VENTURA “BENNY” MARTINEZ HADN’T SLEPT IN DAYS. THIS FRIGID DECEMBER NIGHT, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, HE SAT AWAKE, STIFF-BACKED AND TENSE IN A living room chair. His pudgy, sweaty fingers gripped the handle of a .44 Ruger equipped with an infrared laser to illuminate whoever would be coming for him.
His wife, Sonia, and their two small children slept on a mattress in the dining room behind him. There, they would be insulated from any bullets that tore through the walls.
Benny locked his eyes on the front door of his two-story brick Philadelphia row house and waited. Maybe tonight he’d get whacked. Maybe tomorrow. He didn’t know when. He just knew it would happen.
Even on those rare nights when he could briefly doze off, slumped in a chair, his chin hitting his chest, he’d bolt upright in a cold sweat. He had a recurring nightmare in which Jeff Cujdik, the cop he had worked for as a drug informant, blasted his face off with a shotgun.
Benny inched toward the living room windows. He split the plastic window blinds with his fingers and checked the front porch, then slowly moved his eyes up and down the block—over and over. A streetlight cast a dull, shadowy glow. No one was there. At least Benny couldn’t spot anyone.
Benny stood stock-still.
“Babe, babe, what are you doing?” Sonia asked.
“Shhh,” Benny whispered.
In the darkness, Benny listened to the sounds of the street: a far-off police siren, a dog’s growl, a hip-hop pulse blaring from a car stereo, the buzz-saw whine of the El.
“I can’t take this no more,” Sonia said. “We’ve gotta leave up out of Philly.”
“Nah. It will be okay,” Benny told her. But Sonia knew Benny didn’t believe his own words.
For three years, Benny had been happy and safe in this tan row house sandwiched into a narrow block of Pacific Street. It was a neighborhood where Latinos, blacks, and whites judged one another only by who went to work and who was on welfare.
Now he feared a silent sniper, maybe crouched behind a parked car or hidden in the shadow of a neighbor’s porch.
Benny never thought it would come to this. Just a few months earlier, he’d considered Jeff a blood brother. Benny’s kids called him Uncle Jeff.
They were an unlikely pair. Jeff, tall, muscular, and confident, with chiseled movie-star good looks, came from a family of cops; Benny, short, plump, and street-smart, was an ex–drug dealer. Yet they developed a bond, bitching about their wives, gushing over their kids. And they both got an adrenaline rush from danger.
Jeff was a narcotics cop who relied on Benny to bust drug dealers. Time and time again, Benny ticked off names for Jeff. He told Jeff what they sold, where they lived, and the places they stashed the drugs. Then Benny made drug buys, so Jeff could get a search warrant to raid the dealers’ homes and make arrests. Benny was rewarded for each buy he made, and Jeff’s arrest numbers skyrocketed. They stroked each other’s egos. They rose together, mismatched allies, and both became stars of the game.
Benny was practically a lifer in the world of Philadelphia police informants. The tenure of the typical informant was short. Most ran out of people to roll on, and after they made lots of drug buys, dealers could figure out who had dimed them out. But Benny was the king. He had worked for Jeff for seven years. He was smooth and convincing, the perfect con man. Dealers believed Benny was part of their world because he had been for so long. That is, until something went terribly wrong.
Now Benny was convinced that Jeff wanted him dead. And maybe worse, so did Philly’s drug dealers, who’d figured out Benny was a snitch. He had a target on his back. Too many people knew where to find him and how to gun him down.
Benny knew he couldn’t live like this anymore.
He came up with a plan. Tomorrow was the day.