The Good Cop

CHAPTER 8

The parking spot Ruthie happened to choose was around the corner from Gene and Bernie’s place, in plain sight of the Fourth Precinct. As we got into his car, I glanced at the building, curious as ever as to what exactly was going on inside all that brick and mortar. Staged suicides down in the locker rooms. Gun-selling cops in the squad rooms. A captain upstairs who seemed to be completely oblivious. It was a treasury of dysfunction.

“Okay, so here’s how it works with these guys,” Ruthie said, getting us underway. “There are usually five or six of them out there, but you don’t always see all of … you need to get that?”

My phone had rung. I hauled it out of my pocket and saw it was Mickey the mechanic, probably calling to tell me my car had become the first in history to have a negative blue book value, because it was going to cost more to tow it to the scrap yard than it was actually worth.

“Yeah, hang on,” I said, then hit that little green button and announced, “Carter Ross.”

“Mr. Ross, it’s Mickey,” he said, with a medium-thick accent. Mickey is of Middle Eastern descent. I wasn’t sure why he called himself Mickey, though I guessed it had something to do with people like me mispronouncing his given name so badly he had given up and gone with Mickey.

“Hey, Mickey. How’s my hunk-a-junk doing?”

“Well, it’s bad. Very bad. I talk to your insurance for you. I give them the estimate, doing it the way the insurance tell me to do it. They say it’s totaled. They say they give you twenty-nine hundred for it.”

“Yeah, I sort of expected that,” I said, sighing.

“But I think I can still fix it for you,” he said, pronouncing “fix” like “feex.” Given the age and indeterminate mileage of my car, Mickey was always feexing things for me.

“What’s it going to set me back?” I asked.

“It depends. You want me to cut the corners?”

Mickey was also always asking me if he could cut the corners. It was his way of asking if he could use parts that weren’t a hundred percent new and methods that didn’t necessarily conform to factory standards.

“That’s fine.”

“Okay, I cut the corners. And you pay cash?”

This was another one of Mickey’s standard questions. “Sure.”

“Okay, you need new tire, new bumper. I have my body guy work on the dents, maybe touch up the paint a little. I give you new mirror. I do it for eight hundred.”

I thought about it and quickly decided getting the Malibu back on its feet, as it were, made more fiscal sense than making the massive outlay of cash to buy a new used Malibu. Sure, the way Mickey was proposing making the repairs, my car wasn’t going to be winning any beauty pageants. But it’s not like it was exactly in the running for a tiara before.

“That sounds fine,” I said, and was about ready to hang up when Mickey spoke again.

“Oh, but Mr. Ross? Your LoJack. It’s not so good. It’s busted up. And I can’t fix it. You need special tools and I’m not authorized dealer.”

“Mickey, I don’t have LoJack.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, sir, you do.”

“I’m quite sure I don’t,” I said. The guy I had bought the car from tried to sell me on a LoJack system. But I hadn’t gone for it because that was the whole point of buying a used Malibu: not even the most desperate car thief would steal it.

“Mr. Ross, I find the LoJack on the back corner of your car. It’s a little black box. Trust me, I know what it looks like. And your car has it.”

“Mickey, you’ve worked on that car … had you ever seen a LoJack there before?”

“No, sir.”

“So how did it magically…”

And then it dawned on me:

Someone LoJacked my car.

That’s how Black Mafia Family had been able to find me the second time. It’s why they weren’t waiting for me outside the medical examiner’s office. They didn’t know where I was-they just knew where my car was.

It was how they found me the first time as well. Mimi Kipps hadn’t set me up. My own car had done it. Did her pastor still have something to do with it? I couldn’t rule it out-after all, he did show up at her house mere minutes before BMF arrived, guns blazing. But Mimi? She now appeared to be just as ignorant as I was.

“Mickey, can you please just remove it?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Ross.”

“Thanks. When will the car be finished?”

“A few days. Even cutting the corners, this one is going to take a while, Mr. Ross. It’s a mess.”

