Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

  “But I should like to say this—police investigations cannot be allowed to become witch hunts, just because a senior officer feels some personal animosity toward one group or another, based on their suspected crimes or public appearance and deportment.

  “By the day, this country is becoming more pluralistic, more democratic, and—it is to be hoped—more tolerant. I’m not certain all of the country’s native-born communities can accept the new paradigm, but they must be made to conform to law and democratic practice. By whom I mean at the present time: both the New Druids on the one hand and rogue elements of the police on the other. I’m certain the government backs me in this stance.”

  “And bad cess to you and your miserable minions,” Nuala said to the screen; she was standing in the doorway. And then to McGarr, “That ambitious man, without question acting with Kehoe’s complicity, has as much as burnt you, buried you, and pissed on your grave. Whatever will you do?”

  McGarr’s cell phone had begun ringing. He shook his head; he did not know. It was Sweeney. “They’ll be ringing up any minute now, as soon as I put down the phone.”

  McGarr tried to estimate how long it would take him to get into town to Bresnahan and Ward’s digs in the Coombe, where they had set up all their electronic gear. “I can’t talk now.”

  “But aren’t you talking to me?”

  “Make it quick.”

  “McGarr!” Sweeney roared. “You’re making a balls of this thing. They will talk to you now or never.”

  “Anything else?”

  It took a second or two for the man to gather himself. “I’ve also got those names for you—the ones who’ve joined me in putting up the money.”

  Traffic would still be heavy now at midmorning. “Forty-five minutes at the inside. Make it an hour.”

  “They told me you’d say that and it was a no-go. What in the name of sweet Jesus could you be doing that’s more important than this?”

  “Family. You know that about me, Sweeney. My family comes first. They’re never out of my thoughts.” McGarr rang off.

  The Coombe lies in a hollow that runs down to the banks of the Poddle; once a center of textile manufacturing and weaving, many of its old commercial buildings had been converted into lofts and offices.

  Bresnahan, Ward, Ward’s other wife, Lee Sigal, and their three children lived in a rambling series of buildings that also housed Lee’s antiques business and looked out over the narrow stream.

  The bell on the door, which had been a feature of the shop for more than a century, scarcely produced a sound any longer, but a buzzer that sounded in the living quarters soon brought Lee.

  “Well, Peter McGarr,” Lee said, advancing on him with her hand out. “Aren’t you all the news these days? I hope you’re keeping on.”

  “Have I any choice?” McGarr accepted her hand, and they embraced.

  “No—none whatsoever. That Sheard is a bloody piece of self-serving work, so he is. And we must right the record. I take it you’ve come for Ruth. Hughie is on stakeout, but I suppose you know that.”

  Turning on her heel, she moved through rows of furniture, architectural appurtenances, and other collectible items that stretched off into the shadows of low, crowded rooms, which changed into a bright and airy apartment with tall windows the moment they passed through a heavy curtain.

  Only then did McGarr notice that the dark, pretty woman was pregnant. “Well, this is news. Why am I always the last to know?”

  With finely formed features and dark eyes, she smiled, dimples appearing in her olive-toned cheeks. “I suspect Hughie thought you’ve had enough on your mind.”

  They found Ruth in a large work area filled with computers and other gadgetry. Quickly, McGarr filled her in about the possible call from the ransomers, adding, “If they’re prompt, it should be any minute now.”

  Bresnahan phoned Ward, and they decided upon a strategy that would enable them to learn the number of the incoming call and perhaps even learn its location.

  One of the machines that Bresnahan and Ward used for surveillance was also able to detect the location of the wireless service sending the signal, and from there it could track back to the place from which the call was being sent.

  Learning the number of the phone was more complicated. “But the point is to keep him on the line as long as possible.” Bresnahan tucked a strand of her auburn hair behind an ear and typed several codes into a computer. “You should sit here for the best reception.”

  McGarr had scarcely taken a seat by a tall window when his cell phone bleated. “Yes?”

