YEARS EARLIER, I’D been hand-picked by Lieutenant Robby Wicks for his newly formed violent crimes team. I didn’t have any detective experience and transferred right in from a patrol assignment at Lynwood Station in South Central Los Angeles. I took one of the four slots that the most experienced detectives from all over the county wanted and had lobbied for.
I’d only met Robby once, when he had worked an overtime slot as a field sergeant at Lynwood Station. That particular hot summer night I tracked rusty water from a hit-and-run vehicle’s ruptured radiator. I did it running in the street following a leak as the water evaporated. The driver had hit and killed a young girl, a child in the crosswalk. Hit her so hard the fabric of her dress imprinted in the chrome of the vehicle. When I finally caught up with the driver, I had to cross the line into the gray area of the law, and at the end of my boot I made the arrest. Robby was there to pull me off the suspect, who ended up hospitalized. Robby wrote what had happened to the suspect in his Use of Force report, “All the Injuries were sustained in the car accident.”
Robby Wicks had seen something in my unwavering tenacity and call to violence that he liked. That episode had exposed something hidden in me that I did not like and that he had easily recognized.
Together, for many years, we chased the most violent criminals Los Angeles County had to offer. It was as if Los Angeles was Robby Wicks’ own private game preserve. Working with Wicks called to mind the famous quote from Hemmingway that I’d seen posted over Blue’s desk in the narco office:
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never care for anything else thereafter.
Wicks fell heavily into that category. What I feared most was that I did, too.
When I made my decision to leave the team for a stable schedule in court services, Wicks did everything in his power to talk me out of it. In the end, we parted angry. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand my position—that my daughter had to come first. He could only see how I was messing with his uncompromised need to hunt. I had been his one and only hunting partner, someone he trusted implicitly to back his play no matter how far he ventured into the gray area of the law.
Now he stood in front of me at Judge Connors’ chamber door, smiling like old times. He stuck his hand out. “Bruno, damn good to see you. You going to ask me in, or I gotta stand out here all day?” I hadn’t seen him in two years. He acted as if nothing had ever come between us. I took his hand and shook but didn’t return his smile. When the wolf knocks at your door, you don’t invite him in, you grab your gun. That wasn’t fair. I liked the man. I could even say, in a weird sort of way, loved him. I respected no man more, except my father, but for entirely different reasons.
These weren’t my chambers to bar his entry. I didn’t have that authority. I stepped aside. He entered with a trailing whiff of cologne. He wore his usual brown polyester Western-cut suit. His expensive ostrich-skin cowboy boots had been replaced by highly polished black Wellingtons. He didn’t care that his Western garb was outdated. Over the years he’d developed a brand, the way he looked, the way he talked, the way he treated certain people, and stuck to it. He wanted everyone, the good guys and the bad guys, to instantly recognize him when he walked into a situation. He wore his hair short above his ears and long on top combed to the side like a kid in elementary school. He was anything but. He had intense brown eyes that bore into you even during the most innocuous conversations. Out of view and concealed in a hip holster, he carried a Colt .45 Combat Commander, a gun not approved by the department, a gun with the blood of many who’d gone up against him—gone up against us—the blood deeply engrained in the blue steel and stag grips.
He moved right over to the desk, leaned in, and shook Judge Connors’ offered hand. “Good morning, Your Honor.” He sat in one of the two chairs in front of the desk, something you didn’t do in Judge Connors’ chambers, not without being asked to first.
Connors stared him down. “Cut the shit, Wicks. What do you want?” I marveled at the clash of two obstinate men who always had to have their way.
I’d kept track of Wicks over the last two years with members from his team who came in to get search warrants or arrest warrants signed by the sympathetic Judge Connors. I was envious of their job, of their continued friendship with my old friend, envious of a job I wished like hell I had never left. They had intimated at first, and eventually came right out and said it, that Robby Wicks would do anything to get me back on the team. He had even asked them to test the water when they saw me, to see if I’d take an offer to return.
Robby never came with them. He wouldn’t lower himself to that level of scut work or to swallow his pride and ask me to come back. In my mind, real or imagined, he wanted to avoid any kind of contact with me as it further impugned his reputation. No one left his team the way I did. You promoted out or you just didn’t leave. That’s the way he looked at it. Leaving to go to court services gave him a black eye, and he didn’t like it. Now he sat in my judge’s chambers, smug and arrogant as hell.
I went over and stood at the side of the desk.
Judge Connors said, “Bruno, weren’t you going to take some days off?”
The question shook me out of my stunned reverie and cleared the way for logical thinking. I knew why Wicks had come. A blind man could’ve seen it. I didn’t take my eyes off Wicks. “I think my old supervisor has a favor to ask you, Your Honor. And before he does, I’d like to ask that you not grant that favor.”