Shamrock Alley (47 page)

There was a vibe in the air, and Patrick Nolan’s few companions were not comfortable with it. Simultaneously, the group of them set their unfinished drinks on the bar, shrugged on their coats, and began moving toward the door. Nolan, too, apparently had designs to leave, for he knocked down the last of his gin and tonic in one gulp and began buttoning his own coat.

“Wait awhile,” Mickey said, not looking at Nolan. “Hang around.”

“It’s late,” Nolan said, continuing to button his coat.

Jimmy walked the length of the bar and occupied the bar stool on the other side of Patrick Nolan. Only then did Nolan’s hands slow up and finally cease buttoning his coat. Not looking at either Jimmy or Mickey, he placed his palms on the top of the bar, his fingers splayed.

Sipping his Killian’s, Mickey did not utter a word. Occasionally, his gaze would shift to Nolan’s in the mirror above the bar, but for the most part he was occupied with his beer.

Jimmy smiled and reached into his coat pocket. “You got a nice tan,” he told Nolan. “Where you been?”

“Around. What’s going on, Jimmy?”

“Mickey and me, we got somethin’ for ya.” Jimmy produced a small white box tied with a red ribbon. He placed it on the bar, tapped it twice with an index finger, then slid it in front of Nolan. “This is for you.”

Mickey got up from his stool and moved to the jukebox. He selected a Sam Cooke number, then turned and made his way to the front door. Nolan jerked his head in Mickey’s direction at the sound of the turning dead bolt.

“Go ahead,” Jimmy said. “Open it.”

“What is it?”

“Open
it.”

Nolan’s gaze lingered a moment on Jimmy. Then he turned and looked down at the small white box with the red ribbon. He brought one hand up and pulled the knot out of the ribbon. In the polished mahogany of the bar, he could see Mickey passing behind him. Taking a deep breath, he unwrapped the gift and took off the lid.

Patrick Nolan stared inquisitively at the object in the box. “The hell
is
it?” Then he suddenly knew
exactly
what it was: someone’s tongue. “Oh
shit…”

“You don’t get it?” Jimmy said, picking up the box and the lid. “Lemme show you.” He placed the lid back on the box, brought it to his ear, then worked the lid of the box like the mouth of a puppet. In a high-pitched voice, Jimmy said, “You been rippin’ us, Patty! You been rippin’ us off!”

Patrick Nolan suddenly looked very angry. “Fuck is this all about, Jimmy?”

Jimmy just smiled and slid the box back over to Nolan.

Behind them, Mickey picked up a chair from one of the tables, lifted it over his head, and slammed it down on the bar beside Nolan. Nolan shrieked and jumped in his seat, holding one arm up over his eyes. The chair splintered into pieces. One of his hands bleeding, Mickey grappled with a busted chair leg, freed it, then wielded it like a baton.

“You been ripping us, Nolan!” Mickey shouted, pointing the chair leg at the man.

With as much placidity as he could muster, Nolan assured Mickey that he had no idea what he was talking about.

Mickey prodded Nolan’s shoulder with the chair leg. “The counterfeit money. How much you been moving? How much you got left?”

“There’s
nothing
left,” Nolan said, “and I wasn’t ripping you guys. I worked out a deal with Corcoran. You got a problem with that, you work it out with him.”

“You’re full of shit,” Mickey scowled. Nolan had known he was ripping them off all along—Mickey could tell in Nolan’s eyes, in the way he looked when Mickey confronted him in the restroom, and in the way he had avoided Mickey all evening.

“That’s not how this works, Patty,” Jimmy said. Nolan glanced at him but seemed uncomfortable leaving his eyes off Mickey for too long. “You fucked up our deal. How much money you make moving this stuff?”

“No,” Nolan said quickly, “forget it. My deal was with Corcoran. I didn’t know he was ripping you.”

“You’re lying,” Jimmy said.

“Don’t play bullshit games with me, Jimmy,” Nolan said. His face had turned red, and his eyes had narrowed. “I ran these streets longer than you; I know the setup. You think you can shake me down, you’re out of your minds. I’m not one of them kids who wants to smell your shit.”

