Fat Teddy is on the move.
Fast as Fat Teddy can move, anyway.
From across Broadway, in the liquor delivery truck, Malone watches him come down from the nail shop and hit the street and he’s still on the phone.
“It’s on,” Levin says, looking at his iPad screen.
Teddy has used three phones to call the same Georgia cell phone and now he’s walking downtown on Broadway.
“He just dialed a 212,” Levin says.
“That’s him telling Carter it’s going,” says Monty.
“Where do you want to take him?” Russo asks.
“Wait,” Malone says.
They stay parallel as Teddy crosses 158th. Then he turns right onto 157th and right again up Edward Morgan Place.
“If he’s going into Kennedy’s Chicken,” Monty says, “it’s too much of a stereotype for me.”
They turn behind him.
“Did he make us?” Russo asks.
“No,” Malone says. “Too much on his mind.”
“That’s his car,” Russo says. “Outside the coffee shop.”
“Let’s do it.” He dials Nasty Ass. “Do your thing.”
Nasty hadn’t wanted to be involved in this at all. Flat-ass balked at it. “Man, I could’ve got caught last time. I don’t want to have to go back to Baltimore again.”
“You won’t.”
Nasty tried another. “Ain’t Carter protected by Torres?”
Yeah, that’s the fucking idea, Nasty.
“You run the Task Force now?” Malone asked. “They replaced Sykes with an Ichabod Crane–looking black junkie motherfucker, no one sent me the memo? I’ll decide where I work, asshole.”
“I’m just sayin’ . . .”
“Don’t be sayin’ anything except you gonna do what I ask you to do.”
So now Nasty’s out on the street and he calls 911. “I see a man with a gun.”
Gives the address.
It hits the radio and Russo answers it. “Manhattan North Unit there. We got it.”
They jump out of the truck, walk up behind Teddy and mug him just before he gets to his car.
Teddy ain’t joking around this time, he got no mouth to give.
This is serious business.
Monty puts him against the car.
Levin takes his phone.
Malone says to Teddy, “I swear to God, one fuckin’ word . . .”
They hustle him back into the truck.
“You have some shitkicker friends coming up from the South?” Malone asks him.
Teddy doesn’t say anything.
Monty climbs into the truck with a briefcase. “Look what I found.”
He opens the case. Stacks of hundreds, fifties, twenties. “Save me the trouble, Teddy. How much?”
“Sixty-five,” Teddy says.
Malone laughs. “Did you tell Carter sixty-five? What’s the real number?”
“Fifty, motherfucker.”
Russo takes fifteen out of the case. “It’s a sad, corrupt world.”
“Have you ever met Mantell,” Malone asks, “or just talked to him over the phone?”
“Why you wanna know?”
“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Malone says. He holds up a sheaf of papers, the CI file he placed for Teddy. “Either you become my CI right now, or this paperwork gets leaked to Raf Torres, who sells it to Carter.”
“You’d do that to me, Malone?”
“Oh hell yes,” Malone says. “I’m doing it to you now, dumbfuck. Now what are you gonna do, because I don’t want your cracker friends getting hinky.”
“I ain’t never met Mantell.”
“Sign here, here and here,” Malone says, offering him a pen.
Teddy signs.
“Where were you going to make the exchange?” Malone asks.
“Up by Highbridge Park.”
“The crackers know that?”
“Not yet.”
Teddy’s phone rings.
Levin looks at Malone. “Georgia.”
“You have a shutdown code?” Malone asks.
“No.”
Malone gestures to Levin, who holds the phone up to Teddy.
“Where are you?” Teddy asks.
“Harlem River Drive. Where am I going?”
Teddy looks to Malone, who holds up a pad.
“Dyckman east of Broadway,” Teddy says. “There’s a car service garage on the uptown side. Pull into the alley.”
“You got our money?”
“The fuck you think?” Teddy asks.
Levin clicks off.
“Very good, Teddy,” Malone says. “Now call Carter, tell him everything is copacetic.”
“What?”
