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planned past the current day, just grinned and said, “Time to go aboard for your second honeymoon. Have fun, but don’t do anything naughty. Everybody’s got cell cameras, and you might end up on YouTube!”

THREE
    S ergeant Lee Murillo, seated at a table in the front of the roll call room, was easily the most popular supervisor at Hollywood Station. He was conducting roll call for Watch 5 and, as usual, wanted to get officers of the midwatch in an upbeat mood before turning them loose on the streets at sunset. Sergeant Murillo was the son of Mexican farmworkers and had spent much of his formative years in the public libraries of the Central Valley while his family worked the fields. He still got most of his entertainment from books, and was a whippet-lean long-distance runner who had competed twice in the police Olympics. Although he was not yet forty, his hair was pewter gray, and he could look quite professorial when wearing his round wireless bifocals.
    They were fielding seven cars, and all fourteen officers sat at long tables in fixed chairs with framed movie posters behind them, this being the only police station on the planet with one-sheets hanging on walls around the station. Many of them were from old cop movies or famous films that featured specific locations policed by the cops of Hollywood Station. On the wall by the door was a framed photo of a beloved senior sergeant they called the Oracle. He had died of a heart attack five years prior on the pavement in front of the station, where stars bearing the names of station officers killed on duty were set in marble and bronze, just like famous movie stars were remembered on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. And being a superstitious lot, every officer would touch the Oracle’s picture for luck after roll call, before heading out to the streets.
    The brass plate affixed to the frame around the Oracle’s photo said:
    The Oracle
    Appointed: Feb 1960
    End of Watch: Aug 2006
    Semper Cop
    Sergeant Murillo was doing his Kung Fu impression on this particular Thursday’s roll call while he read the lineup of names and car assignments. “And you, Grasshopper,” he said to Officer Francisca Famosa with the appropriate accent and lilt, “you will be working Six-X-Forty-six with the Unicorn tonight . . . if you can find him.”
    Fran Famosa was an attractive thirty-five-year-old Cuban-American with thirteen years on the Job. She had a dusting of tan freckles on her nose and cheekbones, freckles a bit darker than her hair, which she wore pinned up off her collar, per Department regulations. And like all female uniformed officers, she wore a pale and subtle shade of lip gloss. She was a divorced survivor of a bad marriage to a now unemployed television sportscaster, and the mother of a four-year-old daughter.
    Fran shook her head in dismay. Her partner for the remainder of the deployment period was Chester Toles, who was fifty-eight years old with nearly thirty-five years on the LAPD. The midwatch coppers tended to be divorced or never married, making it easier to work a shift beginning at 5:00 p.m . and lasting until 3:00 a.m ., at the height of the street action. Chester was one of the few at Hollywood Station who’d been married to the same spouse for most of his life, and he had three children and four grandchildren. He was notoriously lazy and would try to kiss off any call he could, but since he “owned his pink slip,” due to having been a cop since back when Gerald Ford was in office, he was fearless in the face of official reprimands or even short suspensions. He considered himself, administratively speaking, bulletproof.
    When it came to handling an end-of-watch call or an unpleasant job of any kind, nobody could ever find Chester, so Sergeant Murillo had dubbed him “the Unicorn.” He said that Chester Toles was like a mythical being that didn’t exist. Fran Famosa had gotten stuck with Chester as a partner when his assigned partner contracted a