Shamrock Alley Read online

  “Weather,” Kersh muttered, shaking the drizzle from his newspaper. There was something childish about him—in his face, his mannerisms, his eyes—that caused John to grin.

  “You look like shit. Don’t you ever shave?”

  “You,” Kersh said, unfolding his newspaper, “suddenly have more important things to worry about than my personal hygiene.” Buried within the folds of his newspaper was a manila folder. Kersh slid the folder out across the table and opened it, rifled through some computer printouts. “Two bits of information for you,” he said, not looking up from his paperwork.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Kersh slid two of the printouts in front of John: O’Shay’s and Kahn’s records from NYPD. John’s meeting with O’Shay had prompted Kersh to retrieve their information the night before. John scanned the printouts, then muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

  “Can you believe it? You see those charges? Kidnapping, assault, attempted murder, some robbery sprinkled in there for flavor. All major arrests … but not a single conviction.” Kersh leaned over the table and drummed a thick finger on one of the rap sheets. “Two murder acquittals on insanity for your churchgoing buddy O’Shay. He’s been in and out of institutions half his life.”

  “I don’t believe this. Not from these guys.”

  “It’s there in black and white,” Kersh told him, then waved a waitress over and ordered himself a cup of coffee. “This puts a bad taste in my mouth, John. I know you said this guy O’Shay’s some dope off the street—”

  “He is—”

  “Nevertheless, you keep this shit in mind every time you meet with this clown—you know what I’m saying? Somebody like this … you don’t know what to expect.”

  Something smelled bogus. True, Kersh was right—it was all here in black and white—but he found it impossible to connect that mook O’Shay to the rap sheet in front of him. Bad guys looked a certain way, spoke a certain way, dressed a certain way, operated in a certain way. Often, they were so cliché and so predictable that it was almost ludicrous. Yet here he was, faced with the exception to that rule, and he was surprised and a bit exasperated by his initial miscalculation.

  “What else?” he asked Kersh. “You said you had two bits of info for me.”

  “Clifton’s prints on those folded hundreds.”

  “They came back?” John asked.

  “They came back clean. His prints aren’t on any of the bills.”

  “Well, that’s terrific. Christ.”

  “Maybe he was careful,” Kersh said. “Or just lucky. It happens. Although I thought we’d get at least one …” Kersh drummed his thick fingers on the table. “Clifton’s got a record, anyway. Minor stuff.”

  “And the gun? The silencer?”

  “Hopefully we’ll hear on that tonight, tomorrow at the latest. They’re checking ballistics.”

  John looked at the clock again while Kersh sipped his coffee, blew rings across the surface.

  “One last thing,” Kersh said absently, looking down at his coffee.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t meet with this O’Shay guy again without telling me first, John.”

  That same fetid smell still clung to the air inside Douglas Clifton’s hospital room. Upon entrance, John and Kersh both expected to find the room’s occupant just as delirious as he’d been the day before. However, as they pushed open the door, John was surprised to see that Dr. Kuhmari had been intimidated by Kersh and had not administered any pain medication to Clifton, as far as John could tell.

  The man writhed in bed, his eyes wide and bloodshot. His breathing was harsh, raspy, filtered through clamped teeth. His dark brush-cut hair had been teased by the mattress in his fitful sleep. He trained his gaze on both John and Kersh the moment they stepped through the door.

  Kersh wasted no time. “Douglas Clifton, I’m Special Agent Kersh, Secret Service. This is Agent Mavio. Do you remember us from yesterday?”

  Douglas Clifton, who’d probably been told exactly why he hadn’t been administered his medication that morning, pushed himself up in his bed, his feet working beneath the sheets. His eyes never left Kersh. Still bandaged and confined to the sling above his bed, Clifton flexed, relaxed, and flexed his injured arm again.

  “Don’t remember nothin’,” Clifton growled. “The hell you guys want?”

  Kersh went straight for the obvious. “What happened to your hand, Doug?”

  “Why?”

  “Curious.”

  Clifton chewed at the inside of his right cheek. “Get over it,” he grumbled.

