Shamrock Alley (41 page)

“Like I said,” Mickey muttered, stuffing the box into his jacket pocket, “these are sold.”

John took the bag from Mickey’s lap, poked around inside, and examined the second gun. Nodding his head, he replaced both weapons back into the bag, rolled it closed, and stashed it away in the back seat.

“You talk to your guy about dropping the points on the counterfeit?”

“You know,” Mickey said, “I been thinking about that. I can drop the points down to fifteen percent.”

“No,” he said. “Still too high, Mickey. I can’t earn off that.”

Mickey stuck out his lower lip. “Okay,” he said, “ten percent.”

John hoped the presumptuous look on his face didn’t register with Mickey. Ten percent meant they were most likely getting the money directly from the printer after all. And how suddenly Mickey had dropped the price—

“Ten percent …
but here’s the deal,”
Mickey added, the timbre of his voice rising. “You buy a million from us.”

He uttered a laugh and turned away from Mickey. “A
million?
Shit, man, you growing this stuff in your
house?”
He whistled, pushed his head back against the headrest. “That’s a lot of money coming from my end. At ten percent, that’s a hundred grand.”

“Is that a problem?” Mickey said.

“Yeah,” he told him, “but it’s worth a try. It’s gonna take me some time to line up customers. I wanna get everybody in line before I make that kind of buy.”

“How long?”

“At least a couple weeks. But I’m interested. Ten percent gives me a lot of interest.”

“I know,” said Mickey.

“In the meantime,” he said, “see what you can do about those silencers.”

“How many you want?”

He considered. “Can you do five?”

“No problem.”

“I’ll see how quick I move ‘em, then maybe we can talk about more.”

“Don’t—” Mickey’s words died in his mouth as his eyes locked onto something just past John’s head. And just as he was about to turn to see what was going on behind him, a quick rapping sounded against the driver’s side window.

A uniformed police officer stood on the other side of the window, inches from his face.

Without waiting for John to roll down the window, the cop pointed toward the intersection with two fingers. His face a bleached white, his eyebrows knitted together, the cop shouted, “Get this car outta here now! You can’t park here, buddy. Move it! Move it!”

He switched the car in gear just as Mickey popped open the passenger door. For one crazy instant, he visualized Mickey pulling a gun from the waistband of his pants and firing round after round into the police officer, sending the officer crashing against the front of the building behind him in a spray of blood. It was frightening just how quickly his mind managed to summon such an image, as if he’d known for some time just how close to the edge Mickey really walked—just
how gone
, how
mentally fragile
—and how quickly things could go bad.

“Move!” the officer shouted again, flecking the window with spit. “Now!”

Mickey slammed the door shut and hurried across the street toward Calliope Candy. The top half of the silencer box, too big for the pocket, jutted like a bone from his coat. The streetlight on the corner painted his shadow in great leaps across the piling snow that covered the sidewalk.

Not once did he turn to look back.

Rolling a handball between his hands, resting one leg up on his desk, John said, “They’re looking to unload the last of what they got. That’s why they’ve dropped the points. And that’s why they want me to take the whole million.”

The glow of his computer screen reflected on his face, Kersh nodded. He was picking apart a Styrofoam cup, with little interest, and rolling the broken pieces into tiny white balls. They’d just finished listening to the reel-to-reel recording made earlier that day. At the part where John had pushed Mickey about Horace Green’s murder, Kersh stood, paced around his desk, like a basketball fan whose team is down by five points with seven seconds left on the clock.

“A deal this big,” John continued, “will flush out Kahn.”

“Jimmy Kahn,” Kersh muttered to himself. He’d been listening to the recordings made from the wire taps daily, and had been ultimately disappointed. Mickey had his greasy fingers into everything, but there was still nothing concrete on Jimmy Kahn. Even when the two of them spoke over the phone, their messages were so cryptic or so insipid that they proved nothing but a waste of time.

“Another thing,” he said. “I think they’re making the silencers in the candy store.”

“Glumly picked up that guy Laughlin today,” Kersh said. “The bartender.”

“And?”

“Big guy collapsed like a little girl,” Kersh said. “If he’s scared of Mickey O’Shay, he isn’t saying. Said he didn’t know anyone who’d be after him—but Glumly pulled his record. Guy’s been arrested a couple times for moving drugs. Mostly marijuana.”

“There could be a million reasons Mickey wants him dead.” He shook his head and rubbed his forehead. “Or no reason at all …”

“Glumly’s moving the bartender to a safe house in Queens for a while. Cable TV, hot meals. Probably the best the punk’s ever lived.”

“Meanwhile,” John said, “let’s make sure we can get the flash money for this counterfeit deal and hope Kahn shows, ‘cause the boss-man isn’t gonna part with a hundred grand.”

“Kahn may show for the silencers,” Kersh said. “That’s fifteen years mandatory right there.”

He could tell Kersh was uncomfortable about the million-dollar deal. However, John didn’t know if Kahn would show just to sell him silencers; in the past, he’d only showed when John was selling. And even if he did, John had to get him involved with the deal; just being there was not good enough. They could put Mickey away for life, but Kahn would eventually be back on the streets. And in the time he’d spent around them, John was quick to realize that with Jimmy Kahn on the streets, another Mickey O’Shay would always came along. That was the problem. For this thing to be successful, they’d have to nail them both for a long, long time. Maybe Bill Kersh would be satisfied with a cheap bust for Jimmy Kahn, but John wouldn’t.

“Anyway, “
Kersh said with exaggerated zeal, “it’s late and I’m tired. I’m going to go home and watch the Discovery Channel until I fall asleep. There’s a killer special on prehistoric sharks I’ve been dying to see.” He stood and struggled with his jacket. “You should go home, too. You look about eight months behind on your beauty rest.”

