“Patriotism, Irish.”
“Don’t bother naming it. I’m saving my own neck.”
“How about Karen Sinclair’s? You seem to have a soft tone when you say her name.”
Soft? I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Ever since I saw her that’s all I could think about.
“Knock it off, Shaffer. Are you coming through?”
“This time I don’t have the choice, do I?”
“No.”
“I’m wondering about something else too,” he said. “You’d like to process this so you come out clean, wouldn’t you?”
I watched him and waited.
Shaffer smiled at me and I couldn’t read his face at all. “I’m going to run your gun permit through for you. You’re being reactivated, Ryan.”
“The hell I am!”
“Then you didn’t read the fine print in those papers you signed a couple years ago. The provision was there. The penalties too.”
“You bastard. I’m not playing cop again.”
“Like you say, Irish boy, ‘The hell you ain’t.’ You know where to reach me. Call in. I’ll get some of the heat off your back. You take care of the rest.” He got up slowly, his mouth twisting in a wry smile. “Maybe it was a good thing she did pick you out of eight million people. You’re just smart enough, mean enough and evil enough to do what has to be done.”
“Listen, Shaffer...”
But he wouldn’t. He shook his head, holding up his hand to cut me off. “We’ll have our men out too. We’ll scour the city for Karen Sinclair, but we know what we’re up against. This isn’t a ransom snatch. It was cleverly planned and executed. The ones behind it have a motivation greater than ransom with more resources at their command than the criminal element. But in their own peculiar ways they are criminals and like the old saying goes, it takes one to catch one. Good hunting, Irish. If we can supply any leads just call. You have the number. I suggest you come down and look at our mug shots.”
He turned and walked out and I cursed him silently every inch of the way to the door. The slob hung me again with my own kind and there was no turning back. Even getting the heat off wasn’t worth it. I liked what I was and wanted to keep it that way and now I was back on the other end of the stick again.
Damn.
Shaffer had clued his office staff. They were all the clean cut type and two of them watched me go over the mug books with narrowed eyes of disapproval. On one’s desk was my dossier so I knew they had all the data from the last deal. The broad at the reception desk was the only one who seemed impressed because she took a pose with her legs so I could see the flash of white thigh above her nylons under the desk and when she brought another set of photos over she bent down deliberately to give me the benefit of an unrestricted view of ample breasts that wanted to spill out of her dress. One of the guys tightened his mouth impatiently and threw three eight by ten glossies in front of my nose and waved her out of there. “Manos Dekker,” he said.
They weren’t studio shots. They were taken with a long range lens and blown up, but the face and all its characteristics were there. Dekker had no stamp of nationality on him, but the set to his eyes, the flaccid mouth and the slight hump in his nose marked him a killer and a man who enjoyed his work. I had seen too many with those almost imperceptible peculiarities not to recognize the breed.
I fastened him in my mind and went back to the selected photos of other agents operating in this country. Two I knew right off, but so did everybody else. In one hazy shot that was evidently an enlargement of individuals originally in a group shot, I thought I had seen another before but couldn’t quite place him. The guy at my shoulder caught my hesitation and said, “Taken at a Commie meeting on the Island. Not identified.”
I nodded, looked through the book and closed it. “Thanks for the trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” I told him.
“Any contact with those persons will be reported.”
“Sure. Dead or alive?”
“Don’t be funny.”
Lisa Williams left very little trail. She was always on call for anything Big Step needed and if he wanted to farm her out to his boys for kicks she had to go along. Ever since he destroyed her with his fists she had lived a life of fear, indelibly tied to the punk because his mark was on her and nobody else would touch her. She hustled the upper Broadway Johns for side money and spent it in the gin mills, a sucker for a touch from every stray cat type with a hard luck story.
Getting to her without making contacts with any of the Stipetto mob or their stringers who would be happy to pass on the news I was in the territory wasn’t easy, but like I said before, it was my city too and there weren’t many back alleys or dodges I didn’t know. I had to live by them the same way they did only on a bigger scale and it took a hell of a lot more doing.
I found her in the back room of a shabby brownstone at four in the morning, a lonely voice fogged out of shape by too much booze, caroling a song from a stage hit she had been in years ago. When I knocked on the door it was as if someone had lifted the arm on a record player. The quiet was almost intense, and I knew that inside she was standing there rigid, listening hard, her heart pounding with that old fear again.
At last she said, “Yes... yes, who is it?”
“Irish, honey, open up.”
Very slowly, the door opened on a chain and she peered out at me, eyes reddened from a big bar night, her hair dishevelled, an untidy lock of it falling across her face. “Ryan?” she said tentatively. And when she made sure it was me she bit into a knuckle and shook her head mutely.
“Let me in, girl.”
“No... please. If anybody sees you...”
“Nobody saw me but they might if I stand here long enough.” That decided her. She closed the door, took off the chain and held it open reluctantly. I squeezed inside, shut and locked it, then walked across the room and sat on the arm of the mohair chair by the shaded window.
“Why... did you come here?”
“I’m looking for Fly. You know where he is?”
She opened her mouth to lie then knew I caught it and let her head fall into her hands. “Why doesn’t Big Step let him alone?” she sobbed jerkily.
“What did he do to you, baby?”
Lisa let her hands fall and hang straight at her sides. “All he could do was hit me. I... I didn’t care. It was that new one from Miami they call Pigeon who did things.” The tears welled up and an expression of shame clouded her face. Without looking at me she sank into a straightback chair and stared at the floor. “That one isn’t normal. He... he’s perverted. He made me...”
“You don’t have to tell me about it.”
“I never did anything like that before, even when they tried to... hold me down. He took this...”
“Can it, Lisa.”
She looked up, her eyes gone dull. “They hurt me. Step laughed and laughed. He thinks I let you go... because of those times years ago.” Like a slow motion picture she moved her hand and ran her fingers through her hair. A smiled played at the corners of her mouth and she said, “I’m going to kill him some day. Some day. Yes, it will be very nice.” There was a sing-song lilt in her voice and only then did I realize how really crocked she was. Constant practice with the bottle and an uncommonly strong constitution provided her with the ability to maintain a semblance of sobriety even when she was almost ready to go off the deep end. Her fear had covered it in the beginning, but now it showed through.
I said, “Where’s Fly, Lisa,” as gently as I could.
Little by little her eyes came back to mine. “Fly is nice. He always told me when... Step wanted me... and I would go away. When I was sick... he sent a doctor. Yes, yes. He stayed with me a week then.”