On the wall behind the long tables where his captive audience sat were framed movie posters, including ones for Sunset Boulevard and L. A. Confidential, an indication that the officers of Hollywood Station were very aware of their unique geography. Finally, the lieutenant ran out of things to lecture them about and said, "Let's go to work." The cops gathered their gear, but before leaving the room, each of them touched for luck the framed photo of their late sergeant whom they'd called the Oracle. They had loved their old supervisor, and he had thought of them as his children.
The framed photo, which was affixed to the wall beside the doorway, bore a brass plate that said:
THE ORACLE
APPOINTED: FEB 1960
END-OF-WATCH: AUG 2006
SEMPER COP
The assistant watch commander, Sergeant Lee Murillo, a calm and bookish Mexican American with hair the color of stainless steel and the knotty rawboned body of a long-distance runner, had fifteen years of LAPD experience and was a supervisor they did happen to like. He was downstairs in the detective squad room talking to the MAC team about Cindy Kroll and Louis Dryden, and he gave the Little Armenia drive-by job to 6-X-76 when Lieutenant O'Reilly was finished with them.
All five patrol units, including 6-X-32, manned by Flotsam and Jetsam, and 6-X-66, with Hollywood Nate driving and Snuffy Salcedo riding shotgun, left the kit room with their gear and headed for the parking lot at 6 P. M. They toted black nylon war bags full of gear, as well as Remington shotguns, Ithaca beanbag shotguns, helmets, Tasers, pepper spray, and rovers. During the prior several years that the LAPD had suffered under the federal consent decree, they had also been required to draw from the kit room devices to record superfluous data about people they stopped or arrested. None of that data collecting had ever provided police critics with information that they'd hoped would prove claims of racial profiling. As hard as they tried, the disgruntled critics of the LAPD were not able to wave the race flag when it came to traffic and pedestrian stops.
P2 Vivien Daley, one of three female officers working the mid-watch that evening, was the driver of the shop belonging to 6-X-76, so called because of the shop numbers on the roof and doors of their Crown Vics. Those numbers allowed a unit to be easily identified by citizens and by the LAPD helicopters, called airships by the troops.
The late summer sun was still high enough that Viv Daley put on her sunglasses when she got behind the wheel. The thirty-year-old cop was born and raised in Long Beach and had played varsity, basketball at Long Beach State, but she had disappointed her parents, who wanted her to become a teacher. She always said she'd applied at the LAPD "on a whim" but had never regretted it in the eight years that she'd served. Viv loved to quote the Oracle to her parents, especially his often-repeated mantra: "Doing good police work is the most fun you'll ever have in your entire lives." She found that to be true.
Viv Daley had scrubbed good looks, and the only makeup she carried was a pencil to darken her sandy eyebrows and a subtle pale lipstick, a shade approved by the Department. She kept her auburn hair pinned up above the collar of her uniform shirt, as was required of all female patrol officers. At end-of-watch, when she'd changed into her jersey and jeans and three-inch wedges, she stood taller than almost every male officer on the watch, but Flotsam could still look down at her, wedges or not.
Her passenger partner "keeping books," or "taking paper," which simply meant being the report writer, was twenty-nine-year-old Georgie Adams, who had seven years on the Job. He wore his raven hair slicked back, and with his black irises and chiseled features, he was as dark and exotic-looking as Viv Daley was fair and freckled. The dissimilarity extended to their stature as well. At a wiry five foot eight, he was the shortest male officer on the midwatch, a full five inches shorter than his gym-fit partner, and though he was well muscled, he didn't outweigh her by much due to her large-boned frame. He referred to Viv as "tall sister" and often called her "sis."
Because of his Anglo-Saxon surname but swarthy appearance, questions about his ethnicity came up immediately with new partners, and when it did, Georgie Adams was quick to display his sinister smile and say, "I'm a Gypsy boy. A distant cousin to the late George Adams, California's 'King of the Gypsies.'"
Nobody ever knew if Georgie's claim was true, and nobody had been able to pry much more of his history from him. He'd served in Iraq with the Marines and had been wounded by a roadside bomb, that much was known for sure. He was born and raised in San Bernardino, California, and sometimes he told what everyone figured was a preposterous story of having been bought from a Gypsy clan passing through town by a Syrian carpet importer and his wife, who raised him and let him keep his noble Gypsy surname. Yet whenever he was called to the home of an Arabic-speaking crime victim in Hollywood, it was clear that he could not speak the language of the Syrians. The next guess was that he was of Latino descent, but he could not speak Spanish either. All bets were off at Hollywood Station as to Georgie Adams's true ethnicity.