Harbor Nocturne Read Online Free PDF

staph infection and was ordered off duty for at least three weeks.
    Earlier in the week, Fran had taken Sergeant Murillo aside to whisper that everyone was happier when the Unicorn was a “house mouse,” working the front desk in the station lobby, instead of being on the streets in a black-and-white. She asked why Murillo couldn’t keep him assigned there.
    Her sergeant had said, “The captain thinks Chester will be more likely to pull the pin and head for Idaho to drink beer and fish his life away with old cronies if he’s forced to work the streets for a while. And by the way, he could manage to vanish for long periods of time even when he was a house mouse, so that was no picnic for us, either.”
    “Why me?” Fran had persisted, but Sergeant Murillo had replied, “Because you’re just about the most mature and sensible officer on Watch Five, Fran. We know you can manage him.” And what could she say to that?
    “So, Chester, are you with us in body and spirit this afternoon?” Sergeant Murillo called out, looking directly at Toles, who sat at the back table beneath a movie poster depicting Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard .
    Next to that one was a poster showing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, wearing the worst blond wig ever inflicted on an actress. Most of the more noirish one-sheet selections had been placed there by “Hollywood Nate” Weiss, LAPD’s only card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild.
    Chester Toles hadn’t responded, so Sergeant Murillo said, “Yo, Chester! Time to wake up.”
    Flotsam, who was sitting on Chester’s left, looked over and saw that behind the aviator eyeglasses that Chester believed made him look more macho, the pudgy cop’s eyes were closed.
    The surfer cop said, “Don’t disturb him, Sarge. Climbing the stairs took its toll, and he needs his narcoleptic nap. When Chester retires he’ll die of terminal bedsores.”
    When Chester heard his name that time, his little blue eyes suddenly popped open, but everyone knew he’d been snoozing. In addition to being Hollywood Station’s invisible man, Chester was also the king of non sequiturs. He scratched the blotchy pink skin on his shiny bald dome while suppressing a yawn and said, “I wasn’t sleeping, Sarge. I was just deep in thought about something from back in the day. I been trying real hard to remember the name of the sergeant we had here on the midwatch before you transferred to the station.” He looked around earnestly at the other troops and said, “Any of you old enough to remember? The supervisor that looked like Luca Brasi, but was a girl? The one we called B.P., for Big Panties? That one? An old boyfriend of hers told me that when she wore her thong underwear it produced a real camel-toe effect down there, if you catch my drift.”
    The entire assembly was speechless after that, especially the three women officers on Watch 5. Then Sergeant Murillo broke the silence by saying, “Too much information. Let’s go to work.”
    Fran Famosa’s heavily lashed brown eyes rolled back in her head as she sagged in her chair and mouthed to the ceiling, “Why me?”
    She was so disgusted that when she got up and left the roll call room she almost forgot to touch the Oracle’s picture for luck.
    The sun was not close to setting at 5:30 on this warm summer evening, as the midwatch cops loaded the trunks of their black-and-white Crown Vics, called “shops” because of the “shop numbers” on the doors and roofs. The numbers allowed any observers, as well as the police helicopters they called “airships,” to identify individual patrol units. Radio car 6-X-72 frequently was the final one to leave the parking lot because of last-minute trips back to the women’s locker room by Officer Sophie Branson.
    She was forty-two years old with twenty years on the Job and had been a blonde for so many years that only her academy classmates remembered her as a brunette. Her career with the