Nolan stood and pushed away from the bar. His anger was coming off him in waves, boiling the air. Hands stuffed in his pockets, he moved quickly toward the door, then paused and turned to face them. He jabbed a finger at Mickey. “This little weasel follows me out, I’ll rip his fuckin’ head off.”

Breathing heavily, white-fisting the chair leg, Mickey stood heaving like an ape. He turned and looked at Jimmy.

Jimmy waved one hand. “Let him go,” he muttered quietly, getting up to unlock the front door.

Nolan stared Mickey down, his eyes rimmed with hatred, his sallow cheeks quivering. Finally, after a moment, Mickey dropped the chair leg on the floor. But he did not move his eyes from Nolan’s.

“You—” Nolan began, but was immediately knocked against the bar following a sound like the crack of a whip. Behind him, Jimmy stood holding the wooden coat rack, its polished wood post marred by a vague circle of hair and blood. Without hesitation, Jimmy brought the clawed feet of the coat rack down on the small of Patrick Nolan’s back.

Nolan screamed and crumpled to the floor, one hand clawing for Jimmy.

Mickey grabbed his chair leg from the floor and proceeded to swing at Nolan’s head. He managed to hit him only once before Nolan grabbed the chair leg and yanked it clean out of Mickey’s hands. Lurching forward, runnels of blood running from his scalp and into his eyes, Nolan rushed Mickey and drove his head into his chest. In an expulsion of breath, Mickey was slammed back against the wall, suddenly victim to Nolan’s pummeling fists.

Jimmy swung the coat rack again, breaking it in half across Nolan’s back. Again Nolan cried out, but his fury was relentless and he refused to cease beating Mickey.

One of Mickey’s hands managed to snake up the wall and close around a clutch of darts stuck into the dart board above his head. Eyes closed, he swung the fistful of darts in a curve toward Nolan’s face. There was a wet, crunching sound, and a spray of warm liquid along Mickey’s knuckles as he drove the darts into the side of Patrick Nolan’s face and neck.

Nolan’s fists suddenly stopped coming, and Mickey opened his eyes. Before him, Patrick Nolan’s eyes had gone wide, the pupils ridiculously small, the left side of his face decorated with the colorful feathered plumes of the darts and smeared with his own blood. Nolan’s jaw worked noiselessly, and blood poured from his mouth. He looked lost, pained, frightened, shocked. But those were just passing emotions, and in an instant, his body seemed to spasm with an electrical jolt, and his eyes refocused on Mickey.

“Uhhh …”
His hands closed around Mickey’s throat and began strangling him. Mickey landed an elbow to Nolan’s face, tried shoving the darts further into his face, but there was no stopping the man—

Until Jimmy appeared at his side and drove a ten-inch knife into Patrick Nolan’s belly.

Immediately, Nolan’s hands dropped away from Mickey’s throat.

Gasping, sputtering, Mickey curled against the wall and pushed himself out of Nolan’s reach. But Patrick Nolan would be reaching for things no more: with a number of quick, upward jabs, Jimmy continued to bury the large knife-blade into Nolan’s gut. Nolan’s shoulders hitched with each stab. Jimmy finally pulled away, his arms covered in blood. With the knife still embedded in his abdomen, Nolan staggered comically against the wall, his eyes suddenly distant and blind.

In a rage, Mickey sprang up and rushed Nolan. He grabbed the man by a clutch of hair with one hand, another hand against one shoulder, and drove the man’s face straight into the brick wall. Yelling, he spun Nolan around and pushed him across the floor, driving Nolan’s face through the glass bubble of the Cloverleaf’s jukebox. The shatter of glass was followed by a display of electrical sparks. Sam Cooke’s voice slowed in an instant to a dull, impeded baritone, then died completely. Nolan’s body twitched a number of times, his face through the juke and impaled on shards of glass. Blood ran down the length of the jukebox and pooled on the floor.

Nearly out of breath, Mickey managed to summon a choked laugh. “Check it out,” he muttered. “Patty Nolan just broke into the music biz.”

