The number one reason the detective in my debut novel is an NYPD undercover, is because that was my husband’s occupation for four out of his twenty years with the NYPD. If it weren’t for his stories, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, often outlandish, I would have never written Laney Bird, nor given her the occupation that takes her down some very dark paths.
Since I couldn’t jam twenty years’ worth of cop tales into one novel, I thought it might be fun to let a few that didn’t make it see the light of day. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed hearing them. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect guilty and innocent alike.
The One Where the Disguise Works Too Well
As an undercover, it was my husband’s (let’s call him H) job to create a persona that would allow him to buy street narcotics easily. One day H found a hospital gown and a hospital wristband (don’t ask me where. I don’t want to know). Wearing nothing but his underpants, a hospital johnnie, flip-flops, and the wristband, H strolled the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, looking to buy crack.
He met up with Honey, a six-foot-plus addict and lady of the night, and told her he had escaped from rehab. Honey told him that no, she didn’t have any dope, but she knew someone who did, and she’d connect H if he shared. H happily agreed, and they now walked with purpose toward a goal, shooting the breeze.
A couple blocks later Honey suffered a crisis of conscience, stopped, and put both hands on H’s shoulders. “Baby,” she said. “Look at yourself. You’re walking around Manhattan in a hospital gown, looking to buy crack. Baby, you have a problem.”
H did not make a buy that time around.
The One with the Drug Dealer and the Surveillance Camera
H was buying crack one day. Let’s call the dealer DD. DD sold H a rock the size of a golf ball, handing it over in his hand, bright as day, unwrapped. Unknown to DD, the surveillance van across the road was recording the entire transaction with a video camera, safely behind tinted windows. Once H had his rock, he locomoted off the set. His team already had the visual evidence it needed.
But DD gave them more. As soon as he sold his rock, he crossed the street to the invitingly reflective surveillance van, planted himself before the window with the camera, and proceeded to style his hair in the window’s reflection.
The One Where the Wife Creates the Fake IDs
Once a police officer becomes an undercover, their real identity is hidden even within the NYPD database, except for payroll. The officer is issued a new government driver’s license with a new name. In H’s case the NYPD took six long months to do this, which meant he had to be on the street, pretending to be someone else, without an ID. So… I made it for him. And I have to say, the quality was good enough so he used it without trouble for months until the “real” fake ID materialized. Another fun fact? The name we put on the ID was the name we gave our son when he was born a few years later.
The One Where the Wife Almost Doesn’t Live Long Enough to Write Her Novel
No matter where H was, or what he was doing on New Year’s Eve, we always tried to meet up at midnight. One NYE a friend had a party on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and since H was working there at the time, I went. We decided he’d come to the party at midnight and then return to work.
Crossing 1st Avenue at a little after ten PM, I heard a siren and suddenly an NYPD van was almost on top of me, racing to a job. I froze, unsure if I should run back or forward, and would have been roadkill if a more primal instinct hadn’t made me run ahead, closely missing the van.
Since this was a relatively normal event for New York City, I shook myself off and headed to the party. Sometime around midnight, there was a commotion. People were running into a back room, turning down music, hiding whatever needed hiding. Cops at the door! H was in uniform that night.
We celebrated at midnight, and as we held hands and chatted about our evening, I told him I’d nearly been run over on the way to the party. He said, wait… what street? I told him. What time? I told him.
He’d been behind the wheel.
And now that I think of it, THAT just might form the skeleton plot of my next novel.
She left the NYPD in the firestorm of a high-profile case gone horribly wrong. Three years later, the ghosts of her past roar back to terrifying life.
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.
This is a Rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Emilya Naymark. There will be THREE winners. ONE winner will receive (1) physical copy of Hide In Place by Emilya Naymark (U.S. addresses only). The giveaway begins on March 1, 2021 and runs through April 2, 2021. Void where prohibited.
Emilya Naymark was born in a country that no longer exists, escaped with her parents, lived in Italy for a bit, and ended up in New York, which promptly became a love and a muse.
Her debut novel “Hide In Place”, is out 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.
This post brought back memories for me. My oldest son’s Godfather was an undercover cop and I remember all the stories he used to tell. And like this post, some were funny and the others very scary.
Thank you for hosting me! Again! This was a blast to write.
Our please, Emilya! It’s a great post!