Shamrock Alley (50 page)

Stepping onto the back porch for a breath of fresh air, Mickey shook his long hair down in front of his eyes and slipped his bloody hands into the pockets of his coat. Beside him, Irish stood smoking a cigar and leaning over the porch railing. His Coors Light cap was back on his head. From the back, his shoulders looked a good four feet wide. He’d been on the porch all the while.

Jimmy was there, too, beside Irish, hunched over the railing and smoking a cigarette. When Mickey stepped onto the porch, Jimmy shot a glance in his direction. Mickey folded his hands over the wrought iron railing. His hands looked like raw cuts of beef.

Without looking at him, Irish said, “You take care of that mess in there, Mickey?”

Lighting his own cigarette, Mickey met Jimmy’s eyes. “She didn’t know nothing,” he said. It was his attempt at correcting the situation.

Jimmy sighed and exhaled a plume of smoke into the night. “Anybody see you go up to her apartment?”

“No,” Mickey said. He hadn’t seen a soul.

“Deveneau’s gonna come sniffing around now,” Jimmy said. Sucking the life from his cigarette, he turned so Mickey could make out his profile. In the poor light, he looked like a crude sculpture of himself. “You know that, right?”

“Fuck Deveneau,” Mickey said.

“No,” Jimmy said calmly, shaking his head. With one hand, he picked peeling flakes of paint from the railing and flicked them into the night. “I don’t wanna have to watch my back for that asshole now.”

“Not a problem,” Mickey said, and blew a waft of smoke up into the sky. “We’ll start the new year off good.”

He’d never liked Francis Deveneau anyway.

Francis Deveneau and his good friend Bobby “Two-Tone” Sallance stood outside Deveneau’s club smoking cigarettes, their foreheads glistening with sweat despite the temperature.

“You should do a ladies night,” Bobby Two-Tone was saying, “like some of the clubs downtown. Free drinks and shit. Gets the girls to come down. Half the time it’s mostly guys here, Frankie. A goddamn sausage fest. That ain’t right.”

“The hell you know about runnin’ a business?”

“I’m just saying, Frankie,” Bobby Two-Tone said. “Hippendorf’s does it on Wednesday nights. Man, on Wednesdays, it like
wall-to-wall
skirts. And they lose no money ‘cause all the guys bust their ass to get in and sniff around. Hit those fools with a twenty-dollar cover. Trust me, man, it’s a goddamn brilliant idea.”

“Sure,” Deveneau said, uninterested. He happened to turn and glance at the traffic passing along the street, shivering against the cold, when he spotted the slow-moving Cadillac creeping along the curb. Uninterested, he watched the Caddy for a couple seconds before stomping on his cigarette and going back into the club. He thought nothing of the car—it was one of a million that passed in front of the club every night.

The thing about Manhattan nightclubs was that it took a catastrophe to keep people from coming. And to Deveneau’s clientele, a shoot-out in the basement a month ago did not count as a catastrophe. Lucky for him.

He made his way through a crowd of dancers, slid by the bar, winked at Sandra behind the bar. One finger tapping at his waist, another finger flossing the smooth divot of skin beneath his nose, he crossed the dance floor and made his way down an unlit brick corridor. Here, the industrial pump of the dance music was absorbed in the walls. Before him, the hallway seemed to shift and sway. A couple necking near a pay phone hardly noticed as he bumped by and stumbled into the restroom.

A few guys were bent over one of the sinks. They’d taken down the mirror and laid it across the basin, and were doing lines of cocaine off it. Deveneau thought he recognized them, and he pointed a finger at one of them. The guy waved him over, clubbed him on the back with a meaty hand, and urged him to snort a line.

“Ahhhh …” He did, enthusiastically.

Turning, one hand fumbling with the zipper of his pants, he pushed himself against a urinal, his eyelids fluttering. The chatter of the men behind him swelled like a balloon in his head. There was a clatter, the squeal of a sneaker on the tile floor.

He muttered something in a singsong voice. No one responded.

When he turned around, two men stood behind him. It took him a second for his mind to adjust. A crooked smile broke across his face.

“Mickey … Jimmy …”

Jimmy Kahn lifted a gun and shot Francis Deveneau in the throat. Deveneau jerked backward against the wall and slumped to a half-crouch against the urine-splattered urinal. He held a hand to his throat, his eyes bugged, and blood squirted through his fingers in a torrent and washed down his shirt and pants, pooling on the filthy tile floor.

He opened his mouth to make a sound, but no sound came out. Only blood.

The whole world tilted and spun, and he saw Jimmy Kahn push the gun into his face. It looked enormous, hideous, fake …

Then—

Nothing.

A light drizzle was falling as Jimmy pulled up outside Calliope Candy. The exhaust was kicking up white clouds that were quickly dispersed by the wind. Traffic zipped by in a blaze along Tenth Avenue.

Mickey slipped out of the car, his .25 Beretta wedged into the waistband of his jeans, his coat pulled tight around his body, and crossed over to the pay phone just outside the store. His heart was racing, his adrenaline pumping. There was a buzzing—a rattling—inside his head that reminded him of chattering teeth. Yet he was not cold; he was burning up.

Beneath the conic gleam of a lamppost’s light, Mickey picked up the receiver to the pay phone, slipped in some change, and dialed a telephone number. Patting himself down, he found a nub of pencil and his Black Box matchbook in one pocket. He waited, the wind angry and biting all around him. He hardly felt it. Even his face, bruised and injured from the fight with Patty Nolan, did not bother him.

