Billingsgate Shoal

by Rick Boyer

  Laura Kincaid backed up two steps warily, eyeing John.

  "Get back from him, Jim. Get back from both of them."

  "But I've got the knife—"

  "Get back! John's not the kind to forget to search somebody they've found upstairs. What about it? Better speak up."

  "I have naw idea what you mean, mum—"

  "Look. Jim and I have wondered about you for some time now. You disappear nights—"

  "Just to go down the boozer, mum. Get a drop."

  "Now look. This is the last haul; by noon we'll be out of the country. Either you'll be with the rest of us aboard the Coquette, or else you'll be joining the nosy doctor here, swinging around the bottom with a bad case of the crabs."

  "Mrs. Kincaid, I dawn't—"

  "Jim, get his gun. Now. You move an inch, John, and you're dead. Why didn't you search the doctor. Why?"

  Schilling slid his huge arm into John's coat and retrieve the Walther with amazing quickness. There went our last ? hope.

  "I told you. I thought Hartzos would have gone over him."

  I saw her raise the rifle up and aim it at my head. I shut my eyes tight and winced, but looked out through the slits, blurry and dim. Surrealistic. I was in a bad, bad dream.

  Laura Kincaid was smart all right. She suspected John the instant she realized he hadn't given me a third-degree search, and now she made John show his hand, because he jumped for her gun, caught it by the barrel as if it were a striking rattler, and flung it out of her hands. But the big man grabbed him, spun him around, and mashed him hard under the jaw with a very big hard hand. With methodical coolness she retrieved the weapon. Schilling raised his arm above John and clipped him on the neck. The double whammy dropped him hard, and he joined me at the brink of the pit.

  "Laura, I repeat: the place is being watched. They know I'm here. Whatever you do, they'll find out. Use your head."

  I hoped like nothing else in the world she believed me. She stood silent for perhaps ten seconds. It seemed like an hour. Then she kept the gun on us while she called Schilling back with her. They whispered together, keeping us well covered. I heard the phrase "then go back to the boat" more than once. Then I heard three words of dread. I knew that John heard them too because I saw the brief, fleeting look of terror cross his face, then a look of—disappointment. Not further terror, or extreme sadness, just disappointment. Chagrin, as if having lost a good poker hand.

  The three words were: Do it now.

  I stared down at the black hole in the floor where the water sloshed. I saw two brief streaks of silver light reflection in a faint ripple, then they vanished. That was my life in there: that will-o'-the-wisp flicker of light for maybe a fiftieth of a second, then black again. I heard Laura Kincaid walking back to us. Slow measured steps. I turned and looked at her. At her eyes. They were the eyes of a pit bulldog. She stopped right behind John, perhaps a yard away. Without a word, she raised up the rifle until the muzzle pointed right at the back of his head. John didn't even turn around. He knelt on the floor, looking ahead of himself and down. His lips were moving, and he had that same disappointed look on his face. But it was gradually replaced by a look of intense concentration, and then of profound love. I heard him say, in a whisper so delicate it was barely audible, "Now take care of yerself, Billy. Take care of your mother—and may you be happy too, for all the days of your life—May Gad bless—"

  I turned to look at the water again before I heard the shot. I didn't want to see John die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE SHOT WAS like a pneumatic spring compressor. It was not the sound I was expecting. It went ptou! An obscene, single-syllable French word. I had my eyes closed by then, and heard a heavy slumping to the ground. I murmured a thought in my mind: And May God bless. Oh Christ. . .May

  God bless.

  When I opened my eyes after no second shot, was fired John was still kneeling. He was looking at the floor right beside him, dumbfounded. Laura Kincaid was on the floor. She was doing a horizontal waltz there. She was dying. I couldn't figure out why. I saw a flicker of movement out of the comer of my eye. Schilling was gone, rushed out the small doorway that ended in darkness. He'd killed her, perhaps to take the loot for himself. I looked back at the woman on the cement floor four feet away. Part of her throat was missing. It was pale white: fish-belly white. The white that no healthy skin ever gets.

