by Brad Parks
By the time I had all that figured out, Hightower had finished fastening the cuffs behind my back. I looked across the store and saw Ruthie was getting the same treatment, only his arresting officer was another familiar figure—Baldy Jones.
“You get that report written on my car yet, Officer Bryson Jones?” I called out. “What about that gun with the red dot on it? You put it in the evidence locker yet, or did you just sell that to some thug on your way back to the station?”
Hightower thumped the butt of his palm into the back of my head hard enough I thought my skull was going to separate from my spinal column. “Shut up!” he yelled.
“Oh my goodness, what have we here,” Baldy called out, holding up a freezer-size Ziploc bag filled with a white substance. “It looks like this gentleman had a big ol’ bag of heroin. I bet he’s going to go away for a long time, selling this much heroin.”
“That’s not—” Ruthie started, but I couldn’t hear the rest of it because Hightower was yelling in my ear.
“Not as long as this guy,” he bellowed. “Look at all the rock I found on him.”
Without bothering to look, I could guess that Hightower had magically found crack cocaine on me. Because, yeah, I always like to carry a few hundred grams on me. Gets me through the day when I need a little pick-me-up.
“Crack and heroin. Looks like these punks had a major distribution network set up,” Baldy shot back. “Good thing we got them off the streets.”
Baldy shoved Ruthie out the door. Hightower and I soon followed. I was slowly overcoming the shock of having my perfect hiding spot discovered and was reaching the obvious conclusion: the corner boys had flipped on us. I had even paid them five hundred dollars to do it. And that was on top of whatever they were getting out of the cops.
As if to confirm this fact, I heard the grating, raspy sound of Famous laughing at me as I was herded out on the sidewalk.
“See you later, Mr. Newspaper Hustler,” he said, the Black & Mild dangling from the side of his mouth. “Have fun with the five-o.”
Blocking him out, I did a scan of the sidewalk and nearby area, hoping to see a bystander gawking at me. A grandma. A workingman. A schoolkid. There had to be someone normal passing by at this time of the day, someone who might just listen when I screamed that I was a newspaper reporter being wrongly imprisoned by corrupt cops; someone who would act when I hollered for them to call Tina Thompson, the state police, the attorney general, or some combination of the three.
But there was no one in sight. The Fourth Precinct building was maybe forty yards away. And having been shoved off the sidewalk and onto the street, I could see that was where I was being led.
It was around this time I felt a real panic setting in. I was stuck in this netherworld where the cops and the crooks were indistinguishable. And there wasn’t anyone who was going to save me from them. The pit of my stomach was dropping quickly out of my body. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.
Up until that moment, I had been walking on my own across the street, albeit prodded by Hightower, who had a bruise-inducing grip on my right arm. No more. It was time to put up at least a token effort at resistance, if only so someone coming along realized the funny-looking white guy was being taken against his will.
I yanked my right arm, planted my right heel in the asphalt, and tried to make a break for it, pushing off as forcefully as I could. I didn’t know how far I could make it, running with handcuffs on, but I at least had to try.
It turns out the answer was: not very far. My bucking and squirming did exactly no good. Hightower, with his octopus hand, never relinquished his grip. One of the other officers, the one with the mustache, anticipated my move, which he had probably seen a hundred times before, and took the opportunity to knee me in the groin.
He didn’t get me square in the kiddy-maker, but he got close enough that I felt a momentary lurch of nausea and doubled over. The mustachioed officer grabbed my left arm, and with Hightower still on my right, they dragged me up the front steps of the precinct—just like the cab driver, John Smith, on that long-ago hot summer night.
I could still hear Famous’s raspy laughter as the doors closed behind me.
* * *
Inside the precinct, the first thing I saw was the desk sergeant, a different one from the other day. I didn’t know if he was involved with the red dot scheme or not, but I was growing desperate. If nothing else, I didn’t want to go quietly.
“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said in a high, panicked voice. “These officers are involved in a major gun-selling operation that I’m about to expose and now they’ve taken me—”
“Would you shut up, you freakin’ hophead?” Hightower outshouted me while giving me another thunk on the head, this time on the side. “You want us to add slander to all those CDS charges against you?”
The desk sergeant didn’t even look up. I guess he was accustomed to loud, crazy, half-coherent people being dragged past him, shouting their various conspiracy theories and claiming police brutality. I might not have even been the first one that shift. All he did was nonchalantly buzz us in.
I inhaled and was about to start shouting again—this time with a little more diaphragm behind it—but Hightower seemed to anticipate it. In a low, deadly serious voice he said, “If you don’t shut the hell up, I will crack your skull like an eggshell and scramble whatever I find inside. Yeah, I’ll end up on administrative leave for a month. But you’ll end up eating through a tube for the rest of your life. You get me?”
For emphasis, he took his nightstick and placed it about four inches from my forehead. I quickly took stock of my situation and realized that in my current state—I was the handcuffed hostage of a gang of killer cops—a concussion wouldn’t do anything to help matters. So I took this as an opportunity to keep my thoughts to myself and retreat into a period of personal reflection.
