Ghosts of Bergen County

by Dana Cann

  “Stow it,” Tina said. “Someplace dry.” They turned to go, to continue east, the way they’d been walking. Ferko stuffed the bags into his front pocket. It was a dilemma he hadn’t anticipated, keeping the stuff dry. His shoulder bag was soaked. Was it dry inside? Maybe in the zippered pocket where he kept his thumb drive and ibuprofen? He’d find out soon. They’d go someplace, perhaps around the corner, and divvy up the dope and then use. He cupped the bags in his dry palm. The sky brightened. Red was gone, vanished down the alley. Dave and Tina hustled across Ninth Street, holding hands. Ferko turned to follow, but two guys were converging on him from the east and west. They were youngish guys dressed in blue-and-black tracksuits and white running shoes with various curvy stripes. They walked toward him, with cautious sideways steps, hands behind their backs. A car glided down the street, its lights flashing, and braked. The passenger door opened. Then the driver’s door. Uniformed officers stood behind them. “Hold on, sir,” one said, which, for a brief moment, presented a false note of hope. The police, after all, served and protected. But then one of the tracksuit guys was on him. “Turn around,” he barked. “Spread your feet and put your hands against the wall.”

  They frog-marched him, flanked by the guys in tracksuits, to the precinct, which, it turned out, was just around the corner from the cop spot. Red was either an idiot or a genius. But he wasn’t here to cower or boast. Ferko wondered whether he’d been set up. Bad luck. Ferko luck. They took his photo. They measured his height and weight. They took his blood pressure. It was like going through intake at the hospital (complete with the ID bracelet) except no one expected him to answer the questions the clerks asked, which ranged from the mundane—reading from his driver’s license: “Are you still at 4540 Woodberry Road in Glen Wood Ridge, New Jersey?”—to the sarcastic—“Bad day, huh?” All the while the shorter of the two tracksuit officers stood behind him and guided him from station to station, from clerk to clerk. Ferko wasn’t cuffed. He wasn’t even under arrest, as best he could tell. He kept his mouth shut, was as compliant as silence allowed. The hallway opened to a room, a bullpen with desks and chairs. Activity swirled. Uniforms. Computers and printers. Ringing phones. Fried chicken and lo mein. English and Spanish. Cops who looked like crooks, and crooks who looked like cops. Firearms strapped to hips and ribs. Bursts of laughter like automatic weapons. A flat-screen on a wall showing the Yankees. Someplace sunny. Oakland. Posada up. One on, one out.

  And Ferko looked—what? Stricken, he imagined. Maybe he wasn’t the good guy or the bad guy. Maybe he was the victim. Maybe he was the witness. They didn’t stop Dave or Tina, even as they’d walked hand in hand in front of the squad car. With Ferko against the wall, his back facing Ninth Street, he’d sensed them watching the proceedings from a safe distance. And no one ran down the alley after Red, either. They took Ferko’s wallet, his phone and keys and a receipt for a milk shake he’d bought hours earlier, hoping the winning combination of fat and sugar would ward off his need for dope. They found that, too, and asked, “What’s this?” like in the movies. Then they went through his shoulder bag, with its notes from meetings, presentations never filed, papers he’d been carrying for months, since before Jen, before dope, before Greg and Grove, and all the while the search was happening, while his legs were spread and his hands were against the wall, prostrate, he remembered the times with Jen, how she’d handled everything—the money, the dope, each aspect of the wordless transactions. He’d gone with her only twice. Mostly, by the time he arrived, she’d already copped. He could tell by the settled look in her eyes, by the serene angles at the corners of her mouth. She’d protected him. So much that Ferko never really felt he owned it, even if it was his money she used. Now he owned it, and even this seemed somehow okay. He remembered before, and there was nothing there but thick walls. Isolation. His and Mary Beth’s. All that had been razed. By Jen. By Amanda. Not by dope. He couldn’t remember ever wanting it.

