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you make the nicest friends.”
    A knowing chuckle came from the woman next to her. “Oh, yeah. Got some of those nice folks in my neighborhood.”
    Rachel plunged on. “I guess I was lucky. I got arrested by some mean-minded cops. I had run a father and his two little kids into a ditch on the freeway. Thank God it only shook them up and made some bruises.” Rachel was staring at a point in mid-air. “But the father had a cell phone and my license number.
    “I only had a blood alcohol content of point-one-six when the cops pulled me over. I was barely beginning to feel good. But I had five ounces of crystal on the floor of the back seat. After all, if you drink as much as I did, you need a lot of speed to wake you up. They thought I was a dealer. That was enough to get me free room and board at County.”
    The silence drew out like a spider’s silk thread.
    Rachel cleared her throat and went on. “An old family friend hired a wheeler-dealer attorney who got me off on a technicality. It seems that I was so drunk I had not understood my Miranda rights.” The drizzle of tears she’d been holding back escaped, leaving a wet path down her cheek.
    The woman beside her barely stirred as she spun out the rest of the story. When she finished, Rachel wondered if her companion was asleep.
    But after a moment, “That’s a reason, all right,” the black woman said laconically. “But it ain’t good enough. Unless the cops are still wanting you for something.”
    “No, it’s over now, but they don’t forget. You ever take a look at some of the gorillas they call cops at Rampart? Would you trust them?”
    The woman raised her chin. “I guess I would.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m just putting in time evenings with the Maids, waiting till my number comes up for the Academy.”
    “The Police Academy?”
    The black woman nodded solemnly. “When I was a kid, I never owned a doll. Not one diaper-wetter, not one Barbie. Nope. My brother Marcus and I played cops and robbers. He was older and bigger, so most of the time he made me be the robber. He never let me have the hat or the holster or the badge. He went to the Academy soon as he turned twenty-one. Now I plan to get me a badge of my very own. I know some cops are thugs, but most are decent like Marcus. And you got to ask yourself, what if someone killed you and the one person who knew it wouldn’t say anything?”
    Rachel had been twisting the hem of her tee shirt. She gazed at the wrinkled fabric in her fingers, then dropped it. “Maybe it was just a genuine hit and run. What if the person who was driving didn’t mean to kill him and is just too scared to say anything?”
    “I guess that’s possible. But you got no call to protect such a one.” The woman glanced across the street. Six or eight people were milling about the sidewalk. A boy was crossing the street toward them. “They’re done. They’re waiting on me. Got to go.” She heaved herself off the bench.
    The boy, when he arrived, announced happily, “All done! Done. Done.”
    Rachel peered at a face as round as a doughnut, the eye sockets narrow, the brows close above them. Chinese, she thought. Chinatown was only a few blocks away.
    “This here is Peter,” the woman said.
    “Nice to meet you, Peter. I’m Rachel.”
    Peter’s head bobbed up and down energetically. A smile all but split his jaw from his face. “Pleased. Pleased.”
    “You go on back. I’ll be right there,” the black woman told him. “Look both ways,” she called after him. “There’s cars all night long in this city.”
    She turned back to Rachel. “They’re re-tards. Sweetest people in the world. Today they call them ‘special people’ or ‘de-velopmentally disadvantaged,’ or some such high-sounding words. But they don’t mind the word retard. They don’t understand the other words. It’s just so much noise in their ears. They know they’re different. They’re simple in a good sort of way. They don’t keep trying to