Danny sits in the rear of an unmarked police car as it rolls past the welcome sign for the city of Kankakee, Illinois. In the front seats sit the same officers who were in the panel van earlier, his handlers for the undercover operation. They are detectives with KAMEG—the Kankakee Area Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Group. Danny has forgotten their names. Both were friendly to him before, but now things are different. Ever since the bust went awry, they’ve been alternating between cold indifference and fiery antagonism.
“You know you could have taken these damn handcuffs off me,” Danny says, shifting his body to find a comfortable way to sit in the seat while his hands are still locked behind his back.
The officer in the passenger seat—a fortysomething man with blond hair, sideburns, and a mustache—shifts around to look at Danny. His eyes glare at Danny with nearly the same rage that had been burning in Mitch’s eyes.
“You’re lucky we’re not throwing your ass in jail,” the officer says.
“Hey,” Danny says, shrugging his shoulders, “I did my part.”
“You were supposed to say the code phrase after you saw the coke. Not before.”
“He was about to pull it out,” Danny says. “I was sure of it.”
“It’s our fault,” says the driver, a man about Danny’s age with a buzz cut that made him look as if he just got out of the marines. “We assumed this high school dropout knew the difference between before and after.”
“My three-year-old knows the difference between before and after,” says the officer with the mustache.
“Yeah, but your son’s human.” The driver looks in the rearview mirror and fixes his eyes on Danny. “Not a rat.”
“Very funny,” Danny says. “You weren’t calling me a rat when I agreed to help you.”
“That was back when we thought you were actually going to help us,” the cop says. “Not screw us over.”
“If it was up to me,” the mustached officer says, “I’d put your lying ass in jail. You reneged on your agreement as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, it’s not up to you,” Danny says, unable to hide a smile. “The state’s attorney says I fulfilled the terms of my deal.”
The cop in the passenger seat looks over at the driver. “I told you he was a slick operator.”
The driver says nothing, and quiet overtakes the car. Danny looks out the window. The car crosses a bridge over the Kankakee River. Its water is gray in the January light, and the trees lining the banks are leafless and lean.
Soon they’re driving through downtown Kankakee, a short strip of old brick storefronts. With a population of about twenty-five thousand people, Kankakee is a nice little town—quaint, quiet, and close enough to Chicago that residents can get their big-city fix whenever they need to.
Danny watches the storefronts roll by, remembering growing up here. He’d ridden his bike into town on summer afternoons. He’d gone swimming in the river. He’d snuck into train cars at the old depot and smoked marijuana with his friends.
His parents were well off, and he’d never been left wanting. As an adult, he’d done well for himself—just not by obeying the law. Up until recently, he’d been making four thousand dollars a week selling cocaine. He’d owned a riverfront house in an upscale neighborhood, and he’d also been making enough to lease a split-level town house for his girlfriend, Nancy. He paid for her place because he didn’t want her and her eight-year-old son, Benji, to be close to his drug-dealing operations.
Life had been great. He’d been planning to buy a boat.
But then KAMEG agents raided his Aroma Park home, seizing ten thousand dollars in cash and two hundred grams of cocaine—with a street value of twenty thousand. The story of the narrow escape that he told to Mitch was a complete fabrication. The truth is he’d been busted red-handed.
A month ago, he’d had the world at his feet. Now he’s sleeping in Nancy’s town house, trying to figure out how to make the monthly payment. All the money he had in the world is gone. Life as he once knew it is now over.
“Why are you looking so gloomy?” the officer in the passenger seat says to him. “You just lucked into a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” Danny says. “What am I supposed to do now?”
As the police car rolls up in front of Nancy’s town house, the two officers look at each other, incredulous. The driver turns around and glares at Danny.
“Why don’t you try getting a job like everybody else.”