Her bleary red eyes darted from Jimmy to Mickey, then back to Jimmy again. In a quiet voice, she uttered, “Huh-high school.”
“How’d you introduce him to Deveneau?”
“Uh …” She didn’t seem to understand the question. She began to tremble harder, her fingernails digging into the chair’s armrests.
“You brought him to Deveneau, right?” Jimmy said.
“Yes …”
“Where’d you meet him—where’d you meet John—before bringing him to Deveneau?”
“Brought him … to … Jeffrey Clay … first,” she managed.
“Whatever,” Jimmy barked. “Where the fuck did this guy John come from?”
She began crying again.
Hands on his hips, Jimmy turned away, rubbing his chin with one hand.
Mickey had had enough. Let Jimmy impress Angelo Gisondi and the rest of the Italians on his own time; this was utter bullshit. He crossed over to Tressa, who began squealing and tried to pull herself from the chair the second she realized she was in for some trouble. Mickey was on top of her quickly, though, pressing one knee into her hip and preventing her from moving. He grabbed her face as he’d done in the Cadillac, eliciting from the girl a hot shriek of terror.
Holding her firmly, he locked his eyes with hers. “Who is he?” Mickey whispered, pushing his face into hers. He could smell sour sweat rushing off her in waves. “Who is he, who is he, who is he?”
Behind him, Jimmy turned to watch. He’d folded his arms and was leaning against the far wall now, a look of frustrated anger on his face. Mickey glanced at him once, disgusted, then turned back to the girl.
Mickey slapped her across the face. Her head whipped to one side, her sweaty, matted hair brushing past Mickey’s face.
“Who is he?” It had become a gruesome litany.
Another slap, whipping her head in the opposite direction. Too pained, too stunned, she was no longer making any sound.
“Tell us who he is,” Jimmy said from against the wall.
The sound of Jimmy’s voice broke a vessel of heat within Mickey’s spine, and he could feel a boiling tension race through his entire body. Grabbing Tressa’s left hand, Mickey hoisted her from the armchair and propelled her across the room. She sailed with the subordination of a rag doll onto the carpet, her fingers immediately clutching the rug, her shoulders hitched beneath the thin fabric of her coat.
“Come on!” Jimmy shouted at the girl, his shadow suddenly enormous across her supine body.
Mickey kicked her along the ribs, and she cried out and rolled onto her side. With her teeth clenched together, she made a sound like a rush of air leaking from a punctured car tire. He shouted at her, not realizing he was partially fueled by his frustration with Jimmy Kahn, and relented only when Tressa curled into a fetal ball and pushed herself against the wall.
“We’ll keep this up all night if we have to,” Jimmy promised her. “Tell us who he is. Is he a snitch? A cop? Is he the fucking Pope?”
“Better yet,” said Mickey, “who are you? You a fucking snitch, Tressa? You a fucking snitch?”
She managed something inaudible.
Mickey bent and yanked Tressa up off the floor by her coat. Her legs were too weak to support her weight, and she slumped like a wet cloth in his arms. She managed to stand after a moment, her hair matted to her face, her breath coming in whimpers. Open-handed, Mickey cracked her across the face, and she stumbled backward against the wall. When she tried to run, he grabbed her by the back of her coat and dragged her back toward him. She struggled out of her coat and ran for the front door. In her panic, she struck the door with her face and chest, her hands grappling for the doorknob. But the door was locked, and she could go no further. Instead, she pressed her head against the knob, dropped to the floor, and continued to cry.
Mickey stalked over to her and grabbed her by the hair. She immediately rose to her feet. Like a caveman, he shook her by the hair.
Her right hand was swollen and looked broken; she clutched it to her chest, a trickle of blood running from one nostril, dotting her shirt. Tressa’s knees buckled and she dropped to the floor again, leaving Mickey standing above her clutching a fistful of sweaty hair.
Mickey stepped on her ankle. She moaned and squirmed along the carpet, articulating no words, her moans nonetheless pleading and pathetic.
