Canary

by Duane Swierczynski

  And I wish I could erase from my memory the New Yorker piece I just skimmed. The one where this sweet girl named Rachel gets busted for having a little weed in her apartment and then all of a sudden they’re sending her to buy serious drugs and a gun from this psycho crime family in the middle of Florida. They put a surveillance device in her purse, but it doesn’t matter because the psycho crime family is tipped off. They pump the purse, drag Rachel away. All the cops find at first is a flip-flop.

  They found her body hours later, shot up with the gun she was supposed to buy.

  Still no word from Tammy. Her mom says she’s around, but … well, that’s Tammy these past few months. Always around, but never really around. I’m guessing it’s a new boyfriend. I’m sure I’ll hear all about him one of these years. Not that it matters. I’m sure he’ll be a charming loser, just like the others. You know Tammy, Mom. Her taste in men is as predictable as the tides.

  Also: Not even a goddamned text from D.

  Isn’t he wondering about his cornucopia of missing pills?

  I need to shower and stop thinking about this.

  The moment Sarie steps into the shower, Marty takes her keys from the plastic hook on the side of the fridge and sneaks outside to her Honda Civic. Looks up and down the block. Too cold for anyone to be out walking around or putting up Christmas decorations, which is good. Not that Marty is overly worried about a potential witness; he could just be running out to his sister’s car to grab a book or something else she forgot. No, his biggest worry is that Sarie or Dad will take a look out a front window while he’s in the driver’s seat, turning the ignition key. How would he explain that?

  Fortunately, he doesn’t have to send power to the engine—just supply enough power to the car so he can read the odometer and jot down the digits.

  This wouldn’t work were it not for his older sister’s anal habits. Whenever she sits behind the wheel of her car (actually, their mom’s old car), she hits the new trip button, setting the mileage to zero. Every time, without fail.

  Miles (50.2) entered into a notebook app on his iPod, Marty turns off the power, pulls the key, steps out of the car, and closes the door as silently as possible. Sarie is still in the shower when he slips into his room, opens up Google Maps, and does some math. He’s good at it. What he discovers doesn’t surprise him.

  Sarie lied about where she went last night.

  Is that why Dad’s angry?

  Marty knows that Dad checks his iPod for messages and notes and emails and stuff, and that’s fine. Dad gave him the same speech he gave Sarie last year on Christmas: “These devices don’t belong to you, they belong to us, you’re just borrowing them, meaning that we can look through them at any time. And we will.” Mom was too sick to say much but she nodded her agreement. And even though Dad kind of zoned out for a lot of spring and summer, he was back to checking the iPod again, which was obvious because of the way he would bring up things supposedly at random (“Hey, what’s new with Adam? You two still hanging out?”). But ultimately technology is the friend of Marty’s generation, not Dad’s.

  Marty opens up his favorite game, Diggit, a world-building app. You can use it to create more or less anything; for the past few weeks Marty has been obsessed with making his own MI6 building, Babylon on the Thames. In a secret torture room Marty lifts up the floor and opens a password-protecting text file. For Dad to get in here, he’s going to have to somehow make it past Britain’s top spies and a flock of mutated sheep with laser eyes (Marty’s personal addition to the facility) and this new password. Marty is pretty sure Dad wouldn’t even be able to find London in Diggit.

  Marty thumbs in what he knows so far:

  Facts:

  My sister has a burner phone

  She lied about where she was the night before Thanksgiving

  She looks exhausted

  She is short-tempered and stressed even more than usual

  Dad was angry with her but seems okay now

  Questions:

  Did she lie to Dad to get out of something?

  Is my sister dealing drugs?

  FRANKFORD

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30

  Wildey inhales a bowl of Sugar Pops and pulls his unmarked car out of the weedy lot next to his house. He makes his way to Kensington Avenue and follows the shadowy underbelly of the El all the way through Frankford—another down-on-its-ass neighborhood with more than its share of shootings and drugs—and back out into the light as he heads up to Mayfair. Funny how things look instantly better without an elevated train rumbling over your head.

