Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  I could take the evidence outside the RUC, to Special Branch in England, and forever live my life a fugitive, knowing that one day they’d get to me, they always do.

  One bright morning in Perth, Australia, I go out to get my paper and a man with an Irish accent says hello, Alexander, and shoots me in the head.

  Or I could bury the case, pretend it never happened.

  Maybe I am a coward. I sat on it, in indecision, and that night…

  Pat comes in with tea. Chitchat. I stroke my beard. I have a beard again. It’s been days. Weeks?

  “You were saying?” Pat asks, liking when I talk, he says it helps me.

  “That night…”

  Heavy fog had smothered the wind and for once the gossipy yachts, dinghies, and small craft were silent.

  My apartment at the marina. The quiet woke me. Gulls and distant foghorns up in Belfast. I sat in the bed and weighed my options. I was sweating, afraid. Death and exile on the one hand, or do nothing and forever live in shame. I heard the sound of hobnail boots on the marina pontoons. I grabbed my service revolver, but I put it down again.

  The interrogating room. Classic twist. The roles reversed.

  “I’m saying nothing until I see a lawyer.”

  “You won’t be seeing a lawyer, Alex, you’re being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.”

  “I want to speak to Buck McConnell.”

  “Chief Superintendent McConnell has taken early retirement as of this morning.”

  And I knew if I blabbed they’d kill me. They suspected that I knew the names of the corrupt cops but if I confirmed it, I’d be dead. They held me for two days and I said nothing and they released me. It gave them and me time to think.

  What do I do, go to Scotland Yard, Special Branch, to the newspapers? I’d be hunted, killed. Say nothing, wait for the shoe to drop, I’d be hunted, killed. Run? Where?

  I walked home from the barracks, afraid of every passing car.

  Yes…

  Pat sponges me down and cleans me off. Gives me green tea that he says is loaded with antioxidants, I throw it up. Why was it so hard going off junk when I wasn’t a junkie? Pat helps me to the toilet and I drizzle diarrhea and sob.

  The bed.

  The apartment overlooking the boats. Death one way. Death the other. Racking my squirreled-up brains.

  And I hit upon a solution.

  A third way.

  Brilliant. The scourge would save me. The biter bit.

  I found my undercover stash and like I’d watched, but never done, I injected myself with heroin and tracked up and down my arm until it looked like I was a junkie. Hit, rest, hit, rest, needle marks. And then I signed into the police station, broke into the evidence room, and got caught stealing half a click of heroin under my jacket. I was arrested on the spot. They found the track marks and it was such an obvious cliché, they bought it, the drug squad officer who uses. Maybe to establish credibility with dealers undercover, maybe because he was tempted, maybe he was weak. But it happened. Pathetic. Caught fucking red-handed. Where do these eejits come from?

  And the higher-ups saw too. I was a junkie drug-squad officer. Caught stealing. How to handle it? Prosecute me?

  No.

  I would resign in disgrace, my file would be closed, we would hush it up.

  Perfect. If I shut up and behaved myself, we’d leave it at that. And if I tried to whistleblow, I would have no credibility, no one would believe me, a junkie peeler caught stealing ketch from the police evidence room.

  No need to kill me now. I wasn’t blabbing, I wasn’t going to anyone. I could never make my case. I had a record and no moral weight and I would live.

  I had saved my life. And every day I kept using and I kept buying and I was safe.

  Heroin had saved my life.

  Or it had for six months till Commander Douglas from the Samson Inquiry came along and made me an offer I had to refuse….

  Pat nods. Rambling and arse backward, but Pat has got the gist of it.

  “So why can’t you go home now?” he asks.

  “They think Commander Douglas will compel me to testify anyway, my evidence alone would not be credible, but it will add to the overwhelming weight of evidence Samson has compiled. They have to plug the hole in every dyke. Have to kill me, just in case. I’m not safe anywhere.”

  “That’s why, Alexander, it’s better that you stay here and do nothing and get well,” Pat says.

