Sleepless. Part 5

"Can we talk?"

The man folded his arms across the Dodgers jersey he wore open over a white tank.

"That's why we're here."

Park flicked one of the bags with his index finger.

"That's what they planted on me."

The man pointed at the bag.

"Because this isn't what I expected to find on you."

Park nodded.

"And it's not what I had on me."

"Hounds and Kleiner took what you had on you?"

"Yes."

"And planted this?"

"Yes."

The man folded his arms a little tighter.

"And what did the arresting officers take off you?"

Park looked at the man's cellphone.

"I should really call my wife. She'll worry."

The man shook his head.

"Later. Tell me what they took off you."

Park drank from the water bottle, draining what was left.

"Demerol. Valium. X."

The man nodded and unfolded his arms and picked up one of the baggies.

"Because this will get you nowhere."

Park touched the ear that had been punched while the black sack was over his head.

"I know. And it's not what I had. It's not what I've been doing."

The man waved a hand.

"I know what you've been doing."

Park shrugged.

"Well, then?"

The man stared at him, shook his head, and sat in the chair opposite.

"I want to hear it."

Park looked at the door again.

"We can talk?"

The man took off his sungla.s.ses, revealing bagged eyes, bloodshot, sunk in deeply wrinkled sockets.

"We can talk."

Park pointed at the sack on the floor.

"Then can you tell me who the h.e.l.l is running things here, Captain?"

The man with the worried eyes shrugged.

"We are."

Park didn't want the duty at first.

It wasn't what he'd joined for. He'd joined to help. He'd joined to do service. When asked by his friends what the h.e.l.l he was going to do, he told them he was going to protect and to serve.

None of them laughed, knowing that Parker Thomas Haas did not joke about such things. He had, in fact, no sense of humor at all when it came to matters of justice and ethics.

Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to be joked about.

Not by him, in any case.

And so he'd wanted to stay in uniform.

Long before he had finished at the academy, he had resolved for himself that justice within the courts did not often live up to the standards it should and must. Long, hot afternoons spent between cla.s.ses in the downtown courthouses, watching the wheels of justice squeal and creak, had settled that case.

But street justice was another matter.

It could be applied directly. In the face of injustice, a man with a badge on the street could actually do something. What happened after the point of interdiction could be a mystery, but in the moment of arrest, leniency, summons, unexpected tolerance, no-BS takedown, comfort, lecture, or application of force, a cop on the beat could enact true justice.

A matter of setting a standard and applying it always, without exception, to everyone.

Including oneself.

For Park, that was as easy as breathing.

But hard as h.e.l.l for anyone working with him.

Which was one of the arguments Captain Bartolome had used on him.

"No one likes you."

Standing in his office, in front of the autographed picture of himself as a boy with a smiling Vin Scully, Bartolome had shrugged.

"Not saying it to make you feel bad, it's just true."

Park had looked at the LAPD ball cap in his own hands.

"It doesn't make me feel bad."

"I didn't think it did. Another reason I think you'd be good for this. Helps not to care if people don't like you."

Park ran a hand up the back of his neck, felt the sharp horizontal hairline that his barber had carved at the bottom of his buzz cut.

"It's not that I don't care in general, Captain. Depends on why they don't like me."

Bartolome stuck the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, then pulled it back, sucking his teeth.

"So it's just you don't care that they don't like you because you're a pain in the a.s.s to work with? Other reasons people don't like you might bother you, that it?"

Park stopped playing with his hair.

"I don't care if they don't want to work with me, because I know I'm right."

The captain from narcotics raised both eyebrows.

"Jesus, Haas. No wonder they don't like you."

Park brushed something from the leg of his blues.

"May I go now?"

Bartolome pointed at the door.

"Can you leave my office now? Yes."

Park started to rise.

Bartolome pointed at the window.

"Can you go back out on the streets? No."

Park, half out of the hard plastic chair, stalled and looked at his superior.

"Sir?"

Bartolome looked at his desk, frowned at the headline on the L.A. Times sports section spread there: MLB ENDS SEASONPlay Not to Resume Until SLP Pandemic Has Been Contained He looked at the officer across the desk.

"There will be no more solo acts, Haas. Everyone rides with a partner. Department can't afford the gas to put enough vehicles on the street. Until we see some more stimulus cash miraculously filling the motor pool with electrics and hybrids, all patrol cars roll with two, three, four officers."

He rubbed his eyes.

"And no one, absolutely no one, wants to ride with you anymore."

Park straightened.

"They never have."

"Uh-huh, but things weren't this bad before. Things weren't as dangerous as they're getting out there. The department wants maximum morale in the face of this s.h.i.+t. Maximum morale means we don't have to worry about the kind of desertions they got when Katrina hit. Cops losing faith in the system and just disappearing."

He stopped rubbing his eyes and looked Park up and down.

"Maximum morale also means that officers have each other's backs. We don't want guys cutting slack out there because they figure they'd be better off if the pain in the a.s.s riding shotgun maybe took one in a gang incident."

Park thought about the time about a year before, riding with Del Rico. How they'd rolled on a two-eleven. Del had said the stockroom at the back of the liquor store was clear. But it wasn't. Turned out the perp wasn't strapped; what the Korean owner of the store had taken for a gun was a length of pipe. But it had been a gun call, and Del had let Park walk into a supposedly cleared room where a perp was hiding behind some boxes with a pipe that could easily have been a piece. Park walked with a couple bruises on his ribs. The perp took a series of baton spears to his genitals.

Del was always cool to Park's face, but he'd heard him making cracks with the guys. Talking about how he couldn't wait till his tour with the monk was over.

Park didn't think Del Rico knew the perp was back there. But he was a good cop. And he'd said the room was clear. Would he have been more thorough if he hadn't been thinking about when he'd be done riding with Park?

"You follow me, Haas?"

Park looked up at the captain.

"I could do bike patrols."

Bartolome rubbed the smooth brown top of his head.

"Bike cops are doubling up, too."

"Motorcycles. I can do traffic."

"You ever ride a hog?"

"No."

Bartolome pointed at a picture on the wall. A younger version of himself, traffic leathers, white and blue helmet, astride a Harley "Field training for the hogs, that takes weeks and costs the department. Tell you right now, the budget the way it is, the only retraining going on is for SWAT and the ant.i.terrorism academy."

Park looked at the picture of Bartolome in his bucket-head rig.

SWATs were in love with their guns and the rush of blowing a door down and charging in. Why they were there, who had done what and to whom, didn't matter in the least to a SWAT. They just wanted a clean shot.

The ant.i.terrorism academy was a one-way ticket to a desk. Paperwork. Intelligence review. Coordinating task forces with the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection.