The Force: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  When he separated from Sheila, a little over a year ago now, Malone decided to be one of those few cops who lives on his beat. He didn’t go all the way up to Harlem, but settled for the outskirts on the Upper West Side. He can take the train to work or even walk if he wants, and he likes the neighborhood around Columbia.

  The college kids are annoying in their youthful arrogance and certitude, but there’s something about that he likes, too. Likes going into the coffeehouses, the bars, hearing the conversations. Likes to walk uptown, let the dealers and the addicts know he’s around.

  His place is a third-floor walk-up—a small living room, a smaller kitchen, an even smaller bedroom with a bathroom attached. A heavy bag hangs from a chain in the living room. It’s all he needs; he’s not there much anyway. It’s a place to crash, shower, make a cup of coffee in the morning.

  Now he goes up, showers and changes clothes. It wouldn’t do to go back to the house in the same clothes because Sheila would sniff it out in a second and ask him if he’s been with “huh.”

  Malone doesn’t know why it bugs her so much, or at all—they separated almost three months before he even met Claudette—but it was a serious mistake to have answered Sheila’s question “Are you seeing anyone?” honestly.

  “You’re a cop, you should know better,” Russo said when Malone told him about Sheila freaking out. “Never give an honest answer.”

  Or an answer at all. Other than “I want a lawyer, I want my delegate.”

  But Sheila had freaked. “‘Claudette’? What is she, French?”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s black. African American.”

  Sheila laughed in his face. It just cracked her up. “Shit, Denny, when you said at Thanksgiving you liked the dark meat, I thought you meant the drumstick.”

  “Nice.”

  “Don’t get all PC with me,” Sheila said. “With you it’s always ‘moolie’ this and ‘ditzune’ that. Tell me something, do you call her a nigger?”

  “No.”

  Sheila couldn’t stop laughing. “You tell the sistuh how many brothuhs you tuned up with your nightstick back in the day?”

  “I might have left that out.”

  She laughed again, but he knew it was coming. She’d had a couple of pops so it was only a matter of time before the hilarity turned to rage and self-pity. And it came. “Tell me, Denny, she fuck you better than I did?”

  “Come on, Sheila.”

  “No, I want to know. Does she fuck better than me? You know what they say, once you try black, you never go back.”

  “Let’s not do this.”

  Sheila said, “Because usually you cheat on me with white whores.”

  Well, that’s true, Malone thought. “I’m not cheating on you. We’re separated.”

  But Sheila was in no mood for legalisms. “It never bothered you when we were married, though, did it, Denny? You and your brother cops tapping everything with a pussy. Hey, do they know? Russo and Big Monty, they know you’re stirring tar?”

  He didn’t want to lose his temper but he did. “Shut the fuck up, Sheila.”

  “What, are you going to hit me?”

  “I’ve never laid a goddamn hand on you,” Malone said. He’s done a lot of bad things in his life, but hitting a woman is not one of them.

  “No, that’s right,” she said. “You stopped touching me altogether.”

  Problem was, she had a point about that.

  Now he shaves carefully, first down and then up against the grain, because he wants to look clean and refreshed.

  Good luck with that, he thinks.

  Opening the medicine cabinet, he pops a couple of 5 mg Dexes to give him a little boost.

  Then he changes into a pair of clean jeans, a white dress shirt and a black wool sports coat to look like a citizen. Even in the summer, he usually wears long sleeves when he goes home because the tats piss off Sheila.

  She thinks they were a symbol of his leaving Staten Island, that he was getting all “city hipster.”

  “They don’t have tattoos on Staten Island?” he asked her. Hell, there’s a parlor every other corner now and half the guys walking around the neighborhood have ink. About half the women, too, come to think of it.

  He likes his tattoo sleeves. For one, he just likes them, for another, they scare the shit out of the mopes because they’re not used to seeing them on cops. When he rolls up his sleeves to go to work on a mope, they know it’s going to be bad.

  And it’s hypocritical, because Sheila has a little green shamrock down by her right ankle, as if you couldn’t tell she was Irish just by looking at her, with the red hair, green eyes and freckles. Yeah, it doesn’t take a $200-an-hour shrink to tell me that Claudette is the exact opposite of my soon-to-be ex-wife, Malone thinks as he clips the off-duty gun to his belt.

