“No, please.”
Russo leans over him. “You tried to kill a New York police detective. Take his head off. What the fuck do you think we’re going to do with you?”
The man whimpers, holds his hand. He curls into a fetal position, giving up, and starts to chant. “Baron Samedi . . .”
“What’s he gibbering about?” Russo asks.
“He’s praying to Baron Samedi,” Monty says. “The god of death in Dominican voodoo.”
“Good choice,” Russo says, pulling his off-duty weapon. “Finish up. You need a chicken or something, you’re SOL.”
“No,” Malone says.
“‘No’?”
“We already have Pena on our score sheet,” Malone says. “We don’t need another homicide beef to worry about.”
“He’s right,” Monty says. “It’s not like our friend here is going to be handling any more garrotes.”
“If we leave him alive,” Russo says, “it sends the wrong message.”
“I’m kind of losing my interest in messages,” Malone says. He squats beside his would-be killer. “Go back to the DR. If I see you in New York again, I will kill you.”
They get in the cars and drive up to Inwood.
Park Terrace Gardens is a castle.
The condo buildings sit on a hill near the tip of the peninsula that is the northern end of Manhattan, the far outer reaches of the Kingdom of Malone.
The peninsula is defined by the Hudson River to the west and Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the north and east, which separates Manhattan from the Bronx. Three bridges span the Spuyten Duyvil—a railway bridge that edges the river, then the Henry Hudson Bridge, and farther to the east, where the creek bends south, the Broadway Bridge.
“The Gardens,” as the residents call it, is a complex of five eight-story gray stone buildings constructed in 1940, now all co-ops, set in a wooded block between West 215th and West 217th.
To the south is Northeastern Academy and the small Isham Park; to the west, the much larger Inwood Hill Park buffers the Gardens from Route 9 and the river. North of the Gardens, one residential block yields to public buildings—Columbia University’s athletic complex, a soccer stadium and a branch of New York Presbyterian Hospital—between it and the creek.
The Muscota Marsh lies to the northwest.
The views from the top floors of the Gardens’ units are spectacular—the Manhattan skyline, the Hudson, the oak slopes of Inwood Hill, the Broadway Bridge. You can see a long way.
You can see someone coming.
The team drives in two cars up Broadway, Inwood’s central artery. A small side street runs west onto Park Terrace East and they take this north to 217th, pull over and look at the building where Castillo lives in the penthouse on the north side.
It just confirms what Malone already knew.
They can’t get to Castillo here.
The heroin dealer, the man who ordered a New York detective to be decapitated, is protected not so much by the stone towers or the moat around them as by the law. This isn’t a project, a tenement or a ghetto. It has a co-op board, a homeowners’ association, its own website. Most of all, it has rich white people, so you can’t just storm in there and haul Castillo out. The law-and-order residents of the Gardens would be on the phone to the mayor, the city council, the commissioner in five seconds, protesting “storm trooper” tactics.
They need a warrant to go in there, which they’re not going to get.
And be honest, Malone tells himself, you can’t go get a warrant because you’re dirty. The last thing in the world you can do is arrest Carlos Castillo and he knows it. So he can sit up in his castle and move his heroin and arrange to kill you.
Suck it up.
What’s your play?
Sooner or later, Castillo is going to put the Dark Horse out on the street. He’ll supervise it personally, that’s his job.
When he does, you can take him there.
So what you have to be is patient.
Back off now, put Castillo under surveillance and wait for him to move. Contact Carter, give him Castillo’s whereabouts.
Play the cards you have, don’t worry about the ones you don’t. A pair of jacks is as good as a straight flush if you know how to manage them. And you have better than jacks.
Russo has his binoculars out and is looking at the penthouse terrace.
“What are we looking at?” Levin asks. He’s still pissy about the 2 a.m. roust at his place.
“Don’t take it personal,” Russo told him. “We had to check you out, see if you’re clean.”
“See if I’m dirty, you mean.”
“The fuck did you just say?” Malone asked.
Levin was smart enough to keep his mouth shut about that. He just said, “Amy was pretty mad.”
“She ask you about the money?” Russo asked.
“Sure.”
“What did you tell her?” Monty asked.
“To mind her own business.”
“Our boy is growing up,” Russo said. “Now you have to marry her. So she can’t testify.”
“I’m giving that money to charity,” Levin said.
Now Malone says to him, “This is Carlos Castillo’s safe house. We’re going to put it up.”
“A wire?”
“Not yet,” Malone says. “Right now just a visual.”
“Hey,” Russo says, handing Malone the binoculars.
Malone sees Castillo himself come out with a morning cup of coffee to enjoy the sunrise.
The king surveying his kingdom.
Not yet, Malone thinks.
It ain’t your kingdom yet, motherfucker.
Chapter 25
“I messed up,” Claudette says.
Part of him hadn’t even wanted to walk through the door, afraid of what he’d find.
But he decided he had to check up on her.
He owes her that.
And he loves her.
Now she’s in that remorseful phase he’s seen a hundred times. She’s sorry (they both know she is), she won’t do it again (they both know she will). But he’s motherfucking exhausted. “Claudette, I can’t do this right now, I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
She sees the mark on his neck. “What happened to you?”
“Someone tried to kill me.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Look, I need a shower. I need to clear my head.”
He goes into the bathroom, strips and steps into the shower.
His body aches.
Malone scrubs his skin until it hurts. Can’t scrub off the welt, can’t scrub off the filth he feels on his skin, in his soul. His old man used to come home from the Job and step right into the shower—now he knows why.
The street stays with you.
It sinks into your pores and then your blood.
And your soul? Malone asks himself. You gonna blame that on the street, too?
Some of it, yeah.
You’ve been breathing corruption since you put on the shield, Malone thinks. Like you breathed in death that day in September. Corruption isn’t just in the city’s air, it’s in its DNA, yours, too.
Yeah, blame it on the city, blame it on New York.
Blame it on the Job.
It’s too easy, it stops you from asking yourself the hard question.
How did you get here?
Like anyplace else.