Shamrock Alley (5 page)

Jimmy leaned back against the wall, popped the tendons in his back. “You got any food around here?”

“You find it, it’s yours,” Irish said, finishing his beer.

Jimmy looked at Raymond and held up his own bottle. “You good?”

“I’ll do another.”

Jimmy flipped his bottle in the air. It spun twice, and he caught it—barely—by the neck as he disappeared into the kitchen.

Irish slipped around a small end table and opened a tarnished pewter box that rested on top of it. “You wanna hit a few lines?”

On Mickey’s left, Raymond laughed at something on the television set while wiping saliva from his chapped lips with the sleeve of his coat. “I’m up,” Raymond said, sounding a bit more relaxed.

Jimmy returned, his fists loaded with frozen burritos. “Chow’s on,” he said. Like a knife-thrower in the circus, he began firing the burritos into the air, laughing when Raymond attempted to grab one and nearly fell out of his chair.

“Good stuff here,” Irish said, sifting through the little pewter box. He brought what looked like a ring-wrapper from a cigar up to his nose, sniffed it, replaced it inside the box.

Raymond gathered two of the burritos from the floor and examined the packaging. “Damn things are still cold, Jimmy. You ain’t heatin’ them up?”

“I look like your mommy?” Jimmy said, and produced a .38 from inside his coat. In one fluid motion, he cocked back the hammer, his fingers somehow seemingly unrelated to the expression on his face. He aimed the gun at Raymond.

Raymond uttered a weak laugh, the burritos dropping from his hands and sliding down his jacket into his lap. “Jimmy, what the hell—”

Jimmy Kahn fired two shots in immediate succession. The first one caught Raymond in the chest, jerking the boy back against the chair, his left arm shooting up to his face, his fingers bent into a crooked talon. The second shot caught him in the side of the face, expelling a black gout of blood that splashed against the back of the chair and the alabaster wall beside Raymond’s head. A deluge of blood poured from his mouth as he convulsed against the chair, his eyes peeled back into his head, his blood-speckled lip working soundlessly.

“Jesus
Christ!”
Irish shouted, his big hands pressed to either side of his face. “Jesus Christ—in my goddamn
house
, Jimmy?”

One of Raymond’s feet snapped out and struck the leg of the small end table, splintering it down the middle and causing the table to topple over. Irish made a noble attempt at rescuing his pewter box, but he was too slow: the box hit the carpet, its lid ricocheting off toward one corner of the room, spilling its contents in a fan of fine powder across the floor.

Raymond’s body flailed. Like a sack of wet grain, the kid slid off the front of the chair and hit the floor. A vertical crimson stripe divided the back of the chair into two sections.

Jimmy reloaded the two spent rounds, his teeth chewing at the inside of his right cheek. Mickey watched Jimmy’s hands move, watched Irish back up against the side of the wall with a look of absolute disgust on his face. The old man couldn’t stop watching as Raymond’s spastic leg continued to grind his snort into the carpet.

Jimmy took a step closer to Raymond. He held the gun out at arm’s length, slowly rotating his wrist, as if he were having a difficult time deciding which way he liked holding the weapon. He thumbed back the hammer.

“Have some more,” he said, and fired three more rounds into Raymond Selano.

Mickey finished his beer and stuffed the empty bottle into the pocket of his peacoat. Like back at the bar, the room began to waver and shift, to expand and deflate … as if he were watching it breathe.

“Goddamn,” Irish muttered. “Look at this mess.”

Jimmy tucked the .38 into the waistband of his pants. He called to Irish without taking his eyes from Raymond’s body. “Get some knives and a few plastic bags.”

“Goddamn,” Irish muttered again. “You bring this shit to my house without tellin’ me? You gonna do somethin’ like this in my goddamn place, Jimmy, you say somethin’. You don’t just do it.”

“Plastic trash bags,” Jimmy reiterated, “big ones. And a couple of those small sandwich baggie things. I want the hands.”

Irritated, Irish shuffled into the kitchen and returned with a cluster of butcher knives and a cylindrical roll of plastic trash bags. He handed the items over to Jimmy, who took them and quickly bent to one knee, grabbed the end of one of the trash bags, and fanned the roll like a magician yanking a tablecloth out from underneath a china dinner setting. A carpet of plastic unraveled the length of the sitting room.

