Authors: Duane Swierczynski
At approximately 1:30 in the morning, Confidential Informant #69, a twenty-six-year-old junkie whore, hears a noise.
CI #69 isn’t stupid; she suspects the cops assigned her that number on purpose. I mean, for fuck’s sake, can you be more obvious? But let them laugh all they want. She’s just received a letter from her friend down in Naples, Florida. She says that her back room is cleaned out and that she can come down and spend Christmas there, with good chances for a job if she can clean up. CI #69 knows she can. All she needs is to be out of the cold and dark under the fucking El and be on a beach with warm sun and the clean fresh sand all around her. She’s young. She’ll rebound. This city and all of its sickness will be just a bad dream.
The El; she won’t miss the relentless rumbling of the El, just a block away from the place she’s been bedding down lately.
But wait.
It’s not the El she hears now.
It’s the cracking of wood.
Oh fuck, someone’s breaking in. CI #69 isn’t the legal owner of this row home on Darrah Street—that’s some dealer who was sent up earlier this year. But she considers it her squat, man. She’s been taking care of it. Practicing for when she’s a guest in her friend’s place down in Naples. She grew up dusting and vacuuming and generally slaving away for her bitch stepmom; she knows what to do.
CI #69 isn’t so much frightened by the intrusion as annoyed. In a few minutes the burglars are going to see she owns nothing worth carrying out of here. And she’ll have to figure a way to secure the back door again.
“You picked the wrong house, assholes,” she calls down the staircase. “Ain’t got nothing worth stealin’!”
The voice that responds frightens her. Not because it is inherently menacing or sinister-sounding, but because CI #69 knows a cop when she hears one.
“We’re not here for your stuff,” the voice says. “We’re here for you.”
And with that CI #69 grabs her bag and is out the back window. Which is why she chose to bed down in the back bedroom—just in case she had to leave in a hurry. It’s a quick hop down to the roof outside the rear room of the house, then another hop to the small fenced yard. But from here, there are three ways out: left or right down a weeded alley, the left leading to Herbert Street, the right leading to another alley that took you to Darrah or Salem, take your pick. Because the cops came in the front, it was likely their cruiser was out on Darrah, so Salem seemed to be her best bet.
If these guys are cops, though, why didn’t they identify themselves? Cops can be dicks, but they all tell you what’s what first.
Maybe these aren’t cops?
CI #69 lands in the backyard and is preparing to sprint to the gate when a voice behind her commands her to freeze.
He’s not in uniform but he is holding a police gun, and the steely look on his face is definitely a cop’s. He’s black and clean-shaven and has the demeanor of someone who is used to having his commands followed.
“What do you want?”
“Yo, she’s back here.”
Calling to his partner inside—a mean-looking chick with dark hair and eyes that seem almost black. And when she emerges, CI #69 knows that she is seriously fucked, because these are not cops and this is not a break-in. She’s survived this long because she knows how to read faces. Nothing fancy. Just little cues she picked up from her asshole stepmom. She just knows what someone looks like when they’re willing to hurt you.
This bitch, the one who’s just stepped out of the back of her house? She looks more than happy to hurt someone.
So CI #69 bolts.
The chase doesn’t last very long. They catch up with her before she can even see the street lamps on Salem Street. The beating is mercifully brief but severe; she loses consciousness. She’s been beaten before but not like this. When she wakes up she’s tied to a chair and apparently she’s in the middle of a torture session whose beginning she cannot recall.
“You were saying,” someone tells her, but CI #69 has no idea what she was saying. She could have been saying anything. There’s a weird burning in her blood, and sweat trickles down from her hairline. They stick something in her arm and then it comes back to her. She
was
talking. She was talking a lot. She was talking about the stuff she usually talks about with Wildey and
only
Wildey, and suddenly she knows what this is about, just as she knows that she’s never going to see Naples or feel the sun or smell the sand. She’s a silly junkie whore to have thought otherwise.
The police call her Confidential Informant #69, but her real name is Megan Stefanich. Within twenty-four hours her corpse will be underwater.
Well, Mom, if I’m a snitch, I guess I’d better learn how to be one. BTW, I hate the word snitch. I check the Internet for synonyms and they’re all horrible:
Narc
Fink
Rat
Rat Fink
Deep
Throat
Turncoat
Weasel
Squealer
Stoolie
Stool
pigeon
The only one that isn’t completely awful is canary, which will probably make you laugh. Remember Dad and his stupid songs about my name? Sarie Canary, who’s she gonna marry? Okay, so I’m a canary. I can deal with canary. Better than being a snitch-ass motherfucker.
