“The fuck are you?” Malone asks.
Stretch it out. Stall. Get your motherfucking head together. This ain’t no dream, this is your life. One wrong play and the rest of your fucking life is down the shitter. Clear your dumb donkey cop head.
“Stan Weintraub,” the guy says. “I’m an investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York.”
FBI and Southern District, Malone thinks.
All federal.
No state or IAB.
“You make me come into work this time of the morning,” O’Dell says, “the least you could do is sit down and watch a little television with me.”
He turns on the video on the computer screen.
Malone sits and watches.
Sees his own face on the screen as Mark Piccone hands him an envelope and says, “Your finder’s fee on Fat Teddy.”
“Thank you.”
“Can you straighten it out?”
“Who’s riding?”
“Justin Michaels.”
“Yeah, I can probably straighten that out.”
They have him cold.
He hears Piccone ask, “How much?”
“Are we talking a reduction or a nol pros?”
“A walk.”
“Ten to twenty K.”
“And that includes your cut, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Dead to rights.
How could you be so fucking stupid, let your guard down because it’s Christmas? The fuck is wrong with you? Did they have Piccone, and he set you up, or were they on you?
Shit, how long have they had you up? What do they know? Is it just Piccone or do they have more? If they know about Piccone, do they know about the Fat Teddy rip, too? That puts Russo and Monty in the jackpot with you.
But it’s not Pena, he thinks.
Don’t panic.
Be strong.
“What you got,” Malone says, “is me taking a referral fee from a defense attorney. Go ahead, hang me. This isn’t worth your rope.”
“We’ll decide that,” Weintraub says.
“I was helping this guy Bailey out,” Malone says. “He’s a CI.”
“So you have a CI file on him,” O’Dell says. “We can pull that, look at it?”
“See, he’s more useful to me alive.”
“He’s more useful to you as a source of income,” Weintraub says.
“You’re not in the driver’s seat here,” O’Dell says. “You’re in the shit. We’ve got enough on that tape to take your badge, your gun, your job, your pension.”
“Put you in a federal lockup,” Weintraub says. “Five to ten.”
“Federal time,” O’Dell says. “You serve eighty-five percent of it.”
“No shit? I didn’t know that.”
“Unless you want to go to a state facility with the guys you put in there,” Weintraub says. “How would that work out for you?”
Malone stands up and gets right in Weintraub’s face. “You gonna play Bobby Badass with me? You can’t. You don’t have the game. Threaten me like that again I’ll put you through that wall.”
“That’s not the way to play this, Malone,” O’Dell says.
Yeah, it is, Malone thinks. Play it tough, play it hard. These guys are just like the dopes in the street—you show weakness, they eat you alive.
“Are there ADAs other than Michaels selling cases?” Weintraub asks.
O’Dell don’t look happy with him, so that’s their first mistake. Weintraub tipped their hand—they’re interested in lawyers, not cops.
So it was Piccone, not me, they had up.
Fuck, I dodge IAB for fifteen years and then walk into someone else’s jackpot. Now I have to find out if Piccone knows or not. “Ask Piccone.”
“We’re asking you,” Weintraub says.
“What do you want me to do, piss myself?”
“We want you to answer the question,” O’Dell says.
“If Piccone is cooperating,” Malone says, “you already know the answer.”
Weintraub starts to lose his temper. “Are there ADAs in the district selling cases?!”
“The hell do you think?”
“I asked you what the hell you think!” Morally outraged.
So Piccone isn’t cooperating. Probably doesn’t know he’s a recording artist yet.
“I think you know,” Malone says. “But I think you don’t want to know. You’ll say you want it all, clean out the whole stable. End of the day you’ll go after a few defense attorneys you got beefs with. Prosecutors, judges will skate. Next time you jam one of them up will be the first time.”
“Did you say judges?” Weintraub asks.
“Grow up.”
Weintraub doesn’t answer.
“It doesn’t have to go this way,” O’Dell says.
Here it comes, Malone thinks. The deal.
How many skels have I offered the deal?
“Do you collect directly from the ADAs?” O’Dell asks. “Or do you get it through the defense lawyers?”
“Why?”
“If it’s you, you wear a wire,” O’Dell says. “Get them on tape. You bring the money to us, it’s vouchered as evidence.”
“I’m not a rat.”
“Famous last words.”
“I can do the time.”
“I’m sure you can,” O’Dell says. “But can your family?”
“I told you, keep my family out of it.”
“No, you keep your family out of it,” O’Dell says. “You put them into this. You. Not us. How are your kids going to feel knowing that their father is a crook? How is your wife going to feel? What are you going to tell them about college—they can’t go because the savings went to defense lawyers, Dad doesn’t have his pension, and the universities don’t take food stamps?”
Malone doesn’t say anything.
This O’Dell guy is good, for a fed. Knows the buttons to push. An Irish Catholic from Staten Island going on food stamps? You wouldn’t live down the shame for three generations.
“Don’t give me an answer now,” O’Dell is saying. “Take twenty-four, think about it. We’ll be here.”
He hands Malone a slip of paper.
“That’s a hello-phone,” O’Dell says. “One hundred percent secure. You call it in the next twenty-four hours, we’ll set up a meeting with our boss and see what we can work out.”
“If you don’t call,” Weintraub says, “we’ll put the cuffs on in your squad room, in front of all your brother officers.”
Malone doesn’t take the slip of paper.
O’Dell shoves it in his shirt pocket. “Think about it.”
“I’m not a rat,” Malone says again.
Malone walks uptown, hoping the fresh air will clear his head, let him think. He feels sick, nauseated from the stress and the fear, the drugs and the booze. They waited, the fucking assholes, he realizes. They picked their shot, waited to grab you at your weakest, when your head was already fucked up.
It was the right move, the move you would have made.
You go after a perp, you try to go in just at dawn, when the guy is asleep, make his dream a nightmare, get a confession out of him before he realizes the alarm clock isn’t going to ring.
Except these fucks don’t need to get a confession out of you, they got you on camera and now they’re offering you the out you’ve offered a hundred skels—“Be my CI, my snitch. Climb out of the pit and throw someone else in instead, shit, you don’t think they’d do the same to you, the tables were turned?”
He’s heard himself say it a hundred fucking times.