  But Kersh was both calm and relentless. “Really—what happened?”

  Clifton’s lower lip quivered. The expression on his face was that of a mule repeatedly beaten for its stubbornness. “Get out of here,” he practically whispered.

  “Don’t wanna talk about the accident?” John began, and Clifton’s eyes quickly shifted in his direction. “Fine. Let’s talk about those counterfeit hundreds you been passing.”

  Like the shadow of an airplane, a look moved briefly over Douglas Clifton’s face. It was that look which immediately gave him away. Yet the man would not comply, and his lower lip began working again. John watched the fingers of Clifton’s good hand pick at the frame of the bed. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he said finally.

  “We’ve got phony hundreds back in our office with your prints all over them,” John lied.

  Clifton laughed once—sharply—and the corners of his mouth hooked up into an unsettling grin. “Prints? Fucking prints? Yeah? With what hand?” He uttered a pained sob and eased his eyes shut. “Don’t mean nothing.”

  John cocked an eyebrow. “It don’t? Look at me.”

  With reluctance, Clifton peeked at John from behind squinted eyes. “Got nothin’ to do with me.”

  “We know you’ve been slipping phony hundreds to some dancer at the Black Box.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “We all know you’re full of horse shit here, Doug,” Kersh said, the soft tone and abrupt message of his voice contradictory almost to the point of comedy. Yet there was nothing comedic about Kersh’s performance. “You have problems, both present”—he nodded toward Clifton’s truncated arm—”and future. We grabbed your car from the pound, found some interesting stuff in the trunk. We’ll put this whole thing together. Your situation right now is going to seem like a walk in the park. Listen to what I’m saying.”

  Despite the pain from his wound and the fear that prodded him just below the surface, Clifton’s eyes grew calm and lucid, his face growing oddly serene. He pushed his head back against his pillow and tilted his eyes up toward the ceiling. Beside the bed, his heart monitor began picking up tempo.

  “Now’s your time to talk,” John pushed.

  “I don’t know what you guys are talkin’ about,” Clifton said. He spoke slow and easy, each word calculated. “Leave me alone. I got no damn hand now. You know what that means? You think I give a shit about what you’re saying?”

  “You better start giving a shit,” John said. “You’re headed for a room with bars and no Jell-O for dessert. And a guy with one hand, I don’t think will do too well in the joint.”

  “You goddamn guys don’t get it,” Clifton said, the ghost of that unsettling grin returning to his lips. “I don’t give a shit what my prints are on or what you found in my trunk—I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ and I don’t know nothin’. I ain’t seen that car in days. Any asshole could’ve stuck somethin’ in the trunk. And, shit, I go to clubs all the time, give girls money all the time. I ever slip ‘em a hundred-dollar bill? Absolutely not.” Shaking his head, that peculiar smile still lingering on his lips, Clifton closed his eyes. Some moisture appeared in the creases. “Ahhhh.” A single tear ran down his temple. “I’m tired, and I fucking hurt. Get out.”

  “This just ain’t gonna go away,” John promised him.

  “You go away,” Clifton murmured. “The both of you.”

  “Where’d yo
u get that money, Doug?” John said, his voice rising. “Who gave you that money?”

  “Get out!” Clifton cried, his eyes flipping open, his head coming up off the pillow. His eyes were like two neon bulbs. “Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out-out-out-out-out!”

  The hospital room door opened, and two young nurses flitted in. One rushed to Clifton’s bedside while the other approached John and Kersh, ushering them out of the way. “Gentlemen, please, you shouldn’t be—”

  John shot a finger out and pointed at Clifton, his eyes just as wild and alert as the man in the bed. This isn’t going away, buddy, his eyes told Clifton. I promise you, man. Not by a long shot.

  One of the nurses bent over Clifton, frantic to get the man under control and relaxed. With his good hand, Clifton shoved the young nurse out of the way, his eyes never leaving John’s, his abbreviated arm rattling in its mechanical casing. Beside the bed, Clifton’s heart monitor began chirping sixteenth notes, the small screen cluttered with flashing numbers and erratic, zigzag lines.

