“Is number one still at large?”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to pay her nothing. She took my car, though. You?”
“Divorced also. Once. No kids. Met my ex in a cop bar in North Hollywood called the Director’s Chair. She wore a felonious amount of pancake. Looked too slutty for the Mustang Ranch and still I married her. Musta been her J Lo booty.”
“Starter marriages never work for cops. You don’t have to count the first one, bro. So how do we play pit bull polo without horses? And where do we play?”
“I know just the place. Get the expandable baton outta my war bag.”
The Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, aka MS-13, began at Los Angeles High School less than twenty years earlier but was now said to have ten thousand members throughout the United States and seven hundred thousand in Central American countries. Many residents of state prison displayed tattoos saying “MS” or “MS- 13.” It was an MS-13 crew member who was stopped on a street in North Hollywood in 1991 by Officer Tina Kerbrat, a rookie just months out of the LAPD academy, who was in the process of writing him a citation for drinking in public, nothing more than that, when the MS-13 “cruiser” shot her dead. The first LAPD woman officer to be murdered in the line of duty.
Later that evening a besieged Mexican resident living east of Gower Street called Hollywood Station to say that she saw an LAPD black-and-white with lights out driving loops around a dirty pink apartment building that she had reported to the police on several occasions as being full of Mara Salvatrucha gang members.
On the other occasions, the officers at the desk kept trying to explain to the Mexican woman about gang injunctions and probable cause, things she did not understand and that did not exist in her country. Things that apparently denied protection to people like her and her children from the criminals in that ugly pink building. She told the officer about how their vicious dogs had mauled and killed a collie belonging to her neighbor Irene, and how all the children were unable to walk safely in the streets. She also said that two of the dogs had been removed by people from the city pound but there were still enough left. More than enough.
The officers told her they were very sorry and that she should contact the Department of Animal Services.
The Mexican woman had been watching a Spanish-language channel and was almost ready for bed when she first heard the howling that drew her to the window. There she saw the police car with lights out, speeding down the alley next to the apartment building, being pursued by four or five barking dogs. On its second pass down the alley, she saw the driver lean out the window and swing something that looked like a snooker stick at one of the brutes, sending it yelping and running back into the pink building. Then the car made another loop and did it to another big dog, and the driver yelled something that her daughter heard from the porch.
Her daughter stumbled sleepily into the tiny living room and said in English, “Mamá, does chukker mean something very bad, like the F word?”
The Mexican woman called Hollywood Station and spoke to a very senior sergeant whom all the cops called the Oracle. She wanted to say thank you for sending the officers with the snooker stick. She was hopeful that things might improve around the neighborhood. The Oracle was puzzled but thought it best not to question her further. He simply said that he was glad to be of service.
When 6-X-32’s lights were back on and they were cruising Hollywood Boulevard, the driver said, “Dude, right there’s where my career with the Mounted Platoon ended. That’s where I decided that overtime pay or not, I was going back to normal patrol.”
His partner looked to his right and said, “At Grauman’s Chinese Theater?”
“Right there in the courtyard. That’s where I learned that you never ride a horse on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”
“Bad juju?”
“Bad footing.”
Sid Grauman’s famous theater seemed somehow forlorn these days, dwarfed and sandwiched by the Hollywood & Highland Center, better known as the Kodak Center, containing two blocks of shopping and entertainment. It was home to the Kodak Theatre and the Academy Awards and was overrun by tourists day and night. But the Chinese Theater still held its own when it came to Hollywood weirdness. Even this late, there were a number of costumed creatures posing for photos with tourists who were mainly photographing the shoe and handprints in the famous forecourt. Among the creatures were Mr. Incredible, Elmo, two Darth Vaders, Batman, and two Goofys, one short, one tall.
“They pose with tourists. Pix for bucks,” the driver said to his partner. “The tourists think the creatures work for Grauman’s, but they don’t. Most of them’re crackheads and tweakers. Watch little Goofy.”
He braked, making the nighttime traffic go around their black-and-white. They watched the shorter of the two Goofys hassling four Asian tourists who no doubt had refused to pay him for taking his photo or hadn’t paid enough. When Goofy grabbed one of the two Asian men by the arm, the cop tooted his horn. When Goofy looked up and saw the black-and-white, he gave up panhandling for the moment and tried to disappear into the throng, even though his huge Goofy head loomed over all but the tallest tourist.
The driver said, “The subway back there is a good escape route to the ’hood. Dealers hang out by the trains, and the hooks hang around the boulevard.”
“What’s a hook?”
“A guy that approaches you and says, ‘I can hook you up with what you need.’ These days it’s almost always crystal. Everybody’s tweaking. Meth is the drug of choice on the Hollywood streets, absolutely.”
And that made him think of his last night at Metro, which was followed by the replacement surgery and a right hip more accurate than a barometer when it came to predicting sudden temperature drops and wind-chill factor.
On that last night in the Mounted Platoon, he and another mounted cop were there for crowd suppression, walking their horses along Hollywood Boulevard all calm and okey-dokey, along the curb past the Friday-night mobs by the subway station, moseying west, when he spotted a hook looking very nervously in their direction.
He’d said to his partner, who was riding a mare named Millie, “Let’s jam this guy.”
He dismounted and dropped his get-down rope. His partner held both horses and he approached the hook on foot. The hook was a sweaty, scrawny white guy, very tall, maybe even taller than he was, though his LAPD Stetson and cowboy boots made him tower. That’s when it all went bad.
“I was talking to a hook right about there,” he said to his partner now, pointing to the sidewalk in front of the Kodak Center. “And the dude just turned and rabbitted. Zip. Like that. And I started after him, but Major freaked.”
“Your partner?”
“My horse. He was fearless, Major was. Dude, I’d seen him chill in training when we were throwing firecrackers and flares at him. I’d seen other horses rear up on their hind legs and do a one-eighty while Major stood his ground. But not that night. That’s the thing about horses, they’re assholes, man.”
“What’d he do?”
“First, Major reared clear up tall and crazy. Then he bit my partner on the arm. It was like somebody cranked up his voltage. Maybe a tweaker shot him with a BB gun, I don’t know. Anyways, I stopped chasing the hook, fuck him, and ran back to help my partner. But Major wouldn’t calm down until I made like I was going to climb in the saddle. Then I did something very stupid.”
“What’s that?”
“I climbed in the saddle, intending to ride him back to the trailer and call it a night. I did that instead of leading him back, which anybody without brain bubbles woulda done under the circumstances.”