Brad Parks - The Good Cop

With Doc in tow, Famous glided off, all those angles and dark skin disappearing around the corner with him. He never did look me in the eye.

* * *

Now that the boss had spoken, it was left to Twan, Ruthie, and me to work out the details. The first thing we had to decide was a location. I couldn’t fathom why Famous didn’t want it going down on his home turf, but I guess he had his reasons.

I knew it needed to be in the neighborhood-the cops would get suspicious if we asked them to do it downtown, outside the front doors of the Eagle-Examiner building-but Twan wasn’t offering any suggestions. The only thing I could think was that I wanted to be in a place where I could see but not be seen. Suddenly, my mind flashed up an image of the bodega in Uncle Bernie’s building, the place with the one-way glass.

It was within sight of the Fourth Precinct, so the cops would be comfortable doing it there. If I had Twan and his buddies make the buy on the corner in front of the bodega, it offered a perfect vantage point to watch the buy from up-close, far closer than we’d be able to get hiding in a tree or crouching in a parked car. And if we wanted to celebrate afterward by getting a good deal on Calphalon cookware, all we had to do was go around the corner. It would be perfect.

Twan made the call to the magic number, got the return call almost immediately, and then set the details. I was going to be funding the purchase of a brand-new.22 caliber Beretta for the low, low bargain price of five hundred dollars. The buy was set for five thirty.

Ruthie and I made a quick run to a local check-cashing place, where I wrote out a check for $508.75 that allowed me to receive $500 in cash. What a deal. Then we returned to the corner boys. Famous and Doc were still gone, but a couple of new guys had replaced them.

I handed Twan the cash, then talked over the plan one more time. We swapped cell phone numbers and agreed that I would call him when we were in place. If he answered the phone by saying his name, he was in a spot where he could talk. If he answered without saying his name, I was supposed to say I had the wrong number. Either way, the call meant he knew he was free to go ahead and make the buy.

We also agreed that, afterward, we would rendezvous back at their corner, so we could inspect the gun.

“So that went great,” I said, as we returned to Ruthie’s car. “It’s a shame about the no cameras thing. But it’s possible the pictures wouldn’t have shown anything anyway.”

“Yeah, and we could at least take cell phone photos, right? As long as they didn’t see us doing it.”

“Oh, yeah, good thought.” The kids and their technology. Low resolution cell phone photos through darkened windows wouldn’t do us much good in the paper-I can’t imagine they’d reproduce as anything more than indistinguishable ink smudges-but at least we’d have some hard evidence of the malfeasance taking place in our fair city.

“So,” Ruthie said, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter, “we’re going to tell Tina about this now, right?”

“What are you, nuts? Why would we want to do that?”

“Well, I mean, she is the manag-”

“Ruthie, you want to be doing Good Neighbors the rest of your life? This story could be a real game-changer for you.”

“I know, but what if-”

“Stop, stop, stop. Think about it. If you call Tina and tell her everything that’s going on, she might just say good luck and Godspeed. Orrrr…”

I drew out the pause a little bit, then picked up: “She also might tell us to pull back, or, worse, she might call the lawyers-who can always invent ten reasons why you should stick to covering ladies auxiliary garden club meetings. Point is, I’d rather give her the chance to tell me everything I did wrong after the fact than give her the chance to micromanage it ahead of time. It’s best she not even know we’re together. Trust me, the less the editors know at this stage, the better.”

“Oh, o-okay,” he said. He regripped the steering wheel and swallowed.

“What?”

“I sort of … I sort of told her I was coming to pick you up.”

“Ruthie!” I said sharply. “I thought you learned your lesson from the toilet water testing incident.”

“I did, but … well, she’s been texting me every ten minutes asking me where I am … and she’s … I mean, she’s the managing editor for local news. I can’t just not text her back!”

“You sure can. As a matter of fact, I think this is a great time to practice.”

“But I-”

“End of discussion,” I said, grabbing the check-cashing receipt from where I had wedged it in his cup holder and stuffing it in my pocket. It was probably as close to documentation as I would get for this little caper. I needed to be able to expense this somehow, and I didn’t think the cops were in the business of giving itemized receipts.

But the more I thought about it, they sure seemed to have the rest of the business thing down. Cops selling arrest-proof guns to thugs. From a purely economic standpoint, it was genius. Who knew the clientele-the thug marketplace, as it were-better than the cops? They had an entire police department’s worth of intelligence on their potential customers. And from a certain point of view, they didn’t even need it: they had been doing market research from the moment they arrived on the force.

They obviously had a good handle on the supply. I didn’t know how they were getting their new guns-I would guess it was either from gun shows, which were pitifully unregulated, or from out-of-state straw buyers-but they had plentiful access to used guns. They could simply take them off other thugs or dip into the nearly endless supply of confiscated guns anytime they got low. They could even drive up demand for their product by making busts on the competitors. It was all pretty slick-until Kipps came along and somehow threatened to ruin it.

And have no doubt about it, it was a substantial threat. To say nothing of the variety of state and federal laws they were breaking by selling unlicensed guns, the officers would, at the very least, be guilty of official misconduct. And in New Jersey, that came with a mandatory minimum of a decade-long jail sentence. No former cop wants to spend ten seconds behind bars, much less ten years.

Then they killed Kipps, which meant they could add first-degree murder charges onto that bill. If caught, they’d be spending the rest of their lives as a guest of the state. It all made the stakes high enough to justify any intervention-killing another cop, like Fusco, or killing the meddlesome newspaper reporter who kept trying to expose their crime.

Until they were all locked up-every last one of them-I was little more than a safe pick in the office Ghoul Pool.

* * *

Ruthie parked around the corner and two blocks down from the bodega, in a spot where none of our new friends would be able to see his car. We walked back up the hill, and I had a brief moment of panic as we approached the store and couldn’t see any lights-had it closed at five o’clock? some of them did-but that was just because of the tinted glass. A YES, WE’RE OPEN sign stuck in the front door eased my fears, as did the sign next to it that established the hours as 6:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M.

The bodega was called “All Brothers Market III,” which might have suggested it was owned by several brothers, who also owned at least two other establishments. But Newark bodegas changed hands more often than they changed canned goods. It was entirely possibly it had gone through two or three ownership swaps, with each new owner deciding not to confuse his loyal customers by ditching the All Brothers name.

I entered to the tinkling of the little bells tied to the door. The Sikh, the same one who had been there last time, was still manning the cash register. He was probably the owner and only employee, which meant he spent thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, sitting in that lonely little bulletproof box. The bells might have been there to wake him up when a customer entered.