“I know, Mickey,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

I ended the call, and Ruthie immediately relaunched his gang tutorial. But I shushed him. I needed a moment to think. A lot of things had just started to make sense. It was like I had been spending time in an idiot box and was finally crawling out.

Because I knew: LoJack is the stolen car recovery system used by the police. Only cops have access to the equipment that tracks the radio signals an activated LoJack device emits.

Which meant it was the police who told Black Mafia Family where to find me; which meant it was the police who slapped that LoJack on my car, perhaps while I was inside their precinct chatting with their captain-which meant it was the police who hired BMF to kill me.

Yes, life outside the idiot box was making a lot of sense. And it would make even more if I could get Buster Hays to confirm one simple detail, something that had seemed so insignificant when he first said it. I called his desk and he picked up after one ring.

“Hays.”

“Buster, it’s Carter.”

“You know, Ivy, I-”

“Save it, Buster. I need you to look back on your notes from the conversation you had with that IA guy.”

Buster didn’t reply immediately, but I could tell from the way he grunted that he was reaching for something, like a notebook. “Yeah, okay, what’s up?”

“You said Kipps called the IA guy and left a message about ‘seeing blotches.’ Did you really mean red dots? Was he calling with something related to red dots?”

“Hang on,” Buster said, then after a few seconds came back with: “Yeah, here it is. Yeah. Blotches. Dots. I guess it was dots. Red dots. Same difference. Does it matter?”

“Oh, trust me, it matters.”

* * *

I got off the phone with Buster before he forced me to explain why it mattered. I couldn’t risk telling Buster yet. He had cop sources all over the place, yes. But, without knowing how widespread the gun-selling was-and how much of the Newark Police Department was involved-I didn’t want Buster unwittingly tipping off someone that we were circling in.

But it was all clear now. Darius Kipps had somehow discovered red dot guns and planned to tell all. Maybe he had been part of it and finally decided to flip, figuring if he was the first to tell, he might be able to avoid jail time. Maybe he had a confidential informant who told him what was happening. Either way, he left a message with a trusted friend in Internal Affairs and planned to spill. Except before his call was returned, he was grabbed by the red dot guys, who took him somewhere, tied him to a chair, and poured bourbon down his throat until he was blackout drunk and vomiting all over himself.

Then they dragged him into the precinct, where anyone not involved would see him as just another cop on a bender, being nobly aided by his fellow officers. They guided him down to the locker room, turned on the shower, and blew his brains out-with the water nicely washing away much of the evidence that would have proven it was not a suicide.

Enter Mike Fusco, the loyal sometimes-partner. He knew Kipps hadn’t killed himself-knew it because of the drunkenness and the bourbon. And he had decided to dig in and get to the bottom of whatever happened. Maybe he was just driving that big truck of his around, leading people to think he was on to something, maybe he was making real headway.

Whatever it was, it had gotten him killed, too, in yet another faked suicide. The cops who were trying to keep their gun-selling operation alive had been able to smuggle his service weapon out of the precinct-because, as Pritch said, anyone with a uniform could get access to the precinct’s gun locker.

Then they snuck into his house and literally caught him sleeping. They forced him to call Captain Boswell and confess to killing Kipps. They shot him, then placed the gun in his dead hand and made him pull the trigger, so there would be gunshot residue. From there, they must have hoped that no one was going to want to look too hard at another cop suicide. And Boswell, under pressure from her superiors to stanch the flow of embarrassing news, played right into their hands by taking the confession and running with it.

There was still the issue of Fusco’s affair with Mimi. But seen in a different light-one in which he was a victim, not a perpetrator-I supposed it was possible their fling had started after Darius had been killed. Mimi Kipps would hardly be the first widow to turn quickly to the comfort of another man in a time of grief. And who was Mike Fusco to deny her? Their relationship didn’t have anything to do with either death. It was just something that I had allowed to mislead me.

So, finally, I had it mostly figured out. The what. The when. The how. The why.

All I lacked was the who. But with young Ruthie Ginsburg acting as my guide, perhaps his corner boys could help us fill in that final blank.

