Canary

by Duane Swierczynski

  The scandal sent Wildey into a mental tailspin, one that lasted all the way through Memorial Day weekend, which was strangely cold and rainy. Would the streets get to me, too? Am I staying good just till the right bribe comes along?

  Then came Monday, and the mayor and commissioner are naming Kaz Mahoney to head up a new “untouchable” narcotics field unit, and Wildey decides that no, the streets would not win.

  Mom, you’re not missing much this Thanksgiving.

  Strange to think that a year ago I was sitting at this very kitchen table, filling out the early admission forms for UCLA, still buzzing from our trip to L.A. the month before. Remember the four of us, walking around Westwood in the warm California sunshine? Me, finding it hard to believe this could be my new life? I kept glancing at your faces, bracing myself for one (or both) of you to tell me, Sorry honey, we can’t do this. But you and Dad were strangely quiet, taking in the sights, holding hands. At the time I thought it was weird but cool. The other weird thing was the headache that you couldn’t seem to shake. It was just the flight, you told me.

  On the last morning of our trip Dad suggested an impromptu drive down to La Jolla. You dismissed it, saying it was close to three hours down, then three hours back, and then we all had a red-eye to deal with. Dad just smiled, told you the kids should see the smelly seals. Me and Marty looked at each other—seals? What was so special about seals? And why did they smell? Dad continued to press his case, and you gave in and made the drive, despite the headache.

  So you drove down Highway 5 all the way to La Jolla, a hilly, pretty beach town totally unlike the Jersey Shore, which is the only beach I remember. Dad swears we were here once before, when I was three, to look at the seals. Nothing rings a bell but I instantly love the vibe of the place. The harsh salt of the ocean, the wet stairway leading to a little promenade where you could watch the seals laze about in a little sandy cove. The creatures were adorable but they also reeked, as promised. It was beautiful and gag-inducing, like so many things in life.

  It’s also the last happy “normal” memory I have of us as a family.

  Because four weeks later, at the pre-Thanksgiving table, I ask you for your social. You don’t hear me. You’re darting between oven and counter and fridge and stovetop like a hummingbird, feverishly trying to get dinner together. I repeat the question, Mom, what’s your social, and I know I sound irritated, which is what probably catches your attention. The look in your eyes startles me. Halfway through dinner you excuse herself. You almost make it to the first-floor bathroom, but then you don’t. I don’t understand until after dinner, when you and Dad tell me to wait a minute, you have something you need to tell me. And the floor of the world drops out from beneath my feet.

  Don’t tell Marty, you say. So I don’t.

  Twelve months later, I’m the one darting around the kitchen, with Marty at the table on his iPod. The thing’s practically glued to his hands these days, just as you predicted. Dad’s out in the backyard, even though it’s freezing, because he has this idea about grilling the small turkey I picked up two days ago. I don’t eat meat, but Dad jokes that I might change my mind once he gets this sucker grilling. I tell Dad I doubt it.

  This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. I was the one who should have been flying home from California this morning. If I’d been in California, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t be a snitch, facing jail unless I do something I know I can never do.

  Fuck, the most I should be worrying about right now is how I’m going to finish Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in time to make it down to Venice Beach with my friends. Or grappling with the tough Friday night decision of hanging out in Westwood vs. driving over to Los Feliz to go to that cool indie bookstore you and I found last year. (Do you remember that place, Mom? Skylight? Remember me promising you that, yes, we’d always go back whenever you visited?)

  I stare at Dad’s back thinking I should tell him. Not everything, but enough. There’s a version I’ve worked up in my mind. A version that doesn’t implicate D., because that would be as bad as narking him out to Wildey. You know Dad. Dad would hit poor D. with the double-barreled shotgun blast of “You so much as look at my daughter again and I’ll rip out your heart” (concerned father) and “Hey, buddy, I’m going to help you beat this thing” (concerned drug and alcohol counselor).

  So maybe I tell him I’m doing extra credit by volunteering with the police department. Observing for a paper, maybe? No, that won’t fly. I’m not taking any criminal justice classes and Dad knows it. None of my freshman triple classes (The Beats, The Greek Way) fit, either.

  So … no. I can’t bring it up. I can’t even hint at it. Talking to you like this is one thing; talking to Dad is another. Dad is still uncannily sharp about these things, despite the events of the past year. For the past four years our relationship feels like that of an ex-con and parole officer, where the P.O. is basically a decent guy who genuinely wants the best for you. But he’s still going to crack down hard on your ass if you so much as think about stepping out of line.

  Now Dad has the turkey in a disposable aluminum pan. He picks it up and turns with an excited look on his face.

  —Want to get the back door for me?

  —You’re really going to do this?

  —I told you, unless it snows, I’m grilling this sucker.

  —You’re hard-core, Old Man.

  —Right on, Sarie Canary.

  In the days immediately following Mom’s death, Dad and I tried to keep up the old routine. The banter, the puns. You always said I had inherited Dad’s weird sense of humor. But we quickly noticed that without you, there was a vital piece missing: our audience. Without you giggling or rolling your eyes, there was no reason for the puns or the banter. It sounded hollow. We stopped. It was bullshit anyway.

