Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“Well, you got anyone in IA who might tell us what the deal was?”

“What’s it matter at this point?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like we’re not getting anything close to the full story.”

“Well, Ivy, maybe they never taught you this at your fancy college, but you know the I in IA stands for ‘internal,’ right? That means it’s stuff they don’t want to get out.”

“So, what, you saying you don’t have anyone?” I asked, because there was no better way to goad Buster into action than to challenge the depth or breadth of his law enforcement contacts.

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s going to take a little finesse, is all. I might have to call in a favor or two.”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if-”

“So that means you have to do me a favor.”

“Uh, okay, shoot,” I said, fairly certain this was somehow going to involve picking up dry cleaning or mowing a lawn.

Instead, Buster said: “You’re doing my Good Neighbors.”

Good Neighbors was the name of a feature that ran six days a week in our community news section. As its name suggested, it was a puff piece about someone who had done a kindly deed, whether it was volunteering, rescuing a cat from a tree, or selling hair to Locks of Love. It was a lovely thing for the readers and for the person featured, I’m sure. But from a journalistic standpoint, it was about as useful as bunions.

Back before the economic tsunami that washed away all trace of newspapering as we once knew it, we had enough resources-okay, it’s a handy word sometimes-that we could farm out Good Neighbors to our network of stringers, mostly housewives who delighted in doing stories that made everyone feel warm and fuzzy. Then the stringer budget was unceremoniously eliminated. As a result, every reporter at the paper had been put on a rotation that required them to produce one Good Neighbors piece every six months or so. In terms of things I liked to do with my time, it ranked ahead of oral surgery but behind trips to the DMV.

“Oh, what the…” I moaned. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Jesus, Buster, I’m busy. I got this Kipps thing and a big thing about public housing that Tina wants by the end of the week. I don’t have time to-”

“You want IA? You give me Good Neighbors.”

“You … you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I would. I am.”

“Couldn’t I just pick up your dry cleaning?”

“My clothes are wash-and-wear.”

“Mow your lawn?”

“I live in a condo.”

I thought about making some kind of argument about how, as colleagues working for the same noble cause, we ought to help each other without expectation of reward. But I didn’t need to be treated to the sound of Buster cackling in my ear.

“Couldn’t you just … I don’t know, do me a solid?”

“I’m gonna teach the Ivy boy a foreign language. Quid pro quo. It’s Latin for ‘quit your whining.’ We got a deal or not?”

Not seeing any other way out, I just sighed and said, “Deal.”

“It’s due Wednesday morning,” Buster said. “Don’t make me wait.”

* * *

The sun was getting low in the sky by this point, which meant it was high time to get off the streets. Like Officer Hightower said, the only white people who came into this part of Newark after dark were there to buy drugs. For someone of my pallor, sitting alone in a car on Irvine Turner Boulevard was an invitation to dealers to approach the window with that innocent-but-loaded question, “You looking?”

And I wasn’t. So I went back to the newsroom, which was nearing that familiar peak in its daily intensity level. For as much as things had changed in the world of newspapering-with the de-emphasis of the dead tree product and the movement to put more online faster than ever before-some things were the same as they had been a generation ago. Six o’clock is still a busy time. Nonbreaking stories are due, and reporters who have otherwise been procrastinating all day finally get serious about their tasks.

I knew, with a Good Neighbors now on my plate, I should probably join them. But having mentally tabled that until the morning, I sauntered back to the library-or the “Info Palace” as the librarians liked to call it-where I knew I could find Kira O’Brien, my newly discovered romantic interest.

Kira was twenty-eight, a fairly recent graduate of Rutgers’ Master of Library Studies program. In some ways, she’s textbook librarian, at least at work. She dresses like a Young Republican, keeps mostly to herself, and has a bookish air about her-all of which belies the fact that the moment she leaves the office, she’s basically insane.

Our relationship began at a house party being hosted by a mutual friend from the newspaper. It was late and we were somewhere between a little and a lot drunk. She was dressed like she had come from either a comic book convention or a sci-fi/fantasy convention. (I get them all confused, I just know each seems to involve women in skimpy clothing being leered at by nerds.) I went over to her to make some kind of clever comment about her hair, which had been dyed blue and purple.

We ended up having a lovely chat. And I noticed, to my surprise, she had a tongue piercing, which she never wore at the office. So-and this was, clearly, the booze talking-I asked her if she had anything else pierced. She hauled me into a bedroom and showed me. Before very long, the demonstration became rather aerobic in nature.

And that, more or less, was the basis of our relationship so far. We went places (often with her in costume). We got drunk with her friends (because hers were more interesting than mine). And then we did our aerobics (oftentimes in unconventional and/or public places). It was an arrangement that had allowed me to cross a number of items off my bucket list, some of which-like getting intimate with Princess Leia in an elevator-I didn’t even know were on there in the first place.

It was unclear if she was going to be a girl I could take home to Mother, or if we would even last that long. But she was feisty and fun, and we had dynamite chemistry. I have come to recognize that, between my sensible car, bland wardrobe, boring hairstyle, and the other totally uninteresting aspects of my life, I need a little crazy to balance things out. And that’s what Kira has been for me lately. My quota of crazy.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled. Kira is small, dark-haired, and dangerously cute-dangerous because she knows just how cute she is. She has blue eyes that manage to be sweet and mischievous at the same time. Plus, what man can resist the naughty librarian?

“Hey,” she said, “want to go to a party in a bit?”

“A party … tonight? It’s a Monday.”

“What, you not allowed to go out on school nights?” she taunted.

“No, I just … okay. A party. On a Monday.”

She cast her eyes left and right, tilted toward me, and whispered, “It’s an absinthe party.”

“What’s an absinthe party?” I whispered back.

“I don’t know, actually,” she said, still hushed. “And I don’t know why we’re whispering about it.” She returned to regular volume: “I guess it’s just a party where we all sit around and drink absinthe.”

“Hasn’t absinthe been shown to cause mental illness?”

“I don’t know. Hopefully, yes.”

“Uh, okay, sounds like a blast.”

“I’m done here at nine,” she said. “We can go over together. Now go away. I have work to do.”

Following orders, I walked back to my corner of the newsroom, passing the All-Slop News Desk along the way. It was actually a collection of desks, of course, with a half-dozen small televisions coming down from the ceiling in the middle. The monitors are equipped to show both Internet and television, allowing us to monitor our competition across a variety of media simultaneously.