Shamrock Alley (38 page)

“Where the hell are the lights?” Mickey said somewhere ahead of him in the darkness.

His eyes adjusting, John could see a faint strip of yellow light on the floor across the room. Light from behind a closed door, he imagined. The place smelled strongly of cigar smoke and provolone cheese.

His hand was in his jacket pocket, his fingers around the hilt of his gun, when the lights came on.

They were standing in a storage room with a large fan humming in a caged casing embedded in the far wall. Around them, cases of beer were stacked to shoulder height, some on handcarts and still wrapped in cellophane.
Playboy
centerfolds were taped to the walls, and there was a clipboard hanging from a nail above a case of Amstel Light, a pencil dangling from it by a greasy length of string.

A thick-shouldered man with graying hair stood by a closed door—the door leading out into the store, most likely—with a look of mild amusement on his face. In a T-shirt and checkered flannel pajama pants, he looked as if he’d just been roused from sleep.

“Keep your voice down, Mickey,” the man said, scratching between the folds of his unshaven chin. “The hell’s the matter with you?”

Uninterested in conversation, Mickey pulled the cellophane from one of the cases of beer and proceeded to bust open the carton. From between two stacks of cased beer, Sean watched Mickey without expression, his fingers working themselves into the fabric of his pants.

Sighing, the man by the door said, “It’s warm.”

“Don’t care,” Mickey said, pulling out a bottle and twisting off the cap. He drank half the bottle in two huge gulps, spilling some down the front of his shirt.

“What are we doing here, Mickey?” John said, his eyes shifting from Mickey O’Shay to the guy in the checkered flannel pants.

The guy in flannel looked at him. “Your friends want beer, Mickey, they pay for it. I ain’t runnin’ a goddamn charity here.”

“Take a walk,” Mickey said, initiating the man’s retreat back to the front of his store.

John turned his gaze on Mickey, who sat passively atop a stack of crates finishing off his beer. “We gonna get to the point now, or what?”

“I know you’re a mover, John,” Mickey said. “There’s a bartender across the street that needs to disappear. Five grand split between the two of you for the hit.”

“Are you for real?” he said.

Mickey didn’t answer, didn’t even bother to meet his eyes.

“Who is this guy?” he asked. “And why me and the kid?”

“Forget it,” Mickey said. “That don’t matter. What matters is if you two do the job or not. Bartender’s name is Ricky Laughlin. I’ll give you guys the guns to do the job. You can keep ‘em along with the money after you’re done.”

“How come you don’t do it yourself?”

“Guy’s
expecting
it to come from me,” Mickey answered, almost with a laugh.

That’s not it. He wants to test me, to own me
.

Mickey pulled himself off the cases of beer and shrugged off his coat. “He’s across the street right now,” Mickey said. “Go over there, check him out, case the joint. You want the job, give me a call in a couple days.”

With nothing more to say, Mickey slipped two more beers from the case and started loading up his coat.

John looked at Sean, saw that the kid had nearly run his fingers down to the bone against the fabric of his pants. Sean looked over at him, too, uncertain if he should speak or not. There was a fire in his eyes—the same look a kid gets when his old man entrusts him for the first time with the keys to the family car.

“Come on,” John said, turning and heading for the door.

Outside, he found himself scanning for any signs of Kersh’s car at the mouth of the alley. If Kersh had kept on their tail, then he was playing it smart and hanging back a block or two.

“Holy
shit!”
Sean said, walking quickly at John’s side toward Amsterdam. “He ever call you for a hit before?”

“Nope.”

“Goddamn! I mean, like, this is the real deal.”

They paused at the curb to wait for a break in traffic. Across the street, the lights of the Samjetta were reflected in puddles in the street and on the windshields of passing cars. He took two quick glances in both directions and could not see Kersh’s sedan, which meant nothing. Bill Kersh had long since mastered the art of camouflage.

