Little Criminals (24 page)

Johnny Hodges’ sax strolled along the road laid down for it by Duke Ellington’s band. Ellington’s piano notes danced around Hodges’ soaring, plunging melody, as though sprinkling a layer of petals in his path. This was one of those tracks Dolly Finn felt had become as much a part of him as his own flesh. Sometimes in bed at night he played the music back in his head, the individual instruments or the collective sound of the band, and it was still there when he woke in the morning.

Dolly paid no attention to the countryside through which he was passing. It was a foreign land in which he must labour until he could return to the life these kinds of jobs paid for. It could be tolerated, as long as there was a purpose to his exile and an end in sight, but it could never be enjoyed. The familiar music gave him comfort, and his companion’s occasional attempt at chit-chat was a trial to be ignored.

When they pulled into the car park at Jack White’s, Dolly switched off the iPod. He knew there’d be chatter. Martin Paxton flexed his arms behind his head and said, ‘Did you ever know her?’ He nodded towards the pub.

Dolly’s brow wrinkled.

‘The one that used to own this place, the one that had her old fella snuffed? Ever come across her?’

Dolly remembered. He shook his head.

Martin said, ‘She served me once, behind the bar, few months after the shooting. Before she got arrested. Seemed nice enough. Brendan Sweetman swears she offered him the job, but he’s full of bullshit.’

Brendan Sweetman, in Dolly’s opinion, was a brute. To survive in an evil world, everyone has to do what they must. For a brute, that’s all there is. No wider view, no remorse, no hope for spiritual redemption. Just the slaking of brutish appetites. Dolly Finn had long accepted that his life must occasionally accommodate such people. He waited, unsure if Martin was finished yapping.

‘Are you coming in for a bite?’

‘No, I’ll wait here.’ He decided to concede an explanation. ‘I want to listen to the next couple of tracks.’

‘It’s good nosh.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Dolly didn’t read newspapers but he knew the bare bones of the Jack White’s Pub killing from a radio report at the time of the trial. Sounded like she was just short of putting an ad in the paper, that one, asking around for estimates for doing the job on her husband. Any mugs that got dragged into a half-arsed thing like that, they deserved whatever they got. Dolly’s brief involvement in hired killing ended seven years back, because of that kind of stupidity.

It was an incident he’d been thinking a lot about recently. Dolly believed he knew who killed Jo-Jo Mackendrick.

About eight years back, Dolly’s army associate, Johnner Mulligan, offered him a job killing an elderly man – eight grand up front. There were people in Dublin who would kill someone for the price of a good night out, but Dolly didn’t move in those circles. He figured if serious people want a proper job done they have to be prepared to pay serious money. Dolly kept it simple. No complicated schemes to go wrong, no guns to create forensic trails. He used a knife from the man’s kitchen, and afterwards he tossed it into the Liffey. Dolly knew little of who the man was and nothing of who wanted him dead, or why. If the guy was in the business, which he probably was, he wasn’t prominent. Just someone who stepped hard on someone’s toes, and someone knew someone. Then, a couple of years later, Johnner offered him a second killing job.

‘This one’s different.’

He’d have to do this one with another guy, and he’d need to use a gun, Johnner said. A back-of-the-motorbike job. Zoom in, bang-bang, zoom off, was how Johnner put it. When Dolly heard who the target was he shook his head.

‘I’d have to think about that. And don’t tell me – whoever’s offering, I don’t want names, OK?’

‘Course not.’Johnner was enthusiastic. ‘It’s terrific money, way above the usual.’

‘Just Jo-Jo? What about Lar?’

‘On his own, Lar’s a wanker. Jo-Jo’s the problem. Do him, Lar’s nothing.’

Dolly asked a few more questions, his casual air concealing the rage he felt. He offered Johnner another coffee. Stupid bastard. Didn’t know the difference. Thought this was just another job. Thing like this, whatever way it goes, this was a no-loose-ends job, and Johnner was handling it like it was an afternoon’s shoplifting.

Do it, you’re a loose end.
Pop
.

Turn it down, maybe someone else does it, maybe not. Either way, when the dust settles there’s a real chance someone’s going to figure you for a loose end.
Pop
.

