Canary (8 page)

Something in Sarie’s jacket buzzes. Dad is still in the backyard so he doesn’t hear it. Sarie’s head, though, whips around like she’s a police dog who just caught a sniff of a bad guy. She takes a step closer to the living room, where her jacket is slung over the couch. There’s another buzz. She looks at Marty and tells him to keep an eye on the carrots, then hurries into the room. What the hell? Marty wonders.

He stirs the carrots a few times, then moves to the doorway. Sarie’s back is to him, but her body language makes it look like she’s texting. Clearly hiding it. She texts all the time, though. Why be so secretive about it?

Marty is clear of the doorway before she turns around. He slides across the kitchen linoleum in his socks, making no sound, and gives the carrots a few more stirs before realizing there’s something missing. The brown sugar, like Mom always used to add. Maybe they’re eating healthier now. When Sarie returns Marty tells her to watch the carrots—he has to go to the bathroom. He expects her to say
thanks for sharing
or something wiseass—the kind of thing they usually say to each other. But she seems preoccupied, says nothing.

Of course Marty doesn’t go to the bathroom. He slips his hand into Sarie’s jacket pocket expecting to feel the familiar contours of her iPhone. Instead he pulls out a cheap flip phone.

After dropping Auntie M. off at the retirement home with plenty of leftovers, Wildey retraces his route, taking Germantown Avenue, which slashes across North Philly, until Lehigh. There he hangs a left, heading toward Kensington Avenue—the heart of the so-called Badlands. Wildey’s three-bedroom row home is here, on Hope Street.

Yeah, yeah, he heard it from everybody when he first moved there. Hope, in the most hopeless area in the city. There’s even an Obama mural on a wall to drive the irony home—though some idiot did spray
BONER
over the one-word slogan beneath the portrait of the president.

When Wildey let his new address slip one day a couple of years back, his buddies back in the Twenty-fourth told them he was fucking nuts.
Why the fuck you living there? Don’t you know you don’t shit where you police?
All Wildey would do is smile and give them a line about its being cheap.
It’d better be fuckin’ cheap, Wildey. Shit, man, they should be paying you to live there.
But Wildey had his reasons, and he thought it was better to keep them to himself.

The Badlands
are
a strange choice for a cop to live.

For decades now its streets had been the biggest open-air drug market on the East Coast. And in recent years, it’s only gotten worse, because word got out: You want the purest, most potent heroin available? Head to Philly’s Badlands. It’s coming straight from the Mexican cartels, and they don’t mess around! Junk fiends have been known to drive from as far away as Florida and Maine to score, but mostly it’s junkies from other (better) neighborhoods or the burbs, near and far. And during the years Wildey worked those streets, he saw an increasing number of white people from the burbs. Not just kids, either. Middle-aged professors. Accountants. Soccer moms and so on.

Wildey quickly figured how it happened. Most well-off white kids don’t drive to a dangerous and heavily policed neighborhood just for the hell of it. They usually start out copping Oxys from friends, then scoring some from a small-time dealer near home. But a few years ago they changed up the Oxys, made it harder to get high on them. So white people had no choice but to go with heroin. The dope they could get in their neighborhoods and towns didn’t quite do the trick. As a general rule: The farther you got away from the city, the weaker and more expensive the dope. The joke going around was that suburban dope has been stepped on so many times, all you smell is sneaker.

No, they wanted the real deal, and it was no mystery where to get it. So they started cruising the strip between K&A—the Kensington and Allegheny El stop—and the next stop on the line, at Kensington and Somerset. Black dealers work one side of the avenue, Latinos the other.

Most of Wildey’s time with the Twenty-fourth was spent in an endless cat-and-mouse thing. You had your cops in uniform (like Wildey). You had uncover guys. You had your junkie CIs, trying like hell to work off their own shit. All three would triangulate on buyers. Some of them, commuting in from the burbs, would try to go for a package deal, buying sixty bags at a time—sometimes even selling it off back at home. The more they carried, the harder they fell. Most times, though, it was small-time, and you might bust a so-called caseworker (corner dealer), but rarely a midlevel player. They were too smart for that.

So on and on it went, the PD more or less fine with the casual deterrent of arrests, the city doing nothing about the endless abandoned houses that served as shooting galleries—“abandominiums,” they called them, turf wars breaking out on hot summer nights, legit business owners saying fuck it and moving out, scared residents with no means to get out sleeping in their bathtubs because they’re seriously afraid a bullet’s gonna come punching through the walls of their house overnight.

So why live here?

Because Ben Wildey wants to be the man who finally cleans it all up.

