“I dunno, Jack does all the cooking,” she says. “Prime rib, I think. You doing your annual Turkey Run this year?”
“Hence the term ‘annual.’”
“Right.”
They’re filing into the briefing room when Malone spots Kevin Callahan out of the corner of his eye. The undercover—tall, skinny, long red hair and beard—looks baked out of his mind.
Cops, undercover or otherwise, aren’t supposed to do dope, but how else are they supposed to make buys and not get made? So sometimes it turns into a habit. A lot of guys come off undercover straight into rehab and their careers are fucked.
Occupational hazard.
Malone walks over, grabs Callahan by the elbow and walks him out the door. “Sykes sees you, he’ll piss-test you straightaway.”
“I have to log in.”
“I’ll sign you out on a surveillance,” Malone says. “You get asked, you were up at the Ville for me.”
The Manhattan North Special Task Force house is conveniently located between two projects—Manhattanville, just across the street uptown, and Grant, across 125th Street below them.
Come the revolution, Malone thinks, we’re surrounded.
“Thanks, Denny.”
“Why are you still standing here?” Malone asks. “Get your ass up to the Ville. And, Callahan, you mess up again, I’ll piss you myself.”
He goes back in and takes a folding metal chair in the briefing room next to Russo.
Big Monty turns around in his chair and looks at them. He holds a steaming cup of tea, which he manages to sip even though his unlit cigar is jammed in the corner of his mouth. “I just want to enter my official protest regarding this afternoon’s activities.”
“Noted,” Malone says.
Monty turns back around.
Russo grins. “He ain’t happy.”
He is unhappy, Malone thinks, happily. It’s good to shake the otherwise unflappable Big Man up every once in a while.
Keeps him fresh.
Raf Torres walks in with his team—Gallina, Ortiz and Tenelli. Malone doesn’t like that Tenelli is with Torres, because he likes Tenelli and thinks that Torres is a piece of shit. He’s a big motherfucker, Torres, but to Malone he looks like a big, brown, pockmarked Puerto Rican toad.
Torres nods to Malone. It somehow manages to be a gesture of acknowledgment, respect and challenge at the same time.
Sykes walks in and stands behind the lectern like a professor. He’s young for a captain, but then again he has rabbis at the Puzzle Palace, brass looking out for his interests.
And he’s black.
Malone knows that Sykes has been tagged as the next big thing, and that the Manhattan North Special Task Force is a high-profile box for him to tick on his way up.
To Malone he looks like some precocious Republican Senate candidate—very crisp, very clean, his hair cut short. He sure as hell don’t have any tattoos, unless there’s an arrow pointing up his asshole reading This Way to My Brain.
That isn’t fair, Malone thinks, checking himself. The guy’s record is solid, he did some real police work on Major Crimes in Queens and then became the Job’s designated precinct janitor—he cleaned up the Tenth and the Seven-Six, real dumping grounds, and now they’ve moved him here.
To check another box on his sheet? Malone wonders.
Or to clean us up?
In either case, Sykes brought that Queens attitude with him.
Squared away, by the book.
A Queens Marine.
Sykes’s first day on command he had the whole Task Force—fifty-four detectives, undercovers, anticrime guys and uniforms—come in, sat them down and made a speech.
“I know I’m looking at the elite,” Sykes said. “The best of the best. I also know I’m looking at a few dirty cops. You know who you are. Soon, I’ll know who you are. And hear this—I catch any of you taking as much as a free coffee or a sandwich, I’ll have your shield and gun, I’ll have your pension. Now get out, go do your jobs.”
He didn’t make any friends, but he made it clear that he wasn’t there to make friends. And Sykes had also alienated his people by taking a vocal stand against “police brutality,” warning them he wouldn’t tolerate intimidation, beatings, profiling or stop and frisk.
How the fuck does he think we maintain even a semblance of control? Malone thinks, looking at the man now.
The captain holds up a copy of the New York Times.
“‘White Christmas,’” Sykes reads. “‘Heroin Floods the City on the Holidays.’ Mark Rubenstein in the New York Times. And not just one article, he’s doing a series. The New York Times, gentlemen.”
He pauses to let that sink in.
It doesn’t.
Most cops don’t read the Times. They read the Daily News and the Post, mostly for the sports news or the T&A on Page Six. A few read the Wall Street Journal to keep up on their portfolios. The Times is strictly for the suits at One Police and the hacks in the mayor’s office.
But the Times says there’s a “heroin epidemic,” Malone thinks.
Which is only an epidemic, of course, because now white people are dying.
Whites started to get opium-based pills from their physicians—oxycodone, Vicodin, that shit. But it was expensive and doctors were reluctant to prescribe too much for exactly the fear of addiction. So the white folks went to the open market and the pills became a street drug. It was all very nice and civilized until the Sinaloa Cartel down in Mexico made a corporate decision that it could undersell the big American pharmaceutical companies by raising production of its heroin, thereby reducing price.
As an incentive, they also increased its potency.
The addicted white Americans found that Mexican “cinnamon” heroin was cheaper and stronger than the pills and started shooting it into their veins and overdosing.
Malone literally saw it happening.
He and his team busted more bridge-and-tunnel junkies, suburban housewives and Upper East Side madonnas than they could count. More and more of the bodies they’d find slumped dead in alleys were Caucasian.
Which, according to the media, is a tragedy.
Even congressmen and senators pulled their noses out of their donors’ ass cracks long enough to notice the new epidemic and demand that “something has to be done about it.”
“I want you out there making heroin arrests,” Sykes says. “Our numbers on crack cocaine are satisfactory, but our numbers on heroin are subpar.”
The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new “management” breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people—they believe the numbers say it all. And when the numbers don’t say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.
You want to look good? Violent crime is down.
You need more funding? It’s up.
You need arrests? Send your people out to make a bunch of bullshit busts that will never get convictions. You don’t care—convictions are the DA’s problem—you just want the arrest numbers.