“Swannee? Has there been any contact from the kids yet?”
A beat of silence as Singer listened. Then: “Shit. I’m losing patience. At least things are going well on this end. The sheriff signed off on our action plan.”
Newkirk thought, if a third party heard this phone conversation, they would be none the wiser. Singer and Swann were careful. They’d had years to practice saying things that got their message across but could not be considered incriminating. It sounded like Singer was concerned for the welfare of the Taylor children, and was angry there had been no progress on their disappearance, which is exactly what Singer, and the other ex-officers, were supposedly there for.
“Yes,” Singer said. “Gonzo’s heading up the investigation into Tom Boyd. Just like we talked about. Newkirk?”
Newkirk looked up to see Singer staring at him. “Newkirk is assisting me at command central. He’s also assigned to follow up on that Fiona Pritzle woman.”
Singer listened for a moment, moving his eyes off Newkirk. Newkirk wondered what Swann was saying.
“No, he’s okay,” Singer said in a low voice.
No, I’m not, Newkirk thought.
“You don’t look so good, Officer Newkirk.”
“I’m fine,” Newkirk lied, and thought: This is the nightmare, all right. The one where something happens that could threaten them, reveal them, and lead to something else, something worse, another crime. Even Singer, the master at controlling these kinds of things, may get swamped by the sheer magnitude of it. And the only way to keep ahead of the situation, to circumvent discovery and revelation, was to think and become truly evil, to become the antithesis of everything he believed in, everything he reached back for to justify his actions, all of the reasons he had become a cop in the first place. A cop: one of the good guys, a valuable part of a thin blue line that kept the scumbags at bay.
“The fuck is the matter with you, Newkirk?” Gonzalez said. “In for a penny, in for a pound. That was the deal.”
That was the deal. But…
“What are the odds on a couple of kids being there?” Newkirk asked. “Right there, where they could see everything? Ten minutes either way, or a mile down the road, and we wouldn’t be here now.” If his own kids were missing…he couldn’t even imagine how he’d feel.
Singer shrugged. “We can’t change the situation now. We can only deal with what we’ve got. Forget that odds business, Officer. It’s like trying to figure out why anything happens. You can’t do that. If the ass-hole on that street corner hadn’t had a video camera with him, nobody would have ever heard of Rodney King and there wouldn’t have been riots, murders, and beatings. We can’t play that game.”
“Fucking game,” Gonzalez said.
“I just wish it wasn’t kids,” Newkirk said.
“Oh, Jesus.” Gonzalez rolled his eyes.
“We all wish that,” Singer said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Nobody likes it. None of us.”
You saw her face, Newkirk wanted to say. She had a beautiful, wide-open face. And her eyes, big as they were, got even wider as she looked at them and seconds lapsed. She had seen something no child, no little girl, should ever have to see. She would be forever tainted. They had poisoned her, and the little boy. Ruined them.
“How many kids did you save?” Singer asked suddenly.
“What?”
“As a cop. Working the streets. All those domestic violence calls. You worked hundreds of them. You ever tally the kids you saved when you busted some scumbag father or live-in? Or took some crackhead whore in so her kids could be taken in by social services? How many, you think?”
Newkirk paused, thinking back, couldn’t even count them. “Hundreds,” he said.
“Hundreds,” Singer repeated solemnly. Then he cocked his head to the side, his eyes fixed on Newkirk. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to even suggest that because you saved so many kids these two don’t mean anything. But if they surface, and they talk, we go down. Simple as that. Between you, me, Gonzo, and Swann, we’ve saved and protected thousands of citizens. The same people who spit on us and riot like animals with half an excuse. We were the only adults in the room. The politicians and the media pandered to those animals, gave them what they wanted, cooed over their problems. Only us-the police-could keep the lid bolted down. We did good, Newkirk. We waded into the shit swamp and saved people’s lives so they could later bash in a truck driver’s head with a cinder block in the middle of the afternoon, on the street, and slap high fives about it. And so the media could say the riots were caused not by rioters, but because of the situation we created. Like those people had no choice but to act like animals. Like they had no responsibility for their own actions. That was our thanks, my friend. We were the ones being portrayed as the criminals.”
Newkirk said nothing.
“What was our reward?” Singer continued. “The Feds came in to oversee our department like we were the problem. No, we earned what we’ve got now,” Singer said, his voice a whisper. “We can’t let anyone, even kids, take that away from us.”
“That was the deal,” Gonzalez said.
Newkirk nodded weakly.
Gonzalez suddenly leaned forward and placed a huge hand on Newkirk’s knee and squeezed with surprising force. His black eyes burned. “Don’t fuck this up for me,” he said softly but with absolute menace. “Let me tell you what this is all about. My grandfather crossed the border into Texas every day of his adult life to pick beans. He never spoke English and couldn’t read Spanish. All he knew was to work hard and keep his mouth shut so what he did would benefit his kids and grandkids. Every day, when he came to work over the checkpoint, they made him strip naked so they could spray him down with pure DDT so he wouldn’t bring his filthy Mexican lice into their pure white country. He brought my dad with him a couple of times to see what he did to support his family, but my dad saw only the humiliation of a good man. It burned in my dad, and when he told me how they treated my grand-dad, he cried. My old man and my mom worked the fields of the San Joaquin Valley and supported me so I could go to the academy. They never spoke English either, but they made sure I did. Look at me now, Newkirk. Look at me.”
Newkirk didn’t dare look away, didn’t dare blink.
“Look where I live, what I’ve fucking got. I own more than the entire village my grandfather came from combined. I can take care of the people who took care of me. It’s the goddamned American dream, and you’re not going to fuck it up for me, understand? I ain’t going backwards now that I’m here. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You fucking better. You know what happened to Rodale when he forgot the deal we all made.”
Newkirk nodded.
“You in?” Singer asked. Everything rode on the answer.
“I’m in.”
Then he remembered the business card in his back pocket.
“ARCADIA POLICE DEPARTMENT,” Singer said, fingering the card. “Eduardo Villatoro, Detective. Then he handwrote ‘Retired’ under it. From our old stomping grounds.”
Gonzalez asked, “You know him?”
“I know him,” Singer said. “Actually, I know of him, because I always avoided meeting with him in person. He’s that pain-in-the-ass local who kept coming around asking questions. He couldn’t recognize a stone wall if he drove into it. Either that, or he didn’t care.”
Newkirk said, “This could be bad.”
Singer shook his head, dismissing the notion.
“What if he’s here because of, you know?”
“Then we’ll handle him,” Singer said calmly.
“Eduardo Villatoro!” Gonzalez said in heavily accented English, rolling his tongue around the name, just like Villatoro had done.
“He’s an ex-small-town cop,” Singer said, handing the card back to Newkirk.