Supervolcano All Fall Down(32)
The San Atanasio policeman wore headphones to help him monitor the radio without interference from the freeway’s unending whoosh and roar. Colin had to repeat his question, louder the second time. Then the fellow answered, “Everything seems pretty quiet. Maybe the fix really is in.”
“Here’s hoping.” Colin still had trouble believing it. He turned east, toward the offramp the fuel trucks would use. A couple of minutes later, a Torrance police car—part of the advance guard, no doubt—pulled off. The cops inside waved when they saw the waiting San Atanasio police officers. Colin waved back.
“Uh-oh!” exclaimed the cop monitoring LAPD radio traffic. “Cars on the way to Braxton Bragg Boulevard and the 110.”
Which was where they were. And the entrance to the southbound freeway was west of the one coming up from San Pedro. They could block the tanker trucks if they got here soon enough. The freeway ran through the L.A. strip, too—the LAPD had all the jurisdiction here it needed.
Here came the first precious tanker. And here, sirens screaming and light bars blazing, came three LAPD police cars. Sure as hell, they positioned themselves to block the westbound lanes of Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Uniformed men with riot guns piled out of them.
“Get out of the way!” Colin yelled.
“Like hell we will!” an LAPD man yelled back, hefting his shotgun.
“Sonny, we will fucking bury you if you don’t get out of the way right now,” Colin assured him, waving toward the Door-Knocker. As if on cue, the machine gun they’d found in storage and mounted on it swung to cover the LAPD man, who wasn’t wearing a helmet. His bulletproof vest might stop a rifle-caliber round, but might wasn’t something you really wanted to test.
“You wouldn’t dare.” The Los Angeles cop’s voice wobbled; he wasn’t altogether convinced they wouldn’t.
Colin was convinced he would. A police force couldn’t function without fuel—Mike Pitcavage was dead right about that. Horses and bikes and shoe leather didn’t cut it, not in L.A. County, they didn’t. “This is our oil. We’ll do whatever we need to do to keep it,” he answered. The fuel trucks were piling up on the offramp. The LAPD guys would already be screaming for their SWAT team and other reinforcements. “Get out of the way. Last warning! We’ll clear you out if you don’t.”
About then, the LAPD officer noticed that the San Atanasio cops were toting M16s, not shotguns. Colin waved to the Door-Knocker again. It rumbled forward with intent to squash.
“You people are fucking insane!” the L.A. cop bleated.
“Yeah? And so?” Colin answered.
The LAPD guy called him something that would have made a CPO with twenty-five years in the Navy blanch. With far less time in the service, Colin only laughed. On came the Door-Knocker, inexorable as fate. Still swearing a very blue streak, the LAPD cop dove back into his squad car and got it out of the way just before the Door-Knocker did the job for him.
As the other LAPD black-and-whites also opened a lane so the fuel trucks could go west, young man, Colin posted armed San Atanasio officers on the southbound offramp from the 110 to Braxton Bragg Boulevard. “Make ’em run over you if they want to get past you,” he told his troops—that was how he thought of them. “And if they look like they want to run over you, shoot first. Got it?”
“Got it!” the San Atanasio cops roared in testosterone-fueled unison. Colin hadn’t taken any female officers on this particular run. He wanted the headstrong craziness that could only come with a pair of balls.
It was maybe half a mile, maybe a little less, from the freeway to New Hampshire Avenue, where the L.A. strip ended and San Atanasio’s jurisdiction actually began. One by one, the fuel trucks followed the Door-Knocker through the gap. San Atanasio cop cars went through, too. They looked a lot like LAPD cars, but the guys inside them were grinning. The Los Angeles policemen ran the gamut from glum to homicidal.
San Atanasio police cars looked a lot like L.A.’s now. Old-timers had told Colin about a ’70s experiment that, for some reason, didn’t last. The city painted its cars a color it called lime yellow—a bureaucrat’s weaseling name for chartreuse. And it slapped POLICE on their sides in enormous diffraction-grating letters.
He’d seen photos, too. But he’d believed the old-timers even without them. Some shit was just too weird to make up. And a decade responsible for Grand Funk Railroad would have to answer for lime-yellow cop cars with rainbow letters as well.
After the last tanker truck rumbled off the freeway and through the LAPD’s would-be roadblock, Colin turned to Gabe Sanchez and said, “Piece of cake.”