Ruthie, who was still on his feet, wasn’t trying anything daring either. And so, together, we were shunted down a hallway, then through some heavy double doors into what appeared to be a holding cell area. The fourth cop, the one who was neither dragging me nor shoving Ruthie, opened up one of the cells and in we went.
“Face the wall,” Hightower ordered, and we did. Didn’t seem like much point in resisting now.
I felt hands going for my pockets and was soon relieved of their contents: cell phone, keys, wallet, notepad, pen. Then the hands ran roughly up and down my legs, arms, and chest.
“Aren’t you at least gonna kiss me before you cop a feel, Officer?” I asked.
Hightower answered with another palm to the base of the skull that, to me, sounded like all the low keys on the piano had been hit at once. I thought that was going to be the worst of it, then out of the corner of my eye I saw him remove his nightstick from his belt, wind up, and take a swing at the back of my right leg.
The next thing I knew I was on the floor, my leg having momentarily lost the will to hold me up. For the first few seconds, I wasn’t feeling any pain—just disorientation—and then a piercing ache rushed up from my knee.
“Fffaaa!” I shouted. I’m not sure what language “fffaaa” is, but I’m sure it’s an expression of pain in some primal protolanguage.
Hightower kneeled one leg on top of my chest, then rested his baton on my nose, grinding it into the cartilage for good measure.
“You keep your mouth shut, princess,” he said. “You got that? You keep it shut or this is going to get a whole lot worse.”
“Hey, get off him!” Ruthie shouted.
“You want it next?” Baldy Jones said. I heard something impact Ruthie’s midsection and most of the air rush out of him.
I whipped my head to the side, to get Hightower’s stick out of my face. He roughly brought himself back to standing, using my sternum as a trampoline. Hightower wasn’t the thickest guy, but he had to weigh two forty, easily. I felt like I was lying in the middle of the street on road-paving day.
As he
walked away from me, he gave my right knee a sideswipe with his boot. It wasn’t a full-on toe kick and didn’t have too much momentum behind it, but it still sent another shock wave up my leg. I twisted into a fetal position, if only to get my throbbing knee some protection.
At that moment, rolled up in a ball on the floor, I decided it was time to stop being brave. And cute. What little satisfaction it was bringing me just wasn’t worth the agony. I heard Ruthie moaning and saw he was doubled over, leaning against a bench for support. I suspected he was reaching the same conclusion.
“Ordinarily, I’d remove the cuffs right now,” Hightower said. “But not for a couple of dangerous drug dealers like you.”
Then, as abruptly as they had arrived in our lives, the four officers left.
I took a moment’s worth of stock in our situation. We were alone and trapped in a windowless dungeon. No one knew where we were, and we had no way of communicating our whereabouts or predicament. Our captors were police officers who could presumably use their perverse version of the law to keep us here for quite some time, assuming they didn’t kill us first. And my leg felt like it had glass shards inside it.
In short, we were in a bad way.
“You okay?” Ruthie said, panting and still leaning against the bench.
“No,” I replied, because honesty is the best policy.
I was about to ask him how he was doing, but before I could, he staggered over to the small metal toilet in the corner of the cell and vomited. Twice. That seemed to answer the question.
He spit a few times, then eventually straightened partway up and lurched over to the bench. He sat down with his head between his knees. I was still in my baby ball, but at least the throbbing in my knee wasn’t getting any worse for the moment. It helped that no one was hitting it anymore.
“So what happens now?” he asked, spitting again.
“I don’t know. Probably nothing good.”
“You got any brilliant ideas for getting us out of here?”
“Nothing that comes to mind.”
“I guess asking for a phone call the next time they come back is out of the question?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said.
“What are they going to do to us?”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to. We eased into something like a respite, neither of us saying anything, each of us nursing our hurts.
How long we stayed like that, I couldn’t accurately say.
* * *
At least an hour passed. Or maybe more like two or three. I was a little disoriented from the beating, and it’s not like we could look outside and see the sun setting. Our only illumination came from the dim fluorescent lights in the hallway outside the cell.
I wasn’t going to tell Ruthie this, but I had no doubt our captors intended to kill us. We knew too much, and they knew we knew it. Famous would have told them. And besides, they had already been trying to get rid of me before I got tangled up with the corner boys. I was a double-marked man.
The only reason they hadn’t gotten around to it yet was that they hadn’t worked out the best way to do it. They seemed to be big fans of the staged suicide—maybe they’d make us hang ourselves by our shoestrings in the cell?—or perhaps they would get more creative, realizing folks would start getting suspicious about all those supposedly morose people at the Fourth Precinct.
Maybe we were going to meet some kind of unfortunate “accident.” Or perhaps they were going to put bullets in our heads and devise some ingenious way to get rid of our bodies so they’d never be found. Cops would probably have a pretty good idea how to do that. Would we be weighted down and tossed out somewhere off Sandy Hook? Buried in some defunct landfill? Stashed in an airtight barrel in someone’s attic?
