Shamrock Alley (4 page)

“The cops had been watching Deveneau and his place for a couple of months for narcotics,” John said. “They got word the joint was hot, so they hit it. They didn’t know we were there, and we didn’t know they were coming.”

Biddleman drummed his fingers on his desktop. “I think things should have been a little more controlled.”

“We’re only responsible for ourselves—”

“There should have been better communication, more professionalism displayed…”

“Professionalism?”
John uttered a laugh. “Come on. You have FBI, DEA, Secret Service, ATF, local cops, transit cops—a million guys with guns and badges trying to lock up the shit. You think we have tea before every operation and discuss it with the world? Shit happens, and last night was just one of those nights.”

“I’m not interested in excuses,” Biddleman said, “and don’t be cavalier with me. We’ve had this sort of discussion before. You shot and killed someone, then ran away like the criminal you were pretending to be. This isn’t a movie set. This is real life, where all your actions have consequences.”

John pushed himself back in his chair. He could sense Kersh beside him—an unmoving presence. “I don’t need a lecture.”

Biddleman sat forward in his chair, his pasty face reflecting in the polished mahogany desktop. “John, you fired the first shot that killed?”

“Yes. He was going to kill the informant. I shot him to save her life.”

“Was he going to kill
you?”

“I don’t know what would have happened after he shot her.”

“Were you in immediate danger, or were you just pushing your undercover role?”

John felt a burning at the pit of his stomach. For some reason, he thought of his father at that moment: prostrate and unmoving beneath a wall of beeping machinery. “You’re out of line,” he told Biddleman. “What the hell do you think I am?”

Kersh put up a hand. His voice was steady. “Roger,” he said. “Listen, the shooting was justified, you know that. Where are we going with this?”

“We are going nowhere. You agents gave Francis Deveneau a pass. This case is done. No one in my office will touch this thing. John, I personally think you acted out of control, used poor judgment. But that’s the Secret Service’s problem.”

“Jesus …”

“Roger,” Kersh said, “let’s reevaluate this. John’s case is still good with Deveneau. We need to flush out his stash of counterfeit, then roll into his supplier. The locals don’t have a problem with any of this. The cops and the D.A.’s office said they won’t do anything to jeopardize our operation. We’re still in.”

“I spoke with the D.A.,” Biddleman said, his eyes volleying between them, narrowed and agitated. “Their office is a lot more tolerant than I’m prepared to be.”

John locked eyes with the attorney. “Why are you pulling this case?”

“Because you take off through these tunnels while a dozen cops are left to shoot up the place. People are dead, people are injured. Who shot Jeffrey Clay?”

“Clay? He went nuts, started shooting at the cops.”

“And now he’s dead, too.”

“I’m not responsible for the New York Police Department. They can shoot whoever they goddamn want.”

“Very intelligent.” Biddleman shifted in his chair. “Did it ever occur to you to make your identity clear to the officers, to identify yourself as a Secret Service agent?”

“What?”
He sat forward, put a hand on Biddleman’s desk. “What the hell was I supposed to do? Stand up, wave my hands, flash my goddamn badge? I’m sitting in the middle of this shit, and you want me to make some damn law enforcement speech?”

“You put other officers at risk by withholding that information. You killed a guy and then ran away. And that’s exactly what Deveneau’s attorney will say at trial, and the jury will convict us. So it’s over. Don’t go near Deveneau again, and fuck his counterfeit money. That’s all, gentlemen. And I hope I’m very goddamn clear on this.”

“You’re wrong on this,” John said.

“That’s all.” Both his manicured hands splayed out before him on the desk, Roger Biddleman watched them from beneath his brow and did not move until John and Kersh were up and out of his office.

Outside in the hallway, John kicked the bench. The sound echoed down the hall. “What garbage. Can you believe this?”

“Believe it,” Kersh said. He was patting himself down, searching for a cigarette.

“Little worm prick. What about me? So concerned with how things look, the perception, didn’t even ask if I’m all right, if I nearly got my head blown off, was I upset, did I shit my pants.”

“You’re a non-entity. He’s an artist—you’re a paintbrush. Lose enough hairs or he don’t like the feel anymore—he’ll toss you and get himself a new one. And remember,” Kersh continued, a half-smile tugging at his livery lips, “they went to Harvard, not some state school on an athletic scholarship.”

There were high-heeled footsteps moving down the hallway. The attractive young receptionist poked her head around the corner, most likely startled by the sound of the bench being kicked. After a moment, she disappeared again.