  When the clerks were done with their questions, the tracksuit guy led him into a room with gray walls and a door with a small, square window, head-high. There was nothing on the walls but scuff marks and dirt. A laminated table stood in the center, surrounded by three chairs—one on each of the long ends and another pushed against the wall farthest from the door. The tracksuit guy paused in the doorway, looked at Ferko, and sniffed. Then he shut the door, and Ferko was alone.

  He didn’t know how long it had been. They’d taken his watch and phone, and there was no clock. He could mark time by watching the heads go back and forth in the hall beyond the door. He wasn’t even sure if the door was locked, but he wasn’t going to try it, either.

  Years ago, before they were married, Ferko and Mary Beth had taken a trip to a spa out west, with mineral baths and hot springs, and they’d paid extra for a hot wrap, where you were placed in a windowed room heated by the baths, and wrapped in hot towels, head to toe, so that only your nose was exposed. Then the spa people left you there, all wrapped up, but you weren’t allowed to talk in the spa, so no one explained to Ferko that he should get up when he’d had enough, that no one was coming back to tap him on the shoulder and let him know that it was time. So he’d lain there and waited, feeling claustrophobic, trying to decide how much time had gone by. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he sat up and unwrapped the towels. Mary Beth was gone. He found her in one of the pools outside. “How’d you like it?” she’d asked.

  “It was awful.”

  Ferko and Mary Beth hadn’t gone away in a long time. It was a simple thing to travel. You chose a place and made arrangements and booked a flight and packed a bag. There were lots of places to go.

  The door groaned, and the two cops in the tracksuits filled the opening. The smaller cop held a red file folder and a pen, followed by the taller cop with a single sheet of paper, folded once. “My name is Officer Thompson,” the taller one said, “and this is Officer Henry.” He unfolded the piece of paper in his hand. “Gilbert S. Ferko of Glen Wood Ridge, New Jersey. Have you ever been to Glen Wood Ridge, Officer Henry?”

  “Can’t say I have.” His voice was thin, unsure, conveying inexperience in its upper registers.

  Good cop, bad cop, Ferko thought. Smart cop, dumb cop. The bankers and the lawyers played the same games in conference rooms uptown.

  “Me, neither,” Thompson said. He dragged a chair from the far end of the table, twisted it around and placed one running shoe on its seat and leaned an elbow on his knee. Henry stayed by the door.

  “The tests came back on that stuff you were holding. Do you know what they showed?”

  Ferko knew enough not to say anything, but it seemed impolite to ignore the question completely. He shook his head.

  “Of course you don’t.” Thompson’s smile showed his teeth, which were remarkably white. “You’re not going to talk to us, are you, Gilbert?” He left a pause, and Ferko found himself in a staring contest he couldn’t possibly win. Thompson’s eyes were mapped with red lines. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, the bulk of the hours spent winning staring contests with the weak and famished, with addicts in withdrawal.

  Ferko blinked and glanced toward the door, where the window revealed heads passing by at an impressive clip and frequency. The pull of heroin had been replaced by a satisfying numbness that occupied his entire core.

  “That’s good,” Thompson’s voice boomed. He removed his foot from the seat of the chair, draped his fingers across the back, and stood on his toes. “Because we haven’t read you your rights. Seems that stuff you were holding was heroin, Gilbert. Low-grade, which I applaud.” Thompson winked. “Saves lives.” He took a breath, and paused. It was Ferko’s turn to speak, to defend the product’s quality, safety, and value. When he didn’t, Thompson continued:

  “You’re under arrest for criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, an A misdemeanor in New York State.”

  He stepped back and Henry stepped forward, a simple bit of choreography that, Ferko imag
ined, the two had executed hundreds of times.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Henry said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”

  He stepped back, and the two officers beamed at each other and then at Ferko. A phone rang. Thompson’s. He put it to his ear. “Yeah?” A sound like a mouse from the earpiece. “Yeah?” He screwed up his face, his eyes focused on the far wall. “Ye-ah?” he drawled, two syllables. Then he spun on his heels and pulled the doorknob and left the room. “Who?” he asked, as the door closed behind him.

