“We’ll see what kinda balls you have,” Jimmy said, moving back into the hallway.
With the gun still pointed at John, Mickey slowly backed his way out of the room. A homicidal grin tore at his face, twisting and contorting his features. For one crazy moment, he looked like a Halloween mask with sunken pits for eyes and fangs for teeth.
“See you in two days,” Mickey said, disappearing into the hallway. “And don’t bother getting up. We’ll let ourselves out.”
Still feeling the vibration throughout the bed, John remained on the mattress, listening to Mickey and Jimmy’s footfalls recede down the hall. He heard the bolts turn on the front door, the door itself squeak open, then slam shut, rattling the frame. Distantly, he could hear their footsteps on the risers in the lobby hallway, and their muffled laughter through the walls.
On the nightstand beside the bed, the alarm clock read 1:28 A.M.
It was the first day of a new year.
JANUARY
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
GET ON THE BED.
He could still hear Mickey O’Shay’s words sounding in his head, racking his mind. And he could still see the clap of fire erupt from Mickey’s gun, the first round slamming into Katie’s pillow right beside his head. Then the second shot—into the crib of his unborn child.
Get on the bed.
Seated alone in the pit, his feet propped up on a second chair, John rubbed the side of his head with two fingers while his eyes stared blankly at the shelves of textbooks. Two nights since the events at his home, and his anger had dulled to a contemplative irritation, dispersed throughout his entire body with the malignancy of ingested poison. This morning, waking up in bed beside his wife at his father’s house (it had been decided they would remain there until the West Side boys were apprehended), he’d felt as if his body had been filled with shards of hot, broken glass and jagged stones. Beside him lay the silent and unmoving shape of his wife. She’d been in a stupor since that night and refused to talk about it, refused to talk to him. That bothered him the most. He wished he could take all her worry and hurt and fear and carry that on his shoulders, too, along with his own. Katie didn’t deserve any of this. And he hated himself for burdening her with it.
Yet there was no turning back from this thing now. He’d looked the beast in the eye—was the only man with a soul who had seen these animals up close and personal—and knew they needed to be stopped. It went beyond the job, beyond personal motivation. These guys were pure evil. And John knew he was the only man who could put an end to them.
For the past two days, Mickey O’Shay had been calling. John refused to answer the line. It was part of the undercover strategy but, in truth, the idea of talking to the son of a bitch sickened him. On the third day, after Mickey’s persistence began to let up, John called him. Just hearing Mickey O’Shay’s voice on the other end of the line was enough to get his blood boiling all over again.
“Where you been, John, I been trying—”
“Listen to me, you shithead. Dealing with you is the last thing I feel like doin’ after that shit you pulled at my place.”
Mickey snorted on the other end of the line.
“But I got a lotta guys waitin’ on this deal and a reputation at stake,” he continued. “We do it tonight. Then we’re through. After tonight, I don’t want to look at you again. You got me?”
Mickey sighed. “There’s a park over on—”
“Fuck that. You meet me tonight at Nathan’s in Coney Island. You’re done calling the shots. And I want Kahn there for the deal. I don’t trust you for shit. In fact, I don’t care if you’re there or not. No Kahn, no deal.”
“Jimmy’s—”
“He’s there, or I walk.”
A moment of silence passed over the line as Mickey considered the situation. In the end, he agreed and hung up the phone.
Following the call and a discussion with Bill Kersh, SAIC Brett Chominsky called John into his office. When he arrived, Kersh was already seated in one of the plush leather chairs before Chominsky’s large desk. John felt himself hesitate in the doorway. Then he stepped inside and took his own seat.
“Mickey knows the money’s gone,” Chominsky said without pause. “We’ve verified that through the wire taps. The fact that this thing is still on now can only mean one thing.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Here,” Chominsky said, pushing play on a tape recorder that rested on the edge of his desk. “Listen.”
The tape came on in mid-conversation. It was a recording of a phone conversation between Mickey and Jimmy—John knew their voices immediately—and as they talked, Chominsky thumbed the volume knob louder.
