The Force: A Novel Read online

  It probably wouldn’t, he thinks.

  Because you still got Everyday Crazy—Drunk Crazy, Junkie Crazy, Crack Crazy, Meth Crazy, Love Crazy, Hate Crazy and, Malone’s personal favorite, plain old Crazy Crazy. What the public at large doesn’t understand is that the city’s jails have become its de facto mental hospitals and detox centers. Three-quarters of the prisoners they check in test positive for drugs or are psychotic, or both.

  They belong in hospitals but don’t have the insurance.

  Malone goes into the bedroom to get dressed.

  Black denim shirt, Levi’s jeans, Doc Marten boots with steel-reinforced toes (the better to kick in doors), a black leather jacket. The quasi-official Irish-American New York street uniform, Staten Island division.

  Malone grew up there, his wife and his kids still live there, and if you’re Irish or Italian from Staten Island, your career choices are basically cop, fireman or crook. Malone took door number one, although he has a brother and two cousins who are firefighters.

  Well, his brother, Liam, was a firefighter, until 9/11.

  Now he’s a twice-annual trip to Silver Lake Cemetery to leave flowers, a pint of Jameson’s and a report on how the Rangers are doing.

  Usually shitty.

  They always used to joke that Liam was the black sheep of the family, becoming a “hose-monkey”—a firefighter—instead of a cop. Malone used to measure his brother’s arms to see if they’d gotten any longer lugging all that shit around and Liam would shoot back that the only thing a cop would heft up a flight of stairs was a bag of doughnuts. And then there was the fictional competition between them about who could steal more—a firefighter on a domestic blaze or a cop on a burglary call.

  Malone loved his little brother, looked after him all those nights the old man wasn’t home, and they watched the Rangers together on Channel 11. The night the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994 was one of the happiest nights in Malone’s life. Him and Liam in front of the TV set, on their knees the last minute of the game when the Rangers were holding on to a one-goal lead by their fingernails and Craig MacTavish—God bless Craig MacTavish—kept getting the puck down deep in the Canucks’ zone and time finally ran out and the Rangers won the series 4–3 and Denny and Liam hugged each other and jumped up and down.

  And then Liam was gone, just like that, and it was Malone who had to go tell their mother. She was never the same after that and died just a year later. The doctors said it was cancer but Malone knew she was another victim of 9/11.

  Now he clips his holster with the regulation Sig Sauer onto his belt.

  A lot of cops like the shoulder holster but Malone thinks it’s just an extra move to get your hand up there and he prefers his weapon where his hand already is. He clips his off-duty Beretta to the back of his waistband, where it nestles into the small of his back. The SOG knife goes into his right boot. It’s against regs and illegal as shit, but Malone doesn’t care. He could be in a situation some skels take his guns and then what’s he supposed to pull, his dick? He ain’t going down like a bitch, he’s going out slashing and stabbing.

  And anyway, who’s going to bust him?

  A lot of people, you dumb donkey, he tells himself. These days, every cop’s got a bull’s-eye on his back.

  Tough times for the NYPD.

  First, there’s the Michael Bennett shooting.

  Michael Bennett was a fourteen-year-old black kid who was shot to death by an Anti-Crime cop in Brownsville. The classic case: nighttime, he looked hinky, the cop—a newbie named Hayes—told him to stop and he didn’t. Bennett turned, reached into his waistband and pulled out what Hayes thought was a gun.

  The newbie emptied his weapon into the kid.

  Turned out it wasn’t a gun, it was a cell phone.

  The community, of course, was “outraged.” Protests teetered on the edge of riots, the usual celebrity ministers, lawyers and social activists performed for the cameras, the city promised a complete investigation. Hayes was placed on administrative leave pending the result of the investigation, and the hostile relationship between blacks and the police got even worse than it already was.

  The investigation is still “ongoing.”

  And it came behind the whole Ferguson thing, and Cleveland and Chicago, Freddie Gray down in Baltimore. Then there was Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Minnesota, on and on.

