Canary Read Free

and weed. Wait wait. What if he’s not here picking up a book? Of course he’s not here for a book.
This is probably the place where D. scores his weed.
Party’s running low, so they ask D. to conjure up some more. He doesn’t have a car of his own (and shouldn’t be driving anyway) so he finds the only sober person with a car in the general vicinity.
Me.
I feel like a world-class idiot.
So Thanksgiving Eve, as my drug counselor Dad is boarding a plane in California, I’m in South Philly on a drug run.
Happy Thanksgiving, right?
     
    Undercover narcotics officer Benjamin F. Wildey, 32, seated behind the wheel of his unmarked car, maintains a laserlike focus on the front door of the row house. Feels like the city’s one big freezer tonight. Not much warmer in this piece of junk hooptie, either. The whole day’s been an icy raw mess with rain and sleet and Wildey out on the street for most of it. He glances at his watch. Look at that. Thanksgiving, as of three minutes ago. Time flies when you’re posted in your car doing surveillance based on a tip from a couple of desperate snitches.
    At first glance there’s nothing about the place on South Ninth Street that screams “drug house.” Clean unmarred sidewalk, freshly painted window frames, refaced brickwork. This was the kind of South Philly row home that immigrants struggled to buy for $4,000 back in the day and now could easily fetch $400,000.
    But a snitch swore that a guy at this address is doing a lot of slinging with college kids. Word is he’s a midlevel dealer who calls himself “Chuckie Morphine” and specializes in small-time trappers who work the universities, sometimes doing direct sales to kids who are leery of driving to the Badlands or Pill Hill. Years ago this whole neighborhood—Passyunk—used to be solid working class, maybe a little sketchy in places. Wildey remembers those days. But now it has gastropubs and consignment shops and pop-up restaurants and all that other hipster catnip. Kids feel safe popping down here.
    If the past few hours are any indication, it’s clear
something’s
going on inside this house on South Ninth. Lots of visitors. Could be a pre-Thanksgiving party, sure, but why is everybody staying for only a few minutes at a time? With no music? No noise of any kind?
    What Wildey needs is a legal way inside the house. One that won’t raise any objections from the Man in the Widener Building. Doing narcotics work these days, you’ve got to be careful. Knuckleheads, perverts, and money grubbers in the department have made the job difficult of late. Take the guys whose blazing stupidity got them featured in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series a bunch of years back.
    Yeah.
That
Pulitzer. A narcotics squad in the Badlands came up with the brilliant idea of busting neighborhood bodegas for selling small plastic baggies. Questionable at best. But that wasn’t the stupid part. Once inside the bodegas, the narcs helped themselves to hoagies, Tastykakes, batteries, milk, loose cash, whatever. You know, because Tastykakes and hoagies are so expensive.
    Now, skimming from a dealer is a time-honored Philadelphia law enforcement tradition. But the thing with skimming from a dealer is, you have to actually skim from the dealer—the perp. You don’t steal from the frightened immigrant couple selling plastic baggies that, the last time Wildey checked, were not illegal. So these idiots sold out the department for a bunch of Tastykakes. Bravo.
    Following the Tastykake Takedown, there seemed to be new scandals popping up all the damn time. A local reporter crunched some numbers and realized that, over the last four years, a Philly police officer was charged with a crime something like every three weeks. Not just narcotics, of course. But those were the ones that seemed to stick in citizens’ minds. Perhaps the most notorious being the cop who shook down a junkie, making her strip naked before jacking off on her jeans. “He was too disgusted