In the Wrong Hands, стр. 34
His thoughts were interrupted by a gorgeous blonde entering the bar. Was she lost? No one went walking into F and J’s on a Monday night looking like that. He took a pull off of his Guinness and watched her make her way to the bar. She sat and looked around as though she was supposed to be meeting someone. Jimmy was tending that night. Ian started yammering on again, but Kevin didn’t hear a word. The woman absently tried to order a drink, but there was some problem with her ID. Jimmy was a stickler for such things. He’d had to make a ton of concessions in order to keep his place open every night of the week, and one of them was agreeing to check every single ID at the bar…no exceptions. The woman appeared to take it in stride. Jimmy offered her a free Coke or something, but she opted to slide her ID back into her little wallet thing-a-ma-bob and exit the bar, but not without giving Reilly a little wink. He appreciated being given reprieve from his problems, if even for one fleeting moment. He wiped the brown, foamy mustache off his lip with his sleeve.
The Potterford Industrial Complex was eight blocks of connected buildings and numbered lots. A railroad track divided the property into two regions, referred to as the river side and the street side. A second railroad track skirted its southern edge. The most visible part of the complex from the road was the scrap yard. That was partly due to its size and partly due to its majesty. A ten-foot corrugated metal fence separated the yard from the road and railroad track with a dozen or so piles of indistinguishable metal scraps looming as high as twenty feet above. Those who didn’t know any better considered the yard an eyesore, but hard-core Potterford residents knew it was beautiful. Not only was it the geographic center of town, but it represented Potterford at its finest: a reminder of what it used to be and, deep down, still was.
Arthur’s eyes passed across the yard. He was starting to understand how it was organized, although he didn’t really care. He, Bubbs, Rick, and Steven (The Gestapo, as referred to by Ernie) were each crouched behind their own pile of castaways. They appeared to be in the area reserved for iron, as indicated by the heavy mechanism towering above them. It was one of those flat, round, ultra-powerful swinging magnet things that always foiled robots in 1970’s cartoons.
Arthur was expecting the fun to start at any moment. He was looking eastward. The small section of chain-link fence that broke up the corrugated metal and formed a lockable entryway was forty or fifty yards in the distance and lit by two street lights. Soon, that little puke, Gordy, would scurry over the fence, closely followed by anyone who chose to follow him from the bar. Reilly would be one of them, and the UJ would be ready.
Then…a voice.
“Well, well well! And just what do we have here!?”
Traci dug through her purse. The quiet of the night amplified the sound of her three-inch heels as she left the bar and took a sharp right on to the pavement. Another of Jimmy’s many concessions to the Town of Potterford was opaque windows. If there was to be debauchery on a Sunday, it was to stay in the bar where the good folks of Potterford couldn’t see it. It would have been cheaper to simply paint the front windows over, but Frankie and Jimmy opted for dark stained glass. This caused a problem. The UJ had a package for Detective Kevin Reilly, and the little puke courier needed to know exactly where the man was sitting. Luckily, the little puke courier went to high school with Braden Reilly, Ian’s son.
Braden was very proud of his father and talked about everything he did, including going to F and J’s every night with his uncle, “Kev.” The boy knew about the Reilly Table, but, thanks to the bar’s strict “No Kids; No Exceptions” policy, had never actually seen it. All he knew was it was one of the tables against the front window. He didn’t know exactly which. Consequently, neither did Gordy, and, until three minutes ago, neither did Traci.
Now it was up to her to make Gordy’s part of the plan as dirt-simple as possible. He couldn’t be trusted to remember instructions for the fifteen seconds it would take him to pedal his bike from the hiding place to the window. He needed a target…a clear, easily seen and easily understood target.
The tiny black purse she bought to go with her disguise was essentially a wallet with a shoulder strap. Her regular Hello Kitty purse was a shopping bag by comparison. Inside it were her phone, lipstick, debit card, keys, and a pad of shamrock-shaped sticky notes which she deftly extracted.
She peeled off a single shamrock, stuck it on the pane next to Reilly’s table, crossed the street, walked two short blocks, backed herself up against a parked car, and waited for the little puke to emerge from his hiding place.
She hadn’t anticipated the problem with her ID, but it solidified her theory regarding the subcategories of pretty. To Jimmy Cuttillo’s eyes, it