The Shadow Box (7 page)

“
I
f someone had come at me
...
ƒ
guess so, yes.
”

“You guess what? Say it.”

“
l would have killed him.
”
'

And that was what scared him.

The person who came at him might just have been some poor homeless slob startled out of his sleep. It's why Moon
has never liked guns. With guns, you do more damage than
you have to. He knew that he'd done more than enough
already. While in the park, his heart still pounding, his hands
balled into fists to keep them from shaking, he did consider
ditching it. Maybe throwing it in the lake. But he didn't.

He exited the park well above 82nd Street, doubled
back, then watched the entrance to his building for a while.
No police cars appeared. At half past eleven, a tenant
pulled up in a taxi and the doorman helped her with her
bags. Fallon seized that moment to enter the building
through the parking garage, using his magnetized card.

  
Should anyone ask, the doorman could not say when he
arrived or even be sure that he'd been out. Nor would he
see the blood that glistened on Fallon's sleeve.

He ran cold water on it, scrubbing clots with a tooth
brush. Some blood had splattered the plaster cast. He
washed it off as best he could and used Clorox to bleach
out the rest. His wrist throbbed painfully. The cast had
cracked. He dried it and secured it with masking tape.
That done, he washed and examined the gun. A Colt Py
thon, 357 Magnum. If he'd shot that man in the leg as he'd
intended, this thing would have blown it off at the knee.

He emptied a Weight Watchers dinner package, con
cealed the Python in it, and placed it in his freezer. The
package bulged considerably but it would serve. He poured
himself a scotch and turned on the television, searching for a local news program.

There was nothing yet, of course. There might be some
thing in the morning. In this city, a mugging is hardly
headline news but this one, he thought, might get a men
tion. The media likes victim-turns-the-tables stories.

He sipped his drink and flipped through the channels.
On one of the cable stations, he found a program about
boxing. He watched it for a while. Oddly, it calmed him.

He did not see boxing as violence. Not mean violence.
Not random violence. He saw it as a fair test of skill and courage between two men, well witnessed, with a referee
ready to step in should one have too great an advantage. He
was more than a fan. Fighting, he supposed, was rooted in
his genes.

His great-grandfather, according to family lore, had
been bare-knuckle champion of three counties: Cavan, Roscommon, and Meath. His grandfather, the first to emi
grate, was more of a saloon brawler, but his father, Tom Fallon, had gone eighteen and two as a light heavyweight and had been promised a shot at Billy Conn before they
drafted him to fight the Germans instead. He became a
tank commander. Fought with Patton's Third Army
through half of France, all of southern Germany, and well
into Czechoslovakia. Won several campaign medals plus
a Bronze Star for valor and two Purple Hearts for shrapnel
wounds. Fallon could never understand how a man like
that, so strong, so brave, could decide that life was too hard and kill himself. Or maybe now he could. A little.

Uncle Jake had never fought in the ring. But he had
been a fight judge, served on the boxing commission, and
helped to promote some major bouts. These, however,
were sidelines. Full-time, he was a Brooklyn Democratic
Party boss and deal-maker who seemed to know every police captain and headwaiter in the city.

As for Fallon himself, he had hoped to enter the Golden Gloves tournament as soon as he turned sixteen. Get Moon
to train him. But his Uncle Jake told him to forget it.

“That string ends with your father. You, you're going
to be a gentleman.”

“Uncle Jake . . .”

“Tennis is good. We'll get you started on tennis.”

“Not polo?”

“Don't get smart. But golf is good too. They have sum
mer camps these days where all you do is learn golf.”

“Uncle Jake, what's wrong with learning how to handle
myself first?”

“That's all you want?”

“I've been beaten up twice. Twice is plenty.”

Jake thought about
thi
s for a day or so.

“Tell you what. A good street fighter will take a boxer
every time. Moon says he'll teach you street fighting.”

”I know street fighting. That's where I got beat up.”