“Good,” Monty says.
Teddy dials as Malone holds the CI statement up to remind him of the stakes.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Teddy says into the phone. “S’all good. . . . Twenty minutes, half hour maybe. . . . All right.”
He clicks off.
“An Oscar-winning performance,” says Russo.
“You got boys waiting at Highbridge Park?” Malone asks.
“What you think?”
“So you’re gonna drive your fat ass up there,” Malone says. “You’re gonna wait for these hillbillies, except they’re not going to show up.”
“You don’t need me to make the buy?”
“Nah,” Malone says. “We have our own fat black man. I can hear you thinking, Teddy, so you think about this—if your new white friends don’t show up at Dyckman, I file your paperwork with Carter.”
“What I tell him?”
“Tell him to watch the news,” Malone says. “And then tell him he shouldn’t be doing business on my turf.”
Teddy gets out of the truck.
Russo cuts up Teddy’s $15K, hands Levin his share.
Levin puts his hand up. “You guys do what you want. I didn’t see anything. It’s just . . . I don’t do that.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Russo says. “You’re either in or you’re out.”
“If you don’t take it,” Montague says, “we don’t know that we can trust you to keep your mouth shut.”
“I’m not a rat,” Levin says.
Malone feels a twinge in his gut.
“No one said you were,” Montague says. “It’s just that you got to have skin in the game, you feel me?”
“Take the money,” Russo says.
“Give it to charity if you want,” Montague says. “Drop it in the poor box.”
“Send it to St. Jude’s,” Malone says.
“Is that what you do?” Levin asks.
“Sometimes.”
Levin asks, “What happens if I don’t take the money?”
Russo grabs him by the shirt. “You with IAB, Levin? You a ‘field associate’?”
“Get your hands off me.”
Russo does, but he says, “Take your shirt off.”
“What?”
“Take your shirt off,” Montague says.
Levin looks to Malone.
Malone nods.
“Jesus Christ.” Levin unbuttons his shirt, opens it for them. “Happy now?”
“Maybe it’s under his balls,” Russo says. “Remember Leuci?”
“If you have anything under your balls but your taint,” Montague says, “you’d better tell us now.”
“Peel them,” Malone says.
Levin shakes his head, unbuckles his belt and slides his jeans down to his knees. “Would you like to look up my asshole, too?”
“Would you like us to?” Russo asks.
Levin pulls his jeans back up. “This is demeaning.”
“Nothing personal,” Malone says. “But you don’t take money, we have to wonder what you’re about.”
“I just want to be a cop.”
“Be one, then,” Malone says. “You just fined DeVon Carter three grand.”
“That’s the way it works?”
“That’s the way it works.”
Levin picks the money up and counts it. “It’s short.”
“The hell you mean?” Russo asks.
“Fifteen thousand divided by four is three thousand seventy and change,” Levin says. “This is three thousand flat.”
They laugh. Russo says, “Well, we got us a real Jew on the team now.”
“One share goes to expenses,” Malone says.
“What expenses?” Levin asks.
“What,” Russo asks, “you want a line-item account?”
“Take Amy out to dinner,” Malone says, “don’t worry about it.”
“Buy her something nice,” Montague says.
“Not too nice,” says Malone.
Russo takes out a thick manila envelope and a pen. “Address this to yourself, mail it. That way you don’t have it on you.”
They get back in the car, swing by a post office, then drive up to Dyckman.
“What if Teddy warns them?” Levin asks.
“Then we’re fucked,” Malone says. But he gets on the horn to Sykes and advises him to get some backup units over to Highbridge Park. Gives him the make, model and registration of Fat Teddy’s car.
Levin is nervous as a whore in church.
Malone doesn’t blame the kid—it’s a huge score, a huge bust, the kind that makes careers, gets you a gold shield. And it was his motherfucking genius idea that put it together.
Teddy’s phone rings.
Monty answers. “Where you at?”
“Coming west on Dyckman.”
“I see you,” Monty says. “Yellow Penske truck?”
