Brad Parks: The Good Cop

How long we stayed like that, I couldn’t accurately say.

* * *

At least an hour passed. Or maybe more like two or three. I was a little disoriented from the beating, and it’s not like we could look outside and see the sun setting. Our only illumination came from the dim fluorescent lights in the hallway outside the cell.

I wasn’t going to tell Ruthie this, but I had no doubt our captors intended to kill us. We knew too much, and they knew we knew it. Famous would have told them. And besides, they had already been trying to get rid of me before I got tangled up with the corner boys. I was a double-marked man.

The only reason they hadn’t gotten around to it yet was that they hadn’t worked out the best way to do it. They seemed to be big fans of the staged suicide-maybe they’d make us hang ourselves by our shoestrings in the cell? — or perhaps they would get more creative, realizing folks would start getting suspicious about all those supposedly morose people at the Fourth Precinct.

Maybe we were going to meet some kind of unfortunate “accident.” Or perhaps they were going to put bullets in our heads and devise some ingenious way to get rid of our bodies so they’d never be found. Cops would probably have a pretty good idea how to do that. Would we be weighted down and tossed out somewhere off Sandy Hook? Buried in some defunct landfill? Stashed in an airtight barrel in someone’s attic?

I tried to stop thinking about it. I pondered, instead, what was going on in the outside world. Had Tina Thompson put out an all-points bulletin for us? Probably not. If she even noticed we were both gone, she would have chalked it up to my usual wanderlust. I was not particularly good about keeping in touch. Plus, I had already filed a story for the day. If she didn’t need me for copy, I wouldn’t necessarily be foremost in her thoughts.

At some point, the adrenaline drained away, the shock dissipated, the exhaustion caught up to me, and I think I drifted off. Actually, I know I did, because I started having one of my classic anxiety dreams, one where it’s ten minutes to deadline and I realize I’ve forgotten to do any reporting on a story I have to write.

It must not have been a very deep sleep, though, because I was stuck in the usual spot in the dream-the part where I’m trying to figure out why I haven’t done any reporting-when I heard those big double doors opening. I jolted wide-awake and scrambled to my feet, my knee swollen but holding my weight. I wanted to be alert and prepared for whatever came at us, ready to exploit any small opening, for however unlikely it was there would be one.

My eyes were aimed somewhere high above the six-foot mark, expecting to see Hightower. Instead, it was Captain Boswell. An angel couldn’t have looked any better than that short black woman with her shelflike butt. Sure, she had probably been told I was in here for dealing crack cocaine, but she had to know that was a sham.

“Captain Boswell, oh thank God,” I said. “I know this is going to sound like crazy talk, but-”

“Shh … keep it down,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

“What do you-”

“Shh!” she hissed more fiercely. “Listen to me and listen carefully, because there’s not much time. LeRioux and Jones are coming back. They’re going to move you to an interrogation room, and they’re probably going to kill you.”

“So, wait, you know about the red dot guns?”

“Yes,” she said quickly.

“So … I’m sorry, you’re the captain here. Why don’t you just blow it out of the water? Report it to the higher-ups downtown? Throw LeRioux and Jones in-”

“It’s not that simple,” she said, her face pressed close to the bars so she could keep her volume down and still be heard. “I have a son.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I’ve only been here six months, remember? This had been going on for years under the nose of my predecessor. I don’t know if he was blind or stupid, but I don’t think he ever knew about it. I’m pretty sure no one downtown knows about it, either. These red dot guys have been very careful. I only learned about it myself recently, but I was sort of clumsy in how I went about things in the early stages. They figured out that I was onto them and they … they…”

She turned away for a moment, and I could see only half of her face as she scrunched it in an effort to stay composed. “They threatened to hurt my son,” she said when she turned back. “Not just hurt him. Mutilate him.”

“I still don’t understand. You could have him put in protective custody, and-”

“And what?” she demanded with quiet ferocity. “Wait for three years until the thing goes to trial and just hope that no one protecting him slips up between now and then? No way. Look, I’ve always loved being a cop, and I hate what these guys are doing to the department’s reputation. Ever since I heard about this thing I’ve been trying to figure out how to defuse it and keep it quiet. But at the end of the day, this is just my job, okay? My son is my life. I’ve got three years left until I’ve put in my twenty, and then we can move to Oklahoma or Kansas or someplace where I can raise him in one piece, and Newark and everything that happened here can become a distant memory.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. “Look, I appreciate your situation, but that doesn’t have any bearing on us. Why don’t you just march us out of here and we’ll-”

“I can’t,” she interrupted.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I still don’t know who’s involved and who isn’t,” she said. “I know several of them must have killed Mike Fusco. I never believed that phone call he made to me, even if I had to go along with it for that stupid press conference. I know several of them killed Darius Kipps, too. But I don’t know who. And I don’t know how many of them there are. If one of them sees me taking you out of here, it’s all over.”

“So where does that leave us?” I asked.

“Like I said, they’re moving you to the interrogation room,” she said. “I overheard some talk that made it sound like they’re going to stage a scene that makes it look like you smuggled weapons in here. They’re going to kill you and call it self-defense.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“Okay, so I’m trying to help you. Turn around and stick your arms through the bars so I can do something about those handcuffs,” she ordered. Ruthie and I complied. As Captain Boswell started going to work with a key, she said, “I’m not taking these off. I’m just unlocking them. LeRioux and Jones have to think they’re still on, okay?”

“Got it.”

“There’s a door at the end of the corridor near the interrogation rooms,” she continued. “It’s an emergency exit. LeRioux and Jones aren’t going to be worried about it because it’s always locked. But I’ve disabled the lock. When you get to the interrogation room, either LeRioux or Jones is going to have to take out his keys and open the door. The lock is always fussy and takes a second to jimmy open. That’s your chance. You make a break for it and run like hell for that emergency door.”

“And then what?”

“Keep running,” she said, having finished unlocking both sets of handcuffs.

“And what if they catch us?” I asked as she turned to leave.

Her last instruction going back through the double doors was unequivocal: “Make sure they don’t.”

* * *

Ruthie and I began discussing the merits of this new plan and quickly agreed it was the worst we had ever heard. We also agreed the only thing it was better than was nothing at all, which had been our plan before.

“When we get out the door, I’ll run left, you run right,” I said. “Hopefully, they’ll only catch one of us.”