The Good Cop

CHAPTER 9

What had felt like a sanctuary-my little perch, wedged between solid objects and out of sight-was now my personal mousetrap. I was too hunched down to even think about vaulting over the magazine rack or trying to run. And I suppose that menacing hunk of black composite in Officer Hightower’s right hand made it all something of a moot point anyway.

With his nongun hand, he grasped the upper right corner of the magazine rack and swept it haphazardly out of the way until it ended up leaning at a forty-five degree angle against the bread display. He walked into what had been my box and grabbed a fistful of shirt and tie. His hand was roughly the size of an octopus, and he used it to pull me to my feet with a quick, effortless yank.

“Lace your fingers behind your head, sir. You are under arrest,” he snarled.

I turned to look at the Sikh in the box, to begin protesting the injustice that was about to transpire in his store. But the Sikh wasn’t visible. Bulletproof glass or no, he had probably ducked down the moment he saw that gun come out. He was a shrugger, after all. He didn’t want to be involved.

Hightower dragged me, stumbling, into the aisle, trained the gun at me, and repeated, “Fingers behind your head, sir, nice and slow.”

Since I didn’t have much choice, I complied with the order. “Two steps forward,” he ordered, and I did it.

Just as Hightower went to walk behind me, I saw his nameplate for the first time: LeRioux.

Officer LeRioux. Maybe in Louisiana that wouldn’t be a terribly unusual last name. But up here, there was only one other LeRioux I could think of having met.

“LeRioux,” I said. “I feel like I’ve seen that name on a few billboards around here.”

“Yeah, I heard you met my dad,” Hightower said and began handcuffing me roughly, slamming metal against bone with vicious delight.

His dad. Of course. They were both unusually tall, and now that I knew about the connection, I could see they bore some resemblance. It had just been hard to see because one was a uniformed cop and the other was a pastor in two-thousand-dollar suits.

But it made sense. Pastor Al had started his noisy, blustery call for an independent investigation, then had suddenly backed off-probably right around the time his son came crawling around, explaining to dear old dad that maybe some stones were better left unturned.

From there, the elder LeRioux had been acting more like a father protecting his guilty son and less like a pastor aiding his grief-stricken parishioner. That was the real reason he had instructed Mimi Kipps to avoid me. He knew she would just help me stir the pot, and he didn’t want that. Even when he showed up at her house moments before the BMF wannabes came cruising by, that was likely because Hightower-having used LoJack to tip off BMF as to my whereabouts-had told Dad that perhaps it was best to remove Mimi from the scene of the crime.

By the time I had all that figured out, Hightower had finished fastening the cuffs behind my back. I looked across the store and saw Ruthie was getting the same treatment, only his arresting officer was another familiar figure-Baldy Jones.

“You get that report written on my car yet, Officer Bryson Jones?” I called out. “What about that gun with the red dot on it? You put it in the evidence locker yet, or did you just sell that to some thug on your way back to the station?”

Hightower thumped the butt of his palm into the back of my head hard enough I thought my skull was going to separate from my spinal column. “Shut up!” he yelled.

“Oh my goodness, what have we here,” Baldy called out, holding up a freezer-size Ziploc bag filled with a white substance. “It looks like this gentleman had a big ol’ bag of heroin. I bet he’s going to go away for a long time, selling this much heroin.”

“That’s not-” Ruthie started, but I couldn’t hear the rest of it because Hightower was yelling in my ear.

“Not as long as this guy,” he bellowed. “Look at all the rock I found on him.”

Without bothering to look, I could guess that Hightower had magically found crack cocaine on me. Because, yeah, I always like to carry a few hundred grams on me. Gets me through the day when I need a little pick-me-up.

“Crack and heroin. Looks like these punks had a major distribution network set up,” Baldy shot back. “Good thing we got them off the streets.”

Baldy shoved Ruthie out the door. Hightower and I soon followed. I was slowly overcoming the shock of having my perfect hiding spot discovered and was reaching the obvious conclusion: the corner boys had flipped on us. I had even paid them five hundred dollars to do it. And that was on top of whatever they were getting out of the cops.

As if to confirm this fact, I heard the grating, raspy sound of Famous laughing at me as I was herded out on the sidewalk.

“See you later, Mr. Newspaper Hustler,” he said, the Black amp; Mild dangling from the side of his mouth. “Have fun with the five-o.”