“Yeah, well, Moon's never even been down. A guy needs to be hurt, Moon gets it done quick. Ten seconds or less.”

Young Fallon made a face.

“What?”

“Nice to know I'm going to be a gentleman.”

“Ten seconds, Michael. It's a kindness if you can think
of it that way. Less damage needs to be done.”

Fallon poured himself another scotch.

The boxing program was about Jack Dempsey. Dempsey had lost his title to Gene Tunney because he couldn't get used to the neutral corner rule, which was still fairly
new. He had Tunney down. The referee kept pointing to
a neutral co
rne
r but all Dempsey wanted was to run and
club Tunney the instant he tried to get up. So Tunney got
his famous long count and he was able to recover. Before
that rule, if you knocked an opponent down you could
stand over him waiting to hammer
him
as soon as his knee
cleared the canvas. What Dempsey did to Willard, for
example, was horrendous. He broke every bone in Jess
Willard's face.

New York is like Dempsey. There's no neutral corner.
You let down your guard and it drops you.

He had a bad night.

Twice he dreamed about the two muggers and woke up
in a sweat. Being awake, in the dark, was worse. That
knife. What if he hadn't turned when he did? What if he
hadn't moved first as Moon had drilled into him? What if those two weren't muggers at all? And that drunk on the
subway platform. What if he wasn't so drunk? And that
burglar who killed Uncle Jake. What if
he was’t
...

Fallon cursed.

He saw what he was doing to himself and it was stupid.
They're all on someone's payroll, right? Someone who
hates him. Which, if we believe Brendan Doyle, means
Bart Hobbs. Okay, then what? Did Hobbs have that man
follow him from the Algonquin just in case it snows and
he decides to take the subway? If so,
wouldn't he have
picked someone a little bigger to try to push him in front of a train? Big enough, for example, that he wouldn't get
the shit kicked out of him by a woman like Lena
Mayfield?

And those two muggers. For them to have been on
someone's payroll, for them to have been out there waiting
for him, they had to have known he'd be coming. But
he'd gone to see that movie on a whim and he took a cab
to get there. What did he think? That someone had a whole surveillance team out there watching his every move? Here
he comes. Uh-oh, he's heading home on foot. Let's go to
Plan B. Call in the fake muggers.

No way.

All it is, it's this rotten city. Predators on every street
corner and behind almost every desk. He'd been one him
self. On Wall Street when he started out. The way they
all start out. Making a hundred cold calls a day pushing stocks that he knew damned well almost no one but him
self and his brokerage house would ever make a nickel on.

Maybe that's what it is. Justice. The city . . . God . . . somebody . . . handing him a bill. But he couldn't start thinking like that either because next thing he knows he'll be afraid to leave the building without that Python in his
belt. And God didn't kill Uncle Jake and Bronwyn just
because Michael Fallon sold stocks that went
south
.

Mr. Doyle was right about one thing. What Michael
Fallon needed was to stop moping. Start seeing some peo
ple. Get a job and keep busy. There were at least three firms that had been trying to recruit him for years.

But not anymore.

They were polite enough. They were sympathetic. They
said let's get together, we'll have lunch. But they never
called. He'd try them again and they suddenly weren't in.

No brokerage firm, no bank, wanted to touch him. He
tried as far west as Los Angeles and as far east as London.
Two or three people leveled with him, after a fashion, and strictly off the record. They said what Brendan Doyle said.

“Mike . . . even if you're clean, even if you win your
lawsuit, we just don't need that kind of baggage.”

“Baggage? I was a top producer at Lehman-Stone. You
guys have hired traders who were under indictment.”

“True, Mike. But nobody ended up dead. People who
get close to you have a way of getting killed.”

“Who? My uncle? Bronwyn? What did that have to do
with me?”

“Mike
...
do yourself a favor. Go buy that boat and see the world.”

That was as much as anyone would say. That and “We
hear things. What we hear is bad. But no one's going to spell it out for you because no one wants to put his hand
on a Bible. Sorry, Mike. Buy that boat.”