Kersh left, and for a while John listened to the larger man’s footfalls creak down the office corridor. There was the familiar grind of the elevator being called to their floor, the
ding!
of the bell as it arrived, and the lethargic
swoosh
as the elevator doors opened. After a second or two, the grinding started up again, and he listened to the elevator slowly descend.

Closing his eyes, he reclined in his chair, squeezing the handball in one hand. The events of the past two months whizzed through his brain like a video on fast-forward. It wasn’t until the phone at his desk rang, startling him that he realized he’d fallen asleep.

It was one of the agents at the duty desk. “John. Wasn’t sure you were still here.”

“What’s up?”

“There’s a woman here to see you. She looks pretty upset.”

“Her name?”

“Says her name is Tressa Walker.”

The handball rolled to the edge of the desk, paused for a moment … then fell off; it bounced a few feet away from the desk, then began rolling across the floor to the wide bank of office windows. Looking up at the windows, John saw his face reflecting back at him.

“I’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up the phone.

I
NSIDE A SMALL, WINDOWLESS INTERVIEW ROOM ON
the main floor of the New York field office, Tressa Walker sat at the end of a long rectangular table with her white, fisted hands pushed into her lap. When John opened the door and stepped inside, the young woman looked up nervously. For a split second, she looked as though she wanted to rise and quickly run out of the room. Fear and confusion registered on her face, pulling the lines of her mouth and eyes into sad fishhooks. It had been close to a month since he’d last seen her, and it now looked as though the girl had aged twenty years.

“Tressa,” he said, moving into the room and shutting the door behind him, “what are you doing here? You can’t come around here like this. You wanted to talk, you should have called me.”

He took a seat not across from her but beside her, with one empty chair between them. Her eyes had a difficult time staying on him, or in any one place for any length of time. She looked much more frightened now than on the evening at McGinty’s. The worry in her face prompted him to lean forward in his chair, suddenly worried that something had gone wrong, horribly wrong.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

“They’re asking questions about you,” she said in an unsteady voice. It was as if she were confessing her sins to a priest, embarrassed by her misdeeds and terrified of the consequences. “Mickey and Jimmy. They’re goin’ around the neighborhood asking about you. They saw me tonight, cornered me, started pumping me for information. I didn’t … I mean … when I saw them, saw who they were, I knew right away something was wrong. Christ.” Her body was trembling. “John, what the hell’s going on? What’s taking so long?”

“First of all, calm down.”

Nodding rapidly, she formed her lips into a wide circle and sucked in a deep breath.

“What did they want to know?” he said. “What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them nothing,” she insisted. “They cornered me, scared the
shit
outta me. I thought…” She fell silent, not needing to continue. Tressa Walker had thought she was going to die.

“What did they ask you?” he pressed her. “What did they say about me?”

“No, nothing,” she said, shaking her head. She fumbled a cigarette from her purse and lit it with one shaking hand. “Just … they just wanted to know stuff … I don’t know …” She pulled a long, hard drag from the smoke. The insides of her cheeks almost touched. “I can’t give ‘em answers for all their questions, John. I’m gettin’ scared. They start askin’ me things I don’t got answers to, I screw up and say the wrong thing, they’re gonna
know
. These guys don’t play around. What the hell is taking you so long to get them?”

“We’re working it.” He tried to sound confident and convincing. “We’re close, but it takes time. You just have to chill out. It’s all right.”

“It’s
not
. They’re still trying to move the money through Francis, you know, but he don’t have no buyers lined up. And really, he’s too goddamn scared to deal with them anymore.” Another pull on her cigarette and John thought her eyes would roll back into her head. “This is taking too long, and I don’t like it. I wanna get out of the city now, get away from them. I don’t like where this is going. That witness protection thing we talked about—you gotta get me out of here
now …”

“Listen to me—Tressa, you have to stay calm. They’re just pushing you—that’s all. We’ve been doing some deals, and they’re starting to trust me now—”

“They don’t trust nobody.”

“If we move you out now,” he continued, “it’ll raise suspicion. It’s better for you to hang here until this thing blows over. They’re just trying to put a scare on you, see if you tell them anything. As long as you
don’t
, there’s nothing to worry about.”

But he could see from the look on her face and from the nervous shift of her eyes that any further pressuring by the West Side boys would surely result in her collapse, regardless of what the penalty might be. What had seemed like her ticket out of Hell’s Kitchen just a short month or so ago now seemed like a death sentence.

“They been trying to find out where you come from, who you’ve dealt with,” Tressa explained. “They been whispering your name all through Hell’s Kitchen, see if anybody’s ever heard of you. John, they find out you’re Secret Service, they’ll fucking cut me, fucking
hurt
—
”

“Relax.”

He realized then just how fragile a foundation the entire case was built on. One word—one false word, false action, false
anything
—put a lot of people in danger.

“This thing’s almost over,” he told her. It was a promise he made to himself more than to her. “A little while longer and we’ll grab them. Just hang in and be smart. Nothing bad is gonna happen.”

Looking down at her lap, she said, “I hope so.”

Yet she already sounded defeated.

O
N THE MORNING OF
D
ECEMBER
23,
ROUGHLY
fifteen hours before he would have a gun pointed at his head, John Mavio awoke early and in a good mood. Slipping his pants on, he turned to watch Katie sleeping in bed. She stirred and twisted her body around to stretch across the width of the mattress. She’d grown accustomed to sleeping alone; he could tell just by the way her body curled into a comma, taking up both sides of the bed simultaneously even in her sleep. That was the way he’d sometimes find her when he would come home at night.