  “Pat, I have nothing there, I have nothing here. The reason I’m getting well, the reason I’m quitting junk, is so that I can fucking shoot Charles Mulholland, the killer of my two friends. Don’t you see, man’s crazy. Gotta be stopped. I’ve got to do it before the announcement on August sixth, before he gets to run for Congress. If I can do it, I can wipe the slate clean.”

  Pat wipes my brow and cleans me with a sponge. Spoons tea into my mouth and shakes his head.

  “Alex, the announcement was yesterday. You’ve been here for ten days. It’s too late. Congressman Wegener has already announced that this will be his last term. The mayor of Fort Collins isn’t entering the race. It’s a coronation. Charles Mulholland will be running for the GOP nomination unopposed. It’s all over. It’s too late. Let it go.”

  “What? Too late? Oh yeah, I forgot, I forgot, that’s not the plan, new plan, kill him at the fund-raiser, kill him then.”

  “Madness,” Pat mutters. “You didn’t listen to me before, listen to me now.”

  I owed Pat a lot. He had operated on my leg to remove a shotgun pellet and then kept me alive despite the fact that I’d been suffering hypothermia, shock, blood loss, and then junk withdrawal. Pat was no surgeon, either, a paramedic, and paramedics aren’t trained for that kind of thing. But he’d done enough. And in any case, I didn’t hear him. I was taking advice from a higher authority. The verse of the Gita echoing in my skull: O Arjuna. Why give in to this shameful weakness? You who would be the terror of thine enemies.

  The terror of thine enemies.

  * * *

  It had taken several more days until I felt confident about walking the streets of Fort Morgan again. I had kicked heroin and my leg was healed and I could walk and run. We had looked out for dodgy characters, but there were none. The hired guns had seen me sink in the South Platte and, as Pat says, but for the two years of drought and the river’s historic low level, I surely would have drowned.

  But, anyway, I was in the clear. They thought I was dead for the second time. You can’t ignore a chance like that. My next move was the story on Channel 9. Charles was having a fund-raiser, a summer “white attire only” ball at the Eastman Ballroom in Denver. It showed Charles’s savvy. The historic Eastman Ballroom hadn’t been used for several years, everybody said a big event like this might help keep away the developers. Regardless. That’s where I would set the world to rights.

  And I was certain about Charles and I knew it was him, but one thing troubled me still. What had happened in the cemetery made no sense. Charles would never have hired contract killers to ambush me. First of all, how could he have met them? Every third hit man in America is an under-cover FBI special agent. Second, as I’d thought at the time, what was to stop them blackmailing Charles once he became famous?

  Something wasn’t right.

  So, free of junk for the first time in nearly a year, I told Pat, “We have to go back to Denver.”

  He protested, raged, refused.

  We packed our stuff. Rode the bus, arrived at Denver, took a taxi to Pat’s old apartment building. The Ethiopians were gone, the lobby smelled of urine and was filled with garbage. Someone had tried to break the new locks on the inner door but fortunately had not succeeded.

  We settled into Pat’s place. I couldn’t go back to the apartment where John had been killed….

  And the world harsher. Denver, a big, hot, unpleasant city, and I got hungry now and I could read people when they were angry and I couldn’t ignore filth and dirt. Ketch softened the edges of everythin
g, soothed you, blurred things like an impressionist painting. With ketch, Streisand was always singing and Vaseline was always on her lens.

  I researched the stories of Robert, Charles, and Amber Mulholland. Old-fashioned police work. Phone calls to Harvard, to Cutter and May law firm, to the Mulholland Trust. Legwork at the Denver Public Library.

  Robert and Charles checked out. They left traces all over the papers. Well known. The kids of a multimillionaire. Father divorced, the trust funds, the private schools, the Ivy League education, both PhDs in economics/political science. There were no surprises.

  The surprise reserved for Amber Mulholland.

  Hardly any information at all under that name. Her wedding in The Denver Post and The New York Times, but very little else. I remembered that photograph in the yearbook in her apartment. During her first year at Harvard, she had changed her name from Amber Doonan to Amber Abendsen. Now, why had she done that? She had mentioned some kind of problem with her father. But it had puzzled me at the time. Which was her real name? There was an easy way to find out….