“We do this thing tonight,” Mickey was saying, “I’m gonna need you there. I ain’t gonna do this on my own.”
“I’ll be there,” he heard Jimmy say.
“All right,” Mickey said. There was a tremulous quaver to his voice, and he sounded very much unlike himself. “This thing goes good, we made a score.”
Chominsky clicked off the tape. Leaning back in his chair, he eyeballed John.
“They’re meeting with you to rip you,” Chominsky told him. “They don’t have the counterfeit, and they’re still talking about making a score. They’re not dealing, John. They’re planning on taking your money.” The distraught tone of Brett Chominsky’s voice also implied that he knew Mickey and Jimmy were planning on killing him, too.
“Not necessarily,” John said. “They could have another stash somewhere that we don’t know about.”
“They don’t talk about another stash,” Kersh interjected. John could tell this thing was weighing heavily on him.
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” he said … although in reality, Chominsky and Kersh were probably right: Mickey and Jimmy were planning on killing him tonight and taking his money. Still, John was not obstructed by such thought. He felt smarter, quicker, better than Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn. And if he had to convince Chominsky and Kersh, then he’d convince them.
“John,” Chominsky said, “we have to look at all the scenarios and figure on the worst. It’s pretty evident this is probably a rip.”
“You don’t have to do this, John,” Kersh added.
“Yes, I do.”
“They’re gonna kill you, John,” Kersh said. “This thing got out of hand a long time ago. We should pull the plug.” He turned to Brett Chominsky. “This thing isn’t going to end well.”
“They’re not gonna do anything without seeing my money,” John assured Kersh. “We set up a money car a few blocks away from Nathan’s. I meet with them, ask to see the counterfeit, and whether they have it or not, I get conversation from Kahn. Then I take them to the money car. Once we get there, you bust ‘em.” Because he didn’t like the looks Kersh and Chominsky were giving him, he added, “You heard the wire. Kahn’s gonna be there. This is our chance to get him dirty in all this. Even if it’s a rip, we’ll have him on conspiracy. It’s still our play.”
“You think so,” Bill said. “O’Shay’s out of his mind. You have no idea what he might decide to do. A deal this big and the crap he pulled at your house, he’s probably worried you’re going to try and rip him. You don’t show up with the money, he might freak and turn out your lights right on the sidewalk.”
“He won’t do that,” he insisted.
“You don’t know that…”
“He won’t, Bill. I’m telling you. I’ve been around this guy enough to smell his moves. He’s nuts, but he ain’t gonna risk losing eighty grand.” To his own ears, it sounded almost as if he were trying more to convince himself. Truth was, he didn’t know what Mickey would do. The only thing he was certain of was his own refusal to let this thing go bad. He could handle it. “Trust me.”
“Against my better judgment, John, I’ve been trusting you,” Kersh said, “and that trust has gotten you up on a tenement roof with a gun pointed at your head and now, three nights ago, these animals break into your g
oddamn house. We’ve lost control of this.”
He hadn’t told anyone—especially Kersh and Katie—about how Mickey had held the gun to his face and made him lie on the bed, nor how Mickey had plugged his wife’s pillow and the baby’s crib. As far as Bill Kersh was concerned, Mickey and Jimmy showed up, asked a few questions, opened a few dresser drawers, and left. And as far as Katie was concerned, no one had ever shown up.
“I’m tired of trying to convince everybody,” he said finally. Turning to Chominsky, he said, “I’m tired of this whole goddamn case. You wanna throw in the towel now after all I’ve been through? Is that what you want? Because I’m not ready to do that. You think I’m on some suicide trip, that I’m an asshole, but this is our only chance to get Kahn dirty.” He glared at Bill Kersh. “They’re not walking away, and I’ll be goddamned if we are.”
“Ultimately,” Chominsky said, “it’s up to you, John. If you’re comfortable with this …”
“We can do this,” he assured the SAIC.
“What about wearing a wire?” Kersh suggested.
