Colin didn’t even particularly resent him for winning the chief’s job, though he’d put in for it himself. Pitcavage could make nice, a talent Colin knew he lacked. You could get by as a lieutenant if people saw what you really thought of them. When you had to deal with the mayor and the city council all the damn time, that didn’t fly any more.
“What’s up?” he asked, looking across the desk at Pitcavage.
The desk was about the size of an aircraft-carrier flight deck. It was almost entirely bare. The only things on it were two framed photographs, one of Pitcavage’s wife, the other of his son. Caroline was a nice gal. She wasn’t a trophy wife or anything; they’d been married a long time. Colin’s opinion of Darren Pitcavage was rather lower. If he weren’t a prominent cop’s kid. .
But he was, so the drunk-driving charge quietly got reduced to speeding. That fight in the bar? People said the other guy threw the first punch. There’d been something that had to do with vandalism, too, but that also didn’t stick. Darren was even better-looking than his old man, but his eyes didn’t seem to want to meet the camera.
Mike Pitcavage opened a desk drawer, took out a piece of paper, and slid it across the desk at Colin. “We’ve got a big oil tanker coming into San Pedro next week,” he said. “The crude will go to the refineries in El Segundo. All the impacted departments will participate in security arrangements. I want you to take leadership in San Atanasio.”
Before Colin said anything, he took a long look at the paper. Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. “So this oil is for South Bay police departments? How’d we manage that?”
“We managed, with some help from the politicians. Trust me-you don’t want to know the gory details,” Pitcavage answered.
Colin believed him. The world seemed to get dog-eat-doggier every day. With more and more people grabbing for less and less, where was the surprise in that? “San Pedro’s part of Los Angeles. I don’t see the LAPD mentioned here anywhere.”
“No, and you won’t, either.” The San Atanasio police chief looked sly.
“Huh,” Colin said. A narrow strip of territory-part of it ran just east of San Atanasio-connected San Pedro to the rest of L.A. The port helped make Los Angeles a great city; it had for more than a hundred years. “So, are we going to have to protect this crude from the L.A. cops, then?”
“They aren’t supposed to know about the tanker,” Pitcavage said.
“And then you wake up!” Colin exclaimed. The chief looked blank. Colin put it in words of one syllable: “What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve made the necessary arrangements,” Pitcavage insisted. How many bureaucrats had been persuaded to look the other way and keep their mouths shut? How much had it cost?
“If LAPD does find out, we’re liable to have a war on our hands.” Colin meant it literally. The To protect and to serve boys were as hard up for gasoline as anybody else. If they found out this big shipment was coming into their port, under their noses, and all earmarked for other people, there’d be stereophonic hell to pay.
“Well, that’s one of the reasons I want you in charge of our part of the security,” Chief Pitcavage answered. “You’ve got the military experience we need.”
To Colin’s way of thinking, a hitch in the Navy didn’t exactly equate him to General Patton (although one might work wonders for Darren Pitcavage). He could see that saying so would do him less than no good, though. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “This takes priority over. .?”
“Everything,” Pitcavage said flatly.
“Including the Strangler case?”
“Everything includes everything,” the chief said. “If we don’t get our hands on this gas, pretty soon we’ll we chasing the damn Strangler on skateboards and scooters.”
It wasn’t that bad. Colin knew it, and Pitcavage had to know it, too. Civilians could still buy-some-gas. But the price went up every day. The supervolcano had wrecked refineries and pipelines. The spasmodic nuclear war in the Middle East had knocked production over the head. If the South Bay towns had to pay anything close to retail for the fuel their cops used, they wouldn’t be able to do much else. Thus-Colin supposed-this skulduggery.
“Well, I’ll do it,” he said: the only possible reply. “And I’ll make damn sure I’ve got Gabe Sanchez right beside me.”
“However you want it.” Something in Pitcavage’s voice told Colin he’d just lost points with the chief. Gabe was too. . too unpolished, that was the polite word, to stand high on Mike Pitcavage’s gold-star list. Gabe didn’t worry about it; he loved his capo di tutti capi, too. Colin didn’t worry about it, either. If Pitcavage needed him so bad, he’d have to live with Gabe. And he evidently did.
Something else occurred to Colin: “Whatever we’ve bought the SWAT team in the way of heavy weapons, I want that, too.”
The chief frowned, plainly trying to remember. “I know we’ve got some military rifles that’ll fire full auto. We may have a real machine gun. If we do, nobody’s taken it out of storage except maybe to clean it for a hell of a long time.”
Colin nodded; he also couldn’t remember the San Atanasio PD hauling out a machine gun. God, the paperwork that would have taken! But, as the man said, the times, they were a-changin’. No, they’d a-changed.
“Let me have the Door-Knocker, too,” he said. “I’ll lead the parade with it.”
“There you go!” He actually made Pitcavage grin. “You got it.” The Door-Knocker was a Ford Explorer armored against small-arms fire, with a ram sticking out from the front of the hood and with vision slits and firing slits for the cops inside. A do-it-yourself armored car, in other words. It was ugly as sin, but terrific for smashing down barricaded entryways to crack houses, meth labs, and lots of other places where the bad guys really didn’t want company.
“Okay,” Colin said, anything but sure if it was. “Let me get my people together, and I’ll see what kind of toys we have in the playroom. When does this tanker get in?”
“Next Tuesday,” the chief answered. “Our convoy of trucks will exit the 110 at Braxton Bragg Boulevard. You’ll meet them at the exit ramp and escort them west through the city before handing off to the Hawthorne PD.”
“Right.” Colin had to hope it would be. His opinion of the neighboring department was not high. Hawthorne was full of gangbangers, and its cops were chronically underfunded. “I’m worrying about the LAPD, but they’ll have to make sure the Crips don’t hijack our crude.”
“Lord knows the Crips get into all kinds of shit, but I don’t think they have a rogue refinery.” Pitcavage grinned to show he’d made a joke.
He thought he had, anyhow. The Crips wouldn’t have to turn the crude into gas and motor oil to get value for it. All they’d have to do was steal it and threaten to light a match. How big a ransom could they squeeze out of people if they did that? Big. Big, big, big. Colin could see as much. Could Mike Pitcavage? It didn’t seem so. He might be able to make nice, but he had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam.
Well, when he wore a uniform instead of Giorgio Armani, he had the row of stars on either side of his collar. He knew where to find a guy with imagination, and knew how to give him orders. Which he’d gone and done.
“I’ll get on it,” Colin said.
The first thing he did, of course, was tell Gabe Sanchez. The sergeant pursed his lips and blew out through them. It might have been a whistle without sound or an exhalation without a cigarette. “We’ve got the fix in good, huh?” he said when Colin finished.
“Sure sounds that way.” After a meditative moment, Colin added, “We’d damn well better.”
“Boy, you can sing that in church!” Gabe agreed. “The LAPD doesn’t know thing one about it, huh?”
“Not Thing One, and not Thing Two, either.” How many times had Colin read his kids The Cat in the Hat? A zillion, at least. “That’s what the heap big boss says, anyway.”
“Could get interesting if he’s wrong,” Sanchez observed.