Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “ ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Landry asks, and Caspars tells him I’ve got the flu, but I’m getting better every second.

  “So after we give Landry the pitch, he tells us there’s not enough time to set up all the stuff we have to set up: put together an op plan, order the cameras, put together all the scenarios, scout the location, set up surveillance, look for countersurveillance, note all the one-way and dead-end streets in the neighborhood, distribute the op plan, hold the TAC meeting, all of it. He wants us to stall Nene until tomorrow, but Caspars tells him that Nene insisted it’s tonight or never. He’s got alternative options otherwise, Nene’s exact words according to Caspars. Alternative options.

  “We let that hang in the air a bit.

  “Landry shakes his head and says sorry. ‘There’s not enough time. It’s just too dangerous.’

  “And I go, ‘It’s dangerous not to make this buy.’

  “My breath must’ve still smelled like Jäger, because he points to me and says, ‘What is this drunk fool doing in my office? Whose buy is this anyway?’

  “Caspars tells him it’s his buy, but he wanted me along because Nene usually rolls deep and if he brings a friend, I’d be there to like even out the numbers.

  “But that’s just more ammo for Landry. He rattles off all the problems: not enough time, the possibility Nene will bring a friend, Nene’s youth, by which he means his stupidity. ‘It’s too many variables,’ he tells us.

  “Hart can’t say anything because all of Landry’s objections are safety-related and it’s the undercovers with their necks in the noose, not him. So I take it upon myself to say, ‘Listen. What if we can get the op plan put together in time?’ And what if we let Landry pick the location? And what if—because clearly he’s not sending a drunk onto the set as an uncle—what if I run surveillance and Caspars partners up with this new undercover we had named Debbie Barnes, who was great, just a pro’s pro. She could pose as Caspars’s girlfriend and hopefully soften the mood a bit, make it a little less testosteroney. And what if we don’t buy this AK and somebody else does?

  “Now, Landry, to his credit, before he was Born Again, he was an AA twelve-stepper, and before that an atheist, and before that an agnostic, and before that a Catholic. So in other words, the guy is willing to change his mind. He goes out onto the rumpus to see if Barnes is even still around, and when he comes back into his office he’s visibly relieved because she’d signed out half an hour ago.

  “But I’ve already called her on her cell. And I’ve got her turning around, making the next available U-turn by promising her that she’ll get to be the primary. And what does that mean? That means the buy will go up on the buy board, directly under her name.

  “For the next couple of hours we’ve got investigators mapping routes to the nearest hospital just in case. Hart and I, we’re putting together the op plan. I’m writing the scenarios, all the ways it can go. Well, of course, not all the ways it can go. Really just three ways, because that’s all the space I have on the form. Just a drop in the bucket, really, in terms of possible futures. Hart is putting together a Nene packet with photos of all his known pals, plus anyone we have in the computer who lives in Ravenswood, more photos than we could possibly go through in the time allotted. Barnes is getting mic’d. Caspars is in Landry’s office, talking on the phone with Nene, setting up the buy for tonight. It’s going to go off outside Nene’s apartment building in Ravenswood, just a simple hand-to-hand on the street. Caspars wants him to bring the gun in a duffel bag of some sort, so it’ll be concealed, of course, but also so the AK will be harder for Nene to pull out in case something goes wrong. Nene says, ‘I’m not trying to give away bags for free here.’ Tacks on another thirty dollars for the duffel, which puts us at seven hundred and eighty dollars. Does that not sound like a lot? For an AK-frickin’-47? Well, it’s not, right? But that’s how many guns are on the street. That’s open-market competition driving down prices on an assault weapon. Anyway, so now we gotta get the money, copy it, get the cars, get the cameras, and race over to the set, eating red lights the whole way.

