Broken

by Don Winslow

  Jimmy and Wilmer take Rico out to the car. Angelo stays behind and gives Keisha two hundred-dollar bills.

  “There’s a bus leaving in an hour,” he says. “You and the little girl be on it.”

  Don’t let morning find you in New Orleans.

  “Where are you taking me?” Rico asks as they shove him into the backseat.

  “Where you took my brother,” Jimmy says.

  The old warehouse is on the river in Arabi, almost over by Chalmette.

  Been empty since the storm.

  Rico’s hands are cuffed behind him, around a steel pillar. He looks at Jimmy and says, “So what are we doing?”

  “I recognize your voice from the video,” Jimmy says. “You were talking about my brother—‘Look at him hop.’ You thought it was funny.”

  “It was,” Rico says. “I laughed my ass off. I know you’re going to kill me. So kill me. What are you waiting for?”

  Jimmy slips a set of brass knuckles onto his right hand and says, “Anyone want out of here, now is the time. No hard feelings.”

  No one moves.

  Harold sits on a pile of crates.

  Wilmer leans against another pillar.

  Angelo lights up a cigarette.

  Jimmy slips another set onto his left hand, lets out a deep breath, and then goes to town on Rico.

  Like a workout on a heavy bag, except this is on a human being.

  Jimmy digs bone-breaking lefts and rights into Rico’s ribs, then steps back and lands a straight right into his liver.

  Rico bellows.

  Jimmy rolls his left shoulder over and throws a hook into Rico’s cheek. Then a right uppercut into his chin, then pulls it back and smashes it into the bridge of Rico’s nose.

  Blood spurts on Jimmy’s face.

  He doesn’t notice.

  Sweat pouring off him now, breathing heavy, he moves in again and smashes his fists into Rico’s ribs, turns him and pounds his kidneys, turns him once more and launches a vicious uppercut into his balls.

  Rico’s chin drops to his chest.

  Blood runs over his tats.

  “That’s enough,” Angelo says.

  “It ain’t enough,” Jimmy says, his chest heaving. “It ain’t near enough.”

  “We need him to talk,” Angelo says. He steps between Jimmy and Rico. “Where do we find Oscar?”

  “You don’t,” Rico says.

  Wilmer slides down the crates. “Let me have a crack at him.”

  He gets up in Rico’s ear and says quietly in Spanish, “That man beating you, he’s El Cajedo.”

  It’s part of old Honduran folklore about a black dog, created by Satan, and a white dog, created by God.

  “The black dog and the white dog are always fighting inside him,” Wilmer says. “Right now, the black dog is winning, which is very bad for you. You want the white dog to win, tell us what we need to know.”

  “They fight inside me, too.”

  “I know,” Wilmer says. “You did a very bad thing, and you’re going to die for it. You’re going to die, and then you’re going to hell. But maybe if you let the white dog win, God will forgive you.”

  “There is no God.”

  “There better be, ’mano,” Wilmer says. “The only other choice is the black dog.”

  Rico’s head drops again. He whimpers in pain. Then he looks back up and says, “Go fuck yourselves.”

  “Y’all leave now,” Jimmy says.

  The team walks out.

  Jimmy walks around and finds a three-foot-long iron pipe on the floor. He picks it up, hefts it in his hand, and walks back to Rico.

  “You broke all my brother’s bones before you burned him to death,” Jimmy says. “Bad news, Rico. The black dog won.”

  He goes at it until he can’t swing the pipe no more.

  Three down.

  One to go.

  “He give it up?” Angelo asks.

  “No.”

  Driving away, Angelo says, “You ever think maybe we’re doing the wrong thing here?”

  “No.” A few minutes later, he adds, “They got what’s coming to them.”

  “It ain’t them I’m concerned about,” Angelo says. “It’s you.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “What you’re becoming,” Angelo says. He waits for a long time before asking, “I mean, is this what Danny would really want?”

  “Dunno,” Jimmy says. “I can’t ask him, can I?”

