The sound of someone knocking at the door froze Harry where he stood in the hallway. From that angle he could see a silhouette through the frosted pane.
And he knew.
Somehow he just
knew
.
Harry
was all that I said when he opened the door.
Johnnie
, Harry replied, and stepped back to allow me to enter a house he had once believed would never be visited by the past.
It’s been a good few years Harry, I said, and walking past him I made my way to the kitchen, sat down at the table as if this was indeed
my
home, and when Harry came through and sat facing me there was silence for more seconds than he could bear.
Once fool you, twice fool me, I said. Getting to think you might not be the man of your word that you once were Harry.
Not going to try and explain things Johnnie, Harry said. Just gonna say that things are good here and I am not prepared for trouble.
Trouble? I asked. I’m not coming to cause trouble Harry … just to ensure that all’s well between us, you know? Spent these past years sweating my skin off in Mexico, thinking that maybe next month, maybe the month after, Harry Rose will get a message to me, send me some money, make things right. You know what I mean?
Harry nodded. I know what you mean Johnnie.
So finally I figured that maybe Harry Rose had forgotten about his little friend from way back when, and I thought to paying you a visit.
And so you’re here.
I smiled. And so I’m here.
And what kind of payback would you be requiring Johnnie?
Figure I get as much as you did Harry.
Money’s gone Johnnie … all the money we had is gone. Bought a little business, bought this house … earning a wage like a good American citizen these days. Had a family to raise, and when you do things legal nothing comes cheap, if you know what I mean?
I shook my head. I didn’t know what he meant. I have lived all these years waiting for my money. Gave up my own family for the life, you know? Coulda been me here with a wife an’ a kid an’ all, but no, what we were doing was always more important than what I wanted. Seems to me now you didn’t share the same sentiment Harry. I came back here just for my money. If I’d known there was no money I wouldn’t have taken the time to find you.
Harry looked at me with the face of an honest man. There ain’t no money Johnnie, and that’s the truth … and you made the decision not to have a family Johnnie. That was your decision and your decision alone.
I was quiet for a time. In my mind I was killing him, killing him like I’d killed a guy for seventeen bucks and change a thousand years before.
So if there’s no money Harry I reckon you can pay me back in kind, I said.
I could tell that Harry Rose went cold and loose inside. I watched his eyes, and they were the eyes of a guilty man. Seven years in Rikers, all those years in Mexico seeing men hiding from the law had taught me the difference between innocence and guilt.
I have an idea, I said, but this isn’t an idea that could be carried by a man alone. Would take two, you know? And you’re the best number two a man could ever have wished for. So what I think is that you’re gonna help me out with this thing, and then I’m gonna walk away and disappear, and you come home and be dad and Mister Joe Public and whatever the hell else you got going here, and we’re done. That’s gonna be okay with you, isn’t it Harry?
Depends on the alternative, Harry said.
The alternative, my dear friend, is that you might not have a home and family to come home to.
Don’t see as there’s much of a choice then, Harry said.
No, I replied, I don’t see that there is.
In that moment Harry Rose could have tried to kill me, and in killing me he would have killed his past. Murdered it. Vanished it from existence. But he did not, and could not have done, for whatever he may have been faced with at that moment he could never forget that I – Johnnie Redbird – had taken the fall for him twice. He owed me something, owed me all my years of freedom, owed me a fortune in greenbacks and Lincolns, and had we both disappeared to Mexico or Vegas after the King Mike Royale fiasco then Harry would never have met Maggie Erickson, and he would never have been a father. So Harry Rose believed that he was fighting for his family, as well as fighting for himself, and had there been a question about priorities there would have been no question. Despite
the agreement we made he believed I could kill a woman and a child just as easily as I could have killed a cop. There
was
no choice. No choice at all. And I could have killed Harry, could have shot him through the head as he sat there at his kitchen table, but I did not, and would not have done. Harry owed me as much money as I could have carried, and I was not going to walk away without it.
