Cold Blooded Murder
A Policeman's Tale, Part 17
"I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings." ~Raymond Chandler
Choose Your Own Adventure
You are rolling past the County Bowl on North Milpas when the call comes out as a gang fight involving numerous subjects. There are multiple callers which means it isn’t just a Riviera divorceé in a 7 Series Mercedes passing Pennywise Market and seeing a sneering gaggle of unemployed homeys for the first time in her life. That happens sometimes, little life shocks for the riviera royalty, and so the woman calls 911 and the homeys all laugh when you roll up because they’d flashed her some gang signs and knew that she would pee in her pants a little bit. In a few more years you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about what really happens at Pennywise, how those homeys terrify and tax the Indian emigrant family who own it. You’ll sit in a back room of the market while the mother sobs from fear. Fear for her daughter, fear for her husband whose health is taking a nosedive from the daily stress put on his business and his life by the tattooed thugs who treat his store, and his life, like their private pantry.
It’s what they would do to everyone, if they could.
But today it’s not that, and whatever this call finally ends up being it won’t be what it sounds like on the radio. The long chain from incident to reporting party to dispatch to a cop in the field is a kind of time and information warp, a telephone game of interpretation and rapidly changing circumstances—and anyway, as you pass the parking lot at the Bowl you’re caught-out meditating on another of the job’s endless pleasantries, on the elementary school teacher who shit on your boot last Saturday night.
It was supposed to be a cozy overtime shift, a short and painless way to pull in some time-and-a-half for the elusive vacation you’ve been promised. You were standing around with the medics in a state of relative relaxation, listening to Steve Miller croon about Space Cowboys under the same towering hills where Joaquin Murrietta once camped between raids. But beautiful reveries cannot go unpunished by the gods and so the Bowl Security kids brought her out to the parking lot. It was obvious even from a considerable distance, given the caterwauling and splayed feet, like a puppy that doesn’t want to go outside, that she was in violation of both the spirit and the letter of California Penal Code 647(f), which goes on at length about intoxicating liquors and being in public and how they usually don’t pair well together.
