Shamrock Alley (3 page)

He closed his eyes, shuddered. In his head, all he could hear were the phantom cries from one of the policemen down beneath the club. Looking down, he noticed he was still holding his gun. Absently, he wondered how he’d managed to climb out of the ground and roll the dumpster over the grate with only one free hand.

He heard sirens farther up the street. He could now hear sounds directly below him, too, just beneath the grate. Footsteps in water. People talking. He turned and walked slowly down the alley in the opposite direction of Francis Deveneau and Tressa Walker. He slipped his gun into his jacket, ran his fingers through his wet hair, and stepped out onto the street.

I
T WAS THE SMELL OF FRYING BACON
that roused him from sleep.

John rolled over. He could hear grease spitting in a frying pan. Katie was up early as usual, and he rolled casually onto her side of the bed and pressed his face into her pillow. She left behind her the ghost traces of lavender and ginger and the stale-sweet odor of sleep. He inhaled vigorously, then rolled back. There was a tiny, single-paned window across the room, veiled from the outside by a length of fire escape. A glint of sun managed to wink into the room. John winced.

He sat up, abruptly aware of his body. His head was particularly angry. The room appeared to tilt the slightest bit. He paused, hunched over in his underwear, folding his limp hands between his knees and breathing deep breaths. Even his throat hurt. Closing his eyes, rubbing his fingers over the lids, he was aware that he’d dreamt last night … though he could only recall flashes of images and feelings—nonsense that may only mean something during the hours of sleep.

A stack of college textbooks sat on the nightstand beside the bed. He thought of his wife at the university. Seated behind one of those uncomfortable wooden desks, the erasable end of her pencil pressed softly to the corner of her mouth … maybe her hair pulled back and out of her face. She certainly looked young enough to pass for a regular student—perhaps even a sophomore—and she was also intelligent enough to get by without a struggle. In fact, perhaps the only thing that might possibly set her apart from the other students was her belly—her pregnancy. And in this day and age, he quietly wondered if that would even matter.

Beside the books, slung over the desk chair, was his leather jacket. From where he sat, he could clearly make out what had been the tears caused by the two bullet holes in the right side pocket. While he slept, they had been stitched.

He stood from the bed, and a zigzag bolt of pain shot up from his ankle and coursed through his leg. His right knee looked red and swollen.

With a noticeable limp he crept into the hallway, the sizzle of bacon riding just above the soft lilt of Katie’s humming. The hallway was narrow, dark, and cluttered with unopened boxes from the recent move. Peering out from the top of some of the boxes was an assortment of wooden picture frames and ancient photographs—of karate and baseball trophies, of a worn pair of leather ice skates tied together at the laces, of an old sombrero with a green plastic parrot on the brim.

The kitchen at the end of the hall was cramped and ill-lit, with only a single window above the double-basin sink. Katie was examining the uncooperative coffee machine, her body wrapped in a pink cloth robe, the gentle S-curve of her back to him. Coming up behind her, he wrapped his arms around her pregnant belly, buried his face in her hair. He could tell she was smiling.

“Your arms don’t make it all the way around anymore.”

“I like it,” he confessed, rubbing the gentle swell of her belly.

“You like big fat girls?”

“Just you.”

“Watch it, buster. You gonna eat anything?”

He shook his head. He was already thinking about last night, and about the confusion that followed his escape through the underground tunnels.

“You should eat,” Katie said. She fixed him a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast, and insisted he sit at the table. “You have to go in today?”

He nodded and sat with some difficulty. His knee felt as if it’d been filled with crushed stones. “Yes.”

“It’s Saturday,” she said.

“Hmmm.”

Katie had noticed his limp: their eyes had met just at the exact moment he sat down at the table, and John knew his affliction had registered with her. But she didn’t say anything. She rarely said anything, rarely asked him about what happened during his long nights working in the dark and the cold. It was a silent pact they’d made once he joined the Secret Service. And in many ways, Katie’s sudden interest in earning a college degree, their moving into the new apartment, and even the baby were all just little, menial things—just wallpaper to cover a poorly painted room—in order to keep their marriage and his job separate.