  Time for care and feeding of his confidential informants.

  Wildey has three active CIs—two solid ones and another who is kind of a fuckup, inherited from the old NFU-CS. Somehow, despite the scandal, the man had managed to keep his identity secret. And, oh yeah, he has Honors Girl, too. But she doesn’t really count.

  One of his solid CIs—a twenty-six-year-old prostitute named Megan Stefanich—promised to point him to a stash house up in the Northeast today. Wildey rousted her under the El one night, not really intending to bust her, just shoo her in somewhere warm for the night, but they struck up a weird kind of friendship. For a while there, she was pointing out shit for free—“bad actors” to keep an eye on. Now she points things out in exchange for money. The going rate: $20 for each buy, anywhere between $150 and $250 for each bust, and $100 extra for each gun recovered at the scene. Wildey knows it all goes in her arm, but better that money come from him than some freak with a diseased dick. She talks about a friend in Florida or some such shit, but Wildey knows she’ll never go anywhere. Her kind never does.

  CI #69 clearly wants breakfast out of Wildey, because she asked to meet at the Red Robin Diner up in Mayfair. Parking is tight. Wildey arrives and there’s no sign of the CI. The place is crowded, but they’re not going to talk business here anyway. No, this is about getting a hot meal into her. Then they’ll talk when they get back into the car. Wildey takes a table near the windows so he can keep an eye on Frankford Avenue. The waitress looks at him. Wildey doesn’t drink coffee, so he orders two boxes of cereal and a carton of milk. By the time he’s finished the second box, it’s 7:51, and still no sign of his CI. What the hell? By 8:02 Wildey is making his way back to Frankford. Maybe she overslept.

  Knocks on the front door get him nothing. Strange. This is not like her to miss an appointment. For a junkie, she’s strangely punctual.

  He knocks again. A neighbor a few doors down pokes her head out, sees Wildey, quick ducks her head back inside. Morning to you, too, ma’am.

  Wildey knows he should split. Plenty of shit to do today otherwise. But he was hoping to spend the day staking out that stash house and working Honors Girl via the cell phone. It’s Saturday already. Fuck, he should have taken that bet with Kaz. He would have been ten bucks richer.

  But as he turns to leave, something stops him. This doesn’t feel right. Wildey is stuck with the awful image of his CI up in this house, blue, with a needle sticking out of her arm. Winding his way through the weed-choked alleys, he hops the fence into the backyard and sees the back door has been popped open. Fuck. He reaches for his gun and makes his way in, clearing the place room by room—not that it’s a big place—but finds nothing out of the ordinary. At least, it’s no different from the last time he was here. The only thing new is a letter to his CI from that friend in Florida. So she is real, huh. Talking about the sun and the sand and the malls down there. Maybe she’ll get out after all. Maybe she’s already split.

  No, that isn’t it. She splits without clearing the slate, she knows her handler will come after her. So where is she?

  NOVEMBER 30

  Still no word from Tammy or D. That’s what I should write on the cover of this secret journal. “No Word from Bestie or My Drug Dealing Non-Boyfriend.”

  What drives me crazy about Tammy is the one-way relationship we seem to have. Whenever she’s in crisis mode, I’m the one dropping everything to give her a hand o
r give her a ride or pull the hair back out of her face. The one time—ONE TIME—I’m truly fucked? It’s all apologetic texts and crickets.

  As for D. … man, whatever.

  Now I’m not even hearing from Wildey. No texts since 2:13 a.m. I don’t get it. He was up my butt sideways for Thanksgiving and Black Friday and now there’s nothing but crickets?

  I’m trying to finish my papers, Mom, I swear, but I can’t focus.

  I can’t understand a word of Naked Lunch. Except for the drug talk. That, shockingly, I get.

  FOX CHASE

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1

  Kevin Holland is not quite sure what to do with himself.

