Lathrop nodded. “Luck and blessings. Those words are tradition. A seal. Binding as any written contract.”
Sullivan was feeling pleased with himself.
“May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live,” he said. “That’s how my Mick ancestors would’ve spun it.”
Lathrop sat there without comment, still shaking Sullivan’s hand, clasping it in his own….
And then he abruptly
Sullivan lifted his eyebrows in confusion, tried to pull away, realized he couldn’t. Lathrop would not let go. He kept holding on, staring at him across the seat.
Sullivan’s grin became a wince of pain. He tried pulling free again without success. Lathrop’s hand was a clamp around his knuckles, squeezing them hard, crushing them painfully together.
“Hey,” Sullivan said. “What
One glimpse of the pistol Lathrop withdrew from his left coat pocket silenced him. A long-barreled.45 automatic, its muzzle came up fast and pushed into the soft flesh below his ear.
“Open your door and get out of the car,” Lathrop said.
“I don’t understand… ”
“I told you to get out,” Lathrop said. “Try to take off, I’ll kill you on the spot. You have a problem with those instructions?”
Sullivan swallowed, felt the pressure of the gun against his jaw.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
Lathrop grinned at him.
“Good business,” he said.
Sullivan knew he’d set himself up for a ripoff of monumental proportions and was only hoping that would be the worst of it, praying to Heaven above that would be the worst. How on earth could he have been so careless and stupid?
He stood inside the darkened park house where Lathrop had led him at gunpoint, his back to a cold, graffiti- scribbled concrete wall, his feet awash in crumpled food wrappers, soda cans, tossed syringes and crack vials, and whatever other unnameable filth a scabby parade of junkies and derelict winos had left here over the decades. He was sick to his stomach, overcome with fear and the grossly horrible stink of the place.
Lathrop, meanwhile, seemed unaffected by their blighted surroundings. He faced Sullivan in silence, a small flashlight in one hand, the.45 leveled in his other. His tall form cutting a dark silhouette against the park house’s barely open steel door.
“I don’t see why you’d want to do this,” Sullivan said. “I’ve always been straight with you. You’ve got some complaints about money, or my terms, we can work it out.”
“Wrong,” Lathrop said softly. “We can’t.”
Sullivan’s nausea rose higher in his throat. It occurred to him to remind Lathrop about the Dragonfly keys, but then he realized that would be a severe blunder and flushed the idea in a hurry. If Lathrop had forgotten about the keys, or thought he didn’t need them, so much the better. He would learn. And maybe then Sullivan could work them for leverage.
“I won’t try to change your mind,” he said at last. “Take anything you want. Just don’t… it would be a mistake for you to get carried away.”
“Oh?” Lathrop stepped closer, the gun held in front of him. “Go ahead, Sullivan. You’re a salesman. Sell me on it.”
Sullivan could hear himself breathing as he tried to collect himself, keep his guts from turning inside out.
“It isn’t like I can hurt you,” he said, swallowing. “Like I can run to the police. We drive off this garbage heap, go our separate ways, it’s over… ”
“I don’t drive here.”
“Whatever.” Sullivan stared tensely at Lathrop in the pale glow of the flash. “I’m just saying you wouldn’t have to think about me causing problems for—”
“You know I don’t drive to these meetings,” Lathrop said with a flat, latched-on sort of emphasis. “You’ve watched me. Last time we were here, for instance.”
Sullivan blinked. He felt a penetrating chill that was unrelated to the cold, remembered being sweaty with nerves in his car not half an hour earlier.
“That isn’t—”
Lathrop frowned in disapproval, took another step forward, jabbed the gun barrel between his ribs.
“Spare me.” He adjusted his flash between them, its beam patching the hollows of his face with light and shadow. “You turned off the FDR on a Hundred and Eleventh and First Avenue, and left your car right outside the playground there. Then you went through the basketball courts, crossed the overpass to the riverside, and walked to that fishing pier about four blocks down. Figured you could wait under the roof in the dark, keep an eye out for me without being spotted. Once you saw me take the footbridge to the island, you went back to the car and followed over the Triboro.”
An insistent gust pushed the door a little farther ajar and Sullivan heard sleet crackle on the park house’s cement floor. The temperature on the island had crept below freezing, crystallizing whatever rain had been mingled with the icy downpour in the offshore winds.
“All right,” Sullivan said. His heart pumped. “I’m not going to lie about it. I won’t try denying what I did. But I wasn’t intending to cross you or anything… I was just taking precautions. Watching my back. Of all people, you should understand—”
“I do,” Lathrop said. “The problem is you’re an excitable boy, Sullivan. And I can’t have that.”
Sullivan heard the click of the.45’s hammer being cocked,
“Taking precautions,” Lathrop said, and then shot him twice, point blank, in the middle of the chest.
Lathrop gazed out over the river, catching his breath, black oily wavelets splashing the toes of his rubber boots. He’d dragged the industrial drum liner containing Sullivan’s body from the park house, brought it downhill to shove it into the water where the city’s Irish mob had dumped their unwanted human meat for generations — and this particular Irishman hadn’t been a lean slab by any means.
He stood watching the Hell Gate’s current swiftly carry his discarded burden toward the Manhattan-Queens branch of the Triboro and then on under the huge, partially submerged bridge posts to vanish in the turbulent night. He could see the lights beading the span’s suspension cables twinkle softly through waves of precipitation. See brighter lights in the windows of the public housing projects on the near Manhattan shore, and, a little farther south, in those of the upscale condominiums… so many lighted windows climbing the dark sky in high, even rows.
Lathrop found himself wishing he could hold a lens to all those distant panes of glass, peer into every room of every apartment. From out here in the night, standing at the water’s edge, he would explore the raw secrets of the lives being led inside them, probe their guarded intimacies, their appetites, their hidden transgressions.
Of course, he thought, playing with secrets could be a dangerous addiction. One that could kill a man if he didn’t have the know-how and constitution to handle them.
Lathrop remained there on the riverbank another moment, staring contemplatively at the lights of the city on the far shore. Then he started back uphill toward the Jaguar, aware he had one final task to carry out before the night was done.
It was minutes shy of two A.M. when Lathrop pulled the Jaguar to the curb in front of the middle school on East 75th Street, stopping a yard or two back from the NO STANDING sign near its entrance.
Turning off the Jag’s motor, he pocketed its keys, inspected the interior for visible trace evidence, and satisfied himself that everything was clean. Then he reached over the seat for Sullivan’s attache, patted the gemstone case neatly tucked away inside his coat, got out, and closed the driver’s door behind him.
