And by “we,” I mean the veteran cops who “raised” me, as they say on the job-the Anti-Crime Unit grunts who took me under their wing, who showed me what it was to be a cop. A lot of them were actual Vietnam veterans who’d traded a foreign war for our unending domestic drug war. Day in and day out, we cruised the streets, making felony collars, taking guns off the street, putting bad guys behind bars.

Sitting here twenty years later, working my latest case, I kept thinking more and more about those fearless cops. As I sat looking out the window, I actually fantasized that they would arrive any minute, pulling into the special angled parking spaces below and hopping out of their cars, ready to give me some much-needed backup.

Because though we’d won the battle of Washington Heights, the war on drugs wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

I turned away from the window and looked back at the pages of an arrest report spread across the battered desk in front of me.

In fact, the war was just getting started. It was about to flare up bigger and badder and deadlier than ever before.

CHAPTER 2

I SIFTED THROUGH some photographs until I found the reason why I was up here so early. I propped the color shot over the screen of my open laptop and did what I’d been doing a lot of in the last few weeks-memorizing one of the faces in it.

The photograph showed three men standing in a run-down Mexican street beside a brand-new fire-engine red Ford Super Duty pickup truck. Two of the men were wearing bandannas and baseball caps to cover their faces and gripped AR-15 assault rifles with extended magazines. Between them stood a bareheaded, broad-shouldered, light-skinned black man. A gold Cartier tank watch was just visible above the cuff of his dark, tailored suit as he smoothed a Hermès tie.