Mickey dropped beside Jimmy, absently scratching at the back of his shaggy head. With little enthusiasm, Mickey removed a slender knife from his coat and jammed it into Raymond’s chest.

He winked at Jimmy. “Just makin’ sure.”

Grinning, Jimmy flicked Mickey’s ear and stood. “Help me drag him to the bathroom,” he said. “We’ll put him in the tub.”

Jimmy removed his coat like a surgeon preparing for an operation. Mickey stuffed the collection of butcher knives into his own coat pocket, bent, and grabbed Raymond Selano’s hands. With Irish standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room, the two men carried the kid’s body into the bathroom with little difficulty. While he carried the body, his hands slick with Ray-Ray Selano’s blood, Mickey finally remembered the song that had been eluding him all evening.

He began to hum.

I
N THE SOFT RAIN OF MIDDAY
, J
OHN
stood across the street from a group of run-down West Side tenements. The rain helped to calm him. Each time he closed his eyes, he could see the waxy, emotionless face of Roger Biddleman. Even in reflection, Biddleman’s forced composure and proctor-like countenance, enshrined in the sanctity of his lacquered office, irritated John to no end. People like Biddleman were an open book, their intentions and motivations so clearly defined that they clouded the air about them like the contrail of a jet plane. And more often than not, their intentions and motivations, John knew, were invariably self-serving.

A taxicab crashed through a puddle beside the curb, and John caught his tired reflection in its passing windows.

Finishing a Styrofoam cup of coffee and shivering against the cold, he crossed Tenth Avenue and passed through a rusted cyclone fence that enclosed, among other things, Tressa Walker’s West Side apartment building.

The Secret Service had picked Tressa Walker up roughly two months ago after she’d passed a few phony hundreds at a string of convenience stores around the city. The bills were excellent fakes, and Kersh quickly recognized them from a previous bust, explaining that the printer—some Jew from Queens named Lowenstein—was currently incarcerated. With Tressa’s prints on the money, the Service located and detained her for questioning. A search of her vehicle uncovered numerous boxes of Pampers and aspirin, each purchased from a different location with a phony hundred. In her purse, they discovered two more hundreds. A young, frightened junkie with a baby at home, Tressa Walker was quick to give up information. Her boyfriend, Franics Deveneau, had access to the money and had given her a few bills to attract potential customers. The capitalist that she was, Tressa had decided to simply pass the bills herself, pocketing the change from her small purchases. Fearful of what awaited her if she refused to cooperate, she readily agreed to take John into Deveneau’s circle.

Tressa’s apartment complex was run-down, the brick façade as black as a bruise from numerous fires. He had been here only once before but noticed very little had changed. From behind a chain-link fence, a grouchy Airedale barked at him as he walked by. The noise attracted several pairs of eyes, all of which peered out at him from darkened first-floor windows like the beady eyes of bats from a cave. Above him, a group of messy-looking children sat on a fire escape and watched him the way peasants might watch someone from a faraway land entering their village.

An emergency exit door at the rear of Tressa’s building was propped open with a plastic trash receptacle. John stepped over the receptacle and passed into a dark, mildew-rich hallway. The bite of fresh urine struck him. Somewhere far off he could hear a small child crying, some television game show turned up too loud. Tressa Walker lived on the second floor. Though John had been to the building once before, he’d never entered her apartment.

He turned up the stairwell and walked lightly. Graffiti along the stone walls offered advice, such as
phuck off and smoke it
. The top of the stairwell faced the door to Tressa’s apartment. John knocked once and heard some commotion from inside, but no one came to the door. Casually, he glanced around. The hallway was empty, with the exception of a hungry-looking cat staring at him from its perch on a windowsill.

He knocked again. “Tressa?”

He heard footsteps approach the door, heard a series of bolts turn, and the door cracked open. Wide-eyed Tressa Walker stared at him from the other side of a security chain. She looked distrustful. A single whip of hair curled down over her face, obscuring her left eye. As she began to recognize him, her brow creased and she looked like someone forced to concentrate on too many things at once.