Blocking him out, I did a scan of the sidewalk and nearby area, hoping to see a bystander gawking at me. A grandma. A workingman. A schoolkid. There had to be someone normal passing by at this time of the day, someone who might just listen when I screamed that I was a newspaper reporter being wrongly imprisoned by corrupt cops; someone who would act when I hollered for them to call Tina Thompson, the state police, the attorney general, or some combination of the three.

But there was no one in sight. The Fourth Precinct building was maybe forty yards away. And having been shoved off the sidewalk and onto the street, I could see that was where I was being led.

It was around this time I felt a real panic setting in. I was stuck in this netherworld where the cops and the crooks were indistinguishable. And there wasn’t anyone who was going to save me from them. The pit of my stomach was dropping quickly out of my body. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.

Up until that moment, I had been walking on my own across the street, albeit prodded by Hightower, who had a bruise-inducing grip on my right arm. No more. It was time to put up at least a token effort at resistance, if only so someone coming along realized the funny-looking white guy was being taken against his will.

I yanked my right arm, planted my right heel in the asphalt, and tried to make a break for it, pushing off as forcefully as I could. I didn’t know how far I could make it, running with handcuffs on, but I at least had to try.

It turns out the answer was: not very far. My bucking and squirming did exactly no good. Hightower, with his octopus hand, never relinquished his grip. One of the other officers, the one with the mustache, anticipated my move, which he had probably seen a hundred times before, and took the opportunity to knee me in the groin.

He didn’t get me square in the kiddy-maker, but he got close enough that I felt a momentary lurch of nausea and doubled over. The mustachioed officer grabbed my left arm, and with Hightower still on my right, they dragged me up the front steps of the precinct-just like the cab driver, John Smith, on that long-ago hot summer night.

I could still hear Famous’s raspy laughter as the doors closed behind me.

* * *

Inside the precinct, the first thing I saw was the desk sergeant, a different one from the other day. I didn’t know if he was involved with the red dot scheme or not, but I was growing desperate. If nothing else, I didn’t want to go quietly.

“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said in a high, panicked voice. “These officers are involved in a major gun-selling operation that I’m about to expose and now they’ve taken me-”

“Would you shut up, you freakin’ hophead?” Hightower outshouted me while giving me another thunk on the head, this time on the side. “You want us to add slander to all those CDS charges against you?”

The desk sergeant didn’t even look up. I guess he was accustomed to loud, crazy, half-coherent people being dragged past him, shouting their various conspiracy theories and claiming police brutality. I might not have even been the first one that shift. All he did was nonchalantly buzz us in.

I inhaled and was about to start shouting again-this time with a little more diaphragm behind it-but Hightower seemed to anticipate it. In a low, deadly serious voice he said, “If you don’t shut the hell up, I will crack your skull like an eggshell and scramble whatever I find inside. Yeah, I’ll end up on administrative leave for a month. But you’ll end up eating through a tube for the rest of your life. You get me?”

For emphasis, he took his nightstick and placed it about four inches from my forehead. I quickly took stock of my situation and realized that in my current state-I was the handcuffed hostage of a gang of killer cops-a concussion wouldn’t do anything to help matters. So I took this as an opportunity to keep my thoughts to myself and retreat into a period of personal reflection.

Ruthie, who was still on his feet, wasn’t trying anything daring either. And so, together, we were shunted down a hallway, then through some heavy double doors into what appeared to be a holding cell area. The fourth cop, the one who was neither dragging me nor shoving Ruthie, opened up one of the cells and in we went.

“Face the wall,” Hightower ordered, and we did. Didn’t seem like much point in resisting now.

I felt hands going for my pockets and was soon relieved of their contents: cell phone, keys, wallet, notepad, pen. Then the hands ran roughly up and down my legs, arms, and chest.

“Aren’t you at least gonna kiss me before you cop a feel, Officer?” I asked.

Hightower answered with another palm to the base of the skull that, to me, sounded like all the low keys on the piano had been hit at once. I thought that was going to be the worst of it, then out of the corner of my eye I saw him remove his nightstick from his belt, wind up, and take a swing at the back of my right leg.

The next thing I knew I was on the floor, my leg having momentarily lost the will to hold me up. For the first few seconds, I wasn’t feeling any pain-just disorientation-and then a piercing ache rushed up from my knee.

