Canary

by Duane Swierczynski

  “These are your international smugglers. Drug Lord hires these guys to transport the product into the country. They’re real good at it, too. Say it’s coke. Their guys are sneaking five hundred tons of shit into the country every year.”

  Wildey slides the drug-smuggling jelly tubs across the tabletop to-ward … what now, what can he use …

  Mustard bottle. One of those fat, squat ones. Yeah, that was right on.

  “This is your kingpin. He’s in the U.S., overseeing the shit on this end.”

  Sarie writes.

  Wildey positions the plastic salt and pepper shakers next to the mustard. “Here’s the next level down, the domestic distributors. They take the shit from the kingpin, they process it, cut it, whatever, then send it on to their dealers.”

  Sarie looks up from her notes expectantly. Wildey scans the table. What’s left? Next to his coffee cup are four empty creamer tubs, paper tops all peeled back. Yeah, they would work. He gathers them up and drops them in front of Honors Girl.

  “Now these are your dealers. The guys out there slinging it to their customers. They’re nobody special. They’re the guys behind the counter at fuckin’ McDonald’s. Expendable, replaceable.”

  And to illustrate the point, Wildey swipes his paw across the table, knocking the creamer tubs so they slam up against the Formica partition.

  “Your boyfriend? He’s a creamer tub. I truly do not give a high holy fuck about him.”

  “You only want to use him to get to the next level,” she says. “The salt and pepper shakers.”

  “Yeah. Making cases against salt-and-pepper motherfuckers is what gets me up in the morning. Even better if I can take down enough of them to get me a mustard bottle. Big fat wide-mouthed one. That’s my real goal.”

  Honors Girl writes it all down, leaving Wildey feeling like he needs to give a summary statement.

  “All this, right here on this table? What you’re sitting in front of? This is a seven-hundred-fifty-billion-dollar game. That’s billion with a b. And I’m just a brother making sixty grand a year trying to throw a wrench into it.”

  She nods, puts her pen down, takes a bite of her salad. Chews thoughtfully, like there’s a lot tumbling around in her head right now. “What happens to the creamer tub once you use him up?”

  Wildey smiles. “Depends. But in this particular case, the creamer tub in question will be fine if he gives up his salt-and-pepper guy. You have my word on that.”

  Sarie chews more salad.

  Wildey continues. “Let me tell you what usually happens to creamers. Either we catch them, or they end up dead. I’m talking the vast majority, Sarie. Doesn’t work any other way unless they cop a deal. Your boyfriend’s white, right?”

  Sarie continues chewing, glancing down at her rabbit food. She’s not going to answer this one. No. Not yet.

  “I’ll assume that’s yes. Maybe he’s got slightly better chances. But he’s also more likely to be dipping into his own product if he isn’t already. White boys do love their pills. Soon, you’ve got judgment lapses all over the place. For instance, you get your innocent girlfriend to drive you down to his salt-and-pepper shaker and then leave her holding the bag. If he’s doing that kind of shit, he’s already circling the drain, you know what I mean?”

  Sarie continues chewing. Washes things down with a gulp of ice water.

  “Which means you’d be doing him a huge f”

  Honors Girl’s cell goes off—a text or something. As she digs it out of her bag, Wildey tries to take a casual peek, but the glare from the diner lights makes it impossible.

  “Who’s that?”

  Sarie looks up at him. “My dad. He’s wondering if I’m going to be home for dinner.”

  “What, with all that salad you’ve been wolfing down?”

  Then it comes: a real smile from Honors Girl. Wildey is floored. When his CI smiles, she looks like a completely different person.

  “So,” Wildey says, feeling emboldened, “anything you want to tell me?”

  The smile fades just as quickly as it appeared, and a look of worry creeps back in. That’s it, Honors Girl. You should be worried. Let’s help your boyfriend—together. Kid talks tonight and Wildey can be preparing his end run on Chuckie by morning. I’ll buy you all the salad you can eat. You know it’s the right thing to do. You’re smart. So come on, do it.

