unnecessary.
The only other sticking point had been Chooch. The chief had refused to cut me loose to work the undercover assignment if Chooch knew the truth.
Tony had reasoned that Chooch would not be able to resist telling his friends that what they were hearing about his father being fired was B. S. 'He'll swear them to silence and then let the secret out.' Tony had said, adding, 'Any leak can get you killed.' Alexa and I had finally and reluctantly agreed to keep our son in the dark.
Alexa had moved some of my clothes over from the house in Venice. We dressed in sweats and went out on the upstairs balcony to sit under the stars.
'You said your car got impounded by Blue Light Towing. You know they probably hung a bug on it,' Alexa said.
'I left it with Harpo. He's sweeping it now. But he's not going to take anything out if he finds one. It would tip them off.'
Of course, the other huge risk in all this was Freeway Ricky Ross himself. He'd threatened my life in the Parker Center garage ten years ago. He'd lost his career, his wife, everything he owned. I'd been the witness who had taken him down. What better way to get back at me than to lure me into a Serpico-like situation, then find a way to let Alonzo or Talbot Jones know that I was an LAPD spy? Td be shot in the field. Fragged in some staged gunfight.
I spent the rest of the night with Alexa in Deputy Chief Arnett's king-sized bed. We made love again, held each other, and then fell into a restless sleep.
Chapter 15
I arrived back at the stereo shop on Sixth Street at a little past seven A. M. Harpo was in his office, hunched over a Mexican breakfast of refried beans and rice.
'Want some of this?' he asked, pushing the plate across his desk and offering me a plastic fork out of a box. 'This guy Gonzales, on the corner, is a genius with a frying pan.'
I grabbed one of the forks and took a bite. Amazing.
'Find anything?' I asked.
'Your Acura has better recording capabilities than the big room over at Capitol Records. Whoever installed that shit knew what they were doing.' He led me over to my car, still carrying the plate of beans, then leaned in and pointed at two carefully concealed microphones. One was in the rearview mirror light sensor, the other was tucked up under the dash on the passenger side out of sight.
'It s all voice-activated. I erased the recording back to the spot just before you pulled in here, then turned it all off.' He elosed the car door and we stepped back. 'All of the units are high-frequency radio bugs. They have receivers in the trunk, stuck to the inside of your spare tire. I left it all right where it is just like you wanted. For the fun of it, I installed a separate voice-activated radio unit of our own. It's buried up in the passenger side of the front seat piggybacking off their mikes.'
'Thanks, Harpo. You're the best.'
'Then how come I got busted?' He grinned.
I took a few more bites of the refried beans while he reactivated the digital recorders, then paid him in cash.
I pulled out of the Sixth Street garage and tuned the radio to an angry rap station, then set the volume at the threshold of pain just to piss off the dirtbag who eventually had to listen to all this.
My guess is they would go into my trunk and switch out the recorder late at night while I was sleeping, or when I was out on patrol with Alonzo and the MDX was unguarded in the police parking lot at the elementary school.
The big disadvantage of hanging a wire on someone is, if the bug ever gets discovered, it's very easy to get fooled by your own trickery. I started thinking of ways to get something on that recorder that would help my cause.
After pondering my top five options, I finally decided to give Sammy from Miami a call. Sammy Ochoa was a forty-year-old Cuban street character whose grind was every low-end street hustle ever worked on the ice-cream eaters from Minnesota who wandered the tarnished streets of Hollywood searching for scraps of movie glamour. He would sell these marks everything from a counterfeit Best Picture Oscar to fake Britney Spears memorabilia. He ran his business out of a gay movie theater he owned on Melrose Boulevard. I'd first busted Sammy when I was still in patrol, right after he got here from Miami Beach. Something about his flat-footed, take-no-prisoners larceny was comically appealing to me and we'd entered into an uneasy friendship where mutual benefit and cash were the glue. He slipped me street intel, which I paid for out of my snitch fund. I also kept Hollywood Vice off his back, claiming him as a street informant.
As I drove back to Haven Park, I decided to put on a little theater production, with Sammy from Miami as my featured guest star.
I got back to the Haven Park Elementary School before eight and parked in the police parking lot that adjoined the school. After I locked the Acura I hurried up the sidewalk.
I had to show my driver's license to the old guy at the gate, who didn't seem to remember me from yesterday.
The locker room was in turmoil like all police shifts getting ready for a tour-guys dressing in patrol uniforms, talking too loud, horsing around, slamming lockers.
Once I was down to my shorts and T-shirt, Alonzo Bell, already in harness, ambled over. Without warning he threw a beefy arm around my shoulders, then turned me roughly and presented me to the room of about ten other patrol officers. 'Meet my new boot, Hardwood Scully,' he announced. 'He fucks movie stars.'
The cops in the room hooted. 'He's a beaut, Al!' one said. 'Tiffany Roberts was fucking that?' Another laughed.
Alonzo suddenly slipped me into a headlock. Before I knew it, he was wrestling me playfully around the locker room, giving me a painful head noogie.
'This is the guy.' He joked as he threw me roughly against a locker, pushing his huge right palm into the middle of my chest, pinning me there. 'Let's check out the merchandise here.' Then he ran his hand quickly across my chest.
The cops in the room hooted with laughter. One shouted, 'Leave him be, Al. He's got an ass like a forty-dollar cow!'
I was grinning, pretending I was having fun while at the same time trying to keep from punching Bell's lights out. But I knew exactly what he was doing. He was checking me for a wire.
'You about through?' I asked, forcing a smile.
He grinned and turned me loose as the rest of the room laughed. 'For now. Let's get you in harness. We got some important shit to attend to. You and me are working fire and health this morning.'
I went to my locker feeling the eyes of the squad on me as I put on the rest of my uniform. Sergeant Bell was a strong flavor. The other cops took their lead from him.
'Where's your hat?' Alonzo asked, coming back from the men's room just as I closed my locker and slipped on my combination padlock.
'Arnie Bale is ordering one. Didn't have my size.'
'Let's go, then,' he said. 'Roll call.'
I carried my equipment duffel, known in police circles a war bag, and followed the stragglers into the gymnasium, where I sat beside Alonzo on the bleachers with other members of the day watch. I'd been told that in Haven Park, like in most departments, the patrol force was divided into three shifts. The day watch went from eight A. M. to four P. M. Mid-watch, from four to midnight. The graveyard was from midnight to eight. The shifts rotated every month. Haven Park now had forty-two patrol officers plus command staff.
In Haven Park, cops rode in single-man cars, what we'd call an L-unit in L. A. This facilitated business in the cafeteria line because with just one cop in a car there was never a corroborating witness. Since I was a probationer being trained by a sergeant, Alonzo and I were the only X-unit, or two-man car, on the day watch.