There was a small voice in one of my ears-one that I probably should have heeded-that told me perhaps it was time to pull back, return to the office, and lay it all out for Tina and Brodie. They would immediately hand it over to the authorities (to folks who didn’t have “Newark Police Department” on their badges), then write some big, four-thousand-word feature (a “takeout,” in newspaper parlance) in a couple of months, once all the arrests had been made.

Except that small voice was almost immediately shouted down by a more boisterous one that reminded me this was potentially a career story. Exposing a ring of murderous, gun-dealing cops? Pulitzer prizes had been won on less, especially in this day and age, when newspapers barely have the resources-that damn word, again? — to do real reporting.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “Please continue. You said there were five or six guys?”

“Yeah. But you might not actually see all of them. I haven’t quite figured out their system yet. It seems like they got one guy sitting on the stash, one guy handling the money, one guy talking to the customers, a couple guys acting as lookouts.”

“Doesn’t really matter, as long as they’re cool with you being there.”

“Yeah, they’re cool,” he assured me. “So how are we going to play this?”

“I don’t know. I mean, they’re kids, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay, so kids are easily confused by a situation they’ve never encountered before. We just keep in mind we’re the grown-ups in this scenario and act accordingly. Tell me a little about them.”

“Well, there’s a little guy everyone calls Twan. He seems to be the spokesman. Or at least he does most of the talking. But I don’t think he’s really in charge.”

“Okay.”

“There’s another guy you’ll see, a big guy who acts real smiley and happy. Everyone calls him Doc.”

“Doc?” I said. As far as I knew, most of the world’s Docs were a minimum of sixty years old, “Doc” being one of those nicknames-like “Scooter”-that seemed to be fading out of the lingua franca.

“Yeah, not sure about why he’s Doc. But whatever you do, don’t piss him off. I’m pretty certain he’s the one who’s armed at all times.”

“Good to know.”

We stopped at a red light, and I watched as two little boys, each gripping their mother’s hand, crossed the street in front of us. They had book bags on their backs and happy little skips in their stride as they came back from school. It’s funny how Newark can be both so strange-full of gun-dealing cops-and so normal at the same time.

Ruthie continued his book report: “But the guy who really matters is this tall kid they call Famous.”

“Famous?”

“Yeah, Famous. I think maybe it’s a rap reference, but I don’t know.”

I clearly wasn’t going to be able to help him there. I was a little behind on my subscription to Vibe magazine.

“Anyhow, Famous barely says anything,” Ruthie continued. “I get the feeling he’s the leader, though.”

“How so?”

“He just … watches things, like he’s the king sitting on his throne. Twan will keep talking and the whole time, he’s got half an eye on Famous, waiting for him to make a little motion with his head or a hand signal or I don’t know what. But Famous is definitely the boss. He actually freaks me out a little bit.”

“Why?”

As we pulled up to Eighteenth Avenue, I soon found out.

* * *

During my years in Newark, I have come to firmly believe that the majority of kids involved in the drug trade are guilty of little more than going along to get along. They are truly products of their environment.

I know, I know, it sounds like liberal babble-and it leaves the factor of personal responsibility out of the equation-but it also happens to be true. Put most of these kids in a nice middle-class family in Franklin Lakes, and they end up heading off to Rutgers, majoring in business administration, and working in sales for a pharmaceutical company.

Put them in Newark and they end up drug dealers. The Newark kids are not inherently any more or less evil than the Franklin Lakes kids.

The first two kids I saw as I got out of the car were perfect examples of this. One was short, muscular, and a bit on the twitchy side, though not to the extent of being diagnosable. This, I guessed, was Twan.

He was on the sidewalk alongside a big, thick kid who had to be Doc. He was about six foot three and was a couple Ring Dings above three hundred pounds. Give him to the right high school football coach and a little time in the weight room, and he would have ended up playing left guard for Wisconsin.