  “And then it’s that old story. The life of a cop? Hurry up and wait. We’re all just sitting around. Waiting on Caspars and Barnes to decide to show up. It’s four o’clock in the morning and me and Hart are slouched down in a Toyota Camry with tinted windows. Parked outside Nene’s Ravenswood residence. Nene’s up in his apartment, waiting on Caspars and Barnes himself. Across the street there are two more detectives in a yellow taxi. Around the corner, within kel frequency range, not that it matters since we couldn’t find a single working mic, are Landry and two more detectives in the command car. My phone keeps vibrating. It’s my wife—I was married at the time—wanting to know if I’m still alive, but I can’t answer because I don’t want the glow of the cell phone lighting up the car. Of course I could’ve called her before I left for the set, but that’s only about one of maybe four million reasons why I got divorced.

  “At the time, though, all I’m thinking is at least I don’t have to pee. Then I have to pee. Then I’m wondering if I have enough time to run to Dunkin’ Donuts and use their bathroom, not that I ever would, not that it was even open probably, but I just wanted to torture myself with the possibility. Hart, meanwhile, is blowing his nose into this disgusting handkerchief because he gets sick when he’s nervous. I don’t know if you knew that. The whole car reeks of the cough drops and Alto ids he keeps popping. He’s blaming me for giving him the flu, and I’m apologizing, even though we both know I never really had the flu, but that’s what happens on surveillance. You start to lose your mind.

  “Finally we see Caspars and Barnes drive past us in a gray Pathfinder. The ghost car’s right behind them. Caspars parks the Pathfinder in front of a hydrant about thirty yards away from the Ravenswood entrance, exactly as he was supposed to. So far, so good. All three of my op-plan scenarios started just like this, with the uncles putting some distance between themselves and the entrance. It’s like I always tell you: make the fishies swim to you.

  “Caspars gets out of the car with the engine still running and he comes over to Barnes’s side, the street side, so the detectives in the cab can get some good pictures of him on his cell phone. He’s calling Nene and the idea here is that he gets Nene to come down with the AK in his bag or whatever, walk the thirty yards to the car, complete the sale out in the open, that’s scenario one, or in the car, that’s scenario two, and when Nene’s walking the thirty yards back, we all grab him before he reaches his building.

  “After Caspars gets off the phone, he reaches into the open passenger window and comes out with a cig, Barnes’s, I guess. He takes a drag, something I’ve never seen him do in my life. Different partners, different vices, I guess. Barnes’s hand is dangling outside the window and she’s wearing what looks like an enormous purple cocktail ring, big as a plum. Before he slides the cigarette back between her fingers, he bends over and gives the ring a big kiss. I don’t know. I’m glad they’re relaxed and having fun, but my hands are shaking like they straight got banged with a hammer. I show them to Hart. I go, ‘Look at this,’ and he says, ‘Tell me about it,’ then blows his nose into the hankie.

  “Nene comes out a little later with a buddy, just as we knew he would. They’re both dressed all in white. White sneakers, white denim shorts. This is February, mind you. White T-shirts. White do-rags under white Yankees caps. In the dark, from a parked car, they looked identical, except Nene’s got his tube socks pulled all the way up like he’s worried Caspars is going to kick him one in the shins. And the friend’s a little bit taller, too. Me and Hart, we’re flipping through photos fast as possible so we can radio a name to Landry, but we don’t recognize the kid. The good news? Nene and the kid don’t recognize us, either. Don’t even look for us, like they’ve got nothing to worry about, no reason at all to keep an eye out for police, because, the bad news, they’ve come out of the building empty-handed.

  “Nene pats his chest, like, ‘
My bad, my bad.’ We don’t need to hear him to know what he’s saying. We’ve heard it literally a thousand times before. ‘My bad, the AK was supposed to be here like hours ago, but we just gotta go pick it up, take a quick drive, no problem, my bad, my bad.’

  “Listen. If black-market gun-sellers were organized and responsible, they wouldn’t be black-market gun-sellers.

  “The problem, though, is that only scenario three had anticipated Nene showing up without the gun. If that happened, the uncle was advised to cancel the buy and pursue it another time. Nothing wrong with punting. But of course, as always, all real-time decisions remain at the uncle’s discretion.

