“That also crossed my mind, as a matter of fact. I have the feeling it crossed Mike’s mind, too. Which is why we meet the tanker trucks loaded for bear.”
“Yeah!” Gabe sounded enthusiastic. He might have rough edges, but he didn’t know how to back up. “Wonder what an LAPD squad car’d look like after it ran into the Door-Knocker.” By the way he said it, he couldn’t wait to find out.
“Mm, the idea is for the Door-Knocker to run into stuff, not the other way around,” Colin reminded him.
“Details, details.” Gabe waved that aside. “Can’t wait to see the L.A. cops’ faces when they find out we’ve got the goods and they don’t.”
“If everything works right, they won’t find out,” Colin said. Gabe shrugged, as if to note that everything never worked right.
Tuesday dawned chilly and rainy, as too many days in San Atanasio had since the eruption. If this was what Seattle had been like before the supervolcano went off, all the Californicators who’d moved to the Northwest got what they deserved. Only now SoCal was getting it, too.
Rain or no rain, Colin and his armed party took their stations on the Braxton Bragg Boulevard overpass to the Harbor Freeway, waiting for the precious petroleum convoy to come up from the south. Gabe Sanchez stood by the rail, the hood to his plastic poncho shielding his face well enough to let him smoke. Colin had his own share of bad habits and then some. He didn’t know how he’d missed tobacco, but he had.
Watching Gabe crush one cigarette under his shoe and then light another, he wondered what would have happened if people had discovered the filthy weed about 1950 instead of way the hell back when. He didn’t need to wonder long. He was convinced governments all over the world would have outlawed it as a dangerous, addictive drug. And, no doubt, bad guys would be growing it on secret farms right this minute and making stacks of illegal cash off it. There’d be books and earnest, concerned TV movies and obscene hip-hop records glorifying the cigar dealer. .
He shook his head. Gabe saw the motion. “What’s up?” he asked, breathing out smoke.
“Nothing.” Colin’s speculation left him faintly embarrassed. Gabe would only guffaw. “Just woolgathering.”
Before Gabe could come up with any more blush-worthy questions, a uniformed cop called, “Won’t be long now. They’re moving past the Goodyear Blimp’s mooring mast. Five, ten minutes.”
“Gotcha, Jimmy,” Colin said. “Tell ’em we’re ready and waiting as soon as they get off the freeway.” He walked over to another black-and-white and asked the man inside, “Anything interesting going on on the LAPD frequencies?” Monitoring the enemy was always a good idea when you were at war.
The San Atanasio policeman wore headphones to help him monitor the radio without interference from the freeway’s unending whoosh and roar. Colin had to repeat his question, louder the second time. Then the fellow answered, “Everything seems pretty quiet. Maybe the fix really is in.”
“Here’s hoping.” Colin still had trouble believing it. He turned east, toward the offramp the fuel trucks would use. A couple of minutes later, a Torrance police car-part of the advance guard, no doubt-pulled off. The cops inside waved when they saw the waiting San Atanasio police officers. Colin waved back.
“Uh-oh!” exclaimed the cop monitoring LAPD radio traffic. “Cars on the way to Braxton Bragg Boulevard and the 110.”
Which was where they were. And the entrance to the southbound freeway was west of the one coming up from San Pedro. They could block the tanker trucks if they got here soon enough. The freeway ran through the L.A. strip, too-the LAPD had all the jurisdiction here it needed.
Here came the first precious tanker. And here, sirens screaming and light bars blazing, came three LAPD police cars. Sure as hell, they positioned themselves to block the westbound lanes of Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Uniformed men with riot guns piled out of them.
“Get out of the way!” Colin yelled.
“Like hell we will!” an LAPD man yelled back, hefting his shotgun.
“Sonny, we will fucking bury you if you don’t get out of the way right now,” Colin assured him, waving toward the Door-Knocker. As if on cue, the machine gun they’d found in storage and mounted on it swung to cover the LAPD man, who wasn’t wearing a helmet. His bulletproof vest might stop a rifle-caliber round, but might wasn’t something you really wanted to test.
“You wouldn’t dare.” The Los Angeles cop’s voice wobbled; he wasn’t altogether convinced they wouldn’t.
Colin was convinced he would. A police force couldn’t function without fuel-Mike Pitcavage was dead right about that. Horses and bikes and shoe leather didn’t cut it, not in L.A. County, they didn’t. “This is our oil. We’ll do whatever we need to do to keep it,” he answered. The fuel trucks were piling up on the offramp. The LAPD guys would already be screaming for their SWAT team and other reinforcements. “Get out of the way. Last warning! We’ll clear you out if you don’t.”
About then, the LAPD officer noticed that the San Atanasio cops were toting M16s, not shotguns. Colin waved to the Door-Knocker again. It rumbled forward with intent to squash.
“You people are fucking insane!” the L.A. cop bleated.
“Yeah? And so?” Colin answered.
The LAPD guy called him something that would have made a CPO with twenty-five years in the Navy blanch. With far less time in the service, Colin only laughed. On came the Door-Knocker, inexorable as fate. Still swearing a very blue streak, the LAPD cop dove back into his squad car and got it out of the way just before the Door-Knocker did the job for him.
As the other LAPD black-and-whites also opened a lane so the fuel trucks could go west, young man, Colin posted armed San Atanasio officers on the southbound offramp from the 110 to Braxton Bragg Boulevard. “Make ’em run over you if they want to get past you,” he told his troops-that was how he thought of them. “And if they look like they want to run over you, shoot first. Got it?”
“Got it!” the San Atanasio cops roared in testosterone-fueled unison. Colin hadn’t taken any female officers on this particular run. He wanted the headstrong craziness that could only come with a pair of balls.
It was maybe half a mile, maybe a little less, from the freeway to New Hampshire Avenue, where the L.A. strip ended and San Atanasio’s jurisdiction actually began. One by one, the fuel trucks followed the Door-Knocker through the gap. San Atanasio cop cars went through, too. They looked a lot like LAPD cars, but the guys inside them were grinning. The Los Angeles policemen ran the gamut from glum to homicidal.
San Atanasio police cars looked a lot like L.A.’s now. Old-timers had told Colin about a ’70s experiment that, for some reason, didn’t last. The city painted its cars a color it called lime yellow-a bureaucrat’s weaseling name for chartreuse. And it slapped POLICE on their sides in enormous diffraction-grating letters.
He’d seen photos, too. But he’d believed the old-timers even without them. Some shit was just too weird to make up. And a decade responsible for Grand Funk Railroad would have to answer for lime-yellow cop cars with rainbow letters as well.
After the last tanker truck rumbled off the freeway and through the LAPD’s would-be roadblock, Colin turned to Gabe Sanchez and said, “Piece of cake.”
Gabe scratched his thick, bushy mustache. “L.A. cops’ll call it a piece of something else,” he said with unusual delicacy.
“Too bad,” Colin answered. “C’mon. Let’s go. I want to be leading the parade again when we hand off to the Hawthorne guys.”
They got into their unmarked Ford. Colin waved sweetly to the guys from the LAPD as they went by. At least three Los Angeles policemen flipped him off in reply. He smiled even wider-he gave them a shit-eating grin, if the truth be known-and went right on waving. As long as they didn’t open fire on him, everything was jake.