“Right.”
“What were you thinking? Or were you thinking at all? Wasn’t your brain doing the driving, was it? Be honest – you didn’t want to know. My screw-ups, you’re all over. Hers, you’d rather not know.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m your friend for over a decade but you get laid once and that’s all out the window, isn’t it? With friends like you . . .”
Bunny looked down at Gringo. “You’re full of crap.”
“Am I?”
“I’m not your father, go find someone else to take your shitty life out on.”
“Fuck you, amigo.”
“Right back at you.”
Bunny turned and walked towards the top of the alley, wiping the blood from his lip as he went. “We’re done, Gringo. You hear me? Done.”
“Good. The end is nigh, amigo, the end is nigh.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Ahh, crap.” Simone pulled the oven door open to be greeted by a wash of acrid smoke. “God damn it.” She waved her hand over the chicken, which was having its worst day since it had died.
She heard the front door open and close behind her. “Hey, babe, I know it’s late but I thought I’d try my hand at cooking. Turns out I’m still no goddamn good at it.” She tried to grab the baking tray and burned her thumb. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
Then the smoke alarm went off.
She grabbed a tea towel and used it to shove the oven closed before turning to flap furiously at the smoke alarm above her head.
Bunny walked into the kitchen behind her.
“Goddamn thing! The numbers on your dial, they aren’t the same as they are back in the States. And then the thing, it didn’t have things written in . . .”
As the warbling finally ceased, she dropped her arms to her sides and sighed melodramatically. “Ah, who am I kidding? I can’t cook for shit.”
She turned to Bunny, expecting his warm grin. Instead she was met by a sombre expression. “Baby, what happened to your lip?”
“Oh,” said Bunny, raising his hand self-consciously.
“Who did that?”
“Gringo.”
“What in the . . . ? That’s a messed-up friendship you got going there.”
“I think that title has fallen by the wayside now.”
Simone tossed her tea towel onto the counter. “What in God’s name is going on with you two? Is this to do with that poor guy getting shot last night?”
Bunny shook his head. “Look, sit down would you?” he said, pointing to the nearest chair beside the kitchen table.
“OK, but just let me—”
“Now.” He seemed taken aback by the force in his own voice, and added, “Please, just . . .”
Simone took off the apron she was wearing and placed it on the table. She sat down, perched nervously on the edge of the chair.
Bunny drew in a deep breath. “You need to tell me what happened.”
“What do you—”
“In New York. You need to tell me everything.”
She shook her head. “No, I already said to you . . .”
Bunny closed his eyes for a moment and held his hand up. “I know and . . . I know. But after the thing with Ryan, Gringo got suspicious. He ran some checks.”
Simone clenched her eyes tightly shut and lifted her face to the ceiling. “Oh God.” She stood. “I have to go. I have to . . . They’ll come looking for me.” She stood up, looking from side to side, not knowing which way to turn. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
Bunny moved forward and placed his hands on her arms. “Relax. Nobody’s coming. He covered it up – nobody knows. But you need to explain to me. I can’t protect you if I don’t know what I’m protecting you from.”
She looked up into his off-kilter eyes, full of sincerity. “You can’t protect me from this.”
“I can, I just . . . I know you’re wanted for murder. Just, tell me. I’ll listen, and whatever it is, I love you.”
She looked away. “Please don’t say that.”
He placed his hand gently under her chin and turned her face towards him. “You don’t have to say it back, but you can’t stop me from saying it, alright?”
She pushed him gently away. “You should wait until you’ve got all the facts before calling that one.”
She sat down on the edge of the seat again. He leaned back on the counter, and there, amidst the stench of burned chicken, she told him everything.
“I was born Simone Michele Delamere, New Orleans, Christmas Day 1969.” She flashed a sad little smile. “I was supposed to change my first name, when I started working for Noel, but I . . . I didn’t. I said I messed up but, in truth, it felt like my name was the only part of me I had left. Stupid, huh?”
“Not at all.”
