The Force. Don Winslow

then there was the fictional competition between them about who could steal more—a firefighter on a domestic blaze or a cop on a burglary call.

      Malone loved his little brother, looked after him all those nights the old man wasn’t home, and they watched the Rangers together on Channel 11. The night the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994 was one of the happiest nights in Malone’s life. Him and Liam in front of the TV set, on their knees the last minute of the game when the Rangers were holding on to a one-goal lead by their fingernails and Craig MacTavish—God bless Craig MacTavish—kept getting the puck down deep in the Canucks’ zone and time finally ran out and the Rangers won the series 4–3 and Denny and Liam hugged each other and jumped up and down.

      And then Liam was gone, just like that, and it was Malone who had to go tell their mother. She was never the same after that and died just a year later. The doctors said it was cancer but Malone knew she was another victim of 9/11.

      Now he clips his holster with the regulation Sig Sauer onto his belt.

      A lot of cops like the shoulder holster but Malone thinks it’s just an extra move to get your hand up there and he prefers his weapon where his hand already is. He clips his off-duty Beretta to the back of his waistband, where it nestles into the small of his back. The SOG knife goes into his right boot. It’s against regs and illegal as shit, but Malone doesn’t care. He could be in a situation some skels take his guns and then what’s he supposed to pull, his dick? He ain’t going down like a bitch, he’s going out slashing and stabbing.

      And anyway, who’s going to bust him?

      A lot of people, you dumb donkey, he tells himself. These days, every cop’s got a bull’s-eye on his back.

      Tough times for the NYPD.

      First, there’s the Michael Bennett shooting.

      Michael Bennett was a fourteen-year-old black kid who was shot to death by an Anti-Crime cop in Brownsville. The classic case: nighttime, he looked hinky, the cop—a newbie named Hayes—told him to stop and he didn’t. Bennett turned, reached into his waistband and pulled out what Hayes thought was a gun.

      The newbie emptied his weapon into the kid.

      Turned out it wasn’t a gun, it was a cell phone.

      The community, of course, was “outraged.” Protests teetered on the edge of riots, the usual celebrity ministers, lawyers and social activists performed for the cameras, the city promised a complete investigation. Hayes was placed on administrative leave pending the result of the investigation, and the hostile relationship between blacks and the police got even worse than it already was.

      The investigation is still “ongoing.”

      And it came behind the whole Ferguson thing, and Cleveland and Chicago, Freddie Gray down in Baltimore. Then there was Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Minnesota, on and on.

      Not that the NYPD didn’t have its own cops killing unarmed black men—Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, George Tillman, Akai Gurley, David Felix, Eric Garner, Delrawn Small … And now this rookie had to go and shoot young Michael Bennett.

      So you got Black Lives Matter up your ass, every citizen a journalist with a cell-phone camera at the ready, and you go to work each day with the whole world thinking you’re a murdering racist.

      Okay, maybe not everybody, Malone admits, but it’s definitely different now.

      People look at you different.

      Or shoot at you.

      Five cops gunned down by a sniper in Dallas. Two cops in Las Vegas shot to death as they sat at a restaurant eating lunch. Forty-nine officers murdered in the United States in the past year. One of them, Paul Tuozzolo, in the NYPD, and the year before the Job lost Randy Holder and Brian Moore. There have been too many over the years. Malone knows the stats: 325 gunned down, 21 stabbed, 32 beaten to death, 21 deliberately run over by cars, 8 blown up in explosions, and none of that counts the guys dying from the shit they sucked down on 9/11.

      So yeah, Malone carries something extra, and yeah, he thinks, there’d be any number of people ready to string you up, they found you with illegal weapons, not the least of which would be the cop-hating CCRB, which Phil Russo insists stands for “Cunts, Cocksuckers, Rats and Ballbusters,” but is actually the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the mayor’s chosen stick for beating up on his police force when he needs to deflect attention from his own scandals.

      So the CCRB would hang you, Malone thinks, IAB—the goddamn Internal Affairs Bureau—would sure as shit hang you, even your own boss would cheerfully put a noose around your neck.

      Now Malone sucks it up to call Sheila. What he doesn’t want is a fight, what he doesn’t want is the question, Where are you calling from? But that’s what he gets when his estranged wife answers the phone. “Where are you calling from?”

      “The city,” Malone says.

      To every Staten Islander, Manhattan is and will always be “the city.” He doesn’t get more specific than that, and fortunately she doesn’t press him on it. Instead she says, “This better not be a call telling me you can’t make it tomorrow. The kids will be—”

      “No, I’m coming.”

      “For presents?”

      “I’ll get there early,” Malone says. “What’s a good time?”

      “Seven thirty, eight.”

      “Okay.”

      “You on a midnight?” she asks, a tinge of suspicion in her tone.

      “Yeah,” Malone says. Malone’s team is on the graveyard, but it’s a technicality—they work when they decide to work, which is when the cases tell them to. Drug dealers work regular shifts so their customers know when and where to find them, but drug traffickers work their own hours. “And it isn’t what you think.”

      “What do I think?” Sheila knows that every cop with an IQ over 10 and a rank over rookie can get Christmas Eve off if he wants, and a midnight tour is usually just an excuse to get drunk with your buddies or bang some whore, or both.

      “Don’t get it twisted, we’re working on something,” Malone says, “might break tonight.”

      “Sure.”

      Sarcastic, like. The hell she thinks pays for the presents, the kids’ braces, her spa days, her girls’ nights out? Every guy on the Job relies on overtime to pay the bills, maybe even get a little ahead. The wives, even the ones you’re separated from, gotta understand. You’re out there busting your hump, all the time.

      “You spending Christmas Eve with her?” Sheila asks.

      So close, Malone thinks, to getting away. And Sheila pronounces it “huh.” You spending Christmas Eve with huh?

      “She’s working,” Malone says, dodging the question like a skel. “So am I.”

      “You’re always working, Denny.”

      Ain’t that the large truth, Malone thinks, taking that as a good-bye and clicking off. They’ll put it on my freakin’ headstone: Denny Malone, he was always working. Fuck it—you work, you die, you try to have a life somewhere in there.

      But mostly you work.

      A lot of guys, they come on the Job to do their twenty, pull the pin, get their pension. Malone, he’s on the Job because he loves the job.

      Be honest, he tells himself as he walks out of the apartment. You had to do it all over again you wouldn’t be nothin’ but a New York City police detective.

      The best job in the whole freakin’ world.

      Malone pulls on a black wool beanie because it’s cold out there, locks up the apartment and goes down the stairs onto 136th. Claudette picked the place because it’s a short walk to her work, and near the Hansborough Rec Center, which has an indoor pool where she