The Force. Don Winslow

laughed at him. “Do you have a private pool I don’t know about?”

      He walks west on 136th out to Seventh Avenue, a.k.a. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, past the Christian Science Church, United Fried Chicken and Café 22, where Claudette doesn’t like to eat because she’s afraid she’ll get fat and he doesn’t like to eat because he’s afraid they’ll spit in his food. Across the street is Judi’s, the little bar where he and Claudette will get a quiet drink on the odd occasions their downtimes coincide. Then he crosses ACP at 135th and walks past the Thurgood Marshall Academy and an IHOP where Small’s Paradise used to be down in the basement.

      Claudette, who knows about these things, told Malone that Billie Holiday had her first audition there and that Malcolm X was a waiter there during World War II. Malone was more interested that Wilt Chamberlain owned the place for a while.

      City blocks are memories.

      They have lives and they have deaths.

      Malone was still wearing the bag, riding a sector car, when a mook raped a little Haitian girl on this block back in the day. This was the fourth girl this animal had done, and every cop in the Three-Two was looking for him.

      The Haitians got there before the cops did, found the perp still on the rooftop and tossed him off into the back alley.

      Malone and his then partner caught the call and walked into the alley where Rocky the Non-Flying Squirrel was lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, with most of the bones in his body broken because nine floors is a long way to fall.

      “That’s the man,” one of the local women told Malone at the edge of the alley. “The man who raped those little girls.”

      The EMTs knew what was what, and one of them asked, “He dead yet?”

      Malone shook his head and the EMTs lit up cigarettes and leaned on the ambulance smoking for a good ten minutes until they went in with a stretcher and came back out with the word to call the medical examiner.

      The ME pronounced the cause of death as “massive blunt trauma with catastrophic and fatal bleeding,” and the Homicide guys who showed up accepted Malone’s account that the guy had jumped out of guilt over what he’d done.

      The detectives wrote it off as a suicide, Malone got a lot of stroke from the Haitian community, and most important, no little girls had to testify in court with their rapist sitting there staring at them and some dirtbag defense attorney trying to make them look like liars.

      It was a good result but shit, he thinks, we did that today we’d go to jail, we got caught.

      He keeps walking south, past St. Nick’s.

      A.k.a. “The Nickel.”

      The St. Nicholas Houses, a baker’s dozen of fourteen-story buildings straddled by Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass Boulevards from 127th to 131st, make up a good part of Malone’s working life.

      Yeah, Harlem has changed, Harlem has gentrified, but the projects are still the projects. They sit like desert islands in a sea of new prosperity and what makes the projects is what’s always made the projects—poverty, unemployment, drug slinging and gangs. Mostly good people inhabit St. Nick’s, Malone believes, trying to live their lives, raise their kids against tough odds, do their day-to-day, but you also have the hard-core thugs and the gangs.

      Two gangs dominate action in St. Nick’s—the Get Money Boys and Black Spades. GMB has the north projects, the Spades the south, and they live in an uneasy peace enforced by DeVon Carter, who controls most of the drug trafficking in West Harlem.

      The border between the gangs is 129th Street, and Malone walks past the basketball courts on the south side of the street.

      The gang boys aren’t out there today, it’s too freakin’ cold.

      He goes out Frederick Douglass past the Harlem Bar-B-Q and Greater Zion Hill Baptist. It was just down the street where he got the rep as both a “hero cop” and a “racist cop,” neither of which tag is true, Malone thinks.

      It was what, six years ago now, he was working plainclothes out of the Three-Three and was having lunch at Manna’s when he heard screaming outside. He went out the door and saw people pointing at a deli across the street and down the block.

      Malone called in a 10-61, pulled his weapon and went into the deli.

      The robber grabbed a little girl and held a gun to her head.

      The girl’s mother was screaming.

      “Drop your gun,” the robber yelled at Malone, “or I’ll kill her! I will!”

      He was black, junkie-sick, out of his fucking mind.

      Malone kept his gun aimed at him and said, “The fuck do I care you kill her? Just another nigger baby to me.”

      When the guy blinked, Malone put one through his head.

      The mother ran forward and grabbed her little girl. Held her tight against her chest.

      It was the first guy Malone ever killed.

      A clean shooting, no trouble with the shooting board, although Malone had to ride a desk until it was cleared and had to go see the departmental shrink to find out if he had PTSD or something, which it turned out he didn’t.

      Only trouble was, the store clerk got the whole thing on his cell-phone camera and the Daily News ran with the headline JUST ANOTHER N****R BABY TO ME with a photo of Malone with the log line “Hero Cop a Racist.”

      Malone got called into a meeting with his then captain, IAB and a PR flack from One Police, who asked, “‘Nigger baby’?”

      “I had to be sure he believed me.”

      “You couldn’t have chosen different words?” the flack asked.

      “I didn’t have a speechwriter with me,” Malone said.

      “We’d like to put you up for a Medal of Valor,” said his captain, “but …”

      “I wasn’t going to put in for one.”

      To his credit, the IAB guy said, “May I point out that Sergeant Malone saved an African American life?”

      “What if he’d missed?” the PR flack asked.

      “I didn’t,” Malone said.

      Truth was, though, he’d thought the same thing. Didn’t tell it to the shrink, but he had nightmares about missing the skel and hitting the little girl.

      Still does.

      Shit, he even has nightmares about hitting the skel.

      The clip ran on YouTube and a local rap group cut a song called “Just Another Nigger Baby,” which got a few hundred thousand hits. But on the plus side, the little girl’s mother came to the house with a pan of her special jalapeño cornbread and a handwritten thank-you card and sought Malone out.

      He still has the card.

      Now he crosses St. Nicholas and Convent and walks down 127th until it merges where 126th takes a northwest angle. He crosses Amsterdam and walks past Amsterdam Liquor Mart, which knows him well, Antioch Baptist Church, which doesn’t, past St. Mary’s Center and the Two-Six House and into the old building that now houses the Manhattan North Special Task Force.

      Or, as it’s known on the street, “Da Force.”

       CHAPTER 2

      The Manhattan North Special Task Force was half Malone’s idea to begin with.

      A lot of bureaucratic verbiage describes their mission, but Malone and every other cop on Da Force know exactly what their “special task” is—

      Hold