The Good Cop cr-4

by Brad Parks

  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 with 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.”

  Ruthie nodded. Any further discussion was squelched when the double doors swung open and Officers LeRioux and Jones-Hightower and Baldy-came stalking through them.

  “Hey, guys,” I started, “why don’t we-”

  “How many times I got to tell you to shut the hell up?” Hightower growled. “You say one more word I’m busting up that other knee. And this time I’ll go for the front of the knee, not the back.”

  Baldy Jones slid open the door to the cells. Ruthie and I stood there, frozen, uncertain, a couple of scrawny newspaper reporters well out of their weight class.

  “All right, come on out, ladies,” Hightower said. “We’re going to take a little walk up to the interrogation room, ask you a few questions about all that dope we took off you. Let’s go, let’s go.”

  At least he didn’t noticed that our cuffs were unlocked. Ruthie eased out of the cell first, and I limped out after him. As we walked toward the interrogation room, I kept telling myself there was no way they would get away with this. No one would believe that Ruthie and I had smuggled weapons into a police station or would know how to use them even if we had. What were they going to do, put metal shivs in our dead hands and claim we tried to stab them? Give themselves superficial wounds to make it look more convincing? It was absurd.

  But to a certain extent, it didn’t matter. Sure, there would be an investigation into our deaths-the paper would put up a hell of a stink-but as long as the cops stuck to their stories, wha
t would there be to contradict them? Ruthie and I would go down in history as a bizarre cautionary tale: a pair of dope-dealing newspaper reporters who got killed by the cops.

  “Keep walking,” Baldy said, as we passed through the double door and were led upstairs and down a hallway. We took a left turn down another hallway. I could see the emergency exit at the end of it. My heart started pounding and, strangely, I felt the urge to urinate. I guess there’s something to the old saying, after all, about being nervous enough to pee your pants.

  I limped a few more steps down the hallway until Hightower said, “Stop here.”

  We had reached the interrogation room. I casually positioned myself so that neither cop was between me and the emergency exit and saw Ruthie do the same. The exit was perhaps thirty feet away, a distance I could cover in, what, a few seconds? Would that be fast enough?

  Baldy Jones started going for his keys. Hightower was resting his hand on his gun, an ominous development. Was that just a reflex for him, or was he expecting trouble? Was the gun strapped in or was it loose? Could he draw it during those two seconds I was running down the hall?

  Ruthie and I agreed that the moment the key touched the door, we would both make a break for it. I bent my legs to prepare for our mad dash down the hallway and glanced over at Ruthie, who returned my gaze with eyes that had doubled in size.

  Then the lights went out.

  This being an interior hallway-in a building where the windows had been bricked over decades ago-we were plunged into immediate and total darkness. There was not a shred of ambient light. Not even the pinprick of a single LED. It was like being in a mineshaft.

  Hightower swore and Baldy uttered a panicked, “What the…?”

  I heard the creaking of leather, like a gun being removed from a holster, and I dropped to the floor. If Hightower started firing in the dark, I wanted to be as small a target as possible. I began desperately crawling in the direction of the emergency exit-how long would it take to get there on my hands and knees? — when I heard a lot of shouting and slamming coming from the front of the building. No, maybe it was the back. Or maybe it was just all over. It was hard to tell.