“Uh …”

“You alone?” he asked.

Chewing at her lower lip, she nodded, seemed to consider the situation, then undid the chain and let him inside.

“Place is a mess,” she said.

The apartment was small and drafty, with only one main living area and a kitchen vestibule as well as a brief corridor that communicated with what was probably a bathroom and bedroom. For the most part, there was no decor—only a conglomeration of junked and salvaged
things:
of splintered furniture and wounded armchairs with springs coiling out like snakes from a den; of crepe garden lanterns, strung together and draped from the ceiling; of mismatched ceramic vases; of dusty record albums fanned out across the carpet; of tiny pictures in wooden frames hanging from the walls, the photographs themselves so small it was impossible to make out any of the faces. Despite the more bizarre artifacts lying around the room—most noticeably, a taxidermic iguana atop an old Zenith—it was these framed pictures that commanded the most attention. It took John a moment to realize why that was: in her own way, those pictures were Tressa Walker’s attempt at humanity, at civility. Unlike the ceramic ashtrays and the crepe garden lanterns and the stuffed lizard, those framed pictures were
planned
and were
human
. He, too, had pictures on his walls at home.

“You expecting company?” he asked.

She shook her head and rubbed her left arm slightly before slipping into the kitchen nook, pretending to look busy. Through the single window over the sink, gray daylight cast a dull gloom across a filthy Formica countertop. A light drizzle pattered against the pane. “No.”

“Deveneau not around?” He glanced down the hallway, tried to see into the bedroom. The door was closed.

“He’s out. Why’d you come here?”

There was a baby’s crib in the center of the room, half hidden beneath a swell of unwashed laundry. Like the pictures, this too provided a strangely human touch, though more out of necessity than of want.

“Baby around?”

“Asleep in the other room. So we should be quiet.” She crossed the room and gathered some laundry in her arms, clearing a section of sofa. “You can sit.”

“I’m okay.”

“What is it? Why’d you come here?”

“What’s the matter with your arm?”

She looked down at her arm, as if the prominent purple-brown bruise had just now been brought to her attention. It wasn’t a drug addict’s bruise—she had plenty of those to compare this one to—but rather the sort of bruise inflicted by the wrap of strong fingers around her arm. Someone else’s fingers.

“It’s nothing,” she said. Then to change the subject: “I should thank you for last night. That guy was gonna kill me. I thought I was—” She rolled her shoulders, the events of last night suddenly no big deal. “And then Deveneau—he went ravin’ about you after what happened, you know? About how you shot that guy to save my life, then helped us escape.”

“I didn’t help anybody escape,” he said. “I just followed the two of you. I’m not a big fan of getting my head blown off.”

“Well, you still killed that guy. I owe you that. So thanks.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I came by to let you know we’re dropping the case.” There was no need to explain the situation to her, no need to go into detail. Anyway, she wouldn’t be interested in such things. They didn’t touch her, didn’t matter to her, and had nothing to do with her right here, right now.

“What about me?”

“I’m letting you walk,” he said. “You and Deveneau.”

It took her several beats to find the words, any words. “That’s it?” She seemed both relieved and disappointed at the same time, uncertain as to what this truly meant. Absently, she fingered the bruise on her arm; it was the color of an early sunset. “You’re just letting me walk?”

“You can tell Deveneau I got hinky after what happened at the club and that I ain’t interested in doing business no more.”

“Just like that?” Before agreeing to cooperate with the Secret Service, Tressa Walker had been facing what she feared to be some serious jail time. And on top of that, it was also made clear that Child Welfare would be called in to come and take away her baby if she didn’t cooperate. Agreeing to take John into Deveneau’s circle had afforded her the opportunity to sidestep prison and keep her baby. Now it was evident in her eyes that she did not know what to make of this new information. She blinked twice, quite noticeably, and brushed the comma of hair out of her eyes. “You let me off just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“What about our deal?”

“I said I’m letting you slide on this. The whole thing. It’s over.”

“Then thank you. Again.” She moved her pile of laundry to a different part of the room, desperate to convey a sense of occupation. Her lower lip was being chewed noiselessly—a sign that her mind was reeling.