Broken

by Don Winslow

  All Jimmy can see now are red lights, tracing through the black like in some sort of stupid laser-tag room, except this is real, the bullets will be real, the dying will be real.

  A dot lands on his chest, and he dives to the deck.

  “Down! Down! Everyone down!” he yells.

  He hears his guys drop.

  The red dots search them out.

  Jimmy takes out his flashlight, turns it on, and rolls it to his left. It draws fire, and he sights in on a muzzle flash and shoots. Angelo and Wilmer do the same, and Jimmy hears Harold’s shotgun boom.

  Then he hears a grunt and a moan of pain.

  “You ain’t want to do this!” Jimmy yells. “Put down your guns! Tell ’em, Wilmer!”

  Wilmer yells out the message in Spanish.

  The answer is gunfire.

  Fuck, Jimmy thinks.

  In fact, fuck shit.

  Then he hears an engine start up.

  What the . . . ?

  Lights come on.

  Headlights.

  Looking to his left, Jimmy sees Harold driving a forklift toward them. The prongs have two heavy crates on them, and Harold lifts them like a shield and yells, “Get on!”

  The rest of the team hop on like soldiers on a tank, shooting around the crates as Harold drives it right toward the shooters, illuminated by the headlights, backing up toward a bulkhead, with nowhere else to go.

  Four of them.

  Not counting the two wounded trying to crawl away from the charging forklift.

  Fuck ’em, Jimmy thinks.

  If they make it, they make it.

  They don’t . . . oh, well.

  Cockroaches anyway.

  Jimmy leans out and sees one of the skells backing up, raising an AK like he doesn’t know what to do.

  Harold makes up his mind for him. Drives the forklift right into him and presses him against the bulkhead. The other three drop their guns and raise their hands.

  Jimmy hops down from the forklift and slaps one of them across the face, hard. “You could have done that twenty minutes ago and saved us all a lot of aggravation.”

  Angelo finds a light switch and turns it on.

  “Well, now,” Jimmy says.

  What he sees is meth.

  Stacks and stacks of rectangles, floor to ceiling, wrapped in black plastic.

  “Gotta be three tons here,” Angelo says.

  Easy, Jimmy thinks.

  A couple of million dollars’ loss for Oscar Diaz. No wonder his boys were willing to slug it out.

  Oscar ain’t gonna be happy.

  Wilmer and Angelo are securing the suspects with plastic ties. Harold still has AK Boy pinned against the wall, although the assault rifle has clattered to the deck.

  Jimmy walks up to him. “You got yourself into a real predicament here, ain’t you?”

  AK Boy squirms.

  “What are we gonna do with you?” Jimmy asks. “You ever see a tick pop? You know, when a tick gets all swollen up with blood and you squeeze it and it just pops? If I tell Harold here to step on the gas . . . pop.”

  “No, please.”

  “‘No, please’?” Jimmy says. “You was gonna kill me, man.”

  “You want me to call this in now?” Angelo asks. “These boys might bleed out.”

  “Give me a minute,” Jimmy says.

  He and Harold take AK Boy up onto the deck.

  The river is still muddy.

  Flowing fast, though.

  “What’s your name?” Jimmy asks AK Boy.

  “Carlos.”

  “Carlos, can you swim?”

  “A little.”

  “I hope so,” Jimmy says. He lifts Carlos over the rail. “Tell Oscar Diaz that Jimmy McNabb says hi.”

  He drops him over the side.

  “Now we can call it in,” Jimmy says.

  Half an hour later, the boat is awash in alphabet soup.

  NOPD, SWAT, DEA, HP, EMTs, even the Louisiana State Police show up, because everyone wants a piece of what might turn out to be the biggest drug bust in New Orleans history.

  Biggest meth bust for sure.

  On the dock the media’s starting to roll up.

  Jimmy lights his own cigarette and then Angelo’s.

  Angelo takes a deep drag and then asks, “What did the boss say?”

  “Big headlines, film at eleven, no humans got hurt,” Jimmy says. “What’s Landreau gonna say? ‘Congratulations.’”

  “But he’s pissed.”