“No way. They find that, I’m really a dead man. I’ll take the transmitter.”
“Transmitter’s got limited range,” Kersh interjected.
“I’m not wearing a wire. They pat me down, find a wire—”
“All right,” Chominsky interrupted. “Brief the squad; get everybody ready. We’ll meet again in two hours.”
Now, some time later, he sat by himself in the pit, going over the details of the plan in his mind. It was quiet here, and the quiet bothered him. He’d asked Kersh once how he could stand such prolonged silence, and the older agent had simply replied, “Because I’m not afraid to listen to myself think.” He wasn’t afraid—he was convinced he’d be able to handle both Mickey and Jimmy—but there was still some gnawing at his gut, at the base of his brain. The pit’s unbroken silence afforded him too much time to dwell on too many other things in his life—Katie and his father at the forefront. He pictured Bill Kersh as the type of man who had no trouble falling asleep at night—who, when his head hit the pillow and his eyes closed, was already halfway off to dreamland. He, himself, could not remember the last time he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Even now he felt wired, anxious to meet with the two West Side boys and put a lid on this thing.
Kersh returned with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He set them on the table without saying a word, and eased his bulk onto one of the chairs that surrounded the table. On the tabletop, a detailed map of Coney Island lay before them. With grease pencils, Kersh had marked a number of street corners and intersections.
Looking at Kersh, John thought he could tell what the man was thinking. He was worried about tonight’s bust, but was also undoubtedly thinking about the slumped form of Francis Deveneau that Dennis Glumly had discovered in the bathroom of Deveneau’s club, his throat and part of his head blown apart. Also, after repeated unanswered calls to Tressa Walker’s apartment, Kersh had gone there himself to check out the situation. No one had answered the door when he’d knocked, despite the sounds of the television through the walls. Flashing his badge to the superintendent, he’d been allowed access to Tressa’s apartment. And the first thing he’d noticed upon entering had been that the television set was not on, and that the noise he had heard was coming from the bedroom, behind a closed door. It had been the crying of Tressa Walker’s baby, abandoned and dirty and hungry and alone in the back of the apartment—and suddenly everything had seemed a whole lot worse.
“Okay,” the older agent said now, sipping his coffee, “let’s run through this again.” He tapped the grease pencil against a scrawled star along Mermaid Avenue. “We’ll have the money car here—the Camaro—and we’ll have all four points covered by surveillance around it …” With the grease pencil, he drew four circles surrounding the star along Mermaid Avenue. “You bring Mickey and Jimmy to the money car, we got four teams ready to bust them.” He dragged the pencil down the map and paused along Surf Avenue, which ran the length of the Coney Island bulwark. “Nathan’s is … here,” he said, pressing the pencil point to the map. “We should have two more cars out here to cover you.”
“I think that’s too many,” John spoke up.
Kersh continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I’ll be up here, on Surf and 15th Street. I’ll have Veccio sit in the car, and I’ll walk the strip so I can keep an eye on things. We’ll have another car at one of the meters along Schweikens Walk. Mickey and Jimmy show up, you eyeball the counterfeit then take them right over to the money car. They don’t have the counterfeit on them—and it’s a lot, so they probably won’t—you don’t need to push the issue. Just take them to the car.” He put the pencil down; it rolled along the length of the map and stopped before rolling off the edge of the table. Not looking at John, Kersh said, “They want you to go someplace with them, don’t. Everybody’s gonna be on edge here—especially them. Chances are, if they have the money it’ll be in their car. Let them show it to you, then bring them right to the Camaro.”
“Pretty simple,” John said.
“Yeah, right.” There was no inflection in Kersh’s voice. “We should sit down with Chominsky again,” Kersh said.
“Bill,” he said, “I know you don’t want to do this …”
Sighing, sipping his coffee, Kersh said, “John, you’ve got a very important decision to make tonight.” Kersh would not look him in the face; he kept his eyes trained on the map of Coney Island. “You can handle this thing like a professional and do your job, or you can bury yourself in it and allow it to consume your entire life. I’m not your father, and I’m through trying to make you see things my way. You’re your own man. Just understand that this deal—this money, these West Side animals—these things are not the ultimate. What’s important,” he continued, thumping a hand against his heart, “is what’s waiting for you at home after all this is over.” He waved a heavy hand carelessly across the map. “Not this shit.”
