Marcus Garvey Village. Your old man’s black?

ME

He died.

MANNING

Where?

I don’t answer.

MANNING

I’m sorry.

Manning takes me out to dinner that night, the only time I’ve ever sat across from him and consumed a meal off actual plates and dishes. Manning, I can see, is moved by the sight of the threads in my closet—and the vanished era they evoke.

MANNING

Did you know your father?

My expression answers.

MANNING

I probably did. I was in Brownsville then. A beat cop.

He asks if I ever wear the Lo.

ME

Around the loft sometimes.

MANNING

Never on the street?

ME

No.

Manning asks what the clothes mean to me. I have a serious answer, but I’m reluctant to verbalize it.

MANNING

Go ahead. You can talk straight with me.

I tell Manning that I understand and even respect the brilliance of fighting poverty and powerlessness with style. With fashion.

ME

Those crews in their day were the flyest thing on the planet.

MANNING

But.

ME

In the end it didn’t work. They died. They wound up in Clinton.

Manning regards me thoughtfully.

MANNING

So you applied to the academy.

The check comes. Manning grabs it.

MANNING

You know I’m jerking your chain when I talk like that about flips and Ricans?

Outside, he walks me to my stop.

MANNING

Don’t sell the Lo. Ever.

I’m recalling that evening now, two and a half hours after being relieved by Kiriakin at Maimonides Medical Center, as a Brooklyn South armory sergeant sets into my fists a Mossberg 500 ZMB “Zombie Killer” shotgun and dubiously ogles my five-foot-four, 125-pound frame.

The SWAT raid on the Russian Mafia kicks off in fourteen hours. Am I really ready for this?

It’s Saturday morning, 0830. The storm has slammed into the city, building from Cat 4 to Cat 5 to possible Superstorm. Per Gleason’s instructions, all DivSix personnel assigned to the warrant service have assembled at Emergency Service Unit South Brooklyn, then proceeded in order of seniority to Weapons and Equipment Draw, where our two teams of four and one team of two (Manning and me) have been issued IBAs, individual body armor—not the Kevlite sleeveless vests that tac officers and bike cops wear but military-issue flak jackets, eleven-pounders, designed to protect against shrapnel, ball bearings, and everything up to and including a Quds Force IED.

The raid on the headquarters of the Russian Mafia is slated for 2230 this evening. The teams will be briefed here at ESU, then rebriefed at the assembly point near Coney Island, where they will link up with the operators who will lead our teams in the actual assault. From there the combined force will proceed in convoy to the target—a complex on Ocean Avenue in Brighton Beach constituted of two homes, an office, and a social club.