Shamrock Alley (33 page)

Mickey took his own swig, then made a face similar to Jimmy’s. Wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his coat, he uttered, “Stuff tastes like
piss!”
Then he laughed—sharply—into the night, a billow of vapor trailing off in the wind. “No, no,” he said, “it’s good.”

“It’s good,” Jimmy repeated, hopping down from the truck. “Canadian whiskey. Good deal. Where’d this stuff come from?”

“Canada,” John said.

Jimmy smirked with the right corner of his mouth. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean.”

“I know. But what’s the difference?”

“This your deal?” Jimmy said.

“Most of it.”

Hands on his hips, Jimmy paced backward toward the rear of the truck again, tabulating something in his head. “All right,” he said finally, “let’s get this shit inside, stack it up by the back.”

The two lackeys wasted no time climbing into the Ryder truck and lifting one of the crates.

“They heavy?” Mickey called over to them, already downing his second or third mouthful of whiskey.

“As a bastard,” said the burly guy, climbing down from the truck with the crate and nearly missing his footing.

“It’s got a ramp,” John said. “Unlatch it. It slides out. You guys’ll break your necks doing it that way.”

“Shit,” mumbled the burly guy. “Set it down, Sean.”

John turned and watched Jimmy and Mickey head over to a wedge of stone steps beside the garage, passing the bottle of whiskey back and forth between them. Together, they moved like equal pieces of the same machine, and any notion of hierarchy John had originally supposed lay between them was now obliterated. Seeing them now, he could tell they
were
partners, fifty-fifty straight down the middle. He could tell just by the language of their bodies, by the confidence they bounced off each other.

They sat down on the stone steps, the bottle now in Jimmy’s hands, and John averted his gaze. Out on the street, a car crept by and he hoped it wasn’t Kersh slipping in too close. But the car did not stop—it continued down the street toward the docks.

“Slipping! Slipping!” the scrawny guy—Sean—shouted as his companion struggled to set the crate down on the ground.

“Hold up,” he said, helping them slide the crate out of the way. “Here.” He undid the latch just above the truck’s bumper and pulled out a steel ramp from beneath the truck bed. “Slide ‘em down,” he told them. “Don’t break any.”

Sean began dragging the crates to the top of the ramp while John and the burly guy—he introduced himself as Donny—moved them together into the garage. In the garage and out of Mickey and Jimmy’s line of sight, he pressed Donny.

“You know these guys long?”

“Who? Mickey and Jimmy? Kinda.”

“They good guys or what?”

Donny shrugged. “They’re all right.” The man seemed unimpressed.

Back at the truck, John was helping take down another crate when Jimmy shouted his name. Looking up, he saw Jimmy waving him over.

“Come ‘ere …”

He walked over to where Mickey and Jimmy sat. In the bottle, the whiskey was now down to the label.

“Sit down,” Jimmy said. “Let those bums do that.”

“I’m with you,” he said, and eased himself down onto a stack of discarded wooden planks. Letting out a deep breath, he ran his fingers through his hair.

“Here,” Jimmy said, tapping him on the arm with the bottle of whiskey. “Warm you up quick.”

“Thanks.” He took a mouthful, held it a moment, then swallowed. It screamed all the way down his throat. He was suddenly aware of just how cold his hands and feet were. A second swig and he passed the bottle over to Mickey.

“Where you from?” It was Jimmy who asked, though he wasn’t facing John; he was busy watching Donny and Sean empty the Ryder truck.

“Brooklyn,” he said. “Bath Avenue.”

“How you know Tressa Walker?”

“Went to the same high school,” he said.

“Which one?”

“Lafayette. You know the area?”

“Bath Avenue,” Jimmy mused, taking the bottle from Mickey. “You a hookup guy? In with the guineas?”

“I’m on my own,” he told Jimmy. “But everybody’s hooked up to somebody. Who you attached to?”

Jimmy executed his half-smirk again and jerked his head in Mickey’s direction. “This guy,” he said.