June of 1979, a night that would otherwise have promised an hour in the garden playing catch or freeze-tag, a pot roast in the kitchen, later his feet on the coffee table, a can of beer in his hand and the
Movie Of The Week
on the tube, Harry told Maggie that he had some business to attend to. He would not be long. He promised her that. And then he kissed her, kissed his child also, and left the house in Englewood near Allison Park and went out to meet the past.
And I – as much a part of that past as Harry had ever been – was waiting for him. Waiting patiently, like a man owed his dues.
The security truck collected from seven all-night stores and gas stations between Coytesville and Palisades Park. The guy who drove the truck was maybe five-four and two hundred and eighty pounds. A fat useless fuck, a truck-fuck, I said. The guy who carried the money from the gas stations and stores to the back of the truck was maybe twenty-two or three, looked like a college quarterback on a summer job. They both carried handguns, and inside the cab up front they had a three-inch Mossburgh Magnum pump action that was padlocked into its retainer. A fuck of a lot of use that’ll do them when the shit hits the fan, I said, and then I pulled away from the curb and took a route down Edgewood onto Nordhoff, past The Cemetery of the Madonna towards the Fletcher Avenue overpass.
There was no way for me to know how Harry was feeling, but the fear was in his eyes. Good enough, I thought. Payback time. Now he gets to feel a little of how I lived for seven years in Rikers. Now he gets to smell his own sweat, to feel the
pressure in his chest, the dumbstruck sense of terror when you think this might very well be your last living breath. Feel these things Harry Rose … feel them and know what it’s like to be truly on your own.
How it went down was later a blur, a maelstrom of shouting and struggling, the fat guy fighting to get the shotgun out of its retainer and open the door of the cab at the same time, all the while aware of the fact that he didn’t really want to come out. The cab was bulletproof, and there we were, me and Harry dragging his young colleague across the forecourt of the Brinkerhoff Avenue Texaco station, looking crazy and violent and beyond compunction, and there was no way he wanted to get his ass blown off. But hell, this was what he was paid for, and so he did release the shotgun, and he did get out of the cab, and once he’d emptied the gun in our general direction he
did
get his ass blown off.
But even as the fat guy was lying on the stone-cold gravel forecourt, his life ebbing away slowly towards the storm-drain, he managed to get his handgun from its holster and fire three shots. The third – though he would never know this – found its target. In the confusion and melee that followed – as police sirens racketed through the night, as the gas station attendants hurried out to see to the younger security guard who lay dying on the sidewalk – I started away from the back of the truck and hightailed it towards the car. Harry Rose, the bone in his right thigh shattered by a .38 slug, did his best to catch up, but when I saw the flashing red-and-blue cherry bars in a procession down Glen Avenue I floored the accelerator and took off. Behind me, growing ever smaller in the distance, was the sight of four heavy money bags, bags that contained something in the region of three hundred and fifty grand, and beside them, his arm outstretched, as if reaching towards them with one last desperate hope, the security guard.
Harry Rose – knowing that destiny had finally found him – stood in the street, his pants leg soaked with his own blood, in his hand the sweat-drenched balaclava he had worn, and he
thought of his child, a few months short of eight years old, and how Maggie would explain where daddy had gone.
He dropped to his knees. The cops encircled him, hollered at him, pointed their guns and made it clear they would shoot him if he didn’t comply, but Harry Rose possessed neither the strength nor the will to get up. His life was over, what life he had managed to claw back from the horrors of Dachau, and he knew it. There was no coming back from this one. This was three strikes good, the end of the line, and the fat lady had not only completed the aria but the echo of her voice was nothing more than a memory.
In the second that I looked back I saw a broken and defeated man. His life had been smashed with all the force of a juggernaut. Gone was his wife, his child, everything he had worked to provide for them. Gone was his future, his past also, and yet also, in amongst all those things, I knew he felt that the debt he owed me had still yet to be paid. Gone was any hope he might redeem his score with Johnnie Redbird. Perhaps that, of all things, was the hardest thing of all. He knew me well enough to know I would never quit. He knew I wanted the money that was mine, and he knew I would never cease until I got it.