  “While Caspars’s thinking about what he’s going to do, Nene moves past him to see who’s sitting in the Pathfinder’s front seat. He leans his head in through the window, like maybe he’s kissing Barnes on the cheek, even though they’ve never met before, and then he pulls his head out laughing, cracking up at something she said. She was pretty charming. Caspars meanwhile is giving Nene’s friend one of those macho upward chin tilts. That was a little unusual because normally when Caspars met somebody new on a buy he’d step forward and give whoever it was like this big double-handed handshake. It was his shtick to act super corny. He wanted people to think, No police department in the world would hire a guy this fake to work undercover. He’d act like he was running for office, slapping backs and cracking jokes and talking crazy loud, horsing around, but in a real buddy-buddy way, like with the ring, kissing Barnes’s ring, but he gave Nene’s friend just the chin tilt, without smiling, like he was in the mood to intimidate. That pleased me, but my hands were still shaking. I kept telling myself, ‘Take it easy, take it easy. If these kids had violence on the brain, they wouldn’t have dressed all in white.’

  “Do you know what that is right there? Itwaru, it’s like your big Korean in the leather jacket. You see him leaning up against that pole or whatever and you’re thinking, Boom, that’s a dealer. A lot of time you’ll hear people say they felt something in their gut or whatever, but one of the things I very much admire about you is that it’s always facts, proofs. You articulate very well. ‘I think this because of that.’ Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, they don’t see the world closely like we do. We’re paying attention in a way almost no one else is. And we’re also building little stories, right? This happened because of this. One thing leads to another. We’re seeing the world very closely and with the stakes being what they are for us, being this sort of life-and-death kind of thing, we need to assess that world accurately, immediately, and so we tell ourselves these stories. Like because he’s a drug dealer, he’s tired of standing, and so that’s why he’s leaning against the pole in his nice jacket. Because Nene and his boy are wearing white clothes, they’re not going to do anything that might risk them getting bloody.

  “But see, your Korean guy wasn’t a dealer. He knew a dealer, sure. But he himself? He was just a guy on a pole. Maybe he works for a dealer, as a steerer or whatever, but we don’t know, right? Saying this guy is probably holding down drugs for this reason or that reason, that’s just a story we tell ourselves. And it does what stories are supposed to do. It makes us feel better. Where we get into trouble is when we forget it’s just a story.

  “Barnes opens up her passenger’s-side door. See if Caspars was going to take this much time to decide what to do, then she was going to get out and stand next to him. That way, if Caspars does decide to play chauffeur, she can easily offer Nene her seat up front. ‘Your legs are longer. You can give directions. We’re in a fight and I don’t wanna sit next to him. I barely met your friend yet. You boys can haggle over prices up there.’ Whatever it takes to avoid the tactical disaster of two possibly armed men sitting behind you in the backseat of a car. I’m sitting in our car, smelling Hart’s cough drops, and I’m powerless, but when I see Barnes’s door swing open … my goodness. I’m telling you, she was simply a pro.

  “But Nene, the Casanova, he pushes the door closed for her, won’t let her give up her seat. He’s pointing west as he goes around to the back. His buddy gets in next to him, neither one of them asking permission as far as I can tell. Caspars heads to the front. He’s walking stiffly with the cement legs he gets when he comes to work straight from the gym. The door slams and the Pathfinder pulls out into the street.

  “Not one of the scenarios provided the backup teams with further instructions if the uncles left the set, but we didn’t need further instructions. If the uncles leave, everybody follows. While Hart’s radioing Landry, the ghost car turns onto Thirty-Sixth Avenue in slow-speed pursuit. The cab goes next. Because me and Hart are faced the wrong way on Twenty-First, we go in the opposite direction and will just have to catch up. Landry gets on the radio and says he wants to run leapfrog, with the ghost car trailing the Pathfinder then heading back to the end of the line and letting the cab pick up the Pathfinder then heading back to the end of the line and letting us pick up the Pathfinder, around and around, for as long as it takes. Almost right away, though, for whatever reason Caspars pulls up in front of this twenty-four-hour Laundromat on the avenue. The ghost and the cab have to coast right on by so they won’t get burned. Me and Hart, we’re not even there yet. By the time the ghost circles the block, the Pathfinder’s gone and there’s all this broken glass in the street, but the ghost team can’t remember if the glass had been there before or not.

  “Landry’s on the radio asking who’s got the eyeball, who’s got the eyeball, but no one has an answer for him.

