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reasons to champion anyway. I got the audition. And the “bad men” are every ounce of that. But everything else Ruben fed me was a lie.
    “Actress or waitress, what you are,
princesa
, is in too deep to be doing anything but what I say until we straighten this problem out.”
    The fading sunlight dies to dark; Tinker Bell flies away, replaced by years of aprons and promises and dreams that always seem to slip out of reach. I lean in at a dangerous cop who knows too much about me, about mistakes I’ve made
—his
mistakes in
his
sting, not CPD’s—mistakes he and his crooked cop partner, Robbie Steffen, have set up to be mine if things go bad. And they have. The smart response, the survival response is shut up, say nothing.
    But not today. Today I got the callback; today my sister and I are the winners. Coleen and I stare straight at Ruben’s eyes. “Whatever youand Steffen are
really
into with the Koreans came this close to getting Robbie killed.” My finger and thumb pinch together. “I don’t know why you picked me for this disaster, but I signed up on a lie and I’m not dying for it. So fuck you, Ruben. And fuck Robbie Steffen. And fuck your psycho problems in Koreatown. How’s that?”
    Detective Ruben Vargas eases a toothpick into a smile that can mean anything from good wishes to cemetery. “Hope it plays in Koreatown, ’cause we both know they’ll kill you if it don’t. And we both know you’re goin’ back.”

Some urban nightmares begin as graffiti on a dirty brick wall. Was 13-year-old Coleen Brennan’s murder a reprisal for racist policing? Or was she raped to death as part of a gang initiation, an act so calculatedly savage that we refuse to believe it possible in our city? Maybe. Or was Coleen’s murder the early work of a growing young sociopath, another Gacy or Speck, watching and waiting in the tenements where life and death are cheap and plentiful?
    —“ MONSTER ,” by Tracy Moens; © 2011
Chicago Herald
OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS
FRIDAY , 3:00 PM
    Foghorns boom across the Laflin Maritime work yard.
    Three nervous gang cops stare at me in the diesel-fouled air. Behind us and the four-story stacks of dented containers, Chicago’s Sanitary and Ship Canal feeds the city her raw materials, the berthing docks loud with the shriek of barge cranes and stevedore shouts. Noise is good. Noise is cover from
on the record
.
    Put cops under, or near, the spotlight of a big-city newspaper fighting to stay in circulation, and to a man, we’ll all be nervous. Every cop has sins, some greater than others. And every cop has bosses, some you can trust, some you can’t. Our boss was promoted to district commander three weeks ago while still up on the far North Side, arrived down here at midnight on the same night, and brought two non-sworn personnel with her. All we know about her is she has a law degree fromNorthwestern, rumored judicial aspirations, and very little street experience. Not the choice downtown would make to stop a gang war.
    Everyone in the 12th District who’s awake believes our new commander’s arrival is directly related to the $44.5 million federal lawsuit filed by Anton Dupree’s family for his “wrongful execution by the state of Illinois.” Those depositions begin in three days. Should one cop or several in this district need to burn to save the city money or embarrassment in the Olympic era, our new commander has no allegiances here, past or present. Shitty, but that’s how the job works. And we’ve been waiting to see how the city and the department play it.
    Then today’s
Herald
lands with the opening installment of “MONSTER,” naming police officers Ruben and Bobby Vargas as complicit in the murder that killed Coleen Brennan, executed the aforementioned Anton Dupree, and could cost the city $44.5 million.
    Me and half of Gang Team 1269 are standing on this oily gravel because we don’t believe the timing of the exposé and depositions is coincidental, and that means the