intervention I’d probably be looking at a fifteen stretch for manslaughter.’
On Rink’s chin was a livid scar, courtesy of Tubal Cain, and he rubbed at it now. He often did so when he was thinking deeply. Coming to a conclusion, he stood up, stretching his tall frame. He yawned — a natural bodily reaction to relieve stress — then grinned. ‘So when do we start?’
‘In an hour I phone Vince. Then we take it from there.’
Rink huffed. ‘Damn, I’m ready to go now.’
‘You and me both.’
Chapter 31
Carswell Hicks believed he had a God-given right to walk the streets of his home town, and no number of FBI and Homeland Security agents scouring the nation for him would put him off. As far as he was concerned, this great country had been fought for and won by good white stock just like him, so he shouldn’t have to scurry in the dark like a rodent. All these Chinese with their garish clothing and shop fronts full of tat, their garbage piled high on the kerbsides, were the ones the government needed to persecute. Lord almighty, he thought, isn’t China big enough for all them to get the hell back where they belonged?
Last time he was in Manhattan, this part of town was lorded over by the Italians, now just look at it. Now it seemed like they’d been pushed up and over Canal Street to give way to a profusion of red and yellow banners offering to buy scrap gold, paper lanterns strung everywhere and the smell of five spice pervading the air. There were little saffron-skinned men and women everywhere, so many of them that the sidewalks couldn’t contain them all and they spilled around the mounds of garbage on to Mott Street. The traffic moved noisily around them, exhausts fuming in the cold air.
Hicks walked like he had an impenetrable bubble around him. The older people moved out of his way, but now and again he got some hard-edged looks from the younger men, who stood like sentries in doorways, their slicked black hair reflecting the blue of the sky. They quickly looked away when the two hulking men at Hicks’ shoulders returned their stares.
Hicks turned off Mott and on to Pell, stepping out along the narrow sidewalk so that people had to scatter before him or be walked over. Just the way he liked it. An old lady, leaning from the front of her store to offer freshly squeezed orange juice for five bucks a pop, quickly withdrew her hand as Hicks shot her a look to curdle milk. She ranted something in her own language, but her unresponsive husband stacking rice on shelves didn’t even bother to glance at her.
Hicks found the entrance to Doyers Street. There he paused, jamming his hands on his hips like he was surveying his domain. He snorted, striding into the alley and heading for where it bent sharply to the left. When he was a college student he’d often leave Greenwich to come here to purchase cheap noodles and rice, and to play pinball in an arcade famous for having a fortune-telling chicken. But that wasn’t all that Doyers Street was famous for: back in the old gang days, the Tongs fought street battles here, using the tunnels connecting the buildings to launch surprise attacks on their enemies. Doyers would forever be called the Bloody Angle, and it had little to do with the sharp bend in the road and everything to do with the gore that once slicked this place.
Wedged between a shop offering spit-roasted ducks with their heads, necks and feet still intact, and a wholesale distributor whose mode of transportation seemed to be a rickety bicycle chained to a railing outside, was a fairly innocuous door. The door was painted in the predominant red and yellow, but was scuffed and peeling. There was no identifying sign or number, just the evidence that the door had been in use as far back as the days of the Tong wars. A single bullet hole pocked the surface near the upper left corner, and though the door had been painted in the interim, no one had bothered to fill the hole. Hicks heard that it was a historical mark of honour; apparently the bullet missed a prominent Tong leader by a hair and hit the door instead, a moment before the leader struck down his would-be assassin with a meat cleaver. Bullet Proof Tzu carried quite a rep after that poorly-skilled assassin missed his shot.
These days the Tongs held little sway over Manhattan’s Chinatown, the local criminals now being those young toughs hanging about the doorways, but Hicks didn’t care about any of that. He wasn’t here to see anyone even half Chinese. He banged on the door.
The door clicked open and Hicks stepped into a narrow hallway, shadowed by one of his minders. The second man stayed on the street, scowling at the rotating ducks in the window next door. Hicks’ minder had barely made it inside when a hidden piston closed the door tight. Locks engaged. Hicks had been here before, so already knew that the door that looked so brittle from outside was sheathed in steel and armed with sturdy locks on the inside. Like many who’d experienced war, the man who lived here was paranoid enough to live in a fortress.
The corridor smelled faintly of dog pee and something else with an acid undertone that nipped at Hicks’ nostrils. He ignored it, walking along the dimly lit hall to the flight of stairs at the far end. The door at the bottom was openly steel this time, smudged with palm prints and streaks of rubber where it had been kicked in the past. Locks disengaged and the door nudged open. Hicks pushed through it and went up the stairs sprightlier than many men approaching sixty years old. His minder puffed along behind him, twenty years younger, but also twenty pounds heavier.
A third line of defence stood in their way, but clicked open as they approached. Hicks couldn’t see the CCTV cameras monitoring their progress, although they were obviously there. As he stepped through the third door a waft of Tiger Balm washed over him. That was the source of the aroma he’d detected in the hall, only ten times more potent. Hicks’ grey eyes began to water.
The second floor apartment was as stark as any monk’s cell, with a cot pushed up against one wall and a metal footlocker the only furnishings at this end. A door opened into another room further along, where things were a little more ramshackle. Hicks recognised the worn office chair and desk, the computer monitor, the battered sofa in one corner, the throw rug with the beer stains. The stack of boxes teetering in a far corner was a new addition, as were the heavy drapes pulled over the window to thwart spying from the opposite building. Making up for the lack of natural light, a lamp threw a slant of yellow across the workstation and the man sitting in the chair observing the video images on the screen.
The chair swung round and the man peered up at Hicks from under a tangle of long salt and pepper curls. In the man’s lap was a small dog. Chihuahua, Hicks thought.
‘It’s been a while, Carswell. Wasn’t even sure it was you when you knocked on my door. I had to look twice.’
Hicks didn’t tell the man he’d undergone a series of cosmetic procedures in the past few months, because Jim Lloyd could already see the end result. Hicks’ predominant feature had always been his hawk-like nose, but that had been reduced, his thin lips thickened, his hairline adjusted so that he now wore a widow’s peak where he used to be bald. His hair was white, as was his newly acquired goatee beard and strap moustache. For someone allegedly dead, he looked strong and healthy.
On the other hand Lloyd looked like he had ten years before. He was still a shaggy bear of a man, stiff with arthritis and old wounds, and Hicks was certain that the combat trousers and plaid shirt were the same he always wore. A patchwork of wrinkles making a spider web pattern around his eyes counted off the years since last they’d met. At sixty-three years old, Lloyd’s face looked every second his age, but the shoulders swelling his shirt, his thick arms, looked like those of a much younger man.
‘Wasn’t sure I was going to open the door, even after a second look. You don’t look a thing like the Carswell Hicks I used to know.’
It was the first time that the two men had shared space in the last decade, but they’d been in regular communication via email and telephone. Hicks had never found it necessary to send an updated photograph. ‘I’m the same man I always was, Jim, just better looking.’
Lloyd eyed him quizzically. ‘You gotta give me the number for your surgeon, Hicks. What they say ain’t true: you can make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear!’
Hicks smiled, but wasn’t really enamoured of Lloyd’s wit; he was neither silk nor a fucking pig, never had been. He let the slight go, because that was just Lloyd’s way. Any other man would be doing a header into the Hudson, trying to find where Hicks had thrown his balls into the river.
Hicks turned to his minder. ‘Wait in the other room.’
