Little Criminals (10 page)

‘I blew it,’ he whispered. He put the glass down on the kitchen counter and stared at it.

Christy shrugged. ‘It’s not personal, mate.’

‘He
owes
me, Christy. Everyone knows that.’

‘I know he can be a right bollocks, Frankie, but Jo-Jo has to look at the big picture. He doesn’t—’

Crowe hit Christy in the throat with the edge of his right hand. Christy floundered, gasping. He grabbed at his throat. Crowe kicked him in the balls. Christy made a loud, harsh noise and fell to the floor. Crowe raised his right foot high and stamped down on Christy’s head. There was a crunching sound. The bodyguard lay still.

Crowe reached down, plucked a small black revolver from the holster at the back of Christy’s belt and walked quickly back out into the garden, cocking the weapon.

Jo-Jo was already standing, tense. When he saw Crowe he dropped his book and picked up his chair.

‘Frankie, you’re fucking mad!’

Crowe squeezed the trigger once, twice – still walking quickly towards Jo-Jo – three times, and two patches of blood appeared on Jo-Jo’s chest, a third on his stomach. He went down, knocking over the table on the way.

Crowe stood over him.

Jo-Jo was lying face up, damaged but alive and very afraid. His face grey, his lips quivering. Every breath was a harsh sucking sound. He looked up at Frankie.

‘Ah, Jesus,’ he said.

Crowe pointed the gun down at Jo-Jo’s head.

‘We all find our own level, right, Jo-Jo?’

There was a scream.

Crowe looked up. Jo-Jo’s mother was standing at an open bedroom window. She screamed again.

Crowe was still looking up at Pearl, looking into her eyes, with the gun pointing straight down at Jo-Jo’s head, when he squeezed the trigger. One second Jo-Jo was a quivering mess of muscle and blood, with fear and hatred blazing in his eyes, then Crowe looked down at him and there was a hole in his forehead, his eyes were vacant and his body was as limp as a discarded costume.

Crowe stood there for several seconds, until Pearl’s
‘Nooooo!!!’
pierced through the fog that had for a moment enveloped him. He glanced up at the bedroom window. Pearl stopped screaming and jerked her head back inside.

Crowe moved fast, back into the house, stepping over Christy, hurrying through the kitchen, across the hall at a run and taking the stairs two at a time. He kicked in the door of the first bedroom he came to. Nothing, wrong room.

By the time he got to Pearl’s bedroom she had managed to pull something, some piece of furniture, halfway across the door. Crowe pushed hard and there was a scream as the door opened and the piece of furniture – it was a chest of drawers – toppled over.

Pearl was lying on the floor, one foot caught under the chest of drawers. Her throat was making little noises. Glancing up at her son’s killer, she pulled her foot free and struggled to rise.

‘Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Frankie—’

Crowe hesitated. From her position on all fours, Pearl made eye contact, the expression on her ancient face a mixture of rage and guile.

With his left hand, Crowe swept a yellow satiny dressing gown off the bed and threw it over Pearl’s head. She screamed, rising from her knees. Crowe put the gun close to the shape of her head and fired once. A rosette of blood blossomed on the dressing gown and she collapsed instantly.

He went down the stairs.

In the hall, approaching the front door, he put the gun away and composed himself. He curled his fingers inside the sleeve of his jacket and used the sleeve to grasp the knob of the front-door lock. Then he remembered the glass. He went out into the kitchen, stepping over Christy’s, found the glass he’d used, emptied it of water and put it into his pocket. He went back out into the hall and again carefully grasped the knob of the front door.

There was a groan from behind him.

At the door into the kitchen, Christy – barely conscious – was trying to stand up, his hands grasping ineffectually at the door and the walls. The left side of his face was a sheet of blood, the eye closed, the mouth pinched. The other eye glared wildly at Crowe.

Crowe took the gun from his pocket and went back across the hall, his heels clicking on the black marble floor.

