Chapter One

It was early evening on Thursday the first week of July and Alexa
and I were walking through San Julian Park in Skid Row, on our way
back from the LAPD Central Division Jail. Homeless men in tattered
coats swung blood-shot eyes in our direction, tracking us like
government radar. We were returning from a training day in jail
transport procedures.

The retraining had been mandated after a Mara Salvatrucha
gang-banger named Hector Morales got bludgeoned to death while
shuffling on a drag line through the underground tunnel that
connects the jail to the Fifth Street courthouse. A rival Hispanic
gang-banger had done the work by somehow slipping out of his waist
restraints and hitting Hector in the head with a cut-down chair leg
from the jail cafeteria. He'd been hiding the weapon inside the leg
of his orange jumpsuit.

The Professional Standards Bureau, our new, media-friendly name for
the Internal Affairs Division, investigated. All supervisors and
detectives above grade two were ordered to undergo a refresher day
on incarceration and transfer tactics. Alexa and I were dressed in
grubbies --- jeans and old sweatshirts --- but before we were
twenty feet into the park, everybody there had made us for cops
anyway.

"Tony says this surgery is no sweat, but you can tell he's scared,"
Alexa was saying as we stepped carefully around some dog shit, a
pile of trash, and a sleeping homeless couple. She was talking
about the upcoming heart surgery our Chief of Police was scheduled
to have tomorrow morning.

"Bypass surgery is getting to be pretty common," I offered. "It's
natural to be scared, but he'll be okay."

Hollow words, considering Tony Filosiani was getting a complete
coronary makeover. The surgeons were cutting his chest open, taking
both mammary arteries, and grafting them around the four blocked
arteries in his heart. Any way you looked at it, he was in for a
tough ten days and wasn't scheduled back on the job for a couple of
months.

"Is it me, or does this park smell worse than ever?" Alexa said,
changing the subject. "Like a big outdoor latrine."

"July heat," I answered. "It always smells worse in the
summer."

We walked past a line of portable toilets, which were called Alices
by the people on the Row, because Alice Callahan of the Las
Familias del Pueblo Community Center had badgered the city council
until they finally funded their installation. In a vengeful act of
municipal retaliation, the toilets were rarely cleaned out but
nonetheless served both physical and commercial needs. A lot of
drug and prostitution deals were consummated within the smelly
three-foot confines of those portable johns.

"I'm gonna check my messages, see if I have a meeting that was
supposed to be set up tonight," Alexa said. "Then if there's time,
I'd like to run over to the hospital and see Tony on the way home."
She stepped over a well-known park character named Horizontal Joe.
He was huddled under a blanket stenciled with a W --- a sure sign
it was stolen from the Weingart Center on South San Pedro
Street.

"Watch where you're goin'," Joe growled, without bothering to look
up.

Parker Center loomed before us like a drifting glass iceberg; a
huge box of a building with absolutely no architectural
significance. One of the strange anomalies of Los Angeles was that
the Central Division Jail and the Police Administration Building
were contiguous to the city's fifty-square-block section of blight
known as Skid Row. Some Parker Center cops felt it was easier to
take the seven-block walk if you were headed toward the lock-up,
rather than move your car out of the Glass House garage and look
for nonexistent parking by the jail. As a result, the cops and
homeless spent countless hours in mutual distrust as we shared the
urine-soaked walkways and broken drinking fountains in San Julian
Park.

Alexa and I stepped off the curb where an ageless man wearing
tennis shoes with no laces and a greasy brown poncho was ranching
quarters out of a parking meter, a practice known as spanging. He
didn't even bother to stop. Most of these people had discovered by
now that no cop worth his wage would waste two hours booking a guy
at the jail over a twenty-five-cent misdemeanor.

"I hope Tony gets back on the job before two months," I groused. "I
can't stand the thought of Great White Mike being in charge of the
department." I had a recent and unrewarding history with Deputy
Chief Michael Ramsey, who I viewed as little more than an ambitious
power junkie in a braided hat.

"Mike's okay. Just a little jacked up," Alexa said, smiling
slightly.

