Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

then and he said, “We are in a divorce battle.”
    “Oh, sorry,” Ronnie said.
    “No problem,” Ali said. “I shall obtain my son from her. I have the best divorce lawyer in all Los Angeles.”
    They said their good-byes, and when they left the nightclub, Bix said, “So what’s your opinion of Ali Aziz?”
    “I wouldn’t wanna work for him,” she said.
    “Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth when he’s talking to cops,” Bix said.
    “Please,” Ronnie said, “make that nonfat yogurt.”
    As they were getting in their car to go end-of-watch, she said, “He won’t be a problem for long. That dude’s so golded up, he’ll probably drown in his pool someday if he goes in the deep end.”
     
     
    And that’s how their uneventful watch would have ended if they had not driven to the station by way of Sunset Boulevard. Traffic was only moderate that evening, but Sunset was blocked at Vine Street by a confusing flare pattern that a motorist had placed. They saw a black-and-white that had been speeding north on Vine Street come screeching to a stop at the intersection. Bix turned on the light bar and drove west in the eastbound lane, turning south on Vine, and there it was: a major traffic collision.
    “The TC must’ve just happened,” Ronnie said, as two cops from Watch 3 were running from their shop to a flattened old Chevy Caprice that had rolled more than once after having been slammed broadside by a two-ton flatbed truck that had blown the traffic light while racing southbound, driven by a teenage driver with a cell phone glued to his ear. The kid was bleeding from facial lacerations and was leaning against a door that was folded like a wallet from the force of the collision.
    Bix leaped out and ran to the old car, Ronnie following. And one of the young Watch 3 cops yelled to them, “Two RA’s on the way! There’s a woman and kid in there! They’re bleeding bad and we can’t get them out!”
    The other cop, a bigger man, was kicking at the jammed rear door of the Caprice where they saw a child’s head inside, gashed open from the crown to the forehead, blood running across her face from deep channels that had been opened to the bone.
    “God!” Ronnie said. “God almighty!”
    And she began kicking the door also, after the big cop stopped and drew his baton. He tried using it as a pry, trying to muscle open the door while yelling to his partner, “Get me a tire wrench! Anything to pry with!”
    Bix could see through the shattered glass that the Asian woman behind the wheel was dead. Her chest had been crushed by the steering column and she stared lifelessly at the black sky through what was left of the roof.
    Ambulance sirens were getting closer and Bix heard several voices shouting, and then he saw something move. He shined his light inside and realized that another child had been in the backseat of the car.
    “There’s another kid in there!” he yelled, just as the big cop succeeded in prying the rear door open, and Ronnie saw clearly that the little girl’s shattered skull was attached to her neck only by a few shredded knots of red, slimy tissue.
    “God almighty!” she repeated and ran around the car to Bix and the other child he had found, hoping that this one was alive.
    Bix, his mini-flashlight on the asphalt, was down on his knees, crawling under the car, trying to lift the portion of wreckage that had the child pinned. Ronnie could hear him grunting and saw him lifting with his back, and when she shined her light under the car, she lit the face of a four-year-old girl who turned out to be the second daughter of young Cambodian immigrants who had been in Hollywood for nearly five years.
    The child’s body was twisted and bloody, but her face and head were unmarked. She had a delicate, very pale beauty, and Ronnie crawled under the wreckage to help Bix try to lift the twisted metal.
    It was then that the thing happened, the thing that Ronnie knew she’d remember for the rest of her