  I put on a shirt and tie and showed up with a dozen white roses at the nursing home Amber’s mother was housed at on Pennsylvania Street.

  A very young security guard with a buzz cut.

  “Yeah, maybe you can help me, I’ve got roses for a Mrs. Doonan, but then that’s crossed out and it says Mrs. Abendsen?” I said in my best approximation of an American accent.

  The guy barely looked at me.

  “Room 201,” he said.

  “What name is it?” I asked.

  “You had it the first time,” he said.

  The home was upscale. Plush carpets, a mahogany handrail, nurses in crisp white uniforms. I knocked on 201. I went in. A frail, silver-haired old lady, sitting in a chair, looking out the window, stroking a sweater curled in her lap like a cat.

  “I’ve got some flowers for you,” I said.

  She didn’t turn around. Didn’t look up.

  “Flowers,” I said again, but she didn’t even appear to be aware of my presence in the room. How old did Amber say she was? Sixty-eight? She seemed just a little older, but clearly, the disease had hit her hard. There was no way I could ask her anything but there was no point in wasting an opportunity. I put the flowers down and scouted the room. A few pictures, prints. Cautiously at first, I opened her chest of drawers. Amber’s mother didn’t move.

  Old-lady clothes, adult diapers, nothing special, but in the top of a cupboard that she couldn’t reach—personal effects. China figurines, Hummel characters, bits of crystal, a few postcards. Several from Amber. Nothing of interest until I found an envelope filled with papers. The mother lode. Literally. Her birth certificate, born Louise Abendsen, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1927, her high school graduation certificate, her marriage license to Sean Doonan on October 31, 1955, and divorce papers from him on January 1, 1974, when Amber would have been about eight or nine.

  Louise stared out the window, not stirring as I looked at this, the most significant piece of information so far. For on the divorce papers it said “Custody to the father, Sean Doonan, on the grounds of Louise Doonan’s present incarceration at the Huntsville State Correctional Facility.” The divorce papers made a big play out of the fact that Mrs. Doonan had gone to prison three times in the previous ten years for shoplifting, petty theft, drunkenness, and other crimes that the papers said “were signs of an unbalanced temperament.” The papers also made a point of explicitly denying “Mrs. Doonan’s claims that Sean Doonan was in any way involved in organized crime.”

  “Flowers,” Louise said, not moving from her spot at the window.

  I said nothing.

  “Flowers,” she said again.

  She was getting agitated. Time to go. I had plenty here to work with anyway. The information almost made me feel sorry for Amber. Screwed-up mother, dodgy father. I put the envelope back. I looked at Louise. I knew I couldn’t leave the flowers, in case someone wondered where they’d come from, so I took them with me and dumped them in a trash can down the hall. I felt bad. The guard didn’t look up as I walked out.

  The rest of the pieces weren’t difficult to fill in. The New Jersey and, indeed, the New York papers had heard of Sean Doonan. A notable, but unindicted, member of the Irish mob in Union City. He had been implicated on several counts of union fraud, numbers rackets, protection rackets. He had never been convicted of anything.

  After their divorce, Amber had gone to live with him full-time. She had clearly run a little wild. Amber Doonan’s name showed up in the Union City Gazette in connection with arrests for vandalism and car theft. I had interlibrary loan at the Denver Public Library get me a photocopy of the relevant issues of the Gazette. A grainy black-and-white photo that showed a defiant, pretty punk girl with a pierced nose and a shaved head.

  Amber, however, had either done brilliantly on her SATs or her da had pulled strings, for she had been accepted to Harvard. As I’d already discovered, in her second year Amber began calling herself Amber Abendsen, her mother’s maiden name. Young Ms. Abendsen won a Boston Drama Festival Prize, and I even found a photograph in The Boston Globe that showed a girl with long blond hair in a Gucci blouse. Neither her father nor her mother attended Amber’s Harvard graduation, something two of her college classmates commented on when I phoned them. It didn’t surprise me now.