  Now Dad’s out back trying to make the grill thing work, but it’s not the same. I miss you two out there, standing around the grill, sipping iced tea and laughing. I miss Marty waging action figure spy wars near the edge of the woods. I miss pretending to read, but mostly listening to you and Dad goof around. I miss the smell of the burning coals and wood chips. After you died, Mom, the whole backyard routine died, too. If me or Marty asked about cooking out, an awful look washed over his face. Kind of like guilt mixed with sorrow mixed with a bit of anger for even bringing it up in the first place.

  Then school resumed and Dad inexplicably rekindled his love for the backyard. I arrived home one day to find him scrubbing the grime off the Weber with a wire brush and a hose. That night, he’d started small—spiral-cut hot dogs for the boys and marinated tofu for me. Dad continued to expand his repertoire, coming up with a surprising number of vegetable dishes. Last week he announced that he would be grilling the Thanksgiving turkey.

  I want to tell him, No thanks, Dad—the police already grilled me down at the station.

  I want to tell him, Dad I’m in serious fucking trouble and there you are playing around in the backyard. Your wife is dead and your daughter’s probably going to jail on a drug charge.

  I want to tell him so much, but for the past year I’ve found it impossible to tell him anything. Why start now?

  FRANKFORD

  NOVEMBER 29

  At approximately 1:30 in the morning, Confidential Informant #69, a twenty-six-year-old junkie whore, hears a noise.

  CI #69 isn’t stupid; she suspects the cops assigned her that number on purpose. I mean, for fuck’s sake, can you be more obvious? But let them laugh all they want. She’s just received a letter from her friend down in Naples, Florida. She says that her back room is cleaned out and that she can come down and spend Christmas there, with good chances for a job if she can clean up. CI #69 knows she can. All she needs is to be out of the cold and dark under the fucking El and be on a beach with warm sun and the clean fresh sand all around her. She’s young. She’ll rebound. This city and all of its sickness will be just a bad dream.

  The El; she won’t miss the relentless rum
bling of the El, just a block away from the place she’s been bedding down lately.

  But wait.

  It’s not the El she hears now.

  It’s the cracking of wood.

  Oh fuck, someone’s breaking in. CI #69 isn’t the legal owner of this row home on Darrah Street—that’s some dealer who was sent up earlier this year. But she considers it her squat, man. She’s been taking care of it. Practicing for when she’s a guest in her friend’s place down in Naples. She grew up dusting and vacuuming and generally slaving away for her bitch stepmom; she knows what to do.

  CI #69 isn’t so much frightened by the intrusion as annoyed. In a few minutes the burglars are going to see she owns nothing worth carrying out of here. And she’ll have to figure a way to secure the back door again.

  “You picked the wrong house, assholes,” she calls down the staircase. “Ain’t got nothing worth stealin’!”

  The voice that responds frightens her. Not because it is inherently menacing or sinister-sounding, but because CI #69 knows a cop when she hears one.

  “We’re not here for your stuff,” the voice says. “We’re here for you.”

  And with that CI #69 grabs her bag and is out the back window. Which is why she chose to bed down in the back bedroom—just in case she had to leave in a hurry. It’s a quick hop down to the roof outside the rear room of the house, then another hop to the small fenced yard. But from here, there are three ways out: left or right down a weeded alley, the left leading to Herbert Street, the right leading to another alley that took you to Darrah or Salem, take your pick. Because the cops came in the front, it was likely their cruiser was out on Darrah, so Salem seemed to be her best bet.

  If these guys are cops, though, why didn’t they identify themselves? Cops can be dicks, but they all tell you what’s what first.

  Maybe these aren’t cops?

  CI #69 lands in the backyard and is preparing to sprint to the gate when a voice behind her commands her to freeze.

  He’s not in uniform but he is holding a police gun, and the steely look on his face is definitely a cop’s. He’s black and clean-shaven and has the demeanor of someone who is used to having his commands followed.

  “What do you want?”

  “Yo, she’s back here.”

  Calling to his partner inside—a mean-looking chick with dark hair and eyes that seem almost black. And when she emerges, CI #69 knows that she is seriously fucked, because these are not cops and this is not a break-in. She’s survived this long because she knows how to read faces. Nothing fancy. Just little cues she picked up from her asshole stepmom. She just knows what someone looks like when they’re willing to hurt you.

  This bitch, the one who’s just stepped out of the back of her house? She looks more than happy to hurt someone.

  So CI #69 bolts.

  The chase doesn’t last very long. They catch up with her before she can even see the street lamps on Salem Street. The beating is mercifully brief but severe; she loses consciousness. She’s been beaten before but not like this. When she wakes up she’s tied to a chair and apparently she’s in the middle of a torture session whose beginning she cannot recall.

  “You were saying,” someone tells her, but CI #69 has no idea what she was saying. She could have been saying anything. There’s a weird burning in her blood, and sweat trickles down from her hairline. They stick something in her arm and then it comes back to her. She was talking. She was talking a lot. She was talking about the stuff she usually talks about with Wildey and only Wildey, and suddenly she knows what this is about, just as she knows that she’s never going to see Naples or feel the sun or smell the sand. She’s a silly junkie whore to have thought otherwise.