*

Crowe didn’t tell Martin Paxton what had happened until half an hour later. ‘Drive,’ he said when he got into the car, and he sat there, breathing hard, as Paxton steered them away from the area. A couple of times, as they drove, Paxton looked across at his friend, but didn’t say anything. Frankie was rubbing the heel of one hand hard against his forehead.

After a while, Crowe realised he still had Christy’s gun. He found a tissue and wiped the gun. They stopped at a bridge over the Royal Canal and Crowe got out and leaned across the parapet, while Paxton drove on and waited in a nearby side road. Crowe glanced around, saw no one looking his way, and let the gun and tissue fall from his hand. Then he took the glass from Jo-Jo’s kitchen out of his pocket. He smashed it against the inside of the parapet wall and watched the pieces fall into the water. Crowe hurried after the car and they drove on towards Finglas.

After a while Paxton asked, ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing,’ Crowe said.

They parked in the grounds of a church in Finglas and walked in silence down the slope to the long, hilly, bare stretch of open space just south of the housing estate. The green space between Finglas and Cabra West had once been vast and full of hollows and thickets within which local kids could find adventure. As children, Frankie and Martin had played cowboys and Indians around here, down by the canal, under the bridge and over where the public swimming pool used to be. They played rounders, football or hurling, they had fights, sometimes with each other, and later they took diversions through these fields while walking their girlfriends home. Now, the expansion of the housing estates had narrowed the gap until only this stretch of green was left, where the occasional football game was played, and teenage urban cowboys let their clapped-out horses roam free.

There, Frankie Crowe – still coming down from the chemical surge that had flared through his veins during the killings – told Martin Paxton what happened.

For more than a minute, Paxton didn’t say anything. He just hunkered down and pulled repeatedly at tufts of grass. Then he said, ‘Jesus Christ, Frankie, what the fuck.’

‘I know.’

‘This wasn’t supposed to happen.’

‘It happened.’

‘This changes everything.’

‘It changes nothing.’

‘What the hell do we do?’

‘Nothing. We do nothing. There’s nothing to connect it to us.’

Paxton stood up, brushing pieces of grass from his fingers. Working hard to keep his voice normal, he said, ‘You can’t be sure about that, Frankie. Someone might have seen you leaving the house. Jo-Jo might have told someone he was meeting you. These things always get out.’

‘No one saw me.’

‘Jesus, Frankie, it wasn’t the end of the world, Jo-Jo saying no. We could have done something else, something that would’ve been OK with Jo-Jo.’

Crowe made a derisive sound. ‘The only thing that Jo-Jo would’ve said yes to was whatever kept us bowing and scraping to him. If we went ahead, and him saying we shouldn’t, who the fuck knows what he’d have done. Grassed us up, maybe. Put the word out we were flush, and he wouldn’t take offence if we got done over.’ He held his arms wide. ‘We’re playing in a different league now, Martin. That means doing what has to be done. And fuck anyone who gets in the way. That’s the difference. Being ready to fuck anyone who gets in the way.’

Frankie walked away, maybe twenty feet, stood there calming himself. When he came back he said, ‘It’s the difference between being a loser and being someone who matters. Being ready to fuck anyone who gets in the way.’

‘Frankie, this didn’t start out, it’s not what—’

Crowe came up close and spoke quietly into Paxton’s face. ‘From here on in, we’re dealing with a fat, soft, civilian target that’ll shit money at the first sight of a gun. We’ve done the homework, we know the layout, the routine. We have the crew, the money’s there for the
taking
.’ He moved away and made a fly-swatting gesture. ‘Jo-Jo couldn’t be helped. It happened. It shouldn’t have, but that’s done now. It’s done now, Martin, the shooting’s over. From here on, we’re dealing with civilians and the job couldn’t be simpler. You can’t back off now, Martin.’

From his silence, a stranger might have imagined that Paxton was thinking it over, coming to a decision. But that decision had been made a long time ago. Paxton tried a smile, but his face didn’t quite make it. ‘I’m not backing off, Frankie. I’m just saying, Jesus—’ Then he said, ‘Ah, fuck it.’

