It puzzled me. If they knew where I lived, why hadn’t they just come in the morning and got me? The building had some security, but nothing a professional couldn’t get around. My door, too. It would have been easy pickings. They couldn’t be following me to see where I was going, because once I’d gone down into the Palisades, the only way back out was the way I’d come. The thing to do would have been to have one man wait back at the car and the other slip down the road after me, to see if I was meeting anyone, or picking up a drop, or whatever. But they weren’t doing that. They had parked the car, and both of them were coming down the hill after me. It was an odd thing to do, for if I started walking back up and past them, it would then be pretty fucking obvious if they turned and began following me again. Whereas if there’s only one of you tailing the suspect, you just keep walking along if you see him double-back, and then the other guy follows him from the car. But both were coming, and I was pretty sure that the car had had only two occupants. They couldn’t have got to a phone, so, unfortunately, the only reason both of them could possibly be coming down this hill at this time was to intercept me and then probably kill me. Nothing else would quite make sense.
This, though, again begged the question as to why they hadn’t killed me in the apartment this morning when I was asleep. I thought about it. Perhaps they’d been watching one of a couple of buildings and didn’t know which one I was actually in. Maybe they roughly knew where I lived but not exactly. Perhaps they’d just got lucky again, cruising Broadway, knowing that I lived around there somewhere and then spotting me. If they’d reacted fast, they could have got me on the street, but maybe it was too late by then, maybe by then I was up at the George Washington Bridge and up there there’d been half a dozen traffic cops. Even in Washington Heights you couldn’t plug somebody in broad daylight in front of six cops and hope to get away with it.
It must have been very exciting for them. There they were chugging along, Sunshine’s voice ringing in their ears. He lives in the 180s near Broadway, I’ve had reports, spies. Just keep driving around and if you see him at all, fucking shoot him first, ask questions later. But don’t be stupid. And then suddenly one of them spots me. There he is. There’s the bastard over there, look. Look, isn’t that him? Tell me if it isn’t him. Longer hair, beard, but that’s our boy, isn’t it? Let me see the picture. Where’s that union ID photo? Aye. That’s him. Where’s he going? Shite, he’s crossing the fucking bridge. All right, be cool, don’t get crazy, just go over.
Yeah, they’d be all excited. Driving over here, cleaning their pieces, wondering if an opportunity would present itself. And there I was, going down into some park in the middle of nowhere with no one around. Jesus, half the population of New Jersey is going over the bridge above us, but down here it’s all quiet, peaceful, no witnesses at all.
I was slightly disgusted with them. I couldn’t really believe that both of them would just come plodding down after me, hoping that I wouldn’t hear, but then a thought occurred to me. Maybe there was more than one car. Maybe they’d be calling in backup. Four men would be a lot to handle, or perhaps the whole entire bloody crew would show up to give me a once-over before putting one behind my neck.
I’d have to be smart. They, of course, had guns, and I, stupidly, did not.
Use the head. Have to remember. I was lucky, though, because I had experience, I’d been through the mill in Belfast, I’d been through the mill in Mexico, and maybe most important, in the army I’d done those two very useful courses. The recon course on Saint Helena, where I punched the guy and got chucked off and out, and a corporals’ course back in Blighty, which I managed to fail, but really there was no shame in that. I mean, you hear a lot about standards these days. They tell you that the Army Rangers is a really hard outfit, except that the pass rate for army basic training is about 95 percent. They don’t tell you that the Navy SEALs pass half of their candidates, desperate for manpower. Honestly. So there’s tough, and there’s tough. Anyway, I did that course in the West of Jock and I redded it, but by way of excuse let me say that the corporals’ course of the British Army is one of the hardest bitches in the world. See, the Brits consider corporals the backbone of the whole organization: corporals and sergeants run everything, so you have to be good. You learn exponentially. In four days, you get months, years of distilled experience. It’s like the wisdom of the I Ching.
