Shamrock Alley (24 page)

The man chuckled once—a rumbling, truck-like sound—and slid the egg cream over to John. He tossed a plastic spoon wrapped in cellophane next to it while licking the syrup from one finger. “Want a little shot of pepper in it?”

“What?”

A bottle of Irish whiskey materialized from behind the counter. The proprietor uncapped it, tipped it, and shook a tablespoon’s worth into the egg cream.

“Wakes up your guts,” the man said. “Stir it with the spoon.”

John stirred it, took a sip. Winced. “Son of a bitch. It’s good.”

The man smiled, exposing a row of tar-stained teeth, then nodded toward the front of the store. “Here’s your boy.”

Mickey entered, wearing a nylon winter coat and a pair of wool gloves with the fingers cut off. His bleary eyes and disheveled appearance communicated to John that Mickey O’Shay had probably just woken up, most likely from the phone call just moments before. He didn’t look irritated or cautious—not even concerned—as John had expected he might. He staggered into the store and paused briefly in front of the space heater. Then he turned and, rubbing his unshaven chin, crossed over to the small booth that stood beside a pinball machine. He emptied his weight onto one of the seats.

“Sit down,” Mickey told him.

John pulled himself off the counter and sat across from Mickey in the booth. He placed his egg cream on the table between them and Mickey’s eyes floated to it, seemed to soften, then turned back to John. When he opened his mouth, his breath struck John like a slap from across the table.

“How’d you know to come here?”

“Tressa told me.”

“I figured,” Mickey said.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m gonna let you know where I stand on this. Last month, I make a deal with somebody. The night I meet with him, the whole thing goes to shit. I nearly wind up shot and almost arrested, and I got nothing to show for it. I meet with you and you sound on the level—then last week you pull this shit on me. I got a buyer for this stuff and probably a couple more, so I don’t have the time or the patience to fuck around. If I didn’t think I could make a score off this stuff, I wouldn’t be here now. So this is kinda like make it or break it.”

Mickey cracked his knuckles. “You don’t like the way we do business, you—”

“We ain’t
doin’
business. Yet. And that’s the problem. I want to make sure this is for real, not just somethin’ you
hope
you can do.”

Mickey snorted and fluttered his eyelids. At that moment he seemed content to sit in this booth, half awake and cracking his knuckles, until the day he died. Again, his casual demeanor provoked John, irritated him. Mickey wasn’t just doing John a favor; he stood to make a hefty score himself on the deal. Yet his conduct continually suggested an indifference toward the prospect of money-making, which was an attitude very much unlike anyone else’s John had ever dealt with.

“You like to talk, don’t you?” Mickey said.

“I’m in it strictly for the money,” he returned.

“You got your car outside?”

“Next block over.”

“Pull it out front,” Mickey said, pulling himself out of the booth and heading toward the door. From where he sat, John watched him hustle across the street and disappear into the blackened doorway of a twelve-story high-rise.

“Take it easy,” he said to the large man behind the counter, sliding out of the booth.

“You gonna pay for that?” the proprietor answered, pointing a knobby finger at John’s egg cream.

Moments later, he was sitting behind the wheel of his car, the engine running to work the heater. His eyes scanned the streets but did not see Kersh’s sedan anywhere. A few cars were parked across the street, the unmistakable shapes of heads behind the windshields. Most of the other cars along the street were vacant, packed like crowded teeth along the curb. Hubcaps missing, fenders dented, the sight reminded him of Evelyn Gethers’s Lincoln Towncar and Pier 76.

Up ahead, he could see the sun dipping down behind the skyline of high-rises.

Mickey appeared in the doorway of his tenement and started across the street toward John’s car. John noticed he never looked up when he walked, was never curious about or tempted by the world around him. It suddenly occurred to him how dissimilar Mickey O’Shay was from Francis Deveneau and Jeffrey Clay. Both Deveneau and Clay had been your run-of-the-mill thugs, struggling to make some dough and a name for themselves. They happened on an opportunity to pass some funny money and did it with gusto. Tressa had introduced him to Jeffrey Clay, and it had been Clay’s greed that eventually led him to Francis Deveneau. And, in turn, it had been Deveneau’s greed that initiated their meeting at the nightclub, the boastful Frenchman ready to make a deal. Yet now here was Mickey O’Shay, an arrogant Irish punk who’d undoubtedly spent his entire life traversing the bowels of Hell’s Kitchen, committing one fashion of deviant act after another.

Mickey stepped around to the Camaro’s passenger side, popped open the door, and slid into the bucket. He slammed the door hard enough to make the window rattle.

“Here,” Mickey said, producing a business-sized envelope from within his coat pocket and tossing it onto John’s lap. “Put your mind at ease.”

John picked up the envelope, pulled back the lip, peered inside. He shook the stack of counterfeit hundreds into his hand. To his surprise, the bills were fresh—crisp and uncirculated, still banded by printer’s tape. This suggested Mickey O’Shay was much closer to the printer—the source—than he’d originally thought. Jeffrey Clay’s money had been wrinkled and held together by rubber bands, most likely counted by Deveneau, then counted
again
by Clay himself. Either Mickey trusted the printer enough not to count the bills, or he worked in collaboration with him. Whatever the reason, John almost felt the world lurch forward beneath him at the sight of the freshly printed hundreds.