  I get it.

  Sheila is everything he grew up with, no surprises, the known. Claudette is a different world, a constant unfolding, the other. It’s not just race, although that’s a big part of it.

  Sheila is Staten Island, Claudette is Manhattan.

  She is the city to him.

  The streets, the sounds, the scents, the sophisticated, the sexy, the exotic.

  Their first date, she showed up in this retro 1940s dress with a white Billie Holiday gardenia in her hair and her lips a vivid red and perfume that made him almost dizzy with want.

  He took her to Buvette, down in the Village off Bleecker, because he figured with a French first name she might like that, and anyway, he didn’t want to take her anywhere in Manhattan North.

  She figured that right out.

  “You don’t want to be seen with a ‘sistuh’ on your beat,” she said as they sat down at the table.

  “It’s not that,” he said, telling a half-truth. “It’s just that when I’m up there, I’m always on duty. What, you don’t like the Village?”

  “I love the Village,” Claudette said. “I’d live down here if it weren’t so far from work.”

  She didn’t go to bed with him that date or the next or the next, but when she did, it was a revelation and he fell in love like he didn’t think was possible. Actually, he was already in love, because she challenged him. With Sheila it was either a resentful acceptance of whatever he did or an all-out, red-haired Irish brawl. Claudette, she pushed him on his assumptions, made him see things in a new way. Malone was never much of a reader, but she got him to read, even some poetry, a little bit of which, like Langston Hughes, he even liked. Some Saturday mornings they’d sleep in late and then go get coffee and sometimes prowl bookstores, something else he never thought he’d do, and she’d show him art books, tell him about the vacation to Paris she took all by herself and how she’d like to go back.

  Shit, Sheila won’t come to the city by herself.

  But it isn’t just the contrast to Sheila that makes Malone love Claudette.

  It’s her intelligence, her sense of humor, her warmth.

  He’s never met a kinder person.

  It’s a problem.

  She’s too kind for the work she does—she hurts for her patients, bleeds inside from the things she sees—and it breaks her, makes her reach for the needle.

  It’s good she’s hitting the meetings.

  Dressed, Malone grabs the wrapped presents he bought for the kids. Well, he bought all the presents for the kids, but Santa gets the cred for the ones under the tree. These are Malone’s gifts to them—the new PlayStation 4 for John and a Barbie set for Caitlin.

  Those were easy; finding a present for Sheila was a bitch.

  He wanted to get her something nice, but nothing romantic or remotely sexy. He finally asked Tenelli for advice and she suggested a nice scarf. “Nothing cheap, from a street vendor like you assholes usually do last minute. Take a little time, go to Macy’s or Bloomie’s. What’s her coloration?”

  “What?”

  “What does she look like, dummy?” Tenelli asks. “Is she dark, pale? What color is her hair?”

&
nbsp; “Pale. Red.”

  “Go with gray. It’s safe.”

  So he went down to Macy’s, fought the crowd, and found a nice gray wool scarf that set him back a hundred. He hopes it sends the right message—I’m not in love with you anymore, but I’ll always take care of you.

  She should know it already, he thinks.

  He’s never late with the child support, he pays for the kids’ clothes, John’s hockey team, Caitlin’s dance classes, and the family is still covered on his PBA health insurance, which is very good and includes dental.

  And Malone always leaves an envelope for Sheila because he doesn’t want her working and he doesn’t want her to have a what-do-you-call-it, a “diminution” of her lifestyle. So he does the right thing and leaves a fat envelope, and she’s grateful and hip enough never to ask where the money comes from.

  Her dad was a cop, too.

  “No, it’s good you do the right thing,” Russo said one time when they were talking about it.

  “What else am I going to do?” Malone asked.

  You grow up in that neighborhood, you do the right thing.

  The prevailing attitude on Staten Island is that men can leave their wives, but only black men leave their kids. Which isn’t fair, Malone thinks—Bill Montague’s probably the best father he knows—but that’s what people think, that black men go around knockin’ they bitches up and then stick white people with the welfare bill.