  Landreau’s pissed, Jimmy thinks. SWAT is pissed, DEA is pissed, Harbor Police is pissed—Jimmy don’t care because he knows . . .

  Oscar Diaz is really pissed.

  He is, and not because the dripping-wet rat is messing up his floor.

  The condo is across the river in Algiers Point. Oscar has the penthouse, and the view from his terrace is of the Mississippi and, beyond that, downtown New Orleans, from the Quarter to Marigny to Bywater. Oscar’s not focused on that, though. He’s focused on his boy Carlos, who just cost him more than he paid for the condo.

  Cost him more than that, though.

  Cost him more than just money.

  This was going to be Oscar’s shot—to rise from the middle ranks of drug slingers to the top tier. This was his big chance—to move that kind of weight up the river to St. Louis and Chicago. Prove that NOLA could be a transshipment hub, use the river and the harbor to bring the stuff in, then put it on trucks and send it out on the highways. If he pulled this off, the Sinaloa people would hook him up with a lot more weight, enough meth to make a move into LA and New York.

  Now the Sinaloans are going to think he’s a piece of shit. That New Orleans is too dangerous. He’s going to have to get on the phone and tell them that he lost their drugs, and he knows that’s the last call of his they’ll ever take.

  So his drugs are gone, his money is gone, and his chance is gone. He’ll spend at least five more years selling to redneck bayou trash.

  He walks back inside to the living room and stands in front of his fish tank, a ninety-one-gallon Red Sea Reefer 350 containing the loves of his life—his beautiful, bright yellow Neptune grouper (cost him $6K), his little red-and-silver bladefin basslet ($10K), the golden with electric-blue stripes clarion angelfish (cost him nothing, was a gift from the cartel), and his most recent acquisition and pride, his $30K blue queen angelfish, which cost so much because the gorgeous beauties live in deep underwater caves.

  Oscar has a lot of time, money, care, and love tied up in his tank with its expensive, beautiful corals. He lifts open the lid, puts in a few flakes of dried food, and then opens a plastic container holding small chunks of raw clam and tosses them in.

  “You’re stressing out my fish,” he says to Carlos. “My fish are very sensitive to stress, and they’re picking it up from you right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Chill out,” Oscar says. “Now, who said to say hi to me?”

  “Said his name was Jimmy McNabb,” Carlos says.

  “DEA?”

  “City cop,” Carlos says. “Narcotics Division.”

  “And he threw you off the boat to give me a message.”

  “Yeah.”

  Oscar turns to Rico. “Take Carlos out and kill him.”

  Carlos turns white.

  “I’m fucking with you,” Oscar says, laughing. He turns back to Rico. “Get my boy a hot shower and some clean clothes. That fucking river is filthy. Entiendes, Rico?”

  Rico understands. Take Carlos out and kill him.

  When they leave, Oscar walks back out and looks at the city.

  Jimmy McNabb.

  Well, Jimmy McNabb, you just made this personal.

  You made it personal and took something away from me.

  Now I’ll take something away from you.

  Something you care about.

  The cop who took the DV comes in to see Eva personally afterward.

  She’d heard it all over the radio, but he wants to show respect.
“Pretty much the way you’d thought it would go. The perp shot the woman and then himself.”

  “How about the kid?”

  “We found him in the clothes dryer,” the officer says. “He’s okay.”

  As okay, Eva thinks, as a little boy who just heard his father shoot his mother to death can be.

  “Good thing he did himself,” she says. “Save us the trouble of a trial.”

  “You got dat right.”

  “And the kid goes into the system,” Eva says.

  She wants to cry.

  But Eva don’t cry.

  Not in front of a cop anyway.

  Rico listens carefully to Oscar and then shakes his head and says, “You can’t touch a cop.”

  Oscar takes this in. Then, “Who says you can’t?”

  Danny and Roxanne are still sitting in the park, their third night waiting for the no-show pervert.

  “Okay,” Danny says after a lot of thought, “fuck Rachel, marry Monica, kill Phoebe.”

  “Poor Rachel,” Roxanne says. “Always fucked, never married.”

  “No, she and Ross got married in Vegas, remember?”

  “Yeah, but they were drunk.”

  “Still counts,” Danny says. “You?”

