want, I can get you his address and give him a call.'
'Sure, check and see if he's still living at the beach.' Shane waited on the line for a few seconds. His head throbbed. His stomach churned. The captain came back on.
'He still lives in Santa Monica, on the Strand 3467 Coast Highway. I'll let him know you're coming.'
Shane put his car in gear and pulled away from the shaded, tree-lined splendor of the private school, then made his way back toward the beach and the shrewd counsel of DeMarco Saint.
All the way there, he kept trying to figure it out. Ray Molar had been a black hole in his life from the day he first met him seventeen years ago. In the beginning, he'd been too green to see it. Eventually he recognized Ray for what he was and had gotten away from him. Last night, with Barbara's call, he'd been pulled back into Ray's sinister orbit. In one second he'd ended Ray's life and opened some kind of evil vortex that now threatened to destroy him as well.
Chapter 7
Any police officer facing an administrative review gets to choose a defense rep to defend him. According to Section 202 in the Police Bill of Rights, that representative can be anyone in the department below the rank of captain. The charter provides that the chosen officer must serve as the accused's defense representative unless such service would cause undue hardship or unless the chosen officer has a current duty assignment of such a sensitive nature as to prohibit the time commitment.
Over the years, several officers had become very adept at winning Internal Affairs cases and, as a result, got chosen as defense reps time and time again. They became schooled in the legal vagaries of the department disciplinary system, and most of them viewed Internal Affairs as a black hole of intrigue that they referred to as 'the Dark Side.' In a way, these men and women were mavericks inside the department, seeing themselves as an important demarcation line between the accused officers and the meat-eating 'politicians' who worked at Internal Affairs.
Such a man was retired Sergeant DeMarco Saint. He lived on the beach in Santa Monica. His house was run- down and desperately in need of a new roof and paint. He had made his place a hangout for a young, breezy beach crowd: everybody from surf bums and Rollerbladers to volleyball players and sidewalk musicians. They hung in clusters in front of his wood-shingled bungalow. DeMarco Saint presided over this collection of party animals like a wise, bearded guru. He had been a police officer for thirty years and had pulled the pin just last December. Then he had made an almost seamless transition from maverick cop to New Age swami.
Shane pulled his slickback into the public parking lot two doors down from DeMarco's house and showed his badge to the attendant, who greeted the free-parking move with a frown. Shane locked the car and walked to the beach bike path. He could hear loud rap music pounding before he even got on the pavement. As he got closer, he saw several young girls in string bikinis and some tanned surfers in boxer shorts sitting on DeMarco's low brick wall like prizes in a game of beach Jeopardy being played all day at high energy under a synthetic drumbeat.
Of course, Shane looked like a cop to them right off, and the conversation shriveled up like rose petals in a hot summer wind. By the time he got to DeMarco's wall, only the recorded rap of Snoop Doggy Dogg managed to ignore his presence.
'DeMarco around?' he asked the closest girl, a tall brunette in her mid-twenties.
'Inside,' she said, arching a pierced eyebrow and clicking her silver tongue stud against her teeth to see if it would piss him off.
'That's nothing.' He smiled. 'I've got mine through my dick.'
She laughed as he moved past her and through the front door of DeMarco's house.
He found the fifty-eight-year-old defense rep on his hands and knees, trying to adjust one of the blasting speakers while a teenage boy watched.
'Fucking bass is vibrating. Sounds like shit,' the young surfer with bleached blond hair and black roots said sullenly.
DeMarco kept fiddling and finally took some of the low end out. He leaned back on his knees to listen. 'Whatta you think?' he asked. 'Better?'
Snoop Doggy Dogg's staccato voice was bouncing ghetto hatred off the walls while DeMarco leaned forward again to screw with his woofers and tweeters.
'Gotta fuck the pigs. Gotta make da man die, if he come passin3 by da pork's gotta fry,' the Snoopster rapped violently.
'You got a minute?' Shane yelled.
DeMarco turned and saw him, grinned, and stood up. He was over six feet tall, and since Shane had last seen him, he'd let his gray hair grow. It was now tied in a ponytail that hung a quarter of the way down his back. He was wearing a tank top and had added a few tattoos that Shane thought looked ridiculous on his spindly arms, but not anywhere near as ridiculous as the silver cross that dangled from a chain in his left ear.
'Halley called. Been expecting you.' He turned to the fifteen-year-old surfer. 'You tinker with it for a while.'
As the rap banged against their ears, he led Shane through the kitchen, where he grabbed two cold Miller Lites out of the refrigerator, and then out the back along the side of the house, onto Santa Monica's long, sandy beach. The waves were unusually high that morning because of a storm in Mexico. They broke energetically forty yards away, shaking the sand under the two men's feet.
'I must be getting really old,' Shane said. 'That shit pisses me off.'
'I like having the kids around. So what're you gonna do?' He smiled, then reached into his ears and pulled out some cotton balls.
Shane couldn't help himself, he started laughing. 'You're tuning your speakers with cotton in your ears. No wonder your low end is vibrating.'
Shane and DeMarco sat in the warm sand and ripped the tabs off. The beer cans chirped and hissed foam. They clinked aluminum, and both took long swallows.
'I need help,' Shane said.
'I know. Captain Halley already filled me in. He thinks you're being schmucked.'
Shane looked at DeMarco. Sixteen years ago, a much younger DeMarco had saved him at a BOR. He was praying the newly ponytailed defense rep could do it again.
'Alexa Hamilton is back down there,' DeMarco continued. 'I figured she'd've transferred to some cushy job in administration by now.'
'She's still there after sixteen years? I thought an average tour at Internal Affairs was only five years.'
'She used to be their number one tin collector,' DeMarco said. 'They brought her back just to get you.' A tin collector was an advocate who got convictions that resulted in an officer losing his badge. Sergeant Alexa Hamilton was the department prosecutor who tried him all those years ago, only she had failed to get his tin.
'They're all a bunch a' ladder-climbing suck-ups,' DeMarco said, his hatred for the Dark Side spewing out of him unchecked. 'Everybody in the fucking division is looking to get to the top floor of the Glass House. It sucks, the way it's set up.'
Shane had heard DeMarco's complaints before and knew the old defense rep was talking about the fact that most of the captains and deputy chiefs on the ninth floor at Parker Center had also spent time as tin collectors in Internal Affairs. That made assignment as an IAD advocate a coveted post. It was a club. Lieutenants and below were selected by virtue of their test scores and oral boards, but to make captain, you had to be picked by the chief of police. The fact was, it was hard to be picked if you hadn't spent some time on the Dark Side. This phenomenon had the effect of making Internal Affairs a catcher's mitt for every hot dog and ladder-climbing politician in the department.
'Why did you mention Alexa Hamilton? What's she got to do with this?' Shane asked, thinking of the attractive but overly severe woman who sixteen years back had prosecuted him with such fanatical enthusiasm. She had quite a reputation, both personally and professionally, leaving a long trail of busted careers and broken hearts. More than
