A Ticket to the Boneyard (27 page)

I said a Coke would be fine. Burke filled a glass and slid it across the bar to me. I picked it up, and Mick raised his own glass to me. He was drinking JJ&S, the twelve-year-old Irish that the Jameson people turn out in small quantities. Billy Keegan, who’d worked behind the stick at Armstrong’s some years back, used to drink it, and I’d tried it on a few occasions. I could still remember what it tasted like.

“It’s a late hour for you,” Mick said.

“I was afraid you might be closed.”

“When did we ever close at this hour? It’s not two yet. We’re open till four, as often as not. I bought this bar to have a place for late drinking. Sometimes a man has need of a late night.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you all right, man?”

“Why?”

“You look like a man who’s been in a fight.”

I had to smile. “This afternoon,” I said, “but it didn’t put a mark on me. A few nights ago it was a different story.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe we should sit down.”

“Maybe we should,” he agreed. He snatched up the whiskey bottle and led the way to a table. I brought my Coke and followed him. As we sat down, someone at the far end of the room played the jukebox and Liam Clancy declared himself to be a freeborn man of the traveling people. The volume was low and the music didn’t get in your way, and neither of us said anything until the song had ended.

Then I said, “I need a gun.”

“What sort of gun?”

“A handgun. An automatic or a revolver, it doesn’t matter. Something small enough to conceal and carry around but heavy enough to have some stopping power.”

His glass was still a third full, but he drew the cork stopper from the JJ&S bottle and topped it up, then picked up the glass and looked into it. I wondered what he was seeing.

He drank off some of the whiskey and put the glass down. “Come on,” he said.

He stood up, pushed his chair back. I followed him to the back of the room. There was a door to the left of the dart board. Press-on letters announced that it was private, and a lock guaranteed privacy. Mick opened it with a key and ushered me into his office.

It was a surprise. There was a big desk, its top completely clear. A Mosler safe as tall as I was stood off to one side, flanked by a pair of green metal filing cabinets. A brass coatrack held a raincoat and a couple of jackets. There were two groups of hand-colored engravings on the walls, some of Ireland, the others of France. He’d told me once that his mother’s people came from County Sligo, his father from a fishing village near Marseilles. Behind the desk there was a much larger picture, a black-and-white photograph with a white mat and a narrow black frame. It showed a white frame farmhouse shaded by tall trees, with hills in the distance and clouds in the sky.

“That’s the farm,” he said. “You’ve never been.”

“No.”

“We’ll go one day. It’s up near Ellenville. We should have snow soon. That’s when I like it the most, when all those hills have snow on them.”

“It must be beautiful.”

“It is.” He went to the safe, worked the combination lock, opened the door. I went over and examined one of the French engravings. It showed sailing boats in a small and well-protected harbor. I couldn’t read the caption.

I went on looking at it until I heard the door of the safe swing shut. I turned. He had a revolver in one hand and half a dozen shells in the palm of the other. I went over and he handed me the gun.

“It’s a Smith,” he said. “Thirty-eight caliber, and the shells are hollow-point, so you won’t lack for stopping power. As for accuracy, that’s another matter. Someone’s cut the barrel down to an inch, and of course that did for the front sight. The rear sight’s been filed down, and so’s the hammer, so you can’t cock it, you have to fire it double-action. It’ll go in your pocket and come free without snagging on the lining, but you won’t win a turkey shoot with it. You can’t really aim it, I don’t think. You can only point it.”

“That’s all right.”

“Will it do you, then?”

“It’ll do fine,” I said. I turned the gun over in my hands, getting the feel of it, smelling the gun oil. There was no powder smell, so it had most likely been cleaned since its last firing.

“It’s not loaded,” he said. “I’ve only the six shells. I can make a phone call and get more.”

I shook my head. “If I miss him six times,” I said, “I can forget the whole thing. He’s not going to give me time to reload.” I swung the cylinder out and began filling the chambers. You can make a case for leaving one chamber empty so you won’t have a live shell under the hammer, but I figured I’d rather have one more bullet in the gun. Besides, with the hammer filed down the possibility of an accidental discharge was slight.

I asked Mick what I owed him.

He shook his head. “I’m not in the business of selling guns,” he said.