Jimmy Kahn stepped beside Mickey, looking down at her body. “You better start thinking of the right thing to say,” he told her, “before it’s too late and you can’t talk at all.”
For a moment, she looked as if she were going to speak. One hand came out, her fingers grazing the material of Mickey’s pants. She whispered something, her voice wet now with blood and trembling with fear. Mickey crouched, his right hand snaking around the back of her head and pressing his fingers into the soft flesh of her neck. With a jerk, he brought her face against his, almost cheek-to-cheek. Heat came off her in dreamy oscillations, and her hair was damp to the touch.
“What?” Mickey said, breathing into her face. Her entire body shook within the grasp of his right hand, quaking. She was like a newborn bird, hatched from the egg, blind and helpless and vulnerable. His heart began to race at the notion. “What? Tell me …”
There was blood smeared across her mouth. She pursed her lips wetly, blood running down the side of her face.
With all the power she could muster, she swung her fisted right hand around and slammed Mickey in his bruised, swollen cheek.
Grievous, agonizing pain blossomed like fireworks in the dark sky of his body, shooting from his face to the back of his head like a bolt of lightning. A moment later, his fingers closed on the flesh of her neck with such force that he could feel the blood coursing through her body. He hoisted her to her feet, and she refused to stand. Supporting her with one hand, he brought a fist to her face once, twice—repeatedly. There was no screaming—only the pummel of packed meat—and each retraction of his fist brought with it the crimson tendrils of fresh blood.
Jimmy’s hoarse, angry voice came from directly behind him: “Mickey!”
With a heave, Mickey sent Tressa Walker across the room. For a moment, it seemed as though she would catch her footing … but then her legs gave out completely and she fell toward the wall, face first, and came crashing down against the radiator. Tumbled. Shook. Rolled and slammed against the carpet, unmoving.
The contrail of a bright red shooting star smeared the side of the radiator.
And the room was silent except for the strained respiration of two men.
Stepping onto the back porch for a breath of fresh air, Mickey shook his long hair down in front of his eyes and slipped his bloody hands into the pockets of his coat. Beside him, Irish stood smoking a cigar and leaning over the porch railing. His Coors Light cap was back on his head. From the back, his shoulders looked a good four feet wide. He’d been on the porch all the while.
Jimmy was there, too, beside Irish, hunched over the railing and smoking a cigarette. When Mickey stepped onto the porch, Jimmy shot a glance in his direction. Mickey folded his hands over the wrought iron railing. His hands looked like raw cuts of beef.
Without looking at him, Irish said, “You take care of that mess in there, Mickey?”
Lighting his own cigarette, Mickey met Jimmy’s eyes. “She didn’t know nothing,” he said. It was his attempt at correcting the situation.
Jimmy sighed and exhaled a plume of smoke into the night. “Anybody see you go up to her apartment?”
“No,” Mickey said. He hadn’t seen a soul.
“Deveneau’s gonna come sniffing around now,” Jimmy said. Sucking the life from his cigarette, he turned so Mickey could make out his profile. In the poor light, he looked like a crude sculpture of himself. “You know that, right?”
“Fuck Deveneau,” Mickey said.
“No,” Jimmy said calmly, shaking his head. With one hand, he picked peeling flakes of paint from the railing and flicked them into the night. “I don’t wanna h
ave to watch my back for that asshole now.”
“Not a problem,” Mickey said, and blew a waft of smoke up into the sky. “We’ll start the new year off good.”
He’d never liked Francis Deveneau anyway.
Francis Deveneau and his good friend Bobby “Two-Tone” Sallance stood outside Deveneau’s club smoking cigarettes, their foreheads glistening with sweat despite the temperature.
“You should do a ladies night,” Bobby Two-Tone was saying, “like some of the clubs downtown. Free drinks and shit. Gets the girls to come down. Half the time it’s mostly guys here, Frankie. A goddamn sausage fest. That ain’t right.”
“The hell you know about runnin’ a business?”
