Except it wasn’t.
Gerard Berger cut his client the sweetheart deal of all time. In exchange for providing intelligence on the cartel and testifying in a dozen standing cases, Diego Pena received two years minus time served, which meant that when he was finished ratting on the stand he would probably walk away.
A federal judge had to sign off on the deal and did, saying that the information Pena could provide would take tons of heroin off the streets and save more than five lives.
“Bullshit,” Malone said. “If it’s not Pena’s heroin, it will be someone else’s. This won’t change a thing.”
“We do what we can,” Hinman said.
“What am I supposed to tell the people?” Malone asked Hinman.
“What people?”
“The people in the neighborhood who put their fucking lives on the line to bring this guy down,” Malone said. “The people who trusted me to get justice for those kids.”
Hinman didn’t know what to tell him.
Malone didn’t know what to tell them.
Except they already knew. It was an old story to them—the careers of a bunch of white suits were more important than the deaths of five black people.
Braylon Carmichael received five life sentences to be served consecutively.
Denny Malone lost part of his soul. Not all of it, but enough of it that when Pena got tired of the straight life and went back to dealing heroin, Malone was both willing and able to execute him.
Chapter 34
Malone’s cell door opens and O’Dell stands there.
He asks, “You had your shower yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” O’Dell says. “We’re going uptown.”
“Where?” Malone is content in his cell, with his own thoughts.
O’Dell says, “Some people want to see you.”
He walks Malone outside, puts Malone in the back of a car and slides in beside him. O’Dell takes the cuffs off. “I assume I can trust you not to run on me?”
“Where would I run?”
Malone looks out the window as the car drives past City Hall and takes Chambers out to West Street and then up the West Side Highway.
After only one night in a cell, freedom already seems strange to Malone.
Unexpected.
Heady.
The Hudson seems broader, bluer. Its wide span seems to offer escape, the whitecaps off a stiff breeze tantalize release. The car passes the Holland Tunnel, then Chelsea Piers, where Malone used to go to play midnight hockey pickup games, then the Javits Center, the concrete and plumbing and windows and lighting of which saved the mob, then the Lincoln Tunnel, and Pier 83, where Malone always meant to take the family on the Circle Tour around Manhattan but never did and now it’s too late.
The car turns east on Fifty-Seventh and that’s when Malone sees that something’s wrong.
The air to the north has a yellow tint to it.
Almost brown.
He hasn’t seen that kind of air since the Towers came down.
“Can I roll down the window?” Malone asks.
“Go ahead.”
The air smells like smoke.
Malone turns to O’Dell with the question in his eye.
“The riots started about five o’clock yesterday,” O’Dell says. “Shortly after you went in.”
The protests on the Bennett decision began peacefully, O’Dell tells him, then a bottle was thrown, then a brick. By six thirty storefront windows along St. Nicholas and Lenox were being smashed, shops and bodegas looted. By ten o’clock Molotov cocktails were being thrown at sector cars on Amsterdam and Broadway.
The tear gas and batons came out.
But the riots spread.
By eleven Bed-Stuy was in flames, then Flatbush, Brownsville, the South Bronx, and parts of Staten Island.
When dawn finally came, smoke obscured the hot July sunshine. City officials hoped the violence would end with the night, but it started again at around noon, as protesters massed outside City Hall and One Police Plaza and charged police lines.
In Manhattan North, firefighters trying to put out blazes were shot at by snipers from the towers of St. Nick’s and then refused to answer any more calls, so entire blocks just burned.
Every cop in the city has been called in on riot duty. They haven’t gone home, instead have grabbed combat naps in locker rooms and cribs. They’re exhausted, mentally and physically played out, ready to snap.
“Volunteers”—biker clubs, militias, white supremacist groups, gun-rights crazies—have come in from other areas to help reestablish “law and order,” making the job even tougher for the police now trying to prevent the riots from escalating into a full-out race war.
It’s the fire this time.
The car drives along Billionaires’ Row and pulls up alongside Anderson’s building.
Berger stands outside the building, clearly waiting for the car. He steps up and opens Malone’s door. “Don’t say anything until you’ve heard them out.”
“What the fuck?”
“That would be saying something.”
They take an elevator to the penthouse.
It’s quite a roomful, Malone sees.
The commissioner, Chief Neely, O’Dell, Weintraub, the mayor, Chandler, Bryce Anderson, Berger, and Isobel Paz. Malone’s surprise at seeing her shows on his face and she says, “We’ve all come to a little arrangement. Have a seat, Sergeant Malone.”
She points to a chair.
“I’ve sat plenty,” Malone says.
He stays standing.
“Seeing as we have a previous acquaintance,” Paz says, “I’ve been asked to emcee this meeting.”
The commissioner and Neely look as though they’d just as soon set Malone on fire. The mayor looks at the coffee table, Anderson looks frozen, Berger smiles his smug smile.
O’Dell and Weintraub look like they want to vomit.
Paz says, “First of all, this meeting never happened. There are no recordings, no memos, no record. Do you understand and agree?”
Malone says, “Write any fiction you want. I don’t give a fuck anymore. Why am I here?”
“I’ve been authorized to make you an offer,” Paz says. “Gerard?”
“I thought you were conflicted out,” Malone says.
“That’s when it looked certain that we were headed to trial,” Berger says. “That is no longer so certain.”
“Why’s that?”
“You may or not be aware of the social turmoil that has resulted from the unfortunate grand jury decision on the Michael Bennett case,” Berger says. “Put simply, one more match will set the entire city, if not the country, aflame.”
“Call the Fire Department,” Malone says. “Can I go back to my cell now?”
“Certain rumors have reached the mayor’s office,” Berger says, “that a video clip, taken with a cell phone, exists of the Michael Bennett shooting, which purports to show Bennett running away when Officer Hayes shot him. If that tape were to be made public, it will make what is happening now look like Girl Scouts roasting s’mores.”
“It can’t be allowed to happen,” the mayor says.
“What’s it have to do with me?” Malone asks.
“You have relationships in the African American community in Manhattan North,” Berger says. “Specifically, you have a relationship with DeVon Carter.”