  A white guy from the East Shore tries something like that, he’s got everyone up his ass—his priest, his parents, his siblings, his cousins, his friends—all telling him what a degenerate he is and showing him up by picking up the slack themselves.

  “You did that,” the guy’s mother would say, “I couldn’t hold my head up going to Mass. What would I say to Father?”

  That specific argument don’t cut much weight with Malone.

  He hates priests.

  Thinks they’re parasites, and he won’t go near a church unless it’s a wedding or a funeral and he has to. But he won’t give the church any money.

  Malone, who also won’t pass a Salvation Army bell ringer without putting at least a five in the bucket, won’t give a dime to the Catholic Church he grew up in. He refuses to donate money to what he thinks is an organization of child molesters that should be indicted under the RICO statutes.

  When the pope came to NYC, Malone wanted to arrest him.

  “That wouldn’t go down so well,” Russo said.

  “Yeah, probably not.” With every cop over the grade of captain elbowing each other aside to kiss the pontiff’s ring or his ass, whichever was presented first.

  Malone ain’t crazy about nuns, either.

  “What about Mother Teresa?” Sheila asked him, when they were arguing about it. “She fed starving people.”

  “If she passed out condoms,” Malone said, “she wouldn’t have had so many starving people to feed.”

  Malone even hates The Sound of Music. It was the only movie he ever saw, he rooted for the Nazis.

  “How could anyone hate The Sound of Music?” Monty asked him. “It’s nice.”

  “What kind of shitty black man are you?” Malone asked him. “Listen to the fucking Sound of Music.”

  “That’s right,” Monty said. “You listen to that rap shit.”

  “What you got against rap?”

  “It’s racist.”

  It’s been Malone’s experience that no one hates rap and hip-hop more than black men above the age of forty. They just can’t stand the attitude, the pants hanging off their asses, the backward baseball caps, the jewelry. And most black men of that age aren’t going to let their women be called bitches.

  That just ain’t gonna happen.

  Malone’s seen it. Once, back before it fell apart, he and Sheila and Monty and Yolanda were on a double date, driving up Broadway on a warm night with the windows open, and this rapper on the corner of Ninety-Eighth saw Yolanda and yelled out, “You got one sweet bitch, brother!” Monty stopped the car in the middle of Broadway, got out, walked over and clocked the kid. Walked back to the car, didn’t say a word.

  Nobody did.

  Claudette, she doesn’t hate hip-hop, but she listens to mostly jazz and makes him go to the clubs with her when one of the musicians she likes is playing. Malone likes it okay, but what he really likes are the older rap and hip-hop guys—Biggie, Sugarhill Gang, N.W.A. and Tupac. Nelly and Eminem are all right, too; so is Dr. Dre.

  Malone stands in his living room and realizes that he’s been spacing out, so the Dexedrine hasn’t kicked in yet.

  He locks up and walks to the garage where they park his car.

  Malone’s personal vehicle is a beautifully restored 1967 Chevy Camaro SS convertible, black with Z-28 stripes, 427-cubic-inch engine, four-speed manual transmission, tricked out with a new Bose sound system. He never takes it to the precinct, rarely even drives it in Manhattan. It’s his indulgence—he uses it to go to the Island or on joyrides to escape the city.

  Now he takes the West Side Highway downtown and then crosses Manhattan near the 9/11 site. It’s been more than fifteen years and he still gets mad when he doesn’t see the Towers. It’s a hole in the skyline, a hole in his heart. Malone, he don’t hate Muslims but he sure as hell hates those jihadist cocksuckers.

  Three hundred and forty-three firefighters died that day.

  Thirty-seven Port Authority and New Jersey police officers.

  Twenty-three cops ran into those buildings and didn’t come out.

  Malone will never forget that day and wishes that he could. He was off-duty but responded to the Level-4 mobilization call. Him and Russo and two thousand other cops went, and he saw the second tower fall, not knowing at the moment that his brother was in it.

