Shamrock Alley (56 page)

Veccio slammed through the crowd, his eyes bulging at the sight of the telescoped Cadillac. He wasted no time shooing the mob away, though they did not go willingly and remained standing in a semicircle around the perimeter of the scene. On the street, cars were slowing for a better look.

“John!” Kersh shouted, peering into the Cadillac. He could see no one else. “John!” Gun still leveled at Jimmy, he scanned the crowd for any sign of John. “Christ!”

Veccio appeared at Kersh’s side and stared at Jimmy Kahn. “Where’s John?” he asked Kersh.

And although he suddenly thought he knew, he did not say so to Tommy Veccio. Instead, he pulled his cell phone from his jacket and slammed it on the hood of the Cadillac. “Here. Get another car down here to take this son of a bitch.”

“Where are you going?”

Coming down 65
^th
Street, Kersh had recognized the area almost immediately …although the plausibility of his initial thought had then seemed inconceivable. He’d been a few blocks from here a couple of nights ago …

John’s father’s house …

“Where are you going?” Veccio shouted again.

Getting behind the wheel of his sedan, Bill Kersh did not answer.

The world a blur around him, John continued to run in the direction of his father’s house. His body was racked with pain, his vision blurred from the crash, his head throbbing in a thousand different places. In his right hand, Jimmy’s gun felt weightless. Time was lost to him now, indistinct and confused, and he had no concept of how much of a head start Mickey had on him. Up ahead was the Eleventh Avenue intersection, and he cocked his head back, closed his eyes, and pumped his arms and legs for all they were worth. The rain was coming down in thick, blinding sheets; it felt like cold, wet nails being driven into his body. His lungs burned, his breath hot and sour.

He turned onto Eleventh Avenue and nearly spilled to the ground to make the turn. The rain was coming down in torrents now, whipping him from every direction, and he threw himself forward and forced himself to charge down the street. In a hideous blur, the street appeared to tilt and waver before his eyes—and he saw, up ahead in the darkness, the lumbering, hunched shape of Mickey O’Shay moving down the sidewalk toward his father’s house.

Mickey O’Shay
.

He felt something rupture inside him. Somehow, his legs began moving faster. Mickey’s shuffling form was suddenly close, very close …

A flashbulb image in his head: Mickey on the tenement roof, pointing the gun at him. Then Katie’s voice over the phone—
I trust you, John
. The accumulation of Kersh’s concerns suddenly tore through his mind like the tips of a million white-hot needles. In that instant he saw his father, dying in a starched white hospital bed, holding Katie’s hand, their mouths moving but speaking no words—

Then he was on Mickey like a jungle cat, all pain and exhaustion wiped out by the adrenaline pump of his wrath.

Mickey turned around, startled, just as John cracked him across the face with Jimmy Kahn’s gun. There was the give of Mickey’s skin against his hand, the solidity of his skull, and then Mickey pinwheeled backward and lost his balance. He crashed to the sidewalk, the wind knocked from him, a large bloody gash across his left cheek.

Mickey had no time to recover.

Propelled by a confusion of rage, John was on top of Mickey a moment later, his teeth clenched, his arms swinging wildly. He grabbed the front of Mickey’s long hair and continued to slam the back of his head against the concrete, blood and rainwater splashing up around him in icy sheets. Mickey didn’t utter a sound. With his right hand, John brought the butt of Jimmy Kahn’s gun down on Mickey’s face, felt the give of Mickey’s jaw, felt the rupture of his right cheekbone. A loud buzzing rattled through his head, and his eyes went funny, causing Mickey’s image to double and triple before him. Rainwater and blood stung his eyes. A burning against his own face, down his neck: Mickey’s fingernails digging into his flesh. Yet he did not relent; he was consumed by fury, driven by an unmitigated rage. Trapped heat inside his body, burning straight through to the surface of his flesh. It was as if a well of liquid madness had volcanoed from deep within him. Closefisted, John pummeled Mickey with his left hand. And each time he brought his fist down on Mickey’s face, he felt that madness augment and multiply and grow—filling him with the divine ability to continue until forever.

I trust you, John
. The way she’d looked when she’d told him she was pregnant, that they were going to be parents … the way she looked in her sleep, bundled—

Mickey swung an arm up, clipping John’s chin, and quickly reached inside his green canvas coat for his own gun. In the blur of movement, he managed to hold the gun up—poised in the rainy night—then, with a stuttering hand, swung it—

John stumbled back, his mind reeling, his body strung like a taut wire about to snap.

He emptied Jimmy’s gun into Mickey O’Shay’s body.

He couldn’t hear the sounds of the gunshots. He couldn’t hear
anything
. In the cast of the moonlight, Mickey’s eyes fluttered and his mouth coughed up a bubble of blood. His body, partially propped up off the ground, shook violently, then fell backward, splashing against the curb. Mickey’s gun fell into the street. One leg twitched. He could see Mickey’s chest rise once, twice—then stop.

The world continued to spin. Sounds began filtering into his head again, too sharp, too overbearing. Bursting, furious, he felt himself rise to his feet, only faintly aware of the empty click of Jimmy’s gun in his right hand … only faintly aware that he was smashing his foot into the side of Mickey’s ribs with feral brutality. He could single in on no specific thought or emotion, just merely felt them all course through him like charges of electrical current.

