The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “I said keep an eye on it. Keep me informed.”

  It’s the kind of word you want going out, an operation like this; at the same time, Mullen feels bad because it does compromise Cirello’s career. That kind of stink is hard to get back in the bottle. On a practical level, if Internal Affairs gets onto Cirello, it could compromise the whole operation.

  Cirello’s ahead of him. “What I need from you is assurance that OC doesn’t have Andrea up, I’m walking into a recording studio, I go home and IAB is waiting on the stoop.”

  “If I go asking questions to OC,” Mullen says, “I have to tell them why. I’m not ready to bring them in yet.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mullen says. “If you get confronted by OC, IAB, anyone else, you tell them you need to speak to your rep, and you come straight to me. At that point, I promise you I’ll straighten everyone out.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is great work, Bobby,” Mullen says. “This takes us up another level. Let’s ride it out.”

  Us, Cirello thinks. It’s not us, boss, it’s me with my ass on the line. Me having to play out being a dirtbag.

  It’s costing him, too.

  The hanging out in casinos, the drinking . . . it isn’t him.

  And Libby doesn’t like it. That relationship’s going good, it’s turning into something. Except lately she says he’s “different,” he’s “changing.”

  “Like how?” Cirello asked when she brought it up.

  They were having brunch (he does “brunch” now, since he got with Libby, what happens, he guesses, when you date a dancer) at the Heights Café over on Hicks Street and she said, “I don’t know. You seem kind of distant.”

  “I’m right here, Libby.”

  “Like, where do you go when I’m working?” she asked. “What do you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said. “I watch TV, I work . . . I’m not cheating on you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” Libby said. “You just seem, I don’t know, stressed. And you’re drinking more than . . .”

  “More than what?”

  “Than when I met you.”

  “It’s the job.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Look, Libby, neither of us has traditional, nine-to-five, how-was-your-day-honey, fine-thank-you jobs, you know?”

  “Mine’s pretty straightforward.”

  “Well, mine isn’t,” he said. Then realized it sounded harsher than he intended. “I’ll watch the drinking; you’re right, I’m hitting it a little hard.”

  “I don’t want to be the nagging girlfriend.”

  “You’re not,” Cirello said. “It’s just that . . .”

  “What?”

  “Where I go is where I go,” Cirello said. “It’s the job.”

  “Okay.”

  But she doesn’t like it and it’s putting stress on their relationship. Cirello doesn’t want to lose this woman. Now he says to Mullen, “No, look, we’re just starting to get somewhere. Of course I want to see it through.”

  “Okay, good. I appreciate it, Bobby.”

  “Sure.” He gets up from the table. “Tell Mrs. Mullen thanks for breakfast. It was really good.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Mullen says. “Come over for dinner sometime soon. Bring . . .”

  “Libby.”

  “We’d like to meet her,” Mullen says. “And, Bobby, be careful, right?”

  “You got it.”

  He meets Andrea again, gives his report, gets his envelope. The next week, Andrea says, “Your stuff checked out.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “It was helpful.” Andrea slips him another piece of paper.

  Two more names.

  “You guys on a hiring jag?” Cirello asks. He doesn’t pick up the paper.

  “What?” Andrea asks. “They ain’t gonna wipe the tab clean, that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I want the vig forgiven.”

  “You want forgiveness, see a priest,” Andrea says. “He’ll give you ten Hail Marys. You don’t do them, he’ll stack on another ten. Even the Catholic Church charges vig.”

  “I’m Greek Orthodox.”

  “You’re not exactly in the strongest bargaining position here,” Andrea says.

  Yeah I am, Cirello thinks, because your people would rather have a gold shield on the arm than their money.

  He slides the paper back. “Google these.”

  They forgive the vig.

  Cirello runs the names.

  Then another set, then he clears a location, then he runs some license plate numbers to see if they’re cop cars.

