Shamrock Alley (25 page)

There were lights on in the house now. He entered the foyer and heard movement in the kitchen.

“Pop,” he called.

Katie appeared in the kitchen doorway, the bulge beneath her shirt wet with dish water. “Quiet,” she said. “He’s asleep.”

“You’re here,” he said.

“Made dinner. We talked for a while. It was nice.”

He went to her, hugged her.

“What are you doing here so early?” she said, pulling away from him and going back to the sink.

“Had some time to kill, wanted to drop off his coat.”

“So you’re going back out again?”

“For a little while. How’s he feeling?”

Putting dishes into the dishwasher, Katie looked at him, pressed her lips together. She looked tired, worn out. Had it been only recently he had pictured her so young and full of life? And now here she was, looking perhaps ten years older than her actual age, with deep purple grooves under her eyes and the lines around her mouth overemphasized.

“He’s in some pain. I know he’s getting up too much during the day, but what are you supposed to tell the man? ‘Stay in bed and never get out’? He wants to get up, move around the house. What can you say?”

He sighed and glanced down the dark hallway that led back to the stairs. “I’m gonna check in on him,” he said.

“You want me to fix you something to eat before you leave?”

“I’m okay.”

Upstairs, evening gloom filtered in through the windows. He moved quietly past his old bedroom until he was able to glance in and see his father’s withered shape in his own childhood bed. He turned into the room, floorboards creaking, and peered over at his father’s shape beneath the sheets. He could hear his father’s shallow breathing.

“John?” his father grumbled, clearing his throat.

“You’re awake?”

“It’s okay. Come in.”

He slipped further into the room and set the coat down across the back of a chair. “Your coat,” he said. “Sorry. Got caught up in things, had it in my car.”

His father waved a thin hand. A pale blue panel of light came in through the bedroom window and fell across the bed, casting pools of shadow in the sunken hollows of his father’s face. John turned the desk chair around and sat in it at the foot of the bed.

“You switched rooms,” he said.

“This one’s closer to the bathroom. Your head bothering you?”

It wasn’t until his father spoke that John realized he’d been unconsciously running his fingers along the faint scar creeping down from his hairline. He’d only been thirteen and already in with the wrong crowd—older kids who, in the years after high school, had seemed to vanish like ghosts. His father had forbidden him from hanging out with those kids, particularly in the schoolyard of P.S. 201 at night, when the daytime clamor of neighborhood children gave way to street gangs, cokeheads, and dangerous women, but John hadn’t listened. On one particular night, a few words were exchanged between some neighborhood thugs and, soon, fists were thrown. John had been caught in the middle of it. He remembered a broken beer bottle swiping toward his face, the way the blood ran into his eyes and soaked his shirt. His so-called friends had scattered like roaches, thinking he’d been killed …

He automatically dropped his hand. “I’m fine.”

“I remember that day like it was yesterday,” said his father. “Twelve stitches. That bottle opened you up pretty good.”

“I should have listened and stayed out of that schoolyard. And away from those jerks.”

“You were a hardheaded kid.”

“I should have listened to you.”

“You want a good laugh?” his father muttered from the bed, his voice barely audible.

“I could use a good laugh,” John said.

“I thought I saw Judy Dunbar today when I passed by the bedroom window.” Judy Dunbar was the mean-spirited woman who had lived next door to them throughout John’s childhood. A nasty, stick-thin creature with pointed features, she’d always professed a strong distrust in doctors and dentists alike and, subsequently, died roughly ten years ago from cancer of the eustachian tube. “I’d just gotten out of bed to use the bathroom,” his father continued, “and I thought I saw old Judy Dunbar standing on her back porch, just leaning with her arms folded on the railing and staring out over her yard. Caught her out of the corner of my eye. Course, when I turned back to look there was no one there. But in that split second when I passed by, I was certain it was her, that I saw her. Old Judy Dunbar. You remember her?”

“I do,” John said.

“What a cantankerous, bitter woman she was,” his father snarled, and coughed up a phlegm-filled chortle.

“She stole my baseball bat off our stoop one year,” John said. “Do you remember?”

“You’d hit her car with a baseball while playing with your friends in the street,” his father said.

