You know what? I’m not gonna tell you about my life now. It’s not that it’s bad. I get to spend time with my son, and God knows he needs someone on his team. Alfie is. . . well. Let’s just say he marches to the beat of his own drum. Driving the school bus in our district lets me be home when he’s home, pays the bills (barely, but I’m not complaining), pays for health insurance. It’s just him and me now.

Like I said, I’d rather recount the kind of day I used to have. Now, you watch movies, and you get the idea that being an NYPD undercover is this gritty, dark, depressing thing. Makes you wonder why anybody does it. I’ll tell you why. It’s fun. Like, exhilaration level fun. You get to be someone else, dress like someone else. Hell, I even had my own undercover name—Kendra. Cops will say they do it to get a detective shield, but there are other paths to a shield.

At first, I worked basic buy and busts. I’d go on a set, connect with a dealer or a steerer, get done, and bingo—body in the van. And bodies in the van mean overtime. I always made my buys, and I always put bodies in the van.

That’s why Harry took me under his wing when I got to Coney Island. Harry was the kind of detective I always imagined my dad would have been to work with—funny as blazes, knew everything and everyone.

One day last August, a billion degrees out, I’m hanging around Surf Avenue looking to get done. It’s late afternoon, scorching hot, and I got a can of Red Stripe in a paper bag (one, it goes with the disguise; two, beer balls. You need ‘em when you’re doing this job.) I’m waiting for a dealer named Ruslan.

When I see him round the corner, my stomach clenches and I take another pull of the warm Red Stripe. I look over my shoulder to check if Harry is still there, ghosting. I don’t see him, but Ruslan is standing in front of me now, and it’s game on. I tell him what I want; he checks me out. In my normal life, I’m no nonsense. I’m not a girly girl. When I’m Kendra, though, that’s another story. Ruslan likes what he sees, but he’s not the warm and fuzzy type. He says he’s got the stuff, and I have to go with him. I say where. He says you want it or not.

I finish my beer and search for Harry again, but nope. He’s not there. Going alone with Ruslan is a terrible idea, but I always make a buy. I always put a body in the van. Okay, I say. He walks fast and I’m nearly running to keep up. I know my phone is giving my coordinates to the team and the app running in the background records what we say, yet I have a feeling. Not a good one. Yes, I have my gun, but Ruslan has twelve inches and a hundred pounds on me. I don’t want to fight over a bag of dope.

He disappears into an alley and I pause. He stops, looks at me. You coming, he asks.

It’s dark behind him. Empty. I feel the hot street breathing on me, pushing me forward. Pushing me to do my job.

I move ahead, and in doing so, turn slightly to the left to sidestep a garbage heap. And that’s when I see the thing that saves me AND puts bodies in the van that day.

There’s a check cashing place across the street. In front of it is a dude flopped over in an office chair. Just kind of slumped sideways. Ruslan says something, but I don’t hear, I’m walking toward the slumped dude. Two guys are on each side of the office chair and they’re trying to roll it into the PAYOMATIC. They turn it this way; they turn it that way; but they can’t get the thing through the door. And the seated guy is sorta not helping. His legs are stiff. His arms are stiff. In fact. . .

I keep walking past the Three Stooges and pull out my phone, then call my sergeant.

Long story short, turns out the guy in the chair had a fatal coronary earlier that morning and his two buddies decided that letting his Social Security check go uncashed was a sin. But since even the PAYOMATIC won’t cash a check without the payee present, they had the very reasonable idea of wheeling him over in the only conveyance at their disposal.

So, there you go. Those are the kind of days I used to have before everything imploded.

Do I miss it? Yes. And no. I became a cop because I wanted to help people. Now my son needs me and that’s more important than the entire world.

I’ll do anything to protect him.

Hide in Place
Genre: Suspense
Release: February 2021
Purchase Link

When NYPD undercover cop Laney Bird’s cover is blown in a racketeering case against the Russian mob, she flees the city with her troubled son, Alfie. Now, three years later, she’s found the perfect haven in Sylvan, a charming town in upstate New York. But then the unthinkable happens: her boy vanishes.

Local law enforcement dismisses the thirteen-year-old as a runaway, but Laney knows better. Alfie would never abandon his special routines and the sanctuary of their home. Could he have been kidnapped–or worse? As a February snowstorm rips through the region, Laney is forced to launch her own investigation, using every trick she learned in her years undercover.

As she digs deeper into the disappearance, Laney learns that Alfie and a friend had been meeting with an older man who himself vanished, but not before leaving a corpse in his garage. With dawning horror, Laney discovers that the man was a confidential informant from a high-profile case she had handled in the past. Although he had never known her real identity, he knows it now. Which means several other enemies do, too. Time is running out, and as Laney’s search for her son grows more desperate, everything depends on how good a detective she really is–badge or no.

Meet the author
Emilya Naymark’s debut novel “Hide In Place”, was released February 9, 2021 from Crooked Lane Books. Her short stories appear in the Harper Collins anthology A Stranger Comes to Town, Secrets in the Water, After Midnight: Tales from the Graveyard Shift, River River Journal, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and 1+30: The Best Of Mystory.

She has a degree in fine art, and her artworks have been published in numerous magazines and books.

When not writing, Emilya works as a visual artist and reads massive quantities of psychological thrillers, suspense, and crime fiction. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.

All comments are welcomed.