Suicide Hill

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is the most brilliant homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and one of its most troubled. In his obsessive mission to protect the innocent, there is no line he won't cross. Estranged from his wife and daughters and on the verge of being drummed out of the department for his transgressions, Hopkins is assigned to investigate a series of bloody bank robberies. As the violence escalates and the case becomes ever more vicious, Hopkins will be forced to cross the line once again to stop a maniac on a murder binge.

The deputy shifted into second and nudged the man. "You got a hard-on for Cyndi Lauper?"Duane Rice said, "No, Officer. Do you?"The deputy smiled. "No, but then I don't carry her picture around with me."Thinking, fall back-he's just a dumb cop making conversation-Rice said, "My girlfriend. She's a singer. She was singing backup for a lounge act in Vegas when I took this picture."What's her name?"Vandy."Vandy? She got one name, like 'Cher'?"Rice looked at the driver, then around at the denim-clad inmates, most of whom would be back in the slam in a month or two tops. He remembered a ditty from the jive-rhyming poet who'd bunked below him: "L.A.-come on vacation, go home on probation." Knowing he could outthink, outgame and outmaneuver any cop, judge or P.O. he got hit with and that his destiny was the dead opposite of every man in the bus, he said, "No, Anne Atwater Vanderlinden. I made her shorten it. Her full name was too long. No marquee value."She do everything you tell her to?"Rice then gave the deputy a mirror-perfected "That's right."Just asking," the deputy said. "Chicks like that are hard to come by these days."With banter effectively shitcanned, Rice leaned back and stared out the window, taking cursory notice of Pacific Coast Highway and winter deserted beaches, but feeling the hum of the bus's engine and the distance it was racking up between his six months of digging firebreaks and breathing flames and watching mentally impoverished lowlifes get fucked up on raisinjack, and his coming two weeks of time at the New County, where his sentence reduction for bravery as an inmate fireman would get him a job as a blue trusty, with unlimited contact visits. He looked at the plastic band on his right wrist: name, eight-digit booking number, the California Penal Code abbreviation for grand