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Then again, no one’s ever really been safe from Malone and his crew.
Malone’s guys made headlines—the Daily News, the Post, Channels 7, 4 and 2; “film at eleven” cops. Recognized-on-the-street cops, the-mayor-knows-your-name cops, comped seats at the Garden, the Meadowlands, Yankee Stadium and Shea, walk-into-any-restaurant-bar-or-club-in-the-city-and-get-treated-like-royalty cops.
And of this pack of alphas, Denny Malone is the undisputed leader.
Walks into any house in the city, the uniforms and the rookies stop and stare, the lieutenants give him a nod, even the captains know not to step on his shoes.
He’s earned their respect.
Among other things (Shit, you want to talk about the robberies he stopped, the bullet he took, the kid in that hostage situation he saved? The busts, the takedowns, the convictions?), Malone and his team, they made the biggest drug bust in the history of New York.
Fifty kilos of heroin.
And the Dominican who was trafficking it gone.
Along with a hero cop.
Malone’s crew laid their partner in the ground—bagpipes, folded flag, black ribbons over shields—and went right back to work because the slingers and the gangs and the robbers and the rapists and the wiseguys, they don’t take time off to grieve. You wanna keep your streets safe, you gotta be on those streets—days, nights, weekends, holidays, whatever it takes, and your wives, they knew what they signed up for, and your kids, they learn to understand that’s what Daddy does, he puts the bad guys behind bars.
Except now it’s him in the cage, Malone sitting on a steel bench in a holding cell like the dirtbags he usually puts there, bent over, his head in his hands, worrying about his partners—his brothers on Da Force—and what’s going to happen to them now that he’s put them neck deep in shit.
Worrying about his family—his wife, who didn’t sign up for this, his two kids, a son and a daughter who are too young to understand now, but when they’re old enough are never going to forgive why they had to grow up without a father.
Then there’s Claudette.
Fucked up in her own way.
Needy, needing him, and he’s not going to be there.
For her or for anybody, so he doesn’t know now what’s going to happen to the people he loves.
The wall he’s staring at doesn’t have any answers, either, as to how he got here.
No, fuck that, Malone thinks. At least be honest with yourself, he thinks as he sits there with nothing in front of him but time.
At least, at last, tell yourself the truth.
You know exactly how you got here.
Step by motherfucking step.
Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.
When Malone was a kid, the nuns taught him that even before we’re born, God—and only God—knows the days of our lives and the day of our death and who and what we’ll become.
Well, I wish he’d fucking shared it with me, Malone thinks. Given me a word, a tip, dimed me out, ratted on me to myself, told me something, anything. Said, Hey, jerkoff, you took a left, you should have gone right.
But no, nothing.
All he’s seen, Malone isn’t a big fan of God and figures the feeling is mutual. He has a lot of questions he’d like to ask him, but if he ever got him in the room, God’d probably shut his mouth, lawyer up, let his own kid take the jolt.
All this time on the Job, Malone lost his faith, so when the moment came when he was looking the devil in the eye, there was nothing between Malone and murder except ten pounds of trigger pull.
Ten pounds of gravity.
It was Malone’s finger pulled the trigger, but maybe it was gravity that pulled him down—the relentless, unforgiving gravity of eighteen years on the Job.
Pulling him down to where he is now.
Malone didn’t start out to end up here. Didn’t throw his hat in the air the day he graduated the Academy and took the oath, the happiest day of his life—the brightest, bluest, best day—thinking that he’d end up here.
No, he started with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that’s the thing about the life you walk—you start out pointed true north, but you vary one degree off, it doesn’t matter for maybe one year, five years, but as the years stack up you’re just walking farther and farther away from where you started out to go, you don’t even know you’re lost until you’re so far from your original destination you can’t even see it anymore.
You can’t even get back on the path to start over.
Time and gravity won’t allow it.
And Denny Malone would give a lot to start over.
Hell, he’d give everything.
Because he never thought he’d end up in the federal lockup on Park Row. No one did, except maybe God, and he wasn’t talking.
But here Malone is.
Without his gun or his shield or anything else that says what and who he is, what and who he was.
A dirty cop.