  “You’re McGarr?” the same fractured voice from the videotapes said.

  “I am, yeah. And who might I be speaking with?”

  “The money. The helicopter. Once you’re up we’ll be in contact with you.”

  “How do I know this is real? That you’re in possession of the books?”

  “The objects on the wall in the videotapes? I should add your pate to them with an eighteen-inch nail.” He rang off.

  “Shit. Not enough time by half,” said Bresnahan.

  McGarr’s cell phone rang again.

  It was Sweeney. “So? You think he’s coddin’?”

  McGarr didn’t know what to think; because of the Ath Cliath headline and the Orla Bannon article, it was now public knowledge that the ransomer collected heads. But the eighteen-inch nails had not been mentioned and would have been apparent only to somebody who had a copy of the tape and the capability of magnifying the image, like Kara. “You have those names I asked for?”

  “Got a fax?”

  McGarr asked Bresnahan for the number and within minutes it appeared, nearly fifty names long with phone numbers and contributions in Sweeney’s barely legible scrawl.

  Moving to a desk, McGarr began working through the list, not getting through to at least half the contributors because of secretaries or assistants. “The blighter phoned me at half-two in the blessed morning, so he did,” said one well-known Dublin developer who had ties to Kehoe. He had coughed up 5 million. “With nary an excuse nor an apology. Strong-arm all the way, and I hope Peter McGarr sees to it I get my money back.”

  Another said he was threatened; yet another said it amounted to blackmail, “him with whole teams of snoops on that rag of his.”

  Not one pretended to be happy about giving. The most sanguine statement was “Well, it’s all for a good cause, and I hope, if it’s got back, it’s kept in some more secure setting. Sweeney’s right about Trinity—an object of such value should never have been kept in a library.”

  McGarr thanked Ruth and said good-bye to Lee and their babies, who had arisen from a nap. He drove home and was just walking through his front door when his cell phone bleeped.

  “No common detox for Pape,” said McKeon. “He’s in intensive care—suddenly, inexplicably having lost consciousness in Sheard’s patrol car, and it doesn’t look good for him. But for Sheard? Shit, with Pape’s brain scrambled or dead, well…”

  The political fix would be in—exculpating Kehoe, the Garda as an institution, and Sheard from blame in the loss of the treasures. The onus would be put squarely on McGarr and Ray-Boy and his gang of louts.

  Even Kehoe’s tenuous alliance with Celtic United might be maintained. After all, Mide and Morrigan had been thorns in Kehoe’s side, with their carryings-on about the Celtic past. Younger New Druids simply wanted to maintain their hold on drugs and other illegal trades.

  “There’s been a second tape and Sweeney says he’s put together the ransom money.” McGarr glanced at his watch; it was time for Maddie to be getting ready for school, if she were going.

  “You’re jokin’.”

  In more than a few ways, McGarr wished he was.

  “How did he do that in such a short time?”

  “It appears he worked through the night.”

  “But is the demand genuine?”

  “Apparently so.” But McGarr wished he could be more certain, since what he was about to ask
McKeon might certainly end his career too, even if they were successful.

  Moving through the upper hall and down the staircase, McGarr paused on a landing with a tall window that looked out on his back garden. What would be agreed between them would, he imagined, set the course of the rest of their lives.

  Explaining how Ward had intercepted a second ransom tape, he then detailed Sweeney’s news that he had put together a “group of patriots” who would pay to retrieve the book but not return it to “that sieve of a place,” Trinity College.

  “Some Opus Dei zealots or others, I’d hazard.”

  “But the demand mentions a helicopter.”

  McKeon waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “And I thought we might provide the service.”

  “You and me.”

  “Well—you, me, Sweeney, of course, and the keeper of old manuscripts at Trinity.”

  “The Kennedy woman.”

  “So it’s not—”

  “A pig in a poke we’re left with. I understand.”

  There was another pause, during which McGarr moved down the cellar stairs.

