Briggs's own partners cuffed him. I didn't have to ask twice. They knew what a planted bag meant, and they knew whose pocket it had gone into. They sat him on the grass, and one of them started reading him his rights in a voice that sounded like it had just realized it might be reading itself its own.
I walked over and crouched down next to Briggs while the cuffs were being tightened. He wouldn't look at me. He looked at the grass.
And then he whispered something that has stayed with me every day since.
"You don't know what you've walked into," he whispered. "This goes way past me."
I stood up. I looked around the park. The fountain was still running. The woman with the stroller was still sitting there with her hand over her mouth. And I understood, standing in that green park in broad daylight, that this had not been a random shakedown.
Somebody had sent him. Somebody had picked the time, the place, and me. That plastic bag was not meant for any man walking through a park. It was meant for the man who had started asking the wrong questions.
I called it in myself. I called the captain's office, then I called the one detective I trusted, Lena Ortiz, and I asked her to come to the park with gloves and an evidence bag.
I did not touch the little bag again. I let it sit on the grass where Briggs had dropped it, and I took a photo of it with my phone before anyone else arrived.
The whole time, Briggs wouldn't stop watching me. That is the part I keep going back to. Not the punch. Not the guns. The way he watched me, like he was waiting to see if the person who sent him was going to walk out of the trees.