The Force

by Don Winslow

  Malone laughs. “Now you worry about that? I’ve been shot, stabbed—I’ve been down a hundred stairways and alleys, through a thousand doors with God knows what on the other side, and now you’re worried about me? After you just almost got me killed? Fuck you all.”

  He walks out.

  “We whack them all now,” Russo says. “Bruno, Savino, Sciollo, all the fucking Ciminos if we have to.”

  “We can’t do that,” Malone says.

  They’re in the co-op.

  “It’s out on the street already,” Monty says. “Denny Malone had an armed confrontation with three wiseguys in a known mob hangout. It’s only a matter of time before IAB comes asking what you were doing there.”

  “You don’t think I fucking know that?”

  Monty asks, “Why did they want to meet?”

  “They heard Torres’s bullshit,” Malone said. “I guess they believed it, I dunno.”

  “Why didn’t you call us for backup?” Russo asks.

  “I thought I could handle it,” Malone says. “I did handle it.”

  “If we had been there,” Monty says, “there would have been no confrontation. No noise on the street, no IAB. Then you go off the radar for three hours. That, considered with what Torres’s people have been saying—”

  “What are you saying, Monty?”

  “Simply this,” Monty says. “In less than sixty days now I’m leaving the Job. I’m taking my family and leaving the city. And I am not going to let anything, or anyone, get in the way of that. So if there’s something we need to take care of, Denny, then let’s take care of it.”

  Malone walks down to his car and gets in.

  A wire loop comes over his neck.

  The wire pulls back and tightens.

  Reflexively, Malone grabs at the cord but it’s too tight against his throat and he can’t rip it off or even dig his fingers in to create any breathing space. He reaches for the gun he set on the passenger seat but his hand can’t grip the handle and then drops it.

  Malone flings his elbows back, trying to strike his assailant, but he can’t twist enough to get any leverage. His lungs ache for air, he feels himself blacking out, his legs start to kick out spasmodically, what awareness he has left tells him he’s dying and in his mind his voice starts to chant a childhood prayer—

  Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

  And I detest all my sins . . .

  He hears his throat croaking.

  The pain is awful.

  And I detest all my sins . . .

  And I detest all my sins . . .

  all my sins . . .

  my sins . . .

  sins . . .

  And then he’s dead and there is no blinding white light only darkness and there’s no music just shouting and he sees Russo and wonders if Phil is dead, too; they say you see everyone you love in heaven but he doesn’t see Liam or his dad only Russo grabbing him by the shoulder, grabbing him and throwing him onto the hard asphalt of the street and then he’s coughing and gagging and spitting as Russo picks him up and walks him toward another car and then Malone is in the passenger seat with Russo behind the wheel where he belongs in this land of the living and not of the dead and the car pulls out.

  “My car,” Malone croaks.

  “Monty has it,” Russo says. “He’s behind us.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere we can have a private chat with the backseat driver.”

  They go up the West Side Highway and pull off into Fort Washington Park, near the GW Bridge.

  Malone gets out. His legs feel unsteady under him as he sees Monty drag the guy out of the car onto an island of grass between two branches of the Hudson River Greenway.

  Staggering over, Malone looks down at him.

  The guy is already beat up, half-conscious. His head looks like the butt of a .38 smashed into it—hair mixed with caked blood. He’s maybe in his midthirties, black hair, olive skin. He could be Italian or Puerto Rican or, shit, Dominican.

  Malone kicks him in the ribs. “Who are you?”

  The guy shakes his head.

  “Who sent you?” Malone asks.

  Guy shakes his head again.

  Monty grabs the guy’s arm and lays his hand in the car door. “The man asked you a question.”

  He kicks the door shut.

  The guy screams.

  Monty opens the door and pulls him out.

  The guy’s fingers are shattered, pointing off in all directions, bones poking through the skin. He holds his wrist with his other hand and stares, then howls again and looks up at Monty.

  “Now we do the other hand,” Monty says. “Or you can tell us who you are and who sent you.”

  “Los Trinitarios.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” the guy says. “They just told me . . . be in the car . . . if you came out . . .”

  “What?” Malone asks.

  “Do you. Bring them your head. For Castillo.”

  Russo asks, “Where’s Castillo now?”

  “I don’t know,” the guy says. “I didn’t meet with him. I just got orders.”

  “Put your other hand in the door,” Monty says.

  “Please . . .”

  Monty pulls his .38 and points it at his head. “Put your other hand in the door.”

  Crying, the guy sets his hand in the door.

  He’s shaking from head to toe.

  “Where’s Castillo?” Monty asks.

  “I have a family.”

  “I don’t?” Malone asks. “Where is he?”

  Monty starts to kick the door.

  “Park Terrace! The penthouse!”

  “What do we do with this guy?” Monty asks.

  “The Hudson’s right there,” says Russo.

  “No, please.”

  Russo leans over him. “You tried to kill a New York police detective. Take his head off. What the fuck do you think we’re going to do with you?”

  The man whimpers, holds his hand. He curls into a fetal position, giving up, and starts to chant. “Baron Samedi . . .”

  “What’s he gibbering about?” Russo asks.

