Bloome remembered the feeling he’d get whenever they’d select their next target. It might have been nothing more than a name and a photograph on the bulletin board at that point, but this man was the target and that meant he was going down. Didn’t matter if the man would eventually confess or keep his mouth shut. Didn’t matter if they’d get full-color video of the crime or one unreliable witness. Bloome would look at that face on the board and know he was on his way to prison. It might take an hour, it might take a week. But the man had a date in the courtroom no matter what they had to do to make that happen.
Sometimes that meant shortcuts. He remembered the first time he saw Jameson put false information on a police report. They picked up a dealer just before he put a bag in his car. On the report, the bag was already in the trunk. Bloome had some misgivings about it at first. All the years he’d been in Narcotics, he’d never lied on a report. Not once. But Jameson took him aside and asked him a simple question: “Was that bag going in his car?”
“Yes,” Bloome said.
“Does the case get complicated if we stop him before that happens?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a small chance he walks because of that?”
“Yes.”
That’s all he had to say. They were getting the right result, even if that meant a white lie.
Not only did they make the case, they both got commendations.
It was Bloome’s first lesson in how the normal rules didn’t apply to them anymore. Not to SIS.
He remembered the first time he broke down a door without a warrant. The first time he searched a car with no probable cause. It was all a new part of doing good police work, taking weight off the streets, making arrests. Nobody ever questioned the shortcuts. They were making their numbers and Chicago was becoming a safe, more drug-free city. That’s all that mattered.
He remembered the first time Jameson took money off a dealer. Money that the dealer wouldn’t miss, Ray had said. Money he’d make back in eight hours. Money that would sit in a metal drawer downtown for a few months until maybe somebody else took it.
All that unpaid overtime they were putting in. This was just a little compensation. Totally justified.
Bloome didn’t sleep that night. He thought they’d catch up to him.
They never did.
It got easier the next time. Easier again when it was two or three cops working together.
You had to take the money then. You were part of the team and it would make everyone else nervous if you didn’t.
The suits got more expensive. You started seeing manicures and hundred-dollar haircuts. You started seeing the cars taken from the dealers parked in the lot outside, gleaming in the sunshine. Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Porsches. Usually black, always fast.
Nobody said a word. In fact, it was more high-profile arrests, more commendations, more pictures with the mayor, more detectives from around the city wanting to be a part of SIS.
And then came Darius Cole.
It was Jameson who first brought up the name, based on a recorded conversation between two high-level dealers. Bloome remembered Cole from his first year in Narcotics and the airtight RICO case the feds had put together to put him away for two consecutive lifetimes. It seemed impossible now that a man who’d been in prison for years could still have such influence in Chicago, two hundred miles away. But Jameson put Cole’s name on the board and the two men got to work.
While Bloome and Jameson were putting together a case on Cole and the men who worked for him, those same men were busy putting together a case on Bloome and Jameson. They knew everything about the two detectives. Where they lived. Where their children went to school. Every case they’d ever worked on. Every bribe they’d ever taken. Until the day Cole contacted them both directly on a prison guard’s cell phone and gave them a choice. I’ll make you fucking rich men or I’ll make you fucking dead men. Your choice.
They took the money. Every month, in an envelope delivered by one of Cole’s men, an ex-gangbanger named Marcos Quintero. At first, Cole was also giving them tips on members of rival organizations, which led to even more arrests than before, their reputations in the unit rising even higher.
We’re still doing good police work, the two men told themselves. And yes, making some good money on the side. Everybody wins.
But Cole’s tips eventually turned into requests for favors. Then those requests started to sound like orders.
When Tyron Harris came along, the first man who actually looked smart enough to take over Cole’s territory, Jameson tried to make a new deal. End the relationship with the man in prison, start fresh with this new kid, somebody we can break in the right way. Somebody who won’t make so many demands.
Cole can’t touch us. That was the idea.
Now Jameson and Harris were both dead. And here I am, Bloome said to himself. Look at where I’m standing. Look at what I was prepared to do to protect myself.
If Jameson was here, Bloome thought, we’d talk this over, see if we had any chance to make this look right. Three dead cops in a quarry, three members of the most elite unit in the city . . . in the middle of the night, with no backup. Nobody else knowing anything about the operation. How do you explain that?
Bloome could already see himself giving his version of this story to Internal Affairs. Then the superintendent. Then the mayor. Then a federal prosecutor in open court.
So it better be one fuck of a story.