The Force. Don Winslow

captain and just below the chiefs. A well-placed inspector—and McGivern is—can kill a captain’s career, and Sykes knows that.

      Malone’s known McGivern since he was a little boy. The inspector and Malone’s father were in uniform together in the Six back in the day. It was McGivern talked to him a few years after his dad passed, explained a few things to him.

      “John Malone was a great cop,” McGivern said.

      “He drank,” Malone said. Yeah, he was sixteen, knew fucking everything.

      “He did,” McGivern said. “Your father and I, back in the Six, we caught eight murdered kids, all under four years of age, inside two weeks.”

      One of the children had all these little burn marks on his body, and McGivern and his dad couldn’t figure out what they were until they finally realized they matched up exactly with the mouth of a crack pipe.

      The child had been tortured and bitten his tongue off in pain.

      “So, yes,” McGivern said, “your father drank.”

      Now Malone takes an envelope from his jacket and slides it across the table. McGivern hefts the heavy envelope and says, “Merry Christmas, indeed.”

      “I had a good year.”

      McGivern shoves the envelope into his wool coat. “How’s life treating you?”

      Malone takes a sip of his whiskey and says, “Sykes is busting my hump.”

      “I can’t get him transferred,” McGivern says. “He’s the darling of the Puzzle Palace.”

      One Police Plaza.

      NYPD headquarters.

      Which has troubles of its own right now, Malone thinks.

      An FBI investigation of high-ranking officers taking gifts in exchange for favors.

      Stupid shit like trips, Super Bowl tickets, gourmet meals at trendy restaurants in exchange for getting tickets fixed, building citations squashed, even guarding assholes bringing diamonds in from overseas. One of these rich fucks got one of the marine commanders to bring his friends out to Long Island on a police boat, and an air unit guy to fly his guests to a Hamptons party in a police chopper.

      Then there’s the thing with the gun licenses.

      It’s hard to get a gun permit in New York, especially a concealed carry license. It generally requires deep background checks and personal interviews. Unless you’re rich and can lay out twenty grand to a “broker” and the “broker” bribes high-ranking cops to shortcut the process.

      The feds have one of these brokers by the nuts and he’s talking, naming names.

      Indictments pending.

      As it is, five chiefs have been relieved of duty already.

      And one killed himself.

      Drove to a street by a golf course near his house on Long Island and shot himself.

      No note.

      Genuine grief and shock waves have blasted through the upper rank of the NYPD, McGivern included.

      They don’t know who’s next—to be arrested, to swallow the gun.

      The media’s humping it like a blind dog on a sofa leg, mostly because the mayor and the commissioner are at war.

      Yeah, maybe not so much a war, Malone thinks, more like two guys on a sinking ship fighting for the last seat in the lifeboat. They’re each facing down major scandals, and their one play is to throw each other to the media sharks and hope the feeding frenzy lasts long enough to paddle away.

      Not enough bad things can happen to Hizzoner to make Malone happy, and most of his brother and sister cops share this opinion because the motherfucker throws them under the bus every chance he gets. Didn’t back them on Garner, on Gurley, on Bennett. He knows where his votes come from, so he panders to the minority community and he’s done everything but toss Black Lives Matter’s collective salad.

      But now his own ass is in a sling.

      Turns out his administration has done some favors for major political donors. There’s a shocker, Malone thinks. There’s something new in this world, except the allegations claim that the mayor and his people took it a little further—threatening to actively harm potential donors who didn’t contribute, and the New York state investigators pushing the case had an ugly word for it—extortion.

      A lawyer word for “shakedown,” which is an old New York tradition.

      The mob did it for generations—probably still do in the few neighborhoods they still control—forcing shopkeepers and bar owners to make a weekly payment for “protection” against the theft and vandalism that would otherwise come.

      The Job did it, too. Back in the day, every business owner on the block knew he’d better have an envelope ready for the beat cop on Friday, or, failing that, free sandwiches, free coffee, free drinks. From the hookers, free blow jobs, for that matter. In exchange, the cop took care of his block—checked the locks at night, moved the corner boys along.

      The system worked.

      And now Hizzoner is running his own shakedown for campaign funds and he’s come out with an almost comical defense, offering to release a list of big donors that he didn’t do favors for. There’s talk of indictments, and of the 38,000 cops on the Job, about 37,999 have volunteered to show up with the cuffs.

      Hizzoner would fire the commish, except it would look like what it is, so he needs an excuse, and any shit the mayor can throw on the Job, he’s going to shovel with both hands.

      And the commissioner, he’d be winning his fight against the mayor on points going away, if it weren’t for this scandal ripping through One P. So he needs better news, he needs headlines.

      Heroin busts and lower crime rates.

      “The mission of the Manhattan North Special Task Force hasn’t changed,” McGivern is saying. “I don’t care what Sykes tells you, you run the zoo any way you need to. I wouldn’t want to be quoted on that, of course.”

      When Malone first went to McGivern and proposed a task force that would simultaneously address the guns and the violence, he didn’t get as much resistance as he expected.

      Homicide and Narcotics are separate units. Narcotics is its own division, run directly from One Police, and they usually don’t mix. But with almost three-quarters of homicides being drug related, that didn’t make sense, Malone argued. Same with a separate Gangs unit, because most of the drug violence was also gang violence.

      Create a single force, he said, to attack them simultaneously.

      Narcotics, Homicide, and Gangs screamed like stuck pigs. And it was true that elite units have stink on them in the NYPD.

      Mostly because they’ve been prone to corruption and over-the-top violence.

      The old Plainclothes Division back in the ’60s and ’70s gave rise to the Knapp Commission, which damn near destroyed the department. Frank Serpico was a naive asshole, Malone thinks—everyone knew you took money in Plainclothes. He went into the division anyway. He knew what he was getting into.

      Guy had a Jesus complex.

      No wonder that not a single officer in the NYPD donated blood after he was shot. Damn near destroyed the city, too. For twenty years after Knapp, the Job’s priority was fighting corruption instead of crime.

      Then it was the SIU—the Special Investigative Unit—given a free hand to operate at will throughout the city. Made some good busts, too, and made a lot of good money, ripping off dealers. They got caught, of course, and things cleaned up for a while.

      The next elite unit was SCU—the Street Crimes Unit—whose principal task was to get the guns off the street that the Knapp Commission had allowed to get there in the first place. One hundred and thirty-eight