  McKeon sighed. “Don’t you know, it’s curious you should bring this up. Because I’m only after thinking, with this Sheard yoke always on the teley blowing his horn that it was time for me to pack it in, join up with Ruth and Hughie, and make a few quid for once in me life.

  “But then the missus tells me that with the kids now gone she thought I’d give up the work altogether, and at last she’d have a companion in me.

  “‘Companion?’ says I. ‘Not sure I like the sound of that. A companion to do what?’ And didn’t she drag out this grocer’s list of places around the globe she’d like to go courtesy of something called Elder Hostel? And me neither an elder nor hostile in any way.”

  McKeon waited for McGarr’s reaction, but there could be none. The situation was too serious for comedy, no matter how well intended.

  “But”—there was another long pause during which McGarr unlocked the cabinet he was now standing before—“maybe I can learn.”

  “I hope—and it’s just a hope—that you won’t have to. But I’m only offering up a suggestion here.” McKeon had raised a large family, who in many ways still depended upon him; McGarr, on the other hand, had only Maddie and Nuala to care for, and having to make a living was probably no longer an issue for him. “I want you to think about it before deciding, perhaps talk with Grainne.”

  Opening the cabinet door, McGarr switched on a light and looked in at what made up a small arsenal of weaponry.

  “What’s to decide? Didn’t we toss our lots together—how many years ago was it, Peter?”

  “I don’t know. Over twenty-five, I guess.”

  “No sense in breaking that now. I’ll ring up the airport, tell them I need to keep up me hours.”

  Which would without question end up in at least a suspension, once he strayed from his flight plan. “You’re sure?”

  “If we’re going down, let’s do it properly. Flames. Crash and burn. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

  After switching off the television that he kept in a far corner of his safehouse/headquarters in Coolock, Raymond “Ray-Boy” Sloane Jr. remained seated in the near darkness while he tried to sort through his emotions and summon his instinct for survival.

  It was what had saved him in the past. Through gang violence as a lad and drug warfare as a man, it had kept him alive, told him when to split, who to hook up with and who to unhook. It had even got him clean without much fuss, enabling—there was a good word, he thought—him to dominate the chancers, gobshites, and other assorted cocksuckers around him. Enabling him, in essence, to get where he was.

  Which was? Sloane shook his head and stared down at his sandals, which were lit by a wedge of daylight angling in from an open skylight above him.

  Fucked, altogether. Thoroughly, totally, terminally fucked with no way out that he could see beyond cutting the balls off the bastards who had betrayed him.

  How had he not seen there was no way people like that would split with the likes of him? After—“Fucking after!” he now shouted at the walls—he’d done his part.

  But he’d promised them, hadn’t he, when they’d decided to go ahead with it. He’d held up his hand and pointed at each and every one of them in their turn. Then he’d said, quiet like, “You know what I’ve agreed to do, what none—not one of yous—could or would do ever, no matter the scene.

  “All I ask is yous do yous part. But yous should know this. Fuck with me, fuck with me in any fucking way”—he had brought the blade of the broadsword down on the council table—“I’ll not just kill yous. No. I promise yous here—and yous should know—I’ll kill each and every one of your family from your granny to the youngest scut that bears your name.”

  Now jerking up a leg, Sloane kicked a sandal off one foot and then the other, before reaching for his boots by the side of the cot.

  Maybe that was the way out. He’d take his revenge and all the fucking money, if by then they had it in hand. He knew where they were and where they’d be. Or, or, he’d wait until they got the money. Then he’d take his revenge. And so forth.

  When they decided to cast him off without making sure he was dead, they had to know there’d be a major dollop of…and so forth. They’d brought him aboard for just that, he’d been told from the start.

  Which was a plan, Ray-Boy decided. But first he had a bit of business to take care of. Because nobody dissed him, especially not “Hawaii Five-O.” They all had handles, real names being an unnecessary hazard.

  “Oh, Dan-Oh Boy,” he began to sing, reaching under the mattress of the cot for his broadsword. “Ah, cripes, ah, cripes—yer mawlin’ me.”