  The police call her Confidential Informant #69, but her real name is Megan Stefanich. Within twenty-four hours her corpse will be underwater.

  JOAN OF NARC

  November 29

  Well, Mom, if I’m a snitch, I guess I’d better learn how to be one. BTW, I hate the word snitch. I check the Internet for synonyms and they’re all horrible:

  Narc

  Fink

  Rat

  Rat Fink

  Deep

  Throat

  Turncoat

  Weasel

  Squealer

  Stoolie

  Stool

  pigeon

  The only one that isn’t completely awful is canary, which will probably make you laugh. Remember Dad and his stupid songs about my name? Sarie Canary, who’s she gonna marry? Okay, so I’m a canary. I can deal with canary. Better than being a snitch-ass motherfucker.

  (Sorry. Guess D. is rubbing off on me.)

  Online I find a PDF organizational chart for the whole Philadelphia Police Department. Wildey’s team seems to fall under the category of special investigations, which itself breaks down into two categories: narcotics and major crimes. Drugs and Serious-Ass Shit, in other words.

  Under narcotics there are narcotics field units (presumably like Wildey’s Nobody Fucks With Us unit), a narcotics strike force (presumably a Nobody Really Better Fuck With Us, Because We Will Fuck Your Shit Up But Good unit), and then a third division called Intensive Drug Investigations, just in case the first two categories didn’t automatically make you wet your pants.

  So they’re real, at least.

  Apparently the whole confidential informant thing is governed by Police Directive 15—a rule book for how cops deal with their snitches. To wit: “Police personnel will maintain professional objectivity in dealing with informants. No personal relationships will jeopardize the objectivity of the informant or the integrity of the department.”

  You hear that, Officer Wildey? I’ll be keeping my eye on you.

  Can’t find any pieces online about Wildey, but his superior is another story. She’s apparently Super Hot Shit in the department. According to one article, she’s in line to be the city’s next drug czar. Though in the comments section on the newspaper website, jerks make fun of her Russian accent:

  —What are they gonna do, bust Rocky the Flying Squirrel?

  —More like drug czarina

  —Kill moose and squirrel and take their crack!

  Why am I researching this? I have real stuff to research. Namely Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther as a Reflection of the Paradigmatic System of German Culture.

  Can’t help it.

  Monday there was apparently this big citywide drug bust and they caught this doctor in South Philly writing phony prescriptions. Cops busted into some row house (wonder if Wildey was among them) and found the sixty-one-year-old doc sitting at the kitchen table, calm as can be, writing those scripts. Guess he was trying to beat the Thanksgiving rush? He also had $740 worth of weed and $425 worth of pills on hand.

  The pills remind me of D., of course, but he hasn’t texted or called. I know he fled from the police, but you’d think he’d give me a yell, if for no other reason than to inquire about his missing hat, missing windbreaker, missing Ziploc baggie full of illegal narcotics.

  Tammy isn’t returning my calls, either. What the hell? Is it something I did?

  The only person I’m hearing from is Officer Wildey.

  WILDEY: You there

  CI #137: I’m here

  WILDEY: Thought of something

  WILDEY: Your boyfriend doesn’t know I picked you up. For all he knows you still have his stuff

  WILDEY: So you should reach out to him and tell him that you have his stuff and want to give it back

  WILDEY: You follow me?

  CI #137: I can’t do that because there is no boyfriend!

  WILDEY: Whatever you call him, doesn’t matter to me.

  WILDEY: Look, it’s the easiest way. Just agree on a meet location and I’ll be there to scoop him up.

  WILDEY: Hey, you there

  WILDEY: Get back to me

  WILDEY: Guess I’ll have to call you

  CI #137: I can’t set up someone who doesn’t exist!

  Mom, I swear, once y
ou start looking, you can’t stop.

  Just read a story about a Philly college student named Tracey, sweet-looking hippie chick based on her online photo (and stuff on Facebook) who bought some LSD online and made the mistake of selling some to some people back home, one of whom was an undercover state cop. Busted, just like me. The way she describes it, the cop was all sweet and shit, even brought her coffee. (Take some notes, Officer Wildey!) But then they put her to work, forced her to bust somebody at Drexel, her own school, in exchange for having her own charges dropped. Her identity was supposed to be sealed and secret (just like me! again!), but the drug world is apparently a small world, at least on campus, and people found out pretty quick. Everybody turned on her. Seriously—everyone. Tracey was big with campus activist groups and they all dropped her. Now she’s pet-sitting and whatever, struggling to make ends meet, and her life sounds pretty fucking miserable. So I suppose I have that to look forward to.

  Then there was the story about a dude on some photo-sharing site calling himself rat215. In addition to posting weird porn selfies, guns, and his headless self flashing gang signs, he also put up photos and court documents that outed a witness to two drug killings. EXPOSE ALL RATS, the caption read. Rat215 turned out to be a high school kid, and nobody has any idea how he found the docs and photos—they were supposed to be sealed, grand jury–style shit. (What was it that Wildey and his boss said about my identity never being revealed?)