Now one of the things I did on the course was a night foot patrol through a forest. There’s another foot patrol looking for you and if they find and “kill” you, you lose. In the patrol, it’s creepy, and you’re approaching a mock village from different parts of the wood, and, believe me, you learn to slow down, to halt your boys, to listen, to hear. People don’t know how to listen these days, but anybody can do it.
In that moment on that hill, in New Jersey, after all my slagging off the army, I remembered all of this in an instant and tried finally to do what they told me. Listen, unclog your ears of bog, you Paddy fuck. Try. Listen. Come on.
I stopped, crouched, and cupped my hands behind my ears. Took my hands away, got in a better position. You could barely hear them at all, but if you listened for a minute and sorted the sounds and deciphered them and filtered out birds and traffic and riverboats and ambience, you could tell that first, they weren’t running; second, they were walking but their footsteps were not regular, not normal; third, they were walking but they were treading lightly, carefully, they were actually trying not to make too much noise. They were confident, but not cocky. This told me two further things: one, they were dumb enough to think that I hadn’t heard them in the first place, which Helen Keller could have done a mile away with a Walkman on; and two, there was probably no backup coming. It was just them, and they, in their half-arsed, crappy way, were trying to be careful. So the two of them and the one of me.
I stood up and started walking again, following the path along the leaf-strewn road, all the way down almost to the river. It was really quite striking. The naked trees with huge branches twisted and gnarled. Underfoot, golden leaves carpeting everything, and in the distance, fleeting glimpses of the Hudson and a mammoth weird city perched precariously on an island.
At the next turning, you approached the water and there was a bit of a grassy meadow and a stony beach. It had to be either at this turning or the previous one. I decided on the previous one because the cover was better. I ran up to the last meander of the road and got in behind a bush just above the path. I hid there and pulled my raincoat close and waited. I was glad I’d been wearing dark colors. The boys were going a wee bit faster now, still careful, but nervous, sensing their big moment was coming up.
If I’d had two functioning feet, the ideal play would have been to let them go past, jump, drop-kick one of them in the back and head (with separate feet), and as he’s going down at least try and get a swipe at the other bastard. But with my left foot unreliable, I decided against this. Instead, I’d jump the bigger of the two guys and try and bowl him over into the other and hope somehow that it all worked out.
I waited for the boys, breathed, kept calm, and remembered that I’d actually failed that corporals’ course on the very first night. Jesus. Who was I kidding? Distilled experience, my arse. I-fucking-Ching. Knowing me, I was almost certainly blitzed that night too. Any U.S. Army week-two reject was probably better than me.
It was in the midst of this period of self-doubt that finally they came. One big and fat, one big and thin. They were both smoking, which was ridiculous. I could have smelled it. I didn’t, but I could have. The big and fat one I recognized as Boris Karloff from the tail on Bridget. The other I’d never seen in my life. He was sallow-faced and skinheaded and probably another import from Erin. I wonder if Darkey made him sing bloody “Danny Boy” to see if he was the business. They were both walking fast and neither had his weapon out, which suited me just fine.
The trail was narrow. The Thin Man was on the inside, so I had to go for him first. It would all have to be very q
uick and very hard. Hesitation would be the death of me. I held my breath, tensed, poised, and then when they were just past, I jumped the bugger. I took off on my good foot and landed on the Thin Man’s back. I got my knee into his spine and knocked all the air out of him. My right hand was already under his neck and pulling his head back. He staggered and fell into Boris. The fall helped me, and I twisted his neck hard and tight. By the time all three of us were sprawled in a heap on the ground, the Thin Man’s neck was broken and I’d scrabbled up his gun, a little six-shot revolver of unknown caliber. Boris was fumbling for his weapon somewhere on the ground in front of him. I took a couple of breaths and pointed the revolver at him. I clicked back the firing pin.
Don’t, I said.
He stopped what he was doing and put his hands up. He was still lying on the ground with his mate splayed out over his legs.
Car keys, I said.
