After a pause, he said, “I have a two-inch Smith in my war bag. Wanna borrow it?”

Still pointing her long, slender index finger, Budgie said, “Two-inch wheel guns can’t hit shit. I’m better off this way.”

Fausto came as close to a guffaw as he had in a long time. She had balls. And she was quick, he had to give her that. Then he saw the car door open, and two teenage Latino boys got out with their hands up and were quickly proned-out and cuffed.

The code 4 was broadcast by the PSR, meaning there was sufficient help at the scene. And to keep other eager cops from coming anyway, she added, “No officer involved.”

Fausto saw one of those surfers, Flotsam, heading their way. Fausto thought about how back when he was a young copper, there was no way in hell bleached hair would be allowed. And what about his partner, Jetsam, swaggering along beside him with his dark blond hair all gelled in little spikes two inches long? What kind of shit was that? It was time to retire, Fausto thought again. Time to pull the pin.

Flotsam approached Fausto and said, “Security guard at the big building there got hassled by some homies when he caught them jacking up a car to steal the rims. Dumb ass capped one off in the air to scare them away. They jumped in the car and hid, afraid to come out.”

“Sky shooting,” Fausto snorted. “Guy’s seen too many cowboy movies. Shouldn’t allow those door shakers to carry anything more than a bag of stones and a slingshot.”

“You should see the ride they were working on,” Jetsam said, joining his partner. “Nineteen thirty-nine Chevy. Completely restored. Cherry. Bro, it is sweet!”

“Yeah?” Fausto was interested now. “I used to own an old ’thirty-nine when I was in high school.” Turning to Budgie, he said, “Let’s take a look for a minute.” Then he remembered her empty holster and thought they’d better get away before somebody spotted it.

He said to Flotsam and Jetsam, “Just remembered something. Gotta go.”

Budgie was thrown back in her seat as they sped away. When she shot him a guilty look, he said, “Please tell me that you didn’t forget your key too.”

“Oh shit,” she said. “Don’t you have your nine-nine-nine key?”

“Where’s your freaking keys?”

“On the table in the john.”

“And where is your freaking gun, may I ask?”

“On the floor in the john. By the keys.”

“And what if my nine-nine-nine key’s in my locker with the rest of my keys?” he said. “Figuring I didn’t have to bother, since I have an eager young partner.”

“You wouldn’t leave your keys in your locker,” Budgie said without looking at him. “Not you. You wouldn’t trust a young partner, an old partner, or your family dog.”

He looked at her then and seeing a tiny upturn at the corner of her lips thought, She really has some balls, this one. And some smart mouth. And of course she was right about him-he would never forget his keys.

Fausto just kept shaking his head as he drove back to the storefront substation. Then he grumbled more to himself than to her, “Freaking surfers. You see that gelled hair? Not in my day.”

“That isn’t gel,” Budgie said. “Their hair is stiff and sticky from all the mai tai mix getting dumped on their heads in the beach bars they frequent. They’re always sniffing around like a pair of poodles and getting rejected. And please don’t tell me it wouldn’t be like that if there weren’t so many women officers around. Like in your day.”

Fausto just grunted and they rode without speaking for a while, pretending to be scanning the streets as the moon was rising over Hollywood.

Budgie broke the silence when she said, “You won’t snitch me off to the Oracle, will you? Or for a big laugh to the other guys?”

With his eyes focused on the streets, he said, “Yeah, I go around ratting out partners all the time. For laughs.”

“Is there a bathroom window in that place?” she asked. “I didn’t notice.”

“I don’t think there’s any windows,” he said. “I hardly ever been in there. Why?”

“Well, if I’m wrong about you and you don’t have a key, and if there’s a window, you could boost me up and I could pry it open and climb in.”

His words laden with sarcasm, Fausto said, “Oh, well, why not just ask me if I’d climb in the window because you’re a new mommy and can’t risk hurting yourself?”

“No,” she said, “you could never get your big ass through any window, but I could if you’d boost me up. Sometimes it pays to look like a stork.”

“I got my keys,” he said.

“I figured,” she said.

For the first time, Budgie saw Fausto nearly smile, and he said, “It hasn’t been a total loss. At least we got the milk.”

At about the same time that Fausto Gamboa and Budgie Polk were gathering her equipment at the substation on Cherokee, Farley Ramsdale and Olive Oyl were home at Farley’s bungalow, sitting on the floor, having smoked some of the small amount of crystal they had left. Scattered all around them on the floor were letters they had fished out of seven blue mailboxes on that very busy evening of work.

Olive was wearing the glasses Farley had stolen for her at the drugstore and was laboriously reading through business mail, job applications, notices of unpaid bills, detached portions of paid bills, and various other correspondence. Whenever she came across something they could use, she would pass it to Farley, who was in a better mood now, sorting some checks they could possibly trade and nibbling on a saltine because it was time to put something in his stomach.

The crystal was getting to him, Olive thought. He was blinking more often than usual and getting flushed. Sometimes it worried her when his pulse rate would shoot up to 150 and higher, but if she mentioned it, he just yelled at her, so she didn’t say anything.

“This is a lot of work, Farley,” she said when her eyes were getting tired. “Sometimes I wonder why we don’t just make our own meth. Ten years ago I used to go with a guy who had his own meth lab and we always had enough without working so hard. Till the chemicals blew up one day and burned him real bad.”

“Ten years ago you could walk in a drugstore and buy all the goddamn ephedrine you wanted,” Farley said. “Nowadays a checkout clerk’ll send you to a counter where they ask for ID if you try to buy a couple boxes of Sudafed. Life ain’t easy anymore. But you’re lucky, Olive. You get to live in my house. If you were living in a ratty hotel room, it’d be real dangerous to do the work we do. Like, if you used a hot credit card or a phony name to get your room like you always did before, you’d lose your protection against search and seizure. The law says you have no expectation of privacy when you do that. So the cops could kick your door down without a search warrant. But you’re lucky. You live in my house. They need a search warrant to come in here.”

“I’m real lucky,” Olive agreed. “You know so much about the law and everything.” She grinned at him and he thought, Kee-rist, those fucking teeth!

Olive thought it was nice when she and Farley were at home like this, working in front of the TV. Really nice when Farley wasn’t all paranoid from the tweak, thinking the FBI and the CIA were coming down the chimney. A couple times when he’d hallucinated, Olive really got scared. They’d had a long talk then about how much to smoke and when they should do it. But lately she thought that Farley was breaking his own rules when she wasn’t looking. She thought he was into that ice a whole lot more than she was.

“We got quite a few credit-card numbers,” he said. “Lots of SS numbers and driver’s license info and plenty of checks. We can trade for some serious glass when we take this stuff to Sam.”

“Any cash, Farley?”

“Ten bucks in a card addressed to ‘my darling grandchild.’ What kinda cheap asshole only gives ten bucks to a grandchild? Where’s the fucking family values?”