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CHAPTER 1
That January, a month before Sam Kelson took a bullet in the head, word came from a snitch that a kid on the Northwest Side was selling the best dope in Chicago. High grade. Cheap. Lines around the block until a cruiser turned the corner and then a magic disappearing act. Kid looked fifteen, maybe sixteen. They called him Bicho. Spanish for Bug. Bicho because he was little and skinny. Bicho because he scurried into a hole whenever a cop showed.
The job went to Kelson, eight years on narcotics, the past five undercover.
Kelson always partnered with Greg Toselli. They went through academy together. Their careers paralleled so closely they could've held hands while riding down the highway on motorcycles.
'Not this time,' said Darrin Malinowski, commander of the narcotics division. 'Toselli's a hothead. Go it alone. Keep it quiet. See what it is.'
'Why the special deal?' Kelson asked.
'This is a kid. You've got a kid, right?'
'A nine-year-old girl.'
'Mine's thirteen. Close enough. You know how it goes. If he looks like someone we can fix, let's take him off the street and put him in a program.'
'You're soft,' Kelson said. 'I like that. What if he can't be fixed?' 'We slam him against a wall and break every bone in his little body.'
'Yeah, you're a marshmallow,' Kelson said. 'A feather pillow. A dish of pudding.'
'You always say what you're thinking?' Malinowski said.
'If I said half of what I was thinking, I'd be divorced, friendless, and, after a day or two on the street, dead.'
Kelson disagreed with Malinowski on Toselli. He wasn't such a hothead. 'I've got principles is all,' Toselli would say.
Principles like First in on a raid. And Safety off. And No man left behind. And Expect the unexpected from others, and do the kind of unexpected things others don't expect.
The principles worked for him. They worked for the men and women he partnered with too. On the second undercover job he and Kelson did together, a crackhead dealer got spooked and held a crusty revolver against Kelson's ear. The man's hand trembled, and it seemed likely he would shoot Kelson by accident if not on purpose. In a single fluid move, Toselli slapped the crackhead's gun hand, grabbed his wrist, wrenched the gun around so it pointed at his belly, and pumped a bullet into his kidney. Toselli's signature takedown.
That was the first time he saved Kelson's life.
'No one I'd rather have watching my back,' Kelson told him later when Toselli and a date came to Christmas Eve dinner. Like Kelson, Toselli was thirty-four, but he dated young. He liked white women, black women, Hispanics, a girl from Malaysia. 'Turn out the lights and it's all the same,' he said, 'but I swear I know the difference between eighteen and thirty.'
'Grow up,' Kelson said.
'Don't want to. How old's your daughter?'
'Don't ever.'
'Just messing.'
'Don't.'
Toselli was crossing a hard line they kept between the personal and the professional. When Kelson said Don't, he also meant Don't tell each other about the ones we love. Don't let me feel for you beyond the lockstep coordination we need when taking down an armed dealer high on PCB. Don't make me care, either to love or to hate – though loving's the real danger.
'Just don't,' Kelson said.
Kelson drove an impounded BMW solo into the Ravenswood neighborhood where Bicho did business. The January sun had softened the snow at the curb, and Kelson crunched the car over ice crystals and cut the engine. He got in line with a bunch of addicts at the head of an alley and bought a teener of coke and two pink OxyContin tablets. When he gave Bicho the twenties, the kid said, 'Gracias, viejo.' A polite kid, but he had wild, worrisome eyes.
'Hasta mañana,' Kelson said.
The next day, he bought an eight ball and four OxyContin tablets. The day after, he bought another eight ball.
'You chug a lot of cola, viejo,' Bicho said. Old man, the kid called him, though Kelson looked in the mirror and didn't see it.
'You got a name besides Bicho?' Kelson asked.
'Nope.' The kid looked to the strung-out woman next in line. 'Hola, chica.'
Every time Kelson asked for more coke or pills, the kid obliged. 'Sky's the limit, viejo. How high d'you want to fly? I'll take you there.'
But something about the kid got to Kelson. Did he see pain in those wild eyes? Did he hear playful innocence in his insistence on calling him old man?
Ten years ago, when Kelson's wife Nancy quit the department and went back to school, in the flipside of his deal with Toselli, Kelson promised never to bring home stories about kids like Bicho.
The stories were too sad.
Too dirty.
And too tempting to Nancy.
She loved working as a cop and she'd done the job better than anyone else. She went through academy with Kelson and Toselli, quietly putting the other cadets to shame – all except their classmate DeMarcus Rodman, a six-foot-eight, 275-pound giant. She did more pull-ups than even Rodman. In hand-to-hand exercises, she threw down men twice her size. She aced the mental tests. When a sergeant asked why a pretty girl like her wanted to be a cop, she said, 'Because men like you treat me like just a pretty girl, and because my mom and dad want me to be a doctor' – and she left it at that.
In the middle of one of the hand-to-hands, Kelson told her he thought tough women were hot. So she hit him in the nose with an elbow strike. When the bleeding stopped, he asked her out for dinner. She said no. Two weeks later, bleeding from an ear, he asked for a third time, and she said yes. They married a year after their first date.
