Bernard Schaffer
SUPERBIA
WHAT IS SUPERBIA?
Superbia is any typical suburban community filled with grandfatherly pedophiles and drug zombies who hide their stashes in dirty diapers. It’s a place where rogue cops rely on an angry six-foot bunny called the Truth Rabbit for really tough interrogations.
Superbia is where doing the right thing can be a fatal career move and the bosses are more dangerous than any crook on the street.
Superbia is a completely fictional book written by a real-life police detective who lost his badge for telling this story, then came right back to write a sequel.
Superbia has been called the most subversive police book written since Serpico and its author the 21st Century successor to Joseph Wambaugh and Ed McBain.
Superbia is the funniest, scariest, most brutal account of what good cops truly experience and most of the world never gets to know.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. No reference to any real person, living or dead, should be inferred.
Welcome to Superbia
Thirty-six thousand police officers protect and serve the citizens of New York City. The five boroughs of New York combined in 1898, creating a citywide jurisdiction of four hundred sixty-eight square miles. Thirty-six thousand cops. One Commissioner. Same uniform. Same directives. More than twice the size of the FBI.
By comparison, the City of Philadelphia is surrounded by three counties, all of which are broken into small municipalities that operate independently of one another. Montgomery County is four hundred and eighty seven square miles, but contains over sixty individual municipalities. Bucks County and Delaware County are much the same. Different governments. Different police departments.
It is a world of cul-de-sacs, shopping centers, age-restricted housing developments, diners, and fast-food chains. Big box stores. Apartment complexes. Farms that make more money selling tickets to their Halloween maze than they do on crops. Low-income housing clusters. Absentee landlords.
Low-budget newspapers with bored, lazy reporters. Movie Theater multiplexes. Rich kids taking pills. Rich kids stealing to get more pills. Rich kids selling pills. Rich kids overdosing on pills. Rich kids dying.
Small towns. Big towns determined to stay small towns by thinking small, planning small, making campaign promises to keep the budget small.
The people in charge are the people who have been in charge. They are the people who will remain in charge. Keeping progress down by keeping taxes down.
Everything is perfect, or at least, better than it would be if you lived in the city.
Somewhere, at the bottom of the barrel, are the people who show up when the cracks in such a carefully crafted world begin to appear.
Welcome to Superbia.
WINTER
1
Emergency tones sound like air raid sirens at four in the morning.
“Seventeen cars, burglary in progress.”
Frank O’Ryan jerked awake in his patrol car, kicking the pedals, slamming his knees into the steering wheel. He jumped up to look around the parking lot. The industrial building in front of him was empty. The January sky, pitch black.
Frank rubbed his eyes and waited, trying to decipher what he’d just heard.
“Seventeen cars be advised the resident is reporting a black male inside of her house. Unknown weapons at this time.”
Frank threw the car into drive and stepped on the gas, dropping axle onto asphalt as he bottomed out speeding onto the roadway. He floored it through an intersection and took the turn without using the brakes.
He switched on the lights, reflecting red and blue off stop signs that he ignored, making one car pull so hard to the right that it blew out a tire on the curb. It had been swerving anyway, he thought. “Drunk,” Frank said. “Serves you right.”
He killed the lights and then the headlights, coasting into the neighborhood toward the caller’s address. He parked a half block from the house and swirled water around his mouth to clear out the taste of old coffee and sleep. He spat on the asphalt and hurried up the sidewalk, seeing Sgt. Joe Hector walking out of the home.
Heck looked back at the front door as he pointed around the side of the house and said, “He went that way?”
A middle-aged woman clutched her robe to her neck and said, “He ran out the back and kept going. I saw him in my bedroom. He was going to rape me!”
Frank’s eyebrows raised. “This a sexual assault, Heck?”
“No,” Heck said quietly. “She woke up and saw a black guy in her doorway. When she yelled, he took off running.”
“He was going to rape me, oh my God!” the woman wailed.
“Hey, calm down, okay?” Frank said. “Go back inside your house and lock the door. We’ll come back.”
Heck poked his head around the corner of the house, looking into the darkness. Her backyard opened up into a small wooded area that separated two neighborhoods. One cul-de-sac backed up against another. “I don’t see any motion lights going off down there.”
“We sure this guy’s even real? Any chance she had a bad dream?”
“Only one way to find out.” Heck pulled out his flashlight and headed across the berm. He stayed low to the ground, walking silently across the grass, sensing where the branches and leaves laid as he stepped. “You go that way and I’ll check over here.”
Motion lights burst to life the moment they descended, flooding them and the area with pale light. “So much for the stealth approach,” Frank muttered.
A kitchen light flipped on inside the house closest to Frank and a homeowner came out, tying his bathrobe around his waist. “What’s going on?”
“Go back in your house,” Frank said. “We’re looking for someone.”
“What did he say?” a woman said from inside the kitchen
“He said they’re looking for someone.”
Frank heard the screen door open again and the woman followed the man outside, both of them falling in behind Frank. “What did he do?” the man said.
“Would you please shut the fuck up and go back inside your fucking house so I can find this person? Please!”
“This… this is my property,” the man sputtered.
“Good. Fine. Stay there, for all I care,” Frank said. He checked under the car in the driveway and kept going. There were a dozen more parked along the street. He stood up on his toes to see where Heck had gone. There was a figure keeping to the shadows, coming toward him. Walking with his head low. Weaving on and off the sidewalk to avoid being seen in the street lights.
“Heck? Is that you?” Frank could see his breath in front of his face when he spoke.
No answer.
Frank aimed his flashlight straight at him, lighting up the dark brown face of the young man coming toward him. The kid squinted in the harsh light, still keeping his hands inside his jacket pockets. “Don’t move!” Frank shouted. He wrenched his gun out of its holster and leveled the weapon at the center of the kid’s chest. “I swear to Christ don’t you move!”
“I live around the corner,” he said.
Heck came running out of a backyard from across the street. He leapt over a small fence, shouting, “You got him? You got him?”