There was no plea bargaining, no second degree, no manslaughter, no justifiable homicide. This was plain and simple murder. The sole extenuating circumstance was that witnesses concurred there were two men. There was no way of telling who had fired the shots that had killed the security guards, and thus the death sentence could not be levied against Honest Harry Rose.
But they could give him life, two terms consecutive, and they sent him down to Rikers like the bad boy that he was.
It was the end of an era, the end of a dream perhaps, and I – looking over my shoulder as I fled – believed that in some small way, in some perverse and circuitous fashion – justice had been seen to be done. Gone was his money, his family, all the things he had worked for.
Same things I had lost. Same things I had never been given a chance to possess.
But I figured that while Harry Rose still carried sufficient strength in his body to breathe there would be a way – there would always be a way – to make him pay his dues.
Annie could not sleep.
It didn’t help that Sullivan was out until the very early hours of Thursday morning, and by the time he did arrive she felt that it would be too much for him to carry her burdens.
She thought of David. A great deal. The
need
to know where he was became a preoccupation, an intensity that almost consumed her. A little after one in the morning she even considered taking a cab out to where he lived. She guessed she could have found it, but the idea of trawling the streets around St Nicholas and 129th in the early hours of the morning frightened her. She was alone, at least for the time being, and she would have to bear it without support.
Eventually, as the sun rose and filled the room with a vague sodium-yellow ghost, she slept, and when Sullivan knocked on her door some hours later it was already past eleven and there was no way she could face The Reader’s Rest.
‘I need to find him,’ she told Sullivan once she’d made coffee for them both and they were seated in the kitchen.
‘Need?’ Sullivan asked. ‘Or want?’
‘Need,’ Annie stated emphatically. ‘I need to find out what happened with him.’
‘I can tell you that,’ Sullivan started, but Annie was shaking her head.
‘I got what you said about fear of commitment and all that, and I’m sure that’s part of it, but I want to hear it from him, from David you know?’
‘And what about your Mr Forrester? He came last night?’
‘He did.’
‘And he brought you the rest of the story?’
Annie nodded.
‘So tell me … what happened with these guys?’
‘I want to talk about David,’ Annie said. ‘I want to go over there, over to his apartment and talk to him.’
‘I don’t think you should do that Annie,’ Sullivan said.
‘Why the hell not?’
Sullivan smiled, but beneath that smile there was a flicker of concern. ‘What the hell happened to the shy and retiring Annie O’Neill that moved in with me all those years ago?’
‘She got pissed off Jack … pissed off with being stepped over and walked past and ignored, that’s what. I’m going to go over to his apartment and speak to him, and to tell you the truth there’s nothing that you can say or do to stop me.’
Sullivan raised his hands. ‘Hell Annie, you got fire in your belly today. I’m not going to stop you, not even gonna suggest it, but I think you better be prepared for the worst.’
‘The worst? What could be worse than not knowing Jack?’
‘Sometimes the truth is worse than not knowing.’
Annie shook her head. ‘Not in this case. If it’s me I want to know it, and if it’s David then fair enough, but I’m not giving up without a fight … you said that yourself, right?’
‘Suit yourself Annie O’Neill,’ Sullivan said. ‘Don’t let it ever be said that I interfered in matters of the heart.’
Annie rose and walked through to her bedroom.
Sullivan sat quietly while she dressed, called through one time to ask her where the manuscript was but Annie didn’t hear him, and when she appeared in the doorway, grabbed her coat from the chair and put it on, he asked her if she wanted him to go with her.
She shook her head. ‘Big girl now,’ she said. ‘I can handle this Jack.’
‘You’re sure?’
She nodded, reached out and touched his arm as she passed him. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.
‘The chapter?’ Sullivan asked as she reached the door.
‘Kitchen counter,’ she said. ‘Brown envelope. Stay here and read it if you want … make yourself at home.’