“Any of it?”
“You think we’re not working hard to find out who killed those two people today?” Malone asks. “You think we lay back on it because they’re black?”
“I’m asking.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you.”
He’s not in the mood for this bullshit.
Claudette is, though. “Be honest, you going to tell me that, subconsciously at least, Gillette doesn’t mean a little less to you because he’s just another ‘Jamaal’? That’s what you call them, right? ‘Jamaals’?”
“Yeah, we call them ‘Jamaals,’” Malone says. “Also ‘idiots,’ ‘mopes,’ ‘skels,’ ‘bangers,’ ‘corner boys’—”
“‘Niggers’?” Claudette asks. “I’ve heard cops in the E-room, chuckling about banging some nigger ’longside the head. Tuning up some moolie. Do you talk that way, Denny, when I’m not around?”
“I don’t want to fight,” he says. “It’s been a day.”
“Poor you.”
The korma tastes like shit now and he feels the evil coming over him. “The only kid I beat up today was white, it makes you feel better.”
“Great, you’re an equal opportunity thug.”
“There were two people killed today,” Malone says, because he can’t seem to stop himself. “That kid and an old lady. And do you know why? ’Cuz a nigguh gots to sling his dope.”
“Now fuck you.”
“I’m working my ass off trying to close those cases.”
“That’s right,” Claudette says. “They’re ‘cases’ to you, not people.”
“Jesus Christ, Claudette,” he says, “are you trying to tell me that every patient who rolls in on a gurney is a fully realized human being to you and sometimes not just another job? Another piece of meat? That you try to save but at the same time, you don’t hate them just a little bit for bleeding their fucked-up, drunk, stoned, stupid-ass violent shit all over you?”
“You’re talking about yourself, not me.”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t all that pain, was it,” Malone says, “all those other people’s pain that made you shoot smack, was it?”
“Go fuck yourself, Denny.” She gets up. “I have an early shift.”
“Go to bed.”
“I think I will.”
She waits up long enough she thinks he’s asleep when she slips into bed and it almost feels like he’s back on Staten Island.
Malone has hellish dreams.
Billy O jerks on the floor like a downed power line.
Pena’s mouth gapes, his dead eyes stare vacantly and yet with accusation. Snow falls from the ceiling, white bricks spill out of the wall, a dog lunges on its chain, puppies whine in fear.
Billy sucks for air, a fish flopping on the bottom of the boat.
Malone weeps and pounds on Billy’s chest. More snow blows out Billy’s mouth onto Malone’s face.
It freezes on his skin.
Machine gun rounds explode in his head.
He opens his eyes.
Looks out Claudette’s window.
It’s jackhammers.
City workers in yellow helmets and orange vests fixing the street. A supervisor sits on a truck gate, smoking a cigarette, reading the Post.
Fuckin’ New York, Malone thinks.
Motherfuckin’ New York.
The sweet, juicy, rotten apple.
It wasn’t just Billy in the dreams.
That was just last night.
Three nights before it was that DOA back when he was in the Tenth. He answered the call and went up to the sixth floor in the Chelsea-Elliott projects. The family was sitting at the table eating supper. When he asked them where the body was, the father jerked his thumb at the bedroom door.
Malone went in and saw a kid lying on the bed, facedown.
Seven-year-old boy.
But Malone didn’t see any wounds, no signs of blunt trauma, nothing. He turned the boy over and saw the needle still sticking out of the kid’s arm.
Seven years old and he was shooting smack.
Swallowing his rage, Malone went back and asked the family what the hell had happened.
The father said the kid “had problems.”
Then went back to eating.
So there’s that dream.
There are others.
Eighteen years on the Job, you see things you wish you hadn’t. What’s he supposed to do, “share” that with some therapist? With Claudette? Sheila? Even if he did, they couldn’t understand.
He goes into the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face. When he comes out, Claudette is in the kitchen making coffee. “Bad night?”
“I’m okay.”
“Of course you are,” she says. “You’re always okay.”
“That’s right.” Jesus, what’s her fucking problem? He sits down at the table.
“Maybe you should go talk to someone,” Claudette says.
“Career suicide,” Malone says. She doesn’t know what happens when a cop voluntarily goes to a shrink. Desk duty—the rest of his career—because no one wants to be on the street with a potential whack job. “Anyway, I don’t see myself going to some shrink whining about I have bad dreams.”
“Because you’re not weak like other people.”
“Jesus shit,” Malone says, “if I wanted to hear what an asshole I am, I’d—”
“Go back to your wife?” she asks. “Why don’t you?”
“Because I want to be with you.”
She stands at the counter and puts together the salad she has for lunch, carefully arranging the ingredients in a plastic container. “I get you think that only other cops can understand what you go through. Y’all feel aggrieved because you’re blamed for killing Freddie Gray or Michael Bennett. But you don’t know how it feels to be blamed because you are Freddie Gray or Michael Bennett. You think people hate you because of what you do, but you don’t have to think that people hate you because of what you are. You can take that blue jacket off, I live twenty-four seven in this skin.
“Here’s what you can’t understand, Denny—what you can’t understand, because you’re a white man, is the sheer . . . weight . . . of being black in this country. The sheer exhausting weight that presses your shoulders down and tires your eyes and makes it hurt just to walk sometimes.”
She presses the lid on. “And you were right last night—sometimes I do hate my patients and I’m tired, Denny, tired of cleaning up the things they do to each other, we do to each other, and sometimes I hate them because they’re black like me and because it makes me wonder about myself.”
She puts the container in her bag.
“So that’s what we go through, baby,” Claudette says. “Every damn day. Don’t forget to lock up.”
She kisses him on the cheek and goes out.
An early spring has come to the city like a gift.
Snow has turned to slush, water runs in the gutters like little brooks. A trace of sunshine promises warmth.
New York is coming out of winter. Not that it ever hibernated; the city had just pulled its collar up and put its head down against the winds that whipped through its canyons, freezing faces and numbing lips. New Yorkers push through winter like soldiers through gunfire.
Now the city uncovers itself.
And Da Force gets ready to hit the Nickel.
“Take it easy at first,” Malone tells Levin. “Don’t try to prove yourself. Just lay back, watch, get the hang of things. Don’t worry, we’ll get you on the sheet.”