  And then the paper-white rift under her jaw grew dark. It oozed bright red. The whiteness was from the shock of the slug as it passed through her flesh, driving all the blood far away from it. But the, blood came back through the thousands of tiny blood vessels, and now poured forth faster and faster. There was no big spurting; no artery had been severed. But I soon heard a sound from her that will haunt me for the rest of my days. I'd heard it before, when I was a kid, on an Iowa farm. They had slit a hog's throat, and beat it with sticks to keep it running around the yard so its heart would pump all the blood out. And I heard screams coming through the blood. Underwater screams. Underblood screams.

  Laura Kincaid, what was left of her, kicked and slapped herself around on the cement like a sea turtle at a Caribbean marketplace. She flapped and flipped, and made ugly noises. She was nowhere near dead and suffering terribly. The wound in her throat had cut her windpipe, and she was in enough pain so her jaw was clenched shut. She breathed through her wound, and screamed and cried through it too. A huge football-shaped mass of brownish-red froth rose up from it, bubbling like perked coffee.

  It was so ill-fitting for the pretty slim lady I had met in the big elegant house. It was so—clumsy. So embarrassing. In a grotesque way it was as if she had just stumbled at a debutante ball, or thrown up on somebody's priceless Nahin rug.

  "Oh pardon me," her soul seemed to be saying, 'I'm sooo sorry—you see, I cannot help it. I'm dying. . .and it hurts and there's nothing I can do."

  She swung her head, now pale gray-blue, back and forth hard against the cement floor. Then she settled down and grabbed at herself all over with her hands, whimpering. She was doing a slow, sad side stroke into eternity.

  Then they came.

  I didn't notice either of them until I smelled the faint sweet reek of whiskey.

  The taller one stepped forth with his pistol. He aimed, at the thrashing woman. Much as I hated her, I would be glad when he ended it.

  His partner ran over to the small doorway where Jim Schilling had disappeared. He flung his head snakelike around the edge for a millisecond, then flung it back inside. I saw his arm flicker, and heard a tremendous crashing boom, then two more. The noise was so loud I could feel it in my chest. His right hand held a huge revolver in stainless steel. He held it deftly, cradled it casually as if it were a water pistol. I didn't like these guys at all.

  The man stayed put in the doorway, glancing back at the three and a half of us.

  The big man nearest me wore a navy blue pea coat. His face was scary because it was a caricature of a face, one you might find on a totem pole. The brown ski mask was decorated in coarse, wide-weave patterns that bespoke Navaho, Aztec, Eskimo—the American aborigines in general. His partner's mask was pure dark wool, a balaclava helmet that covered the entire face except for an eye slit. He looked like a medieval executioner. In fact he was.

  The big man breathed heavily, odoriferously, and stared down at the thrashing form. He heard the thick bubbling from the tom throat, the muted scrape of skin and flesh on rough cement.

  "For God's sake, man," whispered John.

  The big man glanced quickly at John, as if temporarily distracted, then turned his gaze back to the woman on the floor.

  "Thank your stars we've saved you, O'Shaughnessey. Say a prayer of thanks and be done with it. You know who I am. If you interfere now I'll put you away, same's we put the coont here away."

  He aimed the pistol at Laura Kincaid again and I thought he was going to end it.

  But he didn't. He seemed to enjoy watching her.

  "Brian McGooey" he said to
her.

  I don't think she heard him.

  "Michael Tomlins," he said.

  Nothing but more of the same.

  "Patrick Cahill ."

  Nothing much at all now.

  "Bernard Upshaw; " said the other, "and Eamon Dmmele, Sheila Coone, Aden Berry—"

  PTOU!

  The man fired, and Laura Kincaid's left kneecap exploded. The men in ski masks leaned over her as she thrashed in the immense pain of it. A great dark wet stain spreadin her crotch. Still, they did not put her away. The room and the world rocked by me. I saw John's face dimly in the background. It had a look of profound sorrow.

  Laura Kincaid had but a few seconds; she kept up her pitiable, spastic, and partnerless dance until, with a grunt, the taller one pushed his foot into her twitching form and shoved it into the hole.

  "And now," he said turning in my direction, "who in blazes might you be?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  "I ASKED YOU a question."

