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
“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
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
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.
Gabe drove with a splendid disregard for what little traffic there was. “Who’s gonna write me a ticket, huh?” he demanded.
“Not me, dude,” Colin said.
At the border between San Atanasio and Hawthorne, one of the latter town’s finest asked him, “You get any trouble from LAPD?” By the way one eyebrow quirked, he already knew the answer. Well, he would. Every LAPD radio frequency would have been sulfurous. And the Hawthorne cops would have monitored the scanners just so they could stay informed, of course. Yeah, of course.
Colin shrugged and jerked a thumb at the Door-Knocker. “They didn’t want to see whether we really would have shot them up and knocked them out of the way.”
The guy from Hawthorne studied him. “I think they worked out the answer on their own.”
“Maybe.” Colin shrugged again. “The trucks are your babies now. Take good care of ’em. Tell the El Segundo guys the same thing when you make the handoff.”
“Will do,” the Hawthorne officer promised. Like Colin, he wore a suit not too new and not too stylish. If you became a cop to get rich and look cool, you were more than a few boulders short of a rock pile.
Or maybe you were Mike Pitcavage. Colin reported back to the elegant chief of the San Atanasio PD after the Hawthorne cops took charge of the fuel trucks. On the other side of his flight-deck desk, Pitcavage nodded. “Yeah, that pretty much matches the complaint I got from LAPD,” he said, and then stood up and stuck out his hand. “Good job, Colin.”
He was manicured, too. Colin noted as much as he shook with the chief. Just as you’d expect, Pitcavage had a smooth, firm grip. “Sometimes us small-town boys can surprise the city slickers,” Colin said, putting on a cornpone drawl.
“There you go. They want to draw you and quarter you and put your pieces at the city gates to warn off anybody else who gets ideas like that,” Pitcavage said.
“What did you tell ’em?” Colin wondered if he’d get thrown to the wolves, a sacrifice to the great god Petroleum.
But Pitcavage answered, “I said, if they wanted to try it, they’d have to do me first.”
“Thanks.” Colin sounded less dry than usual. Yes, he’d wondered whether Pitcavage would grab the chance to hang him out to dry. He’d been a rival for the leather swivel chair the chief sat in now. He didn’t want it any more, but Pitcavage didn’t know that, and probably wouldn’t believe it if he found out. Ambitious himself, he’d always figure everybody else was, too. But here he’d done everything a subordinate could want from his CO. After a momentary pause, Colin asked, “What did they say when you told ’em that?”
“They told me to fuck myself in the ass. They said they’d drive spikes through a telephone pole, and I could use that.” Pitcavage grinned. “They were righteously pissed off.”
“I guess,” Colin agreed. “If they’re that up in arms, are they really so low on gas themselves? They’re L.A., for crying out loud. They always get what they want.”
“Not this time. This time they get hind tit. They aren’t used to it, and they don’t like it for beans.” Pitcavage