H-his pocket, Boris said in a sad old man’s voice. Boris, I supposed, might even be in his seventies. Why had they sent him on a job like this? His accent had a trace of the Old Country, but it was tempered by years of living here, mostly in Boston, it sounded like. I reached into the Thin Man’s trousers and found the car keys and a wallet that I didn’t look at. I sat cross-legged beside him, still keeping the gun on his face.
Why didn’t you kill me in my apartment? I asked.
We-we didn’t know where you lived. We were looking for you. We saw you go up onto the bridge.
You just got lucky?
Yes.
Did you call it in?
We d-don’t have a radio or a c-car phone or anything like that.
Sunshine sent you?
He nodded.
Where does he live? Do you have his address?
Boris smiled for some reason and it disconcerted me. He leaned over and said in a whisper (as if there was anybody around to hear):
He always met us at the Four Provinces, always, but I know where he lives. Jackie Mac tailed him one day to see if he was whoring after the weans.
I smiled too. I wonder why I’d never thought of that. I knew he wasn’t a pervert, but it might have been good to know where he lived. Could have done the same to Darkey, too. Laziness, I suppose, had been at the bottom of it.
Ok, mate, what’s the address?
He told me, but I couldn’t find a pencil anywhere in my coat so I had to memorize it. I searched Boris and, finding nothing, I took his Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol, a truly beautiful weapon that became my handgun of choice from then on. I ordered him up and together we lifted his partner off the road, Boris at the feet and me at the shoulders. We dragged him into the woods and I got Boris to cover him with leaves.
When he was done, I shot Boris in the head. I did it quick and without any fuss and covered him as best I could. I checked to see if there were any spatter marks on me, but I was fine.
The car was parked half a mile up the road. It was a blue Ford with a manual transmission, and it took me quite a while before I got it up and running. I’m no driver, and with my injury it was a bloody nightmare trying to get over the bridge and back into the city and state of New York. Everything’s relative. A little pain for me, but at least I wasn’t in Sunshine’s shoes—a man who, with any luck, would not now live to see this day’s end.
It took me only about ten minutes to realize that the blue Ford was being followed. I noticed the old black Lincoln when I had just about negotiated the hazards of the George Washington Bridge and was making my way through Upper Manhattan towards Queens. There was an Irish neighborhood in Queens, but it wasn’t our turf and I’d never been out there. I knew only two bits of Queens: the airport and Rockaway Beach.
The Lincoln was tailing me about five cars back. Two men, both in dark suits and raincoats. I figured they’d been tailing the car and not me, and it was just conceivable that they thought I was one of the two original guys. I wasn’t sure where they’d picked me up, but if they’d seen me top Boris and his mate then the game would be up. Of course, they were cops, everything about them said that they were cops. They drove peeler fashion and they gave off that peeler vibe.
Why they were tailing people in Darkey’s organization was hardly a mystery either. Darkey had no charmed life and, despite Sunshine’s obvious talent, they couldn’t avoid the law’s attentions forever. Bob’s death out on Long Island wouldn’t help either. An organized crime unit of the NYPD was finally having to pay a wee bit of attention to Darkey’s shenanigans.
How to ditch them was the tricky part. I never drove in Manhattan and I wasn’t clear which streets were one-way or where the back alleys were. The one street I knew really well was 125th, and I racked my brain trying to think of where I could ditch a car along there and make a run for it.
Obviously, the first thing was not to let on that I knew a tail was on, so I drove normally and kept cool. I wasn’t heading at all for Queens now, just keeping her downtown in heavy morning traffic. I was hitting Broadway and the 130s when a plan occurred to me. The Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th and Broadway had two entrances, one on 125th and one on Broadway. If I parked the car at the McDonald’s on the south side of 125th and then walked over to the 125th Street entrance of KFC (which had no parking lot), it would be the most natural thing in the world for the cops to park near me and wait for me to come out of KFC and go back to my car. They were cops, so they wouldn’t think that they’d been spotted and they wouldn’t be expecting me to ditch the vehicle.