“Fffaaa!” I shouted. I’m not sure what language “fffaaa” is, but I’m sure it’s an expression of pain in some primal protolanguage.

Hightower kneeled one leg on top of my chest, then rested his baton on my nose, grinding it into the cartilage for good measure.

“You keep your mouth shut, princess,” he said. “You got that? You keep it shut or this is going to get a whole lot worse.”

“Hey, get off him!” Ruthie shouted.

“You want it next?” Baldy Jones said. I heard something impact Ruthie’s midsection and most of the air rush out of him.

I whipped my head to the side, to get Hightower’s stick out of my face. He roughly brought himself back to standing, using my sternum as a trampoline. Hightower wasn’t the thickest guy, but he had to weigh two forty, easily. I felt like I was lying in the middle of the street on road-paving day.

As he walked away from me, he gave my right knee a sideswipe with his boot. It wasn’t a full-on toe kick and didn’t have too much momentum behind it, but it still sent another shock wave up my leg. I twisted into a fetal position, if only to get my throbbing knee some protection.

At that moment, rolled up in a ball on the floor, I decided it was time to stop being brave. And cute. What little satisfaction it was bringing me just wasn’t worth the agony. I heard Ruthie moaning and saw he was doubled over, leaning against a bench for support. I suspected he was reaching the same conclusion.

“Ordinarily, I’d remove the cuffs right now,” Hightower said. “But not for a couple of dangerous drug dealers like you.”

Then, as abruptly as they had arrived in our lives, the four officers left.

I took a moment’s worth of stock in our situation. We were alone and trapped in a windowless dungeon. No one knew where we were, and we had no way of communicating our whereabouts or predicament. Our captors were police officers who could presumably use their perverse version of the law to keep us here for quite some time, assuming they didn’t kill us first. And my leg felt like it had glass shards inside it.

In short, we were in a bad way.

“You okay?” Ruthie said, panting and still leaning against the bench.

“No,” I replied, because honesty is the best policy.

I was about to ask him how he was doing, but before I could, he staggered over to the small metal toilet in the corner of the cell and vomited. Twice. That seemed to answer the question.

He spit a few times, then eventually straightened partway up and lurched over to the bench. He sat down with his head between his knees. I was still in my baby ball, but at least the throbbing in my knee wasn’t getting any worse for the moment. It helped that no one was hitting it anymore.

“So what happens now?” he asked, spitting again.

“I don’t know. Probably nothing good.”

“You got any brilliant ideas for getting us out of here?”

“Nothing that comes to mind.”

“I guess asking for a phone call the next time they come back is out of the question?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said.

“What are they going to do to us?”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to. We eased into something like a respite, neither of us saying anything, each of us nursing our hurts.

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.”

Ruthie nodded. Any further discussion was squelched when the double doors swung open and Officers LeRioux and Jones-Hightower and Baldy-came stalking through them.

“Hey, guys,” I started, “why don’t we-”

“How many times I got to tell you to shut the hell up?” Hightower growled. “You say one more word I’m busting up that other knee. And this time I’ll go for the front of the knee, not the back.”

Baldy Jones slid open the door to the cells. Ruthie and I stood there, frozen, uncertain, a couple of scrawny newspaper reporters well out of their weight class.

“All right, come on out, ladies,” Hightower said. “We’re going to take a little walk up to the interrogation room, ask you a few questions about all that dope we took off you. Let’s go, let’s go.”

At least he didn’t noticed that our cuffs were unlocked. Ruthie eased out of the cell first, and I limped out after him. As we walked toward the interrogation room, I kept telling myself there was no way they would get away with this. No one would believe that Ruthie and I had smuggled weapons into a police station or would know how to use them even if we had. What were they going to do, put metal shivs in our dead hands and claim we tried to stab them? Give themselves superficial wounds to make it look more convincing? It was absurd.

But to a certain extent, it didn’t matter. Sure, there would be an investigation into our deaths-the paper would put up a hell of a stink-but as long as the cops stuck to their stories, what would there be to contradict them? Ruthie and I would go down in history as a bizarre cautionary tale: a pair of dope-dealing newspaper reporters who got killed by the cops.

