Debbie is pretty and petite, so her stomach looks huge on her. Her blond hair is stringy and dirty, the apartment is a mess. She sits down on the old sofa; the television is on to the evening news.
It’s hot in the apartment, and stuffy, but it’s always either too hot or too cold in these old apartments—no one can figure out the radiators. One of them hisses now, as if to tell Malone to fuck off if he doesn’t like it.
He lays an envelope on the coffee table.
Five grand.
The decision was a no-brainer—Billy keeps drawing a full share, and when they lay off the Pena smack, he gets his share of that, too. Malone is the executor, he’ll lay it out to Debbie as he sees she needs it and can handle it. The rest will go into a college fund for Billy’s kid.
His son won’t want for anything.
His mom can stay at home, take care of him.
Debbie fought him on this. “You can pay for day care. I need to work.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It isn’t just the money,” she said. “I’d go crazy, all day here alone with a kid.”
“You’ll feel different once he’s born.”
“That’s what they say.”
Now she looks at the envelope and then up at him. “White welfare.”
“It’s not charity,” Malone says. “It’s Billy’s money.”
“Then give it to me,” she says. “Instead of doling it out like Social Services.”
“We take care of our own,” Malone says. He looks around the small apartment. “Are you ready for this baby? You got, I dunno, a bassinette, diapers, a changing table?”
“Listen to you.”
“Yolanda can take you shopping,” Malone says. “Or if you want, we can just bring the stuff by.”
“If Yolanda takes me shopping,” Debbie says, “I’ll look like some rich West Side bitch with a nanny. Maybe I can get her to speak in a Jamaican accent, or are they all Haitian now?”
She’s bitter.
Malone don’t blame her.
She has a fling with a cop, gets knocked up, the cop gets killed and there she is—alone with her life totally fucked up. Cops and their wives telling her what to do, giving her an allowance like she’s a kid. But she is a kid, he thinks, and if I gave her Billy’s full share in one whack, she’d blow it and where would Billy’s son be?
“You have plans for tomorrow?” he asks.
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” she says. “The Montagues asked me, so did the Russos, but I don’t want to intrude.”
“They were sincere.”
“I know.” She puts her feet up on the table. “I miss him, Malone. Is that crazy?”
“No,” Malone says. “It’s not crazy.”
I miss him, too.
I loved him, too.
The Dublin House, Seventy-Ninth and Broadway.
You go into an Irish bar on Christmas Eve, Malone thinks, what you’re going to find are Irish drunks and Irish cops or some combination thereof.
He sees Bill McGivern standing at the crowded bar, knocking one back.
“Inspector?”
“Malone,” McGivern says, “I was hoping to see you tonight. What are you drinking?”
“Same as you.”
“Another Jameson’s,” McGivern says to the bartender. The inspector’s cheeks are flushed, making his full head of white hair look even whiter. McGivern’s one of those ruddy, full-faced, glad-handing, smiling Irishmen. A big player in the Emerald Society and Catholic Guardians. If he weren’t a cop, he’d have been a ward healer, and a damn good one.
“You wanna get a booth?” Malone asks when the drink comes. They find one in the back and sit down.
“Merry Christmas, Malone.”
“Merry Christmas, Inspector.”
They touch glasses.
McGivern is Malone’s “hook”—his mentor, protector, sponsor. Every cop with any kind of career has one—the guy who runs interference, gets you plum assignments, looks out for you.
And McGivern is a powerful hook. An NYPD inspector is two ranks higher than a captain and just below the chiefs. A well-placed inspector—and McGivern is—can kill a captain’s career, and Sykes knows that.
Malone’s known McGivern since he was a little boy. The inspector and Malone’s father were in uniform together in the Six back in the day. It was McGivern talked to him a few years after his dad passed, explained a few things to him.
“John Malone was a great cop,” McGivern said.
“He drank,” Malone said. Yeah, he was sixteen, knew fucking everything.
“He did,” McGivern said. “Your father and I, back in the Six, we caught eight murdered kids, all under four years of age, inside two weeks.”
One of the children had all these little burn marks on his body, and McGivern and his dad couldn’t figure out what they were until they finally realized they matched up exactly with the mouth of a crack pipe.
The child had been tortured and bitten his tongue off in pain.
“So, yes,” McGivern said, “your father drank.”
Now Malone takes an envelope from his jacket and slides it across the table. McGivern hefts the heavy envelope and says, “Merry Christmas, indeed.”
“I had a good year.”
McGivern shoves the envelope into his wool coat. “How’s life treating you?”
Malone takes a sip of his whiskey and says, “Sykes is busting my hump.”
“I can’t get him transferred,” McGivern says. “He’s the darling of the Puzzle Palace.”
One Police Plaza.
NYPD headquarters.
Which has troubles of its own right now, Malone thinks.
An FBI investigation of high-ranking officers taking gifts in exchange for favors.
Stupid shit like trips, Super Bowl tickets, gourmet meals at trendy restaurants in exchange for getting tickets fixed, building citations squashed, even guarding assholes bringing diamonds in from overseas. One of these rich fucks got one of the marine commanders to bring his friends out to Long Island on a police boat, and an air unit guy to fly his guests to a Hamptons party in a police chopper.
Then there’s the thing with the gun licenses.
It’s hard to get a gun permit in New York, especially a concealed carry license. It generally requires deep background checks and personal interviews. Unless you’re rich and can lay out twenty grand to a “broker” and the “broker” bribes high-ranking cops to shortcut the process.
The feds have one of these brokers by the nuts and he’s talking, naming names.
Indictments pending.
As it is, five chiefs have been relieved of duty already.
And one killed himself.
Drove to a street by a golf course near his house on Long Island and shot himself.
No note.
Genuine grief and shock waves have blasted through the upper rank of the NYPD, McGivern included.
They don’t know who’s next—to be arrested, to swallow the gun.
The media’s humping it like a blind dog on a sofa leg, mostly because the mayor and the commissioner are at war.