“Come on,” Jimmy said, reaching out and grabbing the ruffled collar of Nolan’s coat. With a sturdy yank, he managed to pull Nolan from the jukebox. Broken glass clattered to the floor. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, Patrick Nolan was lain out on the floor, his sightless eyes unfocused and facing the ceiling. The force of his face through the jukebox glass had torn most of the darts from the side of his face and neck. A few jagged pieces of glass poked up from ragged wounds at his neck and cheeks.

“Don’t look so good no more,” Mickey muttered, staggering over to the bar and finishing his Killian’s. In the hallway, Corky McKean watched them in silence, his arms folded, one foot tapping on the floor.

Sometime later, just as a light snow began to fall along Manhattan’s West Side, Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn dumped Patty Nolan’s body into the Hudson River. They worked mostly in silence and spoke only after the body had been discarded and they were in the Cadillac on their way back home.

“I been thinking about the counterfeit we got left and this guy Esposito,” Jimmy said. The glare of streetlights washed over his pale face as he drove.

In the passenger seat, Mickey nodded while looking out the window. “Esposito,” he muttered to himself. “Esposito-ito-ito …”

“I been thinking,” Jimmy repeated. Turning onto Tenth Avenue and pulling up outside Calliope Candy, he said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do …”

Somewhere over the river, winter lightning filled the sky.

T
HE
C
LOVERLEAF WAS NOT TOO BUSY
.

Standing in the doorway, John pulled off his leather gloves and skirted his eyes around the room. The bartender stared disconcertedly out the window at the freshly fallen snow, lusterless in the tarnished gray of midafternoon. Across the room against one wall stood a table where the jukebox had been previously. Mickey and Jimmy sat there, picking at the labels of their beer bottles and watching a basketball game on the small television set mounted in the rafters above the bar. Mickey noticed John but did not hold his eyes to him; rather, he took a swig of beer and turned back to the television.

It was December 31, the last day of the year. A light snow had fallen intermittently over the past two days, depositing powder and slush on the streets and sidewalks. John and Katie had spent a draining Christmas morning at the hospital, sitting at his father’s bedside. Unable to do anything more for the old man, the doctors had transferred his father to a room just down the hall from the IGU. “A nice, quiet room,” one of the doctors had told John. “Intensive Care’s hectic. You can sit with him and not be disturbed here.” Quiet or not, in reality it was the room where people went to die.

“This wouldn’t have happened if they’d just kept him here, looked after him,” he’d muttered.

“You don’t know that,” Katie had said. She was standing behind him, one hand on his shoulder.

“He was alone too much.”

“He wasn’t,” she’d insisted. “We were both there as much as possible.”

“I wasn’t.”

“John, you were there that night when it happened, just the same as me. There was nothing we could have done. We knew it was going to come down to this. We knew …” She had more to say, but her voice trailed off nonetheless.

“Do you think he’s in pain?” he had asked her.

“I don’t know,” she’d said truthfully. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“I
always
worry about you.”

They’d eaten Christmas dinner with Katie’s family. John had spent half the evening thinking about his father, and the other half thinking about the West Side boys and their counterfeit money. He recalled the evening on the roof, and how Mickey had pointed the gun at him. Five silencers. There had been no prints on the silencers themselves; however, the boxes were covered in not only Mickey’s prints but the prints belonging to a man named Glenn Hanratty, known to his friends on the West Side as “Irish.” Irish was the proprietor of Calliope Candy. Kersh had matched up the prints on the silencer boxes to a set of prints taken from a box of Junior Mints he’d purchased at the candy store, sold directly to him by “Irish” Hanratty himself. Still … they had nothing solid on Kahn, and John couldn’t help but feel that time was running short.

John pulled out an empty chair and sat at the table with Mickey and Jimmy. The pain was back in his hands, and he alternated pressing his thumbs into his palms to work out the numbness.

“Haven’t heard from you guys in a while,” he said. “Thought maybe you changed your minds.”

“You want a beer?” Jimmy said, and held up one finger to Corky McKean behind the bar.

John glanced up at the basketball game, then over at Mickey. The skin under his right eye was purple-black and shiny, the lid slightly swollen. Two cuts, now hardened and scabrous, broke open the flesh at the tip of his cheekbone.