Boulevard (17 page)

“Hell to pay?” Erin said.

“God, yeah. Complete shitstorm. It took over seventy cops to calm the neighborhood—they had to bring in guys from three other precincts. Two white cops shoot a fifty-three year-old black guy. If that won't rip the city apart, nothing will. Before the shooting, he was just another drunk from the neighborhood, but the second he hit the ground, he became a community leader. That's all the papers wrote about—cops shoot community leader. The autopsy showed he was off-the-chart drunk, but that only made things worse—what kind of cops shoot a drunk? That night I dreamed about it. I dreamed about it for weeks—more. I'd taken a human life. He may have been a perp chasing after a kid with a gun when it happened, but the truth was, he still was somebody's father, grandfather. I'd lay in bed at night thinking, what right did I have? I wondered what my wife thought—what did she think of me now that I had killed someone?

“We got a thirty-day suspension and Angelo and I couldn't be partners any more. The captain called it a bone they had to throw to the neighborhood. But the city just got too hot. I was on the front page of Daily News for a week—the guy who killed the community leader. I could've stuck it out. But I kept asking myself, is this was really where I wanted to raise my kid? LA was looking for cops—they had all these flyers on the stationhouse bulletin board, and suddenly it didn't seem so bad.”

“That's hard. Really hard.”

“Sorta … Yeah. I dunno.” Jimmy felt it in his stomach. He hated going back to the shooting again—but telling her was like letting go a huge breath of air. And no one had asked him about it for a long time—until Erin.

32

I
t was pushing three in the morning when Jimmy finally made it home to Santa Monica. He had a small house on Yale that they moved into when they first came to LA nine years ago. When they bought the place, most of the houses on the block were like his, with low fences around the yards, kid's toys on the lawns. Over the years, one at a time, the houses were being torn down and replaced with lousy-looking, overpriced apartments.

For a while, things were pretty good. But that was before Rancher fell into the abyss. Rancher was fourteen and went to a party at the beach where one of his buddies passed him a crack pipe. He had smoked some pot and drank a little, but nothing serious. Crack was a whole other animal. After the first hit, he did another, and then one more. When he woke up the next morning, all he could think about was how to get the next hit.

First, he emptied his bank account, then he stole all the cash in the house. And after that he stole Jimmy's ATM card from the dresser while they slept—anything for the rock. It was hell for Jimmy and Shannon. Rancher was a solid “A” student before this, and two weeks later he wasn't showing up at school. When Jimmy confronted him, he was still together enough to realize what he was doing with his life, and Jimmy got him to agree to go into a treatment program. After two nights, Jimmy was woken by a call from the treatment center at one in the morning, telling him that Rancher and a girl had busted out. It didn't take a genius to know where they would go.

Jimmy hit Hollywood. He drove down countless dark streets passing pack after pack of strung-out street kids, slowing the car to a crawl, to see if Rancher was with them. He went by dozens of crack whores and their scumbag pimps. He drove past every crackhouse he knew—fifteen or twenty of them—but from the outside there was nothing. Not the tiniest hint of whether Rancher was inside. A giant knot of pain was in his stomach. He cruised the streets endlessly, eyeing every kid he saw, praying that one of them would be his. These were the same streets he worked everyday as a cop, only then he was dealing with someone else's problems, not his own.

He rolled up on the baby transvestite Gina as she was getting out of a car. He could make life miserable for her and she knew it. For fifty bucks Gina told Jimmy about a kid who fit Rancher's description she saw earlier at a crackhouse on Wilton. Jimmy knew the place: the SWAT guys in his precinct had raided it half a dozen times. It had a door like a battleship's, and there were God knows how many guns in there from crackheads trading them for rocks. There was no way Jimmy was going to be able get inside on his own. He parked the car half-way down the block hoping that Rancher would eventually come out. No luck. The sun came up and when it was eight, Jimmy called Charles. It was a call he hated to make, but what choice did he have? Charles told him the SWAT team was serving warrants starting at nine, but the place on Wilton wasn't on the list. Without a second of hesitation, Charles added it on. Fuck a search warrant, Jimmy's kid was inside.