  Roxanne says, “Kill Monica, marry Rachel, fuck Phoebe.”

  “That was quick.”

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” Roxanne says. “I’ve always wanted to do Phoebe. Since like season one.”

  “Jesus, you were what, seven?”

  “I was a precocious lesbian,” Roxanne says. “I played with Barbie dolls.”

  “Every little girl played with Barbie dolls.”

  “No, Danny,” she says, “I played with Barbie dolls.”

  “Oh.”

  Roxanne’s blood and brains splatter on Danny’s face.

  It happens so fast.

  A hand grabs her short hair and jerks her out.

  His car window shatters.

  Danny reaches for his gun, but a cloth is already over his mouth and nose. He kicks against the floor, trying to push off, but it’s too late.

  He’s unconscious when they drag him from the car.

  The sirens sound like baying hounds.

  First one, then another, then four, five, a dozen as the units roll toward McDonough Park. They roll from all over Algiers, then out of the 4th District station house, then across the river from the 8th.

  Responding to Code 10-13.

  Officer needs assistance.

  The sound is horrific.

  A chorus of alarm.

  Echoing across Algiers.

  The party’s at Sweeny’s of course.

  Ain’t nowhere else it would be. Jimmy’s been going there since he was a kid. Literally—he was eleven, twelve years old when he’d go into the bar to get his old man out.

  Or at least get his paycheck before he drank it all.

  Now it’s Jimmy’s home bar and his old man does his drinking at home.

  So the night after the big bust, it was only natural that the cops repaired to Sweeny’s for the celebration.

  The team is there, of course—Angelo, Wilmer, Harold—and all the other guys and gals from the Narcotics Unit, a half dozen cops from SID Intelligence, and a spattering of uniforms and detectives from the 4th, the 8th, and the local 6th District.

  Landreau stopped in for a token drink. Even a couple of city and federal prosecutors came by, and two local DEA guys showed up with cowboy hats for the team and gave a toast: “We’re like McNabb’s dick—no hard feelings.”

  But most of the guests left early, and now it’s just the team, a few cops from Narcotics, and the others that served with them at various times in their careers. The few civilians in the place know enough to mind their own business and just be quietly amused at the raucous storytelling.

  “So I’m lying there flat out,” Jimmy says, “shitting my pants, thinking, We’re fucked, and then Harold . . . Harold comes roaring up on a forklift. . . .”

  A chant starts: “Harold! Harold! Harold!”

  Harold’s on the little stage with a mike in his hand, trying to do stand-up comedy. “So I go to my proctologist. He takes one look at my anus and says, ‘Jimmy McNabb?’”

  “I love you, Harold,” Jimmy says, a little overrefreshed. “In a very heterosexual, manly, Christian way . . .”

  “Harold! Harold! Harold!”

  Harold taps the mike. “Is this thing on?”

  “. . . like Jesus loved . . .”

  “Judas,” Wilmer says.

  “No, the other one.”

  “Peter.”

  “Peter or Paul . . . or Almond Joy,” Jimmy says. “Anyway . . . what was I saying?”

  “Every cop wants a leader of integrity, courage, and honor,” Harold is saying. “But we got Jimmy McNabb, and I say, ‘Easy come, easy go.’”

  Angelo stands up, his legs wobbly, and pounds the table. “Angelo wants sex! Who wants to sex Angelo?!”

  “Jimmy does,” Wilmer says.

  Lucy Wilmette, a veteran from 8th plainclothes, raises her hand. “I want to sex Angelo.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Angelo says. “So who else?”

  “‘Who else?’” Lucy asks. “Jesus, Angelo.”

  Eva watches the blips on the screen.

  Like bees swarming back to the hive.

  She follows the radio calls.

  Officer down . . . Officer lying in the street . . . Ambulance needed . . . Confirm ambulance needed . . . Officer responding . . . Officer responding . . . Officer responding . . . Unit 240 D . . . Where’s the other officer? . . . Why isn’t he responding? . . . Gunshots were heard. . . . Witness on the scene . . . Christ, it’s a kid. . . . Jesus Christ, where’s the ambulance? . . . She’s bleeding out. . . . I can’t get a pulse. . . . Sean, she’s gone. . . . Where’s her partner? Goddamn it, where’s her partner?!