“Keep walking,” Baldy said, as we passed through the double door and were led upstairs and down a hallway. We took a left turn down another hallway. I could see the emergency exit at the end of it. My heart started pounding and, strangely, I felt the urge to urinate. I guess there’s something to the old saying, after all, about being nervous enough to pee your pants.

I limped a few more steps down the hallway until Hightower said, “Stop here.”

We had reached the interrogation room. I casually positioned myself so that neither cop was between me and the emergency exit and saw Ruthie do the same. The exit was perhaps thirty feet away, a distance I could cover in, what, a few seconds? Would that be fast enough?

Baldy Jones started going for his keys. Hightower was resting his hand on his gun, an ominous development. Was that just a reflex for him, or was he expecting trouble? Was the gun strapped in or was it loose? Could he draw it during those two seconds I was running down the hall?

Ruthie and I agreed that the moment the key touched the door, we would both make a break for it. I bent my legs to prepare for our mad dash down the hallway and glanced over at Ruthie, who returned my gaze with eyes that had doubled in size.

Then the lights went out.

This being an interior hallway-in a building where the windows had been bricked over decades ago-we were plunged into immediate and total darkness. There was not a shred of ambient light. Not even the pinprick of a single LED. It was like being in a mineshaft.

Hightower swore and Baldy uttered a panicked, “What the…?”

I heard the creaking of leather, like a gun being removed from a holster, and I dropped to the floor. If Hightower started firing in the dark, I wanted to be as small a target as possible. I began desperately crawling in the direction of the emergency exit-how long would it take to get there on my hands and knees? — when I heard a lot of shouting and slamming coming from the front of the building. No, maybe it was the back. Or maybe it was just all over. It was hard to tell.

I had traveled perhaps eight feet when I bumped into the far wall, which I used as a guide to keep going. Then the emergency door light kicked on, casting an orange-yellow hue on the hallway. I could see over my shoulder that Baldy Jones had grabbed Ruthie. The shouting and slamming was getting closer.

Hightower had been groping in the dark for me, never realizing I had gone low. But even with the dimness of the emergency lights, he couldn’t miss me crawling along the floor. And sure enough, from the way his body turned, I could tell he had locked onto me. As he swept his gun in a smooth arc in my direction, I tried to get my legs back underneath me to scramble away-at least it would give him a more difficult shot-though I was having trouble getting my bad leg to respond with the necessary urgency.

Then a flash blinded me and smoke filled my lungs. The world went yellow and gray and burnt-smelling. I closed my eyes and my mouth and tried to stop inhaling, too. But I had been breathing too hard. I couldn’t help but take gulps of air, even though I knew it was bad.

I was immediately consumed by what had to be the worst allergy attack in human history. Some combination of tears, sweat, and snot began pouring out of every opening on my face. Then, as if there wasn’t enough moisture in the mix, the building’s sprinkler system went off. I kept gasping for air that just wasn’t there. All the oxygen had left the planet, replaced by poison gas and spraying water.

It was pure misery, but even in all the confusion, I knew it was still preferable to being shot. At some point, my brain finally grasped the idea that someone had tossed tear gas, a flash-bang grenade, or something similarly loud, bright, and smoky into the hallway. I didn’t know whether this was a mission of mercy or just a different kind of offensive from a yet-unknown enemy, but I was struggling too hard to survive to make that much sense out of it.

I kept trying to get my eyes to unscrew, but every time I did there was just more stinging and, besides, even when I could force them to open more than a slit, I couldn’t see much. Between the tears and the sprinkler, it was like being underwater.

I felt someone-no, make that two someones-grab me by the armpits and the crotch. Out of instinct, I thrashed against it, but the action was fairly futile. The pepper spray or mustard gas or whatever the hell it was had taken the fight out of me. As I allowed myself to be carried along, I could only hope that one, it wasn’t Hightower and Baldy Jones doing the dragging, and two, the officers had been just as incapacitated by the smoke as I was.

Soon I was outside the building, not that I was sure how it happened. Through my watery eyes I could finally see that I had been seized by a pair of guys in gas masks that made them look like some kind of bug-eyed aliens. They carried me in the direction of two more bug-eyed guys, who each grabbed a side of my upper half and then dragged me to a spot of empty sidewalk, where they laid me facedown.

