Copp On Ice, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

virtually the same street scene from beginning to end.
    But you have passed through a lot of police jurisdictions and you have briefly encountered several unincorporated zones between cities, some in Los Angeles County and some in San Bernardino County. The unincorporated zones are policed—well, sort of—by the respective county sheriffs departments.
    "Helltown" is one such zone, and it represents the worse result of conflicting political and jurisdictional responsibilities. None of the neighboring cities want any piece of Helltown, and of course Helltown does not desire any notice by those cities. There are no zoning or development restrictions, no police presence of any consequence, and of course no local government interference whatever. You can drive through Helltown in twenty seconds flat—it's just a narrow strip of boulevard separating two cities—or you could get stuck there for the rest of your life, which can be very short in that strip.
    I'd never worked in this area—L.A. County ends at Claremont, a few miles west—but I'd spent off-duty time there now and then just to catch the color. There's plenty of color, if you don't care what you catch. It's a tumble of sleazy, room-by-the-hour motels, porno shops, saloons, nudie dives and liquor stores—yet the briskest business going down at any time of night or day is along the curbs and sidewalks where you can catch anything from rock cocaine to AIDS and syphilis without even getting out of your car.
    All I wanted to catch, this time, was a gorgeous female vice cop who'd helped set me up for a fall even before I knew what I was falling into. And I caught her there, yeah, all the while wishing that I had not.
     
    I looked for the jeep and found her in a joint calling itself The Dee-light Zone, a whiskey and pizza emporium featuring topless (and largely bottomless) waitresses and two naked girls in a cage suspended above the bar who, one would have thought, were crazy in love with each other. I wondered how boring it must get for those kids to stand there and paw each other all night long, but they didn't seem to have reached that point yet.
    There were other cages to the rear, bathed in flickering blue light and offering opportunities for patrons who could afford it and loved to be teased to "Cage Up" with a naked kid of their choice—the sex is facsimile rather than the real thing, but for some I guess it's sex enough for the moment. Joints like these learned long ago that they're better off policing themselves. House rules are usually strictly en-
    forced by brawny bouncers with ever-watchful eyes and eager instincts, so the action usually stays within the legal limit.
    Things were winding down in The Dee-light Zone when I got there, thanks to the two o'clock liquor curfew. Not even a joint like this one—especially a joint like this one—is willing to flout the liquor laws—because a suspended license is the quickest way to shut them down. So they typically announce a "last call" at the bar at about one-thirty. You can stack your drinks then if you want but it all has to be down the gullet by two, at which time all unfinished drinks are whisked away and you are stuck with non-alcoholic beverages and whatever food may be available, if the house remains open. This house never closed, it just shifted gears a bit during the dry hours.
    So the bar was dry when I got there but the pizzas were still coming out of the kitchen. There was a sign behind the bar promising "Breakfast From 4 a.m ." for the all-nighters and/or early risers, but no booze between two and six.
    Place was still about half full, thirty to forty patrons, probably almost that many employees if you count bouncers and all. Seemed to be a hangout of sorts, much talk back and forth between tables as though everyone knew everyone else, and certainly the technically naked waitresses seemed at home and comfortable with the patrons, making a lot of eye and body contact whenever circumstances