Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

“Never actually wore the uniform. Not for one day on the job.”

Tracy stared, trying to picture him in the shirt, the hat, the boots.

“Issued me a gun too, but I never carried it. Both have been in storage since the academy. They pulled me out right before graduation to work undercover. Which I’ve done continuously ever since.”

“Undercover?” she said, a term she thought she knew from the movies, but which, when applied to Donny Maddox, had no meaning for her at all.

“Narc work, mostly. I think it started off as an experiment. They wanted someone with a clean background, who could walk around with a real name and a real social security number with real mileage on it. So I kept no personnel file with the state police. Only one captain and one major within the organization knew my cover. My police salary was always paid out into an account under my mother’s name so that I never drew a paycheck. It wasn’t very much anyway. Unlike uniform troopers, I couldn’t pad my take-home with detail work.”

He shook his head like he was rambling.

“I kept what I earned working my cover jobs, lived off that. That was the life. All real jobs, lots of bars, day labor, some under-the-table stuff. Building up visibility and street cred. Every step of the way, I was wheeling and squealing. And always managing to be somewhere else when the cops came knocking.

“Most undercovers go four, five years max. It’s a fast track to promotion. But with me, it wasn’t something I dipped in and out of. I was always in it. Birthdays would come and go, and I’d think, This year, this is the last. Only to see another one come around again. I used to blame the SP, but it was me just as much. Fact was, I liked it. It was what I knew, and it came easy to me. Until the job before this one.”

He cleared his throat. He was telling her everything and it was too much at once. Tracy prepared herself for the worst.

“An OxyContin ring operating out of Haverhill. You know what Oxy is, right? Pharmaceutical painkiller. Heroin users love it because it’s control-released. A sustained high over time. These were bad boys, taking off pharmacies at gunpoint. Ran down a Haverhill cop once on a getaway, the guy died of a heart attack. I worked them through this girl I had conspired to meet, a roommate of one of their sisters. A good girl, basically, with a good heart, but kind of tragically naive and gullible. Perfect for me. I contrived to get myself kicked out of my own apartment, knowing she would take me in. That was how I was trying to break in with her friend’s brother. But it was slow going. I would hit up this girl for information, things she’d heard. These guys were all Latins, and ’roid ragers, paranoiacs. When things started to go bad for them, when they had to shade off some jobs because they picked up on stakeout heat at the scene, they went on a witch hunt. One night I came home and she was gone. No word, nothing. Turned out they had fingered her for the leak instead of me. Her body was found underneath a bridge. They’d force-fed her a couple of crushed-up Oxy, which, outside of its control-release capsule, delivers a twelve-hour high in one bolt. They took turns urinating on her as she was dying.”

Tracy’s arms were crossed so tightly she could hardly breathe.

“Yeah.” Donny cleared his throat again. “I knew how it happened, I knew who did it, but had no proof. So I poured myself into it that much harder, breaking in with them in order to seal this murder rap. But to get there, to run with these scumbags and earn their trust, I had to do some things. Things I wouldn’t ordinarily do. The rules of the game that are meant to be bent? Well, I really bent them. Tied them in knots. But as far as I was concerned, the end more than justified the means.”

He was nodding hard. He looked sick.

Tracy felt paralyzed.

“The other side of it was, I knew my mother was ill. She would tell me she was okay, and I let myself believe her because I couldn’t get out to see her anyway. I was living with these guys by then, this hyper-paranoid bunch — totally insular was how they rolled, you never mixed with anyone outside the crew — and everything was coming to a head. So I put off seeing her, and put it off, and fucking put it off. It was right after I got these guys picked up in the act of knocking over a CVS in Salem, New Hampshire, that she had her fall.

“There was real static coming my way after the case, the rules I broke, and I was at a point where I just didn’t care. So I quit. The day after my mother’s funeral, in fact. Tried to, anyway. Then they came to me about Sinclair, who had been beaten up by Bucky Pail during a DUI stop. He had made some narco allegations against the Black Falls police, and Pinty had already been to the DA’s office about corruption in the department he once ran. It was my hometown, it was a good fit, so they offered me this probationary rehab assignment, a straightforward fact-finding case of possible rogue cops running amok. I didn’t really care about making good myself. It was for Pinty I did it. Aside from my mother, he was the only one who knew what I was — knew that this was the reason I never came back after graduation, never served my scholarship time. He got me hired on to the force here, and I’ve been working this case ever since.”

“Sinclair?” Tracy said, trying hard to understand. “You were his...?”

“He was my informant, yeah. I had that distinct privilege. He was just starting to figure out that this thing was bigger than even he had originally thought when he disappeared. Now, somehow, my small-town criminal conspiracy case has dovetailed into a double-murder investigation.”

She was breathing hard like she had been running the entire time he was speaking. Running away from what he was saying and at the same time racing to keep up with him. “So then, Wanda...”

“She was the only one close to Bucky Pail. That’s what that was all about. But she stayed loyal to him. Or rather, she stayed loyal to his drugs.”

Tracy said, “In the movies, undercover drug agents, sometimes they have to take drugs themselves. To prove they’re not police.”

“Yeah.”

She waited. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

Donny said, “Yeah.”

She felt weird, her hands and legs tingling. Drugs. Donny. She looked at him standing across the kitchen, suddenly realizing that she might not know this man at all. “Did you wear wigs, disguises?”

“No.”

“You used your real name?”

“Mostly. Twice I got loaned out to DEA short-term, they tagged me with a phony background. But predominantly, it was just me.”

“And you’ve put away a lot of people?”

“A good few, yeah.”

“Don’t you worry about them coming back to find you?”

“Not really,” he said.

This was his first lie to her, she realized with a chill. “These people — you would live with them, gain their friendship, trust? Knowing you were going to turn on them in the end?”

“It’s the second-dirtiest game out there, right after the drug trade itself. But there is no other way. The only way to fight street crime is with street presence.” She watched him try to come up with some way of illustrating it so that she would understand. “There are people who are good at doing drugs. That may sound strange to you, but there just are. They can handle it somehow, they can manage their life. What I was good at was this. Undercover. I tried not to question it beyond that. And generally I had success. Until Haverhill.” He could see that he was having trouble getting through to her. “Can you see now why it was so important to me that no one knew about us?”

Tracy felt cold. And scared, and suddenly heartsick. She felt squeezed. “What was her name?” she asked.