The Bad Shepherd Read online

  “So what did you do?”

  “Air Cavalry.” Seeing the perplexed look on her face, he said, “Helicopters. I was a door gunner. Way it worked was.” Bo made his hand into a flat blade and raised it up about shoulder height. “We’d ferry troops into a battlefield.” He dropped his hand to the table with a swooping descent. “They’d jump out, we’d be on the ground a second or two. Then take back off and return to base until they needed to get picked up, or they needed us to do something else. My job was to lay down cover fire with this big ol’ machine gun.”

  Daphne nodded.

  “I’d shoot at anybody wearing pajamas while the boys ran for cover. Man, it was a rush. I didn’t care for being in a war, but those helicopter rides were something else. Felt a lot like surfing.” His voice trailed off, and he was quiet for a few moments. “I saw a flyer for the police department when I processed out of the Army. It seemed like the only thing that would be at least as exciting as dive-bombing in a helicopter, so I applied. Took a couple months for the application to go through, so I just surfed on the money I’d saved from the Army.”

  She asked him if he liked being a cop, and after a short second he told her he loved it. At first it, he explained, was the excitement, crashing through LA’s worst neighborhoods in a patrol car in the middle of the night and running down robbers, muggers, and car thieves. Then he started seeing more and more drug cases. He saw what heroin had done to so many in the inner city. Listless ghosts shambling down the streets, digging for food until they’re strong enough to steal something they can hock for another fix.

  Then he saw a kid on PCP flatten his partner’s face.

  Police Officer Three Kevin Collins, the senior patrol officer, had seventeen years in the street when they’d stopped this kid for erratic driving. They pulled him out of the car for field sobriety test, and he flipped out, throwing punches. Bo tried to subdue him, but nothing worked, this wiry kid was too strong for them. He threw Bo to the ground while Bo was trying to get cuffs on him. Then the kid punched Collins flat in the face. The nose exploded into a hazy, red cloud of blood and bone. The kid turned on Bo, charged him wholly out of his mind, and grabbed for Bo’s service revolver. Collins drew down, ordered the kid to stop, and fired six times when he wouldn’t, landing all six in the kid’s back. Two punctured his lungs, and one severed his spine. The responding ME said that was what finally stopped him. He might well have overpowered Bo, even with six shots in him, based on all the PCP they found in his system.

  The kid, Donnell Taylor, was a local high school sports star and had been accepted to USC on a track scholarship. Community groups went into an uproar because two cops killed a Black kid with a future; seemingly or knowingly oblivious to the fact that he was so high on angel dust he attacked two policemen, injuring one and nearly killing the other, and could well have killed both had he gotten the gun. As it was, Collins’ face would never be the same.

  The uproar continued to grow until the department cashiered Collins to placate the mob. It had been a lawful stop and a righteous shoot; Taylor was out of his mind and unbelievably dangerous. If he’d crashed his car into a storefront or a crowded bus stop, the same community would have been in an uproar because the police hadn’t stopped him. They fired Collins for “excessive force” with just three years before he’d been eligible for his pension. He shot himself in Laguna a year later. He’d had to steal the gun because he didn’t make enough in his rent-a-cop job to afford one.

  Bo later found out that Collins had made a deal with the brass to take the full brunt of the charges so that Bo would be spared. Collins probably thought they’d let him keep his pension when he made the deal.

  Bo saw what drugs were doing. They weren’t just wrecking the lives of the people using them, the dregs and the promising young kids like Donnell Taylor alike. They were also wrecking the lives of families, the local businesses who were being stolen from, and the cops like Kevin Collins. Good men who had dedicated their lives to keeping the streets safe were now fighting a rising tide of crime, violence, and despair the likes of which the city had never seen.

  So Bo made it his mission in life to get into the Narcotics Division. He took every drug class the department offered and took criminology and sociology courses in his off time. Studying for promotion became a second job. Bo took the detective’s exam, passed on his first go, and transferred into the Detective Bureau as soon as a position opened in Narcotics. Bo cut the story there, leaving out any details on the Rockstar Squad.

  They were both quiet for some time; there was little to be said after that.

  “You working Friday night?” she asked finally. Traces of smoke followed her words.

  “Nothing’s on the books right now, far as I know. Why, did you want to go to a show?”

  She shook a negative, and that wicked smile crept up the side of her face.

  “What?”

  “Rik’s having another party.”

  “You wanted me to go?”

  She laughed. “No, I wanted to know if you were raiding it or not,” Daphne said in a teasing voice. “Although, that would be hilarious if you went.”

  “You’re bad news, girl.” Bo grabbed the joint and took a hit. He traced the lines of her abdominal muscles with his left hand. Daphne played a lazy electric piano on his forearm. “We got what we needed out of that clown, and I think he got the message. I don’t expect Rik would try anything else at this point.” Bo didn’t say that if Rik did it would violate his agreement, and he’d be behind bars before the sun rose.

  “He’s promising its going to be ‘huuuuuuge,’” she held her hands out about three feet apart.

  “I’m sure I can find something better for you to do Friday.”

  Daphne shrugged her lithe shoulders. “I promised Marcy. Besides, you said you had plans.”