“The Samjetta,” John said, for the sole benefit of Kersh, who might now be within range of the transmitter in his pocket. “Looks like a steakhouse.”

“What do you think this guy Laughlin did?” Sean asked.

“Beats me.”

Between a break in traffic, the two of them scurried across the street like rats. Sean slammed through a puddle and unleashed a string of foul language. And despite the large neon letters announcing
The Samjetta
just above their heads, Sean turned and was about to continue down the street.

“Hey,” John said to him, opening the front door of the restaurant.

“Over here, Sean.”

In the moments before they entered the restaurant, their images were reflected in tinted windows along Amsterdam Avenue.

The Samjetta was a cozy restaurant with a smattering of tables and booths to the right of the front doors, and a long mahogany bar to the left. The walls were alternating brick and polished wood, adorned with miscellaneous clothing from different generations. Tonight, there was a fair amount of traffic in the place, though there were still a few tables open. The bar, too, was only mildly crowded—mostly men in business suits sitting in small groups.

Sean headed immediately for the bar, but John grabbed him by the forearm and directed him over to one of the empty tables.

The kid looked annoyed. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ll sit here.”

“That him?” Sean was already straining to stare at the bartender from across the floor.

“I don’t know. Could be.”

The bartender was tall and slender with a crop of black hair trimmed close to his head. He sported a goatee and a diamond stud in his left ear. From where he sat, John could make out the bluish swirls of a tattoo on the side of the bartender’s neck.

“I think that’s him,” Sean said, unable to peel his eyes from the bartender.

“Hey.” John drummed a finger on the table to attract the kid’s attention. “You’re gonna do this, huh?”

“What? The hit? Shit, yeah. Why?”

“You ever hear of this guy before?”

“Ricky Laughlin?” Sean shook his head. “No way.”

“Must’ve done
something.”
John looked Sean over. “What’s the deal with that star you carved on your arm? You said you’d tell me later.”

That seemed to collect Sean’s attention. Jarred by the question, the kid turned and faced him, the excitement drained from his face. On the tabletop, his fingers were pushing against the polished surface, as they’d done against the fabric of his pants just a few minutes ago. He looked like someone trying to smooth wrinkles out of the wood.

“Jacob Goldman, you mean,” Sean said.

“Yeah, that’s the name, I think.”

“Just someone I want to remember.”

“He’s that important you gotta carve a star in your arm?”

Without hesitation, Sean said, “To me he is.”

“Come on,” John urged. “Tell me.”

As if to enhance the story, Sean rolled up his sleeve and exposed his filleted arm. Beneath the harsh lighting above their table, the scars looked almost purple and plumped out to grotesque exaggeration.

“Jacob Goldman was a guy who had a lot of money,” Sean said. “He was married four times. His fourth wife was my mother, and she split with him. I don’t know where they went or even if they’re still married. This,” he said, pointing to the star-shaped scar, “reminds me of that bastard. Every day. And I’m gonna find him someday. All the money in the world won’t save him then.”

“Had to carve it in your arm?”

“I see it every day,” Sean Sullivan said.

“That why you follow Mickey O’Shay around?”

Uncomfortable, Sean shrugged. “Where you from?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Around here, you’re either with Mickey and Jimmy, or you’re chased by them. That’s fact. These guys don’t mess around. You wanna make some money, they’re the go-to guys.”

“How well you know ‘em?”

“We’re pretty close,” Sean said. John could tell that he was lying, that the kid was no more a part of Mickey and Jimmy’s group than John was. “I do some jobs for them, stuff like that. Ain’t nobody out here tells them how to do business. Not even the cops. Cops are fucking
scared
of ‘em, man.” The right side of his mouth hooked up into a partial grin. “All the bars pay ‘em kickbacks. Most of the unions down there, too. If there’s money bein’ made in Hell’s Kitchen, Mickey and Jimmy get a piece of it.”

“What about people who don’t wanna pay? What about bars that don’t pay them kickbacks?”

