A low growling laugh, followed by a statement I get a lot. ‘You talk weird.’
‘I get that a lot,’ I say.
‘What is it? Dublin?’
That’s pretty good. Most people get Irish, but never Dublin. ‘I’m impressed. You got relations?’
The legs uncross and stretch. ‘Nah. I work with a guy, he watches this Irish TV show on the net.’
The pennies drop. I know who this is, and all it takes is a flick of the light switch to confirm it.
Macey Barrett. One of Michael Madden’s soldiers.
Okay. This could be trouble.
We don’t really have much organised crime in Cloisters. Too small. But there’s one guy trying to upgrade from hood to boss. He spent a summer with his cousin in the Bronx and picked up some ideas on how to run an organisation.
Irish Mike Madden. Prostitution, protection and a burgeoning crystal meth business, to pull in the weekend tweakers. And here, sitting in my friend Zeb’s waiting room, is one of Madden’s boys. In the dark.
What the hell is going on?
I tell myself to be calm. After all, hoodlums get bloated stomachs too. Maybe this guy’s here for some aloe.
Barrett looks like an accountant. Expensive haircut, expensive smile, nice golden tan. But he isn’t an accountant. Jason pointed him out to me one night in the club.
You see this guy, with the permatan and the penny loafers. Macey Barrett. Irish Mike brought him back from New York. They call this guy the Crab, on account of this little sideways shuffle he does before he sticks you.
Sticking people is apparently Barrett’s favourite pastime. I knew guys like that in the army; they liked to get their hands red. Liked the feel of the blade sliding in.
‘You waiting on the doc?’ Barrett asks me, like he’s just passing time.
I help myself to a cone of water from the cooler. ‘Yeah, sure. I have an appointment.’
‘You don’t say? You’re not in the book.’
He’s reading the book now. Doesn’t even bother hiding the fact.
‘I’m not an in-the-book sort of a guy.’
Barrett rolls himself out of the chair, coming to his feet casually.
‘So, you and the doc, pretty tight? Talks to you and shit? Confides in you?’
I shrug, conveying: you know, whatever. It’s not much of an answer, and Barrett is not happy with it.
‘I’m just saying, you don’t have an appointment and you got a key in your hand. You give a key to someone, he’s your friend. You meet for a beer after work, shoot the breeze. Talk about who’s getting what done in the back room.’
‘Zeb doesn’t talk about patients. He’s like a confessor with that stuff.’
Barrett doesn’t listen past the first word. ‘Zeb? Zeb, you say? Shit, you two are tight.’
Then he changes tack altogether, goes all buddy-buddy. ‘So, pal. How do I know you? I know you from somewhere, right?’
‘Small town.’
Barrett laughs, like this is some kind of joke. ‘Yeah, sure. Small town. Nail on the head, buddy. But I know you. Come on, man. Don’t tell me you don’t know me.’
Barrett makes knowing him sound like a wonderful gift.
Screw it.
‘Yeah, Macey. I know you. I see you on the strip. Madden’s boy.’
And the friendliness shoots up a notch. ‘That’s right. I work for Mike. It’s that shithole club, isn’t it. Slotz, right? Daniel McEvoy, that’s you, tell me I’m wrong. I seen you work, but never heard you talk.’
And he does a little sideways shuffle, dropping his right hand low.
This is not a great development. The sideways shuffle.
‘You’re a big guy, McEvoy,’ says Barrett, shaking something down his sleeve. David Copperfield he ain’t. ‘I bet you knock shitkickers around pretty good.’
I’m having a hard time believing this is actually happening. Barrett is really going to make a move on me just for being here. Wrong place wrong time for one of us. His hand comes up quick and in his fist there is what looks like a shaft of light.
It looks like a shaft of light, but unless he’s Gandalf it probably isn’t.
Good point, and it’s more than enough for my fighter’s instinct to stand up and dance a jig.
I step to one side, dig my heel into the carpet for stability. Adrenalin shoots through my system like nitrous oxide, slowing the whole thing down. The shaft of light flashes past my eye and I put the key through the side of Barrett’s neck, watch him bleed out, then sit down and think about what I’ve done.
CHAPTER 3
When I finally parted ways with the army after my second tour, I quickly realised that there was nothing for me in Dublin. Every minute I spent in the dirty old town sent me further into the whirlwind of my own mind. I couldn’t find a good memory in there that didn’t end in tragedy. And I have a tendency to live in my head. Shit happens, right? So deal with it.
I did. Took advantage of being born in New York City and boarded a transatlantic jet to JFK. Wore the uniform that wasn’t mine any more to check in and even got myself an upgrade. Oldest trick in the manual, after loading a shotgun with tea bags to scare the crap out of looters. Dumped the beret and jacket in the lounge bathroom. Walked out a civilian with a first-class ticket.
My mother may have been from America, but with her family apartment way up high and hanging over Central Park, she wasn’t what you might call a typical New Yorker, and after touchdown it took me a while to credit the local accent. One day it’s bejaysus and begorrah and the next it’s fugeddabout it. They’re putting this on, I thought. Yadda yadda yadda. Badda bing. Bullshit, no one talks like this.
But they did, and worse. I took a couple of beatings in the early days just because I didn’t understand what the hell people were saying to me. Wadda fucku starin’ at? You fuckin’ retahded? Lookit dis fuckin’ guy.
It got so that I didn’t wait around for the chit-chat. Some guy started strutting my way along a bar, and I let him have it with whatever I could reach. An ashtray, barstool. Whatever. Pre-empting fights comes naturally to me. I always know which guys are gonna go off. Something Simon Moriarty taught me once we got to know each other a little.
Seeing as you’re determined to go back, Dan, I may as well pass on a few useful nuggets.
Such as?
Such as when it’s time to stop peacekeeping and start shooting.
It’s in the eyes and the shoulders, Simon had explained. They get to a point and then think screw it. At that moment consequences mean nothing, so you need to take your hands out of your pockets and start swinging. I swing good, too. Twelve years in the army taught me that much at least. But I still get pains in my back whenever I take a swing, especially in deep dark winter, even though the doctors swore they got every sliver of Hezbollah mortar shrapnel. Phantom pains, they said. Doesn’t seem phantom when the frost is creeping up my window like a silver cobweb and my lower back feels like some demented leprechaun is driving rivets into it.
I stuck New York for four full years, working meatpacking during the day and clubs at night. But my fresh start was starting to seem like a dead end; love never walked around the corner, plus my hair was falling out. A decade in the grave and still my father was sending gifts my way. Four years of New York living and I was up to here with wiseguys and weisenheimers. My knuckles were like acorns from punching people. That’s right, people. The women and children are dangerous in the Big Apple. I see a needle coming at me and I don’t care if the person holding it has got braids and milk teeth. One humid autumn evening I gazed down on the baby-faced Asian hooker I had just decked, and decided to get out of the city. I took her knife, though. Nice butterfly with something Chinese on the handle. I’ve had it ever since.
So I packed my army duffel and took a train to the satellite town of Cloisters, Essex County. Only reason I got off there was because of a billboard they had in the station. Cloisters. For People Who Are Tired Of The City. I sure did like the sound of
that.
It turns out that here isn’t much better than there was. For a start, Cloisters has gambling only a bus ride across the Hudson. Which means on the weekends all the city arseholes come to throw away their hard-earned, watch one hundred per cent nude ladies and crash in hotels that are a lot cheaper than Atlantic City. Plus we’ve got our indigenous arseholes too. Six years have gone by and sometimes I think I should have stayed in New York. More than sometimes.