“Looks good,” he said, fingering the paper, rubbing a thumb across the ink. He slipped the money back into the envelope.

“So now, Johnny-No-Bullshit,” Mickey said, “it’s up to you.”

“How much is here?”

“Ten grand.”

“How soon can you get the other ninety?”

“A wink,” Mickey said. “Now how about you?”

“Tonight,” he told Mickey. “Give me three hours, and I’ll be back here tonight.”

Again, that same look of disinterest passed over Mickey’s face. Despite his street-hardened features and coke-reddened eyes, he once again looked like the young choirboy he’d appeared to be on the day of their first meeting as they sat before the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Mickey glanced at the car’s clock. “Make it four hours,” Mickey said. “Pull up along Tenth, in front of the store. You wait for me in the car, and I’ll come out. You stay in the car.”

“Let me keep this ten,” John said. “It’ll help loosen up my money on the other end.”

Mickey plucked the envelope from John’s hand.

“I don’t think so.” Mickey climbed back out into the street. He paused before shutting the car door, his body bent over, his head peeking beneath the roof. “And tell that bitch to quit flappin’ her gums about me. She opens her mouth and says my name one more time, they’ll be the last words she ever speaks.”

“The bills are fresh,” he told Kersh back at the office. “He walked right into his apartment and came out with them, untouched, still banded.”

“Fresh?” Kersh said. He raised his eyebrows. No doubt the same thoughts were crossing Kersh’s mind now that had crossed John’s when he’d first shaken the stack of hundreds into his hand. Kersh set his phone down on the cradle. He’d just gotten off the phone with Tommy Veccio, the agent assigned to keep an eye on Mickey O’Shay and tail him when he left Calliope Candy to pick up the counterfeit.

“Who’re we bringing in on this?” John asked.

“We’ll have Veccio and Conners on surveillance tonight, couple blocks from the store,” Kersh said, unfolding a map on his desk of the West Side District. Early evening, and the number of agents milling about the office had dwindled to a select few finishing reports or going over case files. Kersh’s voice seemed to resonate off the walls. “I’ll be somewhere along Tenth Avenue, between West Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth, facing the store.”

“I don’t want an eyeball on this,” John said quickly, referring to the agent on surveillance who acted as the stationary hub and lookout who maintained contact with all other units on watch. “You get too close to this guy, and he’ll know something’s up. He’ll spook.”

“I think we should play this thing right, maybe get a wire on you …”

“Absolutely not! If this guy decides to pat me down, I’m screwed.”

“John …”

“Trust me, Bill,” he insisted. “We get too close to the surface, and this guy Mickey’ll sniff us out like a dog. I got this guy, okay? I do. I really do. It’ll play out fine.”

“You think you can handle too much,” Kersh said quietly. “That’s not good. You’re too anxious.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Resigned, Kersh leaned back in his chair. His eyes trailed away from John and focused on the bank of windows that looked out over the city and the setting sun. He looked very old in the light of sunset, John thought, and for the first time since he’d known Bill Kersh he wondered why the man had never married.

“I just don’t want you getting too cocky, too pushy on this,” Kersh said after a moment.

“Like a kid in a candy store,” John said.

Bill Kersh did not laugh.

Following a brief twenty-minute meeting with Kersh and Agent Conners, John drove out to his father’s house in Brooklyn. The sky was already ripe with evening by the time he pulled up in front of the house, and he’d spent the entire drive over forcing himself to switch gears and leave tonight’s impending meeting with Mickey O’Shay back at the office. Yet even as he parked the car in front of the house, he couldn’t shake Mickey’s face from his mind.

He leaned over and grabbed his father’s coat from the back seat. The feel of the fabric sent a wave of shame through his body, and again he scolded himself for forgetting to bring his father the coat.

His father had been released from the hospital the day after Thanksgiving. Weakened by extensive bed rest and the chemotherapy, the old man had been barely strong enough to lift himself out of his hospital bed. Watching his father move with such difficulty had bothered him. His father had stood, momentarily in pain, at the foot of his bed while he searched the room for his belongings. John and Katie had remained by the hospital room door. When a male nurse arrived with a wheelchair, John’s father only shook his head.

“I walked in—” the old man said, “I can walk out.”

“Sir,” the male nurse assured him, “all patients are released in a wheelchair. Just to get you downstairs and outside. It’s nothing personal.”

“Dad,” Katie said, moving toward the man. She placed one hand around his frail wrist and led him to the chair, assisting him in sitting down.

Outside the room, a young doctor had given John the rundown on his father’s medication—what needed to be administered for pain, for sleepless nights, for nausea, for whatever else ailed the man. Yet with half his mind on Mickey O’Shay even then, and the other half stuck on the image of his father slowly wasting away in the small stucco house on Eleventh Avenue, he had to ask the doctor to repeat the information, maybe even write it down for him, so that he could get it straight in his head.