Joseph Wambaugh: Hollywood Moon

But Officer Sarah Messinger just had to ignore them all, and she lay back down, her cheek pressed to the concrete, and in a moment went into the deepest slumber of her young life, one from which she would not awaken for ten days.

In agony, Leon Calloway tried to muscle the gun down, but Rupert Moore kept bending his wrist inexorably, and the muzzle kept moving back, back toward the face of the cop, who felt Rupert Moore’s powerful fingers gouging, prying his own away from the trigger guard. And then there was nothing he could do to stop this powerful force.

During those last seconds, Leon Calloway was certain he would die, and he tried to remember the words he’d learned at catechism: “O my God, I am sorry for having offended…”

One blast, one fireball, one echoing.40 caliber round ringing in their ears, and it stopped the praying, the shouting, the Hollywood fantasy, everything.

It came from the yard next door, also fenced off with wrought iron, which Dana Vaughn and her male partner had entered from three properties away during all the screaming. By climbing the fences, they’d managed to get to the adjoining yard of a stucco triplex, where they had a better view. They were right in the kill zone, with Rupert Moore lying at an angle where one of them could risk a head shot. Maybe.

And that’s what Dana Vaughn had done. While her partner was unholstering his nine, she was already at the fence, aiming her Glock with both hands as the airship’s spotlight bounced and the crisscrossing beams from flashlights danced over the two men, making her dizzy. She took a long breath, held it, and squeezed off the only shot she’d ever fired outside the police pistol range.

The.40 caliber round did not strike the intended target, which was the skull of Rupert Moore, but was close enough, entering the side of his throat, ripping apart the carotid arteries and bathing Leon Calloway first in spatter, then in spurt, when he fell face forward onto the gurgling killer, who began quickly to drown in his own blood.

The first rescue ambulance that roared into the alley whisked Sarah Messinger from the scene, followed by a second. One of the cops waiting outside the now-open security gate worried that Rupert Moore hadn’t bled out yet and said to the paramedics, “Did you happen to hear the Dodgers game? Did they win tonight? Who was pitching?”

The paramedics declined the invitation to discuss Dodgers box scores and instead ran to the side of Rupert Moore, who might not have finished bleeding out but who was very dead nonetheless.

At that point in the story, Dana said to Hollywood Nate, “The watch commander sent me downtown to the BSS shrink, and I had to show up without a weapon and sit around with a bunch of other cops who were supposed to talk about emotional trauma they were supposed to’ve experienced. Nobody had much to say, and when it was my turn, I had nothing to say. So I had to go for a private session, where the shrink said, ‘Tell me about your childhood.’ And ‘Tell me about your relationship with your parents.’ I said to him, ‘A cop was about to get killed. What do my parents have to do with it?’ He said, ‘Well, then, tell me what you felt when you pulled that trigger.’ I said, ‘First of all, I didn’t pull, I squeezed. And I felt the Glock buck in my hand. And I also felt an acrylic nail snap off when my finger got snagged on the wire fence. And I felt pissed off because I paid forty bucks for those acrylics. Those are the things I felt.’ Finally, he seemed to think I was hopeless and gave up.”

“What happened to the young boot?” Nate asked.

“She’s okay,” Dana said. “She was in a coma for ten days, but she’s in physical therapy and doing fine now. She was brand-new to Watch Three when it happened, so I didn’t know her at all and had never spoken to her, not even in the locker room.”

“And that was Calloway in the black-and-white?”

“He’s the main reason I requested to come to Watch Five. I thought that if he didn’t see me at roll call every day, he might stop dogging me.”

“So he’s your guardian angel,” Nate said.

“On Watch Three, whenever he was clear, he’d roll on every call of mine that he figured had the slightest element of danger involved. I’m sure it drove his partners crazy. I know it drove me crazy.”

“And now you have someone to watch over you, just like in the song.”

“Much to my discomfort,” Dana said. “I tried talking to him about it, but he claims he backs up everyone like this. I finally talked confidentially to the watch commander and got to come to Watch Five.”

It was close to midnight when Dana Vaughn and Nate Weiss got a “man with a gun” call to the parking lot near the border with West Hollywood. It involved an elderly resident shooting at feral cats with a pellet gun. The pensioner explained that the cats were keeping him awake with their cries at night.

After giving the appropriate warnings and hearing promises from the old guy’s daughter that it would never happen again, Dana and Nate were walking to their car, and there it was again: 6-A-79 parked a few houses away, lights out, watching.

“Okay, that’s it!” Dana Vaughn said.

While Nate waited beside their shop, she crossed the street and approached the driver’s side, saying, “Leon, can I talk to you for a minute?”

The hulking cop said something to his partner, got out of the black-and-white, and trudged off with Dana Vaughn until they were alone.

She said to him, “Leon, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that you think you’re taking care of me, and I know why, but you gotta stop.”

“I back up everyone on code two and code three calls if I can,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

“Not like this, you don’t,” Dana said. “And it’s embarrassing.”

Leon Calloway, looking in the direction of his shoes, said, “You saved my life, Dana. I was two seconds from having my face blown apart. When I go home at night and peek in at my son sleeping, I think, I get to do this because of Dana Vaughn. When I wake up in the morning after a bad dream-and I have lots of bad dreams now-I think, I get to wake up this morning because of what Dana Vaughn did for me. That’s what I think.”

“Have you talked to our BSS guy?” Dana asked, referring to the Behavioral Science Services shrink who was assigned to the officers of Hollywood Station, a man with a lonely job, because cops, being members of a macho tribe, feared a stigma of being soft and needy.

“That’s for sick people,” the big cop said. “I’m not sick.”

“Leon, this is over, hear me?” Dana said. “You’ve gotta move on with your life. Leave it behind. Let it go. If you do this again, I’m gonna have to complain to the captain.”

Leon Calloway kept his head bowed for several seconds and finally turned and shuffled toward his waiting black-and-white.

“Roger that,” he said without looking back. “But I’ll never forget. And if you need anything, you just call Six-Adam-Seventy-nine. I’ll be all over it.”

When Dana got back to their shop and they resumed patrol, she said to Hollywood Nate, “There was one thing about the BSS shrink that I didn’t tell you about. He said that women aren’t so afraid to admit it when we can use a little help. I told him for the third time that I had no regrets about capping that guy, and that he did lots of bad things in his life, and I had no choice and no remorse. The shrink said, nevertheless, I killed a human being, and that means something to me in a certain part of my brain. He predicted that I might have night sweats and recurring dreams about trying to fire my gun and having the round dribble out and fall on the ground. He said that kind of dream is common to cops, especially after a fatal OIS.” She paused, looked over at Nate, and said, “Do you ever have dreams like that?”