  “He’s praying to Baron Samedi,” Monty says. “The god of death in Dominican voodoo.”

  “Good choice,” Russo says, pulling his off-duty weapon. “Finish up. You need a chicken or something, you’re SOL.”

  “No,” Malone says.

  “‘No’?”

  “We already have Pena on our score sheet,” Malone says. “We don’t need another homicide beef to worry about.”

  “He’s right,” Monty says. “It’s not like our friend here is going to be handling any more garrotes.”

  “If we leave him alive,” Russo says, “it sends the wrong message.”

  “I’m kind of losing my interest in messages,” Malone says. He squats beside his would-be killer. “Go back to the DR. If I see you in New York again, I will kill you.”

  They get in the cars and drive up to Inwood.

  Park Terrace Gardens is a castle.

  The condo buildings sit on a hill near the tip of the peninsula that is the northern end of Manhattan, the far outer reaches of the Kingdom of Malone.

  The peninsula is defined by the Hudson River to the west and Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the north and east, which separates Manhattan from the Bronx. Three bridges span the Spuyten Duyvil—a railway bridge that edges the river, then the Henry Hudson Bridge, and farther to the east, where the creek bends south, the Broadway Bridge.

  “The Gardens,” as the residents call it, is a complex of five eight-story gray stone buildings constructed in 1940, now all co-ops, set in a wooded block between West 215th and West 217th.

  To the south is Northeastern Academy and the small Isham Park; to the west, the much larger Inwood Hill Park buffers the Gardens from Route 9 and the river. North of the Gardens, one residential block yields to public buildings—Columbia University’s athletic complex, a soccer stadium and
a branch of New York Presbyterian Hospital—between it and the creek.

  The Muscota Marsh lies to the northwest.

  The views from the top floors of the Gardens’ units are spectacular—the Manhattan skyline, the Hudson, the oak slopes of Inwood Hill, the Broadway Bridge. You can see a long way.

  You can see someone coming.

  The team drives in two cars up Broadway, Inwood’s central artery. A small side street runs west onto Park Terrace East and they take this north to 217th, pull over and look at the building where Castillo lives in the penthouse on the north side.

  It just confirms what Malone already knew.

  They can’t get to Castillo here.

  The heroin dealer, the man who ordered a New York detective to be decapitated, is protected not so much by the stone towers or the moat around them as by the law. This isn’t a project, a tenement or a ghetto. It has a co-op board, a homeowners’ association, its own website. Most of all, it has rich white people, so you can’t just storm in there and haul Castillo out. The law-and-order residents of the Gardens would be on the phone to the mayor, the city council, the commissioner in five seconds, protesting “storm trooper” tactics.

  They need a warrant to go in there, which they’re not going to get.

  And be honest, Malone tells himself, you can’t go get a warrant because you’re dirty. The last thing in the world you can do is arrest Carlos Castillo and he knows it. So he can sit up in his castle and move his heroin and arrange to kill you.

  Suck it up.

  What’s your play?

  Sooner or later, Castillo is going to put the Dark Horse out on the street. He’ll supervise it personally, that’s his job.

  When he does, you can take him there.

  So what you have to be is patient.

  Back off now, put Castillo under surveillance and wait for him to move. Contact Carter, give him Castillo’s whereabouts.

  Play the cards you have, don’t worry about the ones you don’t. A pair of jacks is as good as a straight flush if you know how to manage them. And you have better than jacks.

  Russo has his binoculars out and is looking at the penthouse terrace.

  “What are we looking at?” Levin asks. He’s still pissy about the 2 A.M. roust at his place.

  “Don’t take it personal,” Russo told him. “We had to check you out, see if you’re clean.”

  “See if I’m dirty, you mean.”

  “The fuck did you just say?” Malone asked.

  Levin was smart enough to keep his mouth shut about that. He just said, “Amy was pretty mad.”

  “She ask you about the money?” Russo asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What did you tell her?” Monty asked.

  “To mind her own business.”

  “Our boy is growing up,” Russo said. “Now you have to marry her. So she can’t testify.”

  “I’m giving that money to charity,” Levin said.

  Now Malone says to him, “This is Carlos Castillo’s safe house. We’re going to put it up.”

  “A wire?”

  “Not yet,” Malone says. “Right now just a visual.”

  “Hey,” Russo says, handing Malone the binoculars.

  Malone sees Castillo himself come out with a morning cup of coffee to enjoy the sunrise.

  The king surveying his kingdom.

  Not yet, Malone thinks.

  It ain’t your kingdom yet, motherfucker.

  Chapter 25

  “I messed up,” Claudette says.

  Part of him hadn’t even wanted to walk through the door, afraid of what he’d find.

  But he decided he had to check up on her.

  He owes her that.

  And he loves her.

  Now she’s in that remorseful phase he’s seen a hundred times. She’s sorry (they both know she is), she won’t do it again (they both know she will). But he’s motherfucking exhausted. “Claudette, I can’t do this right now, I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

  She sees the mark on his neck. “What happened to you?”

  “Someone tried to kill me.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Look, I need a shower. I need to clear my head.”