  Kersh squeezed John’s forearm. “Come on,” he said, leading him out into the hallway. “I think we’ve made an impression.”

  Later that evening, Kersh arrived alone in the lobby of One Police Plaza and was directed to Detective Peter Brauman of the Intelligence Division. At roughly Kersh’s age, weight, and height, Peter Brauman could have worn Kersh’s shadow as his own. A dedicated, loyal fellow, John would have been interested to know that Peter Brauman was one of the select few people Bill Kersh honestly liked.

  Now, surrounded by the soft glow of his desk lamp, Brauman sat reclining in his chair listening to some sporting event on the radio. His back to Kersh, the Secret Service agent watched the man for some time without saying a word, amused by his gestures and scowls at the radio. When Brauman happened to look up in Kersh’s direction, he spooked and nearly spilled out of his chair.

  “Christ,” Brauman said. “Give me a friggin’ heart attack.”

  “Working hard as usual, Peter.”

  “Smart guy. How you doing? Sit down.” Brauman hooked a thumb at a box of pastries that sat on his desk. “Want a cruller?”

  “No, I just ate. You got a few minutes?”

  “You know it.”

  Kersh eased himself down in a chair in front of Brauman’s desk. Seated, he noticed some tomato sauce on his shirt and scraped at it with his thumbnail. “Last night I pulled up the records on two guys—Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn. Young Irish guys from the West Side. Got a bunch of arrests but no convictions. Some of the stuff’s pretty heavy—homicide, assaults, that sort of thing. You know anything about them?”

  Brauman leaned back in his chair and turned the volume down on his radio. “O’Shay and Kahn,” Brauman said under his breath. He stood, his chair creaking, and ambled over to a wall of file cabinets. “We got some intelligence files on them going back about two years ago or so. Rumors are they’ve been involved in some hits, loan sharking, extortion, the usual bag of shit. I just know bits and pieces.” He selected two thick folders from the file cabinet and carried them back to his desk. He sat down in a great exhalation. “Supposedly took over Hell’s Kitchen. Here.” Brauman slid the paperwork around so Kersh could read it. “Pretty vicious guys, as you can see.”

  Flipping through the files, Kersh whistled.

  “Like I said, nothing concrete. Supposedly they’ve been involved in a lot of shootings, even got their hands in some of the unions.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s the word.”

  “What’s with the acquittals?” In Kersh’s opinion, there were two reasons for the lack of convictions. One: the assaults were against street punks who, in turn, made lousy witnesses. Or two: O’Shay and Kahn had frightened people to the point that they refused to testify against them. Something John had said about Tressa Walker and how frightened she’d been when talking to him about O’Shay and Kahn …

  Brauman rolled his shoulders and raked his fingers through a graying patch of hair. He looked tired. And it suddenly occurred to Kersh that all middle-aged cops looked tired. “Acquittals? If I had to guess, I’d say the prosecution had a difficult time finding anyone to talk against them.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Quite matter-of-factly, Brauman said, “Because they’re nuts. Real whack-a-doos. They get their way through intimidation. One of ‘em—the O’Shay fella, if I’m thinkin’ right—he got off a homicide on an insanity plea once or twice, did a few months at some nuthouse upstate. Then he became cured and got out. Some system. I know a detective who’s worked some cases, arrested them before.” Lacing his hands across his ample stomach, Brauman leaned farther back in his chair; Kersh could hear the rollers creak beneath the man’s weight. “What’s the deal, anyway? You guys got something on them?”

  Kersh, who was instinctually covetous when it came to the divulgence of case information, even with another officer of the law, merely said, “Their names popped up in some counterfeit case we’re working. Figured I’d check ‘em out, see what came up. Let me ask you—these guys have any connection to a fella named Charles or Charlie Lowenstein that you know of? Guy was a printer.”

  “Don’t ring a bell. I wouldn’t know.”

  “That detective friend of yours?”

  “I can give him a call sometime this week, see what he knows.”

  Kersh frowned, rubbed his chin. “Ahhh—just if you happen to speak with him. Not a big deal.”

