Page 60 of Under Cover
McEnany had met Crosby at the stairwell and given him his cover. He was Rick Young, a six-year veteran of NYPD, Twenty Fourth precinct, tired of the liberal bullshit and wanting to integrate the local police force with his Sons of the Blood brethren. It was a good cover. The Twenty Fourth was one of the older precincts, diverse, beat the hell up, and Crosby knew some of the guys there because the SCTF was stationed in midtown, and they got to know (and piss off) most of the locals. Crosby would remember the assholes and could now deduce which ones were friendly to McEnany’s cause.
McEnany had been thorough. In addition to the job at the Forty Third, “Young” had a furnished flop in the same building as the leader of the local chapter of the Sons of the Blood, a guy named Creedy. The keys to the flop came with the badge, the hiring papers, and the fake IDs.
“What’s my goal?” Crosby’d asked sourly as he’d studied the papers—expertly made, he realized. They might even be the real thing. The badge, the driver’s license, the backstory, even the job that was legit—McEnany had been planning this awhile.
“Your goal is to get in good with the deputy chief of the Active Crimes Division of the Forty Third,” McEnany said, his face set into ugly lines. “Davies. That bitch has turned down more of our guys than I can count. We needsomebodyhigh up in every division, or someone, sometime, is going to get all fucking liberal and fuck up the department.”
Crosby kept his face impassive, but part of him was jumping for joy, and part of him was icy cold. Iliana Davies. Gail’s roommate. Explaining that he was undercover with the Sons would be helpful—and hopefully keep him alive—but he didn’t like that they’d had a connection, or that she was so close to Gail and the other members of the SCTF. If McEnany had done just one more layer of research on Crosby, he’d know that Crosby and Iliana had done the wild thing, and instead of sending Crosby undercover with her, he might have sent Crosby to take her out.
Fuck.Fuck.
With that cold realization in his gut, Crosby didn’t care what the bullshit excuse was—fucking bad guys fucking monologuing. It was fucking twisted how the guys who wanted to blow up the world thought their feelings were so much more important than their victims’. If Crosby hadn’t been aware that roomfuls of enemies were right inside the high-rise he and McEnany huddled next to, he might have reached out and snapped Collie McEnany’s neck with sheer rage. But he kept that part of him controlled. What Crosbyneededto know was why him? And why now?
“What do you get out of this?” Crosby asked bluntly. “You pulled me from my team, and you did it by blackmail, in a way that’s going to arouse suspicion. That’s a helluva lot of risk.”
McEnany glared at him sourly. “God, look who grew a fucking brain and a fucking spine alluvasudden. When you were my fuckin’ boot, I couldn’t get you to commit to full sentences, and now you’re askingstrategy? Which idiot made you think you had it in you?”
Crosby thought miserably of Harding but kept his expression neutral. “What. Do. You. Get?” he asked with no inflection whatsoever.
“I get back in,” McEnany hissed. “You defected. I got nailed with that kid’s shooting and my partner didn’t back me. Suddenly Chicago PD can’t get the stink off fast enough. A friend pulled some strings, and I got this bullshit job as an IA rat—”
“On the federal level—not enough power for you?” Crosby asked. God, he’dlovedworking for the SCTF. It was a tiny, almost invisible federal agency, but it had well-trained, well-briefed people, and he’dlovedit. He’d embraced every class Harding had thrown at them. He hadn’t wanted the promotions, dammit; he’d wanted to be better at his job. It seemed like McEnany could have taken his own lemon and made some rocking lemonade too, but instead he seemed to want to blow up the agency that gave him the better paycheck, the better status, the better everything. Fuckingwhy?
“I’m a fucking Captain,” McEnany snarled. “In the Sons of the Blood, I’m aCaptain. And with the feds I’m arat? Bullshit. But if I want my connections with the Sons to pull me up, to give me some power, I gotta prove I’m not a liability. What better way to do that than to get the guy who jammed me up in the first place to find someone in a new division to pull over to our side? The Forty Third Precinct is clean, my friend. Not a single Son in the ranks, and a lot of that is the new Deputy Chief of Active Crimes. So guess what? I’ve got just enough juice to get someone with a clean record into the ranks. But you’re going to report to me now.”
Crosby tilted his head and decided he was going to make McEnany say it.
“So I want you to spell it out for me,” he growled. “Like I was five. Why am I leaving my team to report to you?”
McEnany’s smile was all yellowing, crooked teeth. “Because if you don’t, I’m gonna have my guys stalk your team, one at a time, until you are just as alone as I was two years ago. You don’t get the good team and the hero’s welcome—not after leaving me out in the cold.”
Crosby let a razor-thin smile escape. “Damir Calvin,” he said deliberately.
McEnany’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“That’s the name of the first corpse you walked over. I thought you’d want to keep a list.”
Those rheumy blue eyes darted a little to the right, and Crosby knew he’d hit a nerve. “There’ll be others,” McEnany said snidely. “Now follow me up. You gotta meet Creedy and the boys. Then you can go to your flat and press your dress blues, flatfoot. You start your new job day after tomorrow.”
The introduction with the guys at Creedy’s flat had been both everything Crosby expected and less.
It was a basic apartment with old, battered plaid furniture, a small kitchenette covered with takeout boxes, a fridge full of beer, and guys on the couch doing lines and playing video games. The guys were all white, some of them thin and raggedy, a few of them buzz cut and stacked—but all of them had either the snarling, hyperaggressive posture or the cringing, obsequious fear of dogs who’d been whipped too much as puppies and now had the devil in them as adults.
Creedy himself was a ruddy-skinned, oddly magnetic man with a square build, dark hair graying at the temples, and an almost perfect rectangle of a face. Like McEnany, his teeth were crooked, and some of the back ones were missing, but his swollen hands and battered knuckles testified to a life working in warehouses, and his sneer told a story about how he thought he was better than that.
The men took McEnany’s intro at face value—which told Crosby he was going to have to watch his back at all times, because these guys were squids and slippery as fuck—and there was lots of bro-hugging and locked hands at the heart level, which Crosby tried not to compare to the easy and authentic camaraderie of the SCTF. He’d hugged every member at one time or another, but not as a ritual, and definitely not when they’d first met.
It made him squidgy.
But that was all on the inside. He kept the itchy, almost automatic dislike for everybody locked away behind his badass face and listened as McEnany helped Jimmy Creedy spin bitterness into spiderwebs, talking about how their friend, Rick Young, was their ticket to getting that bitch cop to let their group into the Brooklyn PD, and their guys could stop, as they put it, “suffering under diversity oppression.”
Which meant that Active Crimes was an equal opportunity shop—everybody could be arrested, and everybody got the same choice of overworked lawyers looking to plead out.
Crosby hid his disgust at the same time he hid a little glow of pride for Iliana. They were never going to be a real forever thing—but God, she had these guys on the run. Good forher. He hoped he’d live long enough to give her the compliment.
The intro session had devolved into the usual—how somebody’s brother’s cousin’s buddy had gotten wronged by the cops—when McEnany’s pocket buzzed.
“Sonovabitch!”
