The Force. Don Winslow

shakes his head. “The other shit. I mean, how much more do we need to earn?”

      “I have three kids,” Russo says. “You have two, Monty three. All smart. You know what college costs these days? They’re worse than the Gambinos, they get their hooks in you. I don’t know about you, I need to keep earning.”

      So do you, Malone tells himself.

      You need the money, the cash flow, but it’s more than that, admit it. You love the game. The thrill, the taking off the bad guys, even the danger, the idea that you might get caught.

      You’re a sick bastard.

      “Maybe it’s time we moved the Pena smack,” Russo is saying.

      “What, you need money?”

      “No, I’m good,” Russo says. “It’s just that, you know, things have cooled down, it’s just sitting there not earning. That’s retirement money, Denny. That’s ‘fuck you I’m out of here’ money. Survival money, anything should happen.”

      “You expecting something to happen, Phil?” Malone asks. “You know something I don’t?”

      “No.”

      “It’s a big step,” Malone says. “We took money before, we never dealt.”

      “Then why did we take it if we weren’t going to sell it?”

      “It makes us dope slingers,” Malone says. “We been fighting these guys our whole careers, now we’ll be just like them.”

      “If we’d turned it all in,” Russo says, “someone else would have taken it.”

      “I know.”

      “Why not us?” Russo asks. “Why does everyone else get rich? The wiseguys, the dope dealers, the politicians? Why not us for a change? When is it our turn?”

      “I hear you,” Malone says.

      They sit quietly and drink.

      “Something else bothering you?” Russo asks him.

      “I dunno,” Malone says. “Maybe it’s just Christmas, you know?”

      “You going over there?” Russo asks.

      “In the morning, open presents.”

      “Well, that’ll be good.”

      “Yeah, that’ll be good,” Malone says.

      “Swing by the house, you get a chance,” Russo says. “Donna’s going full guinea—macaroni with gravy, the baccalata, then the turkey.”

      “Thanks, I’ll try.”

      Malone drives up to Manhattan North, asks the desk sergeant, “Fat Teddy get on the bus yet?”

      “It’s Christmas Eve, Malone,” the sergeant says. “Things are backed up.”

      Malone goes down to the holding cells where Teddy sits on a bench. If there’s any place more depressing on Christmas Eve than a holding cell, Malone doesn’t know about it. Fat Teddy looks up when he sees Malone. “You gotta do something for me, bruvah.”

      “What are you going to do for me?”

      “Like what?”

      “Tell me who’s on Carter’s pad.”

      Teddy laughs. “Like you don’t know.”

      “Torres?”

      “I ain’t know nothin’.”

      There it is, Malone thinks. Fat Teddy is scared to rat on a cop.

      “Okay,” Malone says. “Teddy, you’re not an idiot, you only play one on the street. You know with two convictions on your sheet, the gun alone, you’re going to do five. We trace it back to some straw purchase in Gooberville, the judge is going to be pissed, could throw you a double. Ten years, that’s a long time, but look, I’ll come visit, bring you ribs from Sweet Mama’s.”

      “Don’t be clowning me, Malone.”

      “Dead-ass serious,” Malone says. “What if I could get you a walk?”

      “What if you had a dick ’stead of what you got?”

      “You’re the one wanted to be serious, Teddy,” Malone says. “If you don’t …”

      “What you want?”

      Malone says, “I’m hearing that Carter has been negotiating for some serious weaponry. What I want to know is, who is he negotiating with.”

      “You think I’m stupid?”

      “Not at all.”

      “No, you must, Malone,” Teddy says, “because if I get a walk and you bust them guns, Carter he puts that together and I end up facedown.”

      “You think I’m stupid, Teddy? I work out the walk so it looks like business as usual.”

      Fat Teddy hesitates.

      “Fuck you,” Malone says. “I have a beautiful woman waiting, I’m sitting here with an ugly fat guy.”

      “His name is Mantell.”

      “Whose name is Mantell?”

      “Cracker runs guns for the ECMF.”

      Malone knows the East Coast Motherfuckers are a motorcycle club deep in weed and weapons. Affiliate charters in Georgia and the Carolinas. But they’re racist, white supremacists. “ECMF would do business with black?”

      “I guess black money spend the same.” Fat Teddy shrugs. “And they don’t mind helping black kill black.”

      What Malone is more surprised about is Carter doing business with white. He has to be desperate. “What can the bikers offer him?”

      “AKs, ARs, MAC-10s, you name it,” Teddy says. “S’all I know, son.”

      “Carter didn’t get you a lawyer?”

      “Can’t get hold of Carter,” Teddy says. “He in the Bahamas.”

      “Call this guy,” Malone says, handing him a card. “Mark Piccone. He’ll get it squared away for you.”

      Teddy takes the card.

      Malone gets up. “We’re doing something wrong, aren’t we, Teddy? You and me freezing our asses off, Carter sipping piña coladas on the beach?”

      “Trill.”

      Trill.

      True and real.

      Malone cruises in his unmarked work car.

      There’s only so many places the snitch can be. Nasty prefers the area just north of Columbia but below 125th Street and Malone finds him skulking along the east side of Broadway, doing the junkie bop.

      Pulling over, Malone rolls down the passenger window and says, “In.”

      Nasty Ass looks around nervously and then gets in. He’s a little surprised, because normally Malone don’t let him in his car because he says he stinks, although Nasty don’t smell it.

      He’s jonesing hard.

      Nose running, hands trembling as he hugs himself and rocks back and forth. And Nasty tells him, “I’m hurtin’. Can’t find no one. You gotta help me, man.”

      His thin face is drawn, his brown skin sallow. His two upper front teeth stick out like a squirrel’s in a bad cartoon, and if it weren’t for his smell, he’d be called Nasty Mouth.

      Now the man is sick. “Please, Malone.”

      Malone reaches under the dash to a metal box attached with a magnet. He opens the box and hands Nasty an envelope, enough to fix and get well.