The Force. Don Winslow

ripping open the presents under the tree.

      He doesn’t wake Claudette when he gets up.

      He gets dressed, goes into the little galley kitchen, makes himself an instant coffee and then goes to his jacket and takes out the present he got her.

      Diamond earrings from Tiffany’s.

      Because she’s crazy about that Audrey Hepburn movie.

      Malone leaves the box on the coffee table and goes out. He knows she’ll sleep until noon and then make it to her sister’s for Christmas dinner.

      “Then I’ll probably hit a meeting at St. Mary’s,” she said.

      “They have them on Christmas?” Malone asked.

      “Especially on Christmas.”

      She’s doing well, she’s been clean for almost six months now. Hard for an addict working in a hospital around all those drugs.

      Now he drives down to his pad, on 104th between Broadway and West End.

      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