Don winslow Don winslow - The Force

That’s it.

The guys on Da Force don’t look too much like cops. In fact, Malone thinks as he looks around, they look more like criminals.

The undercovers look like junkies or dope slingers—hoodies, baggy pants or filthy jeans, sneakers. Malone’s personal favorite, a black kid called Babyface, hides under a thick hood and sucks on a big pacifier as he looks up at Sykes, knowing the boss isn’t going to say shit about it because Babyface brings home the bacon.

The plainclothes guys are urban pirates. They still have tin shields—not gold—under their black leather jackets, navy peacoats and down vests. Their jeans are clean but not creased, and they prefer Chelsea boots to tennis shoes.

Except “Cowboy” Bob Bartlett, who wears shitkicker boots with skinny toes, “the better to go up a black ass.” Bartlett’s never been farther west than Jersey City, but he affects a redneck drawl and aggravates the shit out of Malone by playing country-western “music” in the locker room.

The “uniforms” in their bags don’t look like your run-of-the-mill cops either. It ain’t what they wear, it’s in their faces. They’re badasses, with the smirks as pinned on as the badges on their chests. These boys are always ready to go, ready to dance, just for the fuck of it.

Even the women have attitudes. There ain’t many of them on Da Force, but the ones who are take no prisoners. You got Tenelli and then there’s Emma Flynn, a hard-drinking (Irish, go figure) party girl with the sexual voracity of a Roman empress. And they’re all tough, with a healthy hatred in their hearts.

The detectives, though, the gold shields like Malone, Russo, Montague, Torres, Gallina, Ortiz, Tenelli, they’re in a different league altogether, “the best of the best,” decorated veterans with scores of major arrests under their belts.

The Task Force detectives aren’t uniforms or plainclothes or undercovers.

They’re kings.

Their kingdoms aren’t fields and castles but city blocks and project towers. Tony Upper West Side neighborhoods and Harlem projects. They rule Broadway and West End, Amsterdam, Lenox, St. Nicholas and Adam Clayton Powell. Central Park and Riverside where Jamaican nannies push yuppies’ kids in strollers and start-up entrepreneurs jog, and trash-strewn playgrounds where the gangbangers ball and sling dope.

We’d better rule, Malone thinks, with a strong hand, because our subjects are blacks and whites, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, who all hate each other and who, in the absence of kings, would kill each other more than they already do.

We rule over gangs—Crips and Bloods and Trinitarios and Latin Lords. Dominicans Don’t Play, Broad Day Shooters, Gun Clappin’ Goonies, Goons on Deck (seems to be a theme), From Da Zoo, Money Stackin’ High, Mac Baller Brims. Folk Nation, Insane Gangster Crips, Addicted to Cash, Hot Boys, Get Money Boys.

Then there’s the Italians—the Genovese family, the Lucheses, the Gambinos, the Ciminos—all of which would get totally out of control if they didn’t know there were kings out there who would cut off their heads.

We rule Da Force, too. Sykes thinks he does, or at least pretends to think he does, but it’s the detective kings who really call the shots. The undercovers are our spies, the uniforms our foot soldiers, the plainclothes our knights.

And we didn’t become kings because our daddies were—we took our crowns the hard way, like the old warriors who fought their way to the throne with nicked swords and dented armor and wounds and scars. We started on these streets with guns and nightsticks and fists and nerve and guts and brains and balls. We came up through our hard-won street knowledge, our earned respect, our victories and even our defeats. We earned our reps as tough, strong, ruthless and fair rulers, administering rough justice with tempered mercy.

That’s what a king does.

He hands down justice.

Malone knows it’s important they look the part. Subjects expect their kings to look tight, to look sharp, to wear a little money on their backs and their feet, a little style. Take Montague, for instance. Big Monty dresses like an Ivy League professor—tweedy jackets, vests, knit ties—and the trilby with a small red feather in the band. It goes against the stereotype and it’s scary because the skels don’t know what to make of him, and when he gets them in the room, they think they’re being interrogated by a genius.

Which Monty probably is.

Malone has seen him go into Morningside Park where the old black men play chess, contest five boards at a time and win every one of them.

Then give back the money he just took from them.

Which is also genius.

Russo, he’s old school. Sports a long red-brown leather overcoat, a 1980s throwback that he wears well. Then again, Russo wears everything well, he’s a sharp dresser. The retro overcoat, custom-tailored Italian suits, monogrammed shirts, Magli shoes.

A haircut every Friday, a shave twice a day.

Mobster chic, Russo’s ironic comment on the wiseguys he grew up with and never wanted to be. He went the other way with it; as a cop, he likes to joke, he’s the “white sheep of the family.”

Malone always wears black.

His trademark.

All Da Force detectives are kings, but Malone—with no disrespect intended to our Lord and Savior—is the King of Kings.

Manhattan North is the Kingdom of Malone.

Like with any king, his subjects love him and fear him, revere him and loathe him, praise him and revile him. He has his loyalists and rivals, his sycophants and critics, his jesters and advisers, but he has no real friends.

Except his partners.

Russo and Monty.

His brother kings.

He would die for them.

“Malone? If you have a moment for me?”

It’s Sykes.

As I’m sure you know,” Sykes says in his office, “just about everything I said in there was bullshit.”

“Yes, sir,” Malone says. “I was just wondering if you knew it.”

Sykes’s tight smile gets tighter, which Malone didn’t think was possible.

The captain thinks that Malone is arrogant.

Malone doesn’t argue with that.

A cop on these streets, he thinks, you’d better be arrogant. There are people up here, they see you don’t think you’re the shit, they will kill you. They’ll cap you and fuck you in the entry wounds. Let Sykes go out on the streets, let him make the busts, go through the doors.

Sykes doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t like a lot about Detective Sergeant Dennis Malone—his sense of humor, his tat sleeves, his encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop lyrics. He especially doesn’t like Malone’s attitude, which is basically that Manhattan North is his kingdom and his captain is just a tourist.

Fuck him, Malone thinks.

There’s nothing Sykes can do because last July Malone and his team made the largest heroin bust in the history of New York City. They hit Diego Pena, the Dominican kingpin, for fifty kilos, enough to supply a fix for every man, woman and child in the city.

They also seized close to two million in cash.

The suits at One Police Plaza weren’t thrilled that Malone and his team did the whole investigation on their own and didn’t bring anyone else in. Narcotics was furious, DEA was pissed, too. But fuck ’em all, Malone thinks.

The media loved it.

The Daily News and the Post had full-color screaming headlines, every TV station led with it. Even the Times put a story in the Metro section.

So the suits had to grin and bear it.

Posed with the stacks of heroin.

The media also lifted its dress over its head in September when the Task Force made a major raid into the Grant and Manhattanville projects and busted over a hundred gangbangers from the 3Staccs, the Money Avenue Crew and the Make It Happen Boys, the latter of which youth-at-risk capped an eighteen-year-old star woman basketball player in retaliation for one of their own getting shot. She was on her knees in a stairwell begging for her life, pleading for the chance to go to that college where she had a full ride, but she didn’t get it.