The urge to bring up the counterfeit money was great, but if he brought it up now it would be too conspicuous, like dropping a grenade in a foxhole—soldiers are going to scatter. It was possible that he could work around it, maybe head down that path and hope Jimmy Kahn was careless enough to start talking, but he didn’t think Jimmy Kahn ever would.

The bottle came around to him again, and he swallowed another mouthful. This one sent the parking lot listing to the left. Beside him, Mickey pointed at the two guys unloading the truck and mumbled something practically inarticulate to Jimmy. Yet Jimmy must have understood, because he started chuckling under his breath and plucked the bottle from John’s hands. John didn’t know quite what to make of Jimmy—it was still too early—but he’d been around Mickey enough by now to tell Mickey’s impenetrable veneer was slowly sloughing off. With each sip from the bottle, he was regressing to the accessible hood he’d been at the Cloverleaf. It was as close to being friendly, he assumed, as Mickey ever came. With any luck, maybe
Mickey
would initiate a conversation about the counterfeit money …

When the bottle made it back around to him, he was aware of Mickey watching him from the corner of his eye, a drunken grin threatening his lips. He took two large swallows, his eyes on Mickey.

“Uh …” He wanted to hang his head between his legs and moan but wouldn’t give in. Handing the bottle to Mickey, he noticed that Mickey’s hands looked blurred. And so did his.

Wonderful. Now I’m getting shitfaced
.

Mickey drank, passed the bottle to Jimmy. Jimmy knocked back enough to fill a small teacup. They drank like troopers, their postures becoming more and more relaxed, their conversation more and more flowing. They talked for some time about hockey and about their best scores on some pinball machine, Jimmy’s eyes never leaving the two guys unloading the truck, while Mickey’s eyes remained on the circulating bottle.

The plan had been a success. He’d thrown them a curveball, and they’d swung. Now they knew he was a player, a go-to guy, and that put them at ease just a little. There would be no more surface-level bullshit with Mickey O’Shay. He was now at the next stage of the game.

When the final crate was loaded into the garage, Donny sat his bulk down on the bumper of the Ryder truck (his weight caused the truck to list) and the little guy—Sean—just stood beside him. After he caught his breath, Donny got up and took a few steps in their direction, arms outstretched. Despite the cold, his face was red and blotchy from perspiration, and he was panting like a dog.

“Hope you fuckers didn’t wear yourselves out watching us work,” Donny said. “That bottle looks heavy.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Mickey growled, pulling himself to his feet.

Jimmy, too, got up and tossed the now-empty bottle in the grass behind them. Unzipping his fly, he voided a hot ribbon of urine onto the stone steps. Then without saying a word, he walked around the side of the garage, no doubt to inspect his laborers’ work.

“Drank it
all?”
Donny was moaning, peering over the side of the stone steps and down at the empty whiskey bottle in the grass. “Goddamn.”

Eyes swimming in his head, John caught Mickey staring at him through the wet tangles of his hair.

Don’t look at me like that
, he thought.
I’ll knock you right the hell down, Mickey Mouse
.

“All right,” John muttered, and stuck out his hand for Mickey to shake. However, his face remained stoic and unwelcoming. Following a slight hesitation, without even looking at John’s hand, Mickey grabbed it and shook it once, firmly. “Where’s Jimmy? I wanna say good night.”

“Jimmy’s gone,” Mickey said, turning in a loose half-circle and heading around to the other side of the garage.

“What? Already?”

Mickey didn’t answer. His back to John, he walked with his hands stuffed into his pockets, his head cocked toward his feet in his usual manner. Watching him leave, John felt a resurgence of frustration rise up inside him, more potent than any amount of alcohol he could consume. Sitting, shooting the shit, opening conversation … and the bastard just
disappears?
As if he’d never been here in the first place. It wasn’t just that
street guys
didn’t behave that way—it was that
people
didn’t behave that way. Damn it, they made him feel too off-guard.

