More Twisted

the mouth of the alley. “Oh my god.” A middle-aged woman stood twenty feet away, staring at the man with the pistol. Her hands were to her mouth. “Somebody, call the police!”
    The hit man’s attention was on the woman. Schaeffer shoved him into a brick wall. Before he could recover and shoot, the detective sprinted fast down the alley.
    He heard the man shout, “Goddamn it!” and start after him. But Hell’s Kitchen was Bob Schaeffer’s hunting grounds, and in five minutes the detective had raced through dozens of alleys and side streets and lost the killer. Once again on the street he paused and pulled his backup gun off his ankle holster, slipped it into his pocket. He felt the crinkle of paper—what the guy had planted on him. It was a fake suicide note, Schaeffer confessing that he’d been on the take for years and he couldn’t take the guilt anymore. He had to end it all.
    Well, he thought, that was partly right.
    One thing was fucking well about to end.

    Smoking, staying in the shadows of an alley, Schaeffer had to wait outside Mack’s for fifteen minutes before T.G. Reilly emerged. The big man, moving like a lumbering bear, was by himself. He looked around, not seeing the cop, and turned west.
    Schaeffer gave him half a block and then followed.
    He kept his distance but when the street was deserted he pulled on gloves then fished into his pocket for the pistol he’d just gotten from his desk. He’d bought it on the street years ago—a cold gun, one with no registration number stamped on the frame. Gripping the weapon, he moved up fast behind the big Irishman.
    The mistake a lot of shooters make during a clip is they feel they’ve gotta talk to their vic. Schaeffer remembered some old Western where this kid tracks down the gunslinger who killed his father. The kid’s holding a gun on him and explaining why he’s about to die, you killed my father, yadda, yadda, yadda, and the gunslinger gets this bored look on his face, pulls out a hidden gun and blows the kid away. He looks down at the body and says, “You gonna talk, talk. You gonna shoot, shoot.”
    Which is just what Robert Schaeffer did now.
    T.G. must’ve heard something. He started to turn. But before he even caught sight of the detective, Schaeffer parked two rounds in the back of the fat man’s head. He dropped like a bag of sand. He tossed the gun on the sidewalk—he’d never touched it with his bare hands—and, keeping his head down, and walked right past him, hit Tenth Avenue and turned north.
    You gonna shoot, shoot.
    Amen . . .

    It took only one glance.
    Looking into Ricky Kelleher’s eyes, Schaeffer decided he wasn’t in on the attempted hit.
    The small, goofy guy, with dirty hair and a cocky face, strode up to the spot where Schaeffer was leaning against a wall, hand inside his coat, near his new automatic. But the loser didn’t blink, didn’t show the least surprise that the cop was still alive. The detective had interviewed suspects for years and he now concluded that the asshole knew nothing about T.G.’s attempted hit.
    Ricky nodded. “Hey.” Looking around, he asked, “So where’s T.G.? He said he’d be here early.”
    Frowning, Schaeffer asked, “Didn’t you hear?”
    “Hear what?”
    “Damn, you didn’t. Somebody clipped him.”
    “T.G.?”
    “Yep.”
    Ricky just stared and shook his head. “No fucking way. I didn’t hear shit about it.”
    “Just happened.”
    “Christ almighty,” the little man whispered. “Who did it?”
    “Nobody knows yet.”
    “Maybe that nigger.”
    “Who?”
    “Nigger from Buffalo. Or Albany. I don’t know.” Ricky then whispered, “Dead. I can’t believe it. Anybody else in the crew?”
    “Just him, I think.”
    Schaeffer studied the scrawny guy. Well, yeah, he did look like he couldn’t believe it. But, truth was, he didn’t look upset. Which made sense. T.G. was hardly Ricky’s buddy; he was a drunk loser bully.
    Besides, in Hell’s Kitchen the living tended to forget about the dead before their bodies were cold.
    Like he was proving this point, Ricky said, “So how’s this going to affect our, you know, arrangement?”
    “Not at all, far as I’m concerned.”
    “I’m going to want more.”
    “I can go a third.”
    “Fuck a third. I want half.”
    “No can do. It’s riskier for me now.”
    “Riskier? Why?”
    “There’ll be an investigation. Somebody might turn up something at T.G.’s with my name on it. I’ll have to grease