Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

Samantha said nothing, nodded to Dan, and exited the room, closing the door gently behind her.

“I like her,” Dan said. “They say she sleeps with her agents.

Jeremy told me something about a Stasi colonel.”

“Is that so?”

“Apparently. Word of advice. Don’t do it. It’s not good for anybody. Get emotionally involved and all that.”

“Aye, that would be terrible, if she got overly concerned about me getting topped.”

“You’re not going to get killed.”

I stood up, walked around the room, and gazed through the window at the godforsaken flatlands of Queens Boulevard.

Manhattan was a distant dream. Out of the question with all the goons and ex-goons that I knew. I sipped some more of the rancid coffee and sat down again.

“Please, Dan, as a friend,” I said as a jet on its way to La Guardia shook the building. Dan groaned and closed his eyes.

“Michael, all this is bigger than you or me. If those idiots up in Massachusetts manage to blow up a British consulate or kill an ambassador or something it will jeopardize the entire peace process in Northern Ireland. With things screwing up in the Middle East, with the president stuck with an angry Congress, rumors about his sexual activities, basically, apart from the economy, the Northern Ireland thing is the only card Clinton has left to secure his legacy in history. There’s no way I can pull you out of a well-thought and well-planned operation run by the Brits and the bureau to get at least an insight into this group’s activities. There’s nothing I can do to extricate you from this. My job is to make sure Duffy doesn’t kill you, that’s all.”

“Listen, Dan, me old mate, if you let me go back to Chicago, I won’t get in any trouble again, I promise. I’ll live a quiet life within my means.”

Dan blinked with a tired melancholy, shifted his weight, and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“Sorry.”

“Duffy will find out and he’ll kill me and your career will be over,” I tried, on a different tack. And I had a flash of that evil old man on his huge Port Jefferson estate casually ordering a couple of driller killers from West Belfast to keep working me over while he sipped Bushmills whiskey and watched his new Lord of the Dance tape.

“You don’t need to worry about Duffy. Duffy is on his way out. He’s seventy years old. You think he thinks about you ever? You don’t have to worry about him. That contract has long since lapsed. You practically did him a favor getting rid of a power-grabbing maniac like Darkey White.”

This was news to me.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Duffy was never serious about going after you. He had to do a big show, issue the contract. It’s irrelevant now in any case. Duffy doesn’t even have close to a million in ready money anymore. We’ve been closing down his operations one by one. Not just him. They’re all on the way out. The Italians, the Irish, the Russians. The bureau has broken them all. They have a lot more on their minds than old scores.”

“Dan, do you really believe this or are you telling me what I want to hear?” I asked.

He looked at me and I saw that he wasn’t lying, or if he was it was a new skill.

“It’s the truth, Michael. Darkey White is old news. You destroyed his crew completely. You weakened Duffy and now he’s down and soon he’ll be out. There is a contract on your head but Duffy won’t pay it and no one else cares enough to collect it. You can go to northern Massachusetts and you can fly with these fanatics and they won’t know you from Adam. I guarantee it. Even if it was South Boston, I’d say go. Five years is a long time, my friend. And you are my friend, Michael, and I do look out for you, don’t think I don’t.”

He inched closer to me, threw his empty cup in the bin.

“Look, Michael, I’ll keep my eye on this English bitch, this whole op. If it don’t look kosher, I’ll send in the Seventh Cav.”

“How will you keep an eye on it?”

“We got a good guy as liaison. Harrington. I know him from back in Virginia. If he doesn’t like it, or one aspect of it, I’ll make sure you’re pulled out. I’ll go against the AG and the whole State Department to pull you, Mike. I promise.”

I smiled.

He’d made me feel better. Just to know that there was someone, anyone, on my team helped a great deal. He passed me a box of cigarettes but I declined. He lit one himself.

“Anyway, I have news about your old friend Scotchy Finn,” Dan said, smoking his cigarette.

A dead hand grabbed my heart.

“Scotchy Finn?” I asked incredulously.

Scotchy and I had broken out of that Mexican jail five years ago, except that I had made it and he hadn’t. He’d sacrificed his life for mine, dying there on the razor-wire fence that went around the prison. I still had nightmares about it. Scotchy falling through the razors, urging me to go on, screaming…

Dan slapped his forehead.

“What am I talking about? Scotchy Finn, no, no, no, he was an old pal of yours, right? I must have read that name in the report. Er, no, Sandy Finney, that’s who I meant. Sandy Finney.”

I looked at Dan suspiciously.

“I don’t know any Sandy Finney.”

“Sure you do, you called him Shovel.”

“Oh aye, I remember him,” I said. I had kneecapped Shovel and banged his old lady while he was in the hospital.

One of my more charming moments as a gangster.

“What about him?”

“He was murdered last week.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said.

“More than just a murder, Michael. Much more than that. Ever since Darkey’s death there’s been a power vacuum in the west Bronx. The Dominicans, the Irish, the Russians. It’s been crazy. Shovel had risen to the top of the new Mick crew. But now he’s dead. An internal feud. A whack. It’s hard to tell for sure but we think the new underboss for the Bronx is someone who you will definitely remember,” Dan said and licked his lips.

“Oh, the suspense,” I said sarcastically.

“I won’t tell you then,” Dan muttered, his eyes wide with delight.

“Tell me.”

He blew out a line of smoke.

“Bridget Callaghan.”

“Darkey’s Bridget, my Bridget?” I asked, amazed and excited.

“Yeah, Bridget. She’s only a small-time player but she’s going places. Protecting herself, protecting her family, by rising up.”

“She’s married?”

“Nah. Doesn’t need to be. Not just a man’s game anymore. She’s the business. If I was the worrying kind, Michael, she’s the one I’d be worried about. Not now. She ain’t got it now, but in a couple of years.”

Bridget, a player? Sweet, adorable Bridget, my ex-girl, Darkey’s ex-girl, who had shot me in the stomach, would have shot me in the head, and now was looking to take over her late fiancé’s operations. I wouldn’t put it past her. I wouldn’t put anything past her. She was a rare bird.

“Tell me everything,” I said.

Dan and I talked some more and I blew off my schedule for the rest of the day and he took me out to a bowling alley round the corner where I let off some steam and had a few drinks. Dan and I were to bowling what Laurel and Hardy were to competent piano delivery but we drank a lot and we nearly got into a ruck with a Polish short-order cook over the tactics of the Polish football team. The cook denigrating Ireland’s approach as unglamorous and cowardly and praising Poland’s much freer passing game. The dispute had then degenerated into a slagging match over the two countries’ landscapes, women, and finally, Second World War record. The Pole threw a punch, missed, and Dan hustled me out of there before the altercation progressed to international incident.

Instead we bought cheap vodka at a liquor store and drank it in the safehouse. And I felt better. I knew Dan and I trusted him. And if he said it was going to be ok, I wanted to and I did believe him, at least while the vodka lasted and that early August daylight kept away…