The Force. Don Winslow
takes a left and then heads south down Broadway as Nasty Ass shakes the heroin into a spoon, uses a lighter to cook it, then draws it into a syringe.
“That thing clean?” Malone asks.
“As a newborn baby.”
Nasty Ass sticks the needle in his vein and pushes the plunger. His head snaps back and then he sighs.
He’s well again. “Where we goin’?”
“Port Authority,” Malone says. “You’re getting out of town for a while.”
Nasty’s scared. Alarmed. “Why?!”
“It’s for your own good.” Just in case Fat Teddy is pissed enough to track him down and do him.
“I can’t leave town,” Nasty Ass says. “I got no hookups out of town.”
“Well, you’re going.”
“Please don’t make me,” Nasty Ass says. He actually starts crying. “I can’t jones out of town. I’ll die out there.”
“You want to jones at Rikers?” Malone asks. “Because that’s your other choice.”
“Why are you being a dick, Malone?”
“It’s my nature.”
“Never used to was,” Nasty Ass says.
“Yeah, well, this ain’t the used to was.”
“Where should I go?”
“I don’t know. Philly. Baltimore.”
“I got a cousin in Baltimore.”
“Go there, then,” Malone says. He peels out five hundred-dollar bills and hands them to Nasty Ass. “Do not spend all of this on junk. Get the fuck out of New York and stay there awhile.”
“How long I gotta stay?” He looks desperate, really scared. Malone doubts that Nasty Ass has ever been to the East Side, never mind out of town.
“Call me in a week or so and I’ll let you know,” Malone says. He pulls up in front of Port Authority and lets Nasty out. “I see you in New York, I am going to be mad, Nasty Ass.”
“Thought we was friends, Malone.”
“No, we’re not friends,” Malone says. “We’re not going to be friends. You’re my informer. A snitch. That’s all.”
Driving back uptown, Malone leaves the windows open.
Claudette opens the door.
“Merry Christmas, baby,” she says.
Malone loves her voice.
It was her voice, low and soft, even more than her looks, that first drew him to her.
A voice full of promises and reassurance.
You’ll find comfort here.
And pleasure.
In my arms, in my mouth, in my pussy.
He walks in and sits down on her little couch—she has a different word for it he can never remember—and says, “Sorry I’m so late.”
“I just got home myself,” she says.
Even though she’s wearing a white kimono and her perfume smells like heaven, Malone thinks.
She just got home and she got herself ready for me.
Claudette sits on the couch beside him, opens a carved wooden box on the coffee table and takes out a thin joint. She lights it, takes a hit and hands it to him.
Malone sucks down a hit and says, “I thought you were four to twelve.”
“I thought I was, too.”
“Tough shift?” he asks.
“Fights, suicide attempts, ODs,” Claudette says, taking the joint back from him. “Man came in barefoot with a broken wrist, said he knows you.”
An E-room nurse usually on the night or the graveyard shift, so she’s seen it all. She and Malone met when he drove a junkie CI who had accidentally shot half his foot off straight to the hospital.
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” she’d asked him.
“In Harlem?” Malone asked. “He’d have bled out while the EMTs were at Starbucks. Instead he bled all over my interior. I just got the thing detailed, too.”
“You’re a cop.”
“Guilty.”
Now she leans back and stretches her legs across his. The kimono slides up to reveal her thighs. There’s a spot just below her pussy that Malone thinks is the softest place on earth.
“Tonight,” she says, “we had an abandoned crack baby. Left right on the front steps.”
“Wrapped in swaddling clothes?”
“I get the irony, Malone,” she says. “How was your day?”
“Yeah, good.”
Malone likes that she doesn’t press him, that she’s satisfied with what he tells her. A lot of women aren’t, they want him to “share,” they want details he’d rather forget than recount. Claudette gets it—she has her own horrors.
He strokes that soft spot. “You’re tired. You probably want to sleep.”
“No, baby, I want to fuck.”
They finish their drinks and go into her bedroom.
Claudette undresses him, kissing skin as she bares it. She goes to her knees and takes him into her mouth and even in the dark bedroom, with light coming in only from the street, he loves the look of her full red lips on his cock.
She’s not high tonight, it’s just the weed, although it’s very good weed, and he loves that, too. He reaches down and feels her hair, then slides his hand down into the kimono and feels her breast, teases it and feels her moan.
Malone puts his hands on her shoulders to stop her. “I want to be in you.”
She gets up, goes to the bed and lies down. Draws her knees up like an invitation and then issues one. “Come here, then, baby.”
She’s wet and warm.
He slides back and forth across her body, across the full breasts and the dark brown skin and reaches down with a finger to feel that soft spot as outside sirens blare and people shout and he doesn’t care, doesn’t have to care right now, only has to slide in and out of her and hear her say, “I love that, baby, I love that.”
When he feels himself about to come, he grabs her ass—Claudette says she has no ass for a black girl—but he grabs her small tight ass and pulls her close and pushes himself as deep in her as he can go until he feels that little pocket in her and she grabs his shoulder and she bucks up and comes just before he does.
He comes like he always does with her, from the tips of his toes through the top of his head, and maybe that’s the dope but he thinks it’s her, with that low soft voice and warm brown skin, slick and sweaty now, mixing with his, and maybe it’s a minute or maybe it’s an hour when he hears her say, “Oh, baby, I’m tired.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He rolls off her.
She sleepily squeezes his hand and then she’s out.
He lies on his back. Across the street the liquor store owner must have forgotten to turn off his lights, and their reflection blinks red on Claudette’s ceiling.
It’s Christmas in the jungle and for this short time, at least, Malone is at peace.