by Don Winslow
He looks like a fed, Malone thinks. Short blond hair, blue eyes. Blue suit, black shoes, white shirt, red tie, Church Street Gestapo motherfucker.
“Please get in the car, Sergeant Malone,” O’Dell says.
Malone holds up his shield. His words come out like mud. “I’m on the Job, you fuckface Church Street fuck. NYPD, real police. North Manhattan—”
“You want us to cuff you right here on the street, Sergeant Malone?” O’Dell asks. “In your neighborhood?”
“Cuff me for what?” Malone asks. “Public intox? That’s a federal crime now? I showed you my shield, for Chrissakes, a little professional courtesy, huh?”
“I’m not going to ask you again.”
Malone gets in the car.
Fear spins around his fucked-up head.
Fear?
Shit, terror.
Because it hits him—they have him on the Pena rip.
Thirty to life tilting heavy toward life.
John grows up without a father, Caitlin walks down the aisle without you, you die in a federal lockup.
The terror of that blasts through the booze and the weed and the blow and shoots electric jolts through his heart. He feels like he could throw up.
He takes a breath and says, “If this is about inspectors and chiefs taking cash and prizes, that’s above my pay grade. I don’t know anything about that.”
Sounds like Fat Teddy to himself. I ain’t know nothin’.
“Don’t say another word,” O’Dell says, “until we get there.”
“Get where? Church Street?”
New York FBI headquarters.
The Waldorf, it turns out. They take a side door, go up a service elevator to the sixth floor and then into a suite at the end of the hall.
“The Waldorf?” Malone asks. “What, I get red velvet cake?”
“You want red velvet cake?” O’Dell asks. “I’ll call room service. Jesus Christ, you’re a mess. What the hell have you been doing? If we piss-test you now, what’s going to come up? Weed? Coke? Dexedrine? That’s your shield and your gun right there.”
A laptop computer is open on the coffee table. O’Dell points at the sofa in front of it and says, “Sit down. You want a drink?”
“No.”
O’Dell says, “Yes, you do. Trust me, you’re going to need it. Jameson’s, right? A good mick like you isn’t going to drink Protestant whiskey. No Bushmills for a guy named Malone.”
“Quit jerking me off and tell me what this is about,” Malone says. It ain’t the cool he wants to play but he can’t help himself. Can’t stand to wait another second to hear the death sentence—
Pena.
Pena.
Pena.
O’Dell pours a whiskey and hands it to him. “Sergeant Dennis Malone. Manhattan North Special Task Force. Hero cop. Your father was a cop, your brother was a fireman, gave his life on nine/eleven—”
“Keep my family out of your mouth.”
“They’d be so proud of you,” O’Dell says.
“I don’t have time for this bullshit.” He heads for the door. More like staggers, his feet feel like wood, his legs like Jell-O.
“Sit down, Malone. Take some weight off, watch a little TV.” This comes from a squat middle-aged guy sitting in an easy chair in the corner.
“The fuck are you?” Malone asks.
Stretch it out. Stall. Get your motherfucking head together. This ain’t no dream, this is your life. One wrong play and the rest of your fucking life is down the shitter. Clear your dumb donkey cop head.
“Stan Weintraub,” the guy says. “I’m an investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York.”
FBI and Southern District, Malone thinks.
All federal.
No state or IAB.
“You make me come into work this time of the morning,” O’Dell says, “the least you could do is sit down and watch a little television with me.”
He turns on the video on the computer screen.
Malone sits and watches.
Sees his own face on the screen as Mark Piccone hands him an envelope and says, “Your finder’s fee on Fat Teddy.”
“Thank you.”
“Can you straighten it out?”
“Who’s riding?”
“Justin Michaels.”
“Yeah, I can probably straighten that out.”
They have him cold.
He hears Piccone ask, “How much?”
“Are we talking a reduction or a nol pros?”
“A walk.”
