L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Read Online Free PDF

fine and wound up back here in Los Angeles, and I’d been military police for better than three years, so after a few months of beer and girls I went down and applied to join the LAPD.
    Now, what they would do then, and they probably still do it, is when they were done training you they’d partner you up with an older guy. You were partners, you’d ride around together, take turns driving, all of that, but he’s the guy with the experience, so he’s more or less in charge. He’s showing you the ropes and it’s something you can’t get from a book or in a classroom.
    They put me in a car with Lew Hagner. Now, I’d heard of him, because he had a big part in the Zoot Suit Riots in ‘43, and there were plenty of Mexicans who’d have liked to see him dead. And after I was home but before I joined up with the department, there was an incident where he got in a gunfight with three zoot-suiters or pachucos or whatever you want to call ‘em. Mexicans, anyway. He got a scratch, treated and released at Valley General, and they were all dead on arrival. One of them, the wounds were in the back, and the press made some noise about that, but most people wanted to give him a medal.
    Lew was fifteen years older’n me, and I was, what, twenty-two at the time? An old twenty-two, the way everybody’s older after a war, but still. Plus my old man died while I was overseas, and a fifteen-year age difference, plus he’s there to show me the ropes; well, I’m not about to say he was like a father to me, but you might say I looked up to him.
    Anyway, we’re two guys in a car. And it’s good, and I’m learning things you don’t learn any other way. All the feel of the streets, and what might be trouble and what’s not. What you had to enforce and what you could let slide. When you had to go by the book, when you didn’t even have to open it.
    How else are you gonna learn that sort of thing?
    A thing he told me early and often was that domestics were the biggest headache I’d ever have. By that I mean domestic disturbances. You just say “domestics,” you could be talking about somebody’s cleaning girl.
    A domestic disturbance, he said, you got two people trying to kill each other, and you walk in the door and they’ve got a united front. It’s both of them against you, and they’ll go back to killing each other as soon as you’re out of the picture, but for now they’re a tag team and you’re it.
    And even when that doesn’t happen, Lew said, it’s just so fucking frustrating.
    I’m sorry, I guess I should watch my language.

No, that’s all right, Charles. Don’t worry about anything like that.

    Well, it’s how he said it. But I’ll watch it from here on in. I don’t know what you’re gonna do with all this stuff, but I might as well keep it clean for you.
    But about domestics. You get a man’s beating his wife like she’s a rug, and the neighbors call it in or she calls us herself, and he’s there in his underwear, smelling like a bomb went off in a liquor store. And she’s sporting two shiners and a split lip, and that’s her tooth on the floor there, and you want to pack this bum off to Folsom or Q, and you’re lucky if you even get to haul him in. Because maybe six times out of ten she’s hanging onto his arm and telling you it was all a mistake, that she fell down, she’s just so clumsy. And the rest of the time you take him in, and he’s out the next day because she won’t press charges. Oh, officer, it was all a mistake, plus it only happens when he drinks, and he never has a drink except on days ending in a Y .
    You get the picture.
    Well, we had our share of those. Part of the job, you know? Then one night we get a radio call, “See the woman,” and it’s an address on South Olive. Don’t ask me which block, and anyway that whole part of downtown’s completely different nowadays. Whatever house it was, you couldn’t find it today. Torn down years ago and something else there now, and