“If you want to call it that.” Someone wanting you dead is a relationship, I guess.
“Cut the shit, Detective!” the commissioner says. “You and your whole unit were on Carter’s pad!”
Not exactly, Malone thinks.
Torres and his team were.
But close enough.
“Our understanding is that Carter has the video,” Paz says, “and is threatening to make it public. He has gone deep underground where we can’t find him. Our offer is—”
“Can we quit fucking around?” the commissioner asks. “Malone, the deal is you get us the vid clip, you walk. It stinks to high heaven, if you ask me, but there it is.”
“What about Russo?”
Weintraub frowns as he says, “His deal will stick.”
“And no indictment on Montague,” Malone says.
The commissioner says, “Sergeant William Montague is a heroic New York police detective.”
“Do we have a deal?” Paz asks Malone.
“Not so fast,” Berger says. “There is the matter of forfeiture.”
“No,” Weintraub says. “We are not letting him keep the money. No.”
“I was thinking of the house,” Berger says. “Malone agrees to transfer full ownership of their house to his wife, who I understand is starting divorce proceedings anyway, and she keeps the house.”
Chief Neely says, “We’re going to let the dirtiest cop in this city just walk away?”
Bryce Anderson finally speaks. “Would you rather the city burns down? I mean, do we really give a damn that a heroin dealer got what he had coming to him? Are we going to put that against the potential deaths of innocent people, not to mention the destruction? If three bad cops get a pass, well, they won’t be the first, will they? If letting this guy go stops this city from burning, that’s a deal I make every time.”
It’s the last word.
The man in the penthouse gets the last word.
Paz looks to Berger. “Are we good?”
“‘Good’ is not exactly the word I’d choose,” Berger says. “Let it suffice to say we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory arrangement that we can all tell ourselves is for the greater public welfare. Do we have a deal, Detective Malone?”
Malone says, “I’ll need my shield and gun.”
He’s going to be a cop again.
For one last time, he’s going to be a cop.
Chapter 35
Manhattan North is under siege.
Malone runs the gauntlet of rioters pressing up from Grant and down from Manhattanville.
Squadrons of uniformed cops line MLK Boulevard, facing south; more are in position on 126th, facing north, creating a corridor in which the precinct house sits like a surrounded fort. The cops have lined squad cars up like wagons and stand behind them. Mounted cops sit on horses that prance nervously up on the sidewalk. Snipers man the rooftop of the precinct house.
Amsterdam Liquor Mart’s been looted, its windows smashed in, its contents taken. On MLK, the C-Town Supermarket has been trashed. Ministers from Manhattan Pentecostal and Antioch Baptist are on the street, urging calm and passive resistance, while across 126th protesters gather in the little park next to St. Mary’s as both sides seem to be waiting for sundown to see what happens next.
He goes looking for Nasty Ass.
The snitch is in the world of Nowhere to Be Found.
Malone checks all his usual haunts—Lenox Avenue in the Buck Twenties, Morningside Park, outside the 449.
A white cop walking alone in Harlem in the middle of a race riot, it was anyone but Malone, he’d probably be dead. But there’s still his reputation, the fear, even the respect, and the people let him walk and leave him be.
It may be on fire, but it’s still the Kingdom of Malone.
He does find Oh No Henry.
The man sees Malone and takes off like a freakin’ gazelle. Lucky for Malone, junkies ain’t exactly known for their proficiency in the hundred-yard dash, so Malone catches up with him and shoves him against an alley wall. “You run on me now, Henry?”
“Oh, no.”
“You just did.”
“I thought you was a gorilla.”
“Yeah, I want to steal your dope,” Malone says. “Where’s Nasty Ass?”
“Can we take this somewhere private?” Henry asks. “If I get seen with you like this—”
“Then you better start talking fast,” Malone says. “Tell me right now or I’ll get on a bullhorn and walk down Lenox announcing you’re my snitch.”
Henry starts crying. He looks terrified. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”
“Where is he?” Malone bounces him off the wall.
Henry slides down and lies on the ground in a fetal position. Hands over his face, crying hard now. “The school, the playground.”
“Which school?”
“One Seventy-Five.” Henry curls up even tighter. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”
Oh No Henry is full of shit.
Oh No Henry was lying to him, because Malone can’t find Nasty Ass on the playground outside PS 175. And it’s weird—hot summer night, even during a riot, and the playground is empty, abandoned.
Like it’s radioactive or something.
Then Malone hears it.
A moan, but not from something human.
Some hurt mewling animal.
Malone looks around, trying to find the source of the sound. It’s not coming from the basketball court or the chain-link fence.
Then he sees Nasty leaning against a tree.
No, not leaning against the tree.
Nailed to the tree.
Spikes in his hands instead of his arms.
He’s stripped naked, his arms stretched up above him, one hand over the other, nailed into the trunk, his skinny legs stretched out, the feet crossed, nailed into the trunk. His chin is dropped onto his chest.
They beat the fuck out of him.
His face is hamburger, his eyes loll crazily in their sockets. His jaw is broken, his twisted teeth smashed, his lips dangle like strips.
He’s shit himself.
It’s caked on his legs and the tops of his feet.
“Oh, God,” Malone says.
Nasty Ass opens his eyes, as much as they can open. Sees Malone and whimpers. No words, just pain.
Malone grabs the thick nail through Nasty’s feet and yanks it out. Then he reaches up and takes hold of the nail head embedded in Nasty’s hands. He wrenches it and pulls, wrenches and pulls and it finally comes out and Malone catches Nasty and eases him to the ground.
“I got you, I got you,” Malone says.
He radios, “I need a bus. Put a rush on it. One-Three-Five and Lenox.”
“Malone?”
“Send it.”
“Go fuck yourself, rat. I hope you die.”
The bus isn’t coming.
No radio car is coming, either.
Malone gets his arms under Nasty Ass and lifts. Carries him like a baby across Lenox to Harlem Hospital, to the E-room.
“Who did this to you?” Malone asks. “Fat Teddy?”
He can’t make out what Nasty says.
“Where is he?” Malone asks. What he wanted to find out from Nasty in the first place, but he was too late.
“St. Nick’s,” Nasty whispers. “Building Seven.”
Then he smiles, if you can call what forms on what’s left of his mouth a smile, and says, “I heard something else, Malone.”
“What did you hear?”
“That we the same now, you and me,” Nasty Ass says. “We both snitches.”
His head falls back into Malone’s arms.
Malone carries him into the E-room.