  That was true. She’d asked him what he was doing earlier in the week, and he’d said that he was going to be out with his squad. The Rockstars needed to be out, needed to be part of the scene, canvasing clubs and gathering intelligence The Rik-Deacon Blues-Lorenzo Fremont triangle was just one of the leads they were chasing.

  The record ended, and another dropped into its place. Bo set the joint, which was nearly smoked out, back in the ashtray. He leaned over and kissed Daphne. Rik, Lorenzo Fremont, the Rockstars, and the Strip all faded away.

  Bo woke in the small hours. Moonlight filled his bedroom. Daphne lay next to him, her naked form half-covered by a sheet. He studied the curve of her hip and wanted to run a soft finger along the line, but didn’t want to wake her. Instead, he just lay there and admired. For the first time in his life, Bo Fochs felt at peace.

  Chapter Five

  Fochs and Gaffney walked the Strip.

  Bo often said that if Los Angeles were the center of the musical and cultural universe, the Sunset Strip was where the Big Bang happened. The Strip was a neon canyon of vice that lived by night. Every vertical surface was tattooed with the handbills of a million bands; its sidewalks were choked with fans and musicians alike.

  It was the epicenter of a revolution.

  The ‘70s were Vietnam. They were Stagflation, the Energy Crisis, the Munich Massacre, the Cold War, and race riots. They were disco. They were a decade-long nightmare that America was just now waking up from, and America was ready for a party. With their now-legendary 1976 debut album, Van Halen lit the spark of that revolution, signaling to the world that if it were a party that America wanted, it was right here in Southern California.

  In the ‘60s, led by the previous generation, the music was about protest against the Man, against the ruling class, against the war in Vietnam. It was peace and love and LSD. The rock ‘n roll of Generation X was harder and faster, and it signaled only that they wanted freedom. Not freedom from something, but for the sake of freedom itself to live their lives the way they chose, fast and young and hard. The music was also about the music itself. They sang about rock the way no other generation had; this thing beginning t
o be called “heavy metal” turned rock ‘n roll into both a rallying cry and a standard to bear. They didn’t simply take up the mantle from the previous generation. In the blistering opening bars of the prophetically titled “Eruption,” Van Halen ripped rock ‘n roll from the Boomers’ hands and gave it to the youth.

  Bo’s eyes cast up to the neon night. The electricity in the air above and around the Sunset Strip was palpable. Bands playing at Gazzarri’s one night might well be a nationally recognized act the next, and most of them played like they were auditioning to the world. Bo knew of several bands that lived hand-to-mouth on whatever they made gigging. Most didn’t have day jobs because it took away from the practice so they survived, five guys in a shit shack apartment living off the gig money and the charity of girlfriends or groupies.

  Bo put a palm in the center of his partner’s back. “Hard to believe we gotta call this ‘work,’” he said, a huge smile on his face.

  Mitch smiled but said nothing.

  It was a quarter past ten, and the first shows were just getting out. The sidewalks were full, and more than once they had to shoulder through a group. A hilarious irony of the Strip was that hookers were actually fighting twenty-something men in leather pants and ripped jeans for the prime real estate. Bands would be on the corners shoving handbills into any open hand that walked by. The competition for stage time was so fierce that bands basically had to pay club owners for the privilege and the exposure. It was the ‘80s answer to payola.

  Bands would have to buy a certain number of tickets to their show and then resell them on the street. Any profit above what they paid for the tickets was their take for the night. To survive, bands had to build a fiercely loyal and persistent following. To do that, they had to develop an identity, a brand to make them stand out from the legion of head bangers, and their shows had to be bigger, louder, and more outrageous than the next. The Strip was littered with the corpses of bands good and terrible who couldn’t perfect the system. Van Halen was the early master of the Sunset Strip Hustle, and by the time their first album hit, the band’s popularity hung in a low earth orbit. They were shrewd negotiators and had some of the tightest touring contracts in the industry, all because of the streetwise business sense they’d picked up on the Strip. Just ask any concert promoter who was out fifty grand because he put brown M&Ms backstage.

  The Rockstars spent four to five nights a week on the Strip. It was the best source of intelligence they could get. They got to know the bouncers, the promoters, the bartenders, and many of the acts themselves. If a stage act broke big, they would enter an entirely new world of vice and availability. These were not bad people to know.

  Each of the Rockstars had a persona they used on the Strip. Bo and Mitchell’s covers were that they were young A&R reps on the lookout for new talent. That was usually enough to get them backstage for a quick look around and some innocuous questioning.

  Tonight, however, they had a specific purpose in mind. Mitchell still wasn’t sold on Deacon Blues and had managed to convince Hunter that they needed to vet him more thoroughly before they pushed the Lorenzo Fremont bust. Hunter demurred and allowed it. Bo wisely didn’t vocalize his protest, knowing that there was already talk about the time he was spending questioning Blues. Bo and Mitch were following up on a few leads, bands and promoters who were believed to have purchased from Deacon Blues. The goal was to validate his credibility and the authenticity of his claims about a deep supply line. They’d just spent the last two hours at the Whiskey and were now heading to the Rainbow where they were going to meet with a band called Early Warning.