“I’m just saying, Frankie,” Bobby Two-Tone said. “Hippendorf’s does it on Wednesday nights. Man, on Wednesdays, it like wall-to-wall skirts. And they lose no money ‘cause all the guys bust their ass to get in and sniff around. Hit those fools with a twenty-dollar cover. Trust me, man, it’s a goddamn brilliant idea.”
“Sure,” Deveneau said, uninterested. He happened to turn and glance at the traffic passing along the street, shivering against the cold, when he spotted the slow-moving Cadillac creeping along the curb. Uninterested, he watched the Caddy for a couple seconds before stomping on his cigarette and going back into the club. He thought nothing of the car—it was one of a million that passed in front of the club every night.
The thing about Manhattan nightclubs was that it took a catastrophe to keep people from coming. And to Deveneau’s clientele, a shoot-out in the basement a month ago did not count as a catastrophe. Lucky for him.
He made his way through a crowd of dancers, slid by the bar, winked at Sandra behind the bar. One finger tapping at his waist, another finger flossing the smooth divot of skin beneath his nose, he crossed the dance floor and made his way down an unlit brick corridor. Here, the industrial pump of the dance music was absorbed in the walls. Before him, the hallway seemed to shift and sway. A couple necking near a pay phone hardly noticed as he bumped by and stumbled into the restroom.
A few guys were bent over one of the sinks. They’d taken down the mirror and laid it across the basin, and were doing lines of cocaine off it. Deveneau thought he recognized them, and he pointed a finger at one of them. The guy waved him over, clubbed him on the back with a meaty hand, and urged him to snort a line.
“Ahhhh …” He did, enthusiastically.
Turning, one hand fumbling with the zipper of his pants, he pushed himself against a urinal, his eyelids fluttering. The chatter of the men behind him swelled like a balloon in his head. There was a clatter, the squeal of a sneaker on the tile floor.
He muttered something in a singsong voice. No one responded.
When he turned around, two men stood behind him. It took him a second for his mind to adjust. A crooked smile broke across his face.
“Mickey … Jimmy …”
Jimmy Kahn lifted a gun and shot Francis Deveneau in the throat. Deveneau jerked backward against the wall and slumped to a half-crouch against the urine-splattered urinal. He held a hand to his throat, his eyes bugged, and blood squirted through his fingers in a torrent and washed down his shirt and pants, pooling on the filthy tile floor.
He opened his mouth to make a sound, but no sound came out. Only blood.
The whole world tilted and spun, and he saw Jimmy Kahn push the gun into his face. It looked enormous, hideous, fake …
Then—
Nothing.
A light drizzle was falling as Jimmy pulled up outside Calliope Candy. The exhaust was kicking up white clouds that were quickly dispersed by the wind. Traffic zipped by in a blaze along Tenth Avenue.
Mickey slipped out of the car, his .25 Beretta wedged into the waistband of his jeans, his coat pulled tight around his body, and crossed over to the pay phone just outside the store. His heart was racing, his adrenaline pumping. There was a buzzing—a rattling—inside his head that reminded him of chattering teeth. Yet he was not cold; he was burning up.
Beneath the conic gleam of a lamppost’s light, Mickey picked up the receiver to the pay phone, slipped in some change, and dialed a telephone number. Patting himself down, he found a nub of pencil and his Black Box matchbook in one pocket. He waited, the wind angry and biting all around him. He hardly felt it. Even his face, bruised and injured from the fight with Patty Nolan, did not bother him.
After a number of rings, Ashleigh Harris answered the phone.
“It’s Mickey. You got Esposito’s address for me?”
“You know it,” Ashleigh said and gave Mickey the address, which he wrote down on the Black Box matchbook cover.
“He see you follow him?”
“No way,” Ashleigh said. There was loud music on in the background.
“Sure?”
“Positive.”
Mickey hung up and stared at Johnny Esposito’s home address. For a moment, he lingered beneath the glow of the lamppost.
Then, with what looked very much like a smile on his face, he climbed back into Jimmy Kahn’s Cadillac.
CHAPTER FORTY
“PHONE’S RINGING,” KATIE WHISPERED.