I tried to stop thinking about it. I pondered, instead, what was going on in the outside world. Had Tina Thompson put out an all-points bulletin for us? Probably not. If she even noticed we were both gone, she would have chalked it up to my usual wanderlust. I was not particularly good about keeping in touch. Plus, I had already filed a story for the day. If she didn’t need me for copy, I wouldn’t necessarily be foremost in her thoughts.
At some point, the adrenaline drained away, the shock dissipated, the exhaustion caught up to me, and I think I drifted off. Actually, I know I did, because I started having one of my classic anxiety dreams, one where it’s ten minutes to deadline and I realize I’ve forgotten to do any reporting on a story I have to write.
It must not have been a very deep sleep, though, because I was stuck in the usual spot in the dream—the part where I’m trying to figure out why I haven’t done any reporting—when I heard those big double doors opening. I jolted wide-awake and scrambled to my feet, my knee swollen but holding my weight. I wanted to be alert and prepared for whatever came at us, ready to exploit any small opening, for however unlikely it was there would be one.
My eyes were aimed somewhere high above the six-foot mark, expecting to see Hightower. Instead, it was Captain Boswell. An angel couldn’t have looked any better than that short black woman with her shelflike butt. Sure, she had probably been told I was in here for dealing crack cocaine, but she had to know that was a sham.
“Captain Boswell, oh thank God,” I said. “I know this is going to sound like crazy talk, but—”
“Shh … keep it down,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“What do you—”
“Shh!” she hissed more fiercely. “Listen to me and listen carefully, because there’s not much time. LeRioux and Jones are coming back. They’re going to move you to an interrogation room, and they’re probably going to kill you.”
“So, wait, you know about the red dot guns?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
“So … I’m sorry, you’re the captain here. Why don’t you just blow it out of the water? Report it to the higher-ups downtown? Throw LeRioux and Jones in—”
“It’s not that simple,” she said, her face pressed close to the bars so she could keep her volume down and still be heard. “I have a son.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I’ve only been here six months, remember? This had been going on for years under the nose of my predecessor. I don’t know if he was blind or stupid, but I don’t think he ever knew about it. I’m pretty sure no one downtown knows about it, either. These red dot guys have been very careful. I only learned about it myself recently, but I was sort of clumsy in how I went about things in the early stages. They figured out that I was onto them and they … they…”
She turned away for a moment, and I could see only half of her face as she scrunched it in an effort to stay composed. “They threatened to hurt my son,” she said when she turned back. “Not just hurt him. Mutilate him.”
“I still don’t understand. You could have him put in protective custody, and—”
“And what?” she demanded with quiet ferocity. “Wait for three years until the thing goes to trial and just hope that no one protecting him slips up between now and then? No way. Look, I’ve always loved being a cop, and I hate what these guys are doing to the department’s reputation. Ever since I heard about this thing I’ve been trying to figure out how to defuse it and keep it quiet. But at the end of the day, this is just my job, okay? My son is my life. I’ve got three years left until I’ve put in my twenty, and then we can move to Oklahoma or Kansas or someplace where I can raise him in one piece, and Newark and everything that happened here can become a distant memory.”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. “Look, I appreciate your situation, but that doesn’t have any bearing on us. Why don’t you just march us out of here and we’ll—”
“I can’t,” she interrupted.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I still don’t know who’s involved and who isn’t,” she said. “I know several of them must have killed Mike Fusco. I never believed that phone call he made to me, even if I had to go along wi
th it for that stupid press conference. I know several of them killed Darius Kipps, too. But I don’t know who. And I don’t know how many of them there are. If one of them sees me taking you out of here, it’s all over.”
“So where does that leave us?” I asked.
“Like I said, they’re moving you to the interrogation room,” she said. “I overheard some talk that made it sound like they’re going to stage a scene that makes it look like you smuggled weapons in here. They’re going to kill you and call it self-defense.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Okay, so I’m trying to help you. Turn around and stick your arms through the bars so I can do something about those handcuffs,” she ordered. Ruthie and I complied. As Captain Boswell started going to work with a key, she said, “I’m not taking these off. I’m just unlocking them. LeRioux and Jones have to think they’re still on, okay?”
“Got it.”
“There’s a door at the end of the corridor near the interrogation rooms,” she continued. “It’s an emergency exit. LeRioux and Jones aren’t going to be worried about it because it’s always locked. But I’ve disabled the lock. When you get to the interrogation room, either LeRioux or Jones is going to have to take out his keys and open the door. The lock is always fussy and takes a second to jimmy open. That’s your chance. You make a break for it and run like hell for that emergency door.”
“And then what?”
“Keep running,” she said, having finished unlocking both sets of handcuffs.
“And what if they catch us?” I asked as she turned to leave.
Her last instruction going back through the double doors was unequivocal: “Make sure they don’t.”
* * *
Ruthie and I began discussing the merits of this new plan and quickly agreed it was the worst we had ever heard. We also agreed the only thing it was better than was nothing at all, which had been our plan before.
“When we get out the door, I’ll run left, you run right,” I said. “Hopefully, they’ll only catch one of us.”