When she got pregnant with Sue Ellen, she surprised Kelson, her mom and dad, and, if you trusted the look in her eyes, herself by returning to school to pick up the science classes she needed to apply for med school. 'When I finish a shift, I'm so pumped up, I want to hit someone,' she told Kelson. 'Seems like a bad thing in a mom.'
'Sexy,' he said. She gave him a dangerous look, so he added, 'You'll be a good mom. A great one.'
She took her MCATs two weeks after giving birth to Sue Ellen, and her scores were good but not good enough. She could return to the department or pick between veterinary or dental school.
'I don't think you have the temperament to stick your fingers in people's mouths,' Kelson said, 'though I can see you pulling teeth.'
'I hate cats,' she said. 'Can a vet work only with dogs?'
'I don't know. I never heard of it.'
So, along with two partners, she now ran the Healthy Smiles Dental Clinic. She once threatened to knock the incisors out of a seven-year-old who bit her, but mostly the reviews were good and the business thrived.
Now Kelson kept his stories about the street – where Nancy would prefer to spend her days – to himself. Nancy, for her part, promised never to talk about teeth. Or gums. 'Gums gross me out,' Kelson said.
After his eighth purchase from Bicho, though, he broke the promise. He would wake up thinking about the kid's wild eyes. When he watched Sue Ellen playing on the living-room rug or doing homework at the kitchen table, he imagined Bicho beside her.
'I can't get him out of my head,' he told Nancy. 'I think he's older than Malinowski says. Sixteen or seventeen. But he's still a kid.'
'But who is he?' she asked. 'Where's he come from? What makes you think you can save him?'
'I don't know,' Kelson said. 'A guy I talked to on the street says his real name's Alejandro Rodriguez. That's more than anyone else knows.'
'Well, he doesn't belong to you,' Nancy said. 'Kick him out of your thoughts. There's only room for Sue Ellen and me and all the good people and good things you like to think about.' She always looked at the world coolly. Her toughness intimidated some men.
He also broke his promise to Malinowski by talking to Toselli. No names or details, just one question. 'If you had a street dealer you didn't know what to make of – someone you wanted to save even though you suspected he was as bad as the worst – would you trust your instincts and help him?'
'Never happen,' Toselli said, 'and I'd bust his ass even if it did.'
'You act hard, but I know you better,' Kelson said.
But some kids are beyond saving, and Bicho looked like one of them. Over the next month, Kelson watched him throw a penniless junkie down on an icy sidewalk. He saw him cheat addicts too broken to argue, sending them to whore themselves before he fed their need. He noticed the bulge in his pocket where he kept a little gun.
'All this dope, Bicho,' Kelson said, 'what'll you do if someone robs you?'
The speed with which the kid got the tiny Beretta out of his pocket and shoved it against Kelson's belly stunned Kelson. Bicho opened his wild eyes super-wide. 'I pop him, viejo.' And the gun went back in his pocket so fast you would've thought it was a vanishing coin.
Kelson told the division commander, 'We've got to take him down.'
'Do it,' Malinowski said.
Kelson said, 'Someone trusts the boy with the store. No buffer.'
'Set it up. Let's take whoever wrecked him too. But be careful and keep it quiet. Something feels wrong about this.'
CHAPTER 2
On one of those viciously cold February days when the sky is clear and the wind seems to hold a knife to your throat, Kelson strapped his KelTec semiautomatic inside his jacket. A couple of rounds would shred Bicho's Beretta if they got down to that. 'What if I want to make a big buy?' Kelson asked him.
Bicho looked at the snaking line behind Kelson. 'Sky's the —'
'Fuck the sky,' Kelson said.
The tone brought the kid's wild eyes back to him. His hand drifted toward his gun pocket. 'All right, viejo, what kind of big buy?'
'A kilo of coke and five hundred tabs of Oxy.'
Bicho let his fingers brush against the pocket. 'Hell, what kind of fucked-up friends you got?'
'Friends with friends,' Kelson said. 'Friends that'll pay my friends' friends to be friends. Out in the 'burbs. No competition to you.'
Bicho thought about the proposition for only a second. 'I can do that.'
'You want to ask your supplier?'
'You don't want to ask stupid questions, viejo.'
'Worry is all.'
'You know that snowstorm in December? It's like that at my coke man's house every day. He needs a plow to get out his front door. Don't worry about what I can get. Worry about if you got the money to buy it.'
'You know that storm?' Kelson said. 'Think if snow was green and paper. That's my house. If this works out, I'll bring you and your coke man over to party.'
Bicho smirked. 'Let's keep it on the street.'
Kelson turned the screw. 'Thing is, if I'm buying that large, I want to deal with your man direct.'
'Ain't going to happen,' the kid said. 'He don't come out of his house, you know.'
'Talk to him. For something like this, maybe he'll put on his snow boots.'
