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until he could retire with a twenty year service pension to his little ranch east of Chino and live out his days with his wife Clara (a secret drinker), and raise grandchildren in the same American tradition and perhaps buy them ponies and make ballplayers out of them. And give them all the advantages he had provided for his own children.
    Roscoe was, like most policemen, conservative politically by virtue of his inescapable police cynicism but more so because of his misanthropy which had its roots in childhood. He had served in Vietnam and had almost made the Army his career until an LAPD recruiting poster had forced him to compare the benefits of police work to military service.
    Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by takingthem to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them out until they were “doing the chicken” on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney And that if Jesus Christ didn’t have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew Roscoe Rules wasn’t raising his sons to be faggots.
    But Roscoe Rules had a sense of humor. He carried in his wallet two photographs from his Army days which were getting cracked and faded despite the plastic envelopes he kept them in. One showed a Vietnamese girl of twelve or thirteen trying gamely to earn five American dollars by copulating an emaciated oxen which Roscoe and several other American cowboys had lassoed and tied thrashing on its back in a bamboo corral.
    The second photo, which everyone at Wilshire Station had seen, was of Roscoe holding the severed head of a Vietcong by the hair as Roscoe leered into the camera, tongue lolling, neck twisted to one side. The photo had “Igor and friend” printed across the bottom. The thought of the photo was to trigger Roscoe’s finest hour as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.
    Whaddayamean Dean hated being the partner of someone as mean as Roscoe Rules. He knew his own physical limitations and rarely talked tough on the street unless he was absolutely sure that the other person was terrified of police, in which case he allowed himself the luxury of tossing around a few “assholes,” or “scrotes” to please Roscoe.
    “Know why niggers survive serious wounds, partner?” Roscoe Rules asked Whaddayamean Dean.
    “No, why, Henry?” asked Whaddayamean Dean, using the given name abhorred by the other choirboys.
    “They’re too dumb to go into shock.”
    Whaddayamean Dean giggled and snuffled and looked up from his driving at the browless blue eyes of Roscoe Rules, and at his freckled hands which would nervously grab at the crotch, especially when the conversation turned to women. Roscoe was one of those policemen who would sit bored in a radio car in the dark and quiet hours and talk of his incredible sexual encounters in Vietnam or Tijuana and knead and squeeze his genitals until his partners got nauseated.
    Working with Roscoe Rules was many things but it was never dull. He was what is known in LAPD jargon as a “Four-fifteen personality,” 415 being the California penal code section which defines disturbing the peace. Indeed, Roscoe Rules had turned many bloodless family fights or landlord-tenant disputes into minor riots by his presence. He had been transferred around the department more than any member of his academy class, had been the subject of many complaints of excessive force from citizens and even from a few police supervisors, who generally do not challenge the techniques of policemen like Roscoe Rules. Not if they respond promptly to radio calls, write one moving traffic violation a day and stop at least three people daily for