The Runaway

by Martina Cole

  It was family, blood, kin. It was what made the world go round and people strive to better themselves.

  At the end of the day, family was all you had.

  Eamonn Senior lay on the mortuary slab. His heavy face looked much older in repose.

  His son looked down at the man he had both loved and hated, and felt a great grief inside him. He forgot all the times they had fought, forgot the times as a child when he had gone without food so the man on the slab could drink. Forgot the hidings he had endured during drunken rages.

  He was seeing the man who had accompanied his son to a strange land because he knew how much trouble the boy was in. He was remembering how his father had tried, at least that once, to take care of him.

  Swallowing down the tears, he tried to remember his mother. She had been a small woman with a ready smile who had adored her big husband and son. She had died a quick painful death from cancer at a very young age. Her face, so beautiful once, had been ravished by the pain of the tumour inside her breast.

  He remembered the smell of the sick room, the heavy bitter scent of death. Until that moment he had forgotten it all. The pain had been too great to bear.

  Now he could see the pale yellow of the bedspread, the whiteness of the sheets as she lay there, pale and so very thin, in her soft Irish brogue telling him to be a good boy and to do what his father said.

  He had been too young to understand she was telling him goodbye.

  The hospital staff had been kind to him afterwards. The nurses had given him tea and toast and he could remember his father crying. Those tears had frightened him. Eamonn couldn’t remember him drinking before then.

  He realised as he looked down at the dead man that his father had run away from this same memory for the rest of his life, had chased it away with whiskey.

  He had done the best he could for his son, and inadvertently shaped him as an adult.

  In some ways he supposed he should be grateful to his father - grateful for the fact that he had made Eamonn into the cold-hearted, violent killer he was today.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Eamonn followed Petey into the warmth of the Lennox Bar on Lennox Avenue. It was a haunt for the waifs and strays of the bookie market - men who were either overextended or couldn’t get credit any more for various reasons.

  In the Lennox Bar men who would otherwise be black-listed could gamble. All eyes turned to the doorway at their arrival, and a tall thin man with ginger hair and startlingly blue eyes slipped from his stool at the bar and made his way to the men’s room. Without pausing in the bar area, Petey and Eamonn followed him.

  They ambled through the men’s room and out of the window. In the back alley the ginger-haired man was being held by Petey’s two heavies, Paddy and Seamus O’Connor, who had been ordered to wait there in case of just such a manoeuvre.

  Petey wiped a hand across his face and sighed heavily, a theatrical sound full of distress and hurt pride.

  ‘Jasus, Jonjo, you’re driving me up the fucking wall. I mean,’ he looked around at Eamonn for confirmation of his words, ‘we’ve been looking for you all day and me fucking legs are playing me up and now I have to climb - climb - through a fucking window in a fucking shit-house bar and come and fucking get you! Are you on a fucking death wish or what?’

  Jonjo didn’t answer.

  Shaking his head, Petey nodded at Eamonn then leant against the wall to light himself a cigarette. Eamonn walked forward and punched the man to the ground. Jonjo put up no resistance.

  As he lay, curled in a foetal position on the filthy ground, Eamonn proceeded to give him a kicking of epic proportions. Blood was coming from Jonjo’s face and head. His eyes were closed, swollen shut, and his arms hung in strange positions.

  Hardly sweating, Eamonn started on the man’s legs. His face was impassive, the feeling of euphoria that bouts of violence created in him taking over once more. The O’Connor brothers watched in fascination, knowing they were seeing the work of a master. It would make a good story. Since Eamonn had joined the firm, he had become the object of a great deal of interest. Though violence was part of the job for all of them, this man had brought it to the level of an art form.

  As his parting shot, Eamonn took a box cutter. He bent over the inert figure and removed its ears. Fortunately Jonjo was already unconscious as blood ran in deep red rivulets across the dusty ground. Straightening up, Eamonn walked away, cleaning the knife on a piece of old rag as he went.

  ‘How about a beer before the next stop?’ Petey was aware that his own voice sounded high, almost girlish. In fact, like this, the other man frightened him.