“Ten to twenty K.”
“And that includes your cut, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Dead to rights.
How could you be so fucking stupid, let your guard down because it’s Christmas? The fuck is wrong with you? Did they have Piccone, and he set you up, or were they on you?
Shit, how long have they had you up? What do they know? Is it just Piccone or do they have more? If they know about Piccone, do they know about the Fat Teddy rip, too? That puts Russo and Monty in the jackpot with you.
But it’s not Pena, he thinks.
Don’t panic.
Be strong.
“What you got,” Malone says, “is me taking a referral fee from a defense attorney. Go ahead, hang me. This isn’t worth your rope.”
“We’ll decide that,” Weintraub says.
“I was helping this guy Bailey out,” Malone says. “He’s a CI.”
“So you have a CI file on him,” O’Dell says. “We can pull that, look at it?”
“See, he’s more useful to me alive.”
“He’s more useful to you as a source of income,” Weintraub says.
“You’re not in the driver’s seat here,” O’Dell says. “You’re in the shit. We’ve got enough on that tape to take your badge, your gun, your job, your pension.”
“Put you in a federal lockup,” Weintraub says. “Five to ten.”
“Federal time,” O’Dell says. “You serve eighty-five percent of it.”
“No shit? I didn’t know that.”
“Unless you want to go to a state facility with the guys you put in there,” Weintraub says. “How would that work out for you?”
Malone stands up and gets right in Weintraub’s face. “You gonna play Bobby Badass with me? You can’t. You don’t have the game. Threaten me like that again I’ll put you through that wall.”
“That’s not the way to play this, Malone,” O’Dell says.
Yeah, it is, Malone thinks. Play it tough, play it hard. These guys are just like the dopes in the street—you show weakness, they eat you alive.
“Are there ADAs other than Michaels selling cases?” Weintraub asks.
O’Dell don’t look happy with him, so that’s their first mistake. Weintraub tipped their hand—they’re interested in lawyers, not cops.
So it was Piccone, not me, they had up.
Fuck, I dodge IAB for fifteen years and then walk into someone else’s jackpot. Now I have to find out if Piccone knows or not. “Ask Piccone.”
“We’re asking you,” Weintraub says.
“What do you want me to do, piss myself?”
“We want you to answer the question,” O’Dell says.
“If Piccone is cooperating,” Malone says, “you already know the answer.”
Weintraub starts to lose his temper. “Are there ADAs in the district selling cases?!”
“The hell do you think?”
“I asked you what the hell you think!” Morally outraged.
So Piccone isn’t cooperating. Probably doesn’t know he’s a recording artist yet.
“I think you know,” Malone says. “But I think you don’t want to know. You’ll say you want it all, clean out the whole stable. End of the day you’ll go after a few defense attorneys you got beefs with. Prosecutors, judges will skate. Next time you jam one of them up will be the first time.”
“Did you say judges?” Weintraub asks.
“Gr
ow up.”
Weintraub doesn’t answer.
“It doesn’t have to go this way,” O’Dell says.
Here it comes, Malone thinks. The deal.
How many skels have I offered the deal?
“Do you collect directly from the ADAs?” O’Dell asks. “Or do you get it through the defense lawyers?”
“Why?”
“If it’s you, you wear a wire,” O’Dell says. “Get them on tape. You bring the money to us, it’s vouchered as evidence.”
“I’m not a rat.”
“Famous last words.”
“I can do the time.”
“I’m sure you can,” O’Dell says. “But can your family?”
“I told you, keep my family out of it.”
“No, you keep your family out of it,” O’Dell says. “You put them into this. You. Not us. How are your kids going to feel knowing that their father is a crook? How is your wife going to feel? What are you going to tell them about college—they can’t go because the savings went to defense lawyers, Dad doesn’t have his pension, and the universities don’t take food stamps?”
Malone doesn’t say anything.
