Haunted (Michael Bennett 10)

He just nodded.

I didn’t want to get into the why of what he did. Status? Money? Who cares? I never made that much as a cop, but we had everything we needed. More than once I wondered if Brian’s crime had something to do with the loss of his mother years ago. Maeve’s memory still affected me every day, no matter what I was doing. Even after falling in love again. Who knows what it did to the kids, no matter how open we were with each other?

I just couldn’t believe it. What had happened to Brian? My son, arrested for selling drugs. Both meth and a new form of ecstasy. It was almost too much to process.

I hadn’t lectured or yelled. He knew what a terrible mistake he’d made. He realized what could happen. Now I needed answers. I had to get to the bottom of this and save him. It didn’t matter to me if he wanted to be saved or not.

I said, “You’ve got to help us. Help yourself. I need to know who gave you that shit to sell.”

He just stared at me. There was no answer. Barely an acknowledgment.

“And right there near Holy Name. The kids…” I caught myself. I channeled my inner Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am. I gave it thirty seconds. Half a minute of dead silence in this tiny room. The chilling sounds of the lockup drifting inside. Cell doors slamming. Men yelling insults back and forth. For the first time in my career, it was depressing to me.

Finally, I calmly said, “Who gave you the drugs?”

Brian’s voice cracked as he said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t tell you.” He was resolute.

My world crashed down around me.

Chapter 5

Brian and I were done for the day. There was nothing left to say. He wasn’t going to tell me what I needed to know. It could’ve been stupid stubborn teenage pride. Acting like a tough guy, or, more likely, fear of what would happen if he talked. That was relatively new in the culture cops operated in. The whole “snitches get stitches” attitude had popped up in inner-city neighborhoods and spread through music and TV shows. Now it seemed to be the mantra of anyone under thirty.

When the door opened, I had to snatch one more hug from my son. He wrapped his arms around me as well. Then I watched silently as a corrections officer led him away. He moved like a robot. His feet shuffling and the flip-flops making a sad slapping sound on the concrete floor.

I headed toward the exit, where my friend Vinny was waiting to lead me out. I said, “Is there anything you can do to protect him?”

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “We have Brian in what we call the nerd ward. Hackers and financial guys who decided they weren’t going to follow the rules. Those sorts of perps. He only comes into contact with the general population if he goes out to exercise once a week or if we have to move people around because of trouble. But I promise, Mike, we’re keeping a close eye on him.”

This was special treatment because I was a cop. I wasn’t going to refuse it.

When he told me Brian was safe for now, I thought I’d break down and cry right in front of him.

What did people without friends working in the jail do? What about people with no access to a decent lawyer? It made me think about cases I had worked and how I would persuade people to cooperate. Now I saw that they often had no other choice.

Then Vinny took my arm, and as we started to walk, he leaned in closer and said, “The rumor is that the DA’s office wants to make an example of Brian. Wants to show that they’ll go after a white kid as hard as a black kid. And they want to look fair by not showing preference to a cop’s son.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the truth like that all at once. It felt like a punch in the gut. I slapped the cinder-block wall in frustration. The jolt of pain through my body reminded me that I had stitches in that hand. Blood stained the white bandage.

Vinny draped his arm over my shoulder and subtly headed us toward the exit.

I found myself shuffling, just like Brian. I wondered if it had something to do with this place.

This place I would never look at the same way again.

Chapter 6

When I left the jail, I knew exactly what I had to do. By the time I got back to my van in Queens, clouds had drifted in and given the streets a particularly gloomy look. I couldn’t go in to the office. I was on leave. Officially for my injury, but unofficially for beating the murder suspect Laszlo Montez. Thank God no one asked too many questions about a guy who put a knife to a teenage girl’s throat and murdered two people.

My sergeant told me to just go with it. There might be an investigation later, but for now I was a hero who’d been stabbed by a murder suspect. The city sure didn’t care much about heroes’ kids.

But I was still a cop. And, much more important, a father.

Like any cop worth his salt, I had informants. The word snitch had fallen out of favor in police work over the last few years. But it’s hard to find words that rhyme with informant. “Snitches get stitches” is catchier than something like “Informants get dormant.”

Informants are a fact of police work. People like to point out all the problems with using informants, but few understand the benefits. They can go places cops can’t. Cops can’t be everywhere at once. Informants help in that effort. They also give insight into how a criminal thinks.

Jodie Foster didn’t need Anthony Hopkins’s help in The Silence of the Lambs because his character was a Boy Scout. He was a psychopath, and he found the break in the case. Informants are vital and horrible at the same time. And cops need them no matter how they feel about them.