  “Give me forty-eight hours,” Sarie tells him, surprising Wildey for the second time in one day.

  DECEMBER 4

  Mom: You can’t say I’m not learning anything. This afternoon I got a crash course in the drug trade, courtesy of Wildey. He had no idea I was just stalling for time, keeping him talking, asking him questions, giving him the I’m Totally Into What You’re Saying look. (Though it was interesting, to be honest.) But halfway through, my real cell buzzes; I can feel it through my bag. I pull it out, check the screen, praying that Wildey is too busy with his creamer cups and mustard bottle to glance down.

  Because it’s a message from D.:

  —I’m out.

  Wildey tilts his head toward the phone.

  —Who’s that?

  I lie and say it’s Dad.

  —He’s wondering if I’m going to be home for dinner.

  —What, with all that salad you’ve been wolfing down?

  I look up at him and force a big smile. Wildey smiles, too, and I feel like I can breathe for the first time in a week. I quietly slide the phone back into my messenger bag. The coast is clear; in a few minutes D. will be on a Martz bus headed upstate, where he can hopefully turn a couple of bags of pills—product, she reminded herself—into four grand profit. And now it’s up to me to find someone else to offer up in D.’s place. And I can do this. If I can crank out some bullshit paper on the French Revolution in eight hours, I can definitely find a drug dealer in Philadelphia.

  Sarie is showering, which means she’s headed out somewhere. Marty Holland knows this is strange for a school night. If anything, Sarie stays later at school to do some library research but then comes home, makes/eats a quick supper, and goes down to the den to work. Sometimes Marty would bring a book down to the den, ask Sarie about a word or phrase he’d pretend he didn’t know, just to make sure she was okay. She never even goes out to hang with Tammy anymore. (Which is a shame, because Tammy was always cool to him, even though he knows she’s probably just being kind to a dork for karma’s sake.) Ever since starting college in September, Sarie never goes back out at night. So where is she going now?

  Is Dad going to question her? Unlikely. He’s in the living room watching an old eighties action movie, drinking his fourth bottle of Yuengling (judging from the three empties in the recycling bin). He asked Marty to join him, maybe they could even make some popcorn, but Marty passed. Not his kind of thing. Didn’t anyone realize this was a school night?

  Marty holds his ear to the wall to confirm the water is still running, then quickly takes Sarie’s keys from the plastic hook on the fridge and darts outside. The gunfire and explosions from the living room cover up all sounds, which is nice. Confident now, Marty makes his way to the Civic, opens the door, keys the ignition to power up the vehicle, notes the odometer reading, turns off the car.

  But this is just a backup measure, because now he has a new way to figure out where Sarie’s headed. Marty ordered it online over the weekend, and it had arrived today: $18.95 scored him a first-generation sQuare, a non-GPS, Bluetooth-powered tracking device. Normal Bluetooth range is only 100 feet, so unless Marty was only tracking Sarie halfway down the block, the little white plastic chip would be useless. But instead sQuare’s designers came up with a pretty clever idea: crowd-sourcing the search. The moment your sQuare enters the 100-foot range of another sQuare user, you’re notified in your app. The big limitation, of course, is that sQuares aren’t going to be everywhere yet. But a bunch of early adopters and crowd-source funders snapped up the first wave, so Marty was hopeful that there were enough in Philadelphia to give him at least a rough idea
of where Sarie might be.

  Question now is: Where to put it? Marty doesn’t want to bury it in the glove box (which Sarie keeps organized and neat anyway) and cut off from any potential sQuare hits. The outer edges of the Civic would be best. Short of mounting it on the dashboard, where could it go? This is when Marty glances up and notices the oversized St. Christopher’s medallion clipped to the visor. Mom bought that the day they bought the Civic. She was Catholic and superstitious and refused to drive the car without one. Dad, who was a recovering Catholic, drove her straight to a St. Jude’s shop and bought her the biggest he could find. Which was fortunate because the sQuare would fit snugly beneath it, hidden away.