  Which weapon was well and good for the third century but would not do in the twenty-first. From under the cot itself, Ray-Boy also pulled out a shiny Ruger .457 magnum that weighed about four pounds and was packed with hollow-point bullets that could punch an exit wound through a person the size of a blood orange.

  And had, he reminded himself. Surprised by the size of the one he’d plugged through a druggie thief, Ray-Boy had spent maybe a whole precious minute marveling at the hole, when the fucking cannon had made so much noise he really should have split right away.

  Now fitting the gun under his belt at the small of his back, Ray-Boy strapped on his Celtic breastplate, pulled on a leather jacket, and moved out into the middle of the warehouse, which was lined by rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving, some containing old plumbing supplies in crumbling cartons. He had bought the place as is, then registered a dummy company with the Commerce Board.

  From the small office near the bay doors, he could hear a radio playing, and he wondered if the station had broken off to cover the cop press conference. And if the two in the office knew how he’d been done.

  He could also hear Five-O saying, “Great.” A pause. “Smashing.” Another. “Yeah, I’ll take care of it.” Obviously speaking into a phone. “See you soon.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Five-O,” he muttered. Not for a moment. “Oh, Dan-Oh Boy,” he sang again, waving the broadsword from side to side with the lyrics. He’d reached the open door of the office, from which heat, cigarette smoke, perfume from the woman, and the stink of sex was flowing out into the otherwise unheated building. “From pen to fen, and down your monstrous side.”

  Tapping the broadsword against the frame of the door, he reached the blade into the room and wiggled it back and forth, as though it were the one doing the talking. “Are yiz decent and not engaged? Are yiz home for company? Bad enough I have to ask, me who’s footin’ the bill for these brilliant digs, me with all these inches to spare. Would yiz look at me sharp form of forty-eight fucking nasty inches.”

  In the reflection off a picture on the wall, he could see the woman reclining on the sofa with her head on a hand, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. One pudgy tit had lolled out of her open blouse, the nipple spread over the milky
flesh like a big pink bruise.

  “With nobody—woman nor man—brave enough to put me where I belong.”

  Five-O had to be seated or standing somewhere behind the door, which was not good. Ray-Boy reached back and felt for the butt of the handgun.

  The woman had raised her other hand and was beckoning with her fingers. “Come. Come ’ere, baby,” she said woozily.

  But Ray-Boy had not got where he was by shagging poxy bitches. And the thought of how they’d sandbagged him a second time sent a bolt of white rage coursing through him.

  Raising a foot, he kicked open the door to find Dan-Oh sitting at the desk, feet up. He was staring down at something in his right hand, which he raised and pointed at the woman.

  Bang. Her arm shot out and her head fell with a crack against the wooden arm of the sofa. There was a small dot, like a bindi, on her forehead, and the cigarette had fallen on her bare breast, where it lay smoking.

  As though the report of the small gun was disappointing, Dan-Oh examined it for a second before swinging it at Ray-Boy, who had to tug to free the barrel of his Ruger.

  Too late.

  Dan-Oh squeezed off four quick shots, all of which struck Ray-Boy on the breastplate, as he wheeled toward the door, gun now firmly in hand. A fifth shot was high and whizzed past his ear. But the sixth was low and caught him in the thigh, the impact causing him to squeeze off a round as he lurched out the open door.

  The blast was stellar in the small space, and he fired twice more as he dragged his leg, which felt numb, into the darkness. How many shots could Five-O have in a peashooter like that, Ray-Boy wondered.

  And knowing he still had four left in his own weapon, which more than outgunned the other man, Ray-Boy dropped the broadsword and spun around in time to see Dan-Oh’s hand strike the lift button on the bay door closest to the office.

  The motor engaged, and the door began its rattling rise.

  Aiming with both hands now—ba-boom!—Ray-Boy squeezed off another round that splintered the frame of the door behind which Dan-Oh was hiding. Three.