“I know,” he said. “I just don’t want to get up.”
“Up, up,” she said, playfully yanking his hair.
He lifted his head from her shoulder and rolled onto his side of the bed. His left elbow went down on a box of Kleenex, crumpling it. “You want anything from the kitchen?” he said, moving past the foot of their bed and running one hand along the baby’s crib before stepping out into the hallway.
“Orange juice,” she called back, then blew her nose into a ball of tissues.
In the kitchen, he grabbed the phone receiver from the wall and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?”
“It’s Kersh.”
“What’s wrong?” He knew immediately from the sound of Kersh’s voice that there was trouble.
“Stay calm,” Kersh said. “We just heard from one of the wire taps that Mickey’s got your home address. They must have had somebody follow you home. The call was made, like, thirty seconds ago, John. I think they’re heading your way.”
He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. The walls of the kitchen seemed to close in on him. “Holy shit, tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m on my way over to your place right now. I got backup on the way, too. They’ll meet me there. We’ll get this thing straightened out …”
He felt like a sleeping dog that had just been dumped from a moving car. The fact that he’d been so stupid, so easily bested by Mickey and Jimmy to be followed home … the notion made him crazy with anger.
“Wait. Take this address down,” he said, and gave Kersh the address to his father’s home on Eleventh Avenue. He was deliberately trying to keep his voice down, nearly whispering, so that Katie wouldn’t hear. All of a sudden, the apartment felt preposterously small. “Don’t bother coming here; we’re getting out. I’m bringing Katie there—it’s my father’s house—and I want you there. I don’t want her to be alone—”
“Alone?”
“Just go, Bill. I’ll meet you there.”
He hurried back into the bedroom, quickly grabbing a pair of pants from the closet.
“Where’s my juice?” Katie murmured.
“Hon,” he said, “you have to get up. That was work. I need to get you out of the house.” He slipped his pants on and moved to the side of the bed, helping Katie up. He took one of her forearms, and it felt cold.
“John—”
“It sounds worse than it really is,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re just playing it safe. Get on shoes and a coat. I’ll take you to Dad’s house.”
She went momentarily rigid at the foot of the bed. One hand gripped the crib’s railing. “God, John—what happened?”
He smiled and somehow managed to summon a laugh. Rubbing the side of her face, he said, “Humor me. I’m just overreacting. But let’s move it.”
“John …” She sounded very far aw
ay.
“Come on,” he urged.
She covered his hand with her own, pressing his palm into the smoothness of her cheek. “You promise this is nothing?”
“I do,” he said. “I promise. Now get dressed.”
While she pulled on a pair of sweatpants and shoes, he hit the front windows and peered out through the curtains. Cars were parked up and down the street, and a few drove past the intersection. It was too soon—they wouldn’t be able to get out here that fast.
“You almost ready?” he called to his wife.
“My shoes …” she said, shuffling into the front room. “I can’t—”
“Don’t come by the windows.”
She didn’t move, didn’t say a word—just stood there with her coat draped over her nightshirt, the left side of her body illuminated by the dull orange light from the hallway. Unmoving and silent, she just stared at him. As if she were suddenly unsure of who he was and what he was doing …
“Come on,” he said, leading her back out into the hallway toward the closet. “Your shoes … they’re in here …”
He found them, bent down, and coaxed them onto her feet. She moved like a person comprised of cut wood and metal hinges. Looking down the hallway, he could see the kitchen table, the stove, the refrigerator—all those things spread out before him in his home, and how they seemed to pulse with life, with current, with vibration.
“Button your coat,” he told Katie, then dashed down the hallway to the bedroom. Opening his dresser drawer, he slid his gun out and pushed it into the waistband of his jeans. He felt around for his undercover wallet and tossed that on the bed. Resting on the nightstand beside the bed were his real credentials, which he grabbed and stuffed in his pants pocket.
Back out in the hallway, Katie had not moved. She stood by the front door, her coat buttoned incorrectly and hanging lopsided from her shoulders, like a small child in the middle of some great and terrible commotion. And maybe she even was.
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