Famous was seated on the front steps of one of the town houses, leaning against the side railing. He was tall-probably two inches taller than Doc-and lean, with bones jutting out in more than a few places. He had skin like mahogany and eyes like a lizard, large and set wide apart. There was an attempt at a beard on his chin, though it was pretty scraggly, barely visible against his dark complexion. His arms were crossed.

And I got the feeling, right away, he was a bad dude.

He was the kid that, no matter where he grew up, would have ended up involved in some malevolent venture, taking other kids along with him. Stick him in Appalachia and he’d start a crystal meth lab. Stick him on Wall Street and he’d engage in insider trading. That’s why he freaked Ruthie out: Famous was pure evil.

Still, as Uncle Bernie so pertly pointed out, this wasn’t a quilting bee. And I wasn’t here to ask him for advice on sashing and backing.

“Hey, what’s up?” Ruthie asked Twan as he approached on the sidewalk.

“Who’s he?” Twan replied, appraising me with the appropriate level of suspicion that a teenaged city kid gives a well-dressed (albeit still in yesterday’s clothes) thirty-something-year-old white man.

“This is my boss. He’s the one who needs to approve that story about you guys,” Ruthie said. He could have thrown a wink in my direction, but he didn’t need to. I got it.

“Oh, mos’ def, mos’ def,” Twan said, breaking into a wide smile. I translated that to mean “most definitely.”

But I wasn’t going to make this all go so easily. I figured that since I had been put in the position of being The Man, I might as well play the part.

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Geoffrey,” I said. “We have policies and procedures that we must follow with the strictest adherence. As you know, all candidates for an Eagle-Examiner Good Neighbors profile must be carefully vetted to ensure they are of the highest character and moral fiber. The committee absolutely insists on it.”

There was no committee, of course. Just like there were no policies or procedures. But since I could tell Twan was only catching about half of the polysyllabic words I was using, I wasn’t too worried about being called on it. I only wished I had brought a clipboard along. A white man looks that much more convincing with a clipboard.

Ruthie picked up my pile of baloney and helped me make a sandwich out of it.

“That’s true,” he said. “I forgot about the committee.”

“There cannot be even a suggestion of turpitude.”

“Right.”

“I mean, remember what happened with the McNulty boy-very unfortunate.”

Twan was watching this go back and forth and finally cut in. “Whoa, whoa. We tol’ you about red dot. You ain’t flagin us now?”

I had no idea what “flagin” was-I guess the lack of understanding of each other’s vocabulary went both ways-but it sounded like something bad.

“There’s no flagin of any sort going on here. Nor will any flagin be tolerated in the future,” I assured him. “However, there are some minimum requirements that must be met. If we are to write about a rap group, it can’t just be some boys playing around. We only write about serious musicians with legitimate futures. Tell me about this rap group of yours.”

Twan launched into a long and animated description of their group-which they called Hevvy Soulz, because I guess spelling doesn’t count in the hip-hop world-and how someone’s cousin had gotten them some recording time in someone else’s cousin’s basement studio and how they had to lay it down across one of the standard prerecorded tracks, and even though it was one they never heard before, they somehow made it work.

Or at least that was my translation. I’m sure I missed some of the nuance and much of the subtlety. The only person who probably didn’t miss a word-of anything-was Famous, who was watching over Twan, Ruthie, and me, never uncrossing his arms.

“And you’ve got a demo CD? The committee will insist on hearing a demo,” I said, when Twan was done. I knew, from my previous encounters with a variety of aspiring rappers, they all had demo CDs, of which they were very proud and which they would supply to you whether you wanted them to or not. The backseat of my Malibu probably had three demo CDs in it, and that was just from the last two months. I had never listened to any of them, but somehow I was always reluctant to toss them until they had been there for a full season.

Twan ran to a knapsack and grabbed an unmarked CD in a clear jewel case, then handed it to me. I considered it as if my mind were a laser capable of reading the digital material recorded on it and making an instant determination as to its musical quality.

“Excellent,” I said. “This will help the committee greatly. Now there’s just one more thing.”

“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.”

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.

I went over and tapped on the plastic.