He ate. Through the walls, he could hear the faint drone of someone’s stereo. “You got a busy day planned?” he asked Katie.

“Not so much.” She ran water from the sink over the frying pan. Steam billowed and hissed. “I’ll try and empty the rest of the boxes from the hallway.”

“How did we get so much crap?”

“Don’t ask me. Most of it’s yours. I should really just set it on fire.”

“I’ll go through it all.”

“When?”

“When I have time.”

He watched her shuffle from the sink to the refrigerator to the sink again. She was beautiful. Even in the final trimester of her pregnancy she looked almost childishly innocent, naïve even. The sideways glances she would throw him from time to time suggested a certain playfulness only to be admired in a grown woman. She’d somehow grown into absolute purity, with all her half-smiles and casual grazes along parts of his body as they passed each other in a room or the hallway. There was mystique in the way she pulled a curl of hair back behind her ear.

She paused for a moment before the window above the sink, the sunlight striking her in just the right way, and he felt a twang of nostalgia rush through him.

John put his fork down. “What is it?”

“Nausea.” She shook her head. “It’ll pass.”

“You gonna be sick?”

“No, I’m all right.”

“Sit down, and stop worrying about dishes and boxes.”

“I’m okay.” She moved behind him, ran her fingers through his hair while he continued to eat. He could feel her eyes on him, as if she were attempting to wrestle some truth from his skin without his knowledge or assistance. He did not look up at her. With every pause of her fingers in his hair, he felt her concentration grow.

After a while, she said, “Will you see your father today?”

“If I have time.”

“You should find the time.”

“I want to. We’ll see.”

“Are you okay?” she said, still running fingers through his hair, her voice a near-whisper now.

“Just tired,” he said.

She bent, kissed his cheek. “See your dad,” she said.

In the bathroom, he stood for some time before the mirror in his underwear. Twenty-six, with a youthful smile and dark eyes, he possessed the body of a runner, augmented by the well-defined pectoral muscles and biceps of someone passionate about exercise and personal upkeep. He was not a fanatic, though he worked out with some dedication when he found the time. Not very tall, his physique suggested a certain compactness that, in turn, implied a degree of discriminating strength. In his youth he’d been thin and small and, on occasion, he thought he almost caught a glimpse of that child still inside him somewhere, perhaps lingering just beneath the surface of his body.

A faint, puckered scar was visible on his forehead just above his right eye, trickling down from his hairline and quite visible beneath the harsh bathroom lighting.

He showered and dressed quickly. At one point he found himself thinking about his father, and trying to recall the dream from last night, but quickly chased the old man from his mind when he realized what he was doing.

Instead, he focused on the events of last night and, more importantly, on the events to come. He wanted everything as straight as possible in his head before he sat down and said one word to anybody. Thinking of his father only muddled things.

Before leaving, he kissed Katie on the mouth, bent and kissed her belly, and slipped out of the apartment. His wife knew better than to ask what time he’d be home.

Bill Kersh sat on a bench beneath a giant oil painting of two hunting dogs outside the office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Biddleman. Kersh was forty, looked sixty, and smoked like he need not fear death. He sat with his eyes closed, his head back against the alabaster wall, and a pair of headphones over his ears. His shirt was white and wrinkled with one of the buttons undone; his necktie was crooked and spotted with conspicuous burn rings from careless cigarette ash. A heavy, broad-chested Protestant, he was the type of man to ruminate, when left alone, on the intricacies of life and death and all the miserable groaning in between. He found simple pleasure in familiarity and had managed to fashion his personal life in such a way that catered to the predictable. A creature of habit was Bill Kersh.