  "Charles Adams, M.D. I've been hunting this woman, Laura Kincaid, because I think she and her associates killed a friend of mine."

  "Hmmmph! Well yer not alone in that department, Doctor, we can tell you. The question is, shall we have to kill you?"

  "No,"' said John.

  "And why not, assuming of course a couple of brigands like ourselves should be listening to you, O'Shaughnessey?"

  "He's not one of 'em, I'll swear it," replied John, rising to his feet.

  The second thug moved back over to the doorway again.

  "Come on!" he whispered hoarsely. "There's two more upstairs we didn't get; let's go out this way."

  "Did he have a gun?" the big man asked John.

  "Not when he ran out, I don't think. But knowing him, he probably has one by this time, and you bloody well don't want to be on the receiving end of it either. It'll hit you, tear you in pieces before you hear it."

  There was a faint stirring above us. I heard what sounded like a slamming of a door.

  "That's probably Hartzos returning," I said.

  "Naw. Hartzos is no longer among the living."

  "We've got to move now" said Thug Number Two.

  Almost as these words were spoken all of us heard the sound of feet on the metal stairway. From the noise, there was more than one person on them.

  "Where does that tunnel lead?" the big man asked John.

  "It's an old cartway back to the main factory building. It goes underneath ground level."

  "Then that's for us. Is he in there waiting?"

  "I would imagine he's as far away as possible by now, and still moving."

  "Just so, you two will go first." He prodded the gun in our direction. "Move," he said.

  O'Shaughnessey saw the Walther on the floor and started for it, but the big man saw him and kicked the pistol into the hole.

  O'Shaughnessey and I went through the narrow doorway. It was black on the other side. I felt myself beginning to trip on something very hard raised up about two inches. A rail. Then another rail. Then a brick wall. It was a narrow-gauge railway. . . a miniature railroad in which carts ran, very reminiscent of the type used in old mines. O'Shaughnessey seemed to know his way about, and lost no time in turning to his left and moving quickly along between the rails. I followed. Had I any choice? Thug Number One had his silenced Luger pointed at my kidneys. If Schilling were indeed waiting for us, we'd go down first. It was just tough luck. Of course after what I'd been through I could scarcely gripe.

  Still I found it excruciating to walk. Until the past few minutes the fear and shock had held the pain at bay. But now I HURT. I hurt very, very much. I had received two hard kicks to my Sport Section and scores to my belly and back. My right testicle was aflame. I had taken Laura Kincaid's belly kicks well because I had managed to tighten my stomach muscles just as the blows landed. But my back had no such protection. I would probably piss blood for a week or two if I were lucky and it was nothing more serious than a bruised kidney.

  "Coont!" growled Thug Number One as he gazed back into the dreary chamber before joining us in the dark tunnel. I

  "Yah coont yah!"

  "I entirely agree," I murmured, and felt the encouraging prod of the big man's Luger.

  We walked quite fast, knowing that remnants of the Kincaid Schilling staff were at our heels. I heard a grunt of pain in front of me, and a metallic screaking. O'Shaughnessey had bumped up against an old cart. It was a low wooden platform used to haul spools of wire and cord, but had a metal handle like a supermarket cart running along the back side, and he had run into it, knocking his breath away. When Number One Thug caught up with it and saw—with his flashlight—that the front end of the carriage was piled with old spools, he directed us to push it along the rails. Thus, under this crude armor, we advanced, with the two of them—well protected from Schilling should he be lying in wait—bringing up the rear. But as I leaned into the load I saw movement behind me. Number Two Thug whirled around, his leather coat flaps swinging outward with the spin. A yellowish rectangle of light showed behind us where the doorway was being opened.

  A dark figure blocked out a large part of the rectangle. I turned my head still farther back, and could see he was flapping his arms up, as if directing a concerto. His elbows stuck out to the side. Funny looking. No it wasn't funny. He was aiming a pistol with both hands. I dropped to one knee and spun over until the wall stopped me.

  "Down, everybody!" I said.

