Busted
Authors: Wendy Ruderman
EDICATIONS
For my boys, Brody and Sawyer, who give me immeasurable joy. I love you.
In memory of my father, Stan Ruderman, my spiritual guide. Thank you for always cheering me on and for inspiring me to dreamâand dream big. In memory of my nephew, Jake, a little firecracker who died too young.
â
WENDY RUDERMAN
For my children, Josh and Anna, who make everything in life better and brighter. I'll never love anyone more.
In memory of my mom, Etta Laker, who gave me strength and love. She taught me to never give upâand to take time to dance in the kitchen.
âBARBARA LAKER
ONTENTS
1
VENTURA “BENNY” MARTINEZ HADN'T SLEPT IN DAYS. THIS FRIGID DECEMBER NIGHT, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, HE SAT AWAKE, STIFF-BACKED AND TENSE IN A
living room chair. His pudgy, sweaty fingers gripped the handle of a .44 Ruger equipped with an infrared laser to illuminate whoever would be coming for him.
His wife, Sonia, and their two small children slept on a mattress in the dining room behind him. There, they would be insulated from any bullets that tore through the walls.
Benny locked his eyes on the front door of his two-story brick Philadelphia row house and waited. Maybe tonight he'd get whacked. Maybe tomorrow. He didn't know when. He just knew it would happen.
Even on those rare nights when he could briefly doze off, slumped in a chair, his chin hitting his chest, he'd bolt upright in a cold sweat. He had a recurring nightmare in which Jeff Cujdik, the cop he had worked for as a drug informant, blasted his face off with a shotgun.
Benny inched toward the living room windows. He split the plastic window blinds with his fingers and checked the front porch, then slowly moved his eyes up and down the blockâover and over. A streetlight cast a dull, shadowy
glow. No one was there. At least Benny couldn't spot anyone.
Benny stood stock-still.
“Babe, babe, what are you doing?” Sonia asked.
“Shhh,” Benny whispered.
In the darkness, Benny listened to the sounds of the street: a far-off police siren, a dog's growl, a hip-hop pulse blaring from a car stereo, the buzz-saw whine of the El.
“I can't take this no more,” Sonia said. “We've gotta leave up out of Philly.”
“Nah. It will be okay,” Benny told her. But Sonia knew Benny didn't believe his own words.
For three years, Benny had been happy and safe in this tan row house sandwiched into a narrow block of Pacific Street. It was a neighborhood where Latinos, blacks, and whites judged one another only by who went to work and who was on welfare.
Now he feared a silent sniper, maybe crouched behind a parked car or hidden in the shadow of a neighbor's porch.
Benny never thought it would come to this. Just a few months earlier, he'd considered Jeff a blood brother. Benny's kids called him Uncle Jeff.
They were an unlikely pair. Jeff, tall, muscular, and confident, with chiseled movie-star good looks, came from a family of cops; Benny, short, plump, and street-smart, was an exâdrug dealer. Yet they developed a bond, bitching about their wives, gushing over their kids. And they both got an adrenaline rush from danger.
Jeff was a narcotics cop who relied on Benny to bust drug dealers. Time and time again, Benny ticked off names for Jeff. He told Jeff what they sold, where they lived, and the places they stashed the drugs. Then Benny made drug buys, so Jeff could get a search warrant to raid the dealers' homes
and make arrests. Benny was rewarded for each buy he made, and Jeff's arrest numbers skyrocketed. They stroked each other's egos. They rose together, mismatched allies, and both became stars of the game.
Benny was practically a lifer in the world of Philadelphia police informants. The tenure of the typical informant was short. Most ran out of people to roll on, and after they made lots of drug buys, dealers could figure out who had dimed them out. But Benny was the king. He had worked for Jeff for seven years. He was smooth and convincing, the perfect con man. Dealers believed Benny was part of their world because he had been for so long. That is, until something went terribly wrong.
Now Benny was convinced that Jeff wanted him dead. And maybe worse, so did Philly's drug dealers, who'd figured out Benny was a snitch. He had a target on his back. Too many people knew where to find him and how to gun him down.
Benny knew he couldn't live like this anymore.
He came up with a plan. Tomorrow was the day.
IT WAS A COLD BUT SUNNY DAY IN EARLY DECEMBER
2008,
AND MY WEEKDAY MORNING BEGAN IN A GROUNDHOG DAY KIND OF WAY. AFTER I SLIPPED
into jeans, sweater, and sneakers for my job as a reporter at the
Philadelphia Daily News
, I served the kids Eggo waffles, submerged in a lake of gooey syrup, on the black leather couch. I turned on the TV. They always complained when I turned on
Sesame Street
or
Clifford the Big Red Dog
, so I put on
Sponge-Bob
, or some other age-inappropriate cartoon, and went to fetch the newspaper.