After a number of rings, Ashleigh Harris answered the phone.

“It’s Mickey. You got Esposito’s address for me?”

“You know it,” Ashleigh said and gave Mickey the address, which he wrote down on the Black Box matchbook cover.

“He see you follow him?”

“No way,” Ashleigh said. There was loud music on in the background.

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

Mickey hung up and stared at Johnny Esposito’s home address. For a moment, he lingered beneath the glow of the lamppost.

Then, with what looked very much like a smile on his face, he climbed back into Jimmy Kahn’s Cadillac.

“P
HONE’S RINGING,”
K
ATIE WHISPERED
.

“I know,” he said. “I just don’t want to get up.”

“Up, up,” she said, playfully yanking his hair.

He lifted his head from her shoulder and rolled onto his side of the bed. His left elbow went down on a box of Kleenex, crumpling it. “You want anything from the kitchen?” he said, moving past the foot of their bed and running one hand along the baby’s crib before stepping out into the hallway.

“Orange juice,” she called back, then blew her nose into a ball of tissues.

In the kitchen, he grabbed the phone receiver from the wall and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?”

“It’s Kersh.”

“What’s wrong?” He knew immediately from the sound of Kersh’s voice that there was trouble.

“Stay calm,” Kersh said. “We just heard from one of the wire taps that Mickey’s got your home address. They must have had somebody follow you home. The call was made, like, thirty seconds ago, John. I think they’re heading your way.”

He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. The walls of the kitchen seemed to close in on him. “Holy shit, tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m on my way over to your place right now. I got backup on the way, too. They’ll meet me there. We’ll get this thing straightened out …”

He felt like a sleeping dog that had just been dumped from a moving car. The fact that he’d been so stupid, so easily bested by Mickey and Jimmy
to be followed home …
the notion made him crazy with anger.

“Wait. Take this address down,” he said, and gave Kersh the address to his father’s home on Eleventh Avenue. He was deliberately trying to keep his voice down, nearly whispering, so that Katie wouldn’t hear. All of a sudden, the apartment felt preposterously small. “Don’t bother coming here; we’re getting out. I’m bringing Katie there—it’s my father’s house—and I want you there. I don’t want her to be alone—”

“Alone?”

“Just go, Bill. I’ll meet you there.”

He hurried back into the bedroom, quickly grabbing a pair of pants from the closet.

“Where’s my juice?” Katie murmured.

“Hon,” he said, “you have to get up. That was work. I need to get you out of the house.” He slipped his pants on and moved to the side of the bed, helping Katie up. He took one of her forearms, and it felt cold.

“John—”

“It sounds worse than it really is,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re just playing it safe. Get on shoes and a coat. I’ll take you to Dad’s house.”

She went momentarily rigid at the foot of the bed. One hand gripped the crib’s railing. “God, John—
what happened?”

He smiled and somehow managed to summon a laugh. Rubbing the side of her face, he said, “Humor me. I’m just overreacting. But let’s move it.”

“John …” She sounded very far away.

“Come on,” he urged.

She covered his hand with her own, pressing his palm into the smoothness of her cheek. “You promise this is nothing?”

“I do,” he said. “I promise. Now get dressed.”

While she pulled on a pair of sweatpants and shoes, he hit the front windows and peered out through the curtains. Cars were parked up and down the street, and a few drove past the intersection. It was too soon—they wouldn’t be able to get out here that fast.

“You almost ready?” he called to his wife.

“My shoes …” she said, shuffling into the front room. “I can’t—”

“Don’t come by the windows.”

She didn’t move, didn’t say a word—just stood there with her coat draped over her nightshirt, the left side of her body illuminated by the dull orange light from the hallway. Unmoving and silent, she just stared at him. As if she were suddenly unsure of who he was and what he was doing …

“Come on,” he said, leading her back out into the hallway toward the closet. “Your shoes … they’re in here …”

He found them, bent down, and coaxed them onto her feet. She moved like a person comprised of cut wood and metal hinges. Looking down the hallway, he could see the kitchen table, the stove, the refrigerator—all those things spread out before him
in his home
, and how they seemed to pulse with life, with current, with vibration.

“Button your coat,” he told Katie, then dashed down the hallway to the bedroom. Opening his dresser drawer, he slid his gun out and pushed it into the waistband of his jeans. He felt around for his undercover wallet and tossed that on the bed. Resting on the nightstand beside the bed were his real credentials, which he grabbed and stuffed in his pants pocket.

Back out in the hallway, Katie had not moved. She stood by the front door, her coat buttoned incorrectly and hanging lopsided from her shoulders, like a small child in the middle of some great and terrible commotion. And maybe she even was.

He unlocked the door, stepped out into the hallway, glanced around. It was dark and quiet. Reaching for his wife’s hand, he led her onto the landing and shut and locked the door behind them. Still, Katie didn’t say a word; she just moved as told, her mouth a slit beneath her nose, her eyes wide and dazed. He silently thanked God for her cooperation, for he did not know what he would have done had she gone into hysterics or refused, for whatever reason, to leave the apartment.

She was very pregnant and had some difficulty descending the stairs as quickly as he wanted. There, in the building’s lobby, he peered through the diamond window on the door and out into the street. He could see the Camaro at the bottom of the walk, sandwiched between a blue van and a red Toyota Celica. He recognized both cars. And from where he stood, he could see no headlights moving down the street.

Behind him, the sound of a door creaking open broke the breathy silence, and he spun around with one hand over Katie’s belly, his other hand whipping his gun from his pants and pointing it down the hallway.