Lights and Sirens
Part 59 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“All I did was play on the mistakes of other people. That’s all the devil does. He puts on your face and plays you back to yourself.”
~ Charles Manson
Nite Moves
It’s the end of summer and you are leaning against the door of your car in the parking lot at Elings Park, at the far end of the Jerry Harwin Parkway. It’s in the middle of the city but it feels remote because the towering trees have you boxed in. Bandits used to hide here from horseback deputies and other bandits. It’s hot. The sun is falling into the Pacific Ocean and the relative humidity is so high the whole place feels like a clearing in the jungle, like a crude bivouac in Singapore. The asphalt is gummy. People dressed up for safaris are coming out of the trailhead—being dragged through wavy mirage by gigantic slobbering dogs. The safari people have little green bags full of dogshit tied to their wrists, and over in the back corner a carload of stupid white kids are smoking weed in their mom’s Prius. They don’t know who you are, or what you do, and you don’t care what they are doing. One look is all you need: they’re kids, not crooks. The smell of weed drifts in and out on the sticky air. You think: They probably shouldn’t be driving, but it’s not your problem to solve, and you aren’t going to call for a black and white.
You are meeting an informant. Blue. He’s resurfaced after weeks of radio silence, blowing up your phone with messages. He wants to meet. He’s agitated about something. When mercenaries get agitated they find reasons to burn down their competition. It’s a cutthroat business. Respect always matters in that world and it also never does. What’s clear is that some worm has turned in the Santa Boo-Boo underground. You are unlikely to ever know the truth of it, what has set Blue off. A bad transaction. A dose of disrespect. A bad mood. A toothache. The drizzling shits. It could be anything.
You’ve been too busy on other cases, but now you aren’t, and here you are, your shoes making sucking sounds on the asphalt, talking to Blue about the tree rats who live in the palms and wondering how in the fuck Blue, with his wild and pure white hair, like some kind of wandering djinn, is wearing a sweatshirt in all of this heat. He looks like a septuagenarian boxer trying to cut weight. You’ve got swamp-ass and a low-grade tension headache, and the gun on your hip feels like eighteen pounds of melting chocolate, but you have to suffer through the small talk to get to the point.
Blue starts:
