Hollywood Crows Read Online Free PDF

until he attained show business success, whichever came first. By early summer, he had worked on two more TV movies, with a line of dialogue in each, the plots being for people who watch daytime TV. He was sure that the last one might make it to Spike TV because at the last minute they’d included lots of gratuitous blood and gore for high-school dropouts.
     
     
    By July 2007, all of the Crows were future millionaires — in theory. One of them had been born in Iraq and had come to the U.S. as a child. He’d touted the wisdom of buying Iraqi dinars to his Crow partner now that the country was in chaos and its money nearly worthless. Through a currency broker, the partner bought one million dinars for $800 U.S. As the broker explained it to them, when Iraq eventually was able to get back to one dinar for one dollar and started being traded in all of the exchanges, “You’ll be millionaires!”
    So two other Crows bought a million dinars. Three bought half a million each. Another bought one and a half million, figuring to buy a yacht when he retired. Ronnie Sinclair was very hesitant, but thinking of her aging parents, she bought half a million dinars.
    The week after he’d been assigned to the CRO, Nate had one of his vigorous iron-pumping workouts in the high-tech weight room at Hollywood South. After the workout and a mirror examination of his impressive pecs, lats, and biceps, Nate entered the CRO office, sat down at a desk, and carefully studied an Iraqi dinar that one of the others had given to him. Looking at it under a glass and holding it against a lamp, he examined the horse in the watermark as though he knew what he was doing.
    “Check it with a jeweler’s loupe, why don’t you?” said Tony Silva, one of the Hispanic officers. “It’s not counterfeit, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “No, but I read in the paper that counterfeiters are bleeding out the ink on these things,” Nate said, “and using them to make U.S. currency with laser printers.”
    “Aren’t you gonna buy while you have the chance?” Samuel Dibble, the CRO’s only black cop, asked Nate. “What if Bush’s troop surge works and the dinar stabilizes? We’ll all be rich. How about you?”
    Nate only smiled, trying not to look too condescending, but later said privately to his sergeant, “Cops are such suckers. Anyone can sell them a bill of goods. They’ll invest in anything.”
    His sergeant said to him, “Yeah, I’m in for one million.”
    Later, after the new commanding general in Iraq gave a major TV interview and said that the troop surge had a very good chance of success, Hollywood Nate Weiss secretly made a transfer from his savings account, called the currency broker, and bought
two
million dinars without telling any of the others.
     
     
    Of course, Hollywood Nate’s former colleagues, the midwatch officers of Watch 5, were not dreaming of being millionaires. They were just trying to cope with young Sergeant Treakle, whose administrative spanking for bringing the Big Macs to the rooftop standoff had not dampened his zeal or ambition. They knew that Hollywood Division was as shorthanded as the rest of the beleaguered LAPD, so before a supervisor like Sergeant Treakle could get a suspension without pay, he would have to do something
really
terrible. Such as saying something politically incorrect to a member of what had historically been considered a minority group. At least that was the thinking of the midwatch, according to all of the bitching heard around the station.
    On one of those summer nights under what the Oracle used to call a Hollywood moon, meaning a full moon that brought out the crazies, Flotsam mentioned the rooftop incident to Catherine Song and said, “Why couldn’t the jumper have been black or Hispanic? That would’ve pushed Treakle’s off button.”
    “What about a Korean female?” Cat said back to him. “We’re not potential PC victims?”
    “Negative,” Flotsam said. “You people