  Thanksgiving weekend tradition for the past eight years or so has been to pile the kids in the car at the crack of dawn on Black Friday and get the fuck out of Dodge. Kevin’s parents were gone, but there was the annoying contingent of aunts and uncles and cousins still in the area who expected visits, something that Kevin couldn’t bring himself to do. Too much weird family shit, too many accusing eyes, and he was tired of explaining or apologizing or justifying his life choices. So he created the annual Turkey Day Getaway. At the crack of dawn on Black Friday, he and Laura would pile the kids in the car with enough books and clothes to last them for a few days and just drive. The destination really didn’t matter, as long as it was someplace with a little bit of history and a clean hotel. Cleveland, Ohio. Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Huntingdon, West Virginia. Annapolis, Maryland. No shopping, no tourist bullshit, just some quiet family hang time. The kids liked the change of scenery, and Kevin liked that he had a handy excuse for extended family. Oops, sorry, yeah, you know us, always on the road. Last year’s getaway had been put on hold because of their college trip to California for Sarie; there wasn’t enough money to do both. And now this year Kevin just didn’t see the point without Laura.

  So Kevin goes to see what Marty’s up to. As usual, the boy is on his handheld device. Said devices were the source of much debate in the Holland home the previous year, with Laura firmly against them (for many good reasons) and Kevin cautiously advocating for them (remembering his own parents’ steadfast denial of anything fun or cool that every other kid at school already possessed). But when it was clear that Laura was sick, and it was serious, she relented. Smart phones were to be the big Christmas gift that year—she figured the kids would need something to distract them during the grueling year of treatment ahead, long hours in waiting rooms, long hours alone. And surprise, hey, the kids received their devices on Christmas and lost their mother the very next day. Marty didn’t touch his device until February, but when he did, and discovered some game about mining, he never looked back. It was a bit of a fight to get him to put the damned thing down, but Kevin figured there were worse things he could be doing.

  “Hey, you up for the game?”

  Marty looks up. “Sure.”

  “Right on. But try to keep it down to five or six beers, okay? Tomorrow’s a school day.”

  “You too.”

  Kevin stares at his son, wondering if the kid has taken a shot there or if he was just being overly sensitive. Marty’s eyes flick right back to his mining game, so … yeah. Probably didn’t mean anything by it. Doesn’t change the fact that the shot would have been perfectly reasonable. He’s already gone through a case of Yuengling this weekend, and it’s only Sunday. He would have to make a run for a few sixes before the game.

  Kevin was an Eagles fan but only by default. When you’re born in Philadelphia they hand you a birth certificate along with some green and white face paint and a giant foam finger. His cop-father (also a Martin, and boy did he regret saddling his son with that name) lived for the games, drinking steadily during each. Didn’t matter if the Birds were winning or losing—he’d pound cans of MGD to celebrate the former and console himself during the latter. Kevin was thirteen when his father let him have his first sip, which made him stupid for at least an hour. And he liked it. That first cold crisp sip contained the DNA for his entire adult life, right up to this minute. So fuck it, as Martin Holland would say. Crack open a cold one.

  Sarie is downstairs in the den, working on a paper. She seems to always be writing a paper, ever since college commenced late August. Kevin never did the college thing and feels a little lost advising her, relying on his counseling-speak whenever she seems stressed.

  “Sarie Canary—you want to take a break in a couple of hours, watch the game with me and Mart?”

  She turns around slowly, an apologetic look already on her face. “I wish. But there’s so much due this week …”

  “Hey, a couple of hours won’t hurt. If you promise not to turn me in to the authorities, we could even have a beer together.”

  “And then I’d be zonked out for the rest of the night.”

  “Come on, you had a few at the party, right?”

  “Honestly, no. Just one. Barely.” She squints. “You’re testing me, aren’t you?”

  Kevin forces himself to laugh. “Yeah, you know me.”