  As Marty touches the medallion he thinks about Mom, and thinks she’d be frowning at him right now, which is the worst possible thing he can imagine. His lip trembles and he bites down on it. Don’t be a baby. Your sister doesn’t need a baby brother; she needs someone watching out for her.

  There. Snapped into place. Completely invisible, and wedged in tight. The metal shouldn’t interfere at all with the Bluetooth signal, and the low-energy battery is supposed to last nearly a year.

  “Sorry, St. Christopher,” Marty says, just in case. “Don’t hold this against Sarie.”

  St. Christopher, if listening, does not reply.

  Marty steps out of the car, closes the driver’s door as quietly as he can, then darts back up to the house. He opens the door and immediately hears the reassuring sounds of shouts and gunfire. But Sarie’s in the kitchen, in a robe, hair wrapped up in a towel, making a cup of tea. She turns and notices Marty immediately.

  “Where were you?”

  Marty still has his sister’s keys in his hand, which he now hides behind his back, praying they don’t jingle.

  “Thought I heard something outside,” he says, the lie tumbling from his mouth almost automatically. “Are you going somewhere?”

  Sarie turns away to face the counter again. “Yeah, I’m going to study with Tammy for a while.”

  “Tammy? Really?”

  “Yes. Really. Tammy. What’s up with you?”

  “Does Dad know?”

  Sarie turns back around with a strange look on her face. “Yeah, he knows. Why wouldn’t he?”

  “You know … Dad doesn’t always pay attention. Just wanted to make sure he knew where you’d be so he didn’t wake me up at midnight asking about you.”

  That comes out a little more aggro than Marty intended. Sarie looks a little wounded before she turns her attention back to her tea. Another concussive explosion echoes from the living room. Boom. Fail.

  But at least now Marty knows where his sister is supposed to be. Tammy Pleece lives over in Rydal, roughly three miles away. If the sQuare pinged anywhere else in the city, Marty would know instantly. The odometer would tell the story, too, although Sarie could also lie about that and say that she and Tammy just hit a coffee shop somewhere in Abington or wherever.

  Now Marty sits down at the kitchen table and pretends to thumb through today’s Daily News while waiting Sarie out. He had to replace her keys on the side of the fridge before she left, but he wasn’t too worried. She still had to blow-dry her hair and get dressed and do all of that girl stuff. So Marty squeezes the keys tight so they won’t make a sound and looks at stories about people getting shot all over the city. Two in a playground in a neighborhood called Fairhill (which Marty had never heard of). Another, outside a bar on Lancaster Avenue near Powelton Village (which Marty knew, thanks to a true crime book called The Unicorn’s Secret, which he’d read this past summer). And there were still no leads in an alleged drug house massacre in Rhawnhurst, which was disturbingly close. Out in the living room a male voice makes a wisecrack Marty can’t quite hear, followed by the rapid-fire cracks of a pistol and then another wisecrack. Sarie finishes making her tea and walks out of the kitchen without a word. Marty hangs the keys on the side of the fridge and goes up to his room to finish his math homework and wait. It is going to be a long night.

  GIRLS

  DECEMBER 4 (later)

  Tonight: drug research, attempt one.

  Before I regale you with my tale of hard-hitting, on-the-streets research … well, you know me, Mom. I am what people will politely refer to as an introvert. Large crowds are fine just as long as I can lose myself in them and no one tries to talk to me. So the idea of injecting myself into a large crowd to find out where one might score drugs … yeah.

  I did have a lead, though. During one of my sporadic interweb frenzy-searches I found a story about this so-called junkie Bonnie and Clyde who went on a heroin-and-coke-fueled rampage through Camden and Philly. I remembered everyone at school talking about it last March, giggling and passing around their phones to watch some YouTube clip where a police car was smacking into a long series of parked cars. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, so today I looked it up online. And damn …“Clyde” was a twenty-four-year-old day laborer from the suburbs, “Bonnie” was his twenty-three-year-old fiancée. In the before pictures they look like a happy couple—all smiles, heads leaning against each other, delirious with life. He’s lean and muscular, with close-cropped hair and the handsome looks to pull it off. She’s fresh-faced and busty, with perfect white teeth we all wish we had. That was the before.