  Unit 240 D.

  Danny’s car.

  With her left hand, she punches in Jimmy on speed dial.

  Straight to voice mail.

  He’s at the party.

  At Sweeny’s.

  Jimmy, pick up!

  It’s your brother.

  “This is one of them cops you can’t touch?” Oscar asks.

  Danny is handcuffed to a steel chair bolted to the concrete floor in a warehouse by the docks on Algiers Point. His ankles are cuffed to the chair legs.

  “Wake him up,” Oscar says.

  Rico slaps Danny until he comes to.

  “Jimmy McNabb’s little brother,” Oscar says.

  Danny blinks, sees a moon-faced Hispanic man standing over him. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the man who’s going to hurt you,” Oscar says.

  He fires up the acetylene torch.

  The flame glows blue.

  Jimmy raises a pitcher. “A toast! Here’s to taking ass and kicking names!”

  He pours the beer straight from the pitcher into his mouth.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!”

  Jimmy sets down the empty pitcher, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and says, “Seriously—”

  “Seriously,” Wilmer says.

  “—here’s to taking dope off the street, guns off the block, and bad guys off the count. Here’s to the best damn group of cops in the world. I love you people. All of you. You’re my brothers and sisters, and I love you.”

  He plops down into his chair.

  “Was that Jimmy McNabb being nice?” Lucy asks.

  “It’s the booze talking,” Wilmer says.

  Gibson, a sergeant from the 4th, walks into Sweeny’s and sees a party well in progress. Looking through the crowd, he spots Jimmy McNabb onstage doing a horrible karaoke version of “Thunder Road.”

  Gibson searches out Angelo Carter and finds him standing at the bar.

  “Word with you?” Gibson asks. “Outside?”

  “Jesus,” Angelo says. “Danny?”

  The news sobers him up quick. He’s known Danny sin
ce he was a kid, a pain-in-the-ass little brother hanging around, idolizing Jimmy, wanting to catch on with the department.

  And now he’s dead?

  “It’s bad,” Gibson said. “We found his body down by the wharves at Algiers Point. He’d been tortured.”

  Burned.

  Every bone in his body broken.

  Now Gibson says, “We gotta tell Jimmy.”

  “He’ll go crazy,” Angelo says.

  Jimmy McNabb loves nothing in the world except his partners and his family. When he finds out that Danny is dead, he’s going to go violent.

  He’ll rip up the place.

  He’ll hurt other people and himself.

  They have to fucking handle this.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Angelo says.

  Angelo goes through the door first.

  Followed by Wilmer, Harold, Gibson, three of the biggest uniforms Angelo could find in the 6th, and Sondra D, who has parlayed her remarkable resemblance to Marilyn Monroe into a lucrative career as a thousand-dollar-a-go call girl. She was about to make that much with a visiting fireman at the Roosevelt Hotel when Angelo called.

  Everything in the bar stops.

  Everything usually does when Sondra walks into a room.

  Silver-sequined dress.

  Platinum hair.

  “Jimmy!” Angelo yells. “Someone here to see you.”

  Jimmy looks down from the stage and grins.

  Sondra looks up at him and says, “I’m Sergeant Sondra from . . . Internal Affairs. . . . ”

  Which gets a laugh from everyone.

  Including Jimmy.

  “You’ve been a baaaad police officer,” Sondra says in her best MM voice. She produces a pair of handcuffs from her décolletage and dangles them from her right hand. “And now you’re under arrest.”

  Harold and Wilmer step onto the stage, take Jimmy by the elbows, and walk him down to Sondra.

  “Turn around,” Sondra says. “Put your hands behind your back.”

  “Are you going to cuff me?” Jimmy asks.

  “For starters.”

  “Do what the lady tells you,” Angelo says.

  Jimmy shrugs. “Far be it from me . . .”

  He turns around, puts his hands behind his back, and Sondra cuffs him.

  Angelo checks to make sure they’re on tight and locked, then gently bends Jimmy over the bar, leans next to him and says, “Jimmy, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  People in Dispatch later said you could hear Eva’s scream from outside the building.