?”
“A lame-oh that wears socks and sandals on the beach.”
“Oh,” Harris said.
“Sometimes they bring their baloney sandwiches in a shoe box. Shoobie, get it? Way wack.”
“I see,” Harris said.
“So okay, for a dude in a place like this to be sticking a small package under his coat, that, like, sets off all kinds of alarms on our blue radar, don’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Harris said, with conviction this time.
“Goddamnit!”
“Sorry, sorry!”
Flotsam said, “Something about the way that dude dresses says to me he’s an immigrant. It’s like all these Armenian gangsters? Unibrows in Armani Exchange and Members Only jackets, right? You know they ain’t from around here.”
“Got it.”
“Look at that dude’s shoes. Are they plastic or what? And those pants pulled up to his chest bone? And a white dress shirt and horse-blanket coat? He’s from somewheres else too.”
“Got it,” Harris said.
“What if this black guy turns out to be Puerto Rican or Dominican?” Flotsam said. “I heard you can speak Spanish, right?”
“Yes,” the rookie said. Then he hesitated and added, “Well, I get a two-point-seventy-five-percent pay bump for speaking Spanish. I minored in Spanish at Cal State L.A., but I’m not so good at the reading and writing.”
“We won’t have to write to the guy,” Flotsam said.
“To be honest, I sort of speak Spanglish.”
“Close enough,” Flotsam said. “Let’s go hear his story, whatever language it’s in.”
Flotsam parked the car in the red zone in front of the strip mall, and both cops collected their batons and entered the parking lot.
The Nigerian and Dewey Gleason made eye contact the moment the man entered the taco shop. Dewey was about to speak, when he spotted two uniformed cops-one a tall blond with gelled hair, and a younger athletic-looking partner-walking fast across the parking lot. His instincts told him to avert his gaze from the Nigerian’s and to get the hell out of there ASAP.
Sure enough, the cops entered and the tall cop said to the Nigerian, “Sir, we’d like you to step outside for a minute.”
“What for?” the Nigerian said in accented English, eyes widening.