“You’re full of wisdom this morning,” John said after she disappeared. “You must have taken a good dump.”

Bill Kersh located his last cigarette and pushed it between his lips. “John,” he said, “it was
magnificent.”

T
WENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD
M
ICKEY
O
’SHAY, FIRED
up on Thorazine tablets and cocaine, grinned at his reflection in the mirror. For the moment, he was conscious of everything—the ammoniac foulness of the bar’s restroom; the cold porcelain sink basin beneath his hands; the spastic pulse in his left eyelid; the vomit at the back of his throat. There was a steady drumming at the base of his skull. He sucked air in between his clenched teeth, grinned wider, spat into the sink.

Winner
, he thought, and pushed out the restroom door.

Jimmy Kahn was curled over the gloomiest corner of the bar, a metropolis of empty and half-empty Guinness bottles in ruin before him. Mickey clapped him on the back, straddled a stool while shaking his head.

“I been thinking of this fuckin’ song all night,” he said, drumming his fingers against the bar. “I know you know it—dum da dum da da dum … some shit.”

“Have a look,” Jimmy said, jerking his head toward the back of the bar.

Mickey turned, saw a spattering of degenerates and hookers, of drunks and underage hoods, and snickered. A young brunette in a flimsy polka-dot dress was laughing with a group of gray-haired men at a table, nodding as if in agreement with the man closest to her. The man lit her cigarette, and Mickey watched her inhale vehemently.

“Fine,” Mickey muttered.

“Table by the jukebox,” Jimmy said.

“Jukebox,” Mickey parroted, turning to look … and paused. Still, that drumming slammed at the back of his head, sending bright flashes of color up through his brain. His eyes stung. “Son of a bitch.” He pushed the stool out from under him, stood crookedly against the bar. “Son of…”

Now Jimmy turned around as well. Slipping a cigarette into his mouth, Jimmy brought one hand up—
slowly
—his forefinger pointing straight into the musty air. “Raymond,” he called. “Ray-Ray.”

Raymond Selano looked up and froze. The color seemed to drain immediately from his face. For one brief moment, it appeared as though he were about to bolt for the door, then changed his mind at the last second. His eyes, large and brown and wide in disbelief, volleyed between the two men at the bar. Raymond Selano was a scrawny neighborhood punk with an insatiable appetite for petty bullshit—robbery, gambling, assault, anything at all. Like an infectious disease, the kid ran the length of the city, inhabiting dingy bars and clubs from the Upper West Side all the way down to Battery Park.

“Son of a bitch!” Mickey called out again. He rolled his shoulders and sauntered over to Raymond’s table. “Where you been, Ray-Ray? You drinkin’ alone?” He slapped the palms of his hands down on the tabletop.

“Fellas,” Raymond said. He forced a half-smile that came across as a smirk, and dragged his fingers through his greasy hair. “What the hell?”

Jimmy approached, pulled out an empty chair beside Raymond, and dropped himself in it. Compared to Raymond Selano, Mickey thought Jimmy Kahn looked like a prizefighter in a checkered blazer. He chuckled, causing Raymond to shoot an uneasy glance in his direction.

“Ease up, Ray-Ray,” Jimmy said. “You got a light?”

Like someone who’d just been struck in the gut by a two-by-four, Raymond took a moment to clear his head before he could react. Absently, he patted down his coat with quaking hands and produced a silver Zippo from a hidden pocket. He flicked it, held it up to Jimmy’s smoke, his hands trembling.

Jimmy took a long drag, exhaled a blue cloud to the ceiling. “I said ease up, fella. Don’t worry—that twelve hundred’s yesterday’s news.”

“Haven’t seen you guys around,” Raymond said. There were dark patches beneath his eyes. His chin and the sides of his face were peppered with spider-hair beard stubble. He continuously picked at a red sore at his collarbone below the neckline of his shirt. If he shook any harder, Mickey thought the damn kid’s head might roll right off his neck.

“Same goes here,” Jimmy said. “You been all right?”

“You look like shit, Ray,” Mickey said.

“I been okay.”

Jimmy grinned, squeezed Raymond’s shoulder. Raymond’s eyes twitched, and his head went reflexively back and to one side. “You got something against us, Ray-Ray? You’re all tense. See this guy, Mickey?”

“You tense, Ray?”

