Shamrock Alley (32 page)

He arrived home around ten o’clock and crawled into bed just as Katie came in from the shower. Wrapped in a towel, her hair up in one hand, she jumped when she saw him sprawled out across the top of the bed.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she nearly gasped. “Jesus Christ, you scared the hell out of me …”

“Surprise,” he said, grinning. “I only have a few hours.”

“You’re going back out?”

He nodded.

“I hate that,” she said, moving to the closet.

“Don’t get dressed,” he told her. “Come here.”

Smiling, she pulled the towel from her body and hurried quickly to the bed, not quite comfortable with the shape of her new body. He hugged her, kissed her, cradled her head against his chest. Her scent was clean and strong, undeniably female, and it filtered through his nose and coursed through his lungs with ferocious intensity. Still … his mind was not totally here with her: it volleyed between her and
out there
, making a drop-off to Mickey O’Shay and the rest of the Dead End Kids.

“I asked Dad if he wanted me to stay at the house with him,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“He said no. He said you’d be lonely.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“The truth. That you’re never home anyway.”

“It’s just for a little while longer,” he promised, kissing the top of her head. “Is he feeling okay?”

“Hmmmm …” She was half-asleep.

Again, he kissed the top of her head. Held her against his body, feeling the gentle curve of her belly against his side.

Once he was certain Katie was asleep, he pulled himself out of bed and crept down the hall to wander around in the dark until it was time to go.

T
HE STREETS WERE DARK, QUIET
. T
HE CLOSER
he drove toward the piers, the more he was aware of leaving the rest of the living world behind. The Ryder truck’s cab smelled ambiguously bad. The vinyl seats were cracked and torn, gaping yellow foam protruding from the fissures like organs from a mutilated body. Someone had glued three pennies to the truck’s peeling dashboard, all three Lincolns face-up.

Up ahead, John saw the dotted traffic along Eleventh Avenue. Beyond the street, he could make out the dark ink-spot that was Dewitt Clinton Park. Coasting, he studied the passing brick buildings on either side of the street through the grime-flecked windshield. Outside, the night was cold, black, motionless. Sporadically, a small group of snowflakes would pat against the windshield, immediately melting. He had the truck’s heater cranked up and pumping.

Just as Mickey had promised, halfway down the quiet stretch of West 53
^rd
Street, a jutting black awning stretched out over the curb to his left. The narrow window—dark and foreboding—displayed an unlit neon
Open
sign and the word
Pickernell’s
printed on the glass in yellow lettering. John eased down on the brake and felt the truck shudder to a halt. He switched it to
park
, shut off the headlights, and sat in the idling truck, his eyes scanning the street. Straight ahead on Eleventh Avenue, the occasional vehicles buzzed past the mouth of the 53
^rd
Street. To his right across from Pickernell’s was a trashlittered alleyway and a fenced-in auto parts shop. Kersh was back there somewhere, keeping his eyes on the bar across the street.

The truck’s clock read 2:02 A.M. Blowing into his hands to keep them warm, he shifted in his seat and peered at his sideview mirror. Behind him, the street was empty. Even with the windows closed, he could hear the din of traffic along both Eleventh and Tenth Avenues.

Mickey materialized from behind the fence of the auto parts shop. In the moonlight, he looked like an apparition. Unmoving, Mickey stood there behind the fence for a single beat, the fingers of his left hand curled through one of the links in the chain fence. Then he dragged his boots down off the curb and plodded across the street, his head down, the red eye of a cigarette glowing in the darkness.

Mickey cracked opened the truck’s passenger door and climbed into the cab. “Let’s go,” he told John, plucking the cigarette from his mouth between two fingers.

John dropped the truck into drive. “Where?” he asked.

Mickey pointed up ahead, toward Eleventh Avenue. “Go down, take a left.”

He let his foot off the brake and rolled down 53
^rd
Street toward Eleventh Avenue. Silently, he hoped Kersh would be discreet if he chose to follow … which he would, John assumed.

“Where we going?” he asked, crossing between a gap in the traffic along Eleventh Avenue and hanging a left.

“Just drive,” Mickey said, in no mood for conversation. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

To their right, the dark spread of Dewitt Clinton Park rifled by.

