“I just wanted to make sure—”
“I didn’t eat my gun?” Russo asks. “Irish do that, not Italians. Us guineas think about living, not dying. We just think about doing what we have to do.”
“I wish Monty had put one in my head.”
“Suicide by cop?” Russo asks. “Too easy, Denny. Way too easy. If you don’t have the balls to do it yourself, you live with what you did. You live with being a rat. Now, you don’t mind, I’m going to go hug my kids while I can.”
Donna closes the door.
Claudette stands in the doorway of her apartment, not letting him in.
She’s clean, newly clean, her sobriety delicate, fragile, a porcelain cup that would shatter at a harsh sound.
“Go back to your wife,” she says, not unkindly.
Malone says, “She doesn’t want me.”
“So you come back to me?” Claudette asks.
“No,” Malone says. “I came to say good-bye.”
Claudette looks surprised, but says, “That’s probably for the best. We’re no good for each other, Denny. I’ve been hitting the meetings.”
“That’s good.”
“I have to get clean,” she says. “I’m going to get clean, and I can’t do that and love you at the same time.”
She’s right.
He knows that she’s right.
They’re two drowning people who grab on to each other, won’t let go, and sink together into the cold darkness of their shared sorrow.
“I just wanted you to know,” Malone says. “You were never ‘some whore I fucked.’ I loved you. I still do.”
“I love you, too.”
“I’m dirty,” Malone says.
“A lot of cops—”
“No, I’m dirty,” Malone says. He has to tell her—it’s time to come clean. “I put heroin on the street.”
“Oh,” she says.
Just that, “Oh,” but it says everything.
“I’m sorry,” Malone says.
“What happens now?” she asks. “Are you going to jail?”
“I made a deal.”
“What kind of a deal?”
The kind that puts me on the other side forever. The kind I couldn’t look at you in the morning.
“I’m going away,” he says.
“One of those programs? Like in the movies?”
“Something like that.”
“Baby, I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
I am so, so sorry.
The heavy bag jumps.
Pops on its chain and drops back as Malone cocks his left again and then lets go with a brutal body shot.
Again and again and again.
Sweat flies off his face onto the bag. He comes over the top with a right cross and then follows with a left to the liver.
It feels good.
Feels good to hurt.
The sweat, the burn in his lungs, even his raw and bruised knuckles as he works out bare fisted against the bag’s rough canvas, flecked now with his blood. Malone’s taking it out on the bag, taking it out on himself, they both deserve the pain, the hurt, the rage.
Malone sucks in some air and goes at it again, his heavy punches aimed at O’Dell, Weintraub, Paz, Anderson, Chandler, Savino, Castillo, Bruno . . . but mostly at Denny Malone.
Sergeant Denny Malone.
Hero cop.
Rat.
He finishes with a punch to the heart.
The bag jumps and then settles back down on its chain, swings gently like something that’s dead but don’t know it yet.
Chapter 32
In the morning, Malone walks down Broadway past a newsstand on the corner.
He sees his face on the cover of the New York Post with a screaming headline, two heroes shot, a picture of Malone standing with Russo and Monty in the aftermath of Pena.
Monty’s image is highlighted in a white oval like a halo.
The Daily News shouts one elite cop killed, another wounded and has a slightly different photo of Malone, and a photo of Malone from the Pena bust with a subline reading dirty denny? did he feel lucky?
The front page of the New York Times doesn’t have his picture but a headline reads with latest bloodbath, is it time to reconsider elite police units?
The byline is Mark Rubenstein.
Malone hails a taxi and goes to Manhattan North.
Russo looks sharp.
Pressed Armani suit, white monogrammed shirt with cuff links, red Zegna tie, Magli shoes shined to a high polish. Summer, he ain’t wearing the retro overcoat but he has it draped over his arm, making it awkward for O’Dell to cuff him.
At least he does it in front, not behind his back.
Malone lays the overcoat over the cuffs.
The media’s outside Manhattan North. TV trucks, radio, print guys with their photographers.
“You have to do that?” Malone asks O’Dell. “Make him do the perp walk?”
“I didn’t.”
“Someone did.”
“Well, it wasn’t me.”
“And you had to do it here,” Malone says, “in front of other cops.”
“Did you want me to do it at his house, in front of his kids?” O’Dell looks angry, tense. He should be—every cop in the station is eye-fucking him and the other feds.
Eye-fucking Malone, too.
He could have skipped this—O’Dell told him to—but Malone thought he had to be there.
Deserved to be there.
To watch them put bracelets on his brother.
Russo keeps his head up.
“Good-bye, you fucking donkeys,” Russo says. “Have fun waiting out your pensions!”
The feds take him out.
Malone walks with him.
Cameras click like machine guns.
Reporters press forward but the uniforms keep them back. The guys in the bags are in no mood to take any shit. Seeing another cop go out in cuffs makes them sick and scared.
And angry.
After the cop shootings, the Blue went into the projects in waves and with bad intent.
The uniforms disabled the dash-cam systems on their cars so the video cameras wouldn’t work and then went to town.
You had a warrant, a no-show parole date, a complaint for littering—you were going. You had as much as a roach on you, an old needle, a pipe with a grain of old rock in it, you’re going. You resisted arrest, you talked smack, you as much as looked at a cop sideways, you caught a bad beating and then you got thrown in the car with your hands cuffed behind your back but your seat belt unfastened and the cops would speed up and then hit the brakes so your face smashed into the security screen.
The Three-Two went through St. Nick’s twice—looking for weapons, dope, most of all information, trying to get someone to snitch, to drop a dime, to sell a name.
Da Force—what’s left of the motherfuckers anyway—came in right behind and they weren’t looking for collars, they were looking for payback, and the only way to stay out of the equation was to give them information and then you were stuck in a jam between Da Force and DeVon Carter and the thing is, Da Force is going to come and go.
DeVon Carter stays.
You got to catch a beating, you catch it with your mouth shut like it’s wired, which it might well be by the time Da Force and their plainclothes dogs got done with you.
The people in St. Nick’s were wondering why they were catching the shit when everyone knew it was the Domos who massacred those cops, all the way over on the other side of Harlem.
So when the word got out that a cop from Da Force was heading out in cuffs, an eager crowd gathered out on the street.