A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

by Bowden, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780151011834
• ISBN10: 0151011834
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-07-06
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Joey O'Shay is not the real name of the narcotics agent in an unnamed city in the center of the country. But Joey O'Shay exists. The nearly three hundred drug busts he has orchestrated over more than two decades are real, too; if the drug war were a declared war, O'Shay would have a Silver Star. With nerves and mastery worthy of his subject, Charles Bowden follows O'Shay as he sets in motion his latest conquest, a $50 million heroin deal that originates in Colombia and has federal agents sitting at attention from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to New York City. As it unfolds, O'Shay reveals the unerring instinct and ceaseless vigilance that have led him through minefields and brought down kingpins. But now they have led him to a place where it isn't so clear who the heroes are or what the fight has been for. And still the warrior fights on, in a murky and unforgiving landscape readers will not be able to forget.

Author Biography

CHARLES BOWDEN is a writer whose work appears regularly in Harper's, GQ, and other national publications. He is the author of several previous books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Excerpts

HE PUTS THE GUN DOWN. It is close, his finger beside the trigger, the round chambered and ready. Then the man moving toward him hesitates, and the moment passes. Joey O'Shay's face remains passive, a blank as he reaches for the gun and sweeps it up, a blank as he lowers it and puts it down. He says, "Never hesitate, never say a fucking thing, none of this hands-up shit. Just keep pumping them into him. If you want to live."O'Shay looks at the departing man without expression.The bluing has worn off the weapon.The city does not sleep at this hour but becomes a zone of zombies, that time when the drunks have made it home, the sober have not yet risen, and the streets belong to the feral, to predators coursing its arteries for prey.Deep night.He cannot rest. The nights have always been hard but now with this major heroin deal bubbling along, he cannot sleep at all. When he was younger, he prided himself on not needing sleep. Now he is resigned to not getting sleep. He thinks of $5 million a week street value and then he does not sleep at all. Not out of greed but because of other hungers. "One of my sons wrote this about me," he says. Then he slides the music into the dash of his truck.A voice knifes through the stale air:Come take a walk inside my mind,Meet the ghost that lives insideFallen friends and broken dreamsThat haunt me in my sleep.COME, SMELL, LOOK, LISTEN. There, the city spreads like an oil slick across the flat plain at the point where the rain begins to die. The past falls dead here before it is born-bladed, buried, and unmissed. Yesterday has no more meaning than last night's bar bill.Everyone comes here for the money and no one knows why the city itself exists. The sky refuses to forgive, the sun seldom smiles. The air sags with fumes and towers rise and try to center the glistening slick with no tool but money. The talk is boasts, the lips thin, the streets a refutation of the talk. As in all such places, most people believe in the promise and most lose. In the dirt and grass and wind and tired rivers that lie beyond the city, the eyes tighten at its name and one and all say they hate the city. And yet they come regardless of their hatred. And so the city thrives and devours despite the words of anyone. Streams barely move across the flat earth and the waters laze and eddy with trash and time. Smell the exhaust of millions laid out like a pure line for all to suck up through rolled hundred-dollar bills. The grass rank by the ditch, the green water licking the air, diesel fumes foaming out of the trucks, a woman walking briskly in heels and trailing musk, piss in the alleys, raw onion chopped and biting from the small food stalls, pecan smoke reaching out from under the brisket, ribs, and sausage, the fresh tang magically lifting from the beaten streets after a sudden spring shower, the smell of a child's hair, that scentless scent shared with fawns hiding in the tall grass, the faint scent of a child's

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Excerpted from A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior by Charles Bowden
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