The albino squeezed the girl’s neck, pushed the gun hard against her temple. His face had flushed red, had erupted into colorful magnolia blossoms.
It was as if some merciful and divine being suddenly reached out and turned the dial to slow. The albino—the gun—the entire room—became suddenly magnified. And in his mind’s eye, John could see the hammer being pulled back, could see that pale, slender finger press back on the trigger, could see the slow revolution of the chamber as a fresh round positioned itself…
John fired two shots from his own gun buried deep within the pocket of his leather coat. The first shot hit the albino in the forehead, killing him with an almost bloodless vigilance. The albino’s face remained expressionless. Only his right arm jerked, the fingers tensing on the trigger of his weapon. An arbitrary shot exploded and ricocheted off the ceiling. The albino fell backward like a piece of driftwood. John’s second shot missed completely and shattered a collection of half-empty liquor bottles beneath the bar.
The police began shooting, returning the fire. John flinched, ducked, grabbed Tressa, and pushed her face against the dirty floor. Above their heads, slugs slammed into the wall, bursting bottles and splintering wood. The enormous wall mirror that ran the length of the bar shattered into a blizzard of knifelike shards of glass. Beneath him, the girl struggled to free herself and sit up. He kept one hand against the top of her head, restricting her movement. One of her arms swung up and cracked him against the side of the face, blurring his vision.
“Here, here!” Deveneau shouted at him, motioning for them to take cover behind him in the darkened room. He, too, was now fumbling with a handgun, sliding rounds into the chamber. “Move it!”
Jeffrey Clay, his face now pinched down the middle, his eyes exaggerated a dozen times over, pushed himself from the wall and staggered to his feet. He held his .38 out with a straight arm, his body half-bent at the shoulders, and screamed loud enough to rupture his throat. In constant motion, like a carnival target on a moving track, Clay stumbled the length of the bar and unloaded his gun in a series of sharp cracks. Flame licked from the muzzle. He fired quickly and perhaps even managed to empty the gun before he was hit. The first slug took him in the shoulder, two more in the chest, one clipped his right cheek … then it all went down too quickly for John to make heads or tails. Jeffrey Clay jerked spastically, pitched forward, and struck the top of the bar like a wet sack of flour. He slid and dropped, staggered, collapsed to the floor. His face had gone powder-white, speckled with the brilliant red of blood, like some piece of postmodern art, and he coughed wetly deep in his throat. Blood frothed from his lips.
From there, everything exploded. There was no order, only chaos … like so many pieces of a great jigsaw puzzle arbitrarily scattered across the floor of an otherwise empty room.
He heard sudden movement from across the room, followed by the unmistakable chuck-chuck-chuck! of spent cartridges being discarded. Someone was shrieking. John felt a hand grab his shirt collar. He turned and faced Deveneau, who exhaled sour breath into his face. John withdrew his own gun from his leather jacket, the barrel still smoking.
“You said this shit hole was safe,” he breathed. “What happened?”
“Stick close to me,” Deveneau said. “Come on. Quick.” And he was already up on his feet and crouch-walking through the darkness of the adjoining room. John caught the feeble outline of Tressa being raised and pushed forward.
He followed them into the darkness, his heart rattling in his chest. In the room, their breathing was amplified. Their footfalls echoed. John whispered to Deveneau, and the sound of his voice sustained for several seconds. The room was bigger than he’d initially thought. No, not a room—the back opened up and split off into a series of narrow, cylindrical tunnels.
“This way,” he heard Deveneau mutter.
Behind him, he could hear the distant but fast approaching sounds of the police—their voices and heavy feet. The only other sounds audible were the crunch of his own shoes on the crumbling cement floor, Tressa’s soft moaning, and the almost meditative hiss of running water whispering through the walls all around them.
“Where are we going?” he half-whispered. Deveneau and the girl were some distance ahead of him.
“Out,” Deveneau’s voice floated back to him.
