Don winslow Don winslow - The Force

They left her on the landing, her blood dripping down the steps like a little crimson waterfall.

The papers were full of pictures of Malone and his team and the rest of the Task Force hauling her killers out of the projects and toward life without parole in Attica, known in the street as the Terror Dome.

So my team, Malone thinks, brings in three-quarters of the quality arrests in “your command”—serious arrests with serious weight that result in convictions with serious time. It doesn’t show up in your numbers, but you know goddamn well that my team has made assists in just about every drug-related homicide arrest—resulting in conviction—not to mention muggings, burglaries, robberies, domestic assaults and rapes committed by junkies and dealers.

I’ve taken more real bad guys off the street than cancer, and it’s my team that keeps the lid on this shithole, keeps it from exploding, and you know it.

So even though you’re threatened by me, even though you know it’s really me and not you that runs the Task Force, you ain’t gonna reassign me because you need me to make you look good.

And you know that, too.

You may not like your best player, but you don’t trade him. He puts points on the board.

Sykes can’t touch him.

Now the captain says, “That was a dog-and-pony show to satisfy the suits. Heroin makes headlines, we have to respond.”

The fact is that heroin use in the black community is down, not up, Malone knows. The retail sale of heroin by black gangs is down, not up; in fact, the young bangers are diversifying into cell-phone theft and cybercrime—identity theft and credit card fraud.

Any cop in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan North knows that the violence isn’t around heroin, it’s about weed. The corner boys are fighting over who gets to sell peaceful marijuana, and where they get to sell it.

“If we can take down the heroin mills,” Sykes says, “by all means, let’s take them down. But what I really care about is the guns. What I really care about is stopping these young idiots from killing themselves and other people on my streets.”

Guns and dope are the soup and sandwich of American crime. As much as the Job is obsessed with heroin, it’s more obsessed with getting guns off the streets. And for good reason—it’s the cops who have to deal with the murders, the wounded, cops who have to tell the families, work with them, try to get them some justice.

And, of course, it’s guns on the street that kill cops.

The NRA assholes will tell you that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Yeah, Malone thinks, people with guns.

Sure, you have stabbings, you have fatal beatings, but without guns the homicide figures would be negligible. And most of the congressional whores who go to their NRA meeting smelling nice and wearing something frilly have never seen a gunshot homicide or even a person who’s been shot.

Cops have. Cops do.

It ain’t pretty. It don’t look or sound (or smell) anything like in the movies. These asshats who think that the answer is to arm everyone so they could, for instance, shoot it out in a dark theater have never had a gun pointed at them and would shit themselves if they did.

They say it’s all about the Second Amendment and individual rights but what it’s about is the money. The gun manufacturers, who make up the vast bulk of the NRA’s funding, want to sell guns and make their cash.

End of motherfucking story.

New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country but that doesn’t make any difference because all the guns come in from the outside, up the “Iron Pipeline.” Dealers make straw purchases in states with weak gun laws—Texas, Arizona, Alabama, the Carolinas—and then bring them up I-95 to the cities of the Northeast and New England.

The goobers love to talk about crime in the big cities, Malone thinks, but either don’t know or don’t care that the guns come from their states.

To date, at least four New York cops have been killed with guns that came up the Iron Pipeline.

Not to mention the corner boys and the bystanders.

The mayor’s office, the department, everyone is desperate to get guns off the streets. The Job is even buying them back—a no-questions-asked cash-and-gift-card offer: you bring in your guns, we smile at you and give you $200 bank cards for handguns and assault rifles and $25 for rifles, shotguns and BB guns.

The last buyback, at the church over on 129th and Adam Clayton Powell, netted forty-eight revolvers, seventeen semiautomatic pistols, three rifles, a shotgun and an AR-15.

Malone has no problem with it. Guns off the streets are guns off the streets, and guns off the streets help a cop achieve job number one—go home at end of shift. One of the old hairbags taught him that when he first came on the Job—your first job is to go home at end of shift.

Now Sykes asks, “Where are we with DeVon Carter?”

DeVon Carter is the drug lord of Manhattan North, a.k.a. the Soul Survivor, the latest in a line of Harlem kingpins that came down from Bumpy Johnson, Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.

He makes most of his money through the heroin mills that are really distribution centers, shipping to New England, the small towns up the Hudson, or down to Philly, Baltimore and Washington.

Think Amazon for smack.

He’s smart, he’s strategic and he’s insulated himself from the day-to-day operations. He never goes near the drugs or the sales, and all his communications are filtered through a handful of subordinates who go talk to him personally, never over the phone, text or e-mail.

Da Force hasn’t been able to get a CI inside Carter’s operation because the Soul Survivor only lets old friends and close family into his inner circle. And if they get busted, they choose doing the time over flipping on him, because doing the time means they’re still alive.

It’s frustrating—the Task Force could bust as many street-level dealers as they want. The undercovers do numerous buy-and-bust ops, but it’s a revolving door, a few gangbangers go to Rikers and there are others in line to take their place slinging the dope.

But so far, Carter has been untouchable.

“We have CIs out on the street,” Malone says, “sometime we get a twenty on him, but so what? Without a wiretap, we’re fucked.”

Carter owns or has pieces of a dozen clubs, bodegas, apartment buildings, boats and God knows what else and he spreads his meetings out. If they could get a wire into one of those places, they might get enough to move on him.

It’s the classic vicious circle. Without probable cause, you can’t get a warrant, but without the warrant, you can’t get probable cause.

Malone doesn’t bother saying this. Sykes already knows.

“Intel,” Sykes says, “indicates that Carter is negotiating a major firearms purchase. Serious weapons—assault rifles, automatic pistols, even rocket launchers.”

“Where are you getting this?”

“Despite your opinion,” Sykes says, “you’re not the only one who does police work out of this building. If Carter is looking for that kind of weaponry, it means he’s going to war against the Dominicans.”

“I agree.”

“Good,” Sykes says. “I don’t want that war fought on my turf. I don’t want to see that level of bloodshed. I want that shipment stopped.”

Yeah, Malone thinks, you want it stopped, but you want it stopped your way—“no cowboy bullshit, no illegal wires, no booming, no dropping your own dime.” He’s heard the whole speech before.

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” Sykes says. “In the Marcy projects.”

Malone knows the story—it’s been in the papers, paraded on the Job’s website: “From the projects to the precinct—black officer fights his way from the gangs to the upper echelon of the NYPD.” How Sykes turned his life around, got a scholarship to Brown, came home to “make a difference.”