“Hope you got guys,” he said to Mickey. “Stuff’s pretty goddamn heavy.”

“It’s taken care of,” Mickey promised, still smoking his cigarette. He cracked the window an inch, blew the smoke out, then flicked the butt out after it. Then he jerked a thumb to the right, acknowledging one of the side streets leading down to the West Side Highway and the piers. “Turn here.”

John spun the wheel, and the tires slid on some ice. He was unfamiliar with this section of the West Side, had missed the street sign, and was unsure exactly what street they were on or where they were. Around them, the night seemed to have suddenly grown darker. The street itself was barely wide enough for the truck to make it down. On either side of the street, two-story brick buildings crowded against one another like vagrants desperate to keep warm. He could see no other cars, though he could hear vehicles droning back and forth along the avenue. They sounded very far away.

“Slow it down,” Mickey said. A few yards ahead and to the right, a small, fenced-in parking lot spread out before them, wedged between two ramshackle, vacant buildings. The fence gate was open, and Mickey told him to drive the truck through it. Glancing in his sideview to see if Kersh had followed down the street—he hadn’t—John obliged.

The truck hopped a stone curb and trembled, its undercarriage rattling like thunderous applause.

“To the end,” Mickey said, jerking his chin toward the rear of the parking lot. The lot ended at a peeling picket fence, overgrown with weeds and vines and wild shrubbery. To the left, a whitewashed brick garage clung to the back of one of the shops, fronted by a graffiti-laden metal door.

Mickey told him to swing the truck around and line the back up with the garage door.

“What happened to Pickernell’s?” he asked.

“What?” Mickey countered. “I said I’d meet you there.” He opened the passenger door and jumped out. “Let’s go.”

John shut the truck down and climbed out of the cab, still rubbing his hands together. A single streetlight on the other side of the wooden fence offered minimal light. Mickey was on the other side of the truck; only his shadow, distended and freakish pooling along the pavement, could be seen.

Bill Kersh’s warning rose up suddenly in John’s mind:
Once you bring the liquor to him and his pals, what’s to stop them from keeping the three grand and blowing your head off?
Kersh’s ghostly voice surfaced like a white flag on a battlefield. Yet instead of shaking the warning from his head, he used it to prime himself, to siphon power and strength and build his confidence. Build his
will
. He was not thinking about death—was not thinking about his wife and his father and his unborn child. Now, he was only thinking about Mickey O’Shay and himself. And the gun buried inside his jacket. Nothing else mattered, nothing else existed. He understood the volatility of time, had even experienced it during the shoot-out at Deveneau’s club, but now was the first time he was fully
aware
of it: that the here-and-now was a fleeting, ridiculous, impossible thing that could either kill you or spare your life. A moment’s hesitation could be the difference between soaking in a hot bath or riding in a body bag. In his mind’s eye, he watched the replay of the albino going down behind the bar, his eyes suddenly blank and stupid in his head, his grasp on Tressa Walker abruptly disengaged. He’d pacified Kersh—or had at least attempted to—by insisting that Mickey and his gang would not pull a rip and kill him … but in reality, he did not exactly believe that. In fact, standing in the parking lot contemplating the ephemeral qualities of relative time, he’d never felt more suspicious and dubious of Mickey O’Shay in all the time he’d known the man.

Mickey appeared around the back of the truck, lighting another cigarette, his teeth rattling in his head. He turned, his profile temporarily illuminated by the single street lamp on the other side of the wooden fence.

John, hands stuffed in his pockets, walked over to him. “I bum one of those off ya?”

Mickey scrounged around in his coat pocket until he found a wrinkled pack of Kools. He shook one out, and John plucked it from the package and popped it into his mouth. Taking Mickey’s lighter, he lit the stick and inhaled deeply enough to fill his shoes with smoke.

“Christ,” he muttered, exhaling. “At least my lungs will be warm.”

A bang echoed through the parking lot, followed by the grind of rusted gears. A sliver of yellow light fell across them as the metal garage door was lifted. In the widening shaft of light, John could make out several pairs of legs moving about inside the garage.

“Your guys know how to make an entrance,” he muttered, hooking another drag from the Kool.

Through the open garage door, three guys sauntered out onto the parking lot, their bundled forms silhouetted by the dull yellow backlight of the garage.

