The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online Page A

over the head of a man for merely smiling at his woman. Twenty years ago, when she was a lithe young girl with asmooth sensuous belly he would have shot to death any man, cop or not, who would dare to refer to her as a bitch.
    Roscoe Rules knew nothing of
machismo
and did not even sense the slight almost imperceptible flickering of the left eyelid of the Mexican. Nor did he notice that those burning black eyes were no longer pointed somewhere between the shield and necktie of Roscoe Rules, but were fixed on his face, at the browless blue eyes of the tall policeman.
    “Now you two act like men and shake hands so we can leave,” Roscoe ordered.
    “Huh?” the Mexican said incredulously and even the black hod carrier looked up in disbelief.
    “I said shake hands. Let’s be men about this. The fight’s over and you’ll feel better if you shake hands.”
    “I’m forty-two years old,” the Mexican said softly, the eyelid flickering more noticeably “Almost old enough to be your father. I ain’t shaking hands like no kid on a playground.”
    “You’ll do what I say or sleep in the slammer,” Roscoe said, remembering how in school everyone felt better and even drank beer after a good fight.
    “What charge?” demanded the Mexican, his breathing erratic now. “What fuckin charge?”
    “You both been drinking,” Roscoe said, losing confidence in his constituted authority, but infuriated by the insolence which was quickly undermining what he thought was a controlled situation.
    Roscoe, like most black-glove cops, believed implicitly that if you ever backed down even for a moment in dealing with assholes and scrotes the entire structure of American law enforcement would crash to the ground in a mushroom cloud of dust.
    “We ain’t drunk,” the Mexican said. “I had a can of beer when I got home from work. One goddamn can!” He spoke in accented Cholo English: staccato, clipped, just as he did when he was a respected gang member.
    Then Roscoe Rules pushed him back into an alcove away from the eyes of those down the hall who had made their own peace by now and were preparing to go back into their apartments to fix dinner. Roscoe pulled his baton from the ring and hated this sullen Mexican and the glowering black man and even Whaddayamean Dean whose nervousness enraged Roscoe because if you ever let these scrotes think you were afraid…
    Then Roscoe looked around, guessing there were a dozen people between them and the radio car, and started to realize that this was not the time or place. But the Mexican made Roscoe Rules forget that it was the wrong time and place when he looked at the tall policeman with the harder crueler larger body and said, “I never let a man talk to me like this. You better book me or you better let me go but don’t you talk to me like this anymore or… or…”
    “Or? Or?” Roscoe said, his hairless brows throbbing as he touched the small man on the chest with the tip of his stick. “You Mexicans’re all alike. Think you’re tough, huh? Bantamweight champ a this garbage dump, huh? I oughtta tear that oily moustache off your face.”
    Then the flickering eyelid was still and the eyes glazed over. “Go ahead,” the Mexican barely whispered.
    And Roscoe Rules did. A second later the Mexican was standing there with a one inch piece of his right moustache and the skin surrounding it in Roscoe Rules’ left hand. The raw flesh began to spot at once with pinpoints of blood.
    Then the Mexican screamed and kicked Roscoe Rules in the balls.
    Suddenly Whaddayamean Dean found himself trying to get the Mexican’s neck in the crook of his arm, to squeeze off the oxygen to the brain, which would make him lose consciousness and flop convulsively on the ground, thus “doing the chicken.”
    The Mexican’s erstwhile black enemy was experiencing a deep sense of guilt and outrage at the Mexican’s plight.
    “You honky motherfucker!” the black hod carrier yelled when he finally exploded. He