  Eamonn just shook his head and got into the car. Sighing heavily, Petey got in beside him and started the engine. There was a very evident electricity in the air until Eamonn, forcing himself to relax, finally spoke.

  ‘Who’s next on the agenda?’

  Petey grinned. ‘You’ll enjoy this one. It’s a favour for a man called Carmine, an Italian brother. His daughter was married to a guy called Inglesias who beat the fuck out of her. She’s divorced from him now but he still likes to intimidate her, you know? Anyway, the rub is he took the kids last week and didn’t return them. I found out where he lives and we’re going to pay him a little visit. He’s scum.

  ‘Carmine is not a made man but he’s respected, which is why he’s paying us big bucks to sort it out for him. He doesn’t want to take a domestic to his Don, which is understandable in a way, but I also hate the motherfucker we’re going to see. He’s a pimp straight out of the old school. Beats his girls, puts them on drugs, and even has a specialist agency.’

  Eamonn frowned. ‘A specialist agency?’

  Petey gave a twisted grin that made him look even uglier than he was. ‘Listen to this one, Eamonn: this guy Inglesias brings in pregnant women for out-of-town businessmen who are into that type of kick. One of the women, a young Puerto Rican, only nineteen, is brought to an apartment and told that all she has to do is strip. She’s told that there’s a security guy gonna wait outside the apartment and once she’s finished, he’ll remove her from the building and she’ll be five hundred dollars richer. The stupid bitch goes for it. After all, she’s pregnant. She needs the money.’

  He shrugged and then said huskily: ‘They fucking raped her! A pregnant woman and they raped her. Seven men, one after the other, up her arse, you name it. Now I run women, you know that, everyone knows that. But I run fucking women - not kids, not pregnant women - but real honest-to-goodness whores who know what they’re about. She was dumped from a car by Central Park West, already in labour. Her kid died and she was left scarred for life. This low-life fucking scum needs to be sorted out once and for all.’

  Eamonn shook his head. ‘And this Carmine let his daughter marry this scum?’

  ‘Until his daughter told him the score, he knew fucking nothing,’ Petey explained. ‘After the marriage, Inglesias thought he was safe. He had her terrified. Now, though, he thinks that with his money and connections he can get himself out of anything. We’re going to let him know that that is bullshit. He’s a dead man as far as I’m concerned. Or at least a living dead man, you know what I’m saying?’

  Eamonn nodded. ‘So where is he now, and what’s the set-up?’

  ‘This is the good bit, see,’ Petey sniggered. ‘He thinks he’s meeting me in connection with a business proposition. I’ve romanced him over the phone and talked sweet to him once or twice in a few bars. Carmine still don’t know all the man’s business, just thinks he’s a regular pimp. So, I have Inglesias wetting his pants at the thought of the big bucks I’m gonna be bringing in for him. What we have today is a situation where he is meeting us in the privacy and comfort of his own home. We’re gonna take the fucker in his natural habitat.’

  Eamonn laughed now, relaxed and happy. ‘Where are the children?’

  Petey waved a hand dismissively. ‘He gave them back yesterday. It was just another shitty thing to do, frightening his ex-wife by keeping the
kids. He don’t really want them. It’s part of his make up. You know: I don’t want you but I’m fucked if you’ll ever forget me, little lady. Well, after this he’s history.’

  Crussofixio Inglesias looked at the girl beside him and smiled. She tried to smile back but it was difficult with a swollen mouth. He was so handsome, so good-looking, she still tried to believe that he was a nice guy, even though she knew now for definite that he wasn’t.

  ‘If you’d just done what I asked, none of this would have happened, eh?’ He poked her in the chest with a long bony finger. It hurt.

  She nodded. Even her short brown hair seemed to be trembling as she tried to be what he wanted her to be.

  ‘Act like you’re enjoying it. No man’s gonna pay me good for a broad who looks like you do. I mean, you’re looking ugly and you’re looking like a frightened rabbit. Now there are times when that’s what the man might want, a little rough stuff, want you to look frightened. Then it’s good. It brings in the money. You’re like an actress, you know. This is an art form.’