“Show me one,” Sean said with little humor. “Everyone’s scared to death. Even the guineas want to work with them.”

“Get the hell out of here. The
Italians?”

“It’s true,” the kid insisted, now beaming with a corrupted pride. “Listen,” he continued, “you wanna hear something crazy? I mean, like, absolutely fucking nuts?”

“What’s that?”

“Just something I heard, something I—”

“Yeah?” John pressed.

Sean leaned closer to him from across the table, his voice dropping an octave. “There was this bookie, some Jew bastard named Horace Green, collecting loan-sharking debts for a while in Hell’s Kitchen. Mickey and Jimmy get wind of this, they pay him a little visit, tell him they want a piece of the action. They tell him they’ll keep an eye on him, make sure nobody comes around and rips him off. Protection, right? Well, Green tells ‘em to forget it, that he’s got the Italians already watching his back and he don’t need a couple Irish punks from the West Side buggin’ him. Anyway, all’s cool for a couple nights. Then Green shows up in the neighborhood again to collect some vigs, probably in a good mood and everything, and at the end of the day he stops off for a few drinks at a neighborhood bar, right? Later, as he’s comin’ outta the bar in the middle of the night, there’s Mickey and Jimmy, leaning against the guy’s car. This bastard Green tries worming his way around them, probably startin’ to blubber like a goddamn baby, but Jimmy and Mickey, they don’t let nothin’ go—you know what I mean?”

“What happened?” His forehead was burning up with fever, his hands again throbbing beneath the table.

“They kill him,” Sean said flatly. “Jimmy shoots him twice in the chest, they take his keys, dump him in the trunk of his own car. Drive to some warehouse and—get this shit—
the motherfucker is still alive in the trunk when they get there.”

“You serious?”

“Swear to Christ, John, that’s how I heard it.”

“So they kill him at the warehouse …”

“Chopped him up,” Sean said. That vague smile was back on his face, his eyes aglow and teeming with bombast. He was like a parent bragging about his son’s home run in Little League. “Cut the bastard into pieces with an axe—his head, his legs, his arms. Diced him like a Chinatown fish. It’s how they make people disappear, is what I heard. They call it doin’ a Houdini.”

“Where’d you hear this?”

Sean waved away the question. It was unimportant. “I heard it. And you ain’t even heard the best part yet. They grab this guy Green’s loan-sharking book and start going around the city collecting the guy’s vigs! I heard that, thought it was the funniest damn thing in the
world
. Can you imagine?”

“I think whoever told you this story’s full of shit,” he said.

“I don’t think so, man. I mean, I know these guys. These ain’t just stories. This is the way it is down here.”

John turned and glanced over at the bartender, watched him flirt with an attractive Asian woman in tan pants and a red sweater. Without looking at Sean, he asked him how many other people Mickey and Jimmy killed.

Sean Sullivan rolled his shoulders. He suddenly looked very, very young beneath the glow of the restaurant’s lights.

“Word on the street,” Sean said, “they worked a lot of guys.”

F
OR A MOMENT, THE RECORDING OF
S
EAN
Sullivan’s voice rendered the occupants of Brett Chominsky’s office speechless. Then, as Chominsky leaned over and turned the tape recorder off, there sounded a tremulous exhale from where Roger Biddleman stood before the large bank of office windows.

Kersh, who had recorded the conversation via John’s transmitter last night, sat before Chominsky’s desk, his arms folded, his eyes unfocused and distant. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and his chin looked like a loaded pin cushion.

John stood by the closed office door, his back against the wall, his hands stuffed into his pants pockets. Throughout the length of the recording, his eyes had volleyed from Kersh to Chominsky to Biddleman like someone watching a three-man handball game. Each had a different expression on his face: Kersh’s was one of perdition, Chominsky displayed an uncharacteristic incertitude, and Roger Biddleman looked like someone who’d just been dealt four aces in a poker game and was doing his best to keep a straight face.