Rosary girls

34

He had fallen asleep. Ever since he had been a child in the Lake District, where the sound of rain on the roof was a lullaby, Simon had been soothed by the clatter of a storm. It was the car backfiring that awakened him.

Or maybe it was a shot.

This was Gray's Ferry, after all.

He looked at his watch. An hour. He had been asleep an hour. Some surveillance expert. More like Inspector Clouseau.

The last thing he remembered, before being startled awake, was Kevin Byrne disappearing into a rough Gray's Ferry bar called Shotz, the kind of place where, when you walk in, you go down two steps. Physically and socially. A ramshackle Irish bar full of House of Pain types.

Simon had parked on a side street, partly to keep out of Byrne's line of sight, partly because there wasn't a space in front of the bar. His intention was to wait for Byrne to emerge from the bar, follow him, see if he pulled over on some dark street and lit up a crack pipe. If all went well, Simon would have snuck up on the car and snapped a picture of the legendary detective Kevin Francis Byrne with a five-inch glass shooter between his lips.

Then he would own him.

Simon had gotten out his small, collapsible umbrella, opened the car door, spread the umbrella, and sidled up to the corner of the building. He peered around. Byrne's car was still parked there. It looked as if someone had broken the driver's window in. Oh Lord, Simon thought. I pity the fool who picked the wrong car on the wrong night.

The bar was still packed. He could hear the dulcet strains of an old Thin Lizzy tune rattling the windows.

He was just about to head back to his car when a shadow caught his attention, a shadow darting across the vacant lot directly across from Shotz. Even in the dim light thrown by the bar's neon, Simon could recognize Byrne's huge silhouette.

What the hell was he doing over there?

Simon raised the camera, focused, snapped a few pictures. He wasn't sure why, but when you shadowed someone with a camera and tried to assemble the collage of images the next day, every image helped in establishing a time line.

Besides, digital images were erasable. It wasn't like the old days when every snap of a thirty-five millimeter camera cost money.

Back in the car, he had checked the images on the camera's small LCD screen. Not bad. A little dark, of course, but it was clearly Kevin Byrne coming out of that alley and across the lot. Two of the photographs had been against the side of a light-colored van, and there was no mistaking the man's hulking profile. Simon made sure that the image was imprinted with date and time.

Done.

Then his police band scanner-a Uniden BC250D, a handheld model that had more than once gotten him to a crime scene ahead of the detectives-crackled to life. He couldn't make out the details, but a few seconds later, when Kevin Byrne took off, Simon knew that whatever it was he belonged on the scene.

Simon turned the ignition key, hoping that the job he had done securing his muffler would hold. It did. He wouldn't be sounding like a Cessna aircraft while trying to shadow one of the city's savviest detectives.

Life was good.

He put the car in gear. And followed.