Note: this first installment is going out to all subscribers.
Summer 1981, the East Village. A hardened local cop. Two reckless outsiders. When an armored car heist goes bad on Avenue C, all three find themselves running through the same crumbling streets - each chasing a different version of escape.
1
New York City, 1981
NYPD officer John Angelo, known as “Animal,” takes the Kevlar vest handed to him and falls into line. Fifty cops stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the predawn outside Emmanuel Presbyterian, a single-file stack of bodies ready to move on Pueblo Tower, the infamous squat at 751 East Sixth Street, just west of Jacob Riis, the four superblocks of public housing. John got the call at eleven the night before. Off the books, after hours, cops sick of the shit. If this goes well, Mayor Koch will be on WNBC by mid-morning, praising the department’s initiative. If not, they’ll spin some other way. The thin blue line holds regardless.
The cops murmur in low tones as instructions snake down the line, followed by a paper bag. No badges. Badges and name tags go in the bag. Don’t worry about calling any paddy wagons. No 10-52’s. We’re not here to make arrests. We’re here to clear the squat. To send a message. We’re here to flex.
Animal’s not in uniform. None of them are. He keeps his badge in his pocket, not trusting the bag. He had the presence of mind to grab his NYPD windbreaker on the way out the door, and now he pulls it on over the vest.
Animal’s born and bred on the Lower East Side, hardened by tenement housing, the underfunded public school system, and summers spent on the streets. He has a permanent farmer’s tan and a New York accent that’ll blow your hair back.
The paper bag moves down the line, and then the amphetamines follow. They bomb the speed, swallowing wads of powder in one go, rubbing the residue into their gums. The energy shifts—sharp, feral. Blood hangs in the air. Like dogs straining at leashes. Animal grips and regrips his baton, switching hands, his vision hyper-focused, crystal clear. He feels heightened. Immortal. He feels like Animal, the nickname given to him after an operation not too different from this one.
There’s no command to go, but the line moves anyway, a quick shuffle through the pre-dawn darkness. As they near Pueblo Tower, he hears the crack of the battering ram splintering the front door, the sound echoing off the Riis towers like a gunshot. Lights come on in windows. Shouts rain down from above. A few moments later firecrackers start popping. Signals.
Animal trips on the front steps of Pueblo and goes down hard. Something pops in his wrist, but he feels no pain. The cop behind him grabs him by the vest, yanks him upright, and shoves him forward into the lobby. It’s pitch black. Chunks of masonry rain down the stairwell, bouncing off the banisters unpredictably.
Pueblo is an eight-unit apartment building the city seized the year before after the owner bailed on his taxes. Part of the roof is caving in. No running water, no power, no gas. Dozens of squats like it litter the neighborhood—fortified dens of lowlifes, punks, junkies, whores, crazies, and the true down-and-outs. Each one hardened against raids like this.
Animal sprints up the stairs, hugging the wall to avoid the falling bricks. The second-floor hallway is blocked by a tangle of razor wire, so he pushes up to the third. Cops ahead of him are already kicking down plywood barricades. Animal is the first one inside.
A shirtless man swings a shovel at him, the blade leveled at his chest. Animal steps inside the swing and drives his elbow into the man’s cheekbone, dropping him where he stands. A young woman further back hurls a beer bottle at him. It shatters near his head. He body-checks her into the wall. She crumples, vomiting in the corner.
All the doors in the squat have been removed, replaced with sheets hanging like curtains to foster a sense of shared space, of community. It makes Animal’s job easier. He clears two more apartments before hitting serious resistance.
A jet of flame stabs out at him, catching him full in the face. He smells burning hair immediately, turns away, eyes screwed shut, navigating by instinct to the nearest sink. He splashes cold water on his burned face, still acutely aware of the figure behind him—man or woman—with the lighter and aerosol can, trying to set him on fire. Just hosing it back and forth. He screams for help. His back grows hot, the polyester windbreaker melting. His eyes feel like they’ve been stabbed with pins. He’s wedged too tight in the bathroom to turn around, so he rounds his back and lets the vest take the worst of it.
