Which didn’t come. The hand grenade was a dummy.

No fewer than thirty-five LAPD employees were to converge on that store and the streets around it that night: detectives, criminalists, explosives experts, patrol supervisors, even the patrol captain. Witnesses were interviewed, lights were set up, and the area for two blocks in all directions was searched by cops with flashlights.

They found nothing of evidentiary value, and a detective from the robbery team who had been called in from home interviewed Sammy Tanampai in the ER at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. The victim told the detective that the male robber had briefly smoked a cigarette but none had been found by detectives at the scene.

Sammy grew lethargic because the injection they had given him was making him sleepy, but he said to the detective, “I don’t know how they knew about the diamonds. The diamonds arrived at ten o’clock this morning and we were going to show them tomorrow to a client from San Francisco who requested certain kinds of pieces.”

“What kind of client is he?” the detective asked.

“My uncle has dealt with him for years. He is very wealthy. He is not a thief.”

“About the blond woman who you think was Russian, tell me more.”

“I think they were both Russians,” Sammy said. “There are lots of Russians around Hollywood.”

“Yes, but the woman. Was she attractive?”

“Perhaps so. I don’t know.”

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Big breasts,” Sammy said, opening and closing his aching jaw and touching the wounded flesh around his mouth, his eyelids drooping.

“Have you ever gone to any of the nightclubs around here?” the detective asked. “Several of them are Russian owned and operated.”

“No. I am married. I have two children.”

“Anything else that you remember about either of them?”

“She made a joke about keeping my knees together. She said that she never did. I was thinking of my children then and how I would never see them again. And she made that joke. I hope you get to shoot them both,” Sammy said, tears welling.

After all the cops who’d been in the jewelry store were interviewed back at the station, Hollywood Nate said to his young partner, “Some gag, huh, Wesley? Next time I work on a show, I’m gonna tell the prop man about this. A dummy grenade. Only in Hollywood.”

Wesley Drubb had been very quiet for hours since their trauma in the jewelry store. He had answered questions from detectives as well as he could, but there really wasn’t anything important to say. He answered Nate with, “Yeah, the joke was on us.”

What young Wesley Drubb wanted to say was, I could have died tonight. I could have… been… killed tonight! If the grenade had been real.

It was very strange, very eerie, to contemplate his own violent death. Wesley Drubb had never done that before. He wanted to talk to somebody about it but there was no one. He couldn’t talk about it to his older partner, Nate Weiss. Couldn’t explain to a veteran officer like Nate that he’d left USC for this, where he’d been on the sailing team and was dating one of the hottest of the famed USC song girls. He’d left it because of those inexplicable emotions he felt after he’d reached his twenty-first birthday.

Wesley had grown sick of college life, sick of being the son of Franklin Drubb, sick of living on Fraternity Row, sick of living in his parents’ big house in Pacific Palisades during school holidays. He’d felt like a man in prison and he’d wanted to break out. LAPD was a breakout without question. And he’d completed his eighteen months of probation and was here, a brand-new Hollywood Division officer.

Wesley’s parents had been shocked, his fraternity brothers, sailing teammates, and especially his girlfriend, who was now dating a varsity wide receiver-everyone who knew him was shocked. But he hadn’t been sorry so far. He’d thought he’d probably do it for a couple of years, not for a career, for the kind of experience that would set him apart from his father and his older brother and every other goddamn broker in the real-estate firm owned by Lawford and Drubb.

He thought it would be like going into the military for a couple of years, but he wouldn’t have to leave L.A. Like a form of combat that he could talk about to his family and friends years later, when he inevitably became a broker at Lawford and Drubb. He’d be a sort of combat veteran in their eyes, that was it.

Yes, and it had all been going so well. Until tonight. Until that grenade hit the floor and he stared at it and that little officer Mag Takara picked it up with Fausto Gamboa roaring in his ears. That wasn’t police work, was it? They never talked about things like that in the academy. A man with a hand grenade between his knees?

He remembered a Bomb Squad expert lecturing them at the police academy about the horrific event of 1986 in North Hollywood when two LAPD officers were called in to defuse an explosive device in a residential garage, rigged by a murder suspect involved in a movie studio/ labor union dispute. They defused it but were unaware of a secondary device lying there by a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The device went off.

What Wesley remembered most vividly was not the description of the gruesome and terrible carnage and the overwhelming smell of blood, but that one of the surviving officers who had just gotten inside the house before the explosion was having recurring nightmares two decades later. He would waken with his pillow soaked with tears and his wife shaking him and saying, “This has got to stop!”

For a while this evening, after he’d completed his brief statement, after he was sitting in the station quietly drinking coffee, Wesley Drubb could only think about how he’d felt trying to dig with his fingernails into the old wooden floor of that jewelry store. It had been an instinctive reaction. He had been reduced to his elemental animal core.

And Wesley Drubb asked himself the most maddeningly complex, dizzying, profound, and unanswerable question he’d ever asked himself in his young life: How the fuck did I get here?

When Fausto Gamboa got changed into civvies, he met Budgie on the way to the parking lot. They walked quietly to their cars, where they saw Mag Takara already getting into her personal car and driving away.

Fausto said, “It used to make me crazy seeing that kid doing her nails during roll call. Like she was getting ready to go on a date.”

“I’ll bet it won’t annoy you anymore, will it?” Budgie said.

“Not as much,” Fausto Gamboa conceded.

SIX

THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be a routine interview of a missing juvenile, nothing more. Andi McCrea had been sitting in her little cubicle in the detective squad room staring at a computer screen, putting together reports to take to the DA’s office in a case where a wife smacked her husband on the head with the side of a roofing hammer when, after drinking a six-pack of Scotch ale, he curled his lip and told her that the meat loaf she’d labored over “smelled like Gretchen’s snatch.”

There were two things wrong with that: First, Gretchen was her twice-divorced, flirtatious younger sister, and second, he had a panic-stricken look on his face that denuded the feeble explanation when he quickly said, “Of course, I wouldn’t know what Gretchen’s…” Then he began again and said, “I was just trying for a Chris Rock kind of line but didn’t make it, huh? The meat loaf is fine. It’s fine, honey.”

She didn’t say a word but walked to the back porch, where the roofer kept his tool belt, and returned with the hammer just as he was taking the first bite of meat loaf that smelled like Gretchen’s snatch.

Even though the wife had been booked for attempted murder, the guy only ended up with twenty-three stitches and a concussion. Andi figured that whichever deputy DA the case was taken to would reject it as a felony and refer it to the city attorney’s office for a misdemeanor filing, which was fine with her. The hammer victim reminded her of her ex-husband, Jason, now retired from LAPD and living in Idaho near lots of other coppers who had fled to the wilderness locales. Places where local cops only write on their arrest reports under race of suspects either “white” or “landscaper.”