When it was Darth’s turn, he removed the helmet and mask, displaying the headset that he said he wore on the day in question. He did a recitation of the vehicle code section that prohibits the wearing of a headset while operating a bike on city streets.

Then he said, “Your Honor, I would like the court to observe that this headset contains only one earpiece. The vehicle code section clearly refers to both ears being blocked. This officer did not know the vehicle code section then and he don’t know it now. The fact is, I did hear the officer’s horn and siren but I did not think that it was for me. I wasn’t doing nothing illegal, so why should I get all goosey and pull over jist because I hear a siren?”

When he was finished, the judge said to Fausto, “Officer, did you examine the headset that Mr. Mossman was wearing that day?”

“I saw it, Your Honor,” Fausto said.

“Does this look like the headset?” the judge asked.

“Well… it looks… similar.”

“Officer, can you say for sure that the headset you saw that day had two earpieces, or did it have only one, like the headset you are looking at now?”

“Your Honor, I hit the siren twice and he failed to yield to a police vehicle. It was obvious he couldn’t hear me.”

“I see,” the judge said. “In this case I think we should give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Mossman. We find him not guilty of the offense cited.”

There was applause and chortling in the courtroom until the bailiff silenced it, and when business was concluded, Darth Vader put on his helmet and with every eye still on him said to all, “May the force be with you.”

Now Ron LeCroix and his hemorrhoids were gone, and Fausto Gamboa, still smarting from having his ass kicked by Darth Vader, gave the Oracle a big argument the moment he learned that he was being teamed with Officer Budgie Polk. When Fausto was a young cop, women didn’t work regular patrol assignments at the LAPD, and he sneered when he said to the Oracle, “Is she one of them who maybe trades badges with a boyfriend copper like they used to do class rings in my day?”

“She’s a good officer,” the Oracle said. “Give her a chance.”

“Or is she the kind who gets to partner with her boyfriend and hooks her pinkie through his belt loop when they walk the boulevard beat?”

“Come on, Fausto,” the Oracle said. “It’s only for the May deployment period.”

Like the Oracle, Fausto still carried an old six-inch Smith & Wesson revolver, and the first night he was paired with this new partner, he’d pissed her off after she asked him why he carried a wheel gun when the magazine of her Beretta 9-millimeter held fifteen rounds, with one in the pipe.

“If you need more than six rounds to win a gunfight, you deserve to lose,” he’d said to her that night, without a hint of a smile.

Fausto never wore body armor, and when she asked him about that too, he had said, “Fifty-four cops were shot and killed in the United States last year. Thirty-one were wearing a vest. What good did it do them?”

He’d caught her looking at his bulging chest that first night and said, “It’s all me. No vest. I measure more around the chest than you do.” Then he’d looked at her chest and said, “Way more.”

That really pissed her off because the fact was, Budgie Polk’s ordinarily small breasts were swollen at the moment. Very swollen. She had a four-month-old daughter at home being watched by Budgie’s mother, and having just returned to duty from maternity leave, Budgie was actually a few pounds lighter than she had been before the pregnancy. She didn’t need thinly veiled cracks about her breast size from this old geezer, not when her tits were killing her.

Her former husband, a detective working out of West L.A. Division, had left home three months before his daughter was born, explaining that their two-year marriage had been a “regrettable mistake.” And that they were “two mature people.” She felt like whacking him across the teeth with her baton, as well as half of his cop friends whom she’d run into since she came back to work. How could they still be pals with that dirtbag? She had handed him the keys to her heart, and he had entered and kicked over the furniture and ransacked the drawers like a goddamn crack-smoking burglar.

And why do women officers marry other cops in the first place? She’d asked herself the question a hundred times since that asshole dumped her and his only child, with his shit-eating promise to be prompt with child-support payments and to visit his daughter often “when she was old enough.” Of course, with five years on the Job, Budgie knew in her heart the answer to the why-do-women-officers-marry-other-cops question.

When she got home at night and needed to talk to somebody about all the crap she’d had to cope with on the streets, who else would understand but another cop? What if she’d married an insurance adjuster? What would he say when she came home as she had one night last September after answering a call in the Hollywood Hills, where the owner of a three-million-dollar hillside home had freaked on ecstasy and crack and strangled his ten-year-old step-daughter, maybe because she’d refused his sexual advances, or so the detectives had deduced. Nobody would ever know for sure, because the son of a bitch blew half his head away with a four-inch Colt magnum while Budgie and her partner were standing on the porch of the home next door with a neighbor who said she was sure she’d heard a child screaming.

After hearing the gunshot, Budgie and her partner had run next door, pistols drawn, she calling for help into the keyed mike at her shoulder. And while help was arriving and cops were leaping out of their black-and-whites with shotguns, Budgie was in the house gaping at the body of the pajama-clad child on the master bedroom floor, ligature marks already darkening, eyes hemorrhaging, pajamas urine-soaked and feces-stained. The step-father was sprawled across the living room sofa, the back cushion soaked with blood and brains and slivers of bone.

And a woman there, the child’s crack-smoking mother, was screaming at Budgie, “Help her! Resuscitate her! Do something!”

Over and over she yelled, until Budgie grabbed her by the shoulder and yelled back, “Shut the fuck up! She’s dead!”

And that’s why women officers seemed to always marry other cops. As poor as the marital success rate was, they figured it would be worse married to a civilian. Who would they talk to after seeing a murdered child in the Hollywood Hills? Maybe male cops didn’t have to talk about such things when they got home, but women cops did.

Budgie had hoped that when she returned to duty, she might get teamed with a woman, at least until she stopped lactating. But the Oracle had said everything was screwed during this deployment period, with people off IOD from an unexpected rash of on-duty injuries, vacations, and so forth. He had said, she could work with Fausto until the next deployment period, couldn’t she? All of LAPD life revolved around deployment periods, and Fausto was a reliable old pro who would never let a partner down, the Oracle said. But shit, twenty-eight days of this?

Fausto longed for the old days at Hollywood Station when, after working the night watch, they used to gather in the upper parking lot of the John Anson Ford Theater, across from the Hollywood Bowl, at a spot they called the Tree and have a few brews and commiserate. Sometimes badge bunnies would show up, and if one of them was sitting in a car, sucking face with some cop, you always could be sure that another copper would sneak up, look in the window, and yell, “Crime in progress!”

On one of those balmy summer nights under what the Oracle always called a Hollywood moon, Fausto and the Oracle had sat alone at the Tree on the hood of Fausto’s VW bug, Fausto, a young cop back from Vietnam, and the Oracle, a seasoned sergeant but less than forty years old.