“You serious?”
“Lift up the cushion on the bench in front of the cockpit,” I said. “Three steps down and there’s a toilet. Put Mr. Lonigan down there on the seat, close the bench back up, and I’ll tell you what’s next.”
“Who’s calling Peterson? You or me?”
“We’ll flip a coin for it, Mercer. Now, hurry up.”
The Westies had been put out of business, I thought, almost two decades ago.
They were a notorious Irish-American gang that came to power in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s, when much of the area on the far west side of Manhattan, from 40th to 59th Street, was a dangerous slum. Founded by two sadistic mobsters, Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan, the small band of twenty or so members took racketeering to a new level of violence.
I didn’t know what to do first. I couldn’t imagine Coop in the hands of any of these men, or their descendants. But I couldn’t think straight.
My father had killed someone. He’d shot someone in self-defense. It was a story I’d heard over and over again in my childhood. I’d been eight when it happened, on the night of the birthday of one of my older sisters.
Mercer climbed out of the small head after securing Cormac Lonigan inside and stepped on the bench to get back up on the dock.
“We’ve got to let Scully know what’s going on,” he said.
“I feel like I’m paralyzed, Mercer. I can’t move.”
“What do we have?”
I was trying to put the facts together. “That’s just it. You tell Scully and this gets ratcheted up to a level that lets the bad guys know we’re after them, without the first clue about how to find them.”
“He’ll flood Hell’s Kitchen,” Mercer said.
“The Irish mob’s been out of there since before you and I came on the job. It’s so expensive there now, so gentrified, you probably couldn’t find an Irishman within ten miles of Hell’s Kitchen.”
“Where did they go when they broke up?”
“Woodside,” I said. “Mickey Spillane took them to Woodside.”
“Spillane?”
“Not the writer, dude. The gangster.”
“So, Queens,” Mercer said. “Where Cormac Lonigan and Pete Fitzgerald live.”
“Yeah. And call Jimmy. He’s got to keep Fitzgerald isolated and get the tech guys downloading the phone information.”
There were four long wooden crates on the dock. I sat on the first one, leaned forward, and held the top of my head with both hands. It felt like it was going to explode.
Mercer phoned Jimmy North and told him to keep Fitzgerald in lockdown and call TARU about the two confiscated devices.
“It’s almost four thirty, Mike. I’ve got to check in.”
“Give me fifteen minutes. Think it through with me. If I do anything to make Coop’s situation worse than it is, I won’t be able to live with myself.”
“Fifteen and out, Mike. This is bigger than you,” Mercer said. “If it does have anything to do with the Westies, then I’m pretty useless. You know how they operate and I don’t.”
“That’s what I can’t get past.”
“Why would they have brought Alex here?” he asked. “And why only for one night, or for two?”
“Because this is just a staging area, I guess. Someone on the work crew is involved. Maybe a relative of Lonigan’s, maybe just someone who knew the island was pretty much off-limits these days, with no one to guard it at night.”
“They would have to know about the fort,” Mercer said.
“Apparently lots of people do. Especially the guys who work here. Go on downstairs, create a makeshift holding pen-”
“For Alex?”
“For Alex,” I said, speaking her given name, which sounded so much softer and more vulnerable than Coop.
“Then they find out there’s going to be a huge media event,” Mercer said, “and they have to get her off the island.”
“Maybe the endgame was always meant to be somewhere else,” I said, sweeping the air with my hand. “Could be this was just a diversion. Maybe that’s why they’ve moved her.”
“Don’t go dark on me, Mike.”
“Maybe the endgame is in play.”
FORTY-ONE
“You think this has something to do with Brian?” Mercer asked me. “Your father?”
“I do.”
“I know there was a shooting, Mike. I know someone died. If you tell me who it was, maybe we can figure a connection to Lonigan,” Mercer said. “We can get Peterson on the hunt to see if there’s a link.”
“Thirty years is a long time to wait for revenge.”
“Give me a lead.”
“Mickey Spillane stepped into the mobster role in the late sixties, when there was a power vacuum in Hell’s Kitchen. Sort of a gentleman gangster-bookmaking, policy-and then a slow buildup to loan-sharking. Bought turkeys for the needy on Thanksgiving,” I said, shaking my head at the idea, “but began to break legs as he gained control.
“Spillane made a big mistake when he pistol-whipped a local accountant named Coonan for not paying his dues. The guy had an eighteen-year-old son known in the hood as Jimmy C-the kind of kid your mother was always praying you didn’t grow up to be.”
“Yeah.”
“Jimmy C went up to the rooftop of a tenement on West 48th Street with an automatic rifle and just began to fire down at the street, fire at everyone he saw.”
“Not at Spillane?”
“Spillane was nowhere around. Jimmy C just did it to show he was mad about the whipping his old man took, and that he was moving into the turf. The rise of the Westies.”
“Where did Mickey Featherstone come in?” Mercer asked.
“Up from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, just like Jimmy C. Got noticed because he had a thing for killing people. He liked his hardware.”
“Jail time?”
“A few short stints. Then the army. Then psycho’d out of there. Back to the hood. Featherstone was Jimmy C’s right-hand man for years,” I said. “But their major falling-out happened when Coonan decided to go big-time and join forces with the Gambino family.”
“Featherstone got ruffled because that wasn’t loyal to the Irish?”
“You nailed it,” I said. “Coonan became John Gotti’s guy. He put the Westies to work as contract killers for the Gambinos.”
“Now, that’s a high-stakes business.”
“The highest. Ironically, Featherstone’s the one who got convicted for murder-for one of the few murders he didn’t commit.”
“Served time?”
“Not before he turned snitch, Mercer.”
“Featherstone was actually a rat? A big mobster like him?”
“Mickey Featherstone and his wife both agreed to be wired in order to get evidence against Coonan-that’s how bitter the internal Westies feud had become. Rudy Giuliani indicted Coonan with Featherstone’s information-one of the first big RICO cases. Racketeering going back two decades.”
“So one Westie boss winds up in jail,” Mercer said, “and one in Witness Protection.”
“Giuliani declared the Westies dead, but that’s just when all the wannabes began to crawl out of the woodwork,” I said. “There were Shannons and Kellys and McGraths and Cains looking to lead the parade by then, get a piece of the action. It’s like someone had lifted names off headstones in a Dublin cemetery.”
“Didn’t Coonan have an heir apparent?”
“An unlikely one. He wanted the Yugo to step in for him, over all his Irish boys.”
“The Yugo?”
“Bosko ‘the Yugo’ Radonjic,” I said. “He was a Serbian nationalist and for some reason Coonan took a liking to him. Started as a low-level associate-a parking lot attendant in a local garage turned gangster-but he was rewarded early for his efforts. That’s when the next turf war for Hell’s Kitchen began, in the late eighties.”
I swallowed hard and started biting the inside of my cheek again. It was an event that had ripped my family apart, the night I questioned whether my father was really the hero I’d thought him to be.