“I thought about that,” the chief said. “You and Meyer have been on deep undercover assignment, approved directly by my office. Even your captain would have been unaware. So you’re back now, all badged up.”
“Really? What were we doing undercover? Usually coming back from that is accompanied by a big-assed story of wrongs being righted.”
“I can’t talk about it. Neither can you. It involves the feds and national security.”
“Convenient,” I said. “And pretty good thinking.”
“So… are you in?”
I knew that I could speak for Meyer. “We’re in,” I said.
I heard the chief sigh. “Thanks, Johnny,” he said. “Can you come in today?”
“Okay,” I said.
We hung up and I called Meyer and filled him in.
“Oh, great,” he said. “I always wanted to be a cop.”
“Did you always want to be a rich cop?”
“Never crossed my mind,” he said. “I have no idea how to get rich on my own. It was useful to have a little help from my friends.”
“The Beatles lyric was better,” I said. “Any idea how to approach this?”
“Well… we could sit back and relax and do cop work for a couple of years until we work a case that somebody doesn’t want to see go all the way.”
“True,” I said. “But I’m not sure I still want to be a cop that much, for that long.”
“We’ve got to find out who’s been getting into the evidence room, and who’s been making rookie mistakes on cases, and figure out why.”
“Agree. Let’s talk to the chief this morning. We need to know what to come back as. I’m not sure Robbery Homicide is the best job for us to figure this out.”
We talked strategy a little more and agreed to meet at PAB at 8:00.
“Oh, and Johnny…”
“Yeah?”
“You might want to shave the beard before you rejoin the force. You look like an Asian hippie.”
“It’s my undercover beard, asshole. It’ll lend a stamp of verisimilitude.”
“Sure. Don’t your girls find it scratchy?”
“Your girl doesn’t,” I said, and hung up.
—
I told my girls what was going on. They were less than thrilled that I was going to be a cop again, even if it was just for the length of this assignment. There’s a certain amount of everyday risk that goes along with the badge, even if you’re a detective, and even if you’re just pretending to be a detective. They didn’t like it.
“This is going to be major boring shit,” I said. “Going through logbooks and case files, talking to other cops, trying to figure out patterns.”
“You have a way of taking boring shit and turning it into shit that gets you hurt,” Dawn said.
“Not this time,” I said. “Besides, Meyer will be with me. What could possibly go wrong?”
I hate doing aerobic exercise just for the sake of having done aerobic exercise. But given the loss of my defined daily schedule since I left the LAPD, I was regularly missing my early morning kata sessions that had kept me in shape for years after leaving the Army. Not to mention, since becoming rich and living with my three lovelies, I was eating (and drinking) more and better than I used to. Any repetitive aerobic exercise is a bit painful and just as boring as anything possibly could be. But because it’s easy, and because it can be done anywhere at any time, I decided to take up running. Even though I’ve learned over the years that I have to be running after something, or running away from something, or be forced to think about something else as I’m running in order to not think about how easy it would be to just stop.
Machines at the gym are the worst. At least on an elliptical I can read, but on a treadmill all I can think about is that if I stop running right now, I’m already exactly where I need to be.
Dawn is a runner and so I started spending many mornings or afternoons chasing after her tight little ass. It was fun, and I knew that no matter how long or short our runs were, she’d eventually let me catch her and we’d recover with hot sweaty sex. But we’d have to run back home first. Usually.
Thomas Barker introduced me to Ultimate Frisbee. 7 v 7, no timeouts, no halftime. Unless you have the disc you’re running to get open for a pass or running to cover someone else who’s trying to get open for a pass. This I could do. 90 minutes or so of constant jogging and sprinting without thinking of how hard you’re working. There’s nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of losing the person marking you and running full out towards the goal line with the disc in the air heading towards a place you may or may not be able to reach in time. If you get there and snag it, you feel like you ought to be on ESPN.
Then Mary Beth introduced me to recreational soccer. Not playing it — refereeing it. I’m still not quite sure how that happened but suddenly I was signed up with a non-profit organization and had sat through an all-day course on soccer refereeing 101. I had played as a kid and figured I knew everything about the game. Not so much, as it turned out. There was this book: The Laws of the Game. And another book: Advice to Referees. I sucked it all up as I had done before with penal codes and case files. And when I started working games I realized that, as with criminal law, there was a big difference between knowing the Laws and properly applying them. I got better fast.
I was fairly quickly assigned to the higher-level games this organization had, Under 19. Which means 16, 17, 18, and 19-year-old kids. Who can run pretty goddamned fast, by the way. When you referee a soccer match you have to try to stay 10-20 yards from the ball (which is moving all over a 9, 600 square yard fucking field) and be watching and constantly judging everything that’s happening. So you’re constantly walking, running, or sprinting, but it’s not until halftime that you become aware of how hard you’ve been working. Which is good, for guys like me, who don’t really like to run.
Being a soccer referee is a lot like being a traffic cop. There are laws, and you see infractions of the laws, and you have wide latitude to decide whether a given infraction is worth stopping the game for. If every driver was stopped after making any infraction, nobody on the road would be moving.
I had jogged and played Ultimate and refereed enough that I had to admit I was probably in the best shape of my life, at least since the Rangers. I was filthy rich. I had great friends in Meyer, Barker and his women, Richard and Cyndi Morrison, Buddy Magellas and Jen. I lived with three incredibly gorgeous young women with whom I had group sex pretty much every night and every morning. Life was good.
And I was bored. Bored, bored, bored.
I had trained in the martial arts starting when I was 6 years old. I enlisted in the Army at 17 and when I was 18 I became a Ranger. When I left the Army I joined the Los Angeles Police Department and wound up showing enough aptitude for hunting down bad guys that I became a detective. My entire adult life had been about training to fight, seeking the enemy, preparing to fight, fighting, and protecting the lawful.
Now my life was about deciding which type of champagne I should have by the pool.
When we made the deal with the LAPD chief to leave the department but work the cases he would give us that, for whatever reason, he couldn’t have his own troops work, we’d formed Rand & Associates, a private investigation and security firm. Richard Morrison, financial whiz that he is, helped us fund it to nine figures. It was meant to be a cover but it was also meant to give me, Meyer, Buddy, and Jen the ability to use our talents in whatever ways we decided to use them. Sort of a private sector cop force, we thought. We had enough money that we could hire other professionals and probably be very competitive in our chosen market.
So far, we’d prosecuted exactly one case, and that one was for the chief. And it mainly involved Meyer taking bribes. Not very exciting. I had to figure out what we were really going to do with the company and, more importantly for me, what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
I had three different groups that I could approach with an existential question like this. Meyer, Buddy, and Jen ostensibly worked for me and whatever decision I came to about Rand & Associates would affect them. Richard Morrison and Thomas Barker had no commonality with the things I had done in my life, but they were both smart as anything and had turned into dear friends. And, of course, my girls. But I felt that I had to get centered and figure some things out for myself before I went to the girls with this, because they would be the most affected and their opinions would matter the most to me. I decided to start with Barker.
“Hi, Hero,” Tina said when she answered the door, fully nude, which wasn’t at all unusual. “He’s waiting for you in the study.”
I watched her ass as she led me there. I had a thing for Tina, and she had a thing for me. It was a thing that we both knew we couldn’t pursue.
“I’ve been told this is to be a private conversation,” she said. “Pity. I’d love to spend some quality time with you, if you know what I mean.”
Tease.