  “Well, if you want to arrest ‘em, be my guest. Save us some trouble. Oh,” Brauman said, eyebrows raising, “that reminds me. I got your present.” He pushed his chair away from his desk and rolled over to a cabinet, opened a drawer, searched. After a moment, Brauman withdrew a plastic evidence bag from the cabinet and rolled back over to his desk, placing the bag on his New York Mets desk calendar. Inside the bag were the gun and silencer recovered from Evelyn Gethers’s Lincoln Towncar; stapled to the outside of the bag were the results of the ninhydrin exam. “Lab came back with a hit. Douglas James Clifton is your man. Got some good prints off the twenty-two and a nice fat thumbprint on the silencer.”

  Kersh leaned forward in his chair and peered at the bag. “Douglas Clifton,” Kersh muttered, satisfied. “One-armed bandit.”

  When Brauman asked what Kersh meant, the Secret Service agent only shook his head and reached for the last cruller.

  Time.

  It’s a volatile thing. Sometimes, it’s an abyss. In the swimming moments that occupy the turn around a dark corner in an abandoned neighborhood tenement, time becomes infinite. Gun drawn, heart pounding, sweat prickling and itching the sticky nape of one’s neck—time has swallowed that person. He is held captive. Nothing moves, nothing changes. Time has stopped and he is suspended.

  Other times, it is like a locomotive barreling through a mountainside tunnel. Yet for an agent, there is no track to guide the way. There is the sensation of losing control. It can be an eternity that lasts for a second, or a second that extends until forever …

  On the nightstand beside the bed, John’s cell phone rang.

  “No,” Katie muttered, “let it go.”

  “Can’t,” John said, completing a line of kisses down his wife’s neck before rolling over and fumbling with the cell phone in the dark. “John.”

  “You sound funny. You’re already in bed?” It was Kersh.

  “No, no—go ahead. I’m up.”

  “Just thought you’d want to know—prints came back on the gun and silencer. Douglas Clifton’s had his hands all over them.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Well, we’ll see how it shakes down,” Kersh said. “He isn’t the most cooperative soul.”

  “He’ll talk now.”

  “Let’s hope,” Kersh said. “You’re going to Katie’s parents’ tomorrow for Thanksgiving?”

  “For the day, yeah. You got plans?”

  “I help at a church-sponsored soup kitchen every year out in Jersey. Mostly young kids and their mother
s, that sort of thing. I’ll be there most of the day.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me …” Katie raised her head up off the pillow, but John waved her back down.

  Kersh laughed. “Keeps the conscience clean. Better than confession. If there’s a God up there, I’m building toward my big retirement.”

  “You’ll get points just for spending the day in Jersey.”

  Again, Kersh laughed. John pictured him seated in his cramped apartment at a small kitchen table, a can of Spaghetti-O’s choked with a spoon laid out before him. Perhaps in the background hums the soft lilt of one of Kersh’s beloved jazz records.

  “Have a nice holiday,” Kersh said. “Send Katie my regards.”

  “I will. Goodnight.”

  He clicked off the phone and rolled back against his wife. Wasting no time, he pressed his lips to her soft neck while she shivered and smiled in his arms. “Bill Kersh sends his regards,” he mumbled.

  “He’s the big, frumpy guy from the office?”

  “The very same.”

  “He reminds me,” Katie said, “of a big, messy sofa.” She’d only met Kersh once, when they’d bumped into him at a restaurant one afternoon, and she had been impressed with the man’s knowledge of artwork, music, theater.

  “I’ll tell him you said that.”

  “Don’t offend him.”

  “It won’t offend him,” he said, continuing to bury his face into the warm, yielding flesh of his wife’s neck. “He’d actually like it. Now come here and stop talking …”

  For an agent on a tedious surveillance, time becomes an opponent. For an agent suddenly plunged into the whizzing heat of an unexpected gunfight, time becomes a threat. For an agent faced with the daunting task of working and reworking undercover scenarios, time becomes a gift.

  For John Mavio, time became a decision, and it arrived on Thanksgiving morning.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN