When she bent down and looked at him through the passenger window, he said, “I don’t have time for anything but a very sweet head job. I don’t want to go to a motel. If you’re willing to get in and do it in the alley behind the next corner, I’ll pay forty bucks. If you’re not, see you later.”

It was so fast and so easy that Budgie was stunned. There was no parrying back and forth, no wordplay to see if she might be a cop. Nothing. She didn’t quite know how to respond other than to say, “Okay, stop a block down Sunset by the parking lot and I’ll come to you.”

And that was all she had to do, other than signal to her security team by scratching her knee that the deal was done. Within a minute a black-and-white chase unit from Watch 3 squealed in behind the guy, lit him up with their light bar and a horn toot, and in ten minutes it was over. The trick was taken back to the mobile command post, a big RV parked two blocks from the action taking place on Sunset Boulevard.

At the CP were benches for the tricks, some folding party tables for the arrest reports, and a computerized gadget to digitally fingerprint and photograph the shell-shocked trick, after which he might be released. If he failed the attitude test or if there were other factors such as serious priors or drug possession, he would be taken to Hollywood Station for booking.

If it turned out to be a field release, the trick would find his car outside the command post, having been driven there by one of the uniformed cops, but the trick wouldn’t be driving it home. The cars were usually impounded, the city attorney’s office believing that impound is a big deterrent to prostitution.

Budgie was taken in a vice car to the command post, where she completed a short arrest report after telling the guy who wired her that she didn’t need to hear the tape of her conversation with the trick. He was sitting there glaring at her.

He said, “Thanks a lot.” And mouthed the word “cunt.”

Budgie said to a vice cop, “Maybe it’s just a hormonal funk I’m in, but I’m starting to hate his guts.”

The vice cop said to Budgie, “He’s the kind of shit kicker that spent his happiest days line dancing and blowing up mailboxes.” Then to the glowering trick he said, “This is Hollywood, dude. Let’s do this cinema vérité.”

The trick scowled and said, “What the fuck’s that?”

The vice cop said, “You just keep mouthing off, and pretend we’re not in your face with a hidden video camera for a scene maybe you can later interpret for momma and the kiddies.”

Mag’s first came a few minutes after Budgie’s. He was a white guy driving a Lexus, and from the looks of him, one of those downtown businessmen on his way home to the west side. He was more cautious than Budgie’s trick and circled the block twice. But Mag was a trick magnet. He pulled around the corner after his second pass and parked.

The vice cops had said that they expected long tall Budgie to get some suspicious questions about being a police decoy, but Mag was so small, so exotic, and so sexy that she should reassure anybody. And indeed, the businessman was not interested in her bona fides.

He said, “You look like a very clean girl. Are you?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, tempted to try a Japanese accent but changing her mind. “Very clean.”

“I think you’re quite beautiful,” he said. Then he looked around warily and said, “But I have to know you’re clean and safe.”

“I’m a very clean girl,” Mag said.

“I have a family,” he said. “Three children. I don’t want to bring any diseases into my home.”

To calm him down, Mag said, “No, of course not. Where do you live?”

“Bel-Air,” he said. Then he added, “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“No, of course not,” she said. Then came the games.

“How much do you charge?”

“What’re you looking for?”

“That depends on how much you charge.”

“That depends on what you’re looking for.”

“You’re truly lovely,” he said. “Your legs are so shapely yet strong.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, figuring that matching his good manners was the way to go.

“You should always wear shorts.”

“I often do.”

“You seem intelligent. So obliging. I’ll bet you know how to cater to a man.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, thinking, Jesus, does he want a geisha or what?

“I’m old enough to be your father,” he said. “Does that trouble you?”

“Not at all.”

“Excite you?”

“Well… maybe.”

And with that, he unzipped his fly and withdrew his erect penis and began masturbating as he cried out, “You’re so young and lovely!”

For the benefit of the cover team and because of her genuine surprise, Mag yelled into her bra, “Holy shit! You’re spanking the monkey! Get outta here!”

For a minute she forgot to scratch her knee.

Within two minutes the uniformed chase team lit up and stopped the Lexus, and when her vice cop security team pulled up, Mag said, “Damn, he just jizzed all over his seventy-five-thousand-dollar car!”

After arriving back at the mobile CP, where the guy was booked for 647a of the penal code, lewd conduct in a public place, Mag was feeling a little bit sorry for the sick bastard.

Until after his digital photographing and fingerprinting, when he turned to Mag and said, “The truth is, you have fat thighs. And I’ll just bet you have father issues.”

“Oh, so you’re a psychologist,” Mag said. “From looking at my thighs you have me all figured out. So long, Daddy dearest.”

Then she turned to leave and noticed a handsome young vice cop named Turner looking at her. She blushed and involuntarily glanced at her thighs.

“They’re gorgeous like the rest of you,” Turner said. “Father issues or not.”

Mag Takara hooked three tricks in two hours, and Budgie Polk got two. When Budgie’s third trick, a lowlife in a battered Pontiac, offered her crystal for pussy, Budgie popped him for drug possession.

“How’s that? Felony prostitution,” she said, grinning at Simmons when she arrived back at the CP.

“You’re doing great, Budgie,” Simmons said. “Have fun, but stay alert. There’s lotsa real weird people out here.”

Mag met one of them ten minutes later. He was a jug-eared guy in his early forties. He drove a late-model Audi and wore clothes that Mag recognized as coming from Banana. He was the kind of guy she’d probably have danced with if he’d asked her at one of the nightclubs on the Strip that she and her girlfriends sometimes visited.

He’d been hanging back when other tricks flitted around her, making nervous small talk for a moment but then driving away in fear. Fear of cops, or fear of robbery, or fear of disease-there was plenty of fear out there mingling with the lust and sometimes enhancing it. There were plenty of neuroses.

When the guy in the Audi took his turn and talked to Mag, broaching the subject of sex for money very tentatively, he became the second guy of the evening to get so excited so fast that he unzipped his pants and exposed himself.

Mag said into her bra, “Oh my! You’re masturbating! How exciting!”

“It’s you!” he said. “It’s you! I’d pay you for a blow job, but I’m tapped out. And I can’t get old Jonesy stiff, goddamnit!”

And while the chase team was speeding toward the corner, the headlights from a large van lit up the interior of the Audi. Mag looked more closely, and it was true: Jonesy was not stiff. But it was bright crimson!

“Good god!” Mag said. “Are you bleeding down there?”

He stopped and looked at her. Then he released his flaccid member and said, “Oh, that. It’s just lipstick from the other three whores that sucked it tonight. That’s where all my money went.”

A bit later, Budgie violated an order from Simmons by not keeping her feet on the pavement. She couldn’t believe it when a big three-axle box truck hauling calves pulled around the corner and parked in the only place he could, in the first alley north.