“Not saying it to make you feel bad, it’s just true.”

Park had looked at the LAPD ball cap in his own hands.

“It doesn’t make me feel bad.”

“I didn’t think it did. Another reason I think you’d be good for this. Helps not to care if people don’t like you.”

Park ran a hand up the back of his neck, felt the sharp horizontal hairline that his barber had carved at the bottom of his buzz cut.

“It’s not that I don’t care in general, Captain. Depends on why they don’t like me.”

Bartolome stuck the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, then pulled it back, sucking his teeth.

“So it’s just you don’t care that they don’t like you because you’re a pain in the ass to work with? Other reasons people don’t like you might bother you, that it?”

Park stopped playing with his hair.

“I don’t care if they don’t want to work with me, because I know I’m right.”

The captain from narcotics raised both eyebrows.

“Jesus, Haas. No wonder they don’t like you.”

Park brushed something from the leg of his blues.

“May I go now?”

Bartolome pointed at the door.

“Can you leave my office now? Yes.”

Park started to rise.

Bartolome pointed at the window.

“Can you go back out on the streets? No.”

Park, half out of the hard plastic chair, stalled and looked at his superior.

“Sir?”

Bartolome looked at his desk, frowned at the headline on the L.A. Times sports section spread there:

MLB ENDS SEASONPlay Not to Resume Until SLP Pandemic Has Been Contained

He looked at the officer across the desk.

“There will be no more solo acts, Haas. Everyone rides with a partner. Department can’t afford the gas to put enough vehicles on the street. Until we see some more stimulus cash miraculously filling the motor pool with electrics and hybrids, all patrol cars roll with two, three, four officers.”

He rubbed his eyes.

“And no one, absolutely no one, wants to ride with you anymore.”

Park straightened.

“They never have.”

“Uh-huh, but things weren’t this bad before. Things weren’t as dangerous as they’re getting out there. The department wants maximum morale in the face of this shit. Maximum morale means we don’t have to worry about the kind of desertions they got when Katrina hit. Cops losing faith in the system and just disappearing.”

He stopped rubbing his eyes and looked Park up and down.

“Maximum morale also means that officers have each other’s backs. We don’t want guys cutting slack out there because they figure they’d be better off if the pain in the ass riding shotgun maybe took one in a gang incident.”

Park thought about the time about a year before, riding with Del Rico. How they’d rolled on a two-eleven. Del had said the stockroom at the back of the liquor store was clear. But it wasn’t. Turned out the perp wasn’t strapped; what the Korean owner of the store had taken for a gun was a length of pipe. But it had been a gun call, and Del had let Park walk into a supposedly cleared room where a perp was hiding behind some boxes with a pipe that could easily have been a piece. Park walked with a couple bruises on his ribs. The perp took a series of baton spears to his genitals.

Del was always cool to Park’s face, but he’d heard him making cracks with the guys. Talking about how he couldn’t wait till his tour with the monk was over.

Park didn’t think Del Rico knew the perp was back there. But he was a good cop. And he’d said the room was clear. Would he have been more thorough if he hadn’t been thinking about when he’d be done riding with Park?

“You follow me, Haas?”

Park looked up at the captain.

“I could do bike patrols.”

Bartolome rubbed the smooth brown top of his head.

“Bike cops are doubling up, too.”

“Motorcycles. I can do traffic.”

“You ever ride a hog?”

“No.”

Bartolome pointed at a picture on the wall. A younger version of himself, traffic leathers, white and blue helmet, astride a Harley

“Field training for the hogs, that takes weeks and costs the department. Tell you right now, the budget the way it is, the only retraining going on is for SWAT and the antiterrorism academy.”

Park looked at the picture of Bartolome in his bucket-head rig.

SWATs were in love with their guns and the rush of blowing a door down and charging in. Why they were there, who had done what and to whom, didn’t matter in the least to a SWAT. They just wanted a clean shot.

The antiterrorism academy was a one-way ticket to a desk. Paperwork. Intelligence review. Coordinating task forces with the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection.

He looked away from the picture.

“I don’t think I’d be suited to either of those duties, sir.”

“You aren’t being offered either of those duties.”

Bartolome weighed two invisible objects, one in either hand.

“You’re being offered this one thing.”

He showed the heft and gravity of what it was Park was being offered.

“Or you can accept online training for dispatch.”

He displayed the relative lightness of a job relaying radio calls.

Park remembered his father asking him what he thought he could achieve as a police officer that he could not achieve in the family business. The family business having been government service and politics.

He shook his head.

“I simply don’t think I’m suited to the duty, sir.”

Bartolome nodded.

“Why?”

“From a practical perspective, I’m white. And I don’t do street. I mean, I know the jargon, but it never sounds natural. And I’ve never done drugs myself, not even in college. I don’t know where to begin a fake.”

The captain smiled.

“Haas, what the hell? What are you thinking? Are you thinking I’m gonna send you down to Wilmington? Have you dealing meth to the longshoremen working the night shift at the port? Try and mix you in with the vatos down there? Think I’m gonna have you sling rock to the homies in South Central?”

Park found himself thinking about his father again.

“You said ‘undercover,’ sir. You said ‘selling drugs.’”

Bartolome looked at his desk. He cleared away the sports page that had delivered the news that the bullshit going down outside wasn’t going to be relieved any longer this summer by the distraction of a few ball games, and found a sheaf of pages that he’d printed on the back sides of old incident reports and call sheets. As per new department regulations that all paper be double printed before recycling.

“Haas.”

He flipped through the pages, turning them over and back, finding the side he wanted.

“Most cops, being a cop is one of two things to them. One, being a cop is a job. Pay’s not bad. Advancement is available to anyone with some initiative. Benefits are outstanding. No one these days gets the kind of medical police get. Good pension. Lots of perks. And, used to be, plenty of assignments where you don’t have to even wear a gun, let alone worry about pulling it. A high school diploma, couple years at a JC, that or do your bit in the service, and you can get in the academy. It’s a regular guy job. Average cop, his attitude has more in common with a welder than it does, say, a Treasury agent. Second thing is, for some, being a cop means the badge and the baton and the gun. Guys never gonna say it out loud, not sober, but they just plain like telling people what to do. Go to their house for a barbeque, see them talk to their wife and kids same way they talk to some guy they just busted for assault with intent. Guys come in badge-heavy and stay that way.”

He peeled back the corner of one of the sheets of paper in his hand and looked at the one below it.

“Where do you fit in that lineup?”

Park was still thinking about his father, remembering the last time they met, at his mother’s funeral. A month later he had chosen not to go east for his father’s. The old man had said all he wanted to say to Park at his wife’s graveside, though it wasn’t until he got the call from his sister, telling him in stoic Pennsylvania tones that their father had done it with his favorite Weatherby 20-gauge, that he understood what had been meant by the words, No need for you to come home again. Standing over his mother’s coffin, he’d assumed those words were the final dismissal that their entire relationship had been slowly building to. Hanging up after his sister’s call, he knew they’d actually been T Stegland Haas’s last attempt at sheltering his son from the world’s pain.