  Not that the NYPD didn’t have its own cops killing unarmed black men—Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, George Tillman, Akai Gurley, David Felix, Eric Garner, Delrawn Small . . . And now this rookie had to go and shoot young Michael Bennett.

  So you got Black Lives Matter up your ass, every citizen a journalist with a cell-phone camera at the ready, and you go to work each day with the whole world thinking you’re a murdering racist.

  Okay, maybe not everybody, Malone admits, but it’s definitely different now.

  People look at you different.

  Or shoot at you.

  Five cops gunned down by a sniper in Dallas. Two cops in Las Vegas shot to death as they sat at a restaurant eating lunch. Forty-nine officers murdered in the United States in the past year. One of them, Paul Tuozzolo, in the NYPD, and the year before the Job lost Randy Holder and Brian Moore. There have been too many over the years. Malone knows the stats: 325 gunned down, 21 stabbed, 32 beaten to death, 21 deliberately run over by cars, 8 blown up in explosions, and none of that counts the guys dying from the shit they sucked down on 9/11.

  So yeah, Malone carries something extra, and yeah, he thinks, there’d be any number of people ready to string you up, they found you with illegal weapons, not the least of which would be the cop-hating CCRB, which Phil Russo insists stands for “Cunts, Cocksuckers, Rats and Ballbusters,” but is actually the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the mayor’s chosen stick for beating up on his police force when he needs to deflect attention from his own scandals.

  So the CCRB would hang you, Malone thinks, IAB—the goddamn Internal Affairs Bureau—would sure as shit hang you, even your own boss would cheerfully put a noose around your neck.

  Now Malone sucks it up to call Sheila. What he doesn’t want is a fight, what he doesn’t want is the question, Where are you calling from? But that’s what he gets when his estranged wife answers the phone. “Where are you calling from?”

  “The city,” Malone says.

  To every Staten Islander, Manhattan is and will always be “the city.” He doesn’t get more specific than that, and fortunately she doesn’t press him on it. Instead she says, “This better not be a call telling me you can’t make it tomorrow. The kids will be—”

  “No, I’m coming.”

  “For presents?”

  “I’ll get there early,” Malone says. “What’s a good time?”

  “Seven thirty, eight.”

  “Okay.”

  “You on a midnight?” she asks, a tinge of suspicion in her tone.

  “Yeah,” Malone says. Malone’s team is on the graveyard, but it’s a technicality—they work when they decide to work, which is when the cases tell them to. Drug dealers work regular shifts so their customers know when and where to find them, but drug traffickers work their own hours. “And it isn’t what you think.”

  “What do I think?” Sheila knows that every cop with an IQ over 10 and a rank over rookie can get Christmas Eve off if he wants, and a midnight tour is usually just an excuse to get drunk with your buddies or bang some whore, or both.

  “Don’t get it twisted, we’re working on something,” Malone says, “might break tonight.”

  “Sure.”

  Sarcastic, like. The hell she thinks pays for the presents, the kids’ braces, her spa days, her girls’ nights out? Every guy on the Job relies on overtime to pay the bills, maybe even get a little ahead. The wives, even the ones you’re separated from, gotta understand. You’re out there busting your hump, all the time.

  “You spending Christmas Eve with her?” Sheila asks.

  So close, Malone thin
ks, to getting away. And Sheila pronounces it “huh.” You spending Christmas Eve with huh?

  “She’s working,” Malone says, dodging the question like a skel. “So am I.”

  “You’re always working, Denny.”

  Ain’t that the large truth, Malone thinks, taking that as a good-bye and clicking off. They’ll put it on my freakin’ headstone: Denny Malone, he was always working. Fuck it—you work, you die, you try to have a life somewhere in there.

  But mostly you work.

  A lot of guys, they come on the Job to do their twenty, pull the pin, get their pension. Malone, he’s on the Job because he loves the job.

  Be honest, he tells himself as he walks out of the apartment. You had to do it all over again you wouldn’t be nothin’ but a New York City police detective.

