“Can you meet Driscoll and me in the roll-call room?”

“In due time,” the Oracle said. “There’s a time for everything.”

They chose the roll-call room for privacy. The Oracle examined the purse and contents, and as he looked at this angry suntanned surfer cop with his short hair gelled up like a bed of spikes, and at his older partner twitching his nose like a rabbit, he said to them, “You’re right. This has to be a sting. This is unadulterated bullshit!”

Flotsam and Jetsam were lying in the sand next to their boards, by their towels and water, when Jetsam, reaching this part of the story, stopped to take a long pull from his water bottle.

Flotsam said, “Don’t stop, dude. Get to the final reel. What the fuck happened?”

Jetsam said, “What happened was the Oracle came on like El Niño, and everybody stayed outta his way. The Oracle was hacked off, bro. And I got to see what all those hash marks give you.”

“What besides death before your time?”

“Humongous prunes and no fear, bro. The Oracle jumped their shit till the story came out. It was a sting, but as usual, Ethics Enforcement Section fucked up. It wasn’t meant for B.M. Driscoll. He’s so straight he won’t even remove mattress tags, but they wouldn’t say who it was meant for. Maybe somebody on Watch three. We think communications just gave the call to the wrong unit.”

Flotsam said, “EES should stick to catching cops who work off-duty jobs when they’re supposed to be home with bad backs. That’s all they’re good for.”

“Being an LAPD cop today is like playing a game of dodgeball, but the balls are coming at us from every-fucking-where,” Jetsam said.

Flotsam looked at his partner’s thousand-yard stare, saying, “Your display is on screen saver, dude. Get the hard drive buzzing and stay real.”

“Okay, but I don’t like being treated like a thief,” Jetsam said.

Flotsam said, “They gotta play their little games so they can say, ‘Look, Mr. Attorney General, we’re enforcing the consent decree against the formerly cocky LAPD.’ Just forget about it.”

“But we got sideswiped, bro.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“They burned us.”

“For what?”

“The undercover team saw B.M. Driscoll’s uniforms hanging in the car. They had to nail us for something after we didn’t fall for their stupid sting, so we’re getting an official reprimand for doing personal business on duty.”

“Stopping at the cleaners?”

“You got it, bro.”

“What’d the Oracle say about that?”

“He wasn’t there at the time. He’d already headed out for Alfonso’s Tex Mex when a rat from PSB showed up. One of those that can’t stop scratching all the insect bites on his candy ass. And the watch commander informed us we were getting burned.”

“That is way fucked, dude. You know how many man hours were wasted on that chickenshit sting? And here we are, with half the bodies we need to patrol the streets.”

“That is life in today’s LAPD, bro.”

“How’s your morale?”

“It sucks.”

“How would it be if I got you laid Thursday night?”

“Improved.”

“There’s this badge bunny I heard about at the Director’s Chair. Likes midnight swims at the beach, I hear.”

“I thought you said you’d fallen in love with Mag Takara?”

“I am in love, but it ain’t working too good.”

“You said it was hopeful.”

“Let’s hit it, dude,” Flotsam said to change the subject, grabbing his board and sprinting for the surf. He plunged into a cold morning breaker and came up grinning in the boiling ocean foam.

After Jetsam paddled out to his partner, he looked at Flotsam and said, “So what happened between you and Mag? Too painful to talk about?”

“She’s got it all, dude. The most perfect chick I ever met,” Flotsam said. “Do you know what the Oracle told me? When he walked a beat in Little Tokyo a hundred years ago, he got to know the Takara family. They own a couple of small hotels, three restaurants, and I don’t know how much rental property. That little honey might have some serious assets of her own someday.”

“No wonder you’re in love.”

“And she is such a robo-babe. You ever see more beautiful lips? And the way she walks like a little panther? And her skin like ivory and the way her silky hair falls against her gracefully curving neck?”

Sitting astride his surfboard, Jetsam said, “‘Gracefully curving’… bro, you are way goony! Stay real! This could just be false enchantment because she grabbed that dummy hand grenade and tossed it that time.”

Flotsam said, “Then I got way pumped the last night we worked together. I knew after my days off, you and me would be teamed for the rest of the deployment period, so I took the bit in my teeth and I went for it. I said something like, ‘Mag, I hope I can persuade you to grab a bikini and surf with me on the twilight ocean with the molten sun setting into the darkling sea.’”

“No, bro!” Jetsam said. “No darkling sea! That is sooo nonbitchin’!” He paused. “What’d she say to that?”

“Nothing at first. She’s a very reserved girl, you know. Finally, she said, ‘I think I would rather stuff pork chops in my bikini and swim in a tank full of piranhas than go surfing with you at sunset, sunrise, or anytime in between.’”

“That is like, way discouraging, bro,” Jetsam said somberly. “Can’t you see that?”

Flotsam and Jetsam weren’t the only ones complaining about the LAPD watchers that day. One of the watchers, D2 Brant Hinkle, had been biding his time at Internal Affairs Group. He was on the lieutenant’s list but was afraid that the list was going to run out of time before an opening came for him. He was optimistic now that all of the black males and females of any race who’d finished lower on the written and oral exam than he had but got preference had already been selected. Even though he wasn’t a D3 supervisor, he’d had enough prior supervisory experience in his package to qualify for the lieutenant’s exam, and he’d done pretty well on it. He didn’t think anyone else could leapfrog over him before the list expired.

It had been an interesting two-year assignment at IAG, good for his personnel package but not so good for the stomach. He was experiencing acid reflux lately and was staring down the barrel at his fifty-third birthday. With twenty-nine years on the Job this was his last realistic chance to make lieutenant before pulling the pin and retiring to… well, he wasn’t sure where. Somewhere out of L.A. before the city imploded.

Brantley Hinkle was long divorced, with two married daughters but no grandchildren yet, and he tried for a date maybe twice a month after he heard a colleague his age say, “Shit, Charles Manson gets a dozen marriage proposals a year, and I can’t get a date.”

It made him realize how seldom he had a real date, let alone a sleepover, so he’d been making more of an effort lately. There was a forty-year-old divorced PSR whose honeyed tones over the police radio could trigger an incipient erection. There was an assistant district attorney he’d met at a retirement party for one of the detectives at Robbery-Homicide Division. There was even a court reporter, a Pilates instructor in her spare time, who was forty-six years old but looked ten years younger and had never been married. She’d whipped him into better shape with a diet and as much Pilates as he could stand. His waistband got so loose he couldn’t feel his cell phone vibrating.

So he was in decent condition and still had most of his hair, though it was as gray as pewter now, and he didn’t need glasses, except for reading. He could usually connect with one of the three women when he was lonely and the need arose, but he hadn’t been trying lately. He was more focused on leaving Professional Standards Bureau and getting back to a detective job somewhere to await the promotion to lieutenant. If it came.

At IAG Brant Hinkle had seen complaints obsessively investigated for allegations that would have been subjects of fun and needling at retirement parties back in the days before the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal. Back before the federal consent decree.