More cops pour in behind him, and the fire cuts out. He hears voices—cop voices. Fists and boots. Screams and begging. Someone shoves a plastic bottle into his hand.
“Pour it in your eyes, Animal,” a cop says. He tilts his head back, feels a thick fluid run over his face. “Milk of magnesia. All I could find. Should stop the burning.” It helps, enough for Animal to open his eyes, to look around.
Five cops stand over the body of a teenager, moaning and bleeding on the floor.
“He fucked you up, Animal. You should see yourself.” Animal doesn’t want to look. He knows what they’re doing—trying to amp him up, giving him his cue. They’re going to stand here and let him murder this kid. No arrests, send a message, like a mantra.
Footfalls pound on the floor above. Screams. Things break. Somewhere, it sounds like a bathtub is being filled, the pipes screeching. Smoke fills the air. His face feels fragile, brittle, like onion skin.
Someone presses his baton back into his hand.
“We’ll leave you to it, Animal.” The cops back away, rummaging through the makeshift abodes, looking for drugs or cash but keeping one eye on him.
Animal knows what’s expected of him.
Outside, the street erupts. Yelling. Shouts of “Pig!” Rocks and bottles rain against the building. Car horns blare. The neighborhood is waking up, wising up. Animal figures they’re ten minutes away from a full-blown riot if they don’t get the hell out.
He grips the baton and looks down at the semi-conscious kid on the floor.
His fellow cops are gone. A couple of pops ring out—gunfire. A window shatters.
He’s NYPD. He’s here. He has his role to play.
He raises the baton and brings it down. Once. Twice.
The kid on the floor suddenly starts to slide away, like someone’s pulling him on strings. At first, Animal thinks it’s his fucked-up eyes playing tricks, but then he starts sliding too. He drops the baton, grabs at a door jamb. The sound of a subway train roars in his ears. The floor tilts steeply, and he’s falling—two full stories collapsing on top of him.
He remembers his badge in the front pocket of his jeans. He tries to take it out, to throw it away, to get it off his person. But there’s no time. No way.
Well, shit, he thinks.
2
Six months later
“John, are you still with me?” Dr. Mackenzie sits across from Animal, relaxed in a comfortable chair, notebook balanced on her lap. He’s on one of those low-backed sofas that doesn’t let him lean back properly. So he perches, tense.
Dr. Mackenzie. Dr. Gloria Mackenzie, head shrink for the NYPD. She looks Colombian to him, maybe Puerto Rican, but not with a name like Mackenzie. Unless she married an Irish guy, but she’s not wearing a ring. He looked the first time he walked in here.
Dr. Mackenzie frowns, uncrosses and re-crosses her legs. She has nice legs, but for some reason, they don’t do it for Animal. After their first session, he went home and tried to conjure up something—anything—from the memory of those legs, but after a few minutes, he gave up.
“John.” Her voice snaps him back.
“Yeah.”
“How do you feel?”
“Fine,” he says. And he is. He feels pretty good at the moment. His injuries are healed, and today’s the day he’s finally supposed to get cleared for duty.
He doesn’t remember much after Pueblo Tower came down on his head. He woke up in Beth Israel, cuffed to the bed railing, his mind swimming in a haze of pharmaceuticals. His Chief showed up soon after, along with his union rep, uncuffed him, and filled him in.
Mayor Koch never held that press conference praising the NYPD. Instead, heads rolled from the top down to the Ninth Precinct plain-clothes unit. And now that Animal was awake, his was on the chopping block. They had found him unconscious, covered in a dead man’s blood, spatter up his jeans and vest consistent with beating someone lying prone. Amphetamines in his system. Easy to identify—his badge and wallet were right there in his pocket. Most of the other cops pulled out of the rubble slipped away before anyone could take their statements.
Fifteen dead. Twenty-two injured.