  The best job in the whole freakin’ world.

  Malone pulls on a black wool beanie because it’s cold out there, locks up the apartment and goes down the stairs onto 136th. Claudette picked the place because it’s a short walk to her work, and near the Hansborough Rec Center, which has an indoor pool where she likes to swim.

  “How can you swim in a public pool?” Malone has asked her. “I mean, the germs floating around in there. You’re a nurse.”

  She laughed at him. “Do you have a private pool I don’t know about?”

  He walks west on 136th out to Seventh Avenue, a.k.a. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, past the Christian Science Church, United Fried Chicken and Café 22, where Claudette doesn’t like to eat because she’s afraid she’ll get fat and he doesn’t like to eat because he’s afraid they’ll spit in his food. Across the street is Judi’s, the little bar where he and Claudette will get a quiet drink on the odd occasions their downtimes coincide. Then he crosses ACP at 135th and walks past the Thurgood Marshall Academy and an IHOP where Small’s Paradise used to be down in the basement.

  Claudette, who knows about these things, told Malone that Billie Holiday had her first audition there and that Malcolm X was a waiter there during World War II. Malone was more interested that Wilt Chamberlain owned the place for a while.

  City blocks are memories.

  They have lives and they have deaths.

  Malone was still wearing the bag, riding a sector car, when a mook raped a little Haitian girl on this block back in the day. This was the fourth girl this animal had done, and every cop in the Three-Two was looking for him.

  The Haitians got there before the cops did, found the perp still on the rooftop and tossed him off into the back alley.

  Malone and his then partner caught the call and walked into the alley where Rocky the Non-Flying Squirrel was lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, with most of the bones in his body broken because nine floors is a long way to fall.

  “That’s the man,” one of the local women told Malone at the edge of the alley. “The man who raped those little girls.”

  The EMTs knew what was what, and one of them asked, “He dead yet?”

  Malone shook his head and the EMTs lit up cigarettes and leaned on the ambulance smoking for a good ten minutes until they went in with a stretcher and came back out with the word to call the medical examiner.

  The ME pronounced the cause of death as “massive blunt trauma with catastrophic and fatal bleeding,” and the Homicide guys who showed up accepted Malone’s account that the guy had jumped out of guilt over what he’d done.

  The detectives wrote it off as a suicide, Malone got a lot of stroke from the Haitian community, and most important, no little girls had to testify in court with their rapist sitting there staring at them and some dirtbag defense attorney trying to make them look like liars.

  It was a good result but shit, he thinks, we did that today we’d go to jail, we got caught.

  He keeps walking south, past St. Nick’s.

  A.k.a. “The Nickel.”

  The St. Nicholas Houses, a baker’s dozen of fourteen-story buildings straddled by Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass Boulevards from 127th to 131st, make up a good part of Malone’s working life.

  Yeah, Harlem has changed, Harlem has gentrified, but the projects are still the projects. They sit like desert islands in a sea of new prosperity and what makes the projects is what’s always made the projects—poverty, unemployment, drug slinging and gangs. Mostly good people inhabit St. Nick’s, Malone believes, trying to live their lives, raise their kids against tough odds, do their day-to-day, but you also have the hard-core thugs and the gangs.

  Two gangs dominate action in St. Nick’s—the Get Money Boys and Black Spades. GMB has the north projects, the Spades the south, and they live in an uneasy peace enforced by DeVon Carter, who controls most of the drug trafficking in West Harlem.

  The border between the gangs is 129th Street, and Malone walks past the basketball courts on the south side of the street.

  The gang boys aren’t out there today, it’s too freakin’ cold.

  He goes out Frederick Douglass past the Harlem Bar-B-Q and Greater Zion Hill Baptist. It was just down the street where he got the rep as both a “hero cop” and a “racist cop,” neither of which tag is true, Malone thinks.

  It was what, six years ago now, he was working plainclothes out of the Three-Three and was having lunch at Manna’s when he heard screaming outside. He went out the door and saw people pointing at a deli across the street and down the block.