We subscribed to both the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the
Daily News
, even though I could get them for free at work. As fewer and fewer people bought newspapersâlet alone had them deliveredâI felt it was my duty to support the dinosaur of an industry that was mine. It was sad to me that ours was the only house on the block to get a daily newspaper. Seven days a week, a woman drove up in a maroon minivan, rolled down the driver's-side window, and hurled the plastic-wrapped newspaper sleeve onto our front lawn, a grassy postage stamp dotted with weeds and bald patches. She barely slowed before banging a K-turn in the neighbor's driveway.
At 8:00 a.m., my husband, Karl, was still asleep. I had met Karl in a tae kwon do class back in the early 1990s. He was a second-degree black belt and taught classes three nights a week. I spent the entire class watching his firm butt as he demonstrated down block, center punch. I could see his navy-blue Fruit of the Loom briefs through his white uniform. He was lanky yet muscular, with a big, beaky nose, a sexy cleft chin, and doelike brown eyes that were so warm and gentle they caught me by surprise, and still do.
Most of the friction in our marriage centered on sleepâand who got more of it. At times, I resented that Karl could sleep in, but I told myself that he, as the stay-at-home parent, needed his sleep to handle Brody, five, and Sawyer, three. The boys had a way of pulling your nerves taut and snapping them over their little knees like kindling.
“Mom, I'm sticky. I need a wipe,” Brody called from the couch.
“Okay.” I kept reading the newspaper, over coffee, at the dining room table.
“Mommmm! I need a wipe!”
“Okay! Jesus! I'm coming!”
In my decade-long career as a reporter, I'd written stories that helped send a corrupt New Jersey state senator to jail, shamed a governor into firing a rotten state police superintendent, and prompted lawmakers to hold hearings on racial profiling by police, nearly jettisoning the career of an ambitious and powerful state attorney general. I'd earned my share of scalps. At work, I wasn't afraid to take on the law. At home, I was totally unable to lay down the law.
I had never put my kids in time-out. Not once. Not when Sawyer punched me in the back and barked, “Get me something to drink, little woman,” or when he cleaned the television screen with a wet wipe and one of his many concoctionsâa
mixture of pancake syrup and body lotion.
I breast-fed Brody until he was two and a half. He'd walk up to me and say, “I want boob,” and I'd lift my shirt and bring his curly blond head toward me. I couldn't say no. Ever.
If the kids wanted Popsicles for breakfast, fine. Though every so often, I got tough: “No Popsicle until you finish that whole bowl of Apple Jacks.” Then I'd add, “I mean it.”
If they wanted dinner in the bathtub, I spoon-fed them spaghetti while they played with a fleet of blue and yellow plastic boats. Chunks of tomato and strands of pasta drifted to the bottom of the sudsy water and left an oily slick on the white porcelain.
I allowed them to watch so much TV that they went around the house singing jingles to commercials for Nationwide insurance and electric wheelchairs for the elderlyâ“I want to go, Go, GO in my Hoveround.”
When Brody woke up in the middle of the night and stumbled into our bedroom on his stick-figure legs, I held up the covers and nestled him close, even though I knew he kept Karl awake. Brody flopped around all night, kicking and jabbing Karl with his little toenails, until Karl fled to Brody's bed or squeezed into bed with Sawyer and his menagerie of stuffed animals. Karl was a nighttime nomad, condemned to wander the Land of Bad Parenting.
Karl liked to say that I was a great mom and a terrible parent. Part of it was guilt. A workaholic, I was never home during the week. The other part was fear. The responsibility of being a parent intimidated me. So I handed over the job to Karl. He stayed home with the kids while I went off to work and sank my teeth into the hide of some crooked or incompetent city official. This way, if the kids refused to eat veggies, if they were disrespectful to other adults, if they didn't do their
homework, if they became social outcasts and landed in therapy, I could blame Karl.
Karl was good at the job, too. He had the mommy thing down. He was loving and stern all at once. Of course, I didn't help much. When Karl went out grocery shopping or to the store, chaos and mischief ruled. I became the third kid. On summer nights, I allowed Brody and Sawyer to catch fireflies in Tupperware containers and let them free in the house. We turned off the lights and watched them flit around the ceiling, giggling. Sawyer sometimes dumped entire bottles of bubble bath into the tub. He then jumped out of the water and did body slides across the hardwood floors in our living room. I quickly cleaned up the snail-trail of suds with a towel before Karl came home. Karl was annoyingly compulsive about water on the hardwood. In the mornings before work, I let them play with mounds of moldable Moon Sand at the dining room table or allow them to decorate the chairs with Lightning McQueen stickers. Or they turned our kitchen into a bowling alley, flinging ripe peaches into V-shaped lines of Dixie cups. The game left splats of sticky peach juice all over the tile floor. Then I scooted out the door, leaving Karl to mop up the mess and deal with two kids, hopped up on sugar, smacking each other with pillows and wrestling naked.
It took me less than ten minutes to get from my New Jersey house to the foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge. From there, it was a straight shot down the Vine Street Expressway, through Chinatown, to Broad Street, the city's north-south artery. Broad Street cut through Philadelphia, spilling down and around City Hall like an asphalt stream.