He couldn’t say anything to that. How could he make Bill Kersh understand that he needed to do this, needed to succeed, needed to get to the end of the long race he’d started back in November? That he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror if he gave up on this thing? And oddly enough, his mind summoned the picture of his father in his fireman’s garb—the picture that had been on the workbench in the garage when he was a little boy—and how tonight was just a piece of what would make him whole, what would make him complete, what would make him worthy. It was easy to give up and go home; it was difficult to fight things to the end … and even more difficult to emerge the victor. He wasn’t out to win this case for Roger Biddleman or Brett Chominsky or Bill Kersh or anyone else. He was out there trying to win this thing for himself.
But he didn’t know how to explain those things to Kersh. Instead, he stood and began rolling up the map of Coney Island into a tube. He worked quickly and did not look up to meet Kersh’s eyes.
“Come on,” he said after a moment. “Let’s sit down with Chominsky before it gets too late.”
The phone rang a number of times before his wife answered.
“It’s me,” he told her. “Just wanted to say I’m thinking about you. You doing okay?”
“I’m fine. Glad you called,” she said. She sounded so small on the other end of the phone.
It felt good to hear her voice, though it sent a strong sense of impropriety running through him. He felt guilty, guilty for everything …
“It’ll be over after tonight,” he promised her now. “I know things have been crazy, but it’ll be different after tonight. I promise.”
“Don’t worry yourself thinking about me,” she said. “I’m okay. I trust you, John. You take care of this thing, then come on home to me.”
“I’ll try not to be too late,” he said, paused, then hung up the phone.
Outside, a strong wind shook the office windows.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CONEY ISLAND PULSED LIKE A HEARTBEAT IN the night. The flash
ing lights of the bulwark illuminated a grand run of darkness and brought into impressive relief the mass of pedestrians along Surf Avenue. No weather was too cold, no hour too late, to keep people away. The boom of laughter was a constant melody. The shuffling of feet, the combined din of voices, the carnival music from the carousel, and the impatient growl and hum of impenetrable traffic along the avenue completed the soundtrack. Here, the aromas were both commonplace and unique: melted butter and popcorn, French fries and mustard, caramel and candy apples, hot sugar and the sharp roast of peanuts. And beyond, the caustic odor of the ocean and the noxious whiff of axle grease used to oil the amusement park rides.
John paused on the opposite side of Surf Avenue, staring across the street at the crowds of people and the panels of billboards that ran the length of the esplanade. The neon glitter of Clam Bar and Sea Food and Delicatessen converged in a blur of confused lights. The yellow and green Nathan’s awnings dominated the walk, filthy and old and colorful like aged prostitutes. Along the sidewalk, the gantries bustled with dark-skinned laborers catering to large quantities of hungry people, even in the cold. And above and beyond the gantries and the billboards, the colored lights of Astroland dotted the darkness. The Wonder Wheel pulled sluggish rotations; the Cyclone clung black and silent to a dark winter sky. And all around, the elated cries and screams and shouts of young children, teenagers, and adults alike filled the night.
He’d parked the Camaro—the money car—on Mermaid Avenue, surrounded by four invisible units ready to strike once he led Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn to the car. In the cold he trudged down the street toward Surf Avenue. In his leather jacket he had his gun stashed, as well as the cigarette lighter transmitter. Now, as he hurried through the darkened streets, he zipped up his coat, slid his hands into his pockets, and moved quickly with his head down.
He felt inspired. The bones in his body seemed to hum with an electrical excitement. He felt alive. For a brief moment, his wife’s voice reverberated in his head, but it was there and then gone, just as quickly as it had come. Everything was riding on tonight, and he did not want anything to clutter his mind.
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