The Force

by Don Winslow

At least, at last, tell yourself the truth. You know exactly how you got here. Step by motherfucking step. Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.

All he’s seen, Malone isn’t a big fan of God and figures the feeling is mutual.

Then there are the dead gods—the old Lenox Lounge, with its iconic neon sign, red front and all that history. Billie Holiday used to sing there, Miles Davis and John Coltrane played their horns, and it was a hang for James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. It’s closed now—the window covered with brown paper, the sign dark—but there’s talk about opening it again. Malone doubts it. Dead gods don’t rise again except in fairy tales.

There are the gods of place and the gods of commerce, and if you have to bet who’s going to win out, put your money on money every time.

Always crazy in New York, Malone thinks. If it ain’t Christmas Crazy, it’s New Year’s Eve Crazy (drunks), or Valentine’s Day Crazy (domestic disputes skyrocket and the gays get into bar fights), St. Paddy’s Crazy (drunk cops), Fourth of July Crazy, Labor Day Crazy. What we need is a holiday from the holidays. Just take a year off from any of them, see how it works out. It probably wouldn’t, he thinks. Because you still got Everyday Crazy—Drunk Crazy, Junkie Crazy, Crack Crazy, Meth Crazy, Love Crazy, Hate Crazy and, Malone’s personal favorite, plain old Crazy Crazy.

“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.

City blocks are memories. They have lives and they have deaths.

The cops feel for the vics and hate the perps, but they can’t feel too much or they can’t do their jobs and they can’t hate too much or they’ll become the perps. So they develop a shell, a “we hate everybody” attitude force field around themselves that everyone can feel from ten feet away. You gotta have it, Malone knows, or this job kills you, physically or psychologically. Or both.

the Times says there’s a “heroin epidemic,” Malone thinks. Which is only an epidemic, of course, because now white people are dying.

You want to look good? Violent crime is down. You need more funding? It’s up. You need arrests? Send your people out to make a bunch of bullshit busts that will never get convictions. You don’t care—convictions are the DA’s problem—you just want the arrest numbers. You want to prove drugs are down in your sector? Send your guys on “search and avoid” missions where there aren’t any drugs. That’s half the scam. The other way to manipulate the numbers is to let officers know they should downgrade charges from felonies to misdemeanors. So you call a straight-up robbery a “petit larceny,” a burglary becomes “lost property,” a rape a “sexual assault.” Boom—crime is down. Moneyball.

The suits at One Police can say as much as they want that there are no quotas, but every guy on the Job knows there are. Back in the “broken windows” days, they were writing summonses for everything—loitering, littering, jumping a subway stile, double-parking. The theory was if you didn’t come down on the small stuff, people would figure it was okay to do the big stuff. So they were out there writing a lot of bullshit C-summonses, which forced a lot of poor people to take time off work they couldn’t afford to go to court to pay fines they couldn’t pay. Some just skipped their court days and got “no-show” warrants, so their misdemeanors escalated to felonies and they were looking at jail time for tossing a gum wrapper on the sidewalk. It provoked a lot of anger toward the police.

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

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.