The next time they met, Bicho said, 'He'll meet you. But no bitching about the price.' The number he gave him jumped from low market to high.
'No discount for quantity?' Kelson asked.
'Quantity's expensive too,' the kid said. 'Hard to get. High risk.'
Kelson measured him. 'Fuck it,' he said, and turned away.
Bicho laughed – the only time Kelson ever heard him laugh – and said, 'All right, viejo,' and he cut the price by thirty percent.
Kelson reached a hand to shake Bicho's. But Bicho dropped his hand back to his gun pocket.
'Easy boy,' Kelson said. 'We're brothers now.'
CHAPTER 3
Kelson set up the bust. He told Toselli and four other narcotic cops about Bicho and the Northwest Side operation. When he finished, the division commander took questions. Toselli looked stung by the slight. 'You couldn't've told us?'
'What would you have wanted to do if I did?' Malinowski asked.
'Crush the kid.'
'My point. Now you get your chance.'
They planned a standard six-man action. Kelson at the alley mouth with Bicho and his supplier. Toselli and the four others scattered at a hundred-yard perimeter – Toselli at one end of the alley, the others in a van, in a storefront, and in the shadows of a neighboring house at the opposite end. A separate team would shoot video.
Protocol said Kelson should make the bust unarmed so the supplier could frisk him. But while the others slipped into their vests and strapped on their weapons, the division commander pulled Kelson aside and said, 'Carry a full mag on this one,' and, when Kelson gave him a doubtful look, repeated what he said earlier. 'Something feels wrong.'
The KelTec weighed against Kelson's ribs as he climbed from the BMW and walked to the alley. Bicho usually opened shop at nine in the morning and disappeared around noon or after the last stragglers stumbled up and laid balled dollar bills in his palm. Now it was midnight, and the street was empty except for a van idling at the curb a half block away and a man smoking a cigarette outside a twenty-four-hour laundromat. The kid shivered in the cold.
'Where's the boss?' Kelson asked.
Bicho nodded him into the alley – off video but in the sightline of Toselli at the far end. Kelson followed the kid past a pile of broken wood pallets and an upended trash barrel to where the light dimmed. Another two steps would dissolve him in the dark.
Kelson stopped. 'Where's —'
'You got the money?' Bicho asked.
Kelson pulled a wad of fifties and twenties from inside his jacket. He fanned the bills so the boy could see. 'Your turn.'
But Bicho swept his gun from his pocket. 'You're a cop.'
Kelson's fear felt like a blade on his neck. 'Huh?' 'A narc.'
Undercover cops trained for moments like this – in sessions paid for by taxpayers, in conversations with other undercover cops, in sweaty nightmares. Kelson forced a grin. 'All right, all right, you don't want my money, I know people that do.' He stuck the bills back in his jacket – and his hand came out with the KelTec.
The sound of gunshots slammed against the alley walls. The noises came so fast that one seemed to overtake the other in a single explosion.
Kelson and the boy crashed to the cold pavement.
Last thing Kelson saw, Bicho's pip of a gun flashed in the dark alley.
Last thing he saw, his own hands flung from his body as if his arms detached at his shoulders.
Last thing, he was falling, falling, and the fifties and twenties scattered in the windless air like a blizzard.
Narcotics cops swarmed from their posts, their boots and vinyl glinting in the dark, their guns hot in their hands. One cop radioed for help and swung his pistol left and right in case Bicho had armed friends. Others rounded the wall into the alley and ran to Kelson. He had a neat bloody pock in his forehead. He looked dead. Coming from the far end, Toselli reached the boy first. Bicho had a hole like a melon in his chest. Toselli saw right through to the bloody pavement. He drew a sharp breath and shouldered through the other cops. For a moment, it looked as if he would slug Kelson to bring him to life. Instead, he slapped him with an open palm, the meat of his hand cracking against Kelson's cheekbone, spraying blood.
One of the other cops said, 'What are you —'
Like a diver plunging into a black lake, Toselli sucked a breath and mashed his lips to Kelson's. He gave him life from his own lungs. When he came up – eyes wet with tears, lips oily with blood – he drew another breath. Then he plunged into another kiss of life, another gift of what only God could give if you believed in God and something just as miraculous if you didn't.
For twenty minutes, as an ambulance zigged through city streets toward the alley, Toselli breathed for Kelson. When other cops offered to take a turn, he ignored them. He bucked off the supporting hands they rested on his back. More than a lover, more than a father, Toselli claimed Kelson's body as his own.
Then the ambulance crunched over the ice and garbage into the alley, its siren screaming between the brick walls of the abutting buildings. Toselli stopped and stared down at Kelson. Then Kelson, as if responding to his friend's fierce will, breathed once on his own. That was the second time Toselli saved him.
The paramedics strapped an oxygen mask over Kelson's face and loaded him into the back of the ambulance.
The siren screamed again, and the ambulance backed from the alley. Far, far away, Kelson heard a metallic voice – something singing, something of bells.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Trouble in Mind"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Michael Wiley.
Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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