This O’Dell guy is good, for a fed. Knows the buttons to push. An Irish Catholic from Staten Island going on food stamps? You wouldn’t live down the shame for three generations.
“Don’t give me an answer now,” O’Dell is saying. “Take twenty-four, think about it. We’ll be here.”
He hands Malone a slip of paper.
“That’s a hello-phone,” O’Dell says. “One hundred percent secure. You call it in the next twenty-four hours, we’ll set up a meeting with our boss and see what we can work out.”
“If you don’t call,” Weintraub says, “we’ll put the cuffs on in your squad room, in front of all your brother officers.”
Malone doesn’t take the slip of paper.
O’Dell shoves it in his shirt pocket. “Think about it.”
“I’m not a rat,” Malone says again.
Malone walks uptown, hoping the fresh air will clear his head, let him think. He feels sick, nauseated from the stress and the fear, the drugs and the booze. They waited, the fucking assholes, he realizes. They picked their shot, waited to grab you at your weakest, when your head was already fucked up.
It was the right move, the move you would have made.
You go after a perp, you try to go in just at dawn, when the guy is asleep, make his dream a nightmare, get a confession out of him before he realizes the alarm clock isn’t going to ring.
Except these fucks don’t need to get a confession out of you, they got you on camera and now they’re offering you the out you’ve offered a hundred skels—“Be my CI, my snitch. Climb out of the pit and throw someone else in instead, shit, you don’t think they’d do the same to you, the tables were turned?”
He’s heard himself say it a hundred fucking times.
And ninety times out of that hundred it worked.
Malone comes to Central Park South and turns west toward Broadway, past what used to be the Plaza Hotel. One of the best moonlighting security gigs he ever had—guarding some film equipment that arrived before the crew. They paid him to sit in a suite at the Plaza ordering room service, watching TV and looking out the window at the beautiful women.
Midmorning now, springtime, the tourists are out in force and he hears the babel of language—Asian, European, New Yawk—that’s one of the sounds of the city to him. It feels weird, strange—his whole life has changed in the last two hours but the city goes on around him, people walk to where they’re going, they have conversations, they sit at sidewalk cafés, take rides in the horse-drawn carriages, as if Denny Malone’s world hadn’t just come down around him.
He makes himself suck in some of the spring air.
Realizes that the feds made a mistake.
They let him go, let him out of the room, let him get into the world and get a little perspective. I would never let a skel out of the room unless he lawyered up, Malone thinks, and even then I’d try to keep him there and not let him see that there was any other world except my face, no other possibilities than what I was holding in my hand.
But they did, so take advantage of it.
Think.
Okay, they have you for a four-to-five federal time, but you don’t know you’re going away, he tells himself. You have money stashed just for this emergency.
One of the first things he learned, one of the first things he told his guys, is put the first $50K away—in cash where you can get to it—in case you get popped. That way you always have bail money and a down payment on a lawyer.
You might be able to beat this, you draw the right prosecutor, the right judge. It’s a dogshit charge anyway. Half the judges in the system would want to shut this investigation down, they knew about it. Even if you don’t beat it, you can probably plead it down to two.
But suppose you get the whole four, Malone thinks. Those are four critical years for John, the years he goes one way or the other. And Caitlin? Malone’s heard all the stories about girls without fathers, how they go looking for that love with the first guy who comes along.
No. Sheila’s a great mom, and there’s always Uncle Phil, Uncle Monty and Aunt Donna.
They’ll keep the kids straight.
They’ll be hurt but they’ll be all right. They’re Malones, they’re tough, and they come from a neighborhood where sometimes fathers “go away.” The other kids won’t pick on them for that.
And college, I’ve got that covered already.
A man handles his business.
The kids’ tuition is in a trap under the shower.
The guys will take care of Sheila, she’ll still get her envelope. So fuck your food stamps.
They took an oath. If the worst happens, Russo will be at his house with an envelope every month, will take his son to ball games, straighten him out if he has to, make sure he does the right thing.