“It didn’t do any damage. Just bounced off a tire. But she came out screaming just the same—”

“Wearing that ugly bright green housedress with those big red flowers on it,” his father added.

“I remember the housedress. She looked like a Christmas tree.”

“And she fired curses at you kids like arrows. You kids laughed at her.”

“Just crept up that night while we were asleep,” John said, “and snatched my baseball bat from the back porch. She never said anything about it but always kept the bat leaning against her screen door, just where I could see it. I always thought she was tempting me to break in and steal it back. She would have had a field day if I had.”

His father sighed and adjusted the blankets about his body. In the brief time he’d been sitting here, the room had gotten much darker.

“It’s good we talk like this,” John said, knowing before he spoke that the words would come out awkward and stupid.

His father shifted in bed.

John stood, straightened his pants. “I have to get going now. Is there anything I can get you?”

“My coat,” his father said, his voice suddenly absent of the strength used to tell the story of old Judy Dunbar.

“Now?”

“Just lay it on the bed.”

“All right.” He picked up the coat and folded it along the foot of the bed. “Anything else?”

“You’re going to work?”

“I have to.”

“Then be careful,” his father said.

Downstairs, Katie was adjusting the picture on the old Zenith in the living room.

“I’m heading out,” he told her. “You’re staying?”

“For a while longer,” she said, “in case he needs anything. Besides, the apartment gets lonely.”

“Stay here, I’ll pick you up when I’m done. We’ll go home together.”

“That’s too big a gamble,” she said. “You never get home on time.”

T
HE NIGHT TREMBLED WITH SLEET
.

A dull white string of lampposts dotted the intersection of West 53
^rd
Street and Tenth Avenue. The roadway was reasonably crowded. A wet slurry twirled beneath the street lamps’ winter glow, sluicing against the posts and puddling on the ice-slicked sidewalks. Yet despite the uncooperative weather, street corners still catered to a certain arrangement of people. A few of the apartment buildings along Tenth Avenue seemed to shudder against the sky, the dark maw of their doorways framing a peeking head or two. Here, the buildings were strung together like pearls along a length of string, each pressed up against the next … yet unlike pearls, there was nothing attractive or even adequate about them. Crumbling, twelve-story structures housing squalid little flats, they were more like blackened, rotting teeth crowded into an unaccommodating mouth.

There were lights on inside the Calliope Candy shop, though the store had long since closed for the evening. A few dark shapes shifted in the light, silhouetted like cardboard puppets behind a cloth screen. Above the candy shop’s bank of windows, a dull green cloth awning sustained a tough pelting from the weather. The words
Calliope Candy
stitched across the awning in white lettering, seemed to glimmer in the light of the lampposts along the street.

Several blocks away, John Mavio’s rust-colored Camaro sat like a predator in waiting, its headlamps and engine off. Enveloped in darkness, the car was hardly visible. There were a number of other parked cars along the street and the Camaro did not look suspicious, out of the ordinary, or unusual in any way—except for one minor detail: the Camaro’s windows, shut tight against the storm, were fogged.

Inside, John sat in the driver’s seat, his fingers massaging the steering wheel’s rubber grip. He was dressed casually but consciously, as if he might be waiting to pick up a young woman for the evening: loose-collared shirt, jeans, Nikes, leather jacket. His hair, jet-black in the murk of the car’s interior, was wet and hung in his eyes. With the fingers of his left hand, he raked the hair back from his face. His teeth worked noiselessly on a piece of Wrigley’s.

Shifting in his seat, John adjusted his jacket and took a deep breath. He suddenly felt warm. In the inside breast pocket of his leather jacket was a bulky yellow envelope. Inside the envelope was $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills. The bills were divided into two approximately equal stacks, each fastened with greasy rubber bands. The money itself looked worn and tattered but otherwise indistinguishable, and volunteered the faint aroma of turpentine. In the right side outer pocket of his jacket was his gun—a semiautomatic .22-caliber Walther TPH seven-shot (six in the clip, one in the chamber). Specially used by the CIA as a “hit” gun (and rather similar in design to the gun extracted from Evelyn Gethers’s Lincoln Towncar), it fired hollow-point, long rifle bullets that expanded when shot. In short, it was a kill-gun for close quarters.

On the dashboard sat what could have been a cigarette lighter, but wasn’t.

