Fausto walked into the office, where three supervisors were doing paperwork, and being one of the few patrol officers at Hollywood Station old enough to call the sixty-eight-year-old sergeant by his given name, he said to the Oracle, “I don’t like it, Merv.”
“What don’t you like, Fausto?” the Oracle asked, knowing the answer.
“Budgie’s got a baby at home.”
“So what’s that got to do with it?”
“Sometimes she lactates. And it’s painful.”
“She’ll deal with it, Fausto. She’s a cop,” the Oracle said, while the other sergeants pretended to not be listening.
“What if she gets herself hurt? Who’s gonna feed her baby?”
“The cover teams won’t let her get hurt. And babies don’t have to have mother’s milk.”
“Aw shit,” Fausto said, echoing the Oracle’s sentiments about the whole deal.
After he’d gone the Oracle said to the other two sergeants, “Sometimes my ideas work too well. Fausto’s not only gotten out of his funk, I think he’s about to adopt Budgie Polk. Her kid’ll probably be calling him Grandpa Fausto in a couple years.”
Cosmo Betrossian was a whole lot unhappier than Fausto Gamboa. He had diamonds to deliver to Dmitri at the Gulag soon and he had to kill that miserable addict Farley Ramsdale and his stupid girlfriend, Olive, sometime before then. Farley’s claim that he had someone watching Cosmo and Ilya’s apartment was so ridiculous Cosmo hadn’t given it a thought. And as to Farley’s other claim, that he had a letter that would be delivered to the police if something happened to him, well, the addict had seen too many movies. Even if there was a letter, let the police try to prove the truth of it without the writer and his girlfriend alive to attest to its veracity.
Cosmo was going to make them disappear, and he would have liked to talk to Dmitri about that. Dmitri would have some good ideas about how to make someone vanish, but if Dmitri learned about the tweakers, he might see them as potential trouble and back out of the arrangement. No, Cosmo would have to deal with them with only Ilya to help. And it would not be easy. Other than a gang rival back in Armenia whom he had shot to death when he was a kid of eighteen, Cosmo had never killed anyone. Here in America he had never even committed violent crime until the jewelry store robbery. His criminal life had been relegated to the smuggling of drugs, which he did not use himself, fencing stolen property, and in recent years, identity theft, which he’d learned from a Gypsy.
He’d met the Gypsy in a nightclub on the Sunset Strip. Cosmo had been frequenting the Strip then, doing low-level cocaine sales. But the Gypsy introduced him to a new world. He showed Cosmo how easy it was to walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, armed with a bit of personal data stolen by common mail thieves like Farley Ramsdale, and tell a DMV employee that he needed a new driver’s license because he’d changed his address and misplaced his license. At first the DMV employees would ask for a Social Security number but seldom if ever bothered to pull up the photo of the legitimate license holder to compare it with the face before them. They’d just take a new photo and change the address to the location where the license would be sent, and business would be concluded.
Cosmo and the Gypsy normally used an address of a house or apartment in their neighborhood where the occupant worked during the day. And either Cosmo or the Gypsy would check their neighbor’s mailbox every day until the driver’s license arrived. Later, when the DMV started asking for a birth certificate, Cosmo learned that with the information from the stolen mail, it was a simple matter for the Gypsy to make a credible birth certificate that would satisfy most DMV employees.
Cosmo and the Gypsy got so lazy that instead of going to the DMV, they started using a CD template that was making the rounds among all the identity thieves. It showed how to make driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, auto insurance certificates, and other documents.
Stealing credit-card numbers became a bonanza. They could buy just about anything. They could even buy automobiles, and since car dealers were all covered by insurance, they were the easiest. By the time the legitimate card owners got their statements, Cosmo and the Gypsy would be off that card and on to another. Sometimes the credit-card statements went to bogus addresses supplied by Cosmo and the Gypsy, so legitimate card owners wouldn’t discover the account was delinquent until they tried to buy something of value.
The Gypsy had an interior decorator working with them at that time. She said it was amazing how many people on the affluent west side of town kept their old cards, even ATM cards, thrown into a drawer somewhere. Nobody seemed to care much. The credit-card company only took a hit if the card was presented in person by the thief. If the business was done on the Internet or by phone, the credit-card company was not liable. Banks and credit-card companies had long delays in catching up, and identity thefts were so paper intensive the police were overwhelmed.
For a while Cosmo and the Gypsy had gotten so successful they were hoping to deal with the Russians whose eastern European contacts hacked into U.S. banks and lending institutions for card numbers, then ordered high-quality embossing and encoding strips from China. As it was, they just did their business online in the cybercafés or by phone and ordered merchandise to be sent to addresses they’d cased. FedEx would drop the parcels on the porch while the resident was at work, and they would be picked up by Cosmo while the Gypsy waited in their car. The resident would be shocked when, after a few months of this, the police showed up at the home with a search warrant for all that stolen property.
Then one day without warning the Gypsy and the interior decorator moved to New York without notifying Cosmo until they were there. And that was that. Cosmo continued limping through the world that the Gypsy had sailed through, and now Cosmo was dealing with tweaker mail thieves and doing cybercafé networking as best he could. He had almost been arrested twice and was losing confidence now that everybody was doing identity theft.
The big break had come in the batch of mail stolen by Farley Ramsdale, when he had found the letter about the diamonds, and Cosmo had committed his first violent crime in America. He was stunned to learn that he liked it. It had thrilled him, that feeling of power over the jewelry store proprietor. Seeing the fear in his eyes. Hearing him weep. Cosmo had had complete control over everything, including that man’s life. The feeling was something he could never put into words, but he believed that Ilya felt some of it too. If another chance at a safe and profitable armed robbery came up, he knew he would take it.
But of immediate concern to him was Farley Ramsdale and Olive. And Cosmo was very worried about Ilya as a partner in homicide. Could she do what it took, he wondered. He hadn’t spoken with her about the two addicts, not since they had come to the apartment with their blackmail threat. Cosmo sensed that Ilya knew what had to be done but wanted him to deal with it alone. Well, it was not going to work that way. He couldn’t do it alone. They wouldn’t trust him. Ilya was a very smart Russian, and he needed a plan with her involved.
Hollywood Nate Weiss and Wesley Drubb were having another one of those Hollywood nights, that is, a night of very strange calls. It always happened when there was a full moon over the boulevard and environs.
Actually, the Oracle, who’d read a book or two in his long life, forewarned them all at roll call, saying, “Full moon. A Hollywood moon. This is a night when our citizens act out their lives of quiet desperation. Share your stories tomorrow night at roll call and we’ll give the Quiet Desperation Award to the team with the most memorable story.” Then he added, “Beware, beware! Their flashing eyes, their floating hair!”