An hour and a half later, twenty cops in black fatigues, Kevlar helmets, bullet-proof vests, and M-16 machine guns charged the door. The lead guys screamed
Police—we have a warrant!
A second after, two guys behind him smashed the door down with a steel battering ram. The cops raced in yelling
Get on the ground!
, and
On the ground, asshole—now!
His gun drawn like the rest, Jimmy followed the SWAT team in. He had been in plenty of crackhouses, but this was a bad as they got. The place was strewn with garbage, empty cans were all over the place, along with rotting remnants of fast-food burritos and burgers. It smelled of shit and piss. In the first room he went through, a guy with a scraggy beard lay on the floor already cuffed, and beside him was a girl still in her teens, sitting on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest. She must have been seven or eight months pregnant. A cop was kneeling next to her holding up a crack pipe he found in her boot. She was crying and saying,
I try to stop … I'm trying to stop.
Jimmy walked past her into the living room where two Latino guys faced the wall as the lieutenant was speaking Spanish and holding up a gun which he took off one of them. Jimmy made it to the back room. There, sitting on the rattiest mattress he had ever seen, in a room with stench so bad he could barely stand it, was Rancher. He was completely strung out. Beside him was a pretty Hispanic girl with waist-length black hair who must've been a nice kid too before she got into this. She was wearing only a tank top and panties—so it was obvious how she paid for the shit. Rancher's eyes met Jimmy's, not with surprise or even hate—but like he barely recognized him. Jimmy felt like screaming at him, he felt like hugging him. How could this be the same kid he taught to ride a bike, he read to every night, whose little league team he coached, whose laughter and kisses were the happiest parts of his whole life? … He helped him to his feet, then reached across the mattress for a pair of corduroy pants and passed them to the girl. As she slipped them on, Rancher looked up at him. His eyes were distant and drained of life. Somehow, it all began to register. He said, “I'm sorry,” and leaned his head on Jimmy's shoulder.

The girl, Mary, was returned to her parents in San Diego, and when Rancher got home, he slept for almost a day. When he came to, he asked Jimmy for one more chance. Jimmy begged the treatment center to take him back. If Jimmy wasn't a cop, they probably wouldn't have gone for it. Rancher went back in, saying he was completely committed to making it work. But six days later, Rancher bolted and was back out on the street. This time for good.

Jimmy paced his house. He couldn't sleep. He opened the refrigerator. Lots of condiments—pickles, mustard, relish—but little else. This is what happens when you live alone. He threw out some tangerine beef from Wok Fast that should have been tossed last week. He walked some more. He thought of Erin—tried to stop. He picked up a picture on the mantelpiece—the family on the beach in Florida. Shannon, looking as good as she ever did, her arm around his waist as Jimmy held a seven-year-old Rancher. They were happy then. Jimmy flopped down on the couch and pushed the clicker. Bond and some babe racing through a building exploding all around them. Next channel, Australian rules football. Who cares? Next, a cute blonde in some cheeseball Showtime movie running her hands all over her breasts in a sauna. Jimmy used to like bumping into shots like this, but now it made him think of Dani, and all the shit she had to do. Back to Bond. The building was still blowing up. He thought about Erin. Wondered what she was doing now. Was she with the husband? Probably. Was she sleeping? The phone rang.

“It's Erin. I hope it's not too late to call.”

Jimmy felt a jolt in his chest. Should he tell her he was thinking about her, or play it cool. Better not say anything. But he did it anyway. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess we're on the same wavelength,” she said. “I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about the Chateau girl who the busboys told us about. What I would do if I was in her shoes.”

“And?”

“She'd have to be unbelievably hardcore not to tell anyone about it. It would have to be burning a hole in her.”

“You think she spilled it?” Jimmy said.

“It's worth checking out, right?”

Jimmy imagined Erin—sitting at her kitchen table in Chatsworth; the kitchen probably had blue and white wallpaper; glass cabinets with perfectly lined up coffee cups; dark but for one light above the table where she sat in a T-shirt—and he wondered if he would ever get her out of that kitchen, and himself off the fucking couch in Santa Monica.