  ‘But he hurt me, he made me hurt inside.’

  Lighting a joint and breathing in deeply, Crussofixio scowled at the whore. He was that rare kind of man who gets aggressive on grass. Instead of mellowing him out, it made him more angry, and this was a man who was born angry. A man who honestly believed that women were there for men like him to exploit.

  Crussofixio was sitting on a chair, legs splayed, watching the girl, a cruel smile on his face. Her tiny breasts were exposed but she hadn’t realised that fact yet. The halter top had come undone and was hanging loose around her waist. Her breasts were barely buds, nothing there at all to interest a real man.

  She looked what she was: a child. As Crussofixio stood up he seemed to loom over her, his six foot two inches heavy, running to fat.

  ‘Look at yourself!’ he ranted. ‘You look like a slut, you look like every other fucking whore on the streets of this town. I feed you, clothe you, take care of you, and this is what I get. You taking me for a fool, honeybunch? Because if you are, you better think twice, girl.’

  She was terrified, starting to apologise to the man who had beaten her, but before he could raise his fist to her there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Open it,’ he snapped. ‘I’m expecting some business associates. ’ He looked proudly at the girl’s battered face. The men with whom he was going to work would see how tight he kept his ship. They would see just how good he was at his job from this demonstration of what it took to keep a girl in line.

  As Eamonn and Petey walked into the apartment, Crussofixio smiled at them. The girl, convinced they were new punters, attempted to smile at them too, through her pain and tears.

  Petey laughed loudly. ‘What’s going on? This your fucking daughter or something?’ He stared at the girl. ‘Put your tits away, love.’

  He looked askance at Crussofixio who stared back, baffled. These men didn’t look as if they were in his home to do business; in fact, they both looked totally wired. He recognised Eamonn as the mad Irishman everyone was talking about and felt a loosening of his bowels.

  ‘One of my girls, she tried to fuck me with a john,’ he explained nervously. ‘I had to teach her a lesson, you know what it’s like.’

  Petey shook his head. ‘No, I don’t know what it’s like. I never employed a little girl in my goddamn motherfucking life. How would I know what it’s like?’

  Crussofixio was in a quandary. Of all the things he had envisaged from this meeting, being criticised and intimidated had definitely not been on the agenda.

  ‘Hey, man.’ He tried to smile. ‘I have to sort the bitches out myself, need to see that the work’s done proper—’

  Petey slapped his face. ‘Fuck you, man. Fuck you and your shitty operation and your diseased fucking whores and your crappy little clubs. We don’t want no part of you or anything to do with you. We’re here over a fucking grudge, man, a fucking beef you got with your ex-wife’s father, Carmine. I promised him I was going to cut off your fucking balls and bring them back to him in a handkerchief, and that’s just what I’m going to do.

  ‘Not only because I promised Carmine but because you stepped over the line, man, you stepped over all the lines of taste and fucking decency when you began supplying fucking pregnant women. Even the fucking niggers are disgusted with you.’

  Crussofixio looked amazed and very frightened. He stared at the girl on the sofa. She sat watching everything with wide eyes and a chalk-white face. Her body was still trembling from the earlier beating. Petey took her gently by the arm and led her out of the room.

  Crussofixio gaped at the two men before him with bulging eyes. He knew he was about to die, or even worse be left crippled, and remembered all the times he had hit on someone. Finally he knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of violence and he was terrified, because he knew how much he had enjoyed making people feel like this. He held up both arms as if to ward them off even though they had not made a move towards him as yet.

  ‘Hey, guys, listen to me - Carmine is lying. I was married to his fucking tramp of a daughter, for fuck’s sakes. This ain’t business, it’s a private family feud.’

  Eamonn spoke for the first time. ‘What about the pregnant women? I suppose they’re a figment of our imagination as well, are they?’ His London accent made the man before him jump, it was so harsh-sounding in the plush Manhattan apartment, so out of place.