“That’s us.”
“Bring it on in.”
The rental truck pulls into the alley.
A biker type—long hair, beard, leather cut with an ECMF rocker—gets out the passenger side with a pump shotgun. Swastika tat on his neck and an 88—numeric code for the Nazi salute Heil Hitler.
Win-win for this motherfucker, Malone thinks—make some cash and hand the “mud people” tools to kill each other.
Monty gets out of the liquor truck with his left hand raised and a briefcase in his right hand. Malone and Russo come out behind him, standing in back and to the side for open shooting lanes.
Malone sees the biker get hinky. “I didn’t expect white.”
“We just wanted to make you comfortable,” Monty says.
“I don’t know about this.”
“Oh, there’s a lot of black around you,” Monty says. “You just don’t see them because it’s night.”
“Hold up.” The biker calls Teddy’s number. Hears it ring in Monty’s pocket and relaxes a little. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Monty says. “What you got for me?”
The driver gets out, walks around and opens the back of the truck. Malone follows Monty and looks inside as the biker starts to open crates. There are enough guns in there to keep Homicide busy for two years—revolvers, automatics, pump shotguns and automatic rifles—an AK, three AR-15s, including a Bushmaster.
“It’s all there,” the biker says.
Monty swings the briefcase onto the tailgate and opens it. “Fifty large. You want to count it?”
Yeah, he does—he counts the stacks of marked, registered bills. “On the money.”
Malone and Russo start to off-load the guns and carry them back to the liquor truck.
“Let Mantell know,” Monty says, “we’ll buy as much as he can send.”
The biker smiles. “As long as you’re using them on other ‘people of color.’”
Monty can’t help himself. “And maybe cops.”
“Works for me.”
Yeah, does that work for you? Malone thinks. We’ll see how it works for you when some CO is beating your kidneys into Jell-O, you meth-smoking, jerky-eating, cousin-fucking shitkicker. I’d do it right now for you if I didn’t want to hand this bust to Sykes and Da Force.
They finish off-loading.
“You need directions?” Monty asks the driver.
Monty thinks of everything. Sykes has the location covered from all compass points, but this will give him a heads-up on which way the truck is likely to head.
“Back the way we came, I guess,” the driver says.
“Or just go straight up Dyckman here to the Henry Hudson, south to the GW Bridge, then 95 back to Dixie.”
“We’ll find our own way,” the biker says.
“Motherfucker,” Monty says, shaking his head, “if we was going to rip you, we’d do it right here, not chasing you down the highway.”
“Mantell will be in touch.”
“Heil Hitler.”
The Penske truck backs out and true to paranoid form, turns right onto Dyckman to drive all the way across the city before it can get back on a highway.
Malone gets on the horn.
“Suspect is coming east on Dyckman.”
“We have a visual,” Sykes says.
Levin’s grinning.
“Wait for it,” Malone says.
Then it goes off—sirens, yelling. Malone and Levin walk out on the street and see the red flashers as the sector cars move in.
“Well,” Malone says, “there are two mothers, at least, who won’t be getting fucked tonight. Levin, that was some real police work you did.”
“Thanks.”
“Seriously,” Malone says. “You saved some lives tonight.”
A sector car comes down and Sykes gets out of the backseat. Full uniform, freshly shaved, camera-ready. “What do we have, Sergeant?”
“Come on.” He leads Sykes back to the truck.
Sykes looks at the weapons. “Jesus Christ.”
“You call McGivern?” Malone asks. Sykes doesn’t bring McGivern in on this from the jump, the inspector will cockblock his career until he pulls the pin.
“No, Sergeant, I’m an idiot,” Sykes says. “He’s on his way.”
He’s still looking at the guns.
Malone knows what it means to him. Sure, it’s great for his career, but it’s more than that. Like the rest of them, Sykes has seen the bodies, the blood, the families, the funerals.
For a few seconds, Malone almost likes the man.
And for himself, he feels like a cop again.
Instead of a rat.