From the glove compartment, his cell phone tweeted. Keeping an eye on the console’s clock, John reached over and yanked the glove compartment hatch down, grappling with the cell phone. It rang a second time before he got it to his ear.

“Yeah,” he said.

It was Kersh. “We’re hitting the intersection now. It’s mildly crowded, but we’re gonna hang back just the same. There’s some movement in the candy store, too.”

“Remember, Bill, I don’t want anybody up on this guy. You’ll make him hinky.”

“Don’t worry about us. He won’t see a thing.”

Still looking at the Camaro’s clock, he turned the cell phone’s power off and replaced it in the glove compartment. His mind slipped back to only a few days ago—Thanksgiving Day—and to the cold, smoky smell of Mickey O’Shay as he sat in the passenger seat of his car. Now John was suddenly anxious to inhale that smell again. He was an olfactory person by nature, as some people are, and the scent of the city and its occupants aroused not only the agent in him, but also the adolescent he’d once been. It was a rush, the closest thing to ambrosia he would ever encounter. Early on in the first few months of undercover work with the Secret Service, he had established a subconscious correlation between the Service—more specifically,
his job
—and the impoverished streets he’d spent so many dark, lonely hours working. Just as some bankers may have a Pavlovian reaction to the smell of crisp dollar bills, and just as some accountants may associate their office with the smell of wooden pencils and carbon paper and graphite, John remembered the Secret Service when he smelled the salty reek of Manhattan and its ambling destituteness. And now, sitting in wait while watching the car’s clock tick slowly through glowing green numbers, he was itchy to get things rolling.

To pass the time, he thought of Douglas Clifton—
dead
Douglas Clifton—who’d been generous and careless enough to leave behind a cache of fingerprints on the .22 and the accompanying silencer. Not that such leverage would prove beneficial in interrogating the dead. And that was it, wasn’t it? All dead ends? All doors flung open only to slam shut again before he was able to pass through? While John had been fighting through Thanksgiving Day traffic to meet Mickey on time and as Bill Kersh served hot plates of goulash to impoverished New Jersey families, Douglas Clifton had decided to take a flying leap out his hospital room window. The last person to see Clifton alive had been Dr. Kuhmari himself. According to the doctor, he’d gone in to check Clifton’s vitals fairly early in the morning. Everything in order, the doctor departed the room, intent on heading home to a late Thanksgiving Day breakfast with his family. He made it to the nurses’ station, where he administered a number of orders to his staff, handed in his clipboards—and that’s when one of the nurses noticed Clifton’s monitors had gone dead. Assuming Clifton had knocked the wires loose or even yanked them out in haste, as some patients will do, the nurse hurried into the room. A few seconds later she was screaming and hollering for the doctor, peering out the open window and unable to look at the messy heap that lay broken along the sidewalk several stories below. Kersh had gone to the hospital later that evening to speak with Kuhmari and the screaming nurse. From there, he’d called John and laid out the details.

“Homicide’s checking into it, although it sounds like a pretty clear case of suicide,” Kersh had said, and John agreed. With Clifton dead, it didn’t matter how many goddamn fingerprints they were able to pull from the stuff in the Lincoln’s trunk; Clifton couldn’t talk if he was dead.

The numbers on the dashboard clock changed and John cranked the key in the ignition, turned the Camaro’s engine over, flipped on the headlights, and slowly rolled down the street. He headed east toward Eighth Avenue, having decided to swing down and around to arrive at Tenth. This would suggest the appearance of an approach from the opposite direction. Not that Mickey O’Shay would be conscious of such things, he surmised. It was just how John Mavio operated.

After several minutes, the Camaro turned right onto 51
^th
Street and cruised in third gear past St. Clair Hospital. He made another right onto Tenth Avenue and headed toward the intersection of Tenth and West 53
^rd
Street. A soft drizzle heckled the windshield. Outside, the streets were pitch black and soulless, the darkness disturbed only by the constant stream of swerving headlights. More headlights appeared directly behind him as he approached the intersection, too closely, and he watched their reflection with some intensity in the Camaro’s rearview mirror. At the intersection, a horn was blasted and a black Volkswagen Jetta swooped around him and disappeared into the darkness ahead.