  All the time he keeps gambling until he loses, his debt goes up and down like a yo-yo, but the net is that it goes up, vig or no vig. He keeps drinking, looking more and more like what he’s supposed to be, an out-of-control cop on a downward spiral.

  Mullen keeps getting complaints about him—Cirello came in hungover again, Cirello didn’t come in at all, Cirello has an attitude, Cirello’s been seen with a bookie again, Cirello is off the reservation.

  The lieutenant wants to piss-test him, hook him up to a polygraph, at the least send him to a department shrink.

  Mullen says no.

  The lieutenant wonders why the chief of Narcotics is running interference for a cop who seems to be running off the rails.

  Libby wonders what happened to the sweet guy she met.

  It only helps a little when they go to Mullen’s house for dinner. Mullen and his wife are wonderful, the kids are great, but Bobby is tense and preoccupied during the whole meal, almost to the point of being rude.

  They fight about it on the way home.

  “I like your boss,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Bobby says. “I mean, he’s a boss.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What, you on his side now?”

  “I didn’t know there were sides,” Libby says. “I’m just saying I like him.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Fuck you, Bobby.”

  “Yeah, fuck me.”

  “Self-pity is so attractive,” Libby says. “I just want to get you home and jump your bones right now.”

  Cirello knows what he’s doing, knows how he is. Knows the brutal truth of undercover work—you pretend to be something long enough, you’re not pretending anymore, you are that thing.

  That’s why he’s so glad when Andrea says, “My people want to meet you.”

  “Where’s the meet?” Mullen asks.

  “Prospect Park,” Cirello says. “Place called Erv’s, Flatbush and Beekman.”

  “One of those millennial hipster places,” Mullen says. “Craft cocktails, that kind of shit.”

  Cirello doesn’t know how Mullen knows this stuff, but he seems to know everything.

  “The meeting won’t be there,” Mullen says. “Andrea will meet you there and take you somewhere else. I’m sending backup.”

  “They’ll sniff it out.”

  “Look, we don’t know what this is.”

  “They’re not going to kill a New York cop,” Cirello says.

  “We’ll wire you,” Mullen says, “and lay off a little. Then if you get in trouble, we can get there.”

  “I haven’t gone all this way to blow it now.”

  “I’m not putting you on an island, Bobby,” Mullen says.

  Where the hell do you think I am now? Cirello thinks.

  He meets Andrea at Erv’s.

  Mullen called it—urban hipsters “doing” cute cocktails and bespoke coffee drinks.

  “I didn’t make you for a place like this,” Cirello says.

  “We’re not staying.”

  So Mullen called it again. Cirello follows Andrea to his Lincoln Navigator and gets in.

  “I have to pat you down.”

  “Save you the trouble,” Cirello sa
ys. “I have my service weapon, a Glock nine, and I’m not giving it over.”

  “I’m talking about a wire.”

  “Fuck you, a wire.”

  “Come on, Cirello.”

  “Put your hands on me, I’ll smash your face into that windshield,” Cirello says.

  “Why do you have a problem with this?”

  Because I’m wearing a fucking wire, Cirello thinks. But it’s a small mike, like Mullen promised, state-of-the-art, glued between the heel and the sole of the Chelsea boot that Libby had him buy. So he backs down. “Okay, pat me down. But you spend one more second than you have to around my package, I’m telling.”

  Andrea pats him all over.

  “Happy now?” Cirello asks.

  “And horny,” Andrea says. He starts the car and pulls out onto Flatbush.

  “Where are we going?” Cirello asks.

  “That would defeat the point of all this clever subterfuge,” Andrea says. “You’ll see.”

  He takes Eastern Parkway to the Van Wyck and turns south.

  “We going to Kennedy?” Cirello asks, more for Mullen’s benefit than his own.

  “Jesus, you’re worse than my kids,” Andrea says. “‘We there yet? We there yet?’ You don’t have to pee, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Hold it in,” Andrea says. He keeps looking into the rearview mirror.