“Hi, sir, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “We’re reporters with the Eagle-Examiner. Do you mind if we set up in your windows for a little while so we can watch for something on the street? It’s for a story we’re working on. We’ll be out of your hair quickly enough.”

I cringed at the “hair” part because for all I knew he didn’t have any under the turban. But he just shrugged at me. Maybe it was because he didn’t understand why the funny guy in the tie and his tagalong friend wanted to hang out in his store. Or maybe he was just a shrugging kind of guy.

Nevertheless, I felt sufficiently empowered to act like I had the run of the place. I surveyed the windows. One faced north, the other west. Each had a display in front of it, which meant we’d have to do a little shimmying to get access to the windows. Old magazines were the primary obstacle to the west. Chips and fried pork rinds blocked the way to the north. But beyond those impediments, the windowsills were broad enough that we would be able to stand there without disturbing any more than some dust bunnies. If we crouched, we would be out of the gaze of any curious casual shoppers who entered the store. We’d be functionally invisible.

I went outside to test the one-way glass, looking at it from a variety of different angles. It was good. I couldn’t see anything beyond my own reflection.

Returning inside, Ruthie and I reviewed our battle plan. He would take the north window, while I manned the west one, which would give us a fairly full panorama of the street, including all four corners of the intersection. We would each snap a few pictures whenever the action got close, but mostly we were there to observe. We would stay low, hidden in our little sanctuaries. And we would keep our mouths shut-because the glass was see-proof, not soundproof.

It was 5:14. Sixteen minutes to go. I made the call.

“Yeah, it’s Twan,” he said.

“Hey, you guys all set to go?”

“We good. You cool?”

“Yeah. We’re in the windows, but you won’t be able to see us. I’m behind an impressive collection of skin magazines, and I think Ruthie is well hidden by some Andy Capp fries. We’re good as gold.”

“A’ight.”

I ended the call, told Ruthie we were locked and loaded, then got settled into my little sanctuary, with dark glass to my left and seriously cheap particleboard-the backside of the magazine rack-to my right.

This was not the first stakeout of my career, but there was always a thrill to watching bad people do things they weren’t supposed to be doing. What kept it exciting is that, for as much as you might think you knew what was going to happen, the details could surprise you every time.

And, yeah, maybe it made me feel a little bit like a badass special agent, and maybe I liked that feeling. Especially when I knew, unlike those guys, I wouldn’t have to spend three straight days in a van, peeing in an empty Gatorade bottle.

We didn’t have to wait long. At 5:28 VWMT (Verizon Wireless Mean Time), Famous, Doc, and Twan made their appearance, arriving on foot from the west side, Ruthie’s window. Twan and Doc continued walking around to my side, whereupon they leaned against the window where I was set up. Twan rested one foot against the glass. Since I was now seated, the underside of his sneaker was practically at eye level.

I heard the bells clanging to signal that someone had entered the store. Then I saw Famous peering over me. Twan had obviously told him where he could find me, and he was checking to see that I was in place and didn’t have any photographic equipment in tow. I looked up at him and nodded, but he said nothing-he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who was going to stop and inquire how my mother was doing. I heard the sound of his footsteps go over to the other window, where I assume he performed a similar inspection on Ruthie.

Famous went over to the Sikh in the box and said, “Get me some blackies.”

“Blackies” were Black amp; Milds, a brand of cigar popular enough in the hood that their white plastic filters were a familiar sight wherever fine urban litter could be found. After making his purchase, Famous went back out on the street, the bells chiming as he departed. He unwrapped his cigars, casually tossing the cellophane wrapper on the street, then extracted one and lit it. After taking one puff, he peeled off to the right, in the direction of Ruthie’s window. I didn’t know if Ruthie could still see him, but he was out of my line of sight. All I had to look at was the tread of Twan’s sneaker.

Then, no more than ninety seconds after Famous sparked his lighter, a Newark squad car came through the intersection and rolled to a stop in front of the fire hydrant on the corner outside the bodega. I felt a rush of nerves and excitement and, mostly, curiosity: Who were these guys, anyhow?