  After three days of bingeing on heroin, they decide to drive to Camden to cop some more. They’re pulled over on suspicion of buying narcotics, because, duh, why else would they be in Cam-den? Later they told police that they were intending to quit—they had a baby at home, after all—but wanted to go “out with a bang.” Professor Chaykin is always telling us to avoid clichés like “all hell broke loose,” but … all hell broke loose. Bonnie and Clyde decide it’s a good idea to steal the Camden cop’s car. Which they do, taking it over the Ben Franklin Bridge before they’re pulled over again, by the Philly PD, at which point you’d think the story would be over. As YouTube can attest, you’d be wrong. With Clyde in cuffs, Bonnie decides it would be a good idea to steal the Philly PD’s car—maybe she’s trying to steal a cop car from every department in the Delaware Valley?—and hauls off into Fishtown, where she smacks into a bunch of parked cars before screeching to a halt. The cops manage to put some cuffs on her, and the next day, hundreds of thousands of people are busy cracking jokes and passing around the YouTube clip of her final moments of freedom.

  No, Mom, don’t worry, I’m not going to Camden to try to set up a street dealer. Nor am I going to embark on a two-state crime spree in two stolen police cars. Reading their background stories, however, revealed that they were big on the Northern Liberties drug scene, copping in hipster lounges and brewpubs. Especially places with live music. Exactly the kind of place I could get into, thanks to the fake ID from Tammy.

  The trick tonight is going to be dressing up so that I look casual enough for a hangout with Tammy, then dolling it up in the car on the way. Dad won’t pay too much attention to what I’m wearing—he rarely does, and I never give him reason to. Marty’s been acting weird, though, interested in my comings and goings more than usual.

  Wish me luck, Mom. If there are any patron saints of canaries, let them know the deal.

  Text exchange between Kevin Holland and daughter Sarie:

  HOLLAND: Hey, kiddo, it’s getting late. You on your way home?

  HOLLAND: Come on, Sarie, you know the rule let me hear from you.

  HOLLAND: I’m calling …

  SARIE: I’m here, Dad! Home soon.

  WILDEY: Honors girl, give me an update

  WILDEY: Five minutes are almost up …

  CI #137: hang on

  CI #137: can’t text now

  CI #137: working on something for you

  WILDEY: What?

  WILDEY: Update me when u can

  WILDEY: It’s getting late

  WILDEY: I’m not going away. You know that, right?

  DECEMBER 5 (very, very, very late)

  Oh god.

  Mom, that was so fucking stupid.

/>   Don’t even ask.

  [-] crycrybribri 6 points 2 hours ago

  Obvious narc girl last night. Cops keep getting younger and younger huh

  [–] 2 boxer man 1 hour ago

  shit I think I talked to her too she kept asking where to find pancakes and syrup! stupid bitch

  ferrill215 1 point 1 hour ago

  someone should have made her breakfast

  ridonkdonk 1 point 1 hour ago

  KILL ALL SNITCHES

  cerealkilla 31 points 10 hours ago

  anybody got a pic of this girl? She at least hot?

  BEAR CREEK, PA

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5

  Drew “D.” Pike is twenty years old, a junior honors student at a small Catholic college taking in at least sixty grand a year as a small but successful narcotics dealer, and his mother still puts him at the little kids’ table.

  The “kids” in the extended, invented family that Mom gathered around herself in the wake of the divorce run from ages seven to twenty-two—Drew being the second oldest of the lot. Didn’t matter. The party always divides itself into two distinct camps: those who could drink openly and those who had to hide it. Mom and her friends call it the “non-Family,” after some lame-ass clique they formed back in high school.