Hollywood Moon by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online

look older than Sheila
     Montez, nor anyone else at Hollywood Station, and that included twenty-two-year-old rookies. The boyish-looking cop was too
     heavy-footed on brake and throttle for Sheila’s taste, and he caused her to smear polish on her fingertip.
    Both partners had the windows rolled down on this warm summer twilight as Aaron drove through the streets in the Hollywood
     Hills, where a number of car burglaries had taken place during early evening hours. After Sheila finished with her nails,
     she held all ten fingers in front of her, blowing lightly on them. Like all women patrol officers at LAPD, she had her hair
     pinned up so that it did not hang below her collar. And like all women officers who favored lip gloss and nail polish, she
     wore a pale unobtrusive shade while on duty. Aaron Sloane liked watching her do her lips and nails and thought her dusky good
     looks could be enhanced by a more crimson shade, especially if those lustrous umber tresses were unpinned and draped across
     her shoulders.
    Sheila had almost seven years on the Job, and though she’d recently transferred to Hollywood from Pacific Division, she was
     comfortable enough with Aaron to be tending to nails and makeup while riding shotgun in unit 6-X-66. When she’d been a rookie
     at Northeast Division, her field training officer, an old P3 named Tim Brannigan, would’ve had apoplexy if she’d tried this
     in his shop. Tim Brannigan had been the kind of FTO who resented women working patrol in the first place, never talked to
     her when he could yell, and made her call him sir right to the end of her probationary period.
    Since he’d hated writing reports, Tim Brannigan had let her drive only about once every four or five days. The rest of the
     time she was the passenger, doing the report writing. His favorite response to her requests to drive had been, “Rookie, you’re
     taking the paper.”
    Sheila figured the old bastard probably wasn’t breast-fed as a baby, so he never learned to appreciate or respect women. But
     at least he wasn’t one of the handsy partners who’d “accidentally” touch her when reaching for the MDC dashboard computer.
     There had been more than a few of those in her career.
    Sheila recalled a night two weeks earlier when Aaron Sloane was driving and a code 3 call had interrupted her nail polishing.
     She’d had to hang her wet nails out the window to dry while he drove with lights and siren to a check-cashing store where
     a clerk had accidentally tripped the silent robbery alarm. Aaron never complained about her dangling fingers and never told
     the others about what he called her girl stuff and she called her ablutions. And he never complained about the car mirror
     being turned so she could touch up her lips.
    Part of the reason Aaron never protested about anything was that he was one of the smitten ones, as Sheila had suspected from
     their first night together. But she’d never encouraged him, even though now, glancing over at him, she had to admit that he
     had boy-next-door good looks and was buff from a lot of iron pumping. It was just that the sandy-haired, baby-faced reticent
     types like Aaron had never appealed to her.
    And as though he had read her mind at that moment, Aaron said, “I got carded Saturday night when I had a date with a girl
     I met in my poly sci class.”
    Like many of the young cops at Hollywood Station, Aaron was taking college classes, and he was only six units away from a
     bachelor’s degree.
    “Does that surprise you?” Sheila asked. “Getting carded? I wish I could get carded once in a while.”
    “Don’t tell me you’re worried about getting old,” Aaron said, gazing at her with that moony expression of his.
    “Less than two years from now I’ll be thirty,” she said. “It’s hard to believe.”
    “I’ll be thirty in four months,” Aaron said. “And I get carded just about every damn time I go to a bar. It’s embarrassing
     when I have a