Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

Tristan froze. The guy was between him and the exit. If he was into this ’roid monster’s locker, he was one dead identity thief. But the guy walked past him and opened a locker near the end of the row.

Tristan hurriedly completed the switch, closed the locker, and left the locker room, making sure to slip past the desk when the kid was on the phone and not looking, because he hadn’t been in there long enough for a workout or a swim. His only regret was that the Rolex would’ve looked very fine on his wrist. He was definitely a Rolex type of dude.

Officer Sheila Montez, the heavy-lashed, sloe-eyed P2 who was currently the heartthrob of both surfer cops as well as half the midwatch, had just finished doing her nails with clear polish, all the while shooting peevish glances at her slightly older partner. Aaron Sloane, at age twenty-nine and with eight years on the LAPD, certainly did not look older than Sheila Montez, nor anyone else at Hollywood Station, and that included twenty-two-year-old rookies. The boyish-looking cop was too heavy-footed on brake and throttle for Sheila’s taste, and he caused her to smear polish on her fingertip.

Both partners had the windows rolled down on this warm summer twilight as Aaron drove through the streets in the Hollywood Hills, where a number of car burglaries had taken place during early evening hours. After Sheila finished with her nails, she held all ten fingers in front of her, blowing lightly on them. Like all women patrol officers at LAPD, she had her hair pinned up so that it did not hang below her collar. And like all women officers who favored lip gloss and nail polish, she wore a pale unobtrusive shade while on duty. Aaron Sloane liked watching her do her lips and nails and thought her dusky good looks could be enhanced by a more crimson shade, especially if those lustrous umber tresses were unpinned and draped across her shoulders.

Sheila had almost seven years on the Job, and though she’d recently transferred to Hollywood from Pacific Division, she was comfortable enough with Aaron to be tending to nails and makeup while riding shotgun in unit 6-X-66. When she’d been a rookie at Northeast Division, her field training officer, an old P3 named Tim Brannigan, would’ve had apoplexy if she’d tried this in his shop. Tim Brannigan had been the kind of FTO who resented women working patrol in the first place, never talked to her when he could yell, and made her call him sir right to the end of her probationary period.

Since he’d hated writing reports, Tim Brannigan had let her drive only about once every four or five days. The rest of the time she was the passenger, doing the report writing. His favorite response to her requests to drive had been, “Rookie, you’re taking the paper.”

Sheila figured the old bastard probably wasn’t breast-fed as a baby, so he never learned to appreciate or respect women. But at least he wasn’t one of the handsy partners who’d “accidentally” touch her when reaching for the MDC dashboard computer. There had been more than a few of those in her career.

Sheila recalled a night two weeks earlier when Aaron Sloane was driving and a code 3 call had interrupted her nail polishing. She’d had to hang her wet nails out the window to dry while he drove with lights and siren to a check-cashing store where a clerk had accidentally tripped the silent robbery alarm. Aaron never complained about her dangling fingers and never told the others about what he called her girl stuff and she called her ablutions. And he never complained about the car mirror being turned so she could touch up her lips.

Part of the reason Aaron never protested about anything was that he was one of the smitten ones, as Sheila had suspected from their first night together. But she’d never encouraged him, even though now, glancing over at him, she had to admit that he had boy-next-door good looks and was buff from a lot of iron pumping. It was just that the sandy-haired, baby-faced reticent types like Aaron had never appealed to her.

And as though he had read her mind at that moment, Aaron said, “I got carded Saturday night when I had a date with a girl I met in my poly sci class.”

Like many of the young cops at Hollywood Station, Aaron was taking college classes, and he was only six units away from a bachelor’s degree.

“Does that surprise you?” Sheila asked. “Getting carded? I wish I could get carded once in a while.”

“Don’t tell me you’re worried about getting old,” Aaron said, gazing at her with that moony expression of his.

“Less than two years from now I’ll be thirty,” she said. “It’s hard to believe.”

“I’ll be thirty in four months,” Aaron said. “And I get carded just about every damn time I go to a bar. It’s embarrassing when I have a date.”

“You’ll be glad someday to be looking like a perennial frat rat.” To tweak him she added, “Do you have to shave every day, Aaron, or just a couple times a week?”

Aaron reddened and said, “You know, my youthful DNA almost got me killed before I got off probation. Did you know I worked UC for a while? I mean deep undercover.”

“No,” she said, quite surprised. “Where was that?”

“I was one they took right from the academy and put into the buy program,” he said, “back when they still liked to do that. I was twenty-one but looked sixteen. They put me in high school in the Valley, where teenage gangsters were selling pot and meth on campus. It was when a couple kids got killed in a four-car TC after they’d smoked crystal in the gym. It was mostly an intelligence-gathering job rather than making buys of dime bags. I was in school for two months as a senior transfer. My UC name was Scott Taylor, and I actually tried out for the baseball team. One time a very aggressive LAPD officer stopped a few of us in the school parking lot after a game, and he yelled to me, ‘Get your hands up!’ I put them up really high, thinking, if he shoots me, the trajectory test would get my mom and dad some big bucks in the lawsuit.”

With a sly smile Sheila said, “Did you score with any of the cheerleaders?”

“I was warned about fraternizing with the other kids, especially of the female persuasion,” Aaron replied. “And just as I was getting close to the adult gangster that was supplying the high school kids, I screwed up and ended my UC career.”

“How’d you do that?”

“By getting in a fight in shop class. Some little dude in one of the Hispanic gangs kept picking on me, always calling me puto and maricón, shit like that. I got sick of it, and one afternoon he dumped a soda on me and I kicked his ass. Beat him bad right there in class. Our instructor called Security and had us both taken to the vice principal’s office. He happened to be the only one that knew I was cop.”

“Damn, Aaron!” Sheila said. “There’s another side to you. Where do you park your Batmobile?”

“We were both given a suspension,” Aaron continued with a self-conscious smile. “Which was fine with me, except when I drove home from school that afternoon, I got tailed by two tricked-out low riders packed with crew. I figured they were tooled-up, so I tried to call for help, but my cell was dead. And that happened to be the day I was so late for school I ran out the door, leaving my Beretta on the kitchen table instead of taping it under the seat of my UC car like I was supposed to. With that posse driving up my ass, and me all helpless, I can tell you I was scared .”

“So what happened?”

“Of course, there’s never a cop around when you need one, so I drove that shitty UC car straight to the nearest mall with the lead lowrider locking bumpers with me, and me thinking the crowds of people might scare them off. When I got there, I looked in the mirror and saw one dude leaning out the window, aiming what looked like a TEC-nine at me. And I kinda panicked and burned a fast left but lost it and went skidding through the window of a Big Five store, where luckily nobody got hurt but me. Two cracked ribs and a busted collarbone.”