  They drive a few more blocks before Jimmy says, “I know something’s broken in me. I know that. You want off this train, Angelo, jump off. We’re still friends.”

  “You’re not my friend, you’re my partner,” Angelo says. “I ride to the last stop.”

  This might be the last stop, Jimmy thinks. Rico didn’t give it up, and now we have no way of finding Oscar Diaz.

  I fucked up, I lost my temper, and now I can’t avenge my brother.

  It’s over.

  Two murder cops, Garofalo and Perez, look at the body cuffed to the pillar. The man—or what used to be a man—was beaten to death.

  To say the least.

  His arm and leg bones poke through the flesh. His face has been pounded into something resembling a smear of putty.

  “This isn’t your usual drug execution,” Garofalo says. “This was personal.”

  They’re both thinking the same thing.

  Jimmy McNabb.

  Jimmy drinks hard.

  The kind of drinking meant to drown a pain that just won’t stay under. Memories of Danny that float to the surface like all them broken pieces that ran down the streets after the storm.

  Him and Danny walking down Third Street, his brother singing along with the choir music coming out from the Grace & Glory church.

  Him and Danny lying in their beds at night, listening to the old man knock against the furniture when he came in off shift, and Danny looking at him all scared and Jimmy saying, “It’s okay. I’m here.”

  I’ll protect you.

  Or him and Danny arguing about po’boys, which was better, roast beef or oysters, and Danny saying, “Oysters look like snot, probably taste like it, too.”

  “You would know what snot tastes like, you booger-eating little prick.”

  “At least I eat my own.”

  And them laughing and laughing until the Big Shot creme sodas came out their noses.

  Sitting in his chair now in his apartment in the Channel, Jimmy looks at his hands. They’re cut and swollen, his knuckles purple.

  The pain feels good.

  He wishes it were worse.

  He wants to hurt.

  The word in the precinct house locker room is that McNabb is ticking off the boxes.

  “Bullshit,” one cop says.

  “Yeah?” another says. “Look at it. There were four guys on that tape. One of them was Diaz. Maybe the other two were Mantilla and Pineda.”

  “Dispatch had a call the other night,” another one says. “Someone heard screams coming from the recycling plant over on Willow.”

  “Honduran neighborhood.”

  They keep on about it until Angelo walks in.

  “You boys have something you want to talk to me about?” he asks.

  It gets quiet.

  “No one has anything they want to say?”

  No one does.

  “Good,” Angelo says. “Keep it that way.”

  It stays that way until he grabs his gear and walks out.

  The knock on the door wakes Jimmy up.

  He’s still in the chair.

  Reaching for his gun, he holds it behind his back, goes to the door and opens it.

  “Señor McNabb.”

  The guy looks to be in his forties, Hispanic, solidly built. Well dressed in a khaki linen suit, blue shirt open at the neck.

  “What do you want?” Jimmy asks.

  “Something that would be best discussed in private,” the man says. “May I come in?”

  Jimmy ushers him in, makes sure he se
es the gun.

  “I assure you that won’t be necessary,” the man says.

  “Who are you?” Jimmy asks.

  “You don’t need to know my name.”

  “How do you know what I need?” Jimmy asks.

  “I know you need the location of Oscar Diaz,” the man says. “I’ve come all the way from Culiacán, Sinaloa, to give you what you need.”

  “Why would the cartel do that?”

  “Diaz crossed the line,” the man says, “murdering an American police officer in the United States. And in such a sadistic manner. We’d like to do business here, and we’d like to do it under the normal adversarial relationship with the police, not one unnecessarily exacerbated and emotionally laden.”

  “If you wanted Diaz taken out so bad,” Jimmy says, “you’d do it yourselves.”

  “We will if you prefer,” the man says. “But we thought you’d rather do it personally. We understand sangre, family. And we’re confident in your abilities—Diaz is the last on a list, isn’t he? Mantilla, Quintero, Pineda . . .”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “As I said, a normal relationship,” the man says.

  “Business as usual.”

  “Business as usual.”

  “Where is he?”