33
Casey

C
asey and Dragon found Tulip sitting on the low wall by the Chinese Theater. She looked bad—her arms rested on her knees as she bent over to light a smoke. It was ten or eleven and Hollywood was just starting to come alive. Tulip was by herself at one end of the wall. At the other, were a bunch more kids. A couple of skinheads were coming out of Mickey D.'s. Gina, Barbara and two other baby trannys were heading for Joey's. As Casey came closer to the wall, she could see Tulip was more than tired, she was hurt. Her right eye was purple and swollen, the sort of major black eye that cartoonists draw when they're exaggerating what a black eye really looks like.

“What happened?”

“Date. I thought it was straight. Nothing bad. But this jerkoff wanted to piss on me. I told him no way. He gets like, ‘Look you fucking whore, that's what I'm paying you for.' And he wouldn't let it go. Like an idiot, I yell, ‘Go fuck yourself, pervert.' And this is what I got back. Fucking asshole.”

“You gotta get some ice,” Dragon said.

“Nah. I'll be okay.”

“You gotta. We can get it at Joey's. It'll make the swelling go down. You'll feel better.”

Tulip pushed out a smoke. She wasn't going anywhere.

“She's right,” Casey said.

“You'll feel a lot better—really,” Dragon said. “I'll get it.”

Tulip looked up, and with the faintest smile said, “I'm supposed to be the one who takes care of everyone around here.”

She got up and they started towards Highland, when Tulip stopped.

“Hey—where's Paul? I could definitely use a mega-dose of the Saint right now.”

Casey felt it in her stomach. “He get married and leave us all behind? “ Tulip continued.

“Nah, “ Casey said. “He's got some old rich dude hot for him and he's riding it for all it's worth.”

“When you see him—tell him we need his cute ass back here—”

Tulip then saw whipping around a corner, and flying to a stop at the end of the block, three cruisers. A pack of cops jumped out and before anyone knew what was happening, they grabbed a couple of the skinheads and two or three others.
Fuck!
Casey could see more cop cars farther down the Boulevard, all doing the same thing.
This was it!

“Shit!” Tulip yelled. Dragon froze. Casey turned around towards La Brea—and coming down the Boulevard from the other direction were two more cruisers. Tulip scrambled over the wall and sprinted into the parking behind the Chinese. Casey and Dragon followed, and the three girls raced through a line of parked cars. Casey looked back and saw a cruiser had jerked to a stop by the wall, and two cops were coming over it after them.

As she ran, Casey felt a panic like she never had before. The other kids might get popped for being runaways or doing dates—big deal—what they wanted her for was a million times worse. She kept running, but then she realized it was crazy—how could they ever outrun the cops?—the parking lot was only so big, and in seconds they'd be back in the open on a street. Then she saw it. A cool old Impala convertible that someone was stupid enough to park with the top down.

“Here!” Casey called to Dragon and Tulip. She dived over the Impala's door, into the back seat, and the other girls followed. Casey and Dragon were huddled together, tight and low on the right side of the bump, and Tulip was on the left. Casey's heart was pounding and she was so close to Dragon that her arm could feel Dragon's chest going up and down as she tried to catch her breath. They heard a girl cop yelling to her partner.

“It was this row, Manny?”

“Yeah, “ her partner replied. A guy with a Mexican accent. “I saw them. Definitely.”

Casey's heart was racing so loudly you could hear it for a mile. She wanted to lift her head up to see. But didn't. She could hear the soft crunching of boots on gravel as the girl cop walked down the row of cars. Her boots were moving slowly … very slowly, and every footstep sent a jolt through Casey. She thought, one minute you're sitting on the wall chilling with your friends, and five minutes later, they got you. Forever. The steps were getting closer. She could now see the cop—she was in her twenties, intense, with black hair in a tight braid tucked under her hat. She slowly moved through the row of cars, towards them. Casey held her breath and kept saying to herself,
keep going … keep going …
And she did. But then, she stopped. Right at the hood of the Impala. The cop stood only a few feet away, her walkie-talkie was squawking away. Casey looked over at Dragon and Tulip. They were all holding their breath. Dead quiet … All the cop had to do was turn her head and they were busted. Her hand resting on top of her gun, she started to turn around …
Shit. Run for it? Now?
A second later, Casey heard the sound of someone running in the distance—and the cop took off. Casey lifted her head to see it was a skinhead. The cop's partner caught him and was cuffing him. The girl cop was helping out. Casey leaned her forehead into the back seat of the Impala, her heart pounding, body trembling.