I was beyond resistance at this point-that gas packed an indescribable punch-and I actually relaxed as I felt my hands and legs being fastened by strips of plastic. After a lifetime of never once being handcuffed, it had now happened to me twice in one day. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a character in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Then I was left alone. I tilted my head to the right and finally began to gain focus on the surreal scene unfolding around me. There were several handfuls of other people-some of them cops, others dressed as civilians-arrayed on the street and sidewalk around me, also facedown. I spied Ruthie, lying a few bodies away from me. Otherwise, none of them looked especially familiar.

Beyond all the prone figures was a small army of men in gas masks and dark commando gear. Their job was to accept victims from the smoky building. The commandos seemed to be intent on getting everyone out. They would leave the sorting of who was who-and who was on what team-to some later time.

I was starting to feel like I had been saved but still couldn’t figure out who my savior had been, how they knew where I was, or what had tipped them off to the idea that there was someone in need of saving.

Then, in the distance, I saw a man in a dark blue windbreaker with ATF in yellow letters. Then another. Then a guy with an ATF hat. Okay, so they were employees of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. I could imagine they were folks who wouldn’t take kindly to a group of cops selling guns to thugs. That might just be their kind of case.

Did they already know about red dot? Had they been keeping an eye on the precinct and then moved in when they realized something was amiss about Ruthie and me being dragged into the building?

At that point, I couldn’t guess how it had all come down. I just knew I was safe.

I was so happy I didn’t mind when, seconds later, another wave of nausea slammed me and I vomited all over the sidewalk.

* * *

The next two hours or so were something of a muddle. I spent the first part of it lying contentedly on the sidewalk, enjoying the Newark night air, which had never tasted so sweet and clean. The action and commotion continued around me, but it now felt more like a pleasant distraction.

Slowly, the number of people being led from the gassy building diminished. There were perhaps thirty of us by the time it was done, all suffering a variety of unpleasant symptoms from whatever version of bug spray they had used.

After a while, I was unbound and led into a large tent that had been hastily erected as a kind of mobile command center. I was asked for identification but, of course, didn’t have any-my wallet was still stewing in the stink somewhere inside the Fourth Precinct. But when I told them I was Carter Ross, Eagle-Examiner investigative reporter, they seemed to accept it without question, almost like they knew they were going to find me inside somewhere.

There was just as much chaos inside the tent as outside. At one point, I overheard a guy in a suit telling a woman in a windbreaker that Captain Boswell had started spouting names and details just as soon as she had been able to get her nose to stop running. I didn’t know whether she’d get sanctioned for her inaction-the failure to report a crime has rather dire consequences for those in law enforcement-but if she was able to substantiate the threats made against her son, I was hoping the ATF would cut her a break. I doubted she’d be allowed to continue as precinct captain, but maybe she’d find a soft landing somewhere else until she got her twenty in.

As for the other cops, there would be no mercy. And it was only time until one of them-or, perhaps, all of them-started informing on one another. Cops will talk endlessly about the blue wall and brotherhood and solidarity and all that lovely stuff. But when lawful push came to legal shove, I’m sure they knew when they were defeated. They were going to do whatever they could to save their own hides. It was only a question of who would take the hardest fall. I was hoping for Hightower, the brutal bastard. I was also hoping his old man might be in on it, just for good measure.

I thought I’d have to wait my turn to be interviewed or interrogated, and given the number of people they had fished out of the building-and how low a priority I would be-I figured it might be a while.

Instead, the guy in the suit eventually came around, looked perplexed to see me there, then asked for, of all things, my phone number. After I gave it to him, he told me I’d be contacted in a few days and my cooperation would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I was free to go home.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s more like they were kicking me out. When I tried to ask a few questions-the journalistic instinct dies hard-I got a friendly smile and a hardy no comment. Then I got an escort to the perimeter that had been set up for the operation.

As I approached the barricade, I understood why: on the other side, there was a hungry horde of content providers the size of which you’d be unlikely to see anywhere except for perhaps Super Bowl media day. When I passed through the checkpoint, a good portion of them mobbed me.

Unfortunately for them, the Eagle-Examiner has rules about its reporters giving interviews (basically, we’re not allowed unless we have permission). So I held my tongue. From their questions, they seemed to think the raid had something to do with terrorism, because they have been trained to think every unexplained occurrence in the New York/New Jersey area has to do with terrorism. Eventually, when they realized they were only going to get two words out of me-“no” and “comment”-they left me alone. The gauntlet around me dissipated and waited for other fresh meat to emerge from the scene.