And then, as if he had run into a brick wall, he felt the world rush back to him. Pain exploded through his body, and his legs felt suddenly weak. He felt himself begin to tremble, hesitate, fluctuate—then crash down on top of Mickey’s broken body.

Blood soaked the front of Mickey’s canvas coat. Mickey’s face, slack and openmouthed, stared sightlessly up at the rain. Tracks of blood, seemingly too bright, ran from his mouth.

Mickey O’Shay was dead.

Shaking, John thought he heard police sirens rushing up the street. Then the rush of a car engine, in the street and very close to him. Looking down, he saw he still held a clutch of Mickey’s hair in his fisted left hand. To his right he could feel the looming presence of his father’s house bearing down on him and, doubled over in the pouring rain, one leg in the rain-swollen gutter, he managed to turn his head in its direction.

One of the upstairs lights was on in the house. Katie’s silhouette stood in the window, looking down at the street. Looking down at him …

Katie …

He’d brought it home to her. Like a common criminal, and after all he’d done to keep his two lives separate, he’d brought it home to her. The notion struck him like a sledgehammer to the chest, and he nearly collapsed under the weight of his own inescapable horror.

He did not hear Bill Kersh’s voice behind him, did not hear the rush of sirens along 62
^nd
Street, did not hear the downpour of rain all about him.

His eyes remained on his wife.

He wanted to go to her, but found he could no longer move.

H
E AWOKE EARLY IN THE SOFT AMBIENT
light of a new morning. Moving from the bedroom and into the hallway, the floor cold against his bare feet, John made his way into the kitchen and paused by the sink. Outside, the world was white with snow yet untouched by the toil of the day. The sky was gray and cloudless and absent of birds.

He found himself milling about the apartment for some time, doing nothing except thinking an occasional thought. Several times he deliberated just outside the bedroom door while his eyes moved across the tender terrain of his sleeping wife.

In the bathroom, he stood for several long minutes naked before the mirror above the sink. His skin looked too pink in the lighting. With disinterest, he looked up at the light fixture. He thought about how his wife had joked about installing a skylight. Thinking of that now, he managed to summon a half-smile. But the smile did not last long.

The shower water was cold, and he did not wait for it to warm up. He washed quickly and with a businesslike professionalism, hesitating only once to watch the water swirl and wash down the drain. For a few seconds he was hypnotized by it, soothed and unnerved by it at the same time. His head began to ache, and he pressed two fingers to the jutting brow bone above his right eye. It occurred to him then that he’d had the headache all morning. Only now had he really felt it.

It had been several weeks now since Tressa Walker’s body had been discovered. Wrapped in a sheet and buried beneath busting trash bags, discarded soup cans, and folded cardboard boxes, she was found in an alley behind a barbershop in Hell’s Kitchen. She’d been beaten to death.

Her daughter, Meghan, had been taken into the custody of child welfare and was quickly dispatched to Roosevelt Hospital to be treated for pneumonia.

He shut off the water and dried quickly, allowing his eyes time to linger on the fogged-up mirror.

A skylight would be nice
, he thought.
I don’t care what floor we’re on
—
a skylight would be nice
.

Before leaving for the day, he stopped again in the doorway of his bedroom.

He felt hurt by how close she’d come to the whole thing. Yet throughout everything, she’d remained admirably strong—stronger than he had ever thought she
could
be—and he found that
he
was the one who had really been changed by the events of that night, that
he
was the one who had to move ahead and think past it. That night, looking out the window, she had seen everything. He hadn’t known what to expect from her afterward, but she had surprised him by remaining very calm and understanding. Oddly enough, and for whatever reason, it was her sympathy that hurt him the most. This was his fault. All of it. He’d done this to her, and it weighed heavily inside him. And although she appeared sympathetic to the situation, seemingly unchanged after witnessing her husband’s actions, he couldn’t help but wonder what she thought of him now. Sometimes, he wondered if she thought of him with that same confused anxiety with which Tressa Walker had spoken of Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn.

He went to the hall closet. He automatically sifted through the coats for his leather jacket—then paused. There, wedged between his leather jacket and one of Katie’s jackets, was his father’s black wool coat. He pulled it out and stared at it for a moment, trying to remember how it had gotten here. He couldn’t remember, but slipped it on nonetheless. The sleeves were too long, and it felt too tight in the shoulders.

His father had died alone in the hospital on the night he had chased Mickey O’Shay down and killed him in the street. And three days later, on a cold and overcast afternoon, the old man was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. He and Katie had remained by the grave for some time, whipped by the frozen, bitter wind, and daunted by both the simplicity and finality of life. As the wind picked up and the afternoon grew toward evening, he and Katie turned from the grave and moved back to the car. Neither of them said a word to each other.

Outside in the cold, he pulled his father’s coat around his body, shivered against the wind, and moved down the stoop.

A light snow began to fall.

Agents had taken to stacking daily newspapers on Bill Kersh’s desk whenever they contained some information pertaining to the counterfeit case. This was done partly in good humor and partly in silent veneration by those agents who had never, and would never, work an undercover case. And although Kersh appreciated both the humor and the veneration, he never read the papers.

“You’re in early,” John said, coming up behind Kersh and tapping the man lightly on the shoulder.

“Reports,” Kersh said. “I think better in the morning, before anything important has time to happen. What are you doing here? I thought Chominsky said to take some time off.”