“Even so.”

“I’ve no money in it,” he said. “And no need to see money out of it. Bring it back if you don’t use it. Failing that, forget about it.”

“It’s unregistered?”

“As far as I know. Someone picked it up in a burglary. I couldn’t tell you who owned it, but I doubt he registered it. The serial number’s gone. A man who licenses his gun rarely files down the number. You’re sure it’ll do you?”

“I’m sure.”

We went back to the other room and he locked the office door. The same Liam Clancy record was playing as we returned to our table. The television set behind the bar was tuned to a western movie, and the sound was too low to carry past the three men watching it. I drank some Coke and Mick drank some Irish.

He said, “What I said before, that I’m not in the gun business. I’ve been in and out of that business in my day. Did you ever happen to hear the story of the three cases of Kalashnikovs?”

“No.”

“Now this was some years ago. It might be long enough that I could tell it in court. It’s seven years, isn’t it? The statute of limitations?”

“On most felonies. There’s no statute of limitations on tax evasion or murder.”

“Don’t I know it.” He picked up his glass and looked at it. “Here’s how it was. There were these three cases of Kalashnikovs. AK-47s, you know. Assault rifles. They were in a storage bin in Maspeth, just off Grand Avenue. Big crates they were, with more than thirty rifles in each, so you had close to a hundred in all.”

“Whose were they?”

“Ours, once we blew the lock on that storage shed. The crates were too large for the van we had. We broke them open and loaded the rifles into the back of the van. I don’t know whose guns they were, but he couldn’t own them legally, and he couldn’t go to the police about it, could he?” He took a drink. “We already had a buyer for them. You wouldn’t steal something like that if you didn’t.”

“Who was your buyer?”

“Some lads who looked like Hitler’s next of kin. Their heads this close to shaved, and the three I saw were dressed alike. Blue shirts with designs on the pocket and khaki trousers. They said they had a training camp in the Adirondacks, up around Tupper Lake. They wanted the guns, and they paid more than they had to, I’ll say that for them.”

“So you sold them.”

“So I did. And two nights later I’m having a drink at Morrissey’s, and Tim Pat himself calls me aside. You remember Tim Pat Morrissey.”

“Of course.”

“ ‘I hear you’ve a few extra rifles,’ he says. ‘Wherever did you hear that?’ I say. Well, the whole of it is that he wants the lot of them for some friends of his in the north of Ireland. You knew they were involved in all of that, the brothers. Didn’t you?”

“I’d certainly heard as much.”

“Well, nothing would do but he must have these rifles. He won’t believe I’ve already sold them. He’s sure I couldn’t have moved them so quick, you see. ‘You don’t want them in this country,’ he says. ‘Think what your man may do with them.’ Why, I said, he and his friend will go and play toy soldier with them, or at worst they’ll go and shoot a few niggers. ‘You don’t know that,’ he says. ‘Maybe they’ll start a revolution and storm the governor’s mansion. Maybe they’ll give the guns to the niggers. Sell them to me and you’ll know where they’re going.’ “

He sighed. “So we stole them back and sold them to Tim Pat. He wouldn’t pay the price the little Nazis paid, either. What a bargainer he was! ‘You’re doing this for Holy Ireland,’ he said, driving the price down. Still, when you collect twice for the same fucking guns, any price is a good price.”

“Did the original buyers come back at you?”

“Ah,” he said. “Now there’s the part the statute of limitations doesn’t cover. You might say they were in no position to retaliate.”

“I see.”

“I made good money on those guns,” he said. “But once they were out of the country, well, that was an end to it. I was out of guns, and so I was out of the gun business.”

I went to the bar and got another Coke. This time I had Burke cut me a wedge of lemon to cut the sweetness. When I got back to the table Mick said, “Now what made me tell you that story? The gun business, that’s what put me in mind of it, but why go on and tell it?”

“I don’t know.”

“When we sit together, you and I, the stories roll.”

I sipped my Coke. The lemon helped. I said, “You never asked me what I needed with a gun.”

“Not my business, is it?”

“Maybe not.”

“You happen to need a gun and I happen to have one. I don’t think you’ll shoot me, or hold up the bar with it.”

“It’s not likely.”