“I was the oldest of two girls. Momma died giving birth to Denise. Such a cruel thing, and left my daddy as a young widower who got old fast. He never really recovered. People were always telling me they were this dream couple. You’d see them when they went out dancing and think, I want to be them. I guess with Momma gone, Daddy had a hard time wanting to be at all. He wasn’t a bad man, just broken. Drank too much and made bad decisions when he did. Ended up in jail. Came out different after the first jolt. Man like him was never meant for that, couldn’t cope with it. Just sorta shut down, I guess.”
Simone nervously smoothed invisible creases from the hem of her blue dress.
“We stayed with relatives off and on, but, as time went on, it was mostly us. Me and Denise, I mean. I was always looking out for her. Being Mommy, Daddy and big sister all rolled into one. It ain’t no sob story, though. We did OK. We both loved music, and New Orleans has always been a town where you can sing for your supper. We started in the local gospel choirs and then as we got older we both sung in local bands, making a good living in the summer, picking up gigs in the French Quarter, singing for tourists. In between, we bussed at restaurants, waited tables, all the things that everybody does to scrape a living.”
“Then, when I was twenty-four, something unexpected happened: a happy ending. Denise was singing in a band on those Mississippi cruises when she found her Prince Charming. Surrounded by sweet-talking, fast-living musicians, she fell for the geeky kid doing close-up magic. Card tricks round the tables, that kind of thing. Turned out she was the smart one all this time. Derek Wagner, from Minneapolis. He was an MIT graduate who dropped out of the rat race because he loved doing his magic more than anything. Well, until he met my sister.” Simone’s face spread into a soft grin. “You should see the way he looks at my Denise. Everybody should get looked at like that at least once in their life. His moon and stars. A beautiful thing. They’re off somewhere in the Midwest last I heard. Fell out of touch since . . .”
She met Bunny’s eyes briefly and then glanced quickly away, pushing herself back in the seat. “So there I was, twenty-four and suddenly, young, free and single. Nobody I needed to look after and no place I needed to be. Left with the scariest of things – the choice to do whatever the hell I wanted with my life. So, I upped sticks and headed to New York. Broadway!” She fanned her hands through the air, a sad smile playing across her lips. “Me and every other waitress in the five boroughs, right?” She picked up the tea towel to have something to do with her hands. “I mean, I was pretty good, to be fair. On the singing, I got some callback auditions, enough to keep the hope alive. But then they’d ask me to dance.”
She moved her feet around as she spoke. “Heel, toe, step, step, twirl . . . I wasn’t exactly a natural, so I tended bar, waitressed and went to classes. For that, and the acting. Strangest thing – I hear a song one time, I got it down. Could always just . . . y’know.” She shrugged. “But you give me lines to learn . . . I mean, I wasn’t awful, I just wasn’t a natural. Worst way to be in some ways; just enough hope to keep you going, always something around the corner. So for four years, I kept going around corners, again and again. Never getting anywhere. The human body builds up a r
esistance to everything eventually – even hope. A girl I worked with got her big break and I found myself unable to be happy for her. I hated myself for it. It was a real low point. Thinking back, I dunno, maybe that contributed to . . .”
The tea towel was now knotted in her hands. She unfurled it and smoothed it out in her lap. “His name was James. He was charming, funny, handsome I guess. Seemed to know everybody, and yet, when he spoke to you, managed to make you feel like you were the only person in the world. He had big dreams, a sharp suit and not a dime to his name, but damn, could the man talk. He would set up that club, that agency, that bespoke butler service for Manhattan’s high-flyers. He made you think that not just his dreams were possible, but yours too. We moved in together. He’d been sort of managing a bar, then he’d fallen out with the manager. I was still working though, so we were OK, mostly. Then he was investing in a club and we – he – needed seed capital. I was working two jobs, just for a while. He would soon be raking it in though and I’d be able to give up work, concentrate on my auditions. God, even saying it now, I know how damn stupid it all sounds. Believe me, it’s harder to see when you’re inside that bubble.”