He heard Tressa groan louder. Something wet fell into his face, his eyes, and he stumbled and ran himself along the cold, cinder-block wall. His feet splashed through icy puddles.
“Can’t see—”
They rounded a turn and paused, catching their breath beneath grated light. John looked up and saw what appeared to be a rectangular iron sewer grate roughly fifteen feet above their heads. Water splashed down from it and collected in pools at their feet. Curved metal rungs rose up the side of the wall and led to the surface.
“That the street?”
Deveneau gripped one of the rungs. Runoff splashed across his face and down his back, soaking his shirt. His skin showed through. “Yeah,” Deveneau said, nearly out of breath. “Back alley. I’ll go first and remove the grate. Send her up next; then you go.”
“Move it.” He could hear muffled sounds echoing through the tunnels now. “They’re coming.”
Deveneau climbed the rungs quickly. It took him only a few seconds to reach the top. Water from the street above pattered against his face, his hands, his shoulders. He reached out with one hand and grabbed one of the grate’s bars. His hand shook and he muttered something to himself, slid the palm of his hand down his right pant leg, and grabbed the bar again. After a few forceful pushes, the grate came loose, scraping along the rectangular concrete rim.
John grabbed Tressa’s arm, urged her toward the iron rungs. She looked at him, a mixture of confusion and urgency on her face.
He nodded. “Go. Now.”
She paused, and for a moment he thought her body had simply shut down. Then she turned, grabbed one of the rungs with two hands, and hoisted herself off the ground. Above, Deveneau had slid the grate aside and climbed out onto the street. The silhouette of his head briefly blotted out the sodium lights from the street.
John began to climb as soon as Tressa was out of his way. Behind him, he could clearly hear feet crashing through puddles.
Tressa reached the opening, and Deveneau hoisted her out onto the street. John hit the opening a second later, scrambling for a handhold. Deveneau grabbed his wrist, jerked him upward, then grabbed his other wrist. He scrambled out of the ground and was struck by the cold night air and the overwhelming stink of the East River. They were in an alley between the club and a decrepit tenement, countless reams of trash bags and discarded cardboard boxes positioned in a metropolis of swill all around them.
His head was spinning as he uttered, “They’re still coming.”
“Christ.” Deveneau bent and slid the grate back into place. His hands were shaking badly now.
John spotted a large dumpster on wheels against the side of the tenement. He rushed to it, calling for Deveneau to help him without looking back. They grabbed either end of the dumpster, shook it. It was full and heavy, and the sound of rats buried deep inside caused Deveneau to jump back and utter a pathetic laugh. With his foot, John popped the wheel locks and they began rolling it with surprisingly little effort. John heard police sirens wailing up the street.
Deveneau uttered another choked laugh. “Goddamn unbelievable.” The man’s face was torn between a half-grin and the subtle look of fear.
They positioned the dumpster above the grate, and John locked the wheels.
Deveneau finally exploded with laughter. “Son of a bitch!” He punched at the air. “Son of a bitch!”
“Come on!” Tressa shouted. The sirens were louder.
Deveneau pushed Tressa and urged her to start running down the alleyway. He paused before following her, acknowledging John with lunatic, enthusiastic eyes. “See you around.” Then he took off after his girl, legs pumping through trash bags, his feet crashing through puddle
s.
John remained standing in the alley, catching his breath, allowing his mind to wind down. Eleven, he thought then. I counted eleven cops when that mirror spun around. How could this have happened here tonight?
He closed his eyes, shuddered. In his head, all he could hear were the phantom cries from one of the policemen down beneath the club. Looking down, he noticed he was still holding his gun. Absently, he wondered how he’d managed to climb out of the ground and roll the dumpster over the grate with only one free hand.
He heard sirens farther up the street. He could now hear sounds directly below him, too, just beneath the grate. Footsteps in water. People talking. He turned and walked slowly down the alley in the opposite direction of Francis Deveneau and Tressa Walker. He slipped his gun into his jacket, ran his fingers through his wet hair, and stepped out onto the street.