“So you owe me no explanation.”

“No,” I said. “But it makes a good story.”

“Well,” he said, “now that’s another thing entirely.”

I sat there and told him the whole thing. Somewhere along the way he held up a hand and drew a short horizontal line in the air, and Burke chased the last few customers and started shutting down the bar. When he started putting the chairs up on the tables Ballou told him to let it go, that he’d see to the rest of it. Burke turned off the lights over the bar and the ceiling lights and let himself out, drawing the sliding gates across but not engaging the padlock. Mick locked the door from inside and cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of whiskey, and I went right on with my story.

When I got to the end he looked again at the sketch of Motley. “He’s a bad bastard,” he said. “You can see it in his eyes.”

“The man who drew the picture never even saw him.”

“No matter. He put it in the picture whether he saw him or not.” He folded the sketch and gave it back to me. “The woman you brought in the other night.”

“Elaine.”

“I thought so. I didn’t recall her name, but I thought it must be the same one. I liked her.”

“She’s a good woman.”

“You’ve been friends a long time then.”

“Years and years.”

He nodded. “When it all started,” he said. “Your man said you framed him. Is he still saying it now?”

“Yes.”

“Did you?”

I’d left that part out, but I couldn’t see any reason to hold it back. “Yes, I did,” I said. “I got a lucky shot in and he went out cold. He had a glass jaw. You wouldn’t remember a boxer named Bob Satterfield, would you?”

“Wouldn’t I though? His fights looked fixed. The ones he lost, that is. He’d be way ahead, and then he’d get tapped on the jaw and go down like a felled steer. Of course you’d never fix a fight that way, but the average man’s reasoning powers don’t reach that far. Bob Satterfield, now his is a name I’ve not heard in years.”

“Well, Motley had Satterfield’s jaw. While he was out I stuck a gun in his hand and squeezed off a few rounds. It wasn’t a complete frame. I just made the charges more serious so that he’d draw a little jail time.”

“And you trusted her to back you?”

“I figured she’d stand up.”

“You thought that well of her.”

“I still do.”

“And rightly so, if she did stand up. Did she?”

“Like a little soldier. She thought it was his gun. I had a throw-down with me, an unregistered pint-size automatic I used to carry around just in case. I palmed it and pretended to find it when I frisked him, so she had no reason not to believe it was his gun. But she was there to see me wrap his fingers around it and shoot holes in her plaster, and she still went in and swore he’d done the shooting and he’d been trying to kill me when he did it. She put it in her statement and signed it when they typed it up and handed it to her. And she would have sworn to it all over again in court.”

“There’s not many you could count on like that.”

“I know.”

“And it worked. He went to prison.”

“He went to prison. But I’m not sure it worked.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Since he got out he’s killed eight people that I know of. Three here, five in Ohio.”

“He’d have killed more than that if he’d spent the past twelve years a free man.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave him a reason to select certain people as his targets. I broke some rules, I pissed into the wind, and now it’s blowing back in my face.”

“What else could you do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t take a lot of time to think it through when it happened. It was the next thing to instinctive on my part. I figured he belonged inside and I’d do what it took to put him there. Now, though, I don’t think I’d do it that way.”

“Why? All because you gave up the drink and found God?”

I laughed. “I don’t know that I’ve found Him yet,” I said.

“I thought that was what your lot did at those meetings.” Deliberately he uncorked the bottle and filled his glass. “I thought you all learned to call Him by His first name.”

“We call each other by our first names. And I suppose some people develop some kind of a working relationship with whatever God means to them.”

“But not you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know much about God,” I said. “I’m not even sure if I believe in Him. That seems to change from one day to the next.”

“Ah.”

“But I’m not as quick to play God as I used to be.”

“Sometimes a man has to.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t seem to feel the need as often as I used to. Whether or not there’s a God, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m not Him.”

He thought that over, working on the whiskey in his glass. If it was having any effect on him, I couldn’t see it. Nor was it affecting me. The incident in my hotel room that afternoon had been some sort of watershed, and the threat of picking up a drink had lifted for the time being once the bourbon was done splashing in the sink basin. There were times when it was dangerous for me to be in a saloon, sipping Coke among the whiskey drinkers, but this was not one of those times.