Before Colin said anything, he took a long look at the paper. Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. “So this oil is for South Bay police departments? How’d we manage that?”
“We managed, with some help from the politicians. Trust me—you don’t want to know the gory details,” Pitcavage answered.
Colin believed him. The world seemed to get dog-eat-doggier every day. With more and more people grabbing for less and less, where was the surprise in that? “San Pedro’s part of Los Angeles. I don’t see the LAPD mentioned here anywhere.”
“No, and you won’t, either.” The San Atanasio police chief looked sly.
“Huh,” Colin said. A narrow strip of territory—part of it ran just east of San Atanasio—connected San Pedro to the rest of L.A. The port helped make Los Angeles a great city; it had for more than a hundred years. “So, are we going to have to protect this crude from the L.A. cops, then?”
“They aren’t supposed to know about the tanker,” Pitcavage said.
“And then you wake up!” Colin exclaimed. The chief looked blank. Colin put it in words of one syllable: “What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve made the necessary arrangements,” Pitcavage insisted. How many bureaucrats had been persuaded to look the other way and keep their mouths shut? How much had it cost?
“If LAPD does find out, we’re liable to have a war on our hands.” Colin meant it literally. The To protect and to serve boys were as hard up for gasoline as anybody else. If they found out this big shipment was coming into their port, under their noses, and all earmarked for other people, there’d be stereophonic hell to pay.
“Well, that’s one of the reasons I want you in charge of our part of the security,” Chief Pitcavage answered. “You’ve got the military experience we need.”
To Colin’s way of thinking, a hitch in the Navy didn’t exactly equate him to General Patton (although one might work wonders for Darren Pitcavage). He could see that saying so would do him less than no good, though. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “This takes priority over . . . ?”
“Everything,” Pitcavage said flatly.
“Including the Strangler case?”
“Everything includes everything,” the chief said. “If we don’t get our hands on this gas, pretty soon we’ll we chasing the damn Strangler on skateboards and scooters.”
It wasn’t that bad. Colin knew it, and Pitcavage had to know it, too. Civilians could still buy—some—gas. But the price went up every day. The supervolcano had wrecked refineries and pipelines. The spasmodic nuclear war in the Middle East had knocked production over the head. If the South Bay towns had to pay anything close to retail for the fuel their cops used, they wouldn’t be able to do much else. Thus—Colin supposed—this skulduggery.
“Well, I’ll do it,” he said: the only possible reply. “And I’ll make damn sure I’ve got Gabe Sanchez right beside me.”
“However you want it.” Something in Pitcavage’s voice told Colin he’d just lost points with the chief. Gabe was too . . . too unpolished, that was the polite word, to stand high on Mike Pitcavage’s gold-star list. Gabe didn’t worry about it; he loved his capo di tutti capi, too. Colin didn’t worry about it, either. If Pitcavage needed him so bad, he’d have to live with Gabe. And he evidently did.
Something else occurred to Colin: “Whatever we’ve bought the SWAT team in the way of heavy weapons, I want that, too.”
The chief frowned, plainly trying to remember. “I know we’ve got some military rifles that’ll fire full auto. We may have a real machine gun. If we do, nobody’s taken it out of storage except maybe to clean it for a hell of a long time.”
Colin nodded; he also couldn’t remember the San Atanasio PD hauling out a machine gun. God, the paperwork that would have taken! But, as the man said, the times, they were a-changin’. No, they’d a-changed.
“Let me have the Door-Knocker, too,” he said. “I’ll lead the parade with it.”
“There you go!” He actually made Pitcavage grin. “You got it.” The Door-Knocker was a Ford Explorer armored against small-arms fire, with a ram sticking out from the front of the hood and with vision slits and firing slits for the cops inside. A do-it-yourself armored car, in other words. It was ugly as sin, but terrific for smashing down barricaded entryways to crack houses, meth labs, and lots of other places where the bad guys really didn’t want company.
“Okay,” Colin said, anything but sure if it was. “Let me get my people together, and I’ll see what kind of toys we have in the playroom. When does this tanker get in?”