  Malone called in a 10-61, pulled his weapon and went into the deli.

  The robber grabbed a little girl and held a gun to her head.

  The girl’s mother was screaming.

  “Drop your gun,” the robber yelled at Malone, “or I’ll kill her! I will!”

  He was black, junkie-sick, out of his fucking mind.

  Malone kept his gun aimed at him and said, “The fuck do I care you kill her? Just another nigger baby to me.”

  When the guy blinked, Malone put one through his head.

  The mother ran forward and grabbed her little girl. Held her tight against her chest.

  It was the first guy Malone ever killed.

  A clean shooting, no trouble with the shooting board, although Malone had to ride a desk until it was cleared and had to go see the departmental shrink to find out if he had PTSD or something, which it turned out he didn’t.

  Only trouble was, the store clerk got the whole thing on his cell-phone camera and the Daily News ran with the headline JUST ANOTHER N****R BABY TO ME with a photo of Malone with the log line “Hero Cop a Racist.”

  Malone got called into a meeting with his then captain, IAB and a PR flack from One Police, who asked, “‘Nigger baby’?”

  “I had to be sure he believed me.”

  “You couldn’t have chosen different words?” the flack asked.

  “I didn’t have a speechwriter with me,” Malone said.

  “We’d like to put you up for a Medal of Valor,” said his captain, “but . . .”

  “I wasn’t going to put in for one.”

  To his credit, the IAB guy said, “May I point out that Sergeant Malone saved an African American life?”

  “What if he’d missed?” the PR flack asked.

  “I didn’t,” Malone said.

  Truth was, though, he’d thought the same thing. Didn’t tell it to the shrink, but he had nightmares about missing the skel and hitting the little girl.

  Still does.

  Shit, he even has nightmares about hitting the skel.

  The clip ran on YouTube and a local rap group cut a song called “Just Another Nigger Baby,” which got a few hundred thousand hits. But on the plus side, the little girl’s mother came to the house with a pan of her special jalapeño cornbread and a handwritten thank-you card and sought Malone out.

  He still has the card.

  Now he crosses St. Nicholas and Convent and walks down 127th until it merges where 126th takes a northwest angle. He crosses Amsterdam and walks past Amsterdam Liquor Mart, which knows him well, Antioch Baptist Church, which doesn’t, past St. Mar
y’s Center and the Two-Six House and into the old building that now houses the Manhattan North Special Task Force.

  Or, as it’s known on the street, “Da Force.”

  Chapter 2

  The Manhattan North Special Task Force was half Malone’s idea to begin with.

  A lot of bureaucratic verbiage describes their mission, but Malone and every other cop on Da Force know exactly what their “special task” is—

  Hold the line.

  Big Monty put it somewhat differently. “We’re landscapers. Our job is to keep the jungle from growing back.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?” Russo asked.

  “The old urban jungle that was Manhattan North has been mostly cut down,” Monty said, “to make room for a cultivated, commercial Garden of Eden. But there are still patches of jungle—to wit, the projects. Our job is to keep the jungle from reclaiming paradise.”

  Malone knows the equation—real estate prices rise as crime falls—but he could give a shit about that.

  His concern was the violence.

  When Malone first came on the Job, the “Giuliani Miracle” had transformed the city. Police commissioners Ray Kelly and Bill Bratton had used “broken windows” theory and CompStat technology to reduce street crime to an almost negligible level.

  Nine/eleven changed the department’s focus from anticrime to antiterrorism, but street violence continued to fall, the murder rate plummeted and the Upper Manhattan “ghetto” neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood started to revive.

  The crack epidemic had largely reached its tragic Darwinian conclusion, but the problems of poverty and unemployment—drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence and gangs—hadn’t gone away.

  To Malone, it was like there were two neighborhoods, two cultures grouped around their respective castles—the shiny new condo towers and the old project high-rises. The difference was that the people in power were now literally invested.