A cop taking care of his business, taking care of his people. Because of tonight, there’ll be less death and suffering in the Kingdom of Malone.
Another car rolls up and McGivern gets out.
“This is fine work, gentlemen!” he hollers. “Fine work, Captain! It’s a great night to be a New York City police officer, isn’t it?!”
He walks up closer to Sykes. “You seized the buy money, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Sykes says.
More cars roll in. Crime Scene people, Task Force guys. They start taking photographs and vouchering the seized weapons before they take them into the house, where they’ll be laid out for a morning press conference.
After the paperwork is done, Sykes surprises everyone by announcing that the first round down at the Dublin House is on him.
First implies second, which implies third and after that, who’s counting?
Somewhere between five and six Malone finds himself sitting next to Sykes at the bar.
“If someone asked me,” Sykes says, “to name the best and the worst cops I’ve ever worked with, I would answer Denny Malone.”
Malone lifts his glass to him.
Sykes lifts his and they toss them back.
“Never seen you out of uniform before,” Malone says.
“I did three years UC in the Seven-Eight,” Sykes says. “Would you believe that?”
“No. Can’t see it.”
“I had dreads.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Hand to God,” Sykes says. “That was good work tonight, Malone. I hate to think what would happen if those guns hit the street.”
“DeVon Carter ain’t gonna be happy.”
“Fuck Carter.”
Malone starts to laugh.
“What?” Sykes asks.
“I was just thinking about this time,” Malone says, “Monty and Russo and Billy O and me and about six other off-duty detectives are sitting at this bar and this black kid . . . no offense . . . walks through the door with a gun, yells it’s a holdup. World’s dumbest stickup guy, right? Must have been a first-timer because he looked about nineteen and he’s scared to death. So he points the gun and Mike, behind the bar, just looks at him, and all of a sudden this poor kid has probably twelve guns pointed back at him and all these cops are laughing and yelling ‘Get the fuck outta here’ and the kid spins like he’s in a cartoon and runs out the door, we don’t even follow him. We just go back to our drinks.”
“But you didn’t shoot.”
“He was a kid,” Malone says. “I mean, what kind of dumbass sticks up a cop bar?”
“A desperate one.”
“I guess.”
“Difference between you and me?” Sykes says. “I’d have gone after him.”
A party is going on around them. Monty is dancing to the music all on his own, Russo and Emma Flynn are trading shots, Levin is table-surfing, Babyface is trashing a bunch of plainclothes at beer pong.
Malone’s heart is breaking.
He’s going to betray these people.
He’s going to give them cops.
Laying a twenty on the bar, Malone says, “I’d better go.”
“Denny ‘Last Call’ Malone?” Sykes asks.
“Yeah.”
I’d better go before I get any drunker, start talking, spilling my guilty guts, slobbering all over the bar and telling everyone what a piece of shit I am.
Levin sees him get up. “Malone! You can’t leave yet!”
Malone waves to him.
“Malone!” Levin yells. He raises his beer mug. “Everyone. Everybody. Hey, y’all motherfuckers! Listen up!”
“He’s going to feel this tomorrow,” Sykes says.
“Jews can’t drink,” Malone says.
Levin looks like the freakin’ Statue of Liberty with his mug raised above his head like a torch. “Ladies and gentlemen of Da Force! I give you Sergeant Denny Malone! The best motherfucking, ball-breaking, perp-busting badass on the streets of our fair city! The King of Manhattan North! Long Live the King!”
The cops take up the chanting, yell, “Long Live the King! Long Live the King! Long Live the King!”
Sykes smiles at Malone.
“You’re an all right guy, Captain,” Malone says. “I don’t like you very much, but you’re an all right guy. Take care of these people, okay?”
“That’s my job,” Sykes says, looking around the bar. “I love these fucking people.”
Me too, Malone thinks.
He walks out.
He doesn’t belong there anymore.
Doesn’t belong at Claudette’s either.
He goes back to his apartment, polishes off what’s left of a bottle of Jameson’s by himself.