  “There’s no one following us,” Cirello says. “Unless you have someone following us. And if you do, Mike, I’m going to blow your fucking head off.”

  “Relax.”

  They get to Kennedy and Andrea pulls into the Dollar Rent-A-Car return lane.

  “Dollar?” Cirello asks, to let Mullen know where he is. “Not Hertz, not even Avis? Things that bad with you guys?”

  “Come on.”

  Cirello gets out of the car and follows him over to a parking slot where another Lincoln sits.

  “In the front passenger,” Andrea says. He gets in on the driver’s side.

  Cirello gets in.

  Kennedy Airport is a smart choice for a meet, Cirello thinks. Since 9/11 only Homeland Security can do audio surveillance around an airport, and Homeland Security doesn’t give one shit about the mob. And with the planes taking off and landing, the mike in his boot is useless. Mullen won’t be able to hear a thing. He must be shitting bricks.

  No, something goes south here, you’re on your own.

  Unless the chief freaks out and comes charging in, which Cirello hopes he doesn’t do.

  Too much work down the drain.

  Still, Cirello doesn’t like being in the front passenger seat, the “Italian electric chair.” Two pops in the back of the head, they get out and into another rental car, and he becomes a cold case. He can hear Andrea in the interview room now: A dirty cop, he asked me to take him to the airport. After that, what can I tell you?

  So now Cirello asks, “Okay if I turn around?”

  The guy behind him says, “Well, this is supposed to be a face-to-face.”

  Cirello turns around.

  It’s a fucking kid—you’d card him if he came into your store to buy a six-pack.

  Brown hair and a brown beard. Wide face with high cheekbones. His leather jacket wears tight across a heavy chest and shoulders.

  Looks like his grandfather Johnny Boy.

  Johnny Boy Cozzo was the last of the old-school gangsters—didn’t plead out, took his case to juries (two of which acquitted him), didn’t rat when he finally got life without parole.

  Died of throat cancer in a federal lockup.

  They make movies about the guy.

  Cirello knows his mob history—knows it was Johnny Boy who broke the long-standing Cimino family “you deal, you die” commandment and brought cocaine in from Mexico. Killed his boss to do it, took his chair, and the Cimino family made millions from the coke.

  Until Giuliani and them took down the Ciminos and the rest of the Five Families and now they’re, as the saying goes, shells of their former selves. And the “no drugs” order is back on, ordered by Johnny Boy’s son, Junior, because guys were ratting out when faced with the long sentences.

  Except now here’s another John Cozzo sitting next to Steve DeStefano in the back of a car.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asks Cirello.

  “Don’t you know who you are?” Cirello asks. “We have an amnesia thing going on right now?”

  “Hey, we got open mike night here,” Cozzo says. “Do yourself a favor, don’t quit your day job. I’m John Cozzo—yeah, he was my grandfather—people call me Jay.”

  “What are we doing, Jay?”

  “You’ve been shaking down my friend Steve, here.”

  Cirello still has his weapon, but there’s no way he’s going to be able to reach it, cramped like he is in this seat, before one of them can get a shot off. And out of the corner of his eye, he sees Andrea shift his hand toward the waistband of his pants.

  If they really want to do me, Cirello thinks, I’m dead. He asks, “Does your uncle know you’re here?”

  “What’s my uncle got to do with it?”

  “Doesn’t Junior have a rule about slinging dope?”

  “There’s only one rule now,” Cozzo says. “Make money. You make enough money, you make your own rules. My grandfather taught me that. I’m more like him than my uncle is, no disrespect.”

  “Of course not.” Yeah, of course not. Just about everybody disrespects Junior. His own people call him “the Clown Prince” and “Urkel.” He’s just about run what’s left of the family into the ground. And now one of his capos has gone off the reservation, running interference for his nephew’s drug deal.

  “You’re a piece of work,” Cozzo says. “You shake down one of my people for seven grand a week and you don’t pay the money you owe.”

  “You’ve been taking it out in trade.”