Compulsively, Raymond began cracking his knuckles. “I want you guys to know,” he said, voice cracking, “that I got your money coming. I don’t dupe nobody. I just been backed up with some bullshit. Crazy stuff. You know what I’m sayin’? It’s just one damn thing after another and before you know it, shit’s up to your shoulder blades, you know? You’re swimmin’ in the stuff.”

“Crazy goddamn world,” Mickey said.

“It’s just, I need to get in touch with a few people, make some calls. It’s good, everything’s real in-line. Just, you know, wanted you to know that.”

“We trust you, kid,” Jimmy said. “Forget it. In fact, you can make it up to us tonight. Help out a couple of street thugs like Mickey and me?”

Raymond grinned, now somewhat at ease. His teeth were like busted fence pickets. “Shit,” he said, “what you got?”

Jimmy said, “Let’s take a ride.”

Raymond watched Jimmy rise, watched him crush his cigarette out on the floor, watched him half-walk, half-trot to the bar and knock down the last of his Guinness.

“Got this song in my head,” Mickey told Raymond. “Damnedest thing. You know what that’s like? You hear it, but you can’t think of what it is? Right there. Son of a bitch.”

The room seemed to tilt, to spin, to try and shake him off the floor. With one hand, Mickey grabbed the back of a chair, drummed his fingers along it. Looking over his shoulder, he searched for the young girl in the tight polka-dot dress, but she had disappeared. So had the old guy who’d lit her cigarette.

They made it to the Cadillac, although Mickey couldn’t recall leaving the bar, and from the back seat he watched the red sodium glare of Manhattan flit past the window, as if in a dream.

Fifteen minutes later and Jimmy was maneuvering the Caddy through a confusion of rundown apartments on Tenth Avenue. It had rained earlier that evening, and now the car crashed through puddles and splashed through ragged dips along the alley. Few lights were on in the windows of these apartments. Time was suddenly an absurdity. Mickey wondered if the eleven o’clock deli was still open.

Brakes squealed. Jimmy pulled the Caddy against one of the tenements, slammed it into park, and hit Raymond with the punchline of some joke he’d been telling. Mickey saw that the clock on the Cadillac’s dash read 10:47.

Outside, the air was bitterly cold. Mickey blew plumes of vapor into the air. As if in a parade, the three men pulled their coats closed as they mounted the steps to the rear stoop of one of the apartments. An invisible cat hissed and scurried away through a curtain of metal trash cans. Raymond jumped at the noise, and Jimmy found this hysterical.

“This your place?” Raymond asked no one in particular.

Jimmy rapped both his fists along the door in a circular motion. “Yoo-hoo,” he muttered.

After a few seconds, a light came on at the back of the house. Mickey could hear footsteps coming to the door, could see Irish’s grizzled form shuffling toward the door through the wire-mesh glass that looked into the kitchen. Bolts snapped and the door creaked open, spilling a soft yellow glow along the wet patio.

“Bastards,” Irish muttered, grinning wide enough to split his face in half. Irish was old—late fifties, if Mickey had to guess—and looked like a cement truck fitted with a sleeveless undershirt and tobacco-stained khakis. He had thick, meaty jowls and what looked like a million teeth stuffed into his mouth. His gut was large enough to be obscene.

“What’s up, Irish?”

“Jimmy,” he said. “Come inside. Cold out there.”

They moved into the cramped kitchen and stood around like mopes, their hands stuffed into their coat pockets, until Irish told them to sit inside, relax.

The parlor was dimly lit and cluttered with mismatched junk, presumably accumulated throughout a number of decades. The carpet was thick and kicked up sparks of electricity when Mickey dragged his feet. The entire apartment reeked of spoiled eggs.

“The place isn’t too warm,” Irish apologized, hitting the refrigerator for some beers. “Old burner. Swear to Christ, nothing works right in this lousy city. If it’s not the heater in the winter, it’s the goddamn window unit in the middle of summer. Busts my ass.”

He distributed the beers around the room. Raymond claimed a chair beside a flickering black-and-white television set. Once seated, he seemed preoccupied with examining the filth on the bottom of his sneaker.

Irish sighed and assaulted his own beer, finishing half the bottle in one tremendous swallow. “And don’t get me started on that bitch upstairs and her friggin’ cats. I’m tellin’ you, boys, you ain’t never
seen
so many damn cats. All kinds. Them big fluffy ones and the hairless ones—look like sewer rats. Some of the damn things don’t have tails, if you can imagine that.”