My main character spends some time at West L.A. Division, sometimes called the jewel in the LAPD’s crown. In this scene, he walks up the street, and here’s what he encounters…
Moody walked up Butler in a daze toward Santa Monica Boulevard.
He stopped to call Vance’s cell-phone. As he was doing this, he gazed up at the building next door. It was a former Masonic hall (now a Post Office) with a giant, faded, post-apocalyptic mural called “Isle of California,” painted on the three-story stuccoed back wall by the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad. It was a vision of devastation (after the “Big One”) where the ocean is lapping up against a sheered-off cliff near Blythe, California, with a spindle of broken freeway still left teetering. Anyone who has driven across the desert from Phoenix into Southern California knows that Blythe is in the middle of nowhere. The mural originates in the collective fear that everything west of the San Andreas fault, where the American plate ends, including the entire California coast, will someday fall into the ocean.
Here’s an actual photo (near corner Santa Monica & Butler):
