“I had to be sure he believed me.”
“You couldn’t have chosen different words?” the flack asked.
“I didn’t have a speechwriter with me,” Malone said.
“We’d like to put you up for a Medal of Valor,” said his captain, “but . . .”
“I wasn’t going to put in for one.”
To his credit, the IAB guy said, “May I point out that Sergeant Malone saved an African American life?”
“What if he’d missed?” the PR flack asked.
“I didn’t,” Malone said.
Truth was, though, he’d thought the same thing. Didn’t tell it to the shrink, but he had nightmares about missing the skel and hitting the little girl.
Still does.
Shit, he even has nightmares about hitting the skel.
The clip ran on YouTube and a local rap group cut a song called “Just Another Nigger Baby,” which got a few hundred thousand hits. But on the plus side, the little girl’s mother came to the house with a pan of her special jalape?o cornbread and a handwritten thank-you card and sought Malone out.
He still has the card.
Now he crosses St. Nicholas and Convent and walks down 127th until it merges where 126th takes a northwest angle. He crosses Amsterdam and walks past Amsterdam Liquor Mart, which knows him well, Antioch Baptist Church, which doesn’t, past St. Mary’s Center and the Two-Six House and into the old building that now houses the Manhattan North Special Task Force.
Or, as it’s known on the street, “Da Force.”
Chapter 2
The Manhattan North Special Task Force was half Malone’s idea to begin with.
A lot of bureaucratic verbiage describes their mission, but Malone and every other cop on Da Force know exactly what their “special task” is—
Hold the line.
Big Monty put it somewhat differently. “We’re landscapers. Our job is to keep the jungle from growing back.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Russo asked.
“The old urban jungle that was Manhattan North has been mostly cut down,” Monty said, “to make room for a cultivated, commercial Garden of Eden. But there are still patches of jungle—to wit, the projects. Our job is to keep the jungle from reclaiming paradise.”
Malone knows the equation—real estate prices rise as crime falls—but he could give a shit about that.
His concern was the violence.
When Malone first came on the Job, the “Giuliani Miracle” had transformed the city. Police commissioners Ray Kelly and Bill Bratton had used “broken windows” theory and CompStat technology to reduce street crime to an almost negligible level.
Nine/eleven changed the department’s focus from anticrime to antiterrorism, but street violence continued to fall, the murder rate plummeted and the Upper Manhattan “ghetto” neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood started to revive.
The crack epidemic had largely reached its tragic Darwinian conclusion, but the problems of poverty and unemployment—drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence and gangs—hadn’t gone away.
To Malone, it was like there were two neighborhoods, two cultures grouped around their respective castles—the shiny new condo towers and the old project high-rises. The difference was that the people in power were now literally invested.
Back in the day, Harlem was Harlem, and rich white people “just didn’t go there” unless they were slumming or looking for a cheap thrill. The murder rate was high, muggings and armed robberies and all the violence that came with drugs was high, but as long as blacks were raping, robbing and murdering other blacks, who gave a fuck?
Well, Malone.
Other cops.
That’s the bitter, brutal irony about police work.
That’s the root of the love-hate relationship cops have with the community and the community with the police.
The cops see it every day and every night.
The hurt, the dead.
People forget that the cops see first the victims and then the perpetrators. From the baby some crack whore dropped into the bathtub to the kid beat into stupefaction by his mother’s eighteenth live-in boyfriend, the old lady whose hip gets broken when a purse snatcher knocks her to the sidewalk, the fifteen-year-old wannabe dope slinger gunned down on the corner.
The cops feel for the vics and hate the perps, but they can’t feel too much or they can’t do their jobs and they can’t hate too much or they’ll become the perps. So they develop a shell, a “we hate everybody” attitude force field around themselves that everyone can feel from ten feet away.
You gotta have it, Malone knows, or this job kills you, physically or psychologically. Or both.
So you feel for the old lady victim, but hate the mutt who did it; you sympathize with the storeowner who just got robbed, but despise the mope who robbed him; you feel bad for the black kid who got shot, but hate the nigger who shot him.
The real problem, Malone thinks, is when you start hating the victim, too. And you do—it just wears you down. Their pain becomes yours, the responsibility for their suffering weighs on your shoulders—you didn’t do enough to protect them, you were in the wrong place, you didn’t catch the perp earlier.
You start blaming yourself and/or you start blaming the victim—why are they so vulnerable, why so weak, why do they live in those conditions, why do they join gangs, sling drugs, why do they have to shoot each other over nothing . . . why are they such fucking animals?
But Malone still fucking cares.
Doesn’t want to.
But does.
Tenelli ain’t happy.
“Why does this dick have to bring us in Christmas Eve?” she asks Malone as he comes through the doors.
“I think you answered your own question,” Malone says.
Captain Sykes is a dick.
Speaking of dicks, the prevailing opinion is that Janice Tenelli has the biggest one on Da Force. Malone has watched the detective repeatedly kick a heavy bag right where the nuts would be and it made his own package shrivel.
Or expand. Tenelli has a mane of thick black hair, a won’t-quit rack and a face straight out of an Italian movie. Every guy on Da Force would like to have sex with her, but she’s made it very clear she don’t shit where she eats.
All evidence to the contrary, Russo insists on insisting, to Tenelli’s face, that the married mother of two is a lesbian.
“Because I won’t fuck you?” she asked.
“Because it’s my dearest-held fantasy,” Russo said. “You and Flynn.”
“Flynn is a lesbian.”
“I know.”
“Knock yourself out,” Tenelli said, jerking her wrist.
“I haven’t wrapped a single gift,” she tells Malone now, “the in-laws are coming over tomorrow, I have to sit and listen to this guy make speeches? Come on, straighten him out, Denny.”
She knows what they all know—Malone was here before Sykes came and he’ll be here after he leaves. The joke is that Malone would take the lieutenant’s exam except he couldn’t take the pay cut.
“Sit and listen to his speech,” Malone says, “then go home and make . . . What are you making?”