The Black Marble (51 page)
“I didn't mean to suggest anything untoward,” the sergeant apologized.
Flotsam grunted and turned to Jetsam, saying, “Untoward?” Then, to their host: “If we work for you, Sarge, we might need a translator.”
Sergeant Hawthorne, who was thinking exactly the same thing about
them
, said, “You can ask any of the night-watch vice officers about me. I'm a forgiving supervisor, and I'm easy to get along with. Maybe I don't look or sound the part, but I'm a pretty good street copper as well.”
Doubting that, Flotsam told his partner, “Dude, it could be nectar-neat to catch an occasional break from these bluesuits and, like, go all
Mission Impossible
for a night or two.”
“Easy for you to say, bro,” Jetsam said. “You ain't the one that'd have to get your mind into a ghoulish game of show-and-tell where some psycho pervert wants to hump your stump.”
Sergeant Hawthorne said, “It's not like that. Cozzo is basically a grifter with a rich foreign client who has a very strange Achilles' heel, that's all.”
“If he ever decides to go the distance himself, the geek won't even
have
a heel,” Jetsam reminded them with a perceptible sneer.
“We could try it once and see how it goes,” the vice sergeant said. Then: “Whoops!” as another dollop of ketchup obliterated the
A
in
UCLA.
Jetsam shook his head. “Sarge, your sweatshirt now just says UC, as in âundercover,' with two blobs of red beside it. So you just managed to out yourself. Any denizens of the dark out there can read that you're UC, and you did it with your own ketchup.”
Sergeant Hawthorne managed an embarrassed smile and began wiping ketchup off the sweatshirt and off his face, until scraps of shredded napkin clung to his chin.
Jetsam looked at the vice sergeant and said, “What's the thread count on these things anyways? You got pieces of it hanging off your face.”
Flotsam said, “Sarge, if we let you dial us in, you gotta learn how to eat a fucking hamburger. You're making us, like, way nervous here.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1978 by Joseph Wambaugh
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
EBOOKS BY JOSEPH WAMBAUGH
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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