Animal kept his mouth shut. Thin blue line. He took the fall for the whole precinct—a six-month suspension, a month of that spent in a hospital bed. Then came the physical therapy and the mandated weekly visits to the shrink.
“I swear, Dr. Mackenzie,” he says. He figures this last session is pure formality. Get it done, grab his paperwork, head over to the Ninth, and get his badge and gun back. Then he’ll hang around the precinct house until the end of shift and get good and hammered at O’Hara’s. Drinks on everyone else. He’s owed that much, at least.
But Dr. Mackenzie seems intent on giving him the full hour.
Fine. He can do that. Her office is nice. Smells nice, like she does. The first few sessions, he did the macho cop thing, imagining himself as Serpico, the whole thing a waste of time, her job an insult to his manhood. Like it was a direct attack on his toughness, his pride. He followed the script—resist, deflect, crack wise, don’t give an inch.
Then, on the third or fourth visit, it happened. He broke. Tears welled up out of nowhere, and he couldn’t stop them. He cried like a baby, his throat raw, his face red with shame. To her credit, she didn’t say a word. She handed him a box of Kleenex, let him do what he clearly needed to do, and moved on like nothing happened.
He was grateful for that. The next visit, he didn’t give her such a hard time. The one after that, even less.
But the tears kept coming. A word, a phrase, something innocuous would trigger it, and he’d lose it. Fight it back, push it down, teeth clenched, don’t give into it. After a few of these episodes, Dr. Mackenzie suggested he stop fighting it. Let it all out, like that first time, don’t be afraid of it.
Animal was afraid of it.
It was like standing in the doorway of a pitch-black room. He didn’t know what was in there, what he’d find, what was wrong with him. The idea terrified him. He worried he’d break down completely, cry so hard he’d lose his mind and end up in Bellevue, locked away in a padded room forever.
“Last week, we touched on the topic of you resigning from the force. Do you remember?”
That was a moment of weakness. Something he’d said offhand. Part of him is still pissed about what went down at Pueblo. Fifty cops were there that day, and he’s the only one with a blot on his record. He took the fall for the team, but did any of them visit during those five months? Did anyone chip in? He was on reduced pay, lost his apartment, and had to move back in with his parents. He’s struggling.
“I remember you brought it up, but I don’t remember agreeing to it.”
“You didn’t, that’s true. But I didn’t bring it up out of thin air. On more than one occasion, you expressed anger and resentment for what happened to you. You’ve experienced anxiety about returning to work, about facing your peers.”
A rush of anger flares up in him. She spots it immediately.
“What’s going on right now, John?”
“I’ve been coming here for months. You ask me all these questions, and there’s a whole hour to fill, so I say a lot of shit. I feel like I’m supposed to perform. I’m expected to come in here with things prepared to talk about. You do this, Dr. Mackenzie. You make me think like this. So yeah, I’ve said a lot of things I don’t mean.”
Dr. Mackenzie says nothing.
“And then these pauses, like right now. I don’t like it, the silence. Someone’s gotta say something, and you’re sitting there like the cat that ate the canary.” His voice is rising, and he knows it. He takes a breath, then cuts to the chase. “Today’s the day you clear me, right?”
Dr. Mackenzie looks at him for what feels like a full minute, then stands. From a folder on her desk, she pulls out a piece of paper, signs it, and hands it to him.
He reaches for it, but she doesn’t let go.
“John, I’ll give you this, but with one condition. I want you to keep coming here. Once a week. Insurance will cover it. It’ll still be confidential.”
Animal says nothing.
“I mean it, John. You might be ready to go back to work, but we’re not done here. Right?”
Her voice is so kind, like a mother’s—but not his mother. Not even close. And his father? He’d sooner slit his own throat than show his son any kindness. In a rush, Animal feels a wave of sorrow for himself. It’s overpowering.
He pushes it down, deep down. Gets himself straight.
“So, see you next week?”
He nods.
She lets go of the paper.
Animal spends the next twenty-four hours blackout drunk.
##
(to be serialized in weekly installments)