Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“Oh, yeah,” Ruthie said, as if he knew what I was about to say.

“What?” Twan said.

“All Good Neighbors candidates must demonstrate their moral fiber,” I said. “But I think I have an idea as to how you can do that to the committee’s satisfaction.”

Twan furtively glanced back at Famous, who registered no reaction that I could see, then returned his attention to me. “Yeah?”

“Well, as I understand it, you told Geoffrey about a group of policemen who are selling guns in this neighborhood?”

“Yeah. So?”

“A Good Neighbor is the kind of person who wouldn’t tolerate such behavior from a member of the law enforcement community,” I said. “To help us bring these rapscallions to justice, we need to observe you making a buy.”

* * *

Twan again checked in with the stoop. Famous remained impassive.

“How we gonna do that?” Twan asked.

“How does it usually work when you make a buy from them?”

“We just see them, you know, around and stuff. They doin’ they thing, we doin’ our thing. And then we just cool out.”

“I see,” I said, because that had made things so clear for me. “But what if you need a gun immediately?”

“Well, they got this number you call.”

“What kind of number?”

“I don’t know. You let it ring one or two times then you hang up. You don’t leave no message or nothing.”

“And then?”

“Someone calls you back.”

“Who?”

“It don’t matter.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”

“I’m sayin’, whether you talk to one man or the other, it don’t matter. They all the same.”

“How many guys do they have?” I asked, because I was still trying to figure out how extensive this network was. Did it just operate out of the Fourth Precinct? Did it have tendrils reaching out to other parts of the department?

“Don’t know.”

“But a lot of different guys might end up calling you back?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Well, you tell them where you doing your thing”-I didn’t need to ask what “thing” that was-“and then they come rolling up on you. If it was, you know, real police, we’d be gone before they even stop they car. But we know it’s them, so we do the, you know, the hands on the hood thing.”

“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “They sell you a gun right out of their patrol car?”

Twan’s eyes darted quickly toward the still-statuesque Famous, whose inaction allowed Twan to continue.

“Naw, man, they do it in the car.”

“You actually get in the back of the car?”

“Yeah, man. Folks walking along see another nigga being shoved in the back of a car by the po-po, they ain’t looking twice. You feel me? So that’s where it go down.”

I immediately began thinking of the photographic possibilities of that: a kid in the back of a Newark Police car, buying a gun from a cop in a uniform. Brodie might need to be hospitalized for priapism if we got a photo like that.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket for a time check. It read 4:21. The sun wouldn’t set until seven or so. If I asked them to set up a buy for six, that would give me enough time to get a photographer-maybe two-in place and hidden where the cops couldn’t see them, while still having enough natural light for the shooters to get decent art.

“Okay, then let’s set up a buy,” I said.

Twan was apparently primed to go-with Famous’s tacit permission-because he pulled out his own phone and was going to dial a number before I stopped him.

“Slow down, slow down,” I said. “Let’s talk about this for a second. I need a little time to set this up right so we can get pictures. We’ll want to hide some photographers somewhere around here, maybe even get video of this-it’d be great for the Web.”

As soon as I had said the word “pictures,” Famous uncrossed his arms and let them dangle at his sides. He might have even given his head a quarter shake. For him, this qualified as an outburst. And Twan heard it as clearly as if Famous had started screaming.

“What you mean, pictures?” Twan asked. “We ain’t doing no pictures.”

“Why not? What’s the difference?”

“We just … we, you know, we ain’t playin’ with that.”

Twan must have looked up in the direction of the stoop three times during his last sentence. Without Famous to tell him exactly why the pictures were objectionable, Twan was like an electric toy car whose remote control was busted: zooming around on the floor, crashing into random furniture, unsure of where to go.

Finally, Famous stood up-in a slow, unrushed manner that made it clear he wasn’t going to hurry on my account. His arms remained at his side as he deliberately descended down three steps. Once on the sidewalk, he put his hands in his pockets and walked toward me but never looked at me. His head kept swiveling left and right, his wide-set eyes seemingly taking in everything except that which was directly in front of him.

He kept getting closer-much closer than he needed to be-and still never acknowledged me. It was unnerving, but I suppose that was the point. It was a game. Did he intimidate me? Yeah, a little. Was I going to show it? Not a chance. To evince fear was to lose all respect. And I had been hanging around this world long enough to know that in the hood, respect was everything.

He finally stopped when his face was perhaps twenty inches away. He was half a head taller than me, so this put my eyes roughly at the level of his scraggly chin. His gaze was fixed on some point well behind me.

“What’s your deal, dawg?” he asked. His voice was raspy, almost like his vocal cords had been damaged in some way. Or like he smoked a lot of something without a filter.

I smiled. It was time to drop the Mr. White Committee Man act. Something told me it had never really worked on Famous anyway.

“Hell, Famous, I’m like you: just another hustler trying to make my way in this world,” I said. “My hustle just happens to be the newspaper.”

He nodded his head without moving it-I’m not quite sure how he did it, but I’d have to learn how someday. He still wasn’t looking at me.

“We do the buy, you pay for the gun?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“And we keep it?”

“I sure as hell don’t want it.”

This seemed to satisfy him. The pleasure was written all over his face-his cheeks actually raised one-tenth of a nanometer, which for him was like a full-blown grin.

“What you need these pictures for?” he asked

“I’m not making a collage for my scrapbook here, pal. They’d go in the newspaper. Probably big and flashy. Give your rap group a lot of publicity, that’s for sure.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would I have to testify?”

“I don’t have any control over that,” I said. “I do the newspaper part. The testifying part would be up to a prosecutor, assuming there were charges brought and it went to trial.”

“I ain’t testifying,” he said.

“You want to get rid of those red dot guys, this might be your only chance.”

He stood perfectly still. After ten, maybe fifteen seconds, one of his jaw muscles flexed.

“You can do your story without the pictures, though,” he said.

He had me there. “Yeah, that’s probably true. As long as we see the buy go down. It’s just better with the artwork.”

“Not my problem,” he said, pulling away. The movement was so abrupt, and it came after such an extended period of stillness that I nearly flinched.

He stopped in front of Twan and rasped, “We do the buy in an hour. Do it somewhere else, not here. And no pictures. We see any cameras, we off.”