  “Hart’s choking the steering wheel by now, lipping the curb, and I’m on my cell dialing Caspars’s number but it keeps going straight to voice mail. ‘You know what to do,’ it says. I’m on the radio now with Landry telling him I can’t get through and he tells me to keep trying. His voice is like weirdly calm. He tells me he’s calling Barnes but can’t get through, either. Maybe they were in a cellular dead spot, but I’ve since walked all around that neighborhood and never lost reception. Maybe all the other guys were calling Caspars and Barnes at the same time. Maybe that’s why none of our calls got through. At one point, this sanitation truck backs out of an alleyway and Hart has to swerve out of its way and ends up sideswiping a parked car. He’s driving sixty miles per hour down these little streets. I think about telling him to buckle his seat belt, but I don’t because that would be like a defeat somehow, like an acknowledgment that something bad might actually happen. At last Caspars’s phone starts ringing, but nobody answers.

  “We make a hard left onto this little narrow one-way, squeezed in by row houses on one side and an elementary school on the other. As soon as we’re on it, Hart has to hit the brakes hard to keep from running them over. I don’t remember bouncing off the dash, but I must’ve. I’m out of the car now and there’s no Pathfinder anywhere, but a couple yards away from each other Caspars and Barnes are lying in the street. The air had this really thick burnt smell, from the gunshots or Hart’s braking, I don’t know.

  “Caspars was the one closer to me, but I leapt right over him to get to Barnes. That’s another thing I don’t know. Why I did that. I think maybe because he was so, like, irretrievably dead. He lay on his side with his legs bent at the knees and his face was gone, but Barnes was on her back, like maybe just asleep. Except not really, of course. She already had some slight burning across her forehead, all the way up to her hairline. The real damage, though, went down the right side of her face. It looked all dark and sort of charred. Her eye on that side was filled with blood and she had blood all over her chin. Her eyebrow, too, was like super long there, with the inflammation maybe. Like Caspars, she’d been shot through the back of the head, but the bullet had come out at a weird angle, through her cheek. The exit wound looked like this little perfect Valentine’s heart, tipped over on its side. When I was breathing into her mouth, the air came puffing out of that hole.

  “Hart was working on Caspars. He can’t find a pulse, he tells me, and there was no mouth for him to breath into, so I tell
him to come help me with Barnes. He puts his hand on the hole in her cheek and the entire time he’s chewing the heck out of a pen, a cheap little Bic, I don’t know where he got it. Her lungs won’t inflate, so I start chest compressions. Hart is still holding on to her cheek for the compressions, even though he doesn’t have to. I start with the breaths again and it’s like screaming down a well. I’m back on chest compressions when Landry pulls me off her. ‘It’s over,’ he tells me. They’re all here, all the guys, paramedics on the way. I see now that the ring on her hand is not a real ring, but one of those lollipop candy rings.

  “By the time the paramedics arrive, I’m sitting on a stoop outside one of the houses. I’m sitting there and I’m watching them go through the same CPR rigmarole. But it’s hopeless, right? After they gave up, when they were loading Caspars and Barnes onto the bus, one of the paramedics puts the sheets on their faces, but the other medic pulls them off. He won’t pronounce them dead in front of all of us. The bus takes them away with the sirens going all crazy, and after they’re gone I hear Hart saying that was very respectful, the way the guy took the sheets off their faces, and I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not because to me it’s such a pointless gesture. And maybe even a little cowardly to let the hospital doctor declare them DOA. But that’s probably unfair of me to say. I take that back. Those medics work hard, I know. And what a spot they were in. What a difficult spot with all of us staring at them.

  “A little later Landry finds me on my stoop to tell me they found the Pathfinder eight blocks away. Abandoned. It’d take another two days before we found Nene hiding in the woods in Pennsylvania and his buddy at a relative’s in Towson, Maryland. At the time, though, out on that stoop, Landry is telling me IA will be here soon to investigate the shooting. He reminds me that I can delay the interview for up to seventy-two hours. Then he says he’s gotta ask me something. Do I remember if the kel-mics were working when we left the rumpus?