He watched Mickey’s shadow disappear around the side of the garage like a ghost. Something Tressa Walker had said to him last month when he’d met with her at McGinty’s came back to him now, the context of her words unexpectedly more profound than they’d been that evening:
These guys are like no one you’ve ever seen
.

Maybe. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t play them just as hard. Harder, if he had to.

The door to the garage came down in a series of rattles and bangs. It hit the ground hard, the sound like the report of a pistol in John’s head, and was locked from the inside. Several moments later, beyond the fence and across the street, he heard car doors slam and the engine of a large car kick over. Not moving, he stood in the parking lot and listened as the car took off down the street, its headlights glimmering through the slats in the wooden fence at the opposite end of the parking lot.

These guys are like no one you’ve ever seen
.

It was the voice of a ghost, a prophet.

“D
ON’T GET TOO COMFORTABLE,”
K
ERSH SAID JUST
as John was about to sink down into his desk chair.

“What’s up?”

“Chominsky’s waiting on us in his office.”

John pulled off his leather jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. “Whatever it is, let’s just blame Veccio.”

“You feeling all right this morning?”

Rubbing his temples, John said, “Never better.”

Kersh picked up a large dictionary from his desk, held it a few feet over the desktop—then dropped it. Some heads in the office turned. The sound slammed into John’s head, rocketing through his ears.

“Christ,” he muttered.

Grinning, Kersh said, “That’s what you get for partying with the Irish.” Then he handed him a fresh cup of coffee. “Here,” he said. “Just to let you know I’ve been thinking about you.”

“You go on ahead,” he said. “I’m gonna hit the bathroom.”

“Take some aspirin,” Kersh said. “You look like garbage.”

Bill Kersh entered Chominsky’s office following two quick knocks on the door.

Chominsky was seated behind his desk, a box of doughnuts resting at the corner of his desk, two men in suits seated in chairs before him. Both men shifted their gaze to the office door as both he and Kersh entered. The man closest to the door Kersh immediately recognized—Peter Brauman, in a pressed suit and tie. The other man was rather staunch and at first appeared slightly irritated, one hand pressed neatly in his lap while the other held what appeared to be a fruit shake.

Kersh nodded at Brauman. “Peter.”

“How you doing, Bill?”

“Hanging in.”

Chominsky pushed forward in his chair. “Where’s Mavio?”

“He’ll be here in a few minutes,” Kersh said, pulling a chair from the wall and dragging beside Peter Brauman. “What’s going on?”

“Bill,” Chominsky said, “this is Detective Sergeant Dennis Glumly, NYPD.”

“Bill,” Glumly began, “we’ve got a unit that’s been keeping an eye on Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn for just about two years now. We’ve set up surveillance around the candy store on Fifty-third and Tenth, on O’Shay’s apartment, all over the neighborhood. We’ve even got a loft rented down the street and a makeshift HQ at John Jay College.”

“Why are you keeping tabs on them?” he asked Glumly.

Glumly blinked. He had long, feminine lashes and steel-colored eyes. “I was going to ask you guys that same question,” Glumly said, quite matter-of-factly. “Few weeks ago I saw you parked around the intersection by the candy store. Long story short, I saw you there a few more times and made another car that smelled like feds. Got me curious.”

“O’Shay and Kahn are part of a counterfeit investigation,” Kersh said.

Glumly nodded. “Doesn’t surprise me. Those guys are into everything.”

“Bill,” Peter Brauman spoke up, “I didn’t really emphasize just how bad these guys are when you came to me the other night.”

“I saw the reports,” Kersh said.

Brauman shook his head. “You don’t understand …”

A quick knock on the office door and they all looked up. John stepped in, closing the door behind him, and nodded at the men.

Chominsky started to make the introductions. “John, this is—”

Dennis Glumly’s fruit shake fell on the floor. “Holy
Christ!”
It looked as though he were about to topple out of the chair, his eyes never leaving John’s face. A mottled expression of perplexity and shock blossomed across his face, and he brought his hands up in a parody of surrender. “Holy
Christ!”
He couldn’t help but repeat the phrase.