THE van stopped on the side of the road near the village where he lived. Then five men emerged from it and waited. He was coming from the cockpit on his motorbike, and when he made the turn on the road and drew near they opened fire. The first volley pitched him to the blacktop. Then the men approached him and resumed firing. He was already dead, but two of the men kept firing as if in a trance.
I learned about his death from four of my former neighbors”•his neighbors”•during a get-together they hosted for me. They said he’d been a ninja cop, a rookie with a group of other rookies who went after drug dealers”•and not so much to arrest them as to seize their stash and then sell it. He was on the job for less than two years, they said, but already he had five motorized tricycles and five passenger jeeps to his name. He was cocky before he became a policeman, and after he became one and got involved in the drug trade he grew even cockier.
They didn’t know what kind of job he had before he became a policeman. All they knew was that he and his family moved into the village”•a middle-class neighborhood”•four years ago and very quickly made their neighbors realize they had the sensibilities of cavemen.
His father ran a blacksmith shop”•a veritable pigsty”•just outside the gated village. Their dogs roamed and polluted the area, and near it he usually had two or three fighting cocks tethered on the sidewalk.
He loved to go binge drinking with tricycle drivers outside the village gate, where he had a table and stools set up without permission from the homeowners’ association. Late at night, drunk, his drinking buddies gunned their motors and revved them up to rouse the residents before driving off.
He also loved to have a pig slaughtered near the entrance to the blacksmith shop two days before Christmas, and by a minion who didn’t have the training to do it properly. He told an elderly resident who complained about it once that, perhaps, he should try bringing the animal back to life if he was too concerned about its suffering.
Things came to a head after he acquired the jeeps and tricycles. He had no place to park them, so he parked them on the side streets leading up to the village and to another village nearby, making it difficult for the residents of both villages to get in and out with their vehicles.
His neighbors complained to the head of the village council, and quickly the council’s chairman urged him to do something about the problem, but he ignored him. About three weeks later the chairman phoned the president of the homeowners’ association and told him their problem would end soon: The ninja cop was as good as dead because of his illegal business.
One month before he was killed three men dropped by to know exactly where he lived. And a week before he was killed five police officers armed with a search warrant searched his home but found nothing.
Two of my hosts disagreed over the reason for his murder. One said his superior, a participant in the drug trade, had him killed to stop him from singing like a canary once he was exposed. The other said he most likely double-crossed someone who later hired assassins to hunt him down.
They quoted two witnesses who said the first shots slammed him to the blacktop and sent his bike sliding toward a drain. Then the men”•all five of them”•approached him and resumed firing. He was dead as a doornail, but two of them kept firing as if mesmerized, stopping only after the man who appeared to be their leader ordered them back to the van and the van moved out. The people who approached his body said his stomach was open, his mouth was gone and his right eye was missing from its socket.
He left behind a wife and two daughters aged three and two. He was 28 years old.
Cesar Barrioquinto is a copy editor.