He recognized at least one of the guys from the Cloverleaf—a small, wiry guy with nervous eyes. The guy directly to his right was a bit huskier, with a round, doughy face topped in a red knitted cap. The third guy was taller than the other two, his face somehow more well-defined. His eyes were set deep in his head, creating the appearance of a brooding thoughtfulness, and his chest was broad beneath the pullover and checked sports coat he wore. While these other two guys seemed to fit perfectly into Mickey O’Shay’s clique, this guy seemed just a little off-center, a little more shrewd, a little less confrontational.

Mickey flicked his cigarette off into the night. “Fellas,” he said to the two guys behind the taller one. Then he turned to John. “This is my partner, Jimmy Kahn.”

“How’s it going?” John said, and pumped Jimmy’s hand twice.

Jimmy’s eyes fell all over him. “Nice truck.”

“You should see what’s inside,” he said. Emulating Mickey’s famous head-nod, he acknowledged the garage. “What is this place?”

“Back of a bar,” Jimmy said. “Storage.”

“Before this goes down,” he said, “I just wanna make sure we’re straight on the money.”

“Three grand,” Jimmy said.

“You got it?” he asked.

Jimmy rubbed a finger beneath his nose. “Help us unload this shit—then you get paid.”

Without a word, John turned from them, the truck’s keys clanging in his hand, and moved back toward the cab. He felt their eyes on him, had their attention, and even saw Mickey’s shadow move when he opened the driver’s side door and climbed inside. Without hesitation, he turned the truck’s engine over.

Mickey appeared outside the window. “The hell you doin’?”

“You want what’s in this truck,” he said, “you give me my money.”

Laughing, Mickey took two steps away from the truck, his arms out at his sides. He turned to Jimmy Kahn and yelled, “Hey, Jimmy! This guy wants his money! Let’s do this, already!” He held his hand up, palm facing John. “Come on.”

He shut down the truck and hopped back out onto the parking lot.

“Here,” Jimmy said, fishing a wad of bills secured in a plastic bag from his coat pocket. He thrust it toward John, Jimmy’s eyes uncomfortably on him.

He took the money, opened the bag. “This all of it?”

“Three grand,” Jimmy said.

John smirked. “Would have jacked up the price if I knew it included labor.” He tossed the truck’s keys over to Jimmy, who caught them with a swipe of his hand.

Jimmy moved to the rear of the truck, unlocked the door. He motioned for one of the other two guys to give him a hand. Together, they managed to push open the door. Jimmy remained standing on the rear bumper, looking into the back of the truck for several seconds, not saying a word.

“Well?” John initiated.

“That’s all thirty?” Jimmy said.

“All thirty. Count ‘em.”

Still standing on the bumper, Jimmy turned to the scrawnier of the two nameless men. “Go get me that hammer and screwdriver from the back,” he told the lackey. The kid turned and hurried back into the garage.

How many guys they got working with them?
he wondered. It was obvious just by his presence that Jimmy Kahn called the shots—and yet Mickey had introduced them as partners.
Are these two goons running this entire operation?
He thought of the counterfeit money, banded and freshly printed. Were they printing it themselves?
And Irish
, he reminded himself.
Don’t forget Mickey said something about a person named Irish the other night
.

The scrawny guy returned with a hammer and a large flathead screwdriver. He handed them over to Jimmy, who positioned the tapered end of the screwdriver in the crack beneath the crate’s top. Once he felt it was secured, he slammed the hammer down on the back end of the screwdriver, driving it deeper beneath the lid. The gap widened. Wood creaked and splintered. A moment later and the crate’s lid broke upward.

Jimmy tossed the tools onto the pavement and reached his fingers beneath the lid, lifted it. Nails were pulled from the housing. With an upward jerk, he managed to pull the lid completely off. He tossed that, too, to the pavement with little interest.

“One, two, three …” He was counting the bottles inside. Leaning over, he selected one of the bottles, slid it from the crate. Holding it by the neck with one hand, he sloshed the amber liquid around while examining the label.

“Looks good,” Mickey said beside John.

“Don’t give a shit how it
looks
, “Jimmy muttered, and unscrewed the bottle. He took two sizable swigs, winced, bared his teeth. Capping the bottled, he nodded to himself and tossed it over to Mickey.