Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“Okay.”

“There’s another guy you’ll see, a big guy who acts real smiley and happy. Everyone calls him Doc.”

“Doc?” I said. As far as I knew, most of the world’s Docs were a minimum of sixty years old, “Doc” being one of those nicknames-like “Scooter”-that seemed to be fading out of the lingua franca.

“Yeah, not sure about why he’s Doc. But whatever you do, don’t piss him off. I’m pretty certain he’s the one who’s armed at all times.”

“Good to know.”

We stopped at a red light, and I watched as two little boys, each gripping their mother’s hand, crossed the street in front of us. They had book bags on their backs and happy little skips in their stride as they came back from school. It’s funny how Newark can be both so strange-full of gun-dealing cops-and so normal at the same time.

Ruthie continued his book report: “But the guy who really matters is this tall kid they call Famous.”

“Famous?”

“Yeah, Famous. I think maybe it’s a rap reference, but I don’t know.”

I clearly wasn’t going to be able to help him there. I was a little behind on my subscription to Vibe magazine.

“Anyhow, Famous barely says anything,” Ruthie continued. “I get the feeling he’s the leader, though.”

“How so?”

“He just … watches things, like he’s the king sitting on his throne. Twan will keep talking and the whole time, he’s got half an eye on Famous, waiting for him to make a little motion with his head or a hand signal or I don’t know what. But Famous is definitely the boss. He actually freaks me out a little bit.”

“Why?”

As we pulled up to Eighteenth Avenue, I soon found out.

* * *

During my years in Newark, I have come to firmly believe that the majority of kids involved in the drug trade are guilty of little more than going along to get along. They are truly products of their environment.

I know, I know, it sounds like liberal babble-and it leaves the factor of personal responsibility out of the equation-but it also happens to be true. Put most of these kids in a nice middle-class family in Franklin Lakes, and they end up heading off to Rutgers, majoring in business administration, and working in sales for a pharmaceutical company.

Put them in Newark and they end up drug dealers. The Newark kids are not inherently any more or less evil than the Franklin Lakes kids.

The first two kids I saw as I got out of the car were perfect examples of this. One was short, muscular, and a bit on the twitchy side, though not to the extent of being diagnosable. This, I guessed, was Twan.

He was on the sidewalk alongside a big, thick kid who had to be Doc. He was about six foot three and was a couple Ring Dings above three hundred pounds. Give him to the right high school football coach and a little time in the weight room, and he would have ended up playing left guard for Wisconsin.

Famous was seated on the front steps of one of the town houses, leaning against the side railing. He was tall-probably two inches taller than Doc-and lean, with bones jutting out in more than a few places. He had skin like mahogany and eyes like a lizard, large and set wide apart. There was an attempt at a beard on his chin, though it was pretty scraggly, barely visible against his dark complexion. His arms were crossed.

And I got the feeling, right away, he was a bad dude.

He was the kid that, no matter where he grew up, would have ended up involved in some malevolent venture, taking other kids along with him. Stick him in Appalachia and he’d start a crystal meth lab. Stick him on Wall Street and he’d engage in insider trading. That’s why he freaked Ruthie out: Famous was pure evil.

Still, as Uncle Bernie so pertly pointed out, this wasn’t a quilting bee. And I wasn’t here to ask him for advice on sashing and backing.

“Hey, what’s up?” Ruthie asked Twan as he approached on the sidewalk.

“Who’s he?” Twan replied, appraising me with the appropriate level of suspicion that a teenaged city kid gives a well-dressed (albeit still in yesterday’s clothes) thirty-something-year-old white man.

“This is my boss. He’s the one who needs to approve that story about you guys,” Ruthie said. He could have thrown a wink in my direction, but he didn’t need to. I got it.

“Oh, mos’ def, mos’ def,” Twan said, breaking into a wide smile. I translated that to mean “most definitely.”

But I wasn’t going to make this all go so easily. I figured that since I had been put in the position of being The Man, I might as well play the part.

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Geoffrey,” I said. “We have policies and procedures that we must follow with the strictest adherence. As you know, all candidates for an Eagle-Examiner Good Neighbors profile must be carefully vetted to ensure they are of the highest character and moral fiber. The committee absolutely insists on it.”

There was no committee, of course. Just like there were no policies or procedures. But since I could tell Twan was only catching about half of the polysyllabic words I was using, I wasn’t too worried about being called on it. I only wished I had brought a clipboard along. A white man looks that much more convincing with a clipboard.

Ruthie picked up my pile of baloney and helped me make a sandwich out of it.

“That’s true,” he said. “I forgot about the committee.”

“There cannot be even a suggestion of turpitude.”

“Right.”

“I mean, remember what happened with the McNulty boy- very unfortunate.”

Twan was watching this go back and forth and finally cut in. “Whoa, whoa. We tol’ you about red dot. You ain’t flagin us now?”

I had no idea what “flagin” was-I guess the lack of understanding of each other’s vocabulary went both ways-but it sounded like something bad.

“There’s no flagin of any sort going on here. Nor will any flagin be tolerated in the future,” I assured him. “However, there are some minimum requirements that must be met. If we are to write about a rap group, it can’t just be some boys playing around. We only write about serious musicians with legitimate futures. Tell me about this rap group of yours.”

Twan launched into a long and animated description of their group-which they called Hevvy Soulz, because I guess spelling doesn’t count in the hip-hop world-and how someone’s cousin had gotten them some recording time in someone else’s cousin’s basement studio and how they had to lay it down across one of the standard prerecorded tracks, and even though it was one they never heard before, they somehow made it work.

Or at least that was my translation. I’m sure I missed some of the nuance and much of the subtlety. The only person who probably didn’t miss a word-of anything-was Famous, who was watching over Twan, Ruthie, and me, never uncrossing his arms.

“And you’ve got a demo CD? The committee will insist on hearing a demo,” I said, when Twan was done. I knew, from my previous encounters with a variety of aspiring rappers, they all had demo CDs, of which they were very proud and which they would supply to you whether you wanted them to or not. The backseat of my Malibu probably had three demo CDs in it, and that was just from the last two months. I had never listened to any of them, but somehow I was always reluctant to toss them until they had been there for a full season.

Twan ran to a knapsack and grabbed an unmarked CD in a clear jewel case, then handed it to me. I considered it as if my mind were a laser capable of reading the digital material recorded on it and making an instant determination as to its musical quality.

“Excellent,” I said. “This will help the committee greatly. Now there’s just one more thing.”