I expected the cops to leap out and toss Twan and Doc on the hood-to put on a good show, like Twan said they liked to do. But two cops exited their car in no particular hurry.

They were African American, medium height, fairly undistinguished in appearance. One had a mustache. The one without the mustache was darker skinned. I tried to press the image of their faces in my brain in case I needed to identify them from head shots. They were not yet close enough that I could see their name badges.

They moseyed over to Twan and began idly chatting, keeping their distance. It was like they were at a large family reunion, greeting some distant cousins. They weren’t too excited to see them, but they also didn’t mind stopping to gab for a while.

I was absorbed in trying to pick up any small piece of their conversation, concentrating so intensely on a futile attempt to read their lips that I only barely noticed when the bells on the front door of the bodega clanged again. Then I was jolted by the sound of a commanding, somewhat-familiar voice on the other side of the magazine rack, pointed down in my direction.

“Excuse me, sir, you’re loitering,” it said.

I looked up to see six-feet-eight-inches’ worth of Officer Hightower looming above me with a menacing sneer, pointing his gun at my face.

The call came in like all the others did. One, two rings-long enough to get it on the phone as a missed call-then a hang up.

The associates at Red Dot Enterprises, who were all sworn police officers working out of Newark’s Fourth Precinct, took turns manning the cell phone, almost like it was a pager in a medical practice. It wasn’t terribly onerous: there were ten associates altogether, so someone was always working anyway. Plus, there weren’t too many calls. Their business was based more on chance encounters than prearranged ones. The thug set wasn’t much for scheduling.

So when the second call came in from the same number, the officer testily called it back, starting the conversation with, “What’s up, Twan? I’m kind of busy here.”

“This ain’t Twan,” replied a hoarse voice. “It’s Famous.”

“Yeah, fine, what’s up,” the cop huffed. He knew Famous, or whatever he was calling himself now. His real name was Raynard Jenkins. He fancied himself a real tough guy, with his stone-cold stares and crossed arms. He was like hundreds of other corner boys, with a juvenile record far longer than anyone with that short a life should have. He was unlike most of the corner boys in that he had managed not to get arrested during his first eighteen months as an adult. He was smart that way. He was also smart enough to turn situations like this one-a couple of his boys striking up a relationship with a couple of overly trusting newspaper reporters-to his own advantage.

“Y’all got some people who don’t like you much,” Famous said.

“We probably got a lot of people who don’t like us,” the cop replied, annoyed. “What’s your point?”

“What if I served up two of them for you?”

“Depends who you’re talking about.”

“Some newspaper reporters. Couple of crackers.”

Famous had come up with this plan while he had been listening to his boys arrange this deal and was pleased with himself for it. It was the perfect double-cross. Especially since it would allow him to get payment out of both sides.

Little did Famous know just how pleased the cop would be to hear it, that as soon as he said those words-“newspaper reporters”-he had the officer’s attention. All the associates at Red Dot Enterprises knew full well about Carter Ross and the problem he presented.

“How are you going to serve them up?”

“’Cause I know where they’re gonna be.”

“And where’s that?”

“Depends,” Famous rasped. “What’s it worth to you?”

“It’s worth me not sticking a PR-24 up your ass the next time I see you out on that corner, Raynard, that’s what it’s worth to me.”

“I ain’t playin’ like that, Officer,” Famous said. “Have a nice day.”

“Wait, wait,” the cop said. “Talk to me. What do you want? You want a gun? I got some nines and some twenty-twos. Just came in. Brand-new.”

“Nah, man, I don’t want that kid stuff. I want me a Dirty Harry gun, a big ol’ forty-pounder. Something with some punch to it.”

“Fine, we can do that. It won’t be new, but I can get something out of the locker for you.”

“Yeah. And the next time me or one of my boys gets jammed up, we friends, right?”

“Yeah, nothing too big, but I think we can handle that.”

They made the arrangements, agreeing that when the cops saw Famous walk out of the store and light a cigar, it meant the deal was on.

And just like that, Carter Ross had been sold out. For a used gun and a get-out-of-jail-free card.