The only one who remained was Buster Hays. I never thought I would admit this, but I was actually happy to see the man.

“Blotches. Red dots. I think I understand why it matters now,” he said, allowing a knowing grin.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but how did you figure it out already? Everyone else around here seems to think Osama bin Laden got reincarnated and was cooped up in there.”

“You see a guy in a suit in there? Seemed to be running the show?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s just say he owed me a favor or two,” Buster said, the grin growing a little wider. “Hey, before I forget, that girl from the library has called me four times since I’ve been out here. She wants to know if you’re okay.”

I smiled. I could get used to Kira worrying about me. For whatever happened between Tina and me-that would need to be sorted out-Kira and I seemed to have some kind of future.

“Oh,” he continued. “And Tina Thompson told me as soon as I laid eyeballs on you, I was supposed to tell you to give her a call.”

“Yeah, I might have to borrow your phone, mine is still in there,” I said, gesturing toward the battered-but-still-standing Fourth Precinct.

“Sure,” he said. “But it’s going to cost you a Good Neighbors.”

I drew breath to start my protest, then he grinned and handed me his phone.

Tina, naturally, wanted me to file a story immediately. In the coming days and weeks, there would be a lot more of the same. The thrilling first-person narrative. The hard-hitting follows. The put-all-the-pieces-together takeout. Ruthie and I were kept busy.

So was the justice system. It eventually came out that poor Darius Kipps, working late that Saturday night, had seen Hightower unloading guns from his trunk after a trip down south to purchase a load from a prearranged straw buyer. Kipps immediately confronted Hightower about what he had seen. Hightower had tried to bribe him, threaten him, whatever he could do to ensure Kipps’s silence. But Kipps, ever the good cop, wouldn’t back down. He called Internal Affairs and left a message that night. By the next night, he was dead.

In the end, there were charges filed against eight officers, all of whom had been active participants in the conspiracy, all of whom would wind up with multiple life sentences-and only because there is no death penalty in New Jersey. We tried taking another run at Pastor Al, but with his church still behind him in what he characterized as a smear campaign by the Great Satan newspaper, he found a way to survive the scandal. Guys like him always do. Darius Kipps and Mike Fusco were buried with full honors. Mimi had to put back together the pieces of her life, although at least she’d be doing it with the aid of widow’s benefits and a life insurance policy.

All that was to come. But at that point, standing outside the Fourth Precinct, I needed to figure out how to get back to the newsroom-and then, eventually, to my empty home and lonely cat-without the aid of my car, which was still in the custody of Mickey the mechanic. I was starting to look around for someone to give me a ride when, of all people, Gene and Uncle Bernie shuffled up to me.

“I told you they were bad men, but did you listen? Noooo, of course not,” Bernie said, doing a dismissive shooing wave. “You had to be Clint Eastwood, huh? You’re lucky Gene had that Best Buy receipt to do. Otherwise, we might have gone home and you’d be kaput.”

“That’s Yiddish for-” Gene started

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t need the translation this time. Thanks, Gene,” I said. “So, wait, you guys are the one who called this in?”

“I was doing the receipt,” Gene said. “Bernie was watching the camera and-”

“Tut, tut, tut, he doesn’t need all the details,” Bernie interrupted. “Geez, Gene, someone asks you for directions and you pave a damn road for them.”

“But,” I stammered, “but how do you guys know ATF agents?”

“How many times do I have to tell you, kid: in this business, you gotta know everyone,” Bernie said.

“I don’t know what to … I mean, thank you.”

I reached my hand out and clapped Bernie’s shoulder. “You’re lucky you had the Ginsburg boy with you,” he said. “If it’s just you, a goy? Well, maybe I call, maybe I don’t. But nobody messes with a member of the tribe on my watch.”

“We would have called anyway,” Gene assured me.

“Anyhow, enough of that,” Bernie said, then fixed me with a look of genuine concern. “You chilly? You look chilly, scuffling around without a coat on. You’ll catch the death of you from cold. Lucky for you, I got coats. I got in a London Fog the other day-just your size, too. Forty-two long, am I right? What do you say? London Fog makes a good coat, you know, and Uncle Bernie gives you only the best. The best, I tell you.”