  This was a band that the boys knew well, though unlike most, they knew Fochs and Gaffney were police. Bo had gotten the boys out of a few scrapes, mostly simple possession and indecent exposure, though there was the one time that he’d helped the drummer avoid jail time and a baton beating for pissing on a parked Hollywood prowl car. In return, Bo gained their confidence and their friendship. He never asked too many questions. He believed they were really good guys who were just cutting up and trying to live a rock ‘n roll life. Would Fochs be any different in their shoes? Probably not.

  The boys, to their credit, knew that when he was out on the Strip it was usually undercover. In fact, they ate it up, like they were in on the scam. It didn’t hurt their reps either to be seen with a guy that everyone else thought was a label rep. Bo and Mitch squeezed their way into the Rainbow just in time to catch the end of Early Warning’s set. They usually closed with a blazing cover of Black Sabbath’s “A Hard Road.” The song from Sabbath’s last album with front man Ozzy Osbourne was a testament to the struggles of climbing the ladder. The song structure was much different from the “sound of doom” that Sabbath had come to personify. This song’s main riff was a driving, up-tempo number punctuated with a sped-up blues hook, the perfect number to close a set with. Early Warning’s lead singer, Mick Michaels, had every bit the high range that Ozzy possessed and nailed the song like he’d recorded it himself.

  JJ Denham, the lead guitarist, leaned against the bass player Vic Rodgers, and both of them joined in on the closing refrain, “Oooooohhhhhh it’s a hard road!” while Denham fired out the outro.

  Mick grabbed the mike stand and shouted, “We’re Early Warning! Thank you!”

  The detectives found a couple of beers and muscled their way to a high-top table as the house lights came up. Most places emptied a little when the headliners finished their set but not the Rainbow. The club was well known, if not notorious, as the stomping grounds for Hollywood’s musical and cinematic elite. You were just as likely to see Diamond Dave or Keef as you were some starry-eyed blonde from the Valley.

  Bo lipped a longneck and spotted JJ, Vic, and his brother Steven, the rhythm guitarist, emerge from backstage. Bo nodded at Denham, flagging him down. JJ nodded back and directed his band mates over to their table. Bo and JJ had forged an instant friendship, when Bo first got Vic off the hook for possession. JJ was a little older than most of his competition, clocking in at twenty-five, and was less about playing guitar as a way to meet girls than he was about being a great guitar player. Not that the wavy blond hair and liquid brown eyes didn’t help him with the ladies, but unlike so many of the acts his band competed for time with, “the party” wasn’t JJ’s main motivation. The same could not be said for his band mates as when the drummer “Mad” Max Mazza pissed on a patrol car and Fochs intervened after a panicked phone call from JJ early one Sunday morning.

  They knew he was a cop and that Bo worked undercover sometimes so when they say him out, they waited for Bo to introduce himself. Bo never betrayed the friendship or traded on it, neither did they trade on his except with Mad Max. The drummer viewed Fochs as his personal “get out of jail free” card. The drummer’s antics were either directly because of or in spite of their relationship with Bo. It wasn’t to the point yet that Max’s behavior was truly testing those bonds, though everyone had a sense that day was coming. But then, he was a drummer, and they were, by definition, fucking crazy.

  JJ, Vic, and Stevie arrived at the table with high fives all around, and a couple more bottles appeared. Bo and Mitch knew most of the wait staff well and usually didn’t have to wait long for drinks. They had a few moments of light-hearted banter before the band’s manager, Harry Templeton, showed up with Mick Michaels, the singer. Templeton was a slight five-six with a halo of blond hair going silver ringing his temples. He was perpetually tanned from either a golf course or a tennis court and carried a little more around the waist than he used to. But anyone who equated Templeton’s stature with his prowess did so at his or her own peril. If Templeton hadn’t worked with someone in the music business already, odds were knew them or, more importantly, knew their management. Templeton took on Early Warning, allegedly at a token one percent with some kind of deferred compensation, because he recognized the talent and he believed in them.

  That Mazza was nearly scared to death of Templeton said everything one needed to know.


  “Hiya, Bo,” Templeton said amiably. The manager was gruff anyway but even more so around people who had nothing to offer. Bo shook the manager’s hand and introduced Mitch. Templeton also knew that Fochs was a detective; doubtless that card was filed away for future use. “Did you catch the show?”

  “Little bit. Saw the end. They look really good.”

  Templeton dropped into some client talk for a few moments and turned back to act somewhat surprised to see Fochs and Gaffney still at the table.

  “We wanted to talk to you, actually, Harry.”

  You wanted to find out what was going on in the music scene you talked to the managers. The musicians couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was or whether or not they had a bank account. Once they got to a certain level of popularity, or infamy, someone would score their shit for them. Most times, it was the manager, who acted as father confessor, parent, guidance counselor, and Dr. Feelgood all in one—whatever it took to get them on the stage to do what they had to do.

  “Everything’s OK, I trust,” Templeton said cautiously.

  “It’s all fine,” Bo said. “The boys haven’t done anything.”

  “The night’s still young,” Stevie chipped in, laughing like an idiot.