John approached and sat beside him on the bench. Looking at Kersh’s face, the older agent appeared to be in a trance. Eyes still closed, Kersh tapped one of his fingers lightly on the portable tape player that sat in his lap. He smelled faintly of aged tobacco and cheap aftershave lotion.

Without opening his eyes, Kersh said, “Your heartbeat is vibrating through the bench.”

“I took the stairs.”

Kersh didn’t answer, didn’t open his eyes. Across from them was the wooden door with the pebbled glass—Biddleman’s office. A number of distorted shapes shifted behind the glass.

“Who’s in there now?” John asked. He looked at Kersh. “Can you hear me with those things on?”

Kersh sighed and clicked off the tape player. He slid the earphones down around his neck while humming the last few bars of a tune beneath his breath. There was nothing musical about Bill Kersh’s humming. He looked John up and down, examining him the way a psychiatrist might take visual inventory of a patient at the first meeting. Bill Kersh was a good man and a talented agent. Though he was older than most of the agents in John’s squad, Kersh was seen not as a father figure but, rather, as a jaded recluse with a predilection for the eclectic. His disheveled and awkward presence would have elicited snickers behind his back in a less conscious environment. “You doing all right?”

“I’m fine,” John said, looking up at the pebbled glass on the door, “but I think things are gonna change.”

“Don’t worry about it. How’s your dad?”

“Stable.”

“All right.” Kersh glanced casually down at his fingernails. He’d chewed them down to the quick. “Katie?”

“She’s a trooper.”

“Hmmmm.” Kersh pushed his head back against the wall. There was a small red nick on his chin where he had cut himself shaving. “These people don’t understand what we do. And they don’t care to. Don’t forget that.”

The office door opened, and a pair of suits filed out. They talked in murmurs and acknowledged both John and Bill Kersh through glances from the corners of their eyes. Together, they receded down the hallway, their shoes clacking loudly on the marble floor while their shadows stretched along the wall.

A young woman stepped out of Biddleman’s office. “Mr. Biddleman will see you now.”

Roger Biddleman’s office was spacious and well-furnished, with a wall of windows that overlooked the trinity of One Police Plaza, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and the gothic steeples of St. Andrews. A number of framed photographs ran along the wood-paneled walls, their glass panes shimmering with the reflection of Manhattan. The carpet was green plush, and the chairs facing Biddleman’s desk were upholstered in cordovan leather piped with brass tacks. The entire room smelled of cedar and, faintly, of cigar smoke.

Biddleman stood from behind his desk, nodding at the chairs. He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with silver-gray eyes and indented temples. He smiled, exposing a perfect row of white, even teeth. “Have a seat.”

They sat.

“Roger,” Kersh said, folding his hands in his lap.

“Bill.” Biddleman eased back in his own chair and massaged his temples. There were dark grooves under his eyes, and a spray of blood vessels was apparent along the extremity of his nose. “I’m not going to stroke you, gentlemen. Last night was a goddamn mess.” There were a few papers scattered around Biddleman’s desk. Biddleman shuffled through them now, absently and with one hand, until he selected the one he wanted. “Officer … Leland Mackowsky,” he read, sounding the name out. He paused and peered at them from above the top of the paper. “Twenty-seven-year-old kid, been with the force three years. He’s over at NYU Downtown right now with a shattered collarbone and some massive internal bleeding as a result of last night’s shootout. Took a goddamn bullet in the upper chest area, just below his neck. Lucky he didn’t lose his face. It’s very serious.”

“We know,” Kersh said. “We spoke with the detectives and the assistant D.A. last night.”

“Not to mention the two guys shot and killed behind the bar, John.” The attorney’s eyes shifted to him. “One of whom you killed.” There was disdain in his voice, which John sensed was deliberately obvious. Biddleman’s eyes were small and rodent-like, his complexion waxy and pitted. He reminded John of an aged and peeling mannequin. “What the hell happened last night?”