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Malone drives up to Manhattan North, asks the desk sergeant, “Fat Teddy get on the bus yet?”
“It’s Christmas Eve, Malone,” the sergeant says. “Things are backed up.”
Malone goes down to the holding cells where Teddy sits on a bench. If there’s any place more depressing on Christmas Eve than a holding cell, Malone doesn’t know about it. Fat Teddy looks up when he sees Malone. “You gotta do something for me, bruvah.”
“What are you going to do for me?”
“Like what?”
“Tell me who’s on Carter’s pad.”
Teddy laughs. “Like you don’t know.”
“Torres?”
“I ain’t know nothin’.”
There it is, Malone thinks. Fat Teddy is scared to rat on a cop.
“Okay,” Malone says. “Teddy, you’re not an idiot, you only play one on the street. You know with two convictions on your sheet, the gun alone, you’re going to do five. We trace it back to some straw purchase in Gooberville, the judge is going to be pissed, could throw you a double. Ten years, that’s a long time, but look, I’ll come visit, bring you ribs from Sweet Mama’s.”
“Don’t be clowning me, Malone.”
“Dead-ass serious,” Malone says. “What if I could get you a walk?”
“What if you had a dick ’stead of what you got?”
“You’re the one wanted to be serious, Teddy,” Malone says. “If you don’t …”
“What you want?”
Malone says, “I’m hearing that Carter has been negotiating for some serious weaponry. What I want to know is, who is he negotiating with.”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“Not at all.”
“No, you must, Malone,” Teddy says, “because if I get a walk and you bust them guns, Carter he puts that together and I end up facedown.”
“You think I’m stupid, Teddy? I work out the walk so it looks like business as usual.”
Fat Teddy hesitates.
“Fuck you,” Malone says. “I have a beautiful woman waiting, I’m sitting here with an ugly fat guy.”
“His name is Mantell.”
“Whose name is Mantell?”
“Cracker runs guns for the ECMF.”
Malone knows the East Coast Motherfuckers are a motorcycle club deep in weed and weapons. Affiliate charters in Georgia and the Carolinas. But they’re racist, white supremacists. “ECMF would do business with black?”
“I guess black money spend the same.” Fat Teddy shrugs. “And they don’t mind helping black kill black.”
What Malone is more surprised about is Carter doing business with white. He has to be desperate. “What can the bikers offer him?”
“AKs, ARs, MAC-10s, you name it,” Teddy says. “S’all I know, son.”
“Carter didn’t get you a lawyer?”
“Can’t get hold of Carter,” Teddy says. “He in the Bahamas.”
“Call this guy,” Malone says, handing him a card. “Mark Piccone. He’ll get it squared away for you.”
Teddy takes the card.
Malone gets up. “We’re doing something wrong, aren’t we, Teddy? You and me freezing our asses off, Carter sipping piña coladas on the beach?”
“Trill.”
Trill.
True and real.
Malone cruises in his unmarked work car.
There’s only so many places the snitch can be. Nasty prefers the area just north of Columbia but below 125th Street and Malone finds him skulking along the east side of Broadway, doing the junkie bop.
Pulling over, Malone rolls down the passenger window and says, “In.”
Nasty Ass looks around nervously and then gets in. He’s a little surprised, because normally Malone don’t let him in his car because he says he stinks, although Nasty don’t smell it.
He’s jonesing hard.
Nose running, hands trembling as he hugs himself and rocks back and forth. And Nasty tells him, “I’m hurtin’. Can’t find no one. You gotta help me, man.”
His thin face is drawn, his brown skin sallow. His two upper front teeth stick out like a squirrel’s in a bad cartoon, and if it weren’t for his smell, he’d be called Nasty Mouth.
Now the man is sick. “Please, Malone.”
Malone reaches under the dash to a metal box attached with a magnet. He opens the box and hands Nasty an envelope, enough to fix and get well.
Nasty opens the door.
“No, stay in the car,” Malone says.
“I can fix in here?”
“Yeah, what the fuck. It’s Christmas.”
Malone takes a left and then heads south down Broadway as Nasty Ass shakes the heroin into a spoon, uses a lighter to cook it, then draws it into a syringe.
“That thing clean?” Malone asks.
“As a newborn baby.”
Nasty Ass sticks the needle in his vein and pushes the plunger. His head snaps back and then he sighs.
He’s well again. “Where we goin’?”
“Port Authority,” Malone says. “You’re getting out of town for a while.”
Nasty’s scared. Alarmed. “Why?!”
“It’s for your own good.” Just in case Fat Teddy is pissed enough to track him down and do him.
“I can’t leave town,” Nasty Ass says. “I got no hookups out of town.”
“Well, you’re going.”
“Please don’t make me,” Nasty Ass says. He actually starts crying. “I can’t jones out of town. I’ll die out there.”
“You want to jones at Rikers?” Malone asks. “Because that’s your other choice.”
“Why are you being a dick, Malone?”
“It’s my nature.”
“Never used to was,” Nasty Ass says.
“Yeah, well, this ain’t the used to was.”
“Where should I go?”
“I don’t know. Philly. Baltimore.”
“I got a cousin in Baltimore.”
“Go there, then,” Malone says. He peels out five hundred-dollar bills and hands them to Nasty Ass. “Do not spend all of this on junk. Get the fuck out of New York and stay there awhile.”
“How long I gotta stay?” He looks desperate, really scared. Malone doubts that Nasty Ass has ever been to the East Side, never mind out of town.
“Call me in a week or so and I’ll let you know,” Malone says. He pulls up in front of Port Authority and lets Nasty out. “I see you in New York, I am going to be mad, Nasty Ass.”
“Thought we was friends, Malone.”
“No, we’re not friends,” Malone says. “We’re not going to be friends. You’re my informer. A snitch. That’s all.”
Driving back uptown, Malone leaves the windows open.
Claudette opens the door.
“Merry Christmas, baby,” she says.
Malone loves her voice.
It was her voice, low and soft, even more than her looks, that first drew him to her.
A voice full of promises and reassurance.
You’ll find comfort here.
And pleasure.
In my arms, in my mouth, in my pussy.
He walks in and sits down on her little couch—she has a different word for it he can never remember—and says, “Sorry I’m so late.”
“I just got home myself,” she says.
Even though she’s wearing a white kimono and her perfume smells like heaven, Malone thinks.
She just got home and she got herself ready for me.
Claudette sits on the couch beside him, opens a carved wooden box on the coffee table and takes out a thin joint. She lights it, takes a hit and hands it to him.
Malone sucks down a hit and says, “I thought you were four to twelve.”
“I thought I was, too.”
“Tough shift?” he asks.
“Fights, suicide attempts, ODs,” Claudette says, taking the joint back from him. “Man came in barefoot with a broken wrist, said he knows you.”
An E-room nurse usually on the night or the graveyard shift, so she’s seen it all. She and Malone met when he drove a junkie CI who had accidentally shot half his foot off straight to the hospital.
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” she’d asked him.
“In Harlem?” Malone asked. “He’d have bled out while the EMTs were at Starbucks. Instead he bled all over my interior. I just got the thing detailed, too.”
“You’re a cop.”
“Guilty.”
Now she leans back and stretches her legs across his. The kimono slides up to reveal her thighs. There’s a spot just below her pussy that Malone thinks is the softest place on earth.
“Tonight,” she says, “we had an abandoned crack baby. Left right on the front steps.”