Crowe was suddenly all bouncy energy, running his fingers back through his hair. ‘It can’t be this week, OK? Not now, after this. I mean, this is going to cause a few heart attacks around the place. We’re going to have to put it off for a week or so. Breathing space, OK?’

‘OK,’ Paxton said. Then, because he had to ask, he said, ‘Tell me the truth, Frankie.’ He hesitated, unsure of how Crowe would take this. ‘Tell me the truth. Going in, going in to see Jo-Jo, did you have this in mind, is that what you decided to do, if he said—’

‘No,’ Crowe said, shaking his head briskly. ‘No, I swear to you, Martin. It wasn’t like that. It just happened. It just
happened
.’

Paxton didn’t say anything for a while, then he said, ‘OK.’

Crowe took a long, deep breath and when he spoke his voice was just above a whisper. ‘I don’t think so, Martin. To be honest with you. I don’t think so. I think it just happened.’

Paxton didn’t say anything. After a moment, he reached out a hand and he touched Frankie on the shoulder.

They were leaving the green space when Crowe remembered something. The energy that had stirred him seemed to have ebbed.

‘About Jo-Jo. Only me and you know we’d anything to do with that, Martin. Let’s keep it that way. Not a word to Dolly or Brendan. It’s not something they need to know.’

‘Course not,’ Paxton said.

‘What we say, we tell them there’s a small hitch, the target’s routine changed, we’ll have to put things off for a week or two. We tell Milky the same, OK?’

Martin Paxton nodded.

Silent again, the two friends walked slowly back up towards the church and the car. Sheep as a lamb, Martin Paxton told himself. Sheep as a lamb.

The removal service ended with the parish priest thanking the mourners for coming and he reminded them that Jo-Jo Mackendrick and his mother would be laid to rest after ten o’clock Mass next morning. The paying of respects began. The centre aisle filled with people, settling into a queue that inched its way from the back of the church up towards the altar. The crowd at this evening’s ceremony, for the arrival of the remains at St Anthony’s Church in Clontarf, was unusually large.

Just in front of the altar rails, resting side by side on metal trestles, there were two coffins. Jo-Jo’s family sat in the front row, receiving the condolences of the stream of mourners. Although it slowly shuffled up the church, the queue hardly shortened. More joined at the back, as those at the front paid their respects to the family and moved back down the side aisles.

Outside the church, more than half a dozen surly policemen in uniform stood around, making no effort at all to appear respectful of the occasion. From across the road, on the seafront promenade, four detectives from criminal intelligence eyed the mourners as they arrived at the church. They attempted in vain to find some significance in who turned up for the funeral and who stayed away. In the six days since the murders of Jo-Jo and Pearl Mackendrick and Christy Powell, the police had methodically interviewed surviving members of the family, as well as Jo-Jo’s friends and associates, and were none the wiser. It was hard to tell if Jo-Jo’s people thought they owed loyalty to some form of underworld code, or if they just didn’t know anything. The neighbourhood had been canvassed and every tout on the Northside was given an opportunity to ratchet up credit with the police, and no one had anything helpful to say. Autopsies revealed nothing useful. Although Technical fine-combed the house for three days, it soon became clear that there was little for them to work with.

‘Most likely?’ Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe asked a conference of senior officers, reviewing the case on the afternoon of the removal.

The lead investigator looked uncomfortable. ‘Hitman, probably. Hired by – probably someone who got their toes trodden on by Jo-Jo.’

‘Indications?’

‘Well planned. They went in and out without leaving a trail or a witness. Clinical stuff.’

‘Candidates?’

‘No one obvious. Jo-Jo was on good terms with most of the Northside operators. And he didn’t really do much across the river, not in recent years. Anyone he had serious trouble with, he either patched things up with them or they’re not around any more.’

‘What about the IRA? That’s what some of the newspapers are saying.’

‘Possible. A couple of their people had a run-in with Jo-Jo, but that was five, six years back, and we thought it was sorted.’