I drove calmly and slowed down to the McDonald’s opposite the KFC and parked the car. I locked her up and waited patiently for the light to change to cross over 125th, which is wide and dangerous at that time of day. With an air of calm I went in the 125th Street entrance of KFC. A homeless guy let me in, expecting change on the way out. I was hungry and I had a few bucks, so I ordered a chicken sandwich and a coffee. I ate the sandwich, but the coffee was too hot and I didn’t have the time to wait for it to cool. The windows were so clogged full of posters advertising the latest specials that it was impossible to see through them, and so I couldn’t tell if the cops were over there or not, but I guessed they would be.
I went out the Broadway door and looked for the black Lincoln, but of course it was still back in the McDonald’s lot. I ran a block up to the subway escalator. At the top of the stairs, I waited for a minute to see if the cops were after me but they weren’t at all, they were still waiting for me to finish my breakfast at KFC and come out on 125th. Peelers, always the bloody same.
I checked the subway map and figured the best way to Woodside from there. It would mean a couple of changes at the ugliest part of the morning, but it would be ok.
I bought tokens for the return. I rode the train and lifted a Daily News off the seat and, sure enough, the election had been won by the Democrat, Bill Clinton, who was from Arkansas. It was only in that moment that I realized that the state of Arkansas is actually pronounced “Arkansaw,” not “Ar-kansas.” I’d been hearing Arkansas but had no idea where it was. I was quietly delighted with my discovery and wanted to share it with my fellow passengers, but only madmen talk on the subways and I had to keep a low profile.
When I got out in Woodside, the Irish part seemed to be just a few square blocks, surrounded by a much larger Polish neighborhood. It was small, and there were a lot of gossipy-looking witnesses hanging around cafés and Irish bread shops and pubs and the like, but at least I thought that its smallness would make finding Sunshine’s place relatively easy. I went in a store, bought a packet of Tayto Cheese & Onion, and munched as I explored.
I’d arrived around eleven o’clock, but in fact it took me until half past twelve to find his address.
Sunshine lived in a wooden house that was painted blue and was three stories high. It didn’t look to be a particularly nice house: no garden, the paint scuffed, it was right next to a busy street, the front yard had a few leaves collecting up against the metal fence. Aesthetically challenged, but I supposed that around here it cost a packet. It was clos
e to the subway and the neighborhood was white and reasonably prosperous and safe. There was never a doubt in my mind that maybe Boris had stroked me—he was way too much of a good old boy for that. I had a pang of regret that I’d shot him, but I dismissed it; he would have said that he wouldn’t have talked, but he would have. And anyway, it was Boris who’d tailed Bridget that day, Boris who’d passed along the information, Boris who’d set this whole derailing train in motion. Would it have been so difficult to say that Bridget had gone shopping that morning? Give a guy a break.
The way into Sunshine’s would have to be the back door. There was no way I could dick around the front in the broad day with people walking by on the sidewalk.
I opened the fence gate and walked around the back. There was a bit of pathetic grass and a paddling pool clogged with leaves and rainwater. A paddling pool. Did Sunshine have kids? No. Maybe he was an uncle? A good uncle, no doubt, smart, generous, creative.
No screen on the back and the door was locked. I’m no lock guy, so the only thing for it would be to break open a window. Sunshine would hear, of course, so I’d have to be ready for him if he was inside. I selected the rear kitchen window, punched a hole through with my elbow, turned the handle, climbed in, pulled out the Glock, and waited for him to show up with his gun. He didn’t, and after a quick search of the house, I saw he wasn’t home. I’d wait.
I searched the place out of boredom and curiosity, but found little of interest. In a bedroom with lilac bedsheets and matching drapes I discovered a wall safe, but I don’t do combinations, either, so who knows what was inside.
There were no books, but I did find an extensive collection of videos. Over a thousand, maybe. It seemed that Sunshine had seen every bloody commercial film that had come out over the last ten years. There was no porn, and most of the films were complete crap. I tried five in a row before getting one that was ok. I put the sound on low and sat close to the box. The flick was about androids, who really are the good guys, and a cop chasing them, who really is the bad guy, in the future Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, it was raining all the time and it reminded me a bit of Belfast in the seventies.
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