Not now, but someday. He doesn’t have the political muscle or the career busts right now. But he’s read enough and talked enough to know how it could work.

Why does he want to clean it up so badly? Plenty of reasons. But most of all it’s because his great-grandpops helped clean up the Tenderloin. And now Wildey wants to do the same with the Badlands. Carry on the Wildey family business.

The more Wildey reads, the more he realizes his neighborhood
is
the modern Tenderloin. Same shit, different decade. Just like it was ninety years ago, it’s pretty much hands-off. No pretense is made to clean it up unless someone decides to do it through sheer force of will.

Wildey takes a spin down the ave., just to see what’s what on this fine, brisk holiday evening.

There is the usual assortment of junkies hawking clean works and Subs from their bags. A buck for a needle, $10 for a Sub, $5 more to point you in the direction of the corners with the best stuff.

Some cars with out-of-state plates, a dead giveaway. If Wildey were still with the Twenty-fourth, that would be probable cause to pull a car over. Nicer cars, too, and there are plenty on the road tonight. It’s a long holiday weekend, and people need their dope. Let ’em go for it. For now. Wildey will be back for them soon enough.

He takes Lehigh again and turns right onto hopelessly narrow Hope Street. These blocks were built long before the dawn of the automobile, and there is literally no space to park unless you run up onto the sidewalk. Which some people do. Wildey parks his current peep car in the empty lot next to his house. Someone tries to steal the car? Whatever, Wildey will get another one. But no one does, and nobody messes with his house, either. He made sure the word spread: The po-po live here. Yeah, he has bars on the windows, but that wouldn’t stop most housebreakers. No, the thing that gives them pause is that they know how much a cop makes. It ain’t worth the bars.

Still, the previous tenant of his current abode was selling wet—cigarettes dipped in PCP. From time to time, junkies would knock on Wildey’s door and get the surprise of their lives when he would answer it in uniform. “What, you change your mind?” he asked, barely able to contain his laughter as they went booking down the narrow street.

As he drives back to Hope Street Wildey thinks about Batman and Robin.

Robin, especially.

When Wildey was coming up in the late 1990s in the Badlands, Batman and Robin were the two busiest narcotics cops working the streets. Both black guys in their late twenties, afraid of nothing. They’d swoop in with little warning, prompting cries from lookouts—“Yo, here come Batman and Robin!” Their real names didn’t matter to anybody, and they didn’t seek out publicity. Local papers caught on anyway and did a big story on them.

But back then Wildey wasn’t reading newspapers. Wildey was keeping himself indoors those days, but he liked when Batman and Robin would make an appearance because you could step outside and not feel like something was going to happen to you. He especially liked Robin, because he’d slip fifteen-year-old Wildey comic books, ask him, “What’s the word on the street, youngblood?” Not asking for real info, just making conversation.

A short while after the profiles appeared, a drug gang put a $5,000 hit on the heads of Batman and Robin. The small-time wannabe Tony Montanas were quickly rounded up—you don’t threaten a cop in Philadelphia and expect to be walking around for long. Batman and Robin shrugged it off.

Robin was the reason Wildey joined the force five years later. Yeah, he knew about his cop-grandfather, but he never met the man. Robin, though, was the real deal. To Wildey, Robin was how to be a black police officer in Philadelphia. When Wildey finally joined the force, he reached out to Robin to thank him. Robin said that he didn’t remember him but was proud of him anyway. “Still reading comics?” Wildey asked him. Robin just laughed. “I never read them. Those were for you youngbloods, calling me Robin and shit.” Yeah, Robin was his hero.

Until this year, that is.

In this bad, crazy year, Batman was one of the “tainted six” shuffled out of his NFU. And Robin …

Oh, Robin.

In late May, Robin was arrested while stealing drugs and money from a dealer in Southwest Philly. The FBI set up a sting with the help of a CI. Robin, a twenty-four-year vet, caught with $15 in his pocket and five pounds of pot in his jacket pocket. The feds had Robin on a wire, talking about all the dirt he’d done over the years. Even the police union didn’t want to bother with him. Wildey—now reading the papers—stared at Robin’s puffy face staring back at him.
Sorry to let you down, youngblood. But the streets got to me. They’ll get to you, too.

The scandal sent Wildey into a mental tailspin, one that lasted all the way through Memorial Day weekend, which was strangely cold and rainy. Would the streets get to me, too? Am I staying good just till the right bribe comes along?

Then came Monday, and the mayor and commissioner are naming Kaz Mahoney to head up a new “untouchable” narcotics field unit, and Wildey decides that no, the streets would not win.