Jason Pinter - The Darkness

“The layoffs, the deficits,” I said. “You’re saying they’re trying to make up for budget shortfalls by taking a cut of drug payoffs?”

“Words to live by, especially in politics. If something worked twenty years ago, it’ll probably work again now.”

Just then I heard my cell phone ring. I went over to pick it up, but when I saw the caller ID I stopped. Looked at Jack.

“Who is it?” he said.

I shook my head, confused.

“It’s Curt Sheffield,” I said.

“Curt,” Jack said, taken aback. “Well, pick it up!”

I answered the phone. Tried to play it cool.

“Hey, man, what’s up?”

Then I listened as Curt explained to me what was going to happen in just a few minutes.

When I hung up, I looked at Jack and said, “You need to leave.”

Needless to say this was not exactly what he was expecting to hear.

“What the hell are you talking about, Henry?”

“In less than half an hour, somebody is going to come here to sell me drugs. And unless you want to try and pass off as my pot-addicted uncle or something, we can’t have any trace of you in this apartment.”

Curt Sheffield had only been working for the NYPD for five years, but the past two days made it feel like a lifetime.

Two days. Twelve dead. All deaths related to this new drug, the Darkness.

For years, New York was considered one of the safest big cities in the world. The crime that existed was relegated to back alleys and dingy apartments. Upstanding citizens had little to fear as long as they used common sense.

The drug dealers were easy to smoke out. They were usually junkies themselves. They sold because that’s all they had, all they knew. They were uneducated, unloved, and an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay was a foreign concept.

And that’s why dealers were so easy to break.

In real life, those dealers in their teens and twenties didn’t have any sort of real loyalty to the drug lords. It wasn’t like television. There was no “game” and no loyalty beyond a wad of cash. Your employer was simply whoever could pay that day.

When a man making seventeen thousand dollars a year selling crack is forced to choose between turning in a man he barely knows or spending five years behind bars, the decision was always easy.

That’s why people on the top never lasted long. They could never offer the people below them a life worth risking on the streets. Every moment was fleeting, but when push came to shove a fistful of crumpled twenties wasn’t enough to keep someone from saving their own ass.

This drug, though, was different. The narcotics division was sweeping all those back alleys, talking to all their sources, offering all their informants good, hard cash for one tip that could loosen the first thread.

So far, they’d come up empty-handed.

And it wasn’t because the informants had suddenly grown balls or a sense of loyalty. It’s that they didn’t know.

However this product was being moved, it was being done away from the streets, away from the bottom feeders, away from the men and women who sold the very same drugs they ingested.

This was different. And that’s what scared Curt the most.

This city had the best police force in the world, but now that force was being slashed like an unfortunately located forest. A thousand cops, vanished from the streets, victims of a mayor legally beholden to a budget that had come in four billion dollars in the red.

Curt stopped to pick up a pizza on the way home. Half mushroom, half pepperoni. He had no bigger plans than to throw on his Rutgers sweatshirt, lounge on the couch with a few slices and a few beers and flip between games and late-night Cinemax.

As he approached his apartment building, he noticed a man hanging on the street corner. He was wearing a

T-shirt and sweatpants, and had a pair of slippers covering his bare feet. Ordinarily such a thing wouldn’t catch his eye, but this guy was swaying slightly, looking like every few seconds he had to remind himself not to topple over.

It was a chilly night, and clearly the man had either gone out knowingly underdressed or was so zoned out that he hadn’t noticed.

Suddenly he found himself walking over to the man, balancing the pizza in one hand while checking his gun to make sure it was at the ready. Curt had never been forced to use his gun off duty, but something about this man made him tense up. It was the jittery movements, how he looked like he might fall asleep one moment and then suddenly jerk awake the next. He looked like a classic user, and Curt had learned long ago that someone high could only be trusted as much as the drugs allowed them to be.

Curt approached slowly. His hand was getting warm from the bottom of the pizza box. As he got closer, he called out, “Hey, man, you okay?”

The man didn’t respond, just kept swaying. His right arm shot out and caught a lamppost to steady himself.

“I said, you okay, man?”

Then the guy whipped around, and the look in his eyes made Curt glad his gun was so close. His eyes were bloodshot, but they were wide open, crazylike, and he stared at

Curt with a mixture of confusion and apprehension, like an animal cornered who might bare its fangs out of pure panic.

Curt slowly knelt down and laid the pizza on the sidewalk. He hoped this guy was just drunk, and that he could throw him in a cab, be done with it and retreat to his pepperoni. But getting closer, he knew it wouldn’t be that simple.

“Hey, man,” Curt called out. “You’re not looking so hot. Why don’t you head home. Sleep it off.”

The man shook his head. Slowly at first, but then more rapidly until Curt was worried he might hurt himself.

“Whoa, slow down there. I’m a cop. See?” Curt took out his badge, showed it to the guy. “My name’s Officer

Sheffield. I’m here to help.”

“No,” the man moaned. “No. No. No. Nooooooo. ”

“It’s okay. We’ve all had bad days. Why don’t I call a cab…”

“It’s all gone,” he said, his body swaying faster than the breeze.

“What’s gone?”

“All of it,” he said. “All of it. It’s gone.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m sure you have some in your fridge.”

“No. I can’t get anymore.”

Curt kept playing along. “Why not?”

“Money,” he said, his voice like tar pulled through a pasta strainer. “I need it to buy more.”

“More what?”

“Darkness,” the man said, his eyes fixated on Curt.

Sheffield felt his body tense up. The drug was too early in its life for cops to fully know how users reacted to it, how their bodies responded. Each drug did different things to people who took it, and as a cop you learned how to deal with each of them. You had to be supple with your voice, malleable with your body language. The wrong tone or stilted reaction could set someone off, putting you or others at risk.

Curt didn’t know how to deal with people who used this new drug. They were unpredictable, but if anything the last few days had proven without a doubt was that they were uncompromisingly violent. He’d been trained on how to deal with addicts of various substances, but this seemed to go well beyond the training manual.

“Why do you want more, man? What say we get you somewhere safe. St. Luke’s hospital isn’t too far from here. We’ll get you a nice bed, get you cleaned up…”

“I don’t want to be cleaned up!” the man yelled. Curt stepped back, the look in the man’s eyes giving him pause. He thought about calling for an ambulance, figuring whether he liked it or not this guy could use a night in detox. The only worry was whether in the time it took for an ambulance to come, this man was intent on hurting