  “Ruh-roh,” Henry said, bobbing on his toes.

  “What now?” Ferko asked, inexplicably emboldened by Thompson’s hasty exit and Henry’s Scooby-Doo reference.

  “We”—he hesitated—“wait for Officer Thompson.”

  “No, I mean in the big picture. What can I expect next?” He had questions, but he was also looking for an advantage. Sometimes the less experienced adversaries would tell you things they shouldn’t. “I get a call, right?”

  “You watch too much television.”

  “We all do,” Ferko said. Actually, he watched very little, but he used to watch more, which was how he knew about the phone call. “My wife is probably worried. I want to tell her I’m safe in police custody, and not dead in some alley.”

  Ferko left silence to see if Henry would fill it. But he didn’t, and the room stayed quiet—Ferko in his chair and Henry on his feet—for a full minute before the door opened and Thompson, still on his phone, filled the entry. He stood, hunched, and squinted at the far wall, as though whoever was on the other end were actually a tiny figure projected there, and the harder Thompson squinted the better he could hear. Foot traffic blurred behind him, left and right.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and crooked a finger at his partner, and Henry, ever obedient, stepped in to receive the message whispered in his ear. They looked at each other, shared a conspiratorial nod, before Thompson turned and exited. The door groaned and shut.

  “Someone important?” Ferko asked. He had the sense that it was just him and Officer Inexperience from here forward.

  “Oh, yeah,” Henry said, drawing out the syllables to maximum effect.

  Ferko considered the hierarchy: precinct chief to district chief to police chief to mayor. Was it that flat? Bill Prauer was friends with the mayor, and Ferko entertained a brief fantasy in which Prauer, concerned by Ferko’s absence at Riverfront and unsatisfied with Greg’s answers on Grove, had hunted Ferko down, put out an APB and tracked him here and demanded his release. But then he remembered waking up this morning on the couch in the Riverfront lobby. It felt like weeks ago, days since he’d left Greg and Lisa in the Riverfront conference room. Ferko imagined them now, presenting their case to Prauer. Or maybe that meeting was done—mission accomplished—and Prauer was on the phone now with Roy Grove’s lawyer, Horowitz, with belated condolences over the death of his client. Yuk, yuk, yuk. Then pitching a meeting with the surviving Groves. Could Horowitz make that happen? Prauer could be impetuous like that. He turned on a dime, made unpredictable bets that made millions. It was part of his mystique.

  “You want to call your wife,” Henry said.

  Actually, Ferko wanted to call Jen, but said, “She’s going to wonder what the hell happened.”

  “She looking to party, too?” Henry asked.

  “What’s with you guys?”

  Henry shrugged. All the time in the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was Monday morning before she called her dad again. He answered hello with a rushed anxiousness, followed by animated relief once she said hi.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. It wasn’t like him to worry about her.

  “I’ve been trying to call.”

  “I turned my phone off. I wasn’t feeling well, remember?”

  She expected him to ask if she was drinking enough water. It was where he usually started, with her and with his patients when he’d been in practice. Hydrated organs are happy organs, he liked to say, and she’d always pictured hers as pink, slippery fish, writhing in the clean pools that filled her body’s cavities, because she heeded his advice and drank lots of water. She expected that her organs were happy organs; though less so lately, with the substances—powdered and liquid—she’d been consuming. But she was clean, four days and drinking lots of water. She opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle, along with a stick of butter and some crackers—also in the fridge, to keep from the roaches. He sometimes asked her about eating, too, and she realized she hadn’t been all that good on that front.

  When he didn’t answer, she said, “I’m feeling a little better,” to assure him.

  “Sometimes I don’t know what you’re up to.”

