“Do you know who I am?” I asked Cormac Lonigan.
“You’re a cop, is all I know.”
“What was your mother’s name? Before she married.”
“Shauna. Same as it is now.” He was back to smirking at me.
“I’m Chapman. Mike Chapman. My father was Brian,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
He looked me in the eye and spit, intentionally missing me by less than an inch.
We were standing where the end of the dock met Liberty Island. He had removed his jeans and underwear—torn boxer shorts—when Mercer had pointed a gun at him. Now he was dressed only in the long-sleeved shirt and jockeys that had been in his backpack.
“You put the bracelets on,” I said to Mercer. “I’m afraid I might pinch him.”
“What’s the order of play?” Mercer asked me as I heard his metal cuffs click into place.
“There’s a head on that boat.”
“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.”