(Sorry. Guess D. is rubbing off on me.)
Online I find a PDF organizational chart for the whole Philadelphia Police Department. Wildey’s team seems to fall under the category of special investigations, which itself breaks down into two categories: narcotics and major crimes. Drugs and Serious-Ass Shit, in other words.
Under narcotics there are narcotics field units (presumably like Wildey’s Nobody Fucks With Us unit), a narcotics strike force (presumably a Nobody Really Better Fuck With Us, Because We Will Fuck Your Shit Up But Good unit), and then a third division called Intensive Drug Investigations, just in case the first two categories didn’t automatically make you wet your pants.
So they’re real, at least.
Apparently the whole confidential informant thing is governed by Police Directive 15—a rule book for how cops deal with their snitches. To wit: “Police personnel will maintain professional objectivity in dealing with informants. No personal relationships will jeopardize the objectivity of the informant or the integrity of the department.”
You hear that, Officer Wildey? I’ll be keeping my eye on you.
Can’t find any pieces online about Wildey, but his superior is another story. She’s apparently Super Hot Shit in the department. According to one article, she’s in line to be the city’s next drug czar. Though in the comments section on the newspaper website, jerks make fun of her Russian accent:
—What are they gonna do, bust Rocky the Flying Squirrel?
—More like drug czarina
—Kill moose and squirrel and take their crack!
Why am I researching this? I have real stuff to research. Namely Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
as a Reflection of the Paradigmatic System of German Culture.
Can’t help it.
Monday there was apparently this big citywide drug bust and they caught this doctor in South Philly writing phony prescriptions. Cops busted into some row house (wonder if Wildey was among them) and found the sixty-one-year-old doc sitting at the kitchen table, calm as can be, writing those scripts. Guess he was trying to beat the Thanksgiving rush? He also had $740 worth of weed and $425 worth of pills on hand.
The pills remind me of D., of course, but he hasn’t texted or called. I know he fled from the police, but you’d think he’d give me a yell, if for no other reason than to inquire about his missing hat, missing windbreaker, missing Ziploc baggie full of illegal narcotics.
Tammy isn’t returning my calls, either. What the hell? Is it something I did?
The only person I’m hearing from is Officer Wildey.
WILDEY: You there
CI #137: I’m here
WILDEY: Thought of something
WILDEY: Your boyfriend doesn’t know I picked you up. For all he knows you still have his stuff
WILDEY: So you should reach out to him and tell him that you have his stuff and want to give it back
WILDEY: You follow me?
CI #137: I can’t do that because there is no boyfriend!
WILDEY: Whatever you call him, doesn’t matter to me.
WILDEY: Look, it’s the easiest way. Just agree on a meet location and I’ll be there to scoop him up.
WILDEY: Hey, you there
WILDEY: Get back to me
WILDEY: Guess I’ll have to call you
CI #137: I can’t set up someone who doesn’t exist!
Mom, I swear, once you start looking, you can’t stop.
Just read a story about a Philly college student named Tracey, sweet-looking hippie chick based on her online photo (and stuff on Facebook) who bought some LSD online and made the mistake of selling some to some people back home, one of whom was an undercover state cop. Busted, just like me. The way she describes it, the cop was all sweet and shit, even brought her coffee. (Take some notes, Officer Wildey!) But then they put her to work, forced her to bust somebody at Drexel, her own school, in exchange for having her own charges dropped. Her identity was supposed to be sealed and secret (just like me! again!), but the drug world is apparently a small world, at least on campus, and people found out pretty quick. Everybody turned on her. Seriously—everyone. Tracey was big with campus activist groups and they all dropped her. Now she’s pet-sitting and whatever, struggling to make ends meet, and her life sounds pretty fucking miserable. So I suppose I have that to look forward to.
Then there was the story about a dude on some photo-sharing site calling himself rat215. In addition to posting weird porn selfies, guns, and his headless self flashing gang signs, he also put up photos and court documents that outed a witness to two drug killings.
EXPOSE ALL RATS
, the caption read. Rat215 turned out to be a high school kid, and nobody has any idea how he found the docs and photos—they were supposed to be sealed, grand jury–style shit. (What was it that Wildey and his boss said about my identity never being revealed?)
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.