My wife is the head of the Detective Services Group. I'm a
Detective III assigned to Homicide Special, so technically she's my
boss. She's about to make captain and is three layers above me on
the department flow chart. All of which means I get to put out the
garbage on the job, as well as at home. Just kidding.

We finally left the squalor of Fifth Street, known as the Nickel,
and headed toward the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Glass House.
Brown burlap slowly gave way to starched blue as we entered the
marble lobby. We got on the elevator, and since it was empty, I
gave my beautiful wife a kiss. She has long black hair, high
cheekbones, and is one of the most striking women I have ever come
across. She could easily have made her living doing fashion shoots.
I, on the other hand, look like I got emptied out of a vacuum
cleaner. I'm five-eleven and a half, lean, and gristly. Topping
this unholy collection of scars and medical mistakes is a hammered
flat nose and short black hair that never quite lies down. All of
this makes me resemble a club fighter who's stayed in the ring too
long. It's a miracle Alexa ever agreed to marry me. But then, if
Julia Roberts could once marry Lyle Lovett, I guess anything is
possible.

The door opened on four and two young patrolmen got on, so we cut
the funny stuff and I said good-bye.

"See you at home in about an hour and a half," Alexa said as I got
off on that random floor and pushed the Down button for the parking
garage.

Five minutes later I was in my freshly leased, silver Acura MDX,
enjoying the new car smell as I headed out of the
administration-building parking garage on my way home. A bleak
landscape of urban blight and human misery passed by outside, but I
was oblivious with the windows up and the AC on. I was in my
sweet-smelling automotive capsule, immune to the reek and cries of
the Row, thinking about Tony Filosiani.

In the last decade or so, the LAPD had experienced a run of
disasters, from the Rodney King case to the Rampart scandal.
Recently, we had been cleaning up the mess, and that was mostly
because of Tony. Our chief arrived from Brooklyn four years ago and
was known by the troops as the Day-Glo Dago because of his
colorful, somewhat out-there personality and management style. I
was worried about him and would have liked to go over to USC
Medical Center where he was being prepped for surgery to let him
know he was in my thoughts. But I'm just a Detective III, and
somewhere deep in the reptilian part of my brain that processes
police protocol, it felt like an ass-kiss, so I didn't go. It was
different for Alexa. She was a division commander.

I was in a silent argument with myself over this dilemma when I
took my eyes off the road to reach in my glove box and turn on my
police scanner, which is mandated off-duty protocol.

As I switched to Tac One, I heard a loud crash and a thump. I
jerked my eyes up just in time to see a Safeway shopping cart full
of junk skitter across the street in front of me, spilling empty
Evian bottles and useless debris everywhere. I stood on the brake
pedal as I heard screaming.

I'd hit someone.

I piled out of the Acura and started to look for the pedestrian.
Nothing in front. Nothing in back. Where the hell was he?

"Under here, you stupid muthafucka!" a man shrieked.

I kneeled down and looked. Wedged under my oil pan was one of the
scrawniest, scruffiest men I have ever seen. Dusty black skin,
dreadlocks, and a greasy, brown coat that looked like it had been
used as the drop cloth under a lube rack.

"Look what you've done, you asshole!" the man screamed, holding his
wrist. "Can't you watch where you're going?".

"You okay?" I stammered.

I reached under the car and tried to grab him by the shoulder to
drag him out, but when I touched him, he started screaming
louder.

"Whatta you want me to do?" I asked helplessly, wondering how to
get him out from under there.

"Just get away from me, ya dumb muthafucka."

Then he slowly started to worm his way out from beneath my car. It
was hard to guess his age under the tangled beard and layer of
grime, but if I had to, I'd say around thirty-five. He had a cut on
his head and scrapes all over the side of his face. His right wrist
looked broken. How I had not killed him was a miracle.

Once he got out, he spent several moments moaning and cradling his
wrist before he stumbled over, sat on the curb and glared
malevolently. It took him about ten more seconds to figure me out.
"Cop," he finally growled.