  That endless day of searching and waiting and then the phone call that confirmed what he already knew in his gut—Liam wasn’t coming back. It was Malone had to go tell his mother and he’ll never forget the sound—the shrill scream of grief that came out of her mouth and still echoes in his ears in the gray hours when he can’t sleep.

  The other gift that keeps on giving is the smell. Liam once told him that he could never get the smell of burning flesh out of his nose, and Malone never really believed him until 9/11. Then the whole city smelled like death and ash and scorched flesh and rot and rage and sorrow.

  And Liam was right—Malone never has gotten the smell out of his nose.

  He puts Kendrick Lamar on the sound system and blasts it as he goes through the Battery Tunnel.

  The phone rings when he’s on the Verrazano Bridge.

  It’s Mark Piccone. “You got a couple of minutes today for me?”

  “It’s Christmas.”

  “Five minutes,” Piccone says. “My new client wants to get this taken care of.”

  “Fat Teddy?” Malone asks. “Shit, his trial won’t come up for months.”

  “He’s nervous.”

  “I’m headed for the Island,” Malone says.

  “I’m already there,” Piccone says. “Big family thing, I thought I’d try to make my escape late afternoon.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  Malone comes off the bridge near Fort Wadsworth, where the New York marathon starts, gets off on Hylan and drives down through Dongan Hills, past Last Chance Pond, and then takes a left onto Hamden Avenue.

  The old neighborhood.

  Nothing special about it, just your basic East Shore block of nice single-family homes, mostly Irish or Italian, a lot of cops and firefighters.

  A good place to raise kids.

  The truth is he just couldn’t stand it anymore.

  The incredible freakin’ boredom.

  Couldn’t stand coming back from busts, the stakeouts, the roofs, the alleys, the chases to what, Hylan Plaza, Pathmark, Toys “R” Us, GameStop. He’d come home from a tour jacked up from speed, adrenaline, fear, anger, sadness, rage, and then go to someone’s cookie-cutter house to play Mexican Train or Monopoly or nickel poker. And
they were nice people and he’d feel guilty sitting there sipping their wine coolers and making small talk when what he really wanted was to be back on the street in hot, smelly, noisy, dangerous, fun, interesting, stimulating, infuriating Harlem with the real people and the families and the hustlers, the slingers, the whores.

  The poets, the artists, the dreamers.

  He just loved the fuckin’ city, man.

  Watching them ball at Rucker, or standing up on the terrace in Riverside Park watching the Cubans play baseball down below. Sometimes he’d go up to the Heights and Inwood to check out the Dominican scene—the domino games on the sidewalks, the reggaetón music blaring out of car stereos, the street merchants hacking coconuts open with machetes. Go into Kenny’s for a café con leche or stop at a street stand for the sweet bean soup.

  It’s what he loves about New York—you want it, it’s there.

  The sweet, fetid richness of this city. He never really got it until he left his Irish-Italian blue-collar, cop-fireman Staten Island ghetto and moved to the city. You hear five languages walking a single street, smell six cultures, hear seven kinds of music, see a hundred kinds of people, a thousand stories and it’s all New York.

  New York’s the world.

  Malone’s world, anyway.

  He’ll never leave it.

  No reason to.

  He tried to explain it to Sheila, but how do you do that without bringing her into a world you don’t want to put on her? How do you go from a tenement where the mommy-daddy combo is so fucked up on crack, and you find a baby dead for a week, her feet chewed by rats, and then take your own kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s? You supposed to tell her about that? “Share” that? No, the right thing to do is put a smile on your face and talk to the tire salesmen about the Mets or what-the-fuck-ever because no one wants to hear about that and you don’t want to talk about it, you just want to forget it, and good luck with that, ace.

  That time Phil and Monty and him get an anonymous tip, go to this address in Washington Heights and they find this guy tied to a chair, his hands had been cut off for skimming some smack off the top of a shipment and he was still alive because the people who punished him also perfectly cauterized the wounds with a blowtorch, his eyes were bulging out of his skull, his jaw broken from clenching it so hard, and then they had to go back to a cookout and stand around by the grill with the host like guys do and he and Phil looked at each other over the grill and knew what the other was thinking. You don’t talk to other cops about that shit because you don’t have to. They already know. They’re the only ones who know.