  “That’s why I wanted to meet you in person,” Cozzo says. “Look you in the eye, see what I’ve bought.”

  “More of a rental.”

  “Whatever gets you through the day, Detective,” Cozzo says. “I’ve taken a controlling interest in Steve’s business. Given the new arrangement, I don’t think we need to pay you for protection anymore. Here’s the question: Do we need to kill you now, or can we do business?”

  “We’ve been doing business,” Cirello says, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.

  “See, when I said I bought you, that’s what I meant,” Cozzo says. “Bucci sold your paper to Mike, Mike sold it to me. All sales are final.”

  He wants something, Cirello thinks, and he wants it badly. Otherwise he’d have stopped talking and Andrea would have pulled the trigger.

  “What if I tear up the paper?” Cozzo asks. “What does that buy me?”

  “Principal and vig?”

  “Principal and vig.”

  “What do you want?” Cirello asks. This is what it’s been building to, this is the reason for all the games up to now.

  “I’m looking at a major piece of business with someone,” Cozzo says. “I have to know it’s safe. Listen to me now, Cirello—I’m going to bring my family back to its proper place. This deal is a major piece of that and I cannot have it fucked up.”

  “Are you talking heroin?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” Cozzo says.

  “Yeah, he does, Jay,” Andrea says. “It might make a difference where he looks.”

  “Is that right?” Cozzo asks.

  “It is,” Cirello says. “There are different units in Narcotics. There’s a Heroin Task Force, for instance. Then you have the separate precincts . . .”

  “Yeah, heroin,” Cozzo says. “I need this cleared. I need to know local, state, federal . . .”

  “I can give you NYPD,” Cirello says. “State and DEA, I don’t have access.”

  “Get access.”

  “If I can,” Cirello says, “it will cost you more.”

  “Greedy motherfucker.”

  “I
can’t go empty-handed,” Cirello says. “State is one thing, the fucking feds . . .”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty maybe. Cash.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “The cost of doing business, Jay,” Andrea says.

  “And you’re going to take, what?” Cozzo asks. “Fifteen as a finder’s fee?”

  “I’m thinking more like twenty,” Cirello says. “I gotta live, too.”

  “You gotta gamble, you mean.”

  “Same thing.”

  Cozzo thinks about it for a few seconds and then says, “I’ll get you your fifty. You get me the information. But it comes with a guarantee—your motherfucking life, Cirello. Cop or no cop, this goes bad, I’ll kill you.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “Mike will give you that,” Cozzo says, opening the door. “Have a safe drive back. And, Cirello, remember what I said.”

  He and DeStefano get out of the car.

  Cirello watches them walk to another one, get in, and drive off.

  On the way back, Cirello asks Andrea, “Isn’t this going to jam you up with Junior?”

  “Junior has narrowed the income stream like an old man pissing,” Andrea says. “I have kids in college, you know what that costs these days? I don’t want them coming out, they’re already upside down.”

  “You trust this Cozzo kid?”

  “Trust,” Andrea says. “You are a comedian.”

  “Who am I checking out?”

  Black guy out of East New York, Andrea tells him.

  Name is Darius Darnell.

  3

  Victimville

  When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

  —Ho Chi Minh

  Eddie sees the blade and knows he’s dead.

  Cruz is coming down the corridor, a pedazo—a razor blade melted into a toothbrush—held low at his hip and a smile on his face because he’s wanted to kill Eddie for a while and now it looks like La Eme has given him the green light.

  Eddie curses himself because he has nothing but his fists and he should have been ready.

  Caro has fucked him.

  And now Cruz is right up on him and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do to save himself.

  It was different when he first got to Victorville.

  He came onto the yard seven months ago with the endorsement of Rafael Caro and got an instant introduction to Benny Zuniga, the Eme llavero, the shot caller. Zuniga has been the mesa for all of USP Victorville forever, twenty-five years now into a thirty-to-life sentence.