  I saw two things at once: the orange-white burst of flame from the dark figure's chest, and that same figure flung backward against the opened door as if hit by an express train. Some recoil his pistol must've had. But no—

  The figure slumped down like a dishrag, and my ears were splitting, bursting with pain. The retort from Number Two Thug's pistol thudded into my chest cavity like a funny heartbeat. It must have been a .44 magnum. In the closeness of the tunnel the noise was unbearable.

  And was he a pistol shot.

  Four years at the range with small-bore weapons and I thought I was pretty damn good, But this guy, whoever he was, was in another league entirely. I heard John's heavy breathing next to me. I leaned forward close as I dared and asked him the question sotto voce:

  "Who are these guys?"

  "Shhhhhh! IRA Provos. The best they've got, kiddo. They'll kill us in a wink if we give them any trouble. Now mind, do what I do—"

  "Who are you?"

  "I am Stephen O'Shaughnessey of the Garda Siochana, the Irish National Police. 'John' is a pseudonym."

  "Uh, which Ireland? The south?"

  There was a pregnant pause, during which I heard a very distinct sigh of disgust and a slight smacking of lips which told me that my question had not registered favorably with the law officer. I felt an iron grip on my upper arm, and the growly grunt of his voice extremely close to my head. "There is only one Ireland, Doctor Adams. The Repooblic of Ireland. If you learn nothing else out of all this shite, let it be that. Yah twit!" He shoved me away, hard.

  "Move! Move on with yah!" called a hoarse whisper, and we began again to push the cart. No, said Number One, it was too slow. Leave it to slow the others down. We crept around it and jog-walked the rest of the way through the transport tunnel, the two thugs (and one, at least, a superb shot with a big-bore handgun) at our heels., We kept up the pace until I saw a faint rectangular square of very pale blackish gray. Two seconds later, we were emerging from the tunnel, and looking up a gradual incline of old granite cobblestone.

  The two men stood directly behind us.

  "Why don't you two lads go on up and see if it's safe?" demanded Number One. So we did. I had it in mind to spring like hell as soon as I reached the top. It was still too dark to see well. After all I'd been through, all I wanted was to run, find the fence (any fence), and scale the sombitch.

  "Up yah go now! Goddamn me, I say!" said the Number One Thug in a very persuasive tone. "I've got six rounds left and will kill the both of you. The only sound they'll be ahearin' is an ou
nce of lead squirtin' through yer guts like a jet plane. Now up!"

  We reached the top of the ramp and didn't get our heads taken off. Gee, tonight was my lucky night. I could see that it was darker to the sides than it was straight above me. We were in one of the big courtyards that opened off the main factory roadway. In a while the other two came up behind us, and we moved on. I assumed the Provos wanted out of Cordage Park as badly as I did, perhaps to slink back to their car and skedaddle. Plymouth was only minutes away from Southie, where an Irishman down on his luck could find a haven for as long as he needed it. And then there was Charlestown. Talk about rough. I believe I would rather parade around in Harlem on a Saturday night dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit than hang around some sections of Charlestown. If they elected to hide there until this thing blew over nobody could pry them out. Not even the Marine Corps.

  I was saying all this to myself in my mind to take it off the fact that at any instant I could have a whole handful of lead slugs thrown in my direction. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

  We had bunched together now in a tight square of four men. Stephen and I were in front, the two thugs right behind us. All hell broke loose when we reached the roadway. The first thing I heard was a popping behind me. I realized later that the sound must have been from the big .45-caliber slugs tearing into the factory wall. It was more a cracking-pounding than a popping; it had a hard, staccato timbre to it. Just as I turned, I could see that the wall was smoking. Only it wasn't smoke. It was all the brick dust and powder that had been blown off the old wall and hung like a faint gray curtain in the half-light of first dawn.

  The tight group exploded, flung away in different directions by the blast like a clump of tightly racked billiard balls on the break.

  I found the ground and rolled over and over, keeping my arms straight down at my sides. There had been no sound except the slugs hitting the wall. Nothing. But on the next burst I heard it. It commenced with a low whistle of almost electronic purity, and with it a sound like sheet metal being ripped behind a thick felt curtain. And then the loud pounding drowned out the weird sound, and it was as if I were in the middle of a buffalo stampede.