  It seemed that Amber had reinvented herself in Boston. She had disowned her parents. Shanty Irish mobster dad, convict, drunken ma. She had made herself anew. She was moving in different social circles, ashamed of where she’d come from. She’d removed that harp tattoo. Cleaned up her elocution. But you could take the girl out of the bog, but not the bog out of the girl. The stealing of the tip money, the random fucks, she had a little throw-back in her. Or was that a racist thing to say? A classist thing. Maybe.

  Regardless, from The Denver Post, it appeared that neither of Amber’s parents came to her wedding. Probably Charles understood why Amber wanted it this way. At the time of the wedding, her ma was back in jail and her father had been on TV as part of a prolonged trial that had just collapsed. His face had again been in the New York papers. Indeed, Amber’s father, Sean Doonan, was a nephew of Seamus Patrick Duffy, who was now the reputed leader of the Irish mob in New York City.

  The more clear blue water between her and him the better, if she wanted to move in the dizzy circles around Charles Mulholland.

  And all this would have been irrelevant but for one thing.

  Now I probably knew where the gunmen in the park had come from.

  My phone call must have precipitated it. Scared them. Charles and Amber at their wits’ end. Charles had messed up; even though he’d stuck a knife in my heart, I wasn’t dead. And Amber knew that to protect her husband and her future there was only one thing to do. She had to contact dear old Dad. It was possible. Why not? It seemed she had been telling the truth when she told me she didn’t have a relationship with her father. Eight years of estrangement would have had to come to an end. She needed his help. She needed someone in whom she could place absolute trust, who would not blackmail her and Charles, who could supply three professional assassins to meet her husband’s tormentor in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Charles had taken care of everything, but this loose end had to be taken care of by someone else.

  So maybe she had picked up the phone. Knew that he would trade it for future favors, but even so. Dad I need your help….

  So it was another fuckup on my part, I’d arranged the meeting in the graveyard a day in advance, plenty of time for Doonan to fly a hit team to Denver, to drive to Fort Morgan, to scout the territory, to lay the trap. What a fool I’d been. And perhaps Charles had bullied her, frightened her. If I was right, it must have taken some persuading to get her to talk to her da, especially after all she had gone through to be rid of the past. But she had agreed. The future, too important. A politician’s wife. A rising star. Yes, Charles, I’ll call Da, he’ll take care of it, he’ll kill Alex.

  Than
ks, Amber. I am not one to hold a grudge. But, my dear, prepare your screams. Your Jackie Kennedy face. In three days Charles is going to be lying beside you with a bullet in his skull.

  * * *

  I needed a weapon, so I went to see my old dealer, the Mexican kid who worked behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax. Entire books have been written about the relationship between a user and his dealer. Burroughs, De Quincey. Lou Reed has written songs about it. Mine was uncomplicated. I liked Manuelito. I had quit now and no one was interested in ketch in Denver, so I didn’t blame him when he gave me a bit of the old cold shoulder at first when I went to see him.

  “Manuelito,” I said with a big grin.

  “Manuel to you,” he said sourly. His baby face trying to force a frown.

  “Listen, I quit smack, don’t bring me down.”

  He shook his head.

  “Man, you know, heroin isn’t even worth the risks anymore.”

  “I know,” I said, and we chatted about the dreadful state of affairs the world was in when kids wanted to do crack and then go out and rob some old lady, rather than taking honest-to-God Afghani horse, which was so pure these days you could smoke it, mellow out, chill, harm nobody but yourself. On the subject of the dangerous world we lived in, I told him I needed a piece and he told me about an unlikely place to buy one.

  “There’s a guy called Tricky, lives a couple of blocks away from the police headquarters on Federal Plaza, I’ll take you over.”

  We went to see Tricky. A wiry, high-strung Guatemalan kid who had so much energy he made me nervous. Also a bit tense to be looking at shotguns, Armalites, pistols, and a machine gun and thinking about committing a political murder a hundred yards from the police HQ and a divisional office of the FBI. Tricky wanted me to take the machine gun off his hands, but in the end I settled for a long-nosed .38 revolver similar to a gun I’d had in the peelers. Stolen from a gun dealer’s in Mexico, Tricky said. As good as untraceable. Pistol in hand, I thanked the two boys and went back home.