Maybe there’s a balls-up and Jo-Jo leans on the trigger man or Johnner or whoever he can get his hands on. He puts a couple of razor blades in the guy’s mouth, tapes up his lips, starts punching him in the belly, the chest, working up towards the face.

‘There something you’d like to tell me?

One of those Limerick wankers, that’s what he did to some gobshite who got uppity. Did him over for a while, got tired of it, gave him one behind the ear. Dumped the body and when the pathologist peeled the tape off the stiff’s mouth one bloody blade slid out. Pity about the nice firm fingerprint the Limerick wanker left on the tape, which is the kind of thing that Limerick wankers do.

Not the kind of mistake Jo-Jo would make. And if Jo-Jo comes out of this alive and puts on the squeeze he’ll get the name of everyone this thing touched, including Dolly, and Jo-Jo’ll shoot first and he won’t even bother to ask questions later.
Pop
.

Soon as Johnner opened his mouth about this one, Dolly figured they were both already chin-deep in soft shit. He repeated that he’d have to think about it.

Dolly thought about it all that evening, made a decision and slept on it. He went to early-morning Mass, but found he couldn’t concentrate. Went home, thought it all through again, then he went into the GPO and made a call from a phone box, got Jo-Jo’s number, rang him and said, ‘You don’t know me, but I’ve been offered money to kill you.’

They met that afternoon and three days later the radio lunchtime news said two bodies had been found in a field round the back of the airport. Johnner was one of them, strangled. The second body had two holes in the head, entry and exit. Probably the other guy Johnner talked to about the job, the biker. Both of them had been worked on.

Dolly came home one night and found Jo-Jo waiting in a car outside the flat, a holdall on his lap with sixty grand in it.

What Dolly heard was that as soon as the bodies turned up near the airport an ambitious Southsider named Gerry Forbert did a runner. Ended up somewhere on the Continent, probably Spain. No one knew why, except it was for the good of his health. Over the next few months, one of Forbert’s brothers and two of his associates turned up in fields round the back of the airport.

Over the years, Jo-Jo offered Dolly a couple of soft jobs, but Dolly’s instinct was – if possible – to stay away from people like that. They were trouble.

What Dolly reckoned now was that all this time later, Gerry Forbert was homesick and what happened to Jo-Jo and his mother had to do with Forbert clearing the air before he came back to the old sod.

After half an hour, when Martin Paxton came out of Jack White’s, Dolly nixed the Miles Davis track that was playing and browsed the iPod to find a sound more suited as background to the yap he could rely on from Paxton. As Paxton opened the driver’s door, Dolly cranked up the volume on Lee Morgan’s
Sidewinder
and felt the insistently upbeat music surge through his head.

*

The sun came out and Frankie Crowe got worried. They pulled off the road and found a quiet spot. When they took the hostage from the boot her tracksuit was sodden with sweat and Brendan Sweetman had to hold her upright. They put her lying across the back seat, with Frankie’s jacket over her, and told her that if she fucked with them they’d kill her. Frankie reckoned that letting her out of the boot made more sense than maybe arriving in Rosslare with a dead hostage. Every time he looked back at her, the hostage was lying unmoving. Once, he said, ‘You OK?’

When she didn’t reply he leaned over and shook her shoulder.

‘You OK?’

Still silence. He flicked a fingernail against her ear and she made a dry grunt.

‘Answer me. You OK?’

After a few seconds there was a sound that might have been ‘Yes’.

Frankie said, ‘Drink this.’ He thrust a small bottle of Coke into her hand. She pushed the mask up beyond her mouth and made gulping sounds as she drank.

Within an hour of the breakdown of the media blackout on the Kennedy kidnap, Chief Superintendent Malachy Hogg was under instructions to have a report on Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe’s desk before nine o’clock next morning. Within two hours, Hogg knew as much as there was to know about the cock-up, and within the third hour had made a preliminary report to O’Keefe by phone.

When he arrived at O’Keefe’s office at the Phoenix Park HQ at ten minutes to nine the next morning it was merely to confirm this account in a one-sheet written report. Some busybody, most likely a neighbour of the Kennedys who knew the extended family, got wind of what was happening and word spread. Several tips to newspapers and radio stations vanished into the media blackout organised by Hogg. Eventually, someone rang a morning yackety-yack show to complain about the state of the country. Gutless government, decent law-abiding people could be taken from their homes by armed thugs. The idiot DJ made an event of it and the rest of the media panicked and assumed the story was fair game.

