Hollywood Station Read Online Free PDF Page B

my face."
    Teddy watched them walk to an old blue Pinto, open the doors, and get in. He watched the guy turn on the lights and start the engine. He stared at the license plate for a minute and said the number aloud. Then he repeated it. He knew he could remember it long enough to borrow a pencil from somebody and write it down. The next time a cop rousted him for being drunk in public or panhandling or pissing in somebody's storefront, maybe he could use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

    Chapter THREE
    THERE WERE HAPPIER partners than the pair in 6-X-76 on Sunday of that May weekend. Fausto Gamboa, one of the most senior patrol officers at Hollywood Station, had long since surrendered his P3 status, needing a break from being a training officer to rookies still on probation. He had been happily working as a P2 with another Hollywood old-timer named Ron LeCroix, who was at home healing up from painful hemorrhoid surgery that he'd avoided too long and was probably just going to retire.
    Fausto was always being mistaken for a Hawaiian or Samoan. Though the Vietnam veteran wasn't tall, only five foot nine, he was very big. The bridge of his nose had been flattened in teenage street fights, and his wrists, hands, and shoulders belonged on a guy tall enough to easily dunk a basketball. His legs were so massive he probably could have dunked one if he'd uncoiled those calf and thigh muscles in a vertical leap. His wavy hair was steel-gray and his face was lined and saddle leather-brown, as though he'd spent years picking cotton and grapes in the Central Valley as his father had done after arriving in California with a truckload of other illegal Mexican immigrants. Fausto had never set eyes on a cotton crop but somehow had inherited his father's weathered face.
    Fausto was in a particularly foul mood lately, sick and tired of telling every cop at Hollywood Station how he'd lost in court to Darth Vader. The story of that loss had traveled fast on the concrete jungle wireless.
    It wasn't every day that you get to write Darth Vader a ticket, even in Hollywood, and everyone agreed it could only happen there. Fausto Gamboa and his partner Ron LeCroix had been on patrol on an uneventful early evening when they got a call on their MDT computer that Darth Vader was exposing himself near the corner of Hollywood and Highland. They drove to that location and spotted the man in black cycling down Hollywood Boulevard on an old Schwinn three-speed bike. But there was often more than one Darth Vader hanging around Grauman's, Darths of different ethnicity. This one was a diminutive black Darth Vader.
    They weren't sure they had the right Darth until they saw what had obviously prompted the call. Darth wasn't wearing his black tights under his black shorts that evening, and his manhood was dangling off the front of the bike saddle. A motorist had spotted the exposed trekker's meat and had called the cops.
    Fausto was driving and he pulled the car behind Darth Vader and tooted the horn, which had no effect in slowing down the cyclist. He tooted again. Same result. Then he turned on the siren and blasted him. Twice. No response.
    "Fuck this," Ron LeCroix said. "Pull beside him."
    When Fausto drew up next to the cyclist, his partner leaned out the window and got Darth's attention by waving him to the curb. Once there, Darth put down the kickstand, got off the bike, and took off his mask and helmet. Then they saw why their attempts to stop him had been ineffective. He was wearing a headset and listening to music.
    It was Fausto's turn to write a ticket, so he got out the book and took Darth's ID.
    Darth Vader, aka Henry Louis Mossman, said, "Wait a minute here. Why you writing me?"
    "It's a vehicle code violation to operate a bike on the streets wearing a headset," Fausto said. "And in the future, I'd advise you to wear underwear or tights under those short shorts."
    "Ain't this some shit?" Darth Vader said.
    "You couldn't even hear our siren," Fausto