The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

They’re worse’n niggers, coming here and making us pay for their little milk-suckers. General Hospital, my ass. Wonder what they’ll say when they find themselves looking at the ocean?”
    Roscoe then spotted a black man in a business suit walking on Western Avenue with a young white woman in a green tailored jacket and skirt. She was obviously not one of the white prostitutes who worked the area so Roscoe kept his voice low when he drove by looked in their direction and said, “Price of pork what it is, and a spade can still buy a white pig for ten dollars?”
    “You know, I never drove in a pursuit,” Whaddayamean Dean observed as he saw an LAPD traffic car zooming past them to overtake a speeder on Olympic Boulevard.
    “Remember one thing, babe,” Roscoe said, his voice dropping an octave as it always did when he assumed the role of training officer, “don’t never try to overtake a fast car on the outside when you’re going in a turn. Most cars’ll flip on a piece of spit. Hit him on the inner rear fender and he’ll eat the windshield. I once saw a freeway car drive a motherfucker right into an abutment by doing that. Sucker’s car blew up like a howitzer shell. Took four pricks off the welfare rolls
permanent
. And you gotta know when your engine’s gonna flame out. These hogs probably only top out at a hundred ten so you push it very long you’ll probably throw a bearing, drop a rod and blow theengine. That’s embarrassing in a good pursuit. Makes you feel stupid.
    “In addition to knowing your car you gotta know all your equipment,” Roscoe continued, “like that peashooter you’re carrying. I wish I could talk you into buying a Magnum and carrying some good, gut ripping hollow points in it. I want a gun that’ll stop some scrote when I need him stopped. After the prick’s dead I’ll worry about the ammunition being department approved. I ever tell you about that abba dabba burglar my partner shot when I used to work the Watts car? Ripping off a gas station when he set off the silent alarm. We were carrying those peashooters like you got. That sucker could run the hundred in ten flat till my partner shot him, and then he ran it in nine-nine. So I made a vow to get rid a this worthless ammo and get me some killing stuff. I made a study of velocity and shock.”
    And then they got
their
first bloody call of the night. “Seven-A-Eighty-five. A possible jumper, Wilshire and Mariposa,” said the communications operator. “Handle the call code three.”
    Roscoe preferred working an extra car, called an “X-car,” because instead of saying “Seven-X-Eighty-five” or “Seven-X-ray-Eighty-five,” he could improvise by saying, “Seven-Exceptional-Eighty-five,” or “Seven-Exciting-Eighty-five.”
    Roscoe was falling in love with the voice of the radio operator on frequency ten whom he had never seen. So Roscoe picked up the mike, pushed the button to send, made three kissing sounds and said, “This is Seven-Ay-ya-Eighty-five. I say Seven-a-for-Atomic-Eighty-five, rrrrrajah on the call.”
    Then he released the button, turned to Whaddayamean Dean and said, “That’ll make her wet her pants.”
    And the radio operator, who was a fat, fifty-nine year old housewife with six children older than Roscoe Rules, turned to the operator on her left and said, “That guy on Seven-A-Eighty-five sounds like an insufferable prick.”
    • • •
    A janitor named Homer Tilden had placed the jumper call when a twenty-two year old receptionist named Melissa Monroe returned to the office some three hours after the building closed and demanded to be let in on the pretext of having left an important document there.
    “I never shoulda let her in, it’s my fault, all my fault,” the plump black janitor later sobbed to detectives.
    Then the janitor pictured the pert smiling girl with the jazz age bob, who always yelled “Night, Mr. Tilden!” when she left at night, and he burst into tears like a