  ‘You’re a big guy - big and running to fat. Letting yourself go now the money’s coming your way,’ Eamonn continued. ‘You should never have let us in here today without covering firepower at least. You’re a piece of scum in every way, Mr Inglesias, and this is your last day on earth. How does that feel, eh? Come on, tell me. I’m interested.’

  Sitting down on the sofa so recently vacated by the young hooker, Inglesias cried into his long-fingered, perfectly manicured hands.

  Eamonn shot him in the back of his head five times, leaving blood and bone and brains all over the white damask covers. Afterwards Petey removed his balls with the box cutter then, whistling, they made their way back down to their car.

  As they pulled away, Eamonn said: ‘You’re really delivering his balls?’

  ‘Too right I am,’ Petey sniggered. ‘These,’ he held up the bloody handkerchief with pride, ‘are worth over two hundred thousand dollars. We made a big fucking killing today, in more ways than one. We’ll deliver these, have a late lunch, and then get out to do anything else that’s on the agenda.’

  Eamonn nodded his satisfaction with this suggestion. ‘All in a day’s work, eh?’

  They were still laughing as they drove away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Deirdra Mahoney was seventeen, pleasantly plump, with slanting green eyes and deep red hair, this being her crowning glory. Long and thick with a natural curl, it shone with gold lights and hung like a curtain down her back.

  Deirdra knew that if her legs were short and chubby, and her breasts just a little too small, her glorious hair compensated for these deficiencies.

  Unlike her six siblings, she knew her failings and worked on her good points. She was polite and quiet before her mother, deferential to her father, Jack, biding her time until Eamonn Docherty asked for her hand. He had been with her father for a year now, and had worked his way up to a very good position. She was certain he would. She had made it quite plain that it was what she was expecting; made it quite plain too that if he didn’t toe the line in that respect, she would see her father and let him have the final word.

  Once Deirdra had her man, she would finally have a life. A real life, one where she could be mistress of her own house, and have a car and some fun.

  Jack Mahoney had his daughters watched like hawks, and this depressed her greatly. All the other girls at school had had some kind of sexual experience by now; all except her. She’d had to pretend - make something up. It didn’t occur to her that maybe a lot of her schoolfriends had made up their stories as well.
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br />   She ran her hands lightly over her soft breasts and felt a tingling there. She wanted, needed, a man’s hands on them. Sex was constantly on her mind; it was like a drug and she was obsessed by it.

  ‘Deirdra, what on earth are you doing?’

  She was brought back to reality by her mother’s voice. Crossing her fingers, she answered lightly: ‘Just looking out of the window, Ma. Watching the world go by.’

  Maire Mahoney came into her eldest daughter’s room. She straightened a pillow on the bed and smoothed the pink silk counterpane.

  ‘Sure I wish you wouldn’t sit on the bed, girl, you crease everything so.’ It was a reprimand given daily and ignored daily. ‘Would you not come down and play with the other girls?’ Maire’s voice was hesitant.

  Deirdra laughed gently. ‘I’m seventeen, Ma, I don’t want to play any more. Did you ask Daddy about me going to the movies with Eamonn?’

  Maire smiled then, making her prematurely aged face light up, showing an onlooker the beauty that had once been hers.

  ‘Sure, you know you can go, girl, your father’s over the moon about the two of yez. He’s a good Irish Catholic. Jasus, there’s enough of them in New York, I admit, but this one is more our kind.’ She hesitated a few seconds before saying: ‘Well, more your father’s kind. He dotes on him. Talks about him all the time. Jasus, you’d think Jack was in love with him instead of you.’

  Deirdra laughed with her mother. It was her father’s liking for Eamonn that had made her determined to go for the handsome young man, rather than his obvious charms. She was in with a chance with Eamonn Docherty because her father knew and trusted him.

  One thing she vowed: when she got him, there would not be one pink thing in her house. It would all be leather and glass, like the pictures in the magazines she studied.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure it was OK with Dada before I went out, that was all,’ she said humbly now.