  The man hands Jimmy a slip of paper with the address of a high-rise in Algiers Point.

  “Diaz is in the penthouse with an army,” the man says. “He’s frightened and desperate.”

  “If I catch you with dope,” Jimmy says, “I’ll still bust you.”

  “I would expect nothing less,” the man says. “But I’m in management, I never touch the product. Good hunting, Señor McNabb. I hope you succeed. Diaz is a piece of shit.”

  He shuts the door behind him.

  Landreau looks across his desk at Hendricks, the chief of Homicide.

  “We have a problem,” Hendricks said.

  “Don’t we always.”

  “One of your men is a person of interest in three homicides,” Hendricks says.

  “McNabb.”

  “No one wants to see the murderers of Roxanne Pulaski and Daniel McNabb brought to justice more than I do,” Hendricks says, “but a narcotics cop can’t just go around executing people.”

  “Do you have proof?”

  “If I did,” Hendricks says, “McNabb would be in lockup. Along with the rest of his team.”

  “If you can prove it, arrest them,” Landreau says. “Until then . . .”

  Hendricks stands up. “We’re old friends, Adam. We’ve always worked well together. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. Chief’s retiring next year. Word is you’re on the short list, and I’d hate to see something like this—”

  “I appreciate you looking out, Chris.”

  Hendricks leaves.

  Landreau gets on the horn to another one of his teams and tells them to get on McNabb and stay on him.

  The condo building is ten stories high and overlooks the river from Algiers Point.

  Angelo pulled the plans from the City Planning Commission, and now the team sits in the crash pad and goes over them.

  A ground-floor lobby, no doorman but security cameras.

  “He’ll have monitors in his unit,” Jimmy says, “so he’ll see us come in.”

  There are two elevators, but only the one on the right goes up to the penthouse, and it requires a key card.

  “Can you deal with that?” Jimmy asks Harold.

  “Power drill.”

  The elevator opens inside the penthouse unit.

  “Nice when you got groceries,” Angelo says.

  The other elevator only goes to the ninth floor.

  “There’ll be interior staircases,” Jimmy says, “by code.”

  “Here they are,” Wilmer says, pointing.

  The plans show two sets of staircases that run from the roof into the basement, one on the west side of the building, the other on the east. Exterior fire escapes parallel the staircases, so the choice is whether they go up inside or outside.

  “Outside would be easier,” Angelo says. “We go up to the penthouse—there’s a terrace.”

  The plans show a terrace that wraps around three sides of the penthouse, giving the occupant panoramic views of Algiers, the river, and the city beyond.

  “Did you have a terrace in the Ninth?” Jimmy asks Angelo.

  “We called it a ‘porch,’” Angelo says. “After Katrina it had a view of the river, too. From underneath.”

  “Diaz will have a lookout on the roof,” Wilmer says. “He’ll make us if we go up the fire escape.”

  Everyone in the fucking world will see us, Jimmy thinks. Department choppers with cameras will be there before we can get to the sixth floor, or you got some citizen with a cell phone. He doesn’t want to see those vid-clips in court—if they survive the raid, they’re most likely to be indicted for murder.

  “We go up inside,” he says.

  That has its own set of problems. The building has a 90-percent occupancy rate, so there’ll be civilians in the lobby, the elevator, and the hallways. Not only will they be witnesses, but they could be put in danger, and Jimmy doesn’t want any collateral casualties.

  The right thing to do would be to go in with overwhelming force of SWAT, DEA, U.S. Marshals, and uniformed cops, cordon off the building, clear it of civilians, have helicopters drop men on the roof and then hover for protection.

  That’s what we should do, Jimmy thinks.

  Landreau would greenlight it, and the other agencies would trip over their own dicks to get involved. It would be terrific footage for the ten-o’clock news, which would make the chief and the mayor happy.

  The problem with that is that Landreau would insist on going to a judge and getting a warrant, which would bring up some awkward questions about how they know where Diaz is and how they have probable cause that he ordered the cop murders.

  Well, Your Honor, I went to some mob connections, and then I put this guy in a trash compactor. . . .