  Good God. Kevin’s applying peer pressure to his teenaged daughter. What the fuck is wrong with him? Let her work. Let her be the first (of two) Hollands to graduate from college. Go upstairs, old man, and crack your beer and watch your Birds. Take your mind off the fact that the phone hasn’t rung and you’re in limbo until it does.

  Diggit File/MI6 Building/Torture Room 6

  Sarie receives texts but then almost immediately erases them before I have a chance to look

  Sarie’s burner hasn’t gone off since late Friday night—do drug dealers have days off?

  Dad is drinking a lot.

  Nobody’s seen CI #69. Wildey spends most of Sunday scouring Frankford, as well as nearby Mayfair and Wissinoming and finally, in desperation, the Tracks, thinking maybe the girl relapsed and decided that if she couldn’t go to Florida maybe she’d hop back on the heroin highway. It’s bright and cold out here but nothing besides the usual lost faces. Then something occurs to Wildey as he makes his way back to the house in Frankford.

  There was no sign of forced entry in the front, but Wildey realizes he never checked the back door. He makes his way through the weedy alley, crunching on glass (and worse) underfoot. He counts down the houses until he reaches the fifth one in, then tries the fence. It opens. The latch has been pried out of the old wood and tossed a few feet away into the grass.

  And there we go—back door jimmied, too. This is not proof. The Man in the Widener Building wouldn’t necessarily buy this. But it wasn’t good news, either.

  Who came for you, Megan? You owe somebody money or a favor? If you did, why didn’t you come to me for help? That was our deal.

  As Wildey makes his way inside he’s not sure what he dreads more—finding Megan’s body or having to tell Kaz about this.

  DECEMBER 1

  While Dad and Marty watch the Eagles-Cards game upstairs, I’m down in the den suffering through a barely contained panic attack. Every time I hear Dad’s shouts and the roar from the TV, I think it’s a narcotics strike force bashing in our front door, guns blazing. I flinch so many times I start twitching even when there’s no roar.

  Whenever I’m really up against it—paper due, need to speed-read a book for an 8:00 a.m. exam—I exist on the razor-thin edge of total collapse. My blood feels like it’s on fire. My goddamn left eye twitches (yeah, the left, no idea why it never hits the right). My stomach revolts. One day Dad saw me like this and said the best remedy was to stand up and just walk away. Or take a bus ride. Or a shower. I hate buses, and if I showered every time I felt stressed my fingertips would look like raisins. So instead I would go for a walk into the woods just beyond our backyard. Tammy and I used to sneak out at night and walk the bike paths, listening for the voices of adults. (Okay, I can admit this now, Mom—but Tammy also used to hope that those potential “adults” would be drinking beer or smoking weed so we could party. I was secretly relieved the opportunity never arose.) I loved walking in the fall the most, the brittle crunch of
dead leaves beneath my sneakers, breathing in the cold yet strangely humid air.

  Maybe I should go into the woods and just keep on walking. Find the creek and follow it down to the river. Or the opposite direction, out into the western suburbs and keep going all the way to sunny California. Wildey can’t force me to say anything if I’m just gone, can he?

  Gave it some thought. But I couldn’t do that to Dad and Marty.

  Okay … so. I have to snitch on a drug dealer. One who is not D. But he’s the only person I know who sells drugs.

  I can’t give him up.

  Right?

  About an hour later, as night falls in the Pennypack Woods, knowing that the next time the sun comes up it’s deadline time, and there’s a good chance I’m going to know what it’s like to feel handcuffs around my wrists and hear a Miranda warning, I come to what I believe is a sensible decision. I’m going to go back home and tell my dad everything. Everything but D.’s name. I’ll say he’s just a guy I met at the party who needed a ride to his friend’s house. I’ll say he doesn’t even go to school there, but he was cute and I gave him a ride and then all this crazy shit happened. I’ll say he gave me a false name. Then I’ll find a lawyer and put this behind me. Because I didn’t do anything wrong.