Simone stopped talking, looking down at the linoleum floor, lost in thought. Bunny let the moment stretch out and then he cleared his throat quietly. Simone looked up, a little startled, as if waking from a dream.
“So, James had always dabbled, y’know, with the drugs. Nothing big. He was a party boy. He did it because everyone was doing it. Well, except me. I tried a couple of times, but I couldn’t relax. I’m the child of an alcoholic, and we go one of two ways: either we repeat the same destructive patterns or we shut all that down. Still, if he wanted to, now and then, no big deal, I didn’t mind. Then the occasional Saturday night became every weekend, and soon enough, it was every day. Got bad when the club failed. It failed because he couldn’t keep his shit together, and his response was to lose it all the more. At that point, I was working to pay his coke bills and I couldn’t keep up. He was still talking the talk, but that was all it was by then. He started dealing, thinking he was a big, bad man. He was his own best customer though, and soon he ended up somewhere he couldn’t talk his way out of. He met some truly bad men and found out he really wasn’t one. And so he dealt the only thing he had left . . .” Simone paused and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Me.”
In the periphery of her vision, she could see Bunny’s feet moving towards her.
She raised a hand. “Don’t . . . Please. Let me just get through this.”
She watched his feet hesitate in the middle of the floor before retreating back to their position beside the counter. His voice was barely above a whisper. “OK.”
“He came to tell me he was in real trouble. His hand was broken, which is just a taster apparently. These men were going to kill him unless I could help him. Just one time. A friend of these men knew a guy or – hell, I don’t know the ins and outs. I don’t even know if James really did. Long and short, there was a really rich guy, the Big Fish they called him, and he was going to be in town. He wanted a girl for the night. Discreet, he said. In other words, he didn’t want a hooker. Some, I dunno, some kind of power trip thing, fuck knows. He liked having a woman he wasn’t paying for, at least not directly. I’m told he’s a little different and, long story short, either I do it or James ends up scattered in various pieces along the East River.”
She stopped and rubbed the heel of her right hand into her eye. “And right there and then, like some switch is thrown, I looked at James and saw what he really was – a cheap piece of shit in a shiny suit. Maybe he was always that guy, I don’t know, or maybe the sweet guy was still in there somewhere, lost. If he was, I couldn’t just leave him to it. So I slept on it. I stared at the ceiling for the night and then I sat him down, said I’d do it on one condition. If I did this, he’d be out of my life for good, never see me again. I’d leave the city and he could not come looking for me. When he accepted the deal so readily, I saw just what I was to him. It was all set up for three days’ time. I got sent some clothes, a certain bottle of perfume. Whatever. The night arrived, and some small part of me kept waiting for James to come to me, tell me not to go. Ask me to run away with him. Something. Anything. I’d have gone too, even then, fool that I was. Instead, he picked me up to drive me there. He gave me a pill and told me to take it, said it’d make it all go by easier. In my head, I was thinking maybe it was like that Indecent Proposal film, y’know . . . But it wasn’t. The man, he had certain . . . tastes.”
She tasted bile in her throat as she said the word and wondered if she was actually going to be sick. She sensed Bunny tense but she couldn’t look at him. She knew that she would cry and she’d sworn to herself that she would never cry over this again.
It was he who spoke next, his voice rasping. “What did—”
“No.” Her voice was firm. “No. That door stays closed.”
She placed the tea towel, folded neatly, onto the kitchen table. “The next day, I went home and booked a flight to New Orleans for two days’ time. James was nowhere to be seen. Left his keys on the table, just like I asked. Next day, the men came. I’d never seen them before. Two of them. Grabbed me off the street outside my place and hauled me into a van. Took me to a warehouse. Turns out James and his friends had come up with a plan. Unbeknownst to me, they’d installed a camera in the room and had the whole night, all the . . . they had a recording of it. They were trying to blackmail the Big Fish. He’d been sent a copy of the tape that morning with a demand for . . . I don’t know how much money it was about. How much they thought my humiliation was worth. Maybe I don’t want to know.”