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS THE SMELL OF FRYING BACON that roused him from sleep.
John rolled over. He could hear grease spitting in a frying pan. Katie was up early as usual, and he rolled casually onto her side of the bed and pressed his face into her pillow. She left behind her the ghost traces of lavender and ginger and the stale-sweet odor of sleep. He inhaled vigorously, then rolled back. There was a tiny, single-paned window across the room, veiled from the outside by a length of fire escape. A glint of sun managed to wink into the room. John winced.
He sat up, abruptly aware of his body. His head was particularly angry. The room appeared to tilt the slightest bit. He paused, hunched over in his underwear, folding his limp hands between his knees and breathing deep breaths. Even his throat hurt. Closing his eyes, rubbing his fingers over the lids, he was aware that he’d dreamt last night … though he could only recall flashes of images and feelings—nonsense that may only mean something during the hours of sleep.
A stack of college textbooks sat on the nightstand beside the bed. He thought of his wife at the university. Seated behind one of those uncomfortable wooden desks, the erasable end of her pencil pressed softly to the corner of her mouth … maybe her hair pulled back and out of her face. She certainly looked young enough to pass for a regular student—perhaps even a sophomore—and she was also intelligent enough to get by without a struggle. In fact, perhaps the only thing that might possibly set her apart from the other students was her belly—her pregnancy. And in this day and age, he quietly wondered if that would even matter.
Beside the books, slung over the desk chair, was his leather jacket. From where he sat, he could clearly make out what had been the tears caused by the two bullet holes in the right side pocket. While he slept, they had been stitched.
He stood from the bed, and a zigzag bolt of pain shot up from his ankle and coursed through his leg. His right knee looked red and swollen.
With a noticeable limp he crept into the hallway, the sizzle of bacon riding just above the soft lilt of Katie’s humming. The hallway was narrow, dark, and cluttered with unopened boxes from the recent move. Peering out from the top of some of the boxes was an assortment of wooden picture frames and ancient photographs—of karate and baseball trophies, of a worn pair of leather ice skates tied together at the laces, of an old sombrero with a green plastic parrot on the brim.
The kitchen at the end of the hall was cramped and ill-lit, with only a single window above the double-basin sink. Katie was examining the uncooperative coffee machine, her body wrapped in a pink cloth robe, the gentle S-curve of her back to him. Coming up behind her, he wrapped his arms around her pregnant belly, buried his face in her hair. He could tell she was smiling.
“Your arms don’t make it all the way around anymore.”
“I like it,” he confessed, rubbing the gentle swell of her belly.
“You like big fat girls?”
“Just you.”
“Watch it, buster. You gonna eat anything?”
He shook his head. He was already thinking about last night, and about the confusion that followed his escape through the underground tunnels.
“You should eat,” Katie said. She fixed him a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast, and insisted he sit at the table. “You have to go in today?”
He nodded and sat with some difficulty. His knee felt as if it’d been filled with crushed stones. “Yes.”
“It’s Saturday,” she said.
“Hmmm.”
Katie had noticed his limp: their eyes had met just at the exact moment he sat down at the table, and John knew his affliction had registered with her. But she didn’t say anything. She rarely said anything, rarely asked him about what happened during his long nights working in the dark and the cold. It was a silent pact they’d made once he joined the Secret Service. And in many ways, Katie’s sudden interest in earning a college degree, their moving into the new apartment, and even the baby were all just little, menial things—just wallpaper to cover a poorly painted room—in order to keep their marriage and his job separate.
He ate. Through the walls, he could hear the faint drone of someone’s stereo. “You got a busy day planned?” he asked Katie.
“Not so much.” She ran water from the sink over the frying pan. Steam billowed and hissed. “I’ll try and empty the rest of the boxes from the hallway.”
“How did we get so much crap?”
