“This ain’t what’s goin’ on here, wood,” Tristan said. “This ain’t no sissy pickup. Kessler’s workin’ this kid like he worked me.”
“Okay, so what’s that got to do with us gettin’ rich behind it?”
“It’s gonna take a little time to explain.”
“Gimme the Reader’s Digest version. I ain’t got all night.”
“Okay, so let’s look at this Kessler, or whatever his name is. A big crime boss? Shit, he never made me, not one time, and I been followin’ him all over town. He’s nothin’ but another little cyber café identity thief with a gimmick. Except he’s in business with somebody smarter than him, somebody who’s makin’ those bogus driver’s licenses and credit cards and writin’ phony paper for the purchases we hauled to the storage yard. Where there was lotsa other goods squirreled away, you might remember. Kessler’s jist a recruiter of runners like us, and a money collector. We gotta find out who his boss is and then we make our move.”
“What move?”
“We’re gonna become the junior partners.”
“Take me home, man. Now.”
“No, wait, dawg! We know where Kessler keeps the TVs and other shit he steals. We saw how he does that part of his game, and we know the address of the guy who’s gonna get the bill for all that stuff we delivered. We know Kessler dresses up in disguises. We lean on him and let him know what we know, he’ll faint tits-up like the bitch he is and either let us in or else buy us out. Think about it.”
“We can’t blackmail him. We been on jobs with him!”
“I’m jist sayin’, we could tell him we’ll rat him out to the cops about that house in Los Feliz, and where we took the stuff to his storage locker and all the other shit. He can’t take a chance that we’re runnin’ a game on him, because he don’t know nothin’ about us, and we know lots about him. Especially we know where he lives.”
“Maybe his boss ain’t a bitch like him,” Jerzy said. “What if he’s partnered up with some bad motherfucker that don’t want no junior partners?”
“That’s why we need a little bit of patience. Maybe we do another job or two with him and we find out more, like who does he work for and where is that partner. Shit, it might be that whoever runs him works the business right outta his crib on Franklin. Then we got him. He won’t be able to bounce on out in the middle of the night. We gotta know a little more about how it all works.”
Tristan stopped talking then and looked at Jerzy. He figured the Polack must be burning up every little brain cell he had. The silence went on for nearly a minute and then Jerzy said, “Okay, let’s get him to give us a job tomorrow. I ain’t gonna play along forever, man. And one other thing you gotta know about me right now.”
“What’s that?”
“I ain’t into violence unless…” He gave an ambiguous shrug.
“Unless what?”
“There’s real money to be had.”
Tristan held out his palm, and Jerzy slapped it without enthusiasm, saying, “Man, this could be a big fuckin’ mistake.”
Late in the evening, Officer Harris Triplett, the young patrol officer who’d recently completed his probation, was on temporary loan to the vice unit as a UC operator. He was posing as a trick and not having a good time so far. Harris wore his sandy hair so short and looked so youthful that the vice sergeant thought the young cop could easily pass for a sailor or Marine on liberty. The plan was to borrow a few cops to use as operators to get as many hookers as possible off the streets ASAP, because one of the local TV stations had been regularly featuring a spokesperson for the Restore Hollywood project who claimed that the LAPD was ignoring vice problems on the boulevards.
It was an informal three-day operation to quiet the critics, so Harris Triplett was not wearing a wire under his Aloha shirt, as a female UC operator would if she were posing as a hooker on the boulevard. Under the front seat of the Mercury Sable that he was driving were a rover and his service weapon.
The first drag queen he encountered on the Santa Monica track, aka the “fruit loop,” was a mixed-race addict. The dragon, wearing a short gold dress and platforms, looked at him through the window and said, “So whatchoo lookin’ for, dope or pussy?”
“What’ve you got?” Harris Triplett said, figuring if a good drug bust came his way, he shouldn’t say no. He started sniffling and acting twitchy, his version of an addict, but he was far too hale and hearty to pull it off.
“You look like you could use some black,” the dragon said with a knowing smile.
“Yeah,” he said, figuring that “black” was tar heroin.
“Well, I ain’t got no black,” the dragon said. “Maybe I can get some liquid, though. I know somebody with a vial. That’s sixty doses. You got that kind of sugar?”
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” Harris Triplett said, figuring that “liquid” was LSD or PCP.
The dragon let out a raspy chuckle and said, “You switched up on me to the other dope way too fast, baby. That means you’re a cop. But you’re a cute little puppy. Come back when you’re a big dog.”
The dragon laughed again and walked away.
The next streetwalker he encountered was a tall white transsexual, well known to the vice unit who’d arrested her in the past. And now that she was post-op, she could not be booked into a male facility. The tranny stopped on the sidewalk, holding back her shoulder-length natural-red hair and bent forward to look inside the car.
“This is a pool car,” she said, “and you’re a cop.”
“What?” Harris Triplett said. “Me, a cop? I’m a Marine from Twenty-nine Palms.”
“Kiss me if you’re not a cop,” the tranny said.
Harris Triplett hesitated and said, “I don’t even kiss my wife.”
“You only got one key in the ignition, sweetie,” the tranny said before turning to walk away. “You should always use a key ring with at least a house key on it. I wish you weren’t a cop. You’re cute as a button.”
Harris Triplett was starting to think that he was cute enough to clean up the streets of Hollywood single-handed if he just knew his ass from lamb chops. He put the vice unit’s Mercury key on his own key ring and hoped he could manage to pop at least one hooker before his three-night loan to the vice unit ended.
He got on the rover to ask for permission from his cover team to try the Sunset Boulevard track, and permission was granted. And that did the trick. The first streetwalker he spotted on Sunset Boulevard was neither a dragon nor a tranny. She had real double-X chromosomes, and she appeared to be very young. And as it turned out, she was only fifteen years old. She was full-figured, bulging out of her little black dress, and wore her white-blonde hair in a bob, with blood-red gloss on her plump lips that made her look like a child playing dress-up.
She was only slightly more experienced than Harris Triplett at this game, and she smiled brightly when she saw his dewy grin, smooth, chiseled features, and short chestnut hair.
“Hi!” she said.
“Hi,” Harris Triplett said. “What’s up tonight?”
“Whatcha looking for?”
“Whatcha got?” he said.
“Do you have, like, a hundred bucks to spend?” she said.
“On what?” he said.
“I don’t wanna, like, make you mad or anything,” she said, “but I been told that I shouldn’t negotiate until we get where we’re going.”
“So where we going?”
“My apartment. It’s just up the street. I’ll walk and you can follow me.”
“How do I know you aren’t taking me someplace where I’ll get mugged?”
“There’s a whole lot going on up in my apartment house, but it ain’t got nothing to do with mugging,” she said.
Harris Triplett didn’t have enough for his violation yet, since she hadn’t defined negotiate by offering sex for money, so he said, “Okay, start walking. I’ll be right behind you.”