The Shamrock was a rent by the week or month or hour kind of place. Some of the doors on the ground floor had hasps above the door knobs with large padlocks, extra security for the meth-fried speed freaks who thought everyone was out to get them. We took the stairs to the second floor, the stairwell too narrow for fire code.

The second floor wasn’t any different than the first with the exception of the odor. Here, it was warm and sour, like thrown-up milk. Robby stopped, listened, and looked. His paranoia made me reach down and touch the place on my hip where I used to carry my gun, back when we rolled as a team, rolling hot, chasing violent fugitives.

Robby put the key in the door, hesitated, knocked quietly, turned the key, eased the door open a crack, and said, “It’s me.” He waited a beat and went in. The room was dark with an orange cast from a t-shirt hanging over the end table lamp. The Mötley Crüe emblem on the tee threw an eerie shadow. I entered, button-hooked left out of habit, and kept my back to the wall while my eyes adjusted. Off in the center of the ten-foot-square pleasure palace, stood a shadow, a figured obscured by thick clothing that gave an image of a robed monk. “Bruno?” Her voice, disguised with a heavy rasp of a smoker. I didn’t recognize it.

Robby moved to the right over to the end table. “I told you, I don’t like the room dark.” He yanked off the Crüe shirt.

Chocolate flung up an arm to cover her face. In the brief glimpse it afforded, I didn’t recognize Chocolate. Robby tricked me. This was some old crone at least seventy years old, wrinkled, slump-shouldered, dressed in panhandler rags.

She slowly brought her arm down, her expression yearning for approval. A smile, concave from no teeth, added to the haggard image.

Her eyes suddenly stood out, brown and youthful yet over-tired. Right then it clicked in, an old memory. This was Chocolate. The street had been horribly unkind. It never was kind to anyone wedded to the glass pipe. It stole thirty years of her life, probably more because she would never recall the first thirty, her memory a blur, having lived fast and loose way out on the fringe. I tried to remember how old she should be. Twenty-eight. My God, twenty-eight.

I couldn’t keep the shock out of my expression. Her smile fell. She covered her face with her hands and ran to the bathroom. “Chocolate, wait.” I went after her, got to the door before she could close it. She didn’t fight and stepped back, her face turned down, hands up for cover.

I stepped in and closed the door. The room turned to pure blackness. We waited, her breathing the only sound. “I’m sorry. I … I—”

“You don’t have to explain. I know.”

I stepped over, hands out in the dark reaching for her. I touched her. She backed off a step. I moved in and took hold of her, hugged her frailness. She shook as she wept.

The first time I came across her was on Long Beach Boulevard during a call of an armed robbery.

The white-haired diminutive old man, the victim who’d called, stood out in front of the motel waiting for me. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. I pulled into the driveway, rolled the window down. The night was cold. “Are you the one who called?”

He nodded.

“What happened?”

“She took my car. I want my car back.”

“Who took your car?”

“A hooker.”

This was odd. Usually the johns made up some story as a cover for their extramarital vice gone wrong. This one held his head up, proud.

“Who took it and what kind of car was it?” I wanted to get out a broadcast right away. “She was an African goddess. The most beautiful woman you ever did see. You’d have to look a long time—”

“Sir, what kind of car was it and what kind of weapon did she use?”

“As soon as we got in the room, she said, ‘Give me the keys, ol’ man.’ I didn’t even have time to reach in my pocket. I’d have given her anything just to see her naked, just to see that beauty in its natural state. Deputy, she’s that beautiful. Then she—” he laughed, then said, “she grabbed hold of me, picked me up, turned me upside down, and shook me until my keys fell out of my pocket. The way she touched me, wrapped her arms right around me, turned me upside down, my God, it was sensual. Worth every penny of the two hundred dollars in my wallet. I don’t care about the money, honestly, I don’t. I just want my car back. It’s a brand-new Lincoln Mark IV, green with soft, butter-cream leather interior.”

Chocolate never wanted to hurt anyone, at least not at first. Later on, the street put the finishing touches on her. With her corruption complete, she did a year and a half in the joint for stabbing John Ahern, aka Jumbo. In reality, it was self-defense.

I caught up with her a few days later, still driving the old man’s car, the Lincoln. The old man was right, she was an absolute beauty, the kind of young girl you wanted to just look at, her youth, her vibrancy, the wildness in her eyes. She was a gorgeous seventeen-year-old hooker, new to the street, tall, five eleven, a hundred and forty-five pounds. Her weight in all the right places, hips and breasts, muscular arms and long, well-defined legs.

She looked at me strangely when I didn’t handcuff her. I gave her what I called my Father Willy speech about the life she’d chosen and how she was on the wrong path. No one had ever done that for her, especially not a cop who should’ve been taking her to jail. I’d passed the test. Two weeks later, she called me at the station and gave up a mid-level rock coke dealer, Q-Ball. When I didn’t give her up in court, she grew to trust me. Her beauty opened every door on the street, the lowlife slime and the corrupt upper class let her pass, told her about their robberies, the molestation, where they kept their stash. Together we threw a lot of bad folks in jail. I’d lost touch with her, my life overcrowded with my obsession, working on the Violent Crimes Team.

Chocolate was content to stay just the way we were in the quiet, dark bathroom that smelled of urine and mold and soured plastic. We stayed for a long time. I couldn’t help thinking how everyone involved in this thing: Robby, Jumbo, Q-Ball, and now Chocolate were linked to and through me to everything going on. Sure, everything on the street was connected one way or another. With the regular Joe Citizens there’s six degrees of separation. With crooks, since they only make up five percent of the population, there was only two degrees. This wasn’t Robby’s street doctrine, it was mine.

Jumbo ran a big section of South Central Los Angeles, which meant everyone on his turf he controlled or at least influenced. Everyone swirled around the same toilet bowl, never leaving, never changing.

Finally, I whispered, “Did you see what happened? Did you see who threw the gas and lit the fire that burnt that poor soul?”

She shook her head no.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I pulled her away, reached back for the switch on the wall.

“No, please, leave it off.”

I stopped just as my hand found it. “Then why are we here like this?”

When she hesitated, I knew it was going to be the truth. “The cops, they kicked in my door, threw me to da ground, and found my stash, what little there was. They said dey wouldn’t take me to jail if I cooperated and told them what I saw outside my window. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go in on another possession. I’m on probation already. I’m lookin’ at five years. I saw that asshole Wicks come up. So I told the cop I wanted to talk to Wicks and then I told Wicks I’d only talk to you. You gotta help me, Bruno, I can’t do another day in the joint.”

“That’s not going to happen. I promise.”

“Thanks, Bruno.” She clung a little tighter. “You think you could spot me a twenty?”

“You know better than that. I’ll buy you some food, but I won’t give you money for any rock.”