PROLOGUE (#ulink_bcfbdc03-71ad-598b-8a0d-11fd3c95c7ea)
(#ulink_bcfbdc03-71ad-598b-8a0d-11fd3c95c7ea)
Lenox Avenue,
Honey.
Midnight.
And the gods are laughing at us.
—LANGSTON HUGHES, “LENOX AVENUE: MIDNIGHT”
Harlem, New York City
July 2016
Four A.M.
When the city that never sleeps at least lies down and closes its eyes.
This is what Denny Malone thinks as his Crown Vic slides up the spine of Harlem.
Behind the walls and windows, in apartments and hotels, tenements and project towers, people are sleeping or can’t, are dreaming or are beyond dreams. People are fighting or fucking or both, making love and making babies, screaming curses or speaking soft, intimate words meant for each other and not the street. Some try to rock infants back to sleep, or are just getting up for another day of work, while others cut kilos of heroin into glassine bags to sell to the addicts for their wake-up shots.
After the hookers and before the street cleaners, that’s the window of time you have to make a rip, Malone knows. Nothing good ever happens after midnight, is what his old man used to say, and he knew. He was a cop on these streets, coming home in the morning after a graveyard shift with murder in his eyes, death in his nose and an icicle in his heart that never melted and eventually killed him. Got out of the car in the driveway one morning and his heart cracked. The doctors said he was dead before he hit the ground.
Malone found him there.
Eight years old, leaving the house to walk to school, he saw the blue overcoat in the pile of dirty snow he’d helped his dad shovel off the driveway.
Now it’s before dawn and already hot. One of those summers when God the landlord refuses to turn the heat down or the air-conditioning on—the city edgy and irritable, on the brink of a flameout, a fight or a riot, the smell of old garbage and stale urine, sweet, sour, sickly and corrupt as an old whore’s perfume.
Denny Malone loves it.
Even in the daytime when it’s baking hot and noisy, when the gangbangers are on the corners and the hip-hop bass beats hurt your ears, and bottles, cans, dirty diapers and plastic bags of piss come flying out of project windows, and the dog shit stinks in the fetid heat, he wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.
It’s his city, his turf, his heart.
Rolling up Lenox now, past the old Mount Morris Park neighborhood and its graceful brownstones, Malone worships the small gods of place—the twin towers of Ebenezer Gospel Tabernacle, where the hymns float out on Sundays with the voices of angels, then the distinctive spire of Ephesus Seventh-Day Adventist and, farther up the block, Harlem Shake—not the dance but some of the best damn burgers in the city.
Then there are the dead gods—the old Lenox Lounge, with its iconic neon sign, red front and all that history. Billie Holiday used to sing there, Miles Davis and John Coltrane played their horns, and it was a hang for James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. It’s closed now—the window covered with brown paper, the sign dark—but there’s talk about opening it again.
Malone doubts it.
Dead gods don’t rise again except in fairy tales.
He crosses 125th, a.k.a. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Urban pioneers and the black middle class have gentrified the area, which the Realtors have now christened “SoHa,” a blended acronym always being the death knell of any old neighborhood, Malone thinks. He’s convinced that if real estate developers could buy properties in the bottom levels of Dante’s Inferno they’d rename it “LoHel” and start throwing up boutiques and condos.
Fifteen years ago, this stretch of Lenox was empty storefronts; now it’s trendy again with new restaurants, bars and sidewalk cafés where the better-off locals come to eat, the white people come to feel hip and some of those condos in the new high-rise buildings go for two and a half mil.
All you need to know about this part of Harlem now, Malone thinks, is that there’s a Banana Republic next to the Apollo Theater. There are the gods of place and the gods of commerce, and if you have to bet who’s going to win out, put your money on money every time.
Farther uptown and in the projects it’s still the ghetto.
Malone crosses 125th and passes the Red Rooster, where Ginny’s Supper Club resides in the basement.
There are less famous shrines, nonetheless sacred to Malone.
He’s attended funerals at Bailey’s, bought pint bottles at Lenox Liquors, been stitched up in the E-room at Harlem Hospital, played hoops by the Big L mural in Fred Samuel Playground, ordered food through the bulletproof glass at Kennedy Fried Chicken. Parked along the street and watched the kids dance, smoked weed on a rooftop, watched the sun come up from Fort Tryon Park.