“Don’t ask me. Most of it’s yours. I should really just set it on fire.”
“I’ll go through it all.”
“When?”
“When I have time.”
He watched her shuffle from the sink to the refrigerator to the sink again. She was beautiful. Even in the final trimester of her pregnancy she looked almost childishly innocent, naïve even. The sideways glances she would throw him from time to time suggested a certain playfulness only to be admired in a grown woman. She’d somehow grown into absolute purity, with all her half-smiles and casual grazes along parts of his body as they passed each other in a room or the hallway. There was mystique in the way she pulled a curl of hair back behind her ear.
She paused for a moment before the window above the sink, the sunlight striking her in just the right way, and he felt a twang of nostalgia rush through him.
John put his fork down. “What is it?”
“Nausea.” She shook her head. “It’ll pass.”
“You gonna be sick?”
“No, I’m all right.”
“Sit down, and stop worrying about dishes and boxes.”
“I’m okay.” She moved behind him, ran her fingers through his hair while he continued to eat. He could feel her eyes on him, as if she were attempting to wrestle some truth from his skin without his knowledge or assistance. He did not look up at her. With every pause of her fingers in his hair, he felt her concentration grow.
After a while, she said, “Will you see your father today?”
“If I have time.”
“You should find the time.”
“I want to. We’ll see.”
“Are you okay?” she said, still running fingers through his hair, her voice a near-whisper now.
“Just tired,” he said.
She bent, kissed his cheek. “See your dad,” she said.
In the bathroom, he stood for some time before the mirror in his underwear. Twenty-six, with a youthful smile and dark eyes, he possessed the body of a runner, augmented by the well-defined pectoral muscles and biceps of someone passionate about exercise and personal upkeep. He was not a fanatic, though he worked out with some dedication when he found the time. Not very tall, his physique suggested a certain compactness that, in turn, implied a degree of discriminating strength. In his youth he’d been thin and small and, on occasion, he thought he almost caught a glimpse of that child still inside him somewhere, perhaps lingering just beneath the surface of his body.
A faint, puckered scar was visible on his forehead just above his right eye, trickling down from his hairline and quite visible beneath the harsh bathroom lighting.
He showered and dressed quickly. At one point he found himself th
inking about his father, and trying to recall the dream from last night, but quickly chased the old man from his mind when he realized what he was doing.
Instead, he focused on the events of last night and, more importantly, on the events to come. He wanted everything as straight as possible in his head before he sat down and said one word to anybody. Thinking of his father only muddled things.
Before leaving, he kissed Katie on the mouth, bent and kissed her belly, and slipped out of the apartment. His wife knew better than to ask what time he’d be home.
Bill Kersh sat on a bench beneath a giant oil painting of two hunting dogs outside the office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Biddleman. Kersh was forty, looked sixty, and smoked like he need not fear death. He sat with his eyes closed, his head back against the alabaster wall, and a pair of headphones over his ears. His shirt was white and wrinkled with one of the buttons undone; his necktie was crooked and spotted with conspicuous burn rings from careless cigarette ash. A heavy, broad-chested Protestant, he was the type of man to ruminate, when left alone, on the intricacies of life and death and all the miserable groaning in between. He found simple pleasure in familiarity and had managed to fashion his personal life in such a way that catered to the predictable. A creature of habit was Bill Kersh.
John approached and sat beside him on the bench. Looking at Kersh’s face, the older agent appeared to be in a trance. Eyes still closed, Kersh tapped one of his fingers lightly on the portable tape player that sat in his lap. He smelled faintly of aged tobacco and cheap aftershave lotion.
Without opening his eyes, Kersh said, “Your heartbeat is vibrating through the bench.”
“I took the stairs.”
Kersh didn’t answer, didn’t open his eyes. Across from them was the wooden door with the pebbled glass—Biddleman’s office. A number of distorted shapes shifted behind the glass.
Shamrock Alley Page 2