Wiseguys take the same oath, but nowadays they rarely follow up past a few months. One of theirs is in prison or the dirt, his wife has to go to work, his kids look like ragamuffins. Didn’t used to be that way—now it’s a big reason wiseguys turn rat.
It’s not that way with this crew—Monty and Russo know who to go see to get Malone’s stashed money, and every penny of it would go to keep Sheila comfortable.
And he’d keep earning a full share in the joint.
So you don’t have to worry about your family.
Claudette, you can always get money to her she needs it. But as long as she’s off the shit, she’s okay. She’s been clean for almost a year now, has her job, her family, some friends. Maybe she waits for you, maybe not, but she’ll be all right.
He reaches the southwest edge of the park and walks around Columbus Circle onto Broadway.
Malone loves walking Broadway, always has.
Lincoln Center is always beautiful, and now he’s back on his beat, his turf, his territory.
His streets.
Manhattan North.
Goddamn, he loves this street. Has since his stint in the Two-Four. The old Astoria building, Sherman Square, which they used to call “Needle Park,” Gray’s Papaya. Then the old Beacon Theater, the Hotel Belleclaire and the spot where Nick’s Burger Joint used to be. Zabar’s, the old Thalia, the long gentle slope uptown.
He ain’t afraid of doing the time. Sure, there’ll be cons in there looking to even scores, and they’re tough guys, but I’m a tougher guy. And I won’t go in unprepared—the Ciminos will make sure there’s a welcome committee at whatever prison they send me to. No one jacks with mobbed-up guys.
If I even do any time.
Any which way, you lose your job. If the criminal charges don’t take you out, the Departmental Disciplinary Hearing will. It’s a rigged court—the commissioner never loses. If he wants you out, you’re out.
No gun, no badge, no pension, no job and no other department in the country will touch you.
What the hel
l am I going to do?
He doesn’t know how to do anything else. Being a cop is the only job he’s ever had, the only job he’s ever wanted.
And now it’s over.
It hits him like a punch in the face. I’m done being a cop.
Thanks to one stupid, careless, jackass moment on a Christmas afternoon, I’m done being a cop.
Maybe I can pick up with a security company or an investigative firm, he thinks. Then he rejects that. He don’t want to be a fake cop, a has-been, and that kind of job would always put him in contact with real cops who’d pity him, or look down on him, or at least remind him of what he used to be and isn’t anymore.
Better to have a clean break, do something totally different.
He has money in the bank, a lot more money when they flip the Pena rip.
I can start a business, he thinks. Not a bar—every retired cop does that—but something else.
Like what, Malone? he asks himself.
Like freakin’ what?
Like nothin’, he thinks.
All you know how to do is be a cop.
So he goes to work.
Chapter 10
“Where you been?” Russo asks him.
Malone looks at his watch. “Noon tour, I’m on time.”
He’s on time, but his head is fucking reeling. Booze hangover, drug hangover, sex hangover, fear hangover.
They’ve got him by the fucking balls and he doesn’t know what to do.
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Russo says. “You haven’t changed your clothes. You smell like booze, weed and pussy. Expensive pussy, but still . . .”
“I been at my girlfriend’s,” Malone says. “That okay with you?”
It’s the first lie.
To his partner, his best friend, his brother.
Tell him, Malone thinks. Take him and Monty out into the alley and tell them. You got your dick caught in the Piccone thing, you’re going to work it out, they got nothing to worry about.
But he doesn’t.
“You went to your girlfriend’s?” Russo laughs. “Looking like that? How’d that go?”
“Like it looks,” Malone says. “It’s okay with you, Mom, I thought I’d shower here, change.”
If he looks like hell, Levin looks like hell lined with shit. He’s hunched over on the bench, trying to tie his shoes, but it seems like too much for him. When he looks up and sees Malone, his face is white.