Shamrock Alley (19 page)

Flipping through the files, Kersh whistled.

“Like I said, nothing concrete. Supposedly they’ve been involved in a lot of shootings, even got their hands in some of the unions.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s the word.”

“What’s with the acquittals?” In Kersh’s opinion, there were two reasons for the lack of convictions. One: the assaults were against street punks who, in turn, made lousy witnesses. Or two: O’Shay and Kahn had frightened people to the point that they refused to testify against them. Something John had said about Tressa Walker and how frightened she’d been when talking to him about O’Shay and Kahn …

Brauman rolled his shoulders and raked his fingers through a graying patch of hair. He looked tired. And it suddenly occurred to Kersh that
all
middle-aged cops looked tired. “Acquittals? If I had to guess, I’d say the prosecution had a difficult time finding anyone to talk against them.”

“Why’s that?”

Quite matter-of-factly, Brauman said, “Because they’re nuts. Real whack-a-doos. They get their way through intimidation. One of ‘em—the O’Shay fella, if I’m thinkin’ right—he got off a homicide on an insanity plea once or twice, did a few months at some nuthouse upstate. Then he became cured and got out. Some system. I know a detective who’s worked some cases, arrested them before.” Lacing his hands across his ample stomach, Brauman leaned farther back in his chair; Kersh could hear the rollers creak beneath the man’s weight. “What’s the deal, anyway? You guys got something on them?”

Kersh, who was instinctually covetous when it came to the divulgence of case information, even with another officer of the law, merely said, “Their names popped up in some counterfeit case we’re working. Figured I’d check ‘em out, see what came up. Let me ask you—these guys have any connection to a fella named Charles or Charlie Lowenstein that you know of? Guy was a printer.”

“Don’t ring a bell. I wouldn’t know.”

“That detective friend of yours?”

“I can give him a call sometime this week, see what he knows.”

Kersh frowned, rubbed his chin. “Ahhh—just if you happen to speak with him. Not a big deal.”

“Well, if you want to arrest ‘em, be my guest. Save us some trouble. Oh,” Brauman said, eyebrows raising, “that reminds me. I got your present.” He pushed his chair away from his desk and rolled over to a cabinet, opened a drawer, searched. After a moment, Brauman withdrew a plastic evidence bag from the cabinet and rolled back over to his desk, placing the bag on his New York Mets desk calendar. Inside the bag were the gun and silencer recovered from Evelyn Gethers’s Lincoln Towncar; stapled to the outside of the bag were the results of the ninhydrin exam. “Lab came back with a hit. Douglas James Clifton is your man. Got some good prints off the twenty-two and a nice fat thumbprint on the silencer.”

Kersh leaned forward in his chair and peered at the bag. “Douglas Clifton,” Kersh muttered, satisfied. “One-armed bandit.”

When Brauman asked what Kersh meant, the Secret Service agent only shook his head and reached for the last cruller.

Time.

It’s a volatile thing. Sometimes, it’s an abyss. In the swimming moments that occupy the turn around a dark corner in an abandoned neighborhood tenement, time becomes infinite. Gun drawn, heart pounding, sweat prickling and itching the sticky nape of one’s neck—time has swallowed that person. He is held captive. Nothing moves, nothing changes. Time has stopped and he is suspended.

Other times, it is like a locomotive barreling through a mountainside tunnel. Yet for an agent, there is no track to guide the way. There is the sensation of losing control. It can be an eternity that lasts for a second, or a second that extends until forever …

On the nightstand beside the bed, John’s cell phone rang.

“No,” Katie muttered, “let it go.”

“Can’t,” John said, completing a line of kisses down his wife’s neck before rolling over and fumbling with the cell phone in the dark. “John.”

“You sound funny. You’re already in bed?” It was Kersh.

“No, no—go ahead. I’m up.”

“Just thought you’d want to know—prints came back on the gun and silencer. Douglas Clifton’s had his hands all over them.”

“Beautiful.”

“Well, we’ll see how it shakes down,” Kersh said. “He isn’t the most cooperative soul.”

“He’ll talk now.”

“Let’s hope,” Kersh said. “You’re going to Katie’s parents’ tomorrow for Thanksgiving?”

“For the day, yeah. You got plans?”

“I help at a church-sponsored soup kitchen every year out in Jersey. Mostly young kids and their mothers, that sort of thing. I’ll be there most of the day.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me …” Katie raised her head up off the pillow, but John waved her back down.

Kersh laughed. “Keeps the conscience clean. Better than confession. If there’s a God up there, I’m building toward my big retirement.”

“You’ll get points just for spending the day in Jersey.”

Again, Kersh laughed. John pictured him seated in his cramped apartment at a small kitchen table, a can of Spaghetti-O’s choked with a spoon laid out before him. Perhaps in the background hums the soft lilt of one of Kersh’s beloved jazz records.

“Have a nice holiday,” Kersh said. “Send Katie my regards.”

“I will. Goodnight.”

He clicked off the phone and rolled back against his wife. Wasting no time, he pressed his lips to her soft neck while she shivered and smiled in his arms. “Bill Kersh sends his regards,” he mumbled.

“He’s the big, frumpy guy from the office?”

“The very same.”