  And even if they got the raid papered, the goal would be to arrest Diaz, walk him out in front of the cameras with his hands up—another victory for the forces of law and order. But Jimmy doesn’t want Diaz coming out of that building anything but dead, and he wants to be the one to do it. Landreau would probably give him the chance to go in first, but Jimmy doesn’t want to risk some SWAT sniper taking Diaz out clean and quick with a head shot.

  It ain’t gonna be clean, it ain’t gonna be quick, and it ain’t gonna be no one but Jimmy McNabb.

  Question is how to make that happen.

  “There has to be a service elevator,” Angelo says. “Rich people need service, and they don’t want the lower orders dirtying up the passenger elevators. Say Diaz needs . . . I don’t know, a fifty-thousand-dollar designer sofa delivered. . . .”

  They find it in the plans, running up the north side to the roof, with an entrance outside the penthouse.

  “It’ll have the same key-card problem,” Wilmer says.

  “Ain’t no problem,” Harold says. “It puts us outside the penthouse, though. Door goes into the kitchen. It’s sure to be locked.”

  “Plastic charge?” Jimmy asks.

  “Shotgun breach,” Harold says.

  “We’ll go in as HVAC guys,” Jimmy says. They have the uniforms from surveillance work, and no one in New Orleans is ever going to turn an air-conditioning guy away. “The overalls will cover up the weapons, and we wear the vests underneath.”

  They decide that Jimmy and Harold will go to the service elevator, Harold will blow the door, Jimmy will go through first. Wilmer will go up the interior stairs in case Diaz tries to bust out that way, and Angelo will cover the fire escape.

  “You’ll be seen,” Jimmy says.

  “One guy on a big building?” Angelo says. “Maybe not.”

  “Diaz will have men stored in units all over the building,” Wilmer says. “It’s going to be whack-a-mole. Shooting breaks out under him, he’s going t
o be ready.”

  “Any of y’all ain’t wanna go, I’m fine with it,” Jimmy says. “We go in, ain’t no guarantee we’re coming out. Even if we do, our careers are fucked.”

  They know all this.

  Know there’s never a guarantee.

  Know they’ll lose their jobs, their badges, maybe go to jail.

  That this could end in Angola or in a box.

  “Angelo?”

  “You know where I stand, Jimmy.”

  “Wilmer?”

  Wilmer says, “It’s an honor thing.”

  “Harold?”

  Of them, Harold is the straightest, the most likely to want out. He stands up, pushes out a ceiling panel, reaches up, and hands down an arsenal—an HK MP5K, a Steyr machine pistol, a Glock 9mm, a Benelli M-4 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun, a GS-777 shoulder-fired grenade launcher and an M16 antipersonnel mine.

  All are weapons they’ve taken from narcos over the years and not turned in. Instead they warehoused them in the crash pad against the day they’d need to slug it out with untraceable weapons. For the day they’d need firepower the police department doesn’t offer.

  Diaz has an army? Jimmy thinks as he watches.

  Fine.

  We are an army.

  They get dressed in the technicians’ uniforms, put the weapons into duffel bags, and go out to the cars.

  Landreau takes the call.

  “They’re leaving the Quarter.”

  “Keep me in the loop.”

  One of them nights, man.

  One of them steamy, hot, pressure-cooker New Orleans nights when the lid is on the pot, but just.

  Could blow off any second.

  Might come out in a trumpet riff.

  A bad look or the wrong word.

  A blade comes out, a gun gets pulled.

  Kind of night when you’re better off keeping your eyes to the ground, your ears open, and your mouth shut.

  The night might come down on you anyway.

  Jimmy’s crew takes St. Philip’s to Decatur.

  Decatur to Canal.

  Canal to Tchoupitoulas.

  Then onto the bridge and across the river.

  “They’re headed for Algiers.”

  They park on Patterson a block away from the high-rise and wait for Harold to come back.

  Takes him twenty minutes, then he gets back in the car and tells them that he had no trouble getting down to the basement and shutting off the air-conditioning.