  He goes into the bathroom, strips and steps into the shower.

  His body aches.

  Malone scrubs his skin until it hurts. Can’t scrub off the welt, can’t scrub off the filth he feels on his skin, in his soul. His old man used to come home from the Job and step right into the shower—now he knows why.

  The street stays with you.

  It sinks into your pores and then your blood.

  And your soul? Malone asks himself. You gonna blame that on the street, too?

  Some of it, yeah.

  You’ve been breathing corruption since you put on the shield, Malone thinks. Like you breathed in death that day in September. Corruption isn’t just in the city’s air, it’s in its DNA, yours, too.

  Yeah, blame it on the city, blame it on New York.

  Blame it on the Job.

  It’s too easy, it stops you from asking yourself the hard question.

  How did you get here?

  Like anyplace else.

  A step at a time.

  Thought it was a joke when they warned you at the Academy about the slippery slope. A cup of coffee, a sandwich, it leads to other things. No, you thought, a cup of coffee was a cup of coffee and a sandwich was a sandwich. The deli owners were grateful for your service, appreciative of your presence.

  What was the harm?

  There wasn’t really.

  There still isn’t.

  Then there was 9/11.

  Jesus, don’t blame it on that. You haven’t sunk so low you’d blame it on that, have you? A dead brother, twenty-seven dead brothers, a shattered mother, a broken heart, the stench of burned corpses, ashes and dust.

  Don’t blame it on that, ace.

  You blame it on that you can never visit Liam’s grave again.

  Plainclothes is where it really started.

  You and Russo walked into a stash house, the skels took off and there it is—money on the fucking floor. Not a lot, a couple of grand, but still, you had a mortgage, diapers, maybe you wanted to take your wife out someplace that had tablecloths.

  Russo and you looked at each other and you scooped it up.

  Never said anything about it.

  But a line was crossed.

  You didn’t know there were other lines.

  At first it was targets of opportunity—money left by fleeing dealers, cash or freebies offered by a madam in exchange for looking the other way or looking out, an envelope from a bookie. You didn’t seek it—you didn’t hunt, you gathered, but if it was there, you took.

  Because what harm did it do? People are going to gamble, they’re going to get laid.

  And okay, maybe then you went to a burglary or a store break-in and maybe you took something the thief didn’t. Nobody got hurt except the insurance company and they’re bigger crooks than anybody.

  You’re in court all the time—you see how incompetence, inefficiency, and shit yes, corruption, turn loose guys you risked your life to put on trial. You watch them walk away and grin at you, grin in your face, and then one day a defense lawyer comes up to you outside the courthouse and says we work in the same system anyway, maybe we can make it work for both of us, and he gives you a card and says there’s a taste in it for you if you send me referrals.

  And why the hell not? The accused is going to get a lawyer anyway and everyone in the system is getting paid but you so why shouldn’t you take a piece if it’s offered? And then if he wants you to bring an envelope to a willing prosecutor to let a guy walk who’s probably going to walk anyway—shit, you’re just taking more of the dealer’s money.

  You took advantage of crimes, you didn’t set crimes up to take advantage, and then . . .

  It was a crack mill on 123rd off Adam Clayton Powell. You hit it by the book, a warrant and everyth
ing, and the dealer didn’t run—he just sat there calmly and said, “Take it. I walk away and you walk away and we’re both better off.”

  And now you’re not talking one, two grand, you’re talking fifty, you’re talking serious money, the kind of money you put it away, it puts your kids through college. Like the dealer ain’t going to get himself a Gerry Burger and walk anyway? Shit, at least you punished him, cost him some money, issued a fine—why should it go to the state instead of in your pocket, where it can do some good?

  So you let him walk.

  You don’t feel good about it but you don’t feel as bad as you thought you would because you got there step by step. Why should the lawyers make the money? The court system? The prisons?

  You shortcut the whole process and issue justice on the spot.

  What kings do.

  But there was still a line you hadn’t crossed. You didn’t even realize you were walking toward it.

  You told yourself you were different, but you knew you were lying. And you knew you were lying when you told yourself that was the last line you’d cross, because you knew it wasn’t.

  Used to be you’d cheat on the warrants to make righteous busts—take dope and criminals off the street. Then came the time when you cheated on the warrants to make busts so that you could make rips.

  You knew you’d make the transition from scavenger to hunter.

  You became a predator.

  An out-and-out criminal.

  Told yourself it was different because you were robbing drug dealers instead of banks.

  Told yourself you’d never kill anyone to make a rip.

  The last lie, the last line.

  Because what the fuck were you supposed to do when you went into a mill and they wanted to slug it out? Let yourself get killed or gun them down. And then were you supposed to not take the money, not take the drugs, just because some dirtbags had been taken off the count?

  You took money with blood literally on it.

  And you took the dope.

  And let them call you a hero cop.

  And half believed it.

  And now you’re a drug dealer.

  No different from the dirtbags you came on the Job to fight.

  Now you’re naked and you can’t wash the mark of Judas off your body or out of your soul and you know that Diego Pena wasn’t drawing his gun to shoot you, you know that you flat-out murdered him.