O’Keefe was wearing Sunday casual. He had half a dozen of his staff working the weekend along with him. There wasn’t much he could do, but if an executive decision had to be made he didn’t want to be at the wrong end of a bad mobile connection. ‘You’re certain none of our lot had anything to do with leaking it for a few shillings?’

‘Certain.’

‘Can’t be helped, then. We can live with it.’

‘There is one thing. Last evening, John Grace rang me with a suggestion. He reckons the public fuss might make Frankie jumpy. Might even spook him so much he decides to cut his losses, abandon the whole idea.’

‘And kill the hostage?’

‘And kill the hostage. In case she saw or heard something. Far as Frankie’s aware, no one knows who did the kidnap. He might decide to just bury her somewhere and go home.’

‘Grace thinks it’s a serious possibility?’

‘Very much so.’

‘And?’

Hogg’s voice remained neutral, making it impossible to measure his opinion. ‘Grace reckons we should leak it that we know who’s behind the kidnap. Takes away the reason to kill her.’

O’Keefe drummed his fingers on his desk for a few moments. Then he shook his head. ‘Too many mights and maybes in that. Could just as easily push the little bastard over the edge. No, I don’t think so.’ O’Keefe arched his eyebrows, inviting an opinion.

Hogg said, ‘Grace is a plodder, but he knows Frankie. There’s that. But it’s a risky thing to do.’

Both men knew where the heaviest weight lay in this equation. Hang on, do nothing, and if something goes badly wrong it remains a matter of opinion about whether one initiative or another should have been tried. Make a chancy move and it goes wrong and your arse is out the window. Until an identifiable target popped up, from where O’Keefe was sitting the safest thing to do was hold fire.

*

About an hour later, Frankie Crowe waited until the hostage stopped vomiting, then he waited some more. Only fair to give her a chance to get herself together. After a while, he tapped on the bathroom door. He was wearing latex gloves. ‘I’ve a job for you.’ He heard the toilet flush, a tap running. He held up his wrist – fucking mask, didn’t make anything easy – and glanced at his Rolex. Still not ten o’clock.

The bathroom door opened and the hostage came out. Have to give her credit. Four days, now – four and a half – and her purple tracksuit was creased and grimy, her hair tied back, her face pale and clammy, no proper wash, and from what the lads said she hadn’t eaten much over the past couple of days. Then there was the stress of a couple of tough trips in the boot of the car, and being locked in a small room for the rest of the time. All that and you could still see she was a bit of a ride. He remembered, on the landing in her house, after the stupid cunt snuck off to try to make a phone call, grabbing the front of her red dress and noticing even in his fury the delicate lightness of the material, and the glancing touch of his knuckles against her breasts.

‘I need you to write a note to your hubby.’

He brought her back to the small bedroom where she had been held since the previous evening. The window was boarded up, but it was better than the old storeroom up in Dublin, cleaner, with a single bed and a bedside locker and lamp.

Frankie had already been getting antsy about the old butcher’s shop. Fine as a hideout for a very short-term job, but the longer it went on the greater the chance of some nosy neighbour noticing unusual comings and goings. Once the kidnap went public, and busybodies all over the city were on the lookout for anything suspicious, it made even more sense to use the Rosslare place ahead of schedule.

The original plan was to use Rosslare as a halfway house, somewhere to rest, split the money and suss out the lie of the land once the job was over, the hostage released and the ransom in the bag. Rosslare was Milky’s idea. He used a front to rent it for a month. ‘Holiday resort, so many people pass through, no one notices anyone. It’s twenty minutes into Wexford, if you want to get some clothes, food, stuff like that.’ Far enough from the city to be out in the sticks, a whole other place, and near enough to drop back to Dublin when Frankie needed to. Today, Frankie could be back up in town by lunchtime, do the necessary, maybe spend the night in a B&B, maybe his Uncle Cormac’s. By teatime tomorrow, phase one of the job should be done and dusted.