A spark of anger flickered in her chest and she clung to it, because it was the best thing she had here. Being angry was so much better than the other options.
“The Big Fish, he wasn’t happy about it, and these men were ‘dealing with the problem’. They wanted to know where James was. I’d honestly have told them if I knew, but they didn’t believe me. They beat me. They showed me the tape. They asked me why I was lying for that piece of shit. I swore that I wasn’t. When they still didn’t believe me, well . . .”
She raised her right hand and pushed her hair back, exposing the burned line of skin running down the right side of her face. “The main guy did this, with a poker he’d stuck in a fire.”
She felt her stomach start to heave as the sense memory of the stench of burning skin came back to her. “Did it, he said, ‘just to be sure’. I looked into his eyes as . . . You’ve never seen a man look so calm. I can still see those damn eyes.”
She sensed Bunny trying to move towards her again but she waved him back. She did not want to be touched.
“The main guy, he went away to – I don’t know, what do psychos like that do with the rest of their time, play chess in the park? Anyway, his assistant was just as nasty but nowhere near as bright. He tried to have a little fun with me on his own but he left the knife in his belt exposed. So I . . .” She held up her hands in front of her, as if to say that they had acted of their own accord. “Did I kill the son of a bitch? I suppose I did. I sure as hell stabbed him enough times, and if you want the truth, of all my many regrets, that ain’t one. I survived. I did what had to be done. I left him gurgling on the floor, unlocked the chain around my ankle and ran, taking that damn tape with me, because I didn’t want anybody, ever, seeing that again.”
She rubbed her fingers up and down the edge of the table. “Somehow, bleeding, half-naked, I staggered through the streets. As I was running I realised I couldn’t go home. Same with work. They’d find me. What friends I had didn’t deserve me bringing this to their door. I had nowhere to go. I saw a church and I staggered in. Just to rest.”
She took a deep breath and looked up at Bunny for the first time in what felt like the longest of times. There were tears on his cheeks.
“Then,” she continued, “I woke up in a white room, thought I was dead. Wondered if I was in heaven. I remembe
r thinking that I wouldn’t have that many bandages in heaven. Then a little tiny nun walked in. She said I was in the care of the Sisters of the Saint. I’d never heard of them. I don’t think many people have. After a couple of days, they showed me my picture in the paper. The article was saying I’d killed a man. So, when I couldn’t think of anything better, I told them the truth.”
“Couldn’t you go to the police?”
She shook her head. “The sisters, they never fully explained it, but they’ve got some contacts. They made some careful enquiries and told me that going to the police was a very bad idea. The Big Fish had powerful friends.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah,” said Simone. “So, a couple of weeks went by, and when I was mostly healed up, they slipped me onto a boat leaving Jersey in the middle of the night and I got slipped off again at the other end. Here. In Dublin.”
She stood up. “So there you go. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
He moved towards her again.
“No, don’t.”
But this time he wouldn’t be stopped. He wrapped his arms around her and they stood there for the longest time, until her tears soaked through his shirt.
Eventually, she pushed him softly away and turned to go upstairs.
His voice was hoarse as he spoke. “I can protect you.”
She stopped, nodded and tried to smile, before continuing on her way.
Then, as she walked up the stairs she spoke to him in a whisper not intended to be heard. “You can’t save everybody, but I do love that you try.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Tommy Carter took a long, hard look in the mirror. There were bags under his eyes. It had been a rough time for him, but appearances were important. He’d spent the majority of the last two days in an interrogation room, sticking to his story. They had released him late last night. He’d been surprised they hadn’t been kept for the maximum seventy-two hours. Maybe the Gardaí were getting tired of receiving the same answers again and again. He’d rung Moran and Franko when he’d got home, and they’d both said they’d had a nice trip – code for nothing having happened under interrogation.
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