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to touch me, but he wasn’t too disgusted to touch himself and ejaculate on my seventy-dollar friggin’ pants,” the junkie told a federal judge. The cop gave her six dollars for cigarettes and told her to get dressed and scram. The local tabloid had a field day: THOUGHT YOU GOT OFF, EH? And a new phrase entered the local legal lexicon: “the masturbation civil rights violation.”
    All of this culminated in a full-scale clusterfuck that closed an entire field unit, saw five hundred drug cases tossed, and sent a bunch of cops to desk duty or early retirement. As a result, the D.A.—most likely sowing his mayoral oats—declared war on the entire narcotics division from his office in the Widener Building.
    So Wildey knows to be super-careful. The old ways don’t fly anymore—“old” meaning as of six months ago. Last spring he could have braced any one of these college kids and ordered them up against a wall, pockets out. Boom, probable cause. A ticket to the show.
    But Wildey can’t stop any of them. Not without a solid, defensible-in-court reason. In the wake of all this departmental chaos, defense lawyers would knock the whole thing down without so much as a thanks
for nothing
. Chuckie Morphine himself was too smart to be caught in the open. The name on the lease of the property is a corporation, probably a shell. Nobody knows Chuckie’s real name, or even what he looks like. Wildey has yet to snatch a glimpse of him.
    But he’s exactly the kind of guy Wildey’s dying to bust. Nobody else in his unit’s even heard of this guy, which means he’s relatively new.
    So Wildey keeps an eye on the place, waiting for an opening. This is only one of a half-dozen leads he kept tabs on, but this is the fattest—a bloated tick ready to pop. Lots of traffic. And a pusher with an irritating nickname. Man would Wildey
love
to be the guy who busted Chuckie Fucking Morphine. Idiot should serve time just for that name.
    There is also the little matter that Morphine is almost certainly a white dude. Now, Wildey isn’t racist. But a few months before he was recruited to the newly formed Narcotics Field Unit-Central South (NFU-CS for short, as in Nobody Fucks with us) he read a study from the ACLU that said the majority of people arrested for pot were black. Yet whites bought and smoked more dope than anybody else. In Philly, something like 80 percent of the marijuana arrests were of blacks. Wildey had arrested his fair share in the Badlands, though he tried to be an equal opportunity cop, busting black, brown, and white alike. Still, it would be nice to get those percentages down.
    Lieutenant Katrina “Kaz” Mahoney told him the day she hired him: Find me the cases others have missed. Forget the street corner busts. Bring me big cases. I don’t care who’s paying who or what’s happened before today. The rules are different now.
    So sorry, rich white drug lords. A brother has to start his career somewhere.
    And here’s hoping it starts with Chuckie Morphine.
    But of course … done right.
    In the words of his superior: “Imagine the Man in the Widener Building is wedged up your ass at all times, watching everything you do, second-guessing every thought in your head. You take a leak, imagine him complaining you’re taking too long and massaging your prostate to get things moving.”
    Ten minutes after midnight Wildey perks up when he sees a silver Honda Civic glide into the usual spot—up near the corner, where the valet guy lets all of Chuckie’s (alleged) customers idle for a bit. Breaking no laws.
    Wildey actually likes this setup. Makes it easier to keep tabs on the customer base. A hat-wearing hipster, about twenty or twenty-one, bright red pants, green backpack slung over his shoulder—yo slick, Christmas ain’t for another month yet—launches himself out of the passenger seat, clears the sidewalk in a few long strides, then jogs up the short stoop to the front door. Knocks three times. Door opens. Red Pants