What was left of Melissa Monroe was being covered by a sheet when Dean Pratt stumbled by on his way to the radio car.
“Let me make the reports, partner,” Roscoe Rules said, and for the very first time Dean heard Roscoe’s voice quiver with uncertainty.
Then Whaddayamean Dean looked at Melissa Monroe and said later it was as though God in Heaven was displeased with dessert and had hauled off and threw it at the Ambassador Hotel but missed and splattered the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard. Skull and body had exploded. Organs and brain littered the pavement. She was white and yellow and pink, covered with lumpy red sauce and syrup. Melissa Monroe had been turned into a raspberry sundae.
Dean Pratt was very quiet for the rest of this bloodiest of all nights of his life. He thought they were finished when at the station Roscoe Rules finished writing his 15.7 report: that indispensable police document which handily covers all those police situations which do not conveniently fit into a category such as robbery burglary or vehicle theft.
“Remember, partner,” Roscoe warned as they sat alone in the station coffee room, “as soon as the janitor left, she just jumped. Nothing was said by nobody. She just jumped!”
Dean Pratt nodded and sipped at a soft drink, longing for a water tumbler of straight bourbon as he had never longed for anything in his life. He hoped there might be some downers left in the bottom of his closet at home where his girlfriend left a small cache. He was terrified by barbiturates since drug use was an irrevocable firing offense. But he wanted to get loaded and sleep.
At 11:00 P.M. Roscoe Rules dragged his partner out of the coffee room and said, “Come on, partner, let’s go do some police work.”
“Huh?”
“Come on, goddamnit, let’s hit the bricks.” Roscoe grinned. “We ain’t through yet. We still got forty-five minutes.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Dean.
“Come on!” Roscoe commanded, his grin vanishing. He took Whaddayamean Dean very firmly by the arm and walked him out to the radio car.
“Don’t go cuntish on me!” Roscoe snarled when he drove away from the station. “As far as I’m concerned we handled that call just right. If that whacko bitch wanted to take gas, fuck it, it ain’t our fault.”
When Dean didn’t answer Roscoe became angrier. His hairless brows puckered and whitened. “Fuck it! Who cares if all these rotten motherfuckers take gas. They’re all shit sucking, miserable scrotes anyways. What the fuck’s a life anyway, less it’s yours?”
Still Dean did not answer and Roscoe unconsciously pulled at his crotch and raged on. “You bust a good felony and you tell him to throw up his hands. He don’t do it and there’s no witnesses, I say put him down. Understand? Shoot em down like birds that shit on your roof. Remember that nigger and spick The Night My Balls Blew Up? I’m gonna get them someday And I’ll worship the ground they’re laid under. You’d like to blow em down, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess so,” Dean nodded.
“One nigger plus one spick equals a Mexi-coon!” Roscoe shouted. “That’s my hard charging partner! One a these nights we’ll get a couple a scrotes who wanna go the hard way. We’ll show some a these so called cops with their withered nuts how a couple a honest to God hard chargers do it! We’ll perform a little retroactive birth control and blow the motherfuckers right outta their shoes with my Magnum and your little peashooter!”
“I guess so, Roscoe,” Dean mumbled.
Roscoe was unconsciously pushing the radio car eighty miles an hour on the Santa Monica Freeway, heading nowhere, feeling the rush of cool wind, stroking himself while Whaddayamean Dean watched the speedometer.
And then they received the last radio call of the night.
“Seven-A-Eighty-five, Seven-Adam-Eight-five, assist the traffic unit, Venice and Hauser. Code two.”
“Seven-A-Eighty-five, roger,” Dean responded, banging the mike back in the holder, disgustedly jotting the location on the notebook pad.
“Shit fuck!” said Roscoe Rules, an expression he seldom used anymore since a former partner convinced him that it made him sound like a Central Avenue nigger.
“I’ve had enough for one night,” Dean grumbled. “I was ready for code seven.”
“Coulda used some chow myself,” said Roscoe. “Don’t the scrotes at communications have another car they can pick on? Shit fuck! Give her the handcuffs, partner.”
Dean Pratt, as Roscoe Rules had taught him, opened the bracelet of his handcuffs, holding it next to the hand mike, and squeezed the bracelet through five or six times, making a ratchet sound very like a large zipper being ripped open and closed. Roscoe was convinced that the sound would be magnified in the operator’s radio headset.
“Sounds like the jolly green giant opening his fly, don’t it, partner?”
Whaddayamean Dean nodded, suddenly a bit carsick. He hadn’t had a thing to eat for almost twenty-four hours. He had been in court all day and had come straight to work after testifying. And Roscoe Rules sitting there pulling on his dork wasn’t doing anything to settle his queasiness.
“I ever tell you about that slopehead we used to gang-bang in Nam, partner?” Roscoe asked, in a downright jovial mood since this would be their last call.
Even if it was a quickie he intended to make it an “end-of-watcher,” by “milking” the time out and failing to clear when they were finished.
“Don’t think you told me that one,” Dean sighed, by now deciding that he would rather have four fingers of bourbon than a hamburger.
“This little gook was about fourteen, but retarded. Had the brain of a chicken and nearsighted to boot. We got a translator to tell her that fucking was good for her eyes. She was ugly as a busted blister. Just a little better than jacking off. Best part wasn’t the pussy, it was cleaning her up ahead a time. We used to get these fifty cent rice paddy whores like her and throw them in this big wooden tub and eight or ten of us would get hot water and GI brushes and scrub the stink off them. Goddamn, that was fun! We’d lather them up and scrub every inch. Shit, we’d take our clothes off and fall in the water and drink beer and wash those bitches. Seems kinda weird but it was more fun washing them than gang fucking them.”
Dean nodded and leaned back while Roscoe drove west on Venice Boulevard and dreamed of thin young yellow bodies in soapy water. He had had many a lay but never had a more exciting sexual experience than scrubbing and lathering the rice paddy whores. Even now he got a blue veiner every time he held a bar of soap.
“Shit fuck!” Dean observed. “There it is!”
And there it was! Traffic was snarled six blocks in every direction. Fifty people were milling around like ghouls, and two frantic traffic officers in white hats were trying to lay down a flare pattern to divert east- and westbound traffic. Every east-bound lane was blocked by the wreckage of a spectacular four car collision.
Roscoe pulled on his red lights, crossed the center divider and parked the wrong way on Venice Boulevard.
“Glad you got here,” said a heavy middle aged traffic policeman who came running up with a handful of flares and spots of ash on his uniform. “Worst goddamn crash I seen in a long time. Drag race. Two cars laid down sixty feet of skids before they plowed into a northbound station wagon and knocked it clear back into the eastbound lanes.”
“What station wagon?” Dean asked, adjusting his hat, getting his flashlight ready as he and Roscoe jogged back toward the wreckage where several souvenir hunters were already starting to prowl.
“Get the hell out of here or you’re going to jail!” the traffic officer shouted to the unkempt teenagers.
“Everybody gone to the hospital?” Roscoe asked, waving his flashlight violently at a car which was trying to get past the wreckage to go south on Ridgely Drive.