Now more dead gods, ancient gods—the old Savoy Ballroom, the site of the Cotton Club, both gone long before Malone’s time, ghosts from the last Harlem Renaissance haunting this neighborhood with the image of what it once was and can never be again.
But Lenox is alive.
It actually throbs from the IRT subway line that runs directly underneath its entire length. Malone used to ride the #2 train, the one they called “The Beast” back then.
Now it’s Black Star Music, the Mormon Church, African American Best Food. When they get to the end of Lenox, Malone says, “Go around the block.”
Phil Russo, behind the wheel, turns left onto 147th and drives around the block, down Seventh Avenue and then another left onto 146th, and cruises past an abandoned tenement the owner gave back to the rats and the roaches, chasing the people out in the hope that some junkie cooking up will burn it down and he can collect the insurance and then sell the lot.
Win-win.
Malone scans for sentries or some cops cooping in a radio car, bagging a little sleep on the graveyard shift. A sole lookout stands outside the door. Green bandanna, green Nikes with green shoelaces make him a Trinitario.
Malone’s crew has been watching the heroin mill on the second floor all summer. The Mexicans truck the smack up and deliver it to Diego Pena, the Dominican in charge of NYC. Pena breaks it down from kilos into dime bags and distributes it to the Domo gangs, the Trinitarios and DDP (Dominicans Don’t Play), and then to the black and PR gangs in the projects.
The mill is fat tonight.
Fat with money.
Fat with dope.
“Gear up,” Malone says, checking the Sig Sauer P226 in the holster on his hip. A Beretta 8000D Mini-Cougar rests in a second holster in the small of his back just below the new ceramic-plate vest.
He makes the whole crew wear vests on a job. Big Monty complains his is too tight, but Malone tells him it’s a looser fit than a coffin. Bill Montague, a.k.a. Big Monty, is old school. On his head, even in summer, is his trademark trilby, with its stingy brim and a red feather on the left side. His concession to the heat is an XXXL guayabera shirt over khaki slacks. An unlit Montecristo cigar perches in the corner of his mouth.
A Mossberg 590 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun with a twenty-inch barrel loaded with powdered ceramic rounds sits at Phil Russo’s feet by his high-polished red leather shoes with the skinny guinea toes. The shoes match his hair—Russo is that rare redheaded Italian and Malone jokes that there must have been a bogtrotter in the woodpile. Russo answers that’s impossible because he isn’t an alcoholic and he don’t need a magnifying glass to find his own dick.
Billy O’Neill carries an HK MP5 submachine gun, two flashbang grenades and a roll of duct tape. Billy O’s the youngest of the crew, but he has talent, street smarts and moves.
Guts, too.
Malone knows Billy ain’t gonna cut and run, ain’t gonna freeze or hesitate to pull the trigger, if he needs to. If anything, it’s the opposite—Billy might be a little too quick to go. Got that Irish temper along with the Kennedy good looks. Got some other Kennedy-esque attributes, too. The kid likes women and women like him back.
Tonight, the crew is going in heavy.
And high.
You go up against narcos who are jacked on coke or speed, it helps to be pharmacologically even with them, so Malone pops two “go-pills”—Dexedrine. Then he slips on a blue windbreaker with NYPD stenciled in white and flips the lanyard with his shield over his chest.
Russo orbits the block again. Coming back around on 146th, he hits the gas, races up to the mill and slams the brakes. The lookout hears the tires squeal but turns around too late—Malone’s out the door before the car stops. He shoves the lookout face-first into the wall and sticks the barrel of the Sig against his head.
“Cállate, pendejo,” Malone says. “One sound, I’ll splatter you.”
He kicks the lookout’s feet out from under him and puts him on the ground. Billy is already there—he duct-tapes the lookout’s hands behind him and then slaps a strip over his mouth.
Malone’s crew press themselves against the wall of the building. “We all stay sharp,” Malone says, “we all go home tonight.”
The Dex starts to kick in—Malone feels his heart race and his blood get hot.
It feels good.
He sends Billy O up to the roof to come down the fire escape and cover the window. The rest go in and head up the stairs. Malone first, the Sig in front of him, ready. Russo behind him with the shotgun, then Monty.
Malone don’t worry about his back.