“He reminds me,” Katie said, “of a big, messy sofa.” She’d only met Kersh once, when they’d bumped into him at a restaurant one afternoon, and she had been impressed with the man’s knowledge of artwork, music, theater.

“I’ll tell him you said that.”

“Don’t offend him.”

“It won’t offend him,” he said, continuing to bury his face into the warm, yielding flesh of his wife’s neck. “He’d actually like it. Now come here and stop talking …”

For an agent on a tedious surveillance, time becomes an opponent. For an agent suddenly plunged into the whizzing heat of an unexpected gunfight, time becomes a threat. For an agent faced with the daunting task of working and reworking undercover scenarios, time becomes a gift.

For John Mavio, time became a decision, and it arrived on Thanksgiving morning.

S
EVEN-THIRTY
T
HANKSGIVING MORNING, AND THE TEMPER
ature registered at just under forty degrees. The sun was visible only when it passed between the patches of iron-colored clouds that hugged the skyline. Already there was movement in the Mavio home. In the kitchen, Katie hovered around the table like a bee to a flower, filling two large plates with the cookies she’d been baking for the past two days. Humming under her breath, she was a young girl once again, helping her mother prepare food for the holidays. On the counter beside the sink, a small television was turned to NBC, though the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade would not begin for another hour and a half.

In the bedroom, John stirred and rolled over, half-awake. He could hear his wife’s humming, could hear the sounds of the television set coming down the hall. Outside, he could even make out the early-morning calls of kids out in the street, marching in a parade of their own. Their apartment was situated in a predominantly Italian neighborhood. Italians—particularly
New York
Italians—lived for the holidays. Any annual celebration was an excuse to unload tremendous amounts of food on willing and eager relatives, to clutter kitchens with baked sweets and fresh bread still warm from the bakery. As a child, John had shared a few Thanksgivings with distant relatives, but usually it was just he and his father.

Katie came into the room, yanked open the closet, and stood there with one hand on her hip and her other hand pressed to the swell of her belly. Without looking in her husband’s direction, she said, “Wake up, wake up, wake up. Your day off and you’re going to spend it in bed?”

“I was dreaming. What time is it?”

“Morning.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed. Cookies smell good.”

“Get up, and get ready,” she told him. “We have some driving to do today.”

He staggered out of bed at Katie’s insistence, was practically shoved into the shower and thrust into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. And although some part of his mind was already interrogating Douglas Clifton, he felt mostly at peace with himself and ready to shake his job from him, at least for several hours. It would be nice—pleasant drive to Katie’s parents’ house, taking in the scenery, spending some time with his wife. To him, it seemed that Katie’s pregnancy had progressed in a series of hasty snapshots. Like an absent father sent photographs of his child, surprised at how much the child has grown, he sometimes found himself looking at Katie when she didn’t know she was being observed, just capturing her in his mind. There was a rejection he sometimes felt deep within himself when staring at her in this way. As if it was
her
feeling of rejection, radiating so strong that it felt like his own. In a perfect world time would mean nothing, work would be nonessential, and he could spent an eternity staring at his wife.

By eight o’clock there was a strong wind blowing against the side of the building, rattling the windows. The streets filled with shade as the sun was again swallowed up by another blind of clouds. While his wife showered and dressed, he sneaked a couple of oatmeal cookies from the prepared trays and watched the television with little interest. Despite the cold weather, he was in a good mood. It had been a while since he’d felt relaxed.

A chirping sound: his cell phone, still on the nightstand in their bedroom.

Personal calls were always made to the house, so he knew right away the call was work-related. And his first thought was
Kersh
. He hurried down the hall and scooped the phone off the nightstand, pressed the green button.

“Yeah?”

“John.” A man’s voice—but not Bill Kersh’s. He knew the voice, but it took his brain a couple seconds to place a face to it. “John,” the man repeated, his voice uninflected.

It was Mickey O’Shay.

“Yeah, this is John.”

There was some rustling on the other end of the phone. “Where are you?”

He uttered an apprehensive laugh and glanced back toward the hallway. Quickly, he moved across the bedroom floor and quietly shut the bedroom door. “At home. This—Mickey?”

“I want you to meet me in one hour.”

“Somethin’ wrong?”

“No,” Mickey said. “I got your money with me now.”

He thought of the way Mickey O’Shay sat huddled in the front pew of St. Patrick’s Cathedral …

“Are you kidding me, man?” he said. “I don’t have my end. I told you I’d need at least a day.” He summoned a forced laugh. “You tryin’ to bust my balls here or what?”

“Forget your end,” Mickey said. “I’ll front it to you.”

A rapid sinking sensation overcame him; Mickey had left him no wiggle room.

John breathed heavily into the phone. “The hell you talking about?”

“It’s yours,” Mickey said. “I’m fronting it. You want it, come get it.”

“This better not be bullshit,” he told Mickey. “Where you wanna meet?”

A minute later and he was standing in the hallway, watching Katie wrap the trays of cookies in colored Saran Wrap. Her hair was still wet from the shower, strands of it hanging in her face. He watched her work for some time.

She looked up, her hands still holding taut a piece of Saran Wrap. The expression on her face suggested he needn’t say anything. “When do you have to leave?” she said.