  She felt the weight of withdrawal then, a flush of nausea, something solid pressed against her, a concrete wall. The morning had gone well. She’d managed to sleep. She put the butter and the crackers on the dining table, and twisted open the top of the water bottle. “You’re not supposed to,” she said, recovering. She took a swig. “I’m thirty-eight.”

  “I got a call yesterday from Ferko. He says he can’t reach you and thought maybe you were staying with me. So I try to call you. It goes straight to voice mail. I try you later. Same thing. Last night. Same thing. I couldn’t sleep, imagining the worst.”

  “Dad.” Jen felt it now—something had attached itself to the place in the pit of her stomach where the butterflies flapped their wings. But this something was solid, weighted, and it told her she wasn’t getting off dope. In fact, it told her that right now a line of dope would be good; it was close, available, and wasn’t it great that she had a day off from work to get a bag and get herself right again?

  “Then, this morning, I still can’t reach you. I tried your office but you’re not there. Then some guy named Nick calls. Do I know him?”

  “Nick?”

  “Says he’s your friend.”

  She sighed into the mouthpiece.

  “Nice kid,” her dad said. “He hasn’t been able to reach you since Saturday.”

  “You don’t know him,” she said, answering the question he’d asked but had since moved on from.

  “Why’s he calling?”

  She thought she detected accusation in his tone. It wasn’t like him to judge her.

  “Then I hang up with Nick, and guess who calls me in the next instant?” Her dad didn’t give her a chance to guess. “Ferko, asking if I’ve heard anything.”

  The thing in the pit of her stomach swelled. She’d assumed she was on her own. She realized now she wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “I was about to call the police.”

  “It was a bad idea to turn off my phone,” she said, but she didn’t believe it. She hadn’t gone about it in the right way, was all. She should have issued a warning.

  “Well, I’m relieved,” he said, with the sort of finality that indicated that the difficult portion of the conversation was over.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” she said.

  She waited, but so did her dad.

  “It was unnerving,” he said after a while. “I couldn’t find you.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  He gasped. Was he crying?

  “Dad?”

  “Tell me you’re okay,” he said after another moment.

  “I’m okay. I’m sick, but I’m getting better.”

  “You call me. If you don’t, I’ll call you. Leave your ringer on. You’d better answer.”

  The text messages scrolled in a long, unbroken string, symbols bunched together and piled up. She didn’t think she could face them. She didn’t think she could follow the tiny letters that formed the indiscernible words. There were phone calls, too. New messages waiting. She wondered whether she’d need to toss the phone and ge
t a new number in order to stay clean. She clicked on Ferko’s two-oh-one, the first number she saw. He answered on the first ring.

  “You called?” she asked.

  “Hey!” he nearly shouted. “Are you pissed at me?”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “For what?” Then she said, “I’ve been sick,” which, quite suddenly, felt like a lie, self-inflicted as her condition was. When you’re hungover, you don’t say you’re sick. You say you feel awful.

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “At home.”

  “I stopped by Saturday. You weren’t home.”

  When she didn’t answer, he said, “We got busted.”

  “Who?”

  “Me, Tina, and Dave. Except they skated and watched me do the perp thing from a safe distance across the street. It was like Paramus all over again.”

  “I didn’t stick around and watch.”

  “You skated.”

  “I was holding,” she said. “You weren’t.”

  “This time I was.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I’ve never had more than a speeding ticket. Now I’m in databases. I’m probably on the no-fly list.”

  She took it as a good sign he could make jokes, if those were jokes. They sounded like jokes. She took it as a good sign she could talk to Ferko about his misadventures without impulse blossoming inside her. The sliver of sky through her window was blue. The sun reflected off the dull surface of her parquet floor.

  “What do you have, a cold? The flu?”

  “I guess.”

  “You know that sewing machine repair shop?”

  “Which one?”

  “How many are there? The one on your street. It’s never open.”