Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  “Please,” she said, and smiled at him, shrugging in apology. Johnser was halfway to the door. Daria pulled her hand back but the blond man didn’t let go.

  “Ah-ah,” he said, still smiling. With his tongue, he shifted the ivory toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. “Come on. One drink. We could go around the corner, to my place. It’s clean.”

  Johnser was nearer to her now, so Daria leaned back into the booth, hiding from him, and pretended to think about the offer. “Well . . .”

  “There you go,” the blond man said, winking. “We’ll have a couple of shots, you’ll tell me your life story.”

  Daria heard the little bell over the door, knew that Johnser had stepped outside. She leaned forward and laid out her other hand, palm up. The blond man smiled contentedly and moved his hand, grasping the one that she offered.

  Daria said, “Maybe another time.” She twisted sharply, her elbow in the air. The blond man’s thumb broke. Two thin bones in his wrist sheared. His eyes bulged, his tongue moved as if to warble but he made no sound.

  Daria stood and was across the room, her hand on the door, when she heard the blond man puke.

  The most disturbing thing about the encounter, Daria knew, was that on another day, she might well have said yes the first time he asked.

  LOS ANGELES

  Donal O’Meara set two six-packs of Samuel Adams on the middle of the little round table and said, “Help yerselves, then.” Back home, of course, it would have been Harp or Guinness. But he’d soon figured out that the horse piss they passed off as Guinness in the States was a faint fake compared to the real thing. He vowed not to taste the deep, dark brew until his feet touched the soil of Northern Ireland again.

  An Ireland free from the grasp of Rome.

  “Ta,” said the smallest in the group, a wiry little man from Derry named Feargal Kelly. He was a fine gunman, O’Meara thought, both a gifted sniper and good at up-close wet work. A little crazy, but then who wasn’t? Next to him sat Keith O’Shea, who’d been born on the beautiful Antrim Coast and who’d learned to hate the Catholics after his father and older brother were slaughtered by a bomber in Kilkeel. O’Shea was a fighter, pure and simple. He liked a knife but could use the machine pistol with the best of them. These two, with Johnser Riley’s bulk, fighting skills, and pure meanness, made for a good quick-strike team.

  “So it worked,” Kelly said, draining a third of his beer.

  O’Meara nodded. “Our friend sounds like a right wanker but he delivered. Simple as that.”

  They clinked the necks of their beer bottles together.

  “But can he do it again?” O’Shea asked. “Can he bring down the plane we tell him to?”

  “Fella says he can,” O’Meara said, and shrugged. “Got no reason to doubt him so far. The flight happens in a couple of days. When it does, we let our friend deal with it. That’ll put things right.”

  “Aye,” the others chimed in, just as the door of their hole-up opened. Johnser Riley rolled in with that John Wayne walk he was perfecting.

  On the street below them, Daria made note of the address. The building looked like it was deserted. No life was evident from the street, but this was where the big Irishman had gone.

  She tried the door, found it locked. He must have had a key.

  She found a space between the apartment building and the next one, too narrow to be called an alley. The space was cobwebbed and no wider than her shoulders. The narrow shaft of air was dark, the ground cluttered with beer bottles and bricks. She started edging her way down the space, walking sideways, the front and back of her sporty jacket quickly growing filthy with soot. Rats squealed, dodging over and around her open-toed slingbacks. She wished she hadn’t worn a short skirt. The thin space smelled of urine. She got to the end and found a narrow courtyard tucked among all the tall buildings. No sun had touched the ground back here in generations. A rail-thin cat arched its back and hissed at her. Stained mattresses were stacked up, reeking of mildew. A child’s Big Wheel lay on its side under a fine layer of dust. More rats skittered away; some stood their ground and stared at her with red eyes.

  Daria found a window low to the ground and broke it with her elbow. She used a bit of brick to clear it all away. She buttoned up her black leather Versace jacket—it was ruined anyway—then got down on her stomach and climbed into the rank darkness of the condemned apartment building, wiggling through the window headfirst, her body blocking all light.

  20

  EXCUSE ME?”

  The bartender, a thick cube of a man with a cauliflower ear and a marine buzz cut, turned to the two men in blue suits. One suit was off the rack and generic. A big guy wore that one. The other was hand-tailored and unique. A black guy wore that one. Both held badges.

  “Yeah?”

  Ray Calabrese pulled the photo of O’Meara out of his jacket pocket. “We’re with the FBI. We’re looking for this man.”

  The bartender slipped on a pair of bifocals, the earpieces held together with black tape, and took the photo, holding it at an angle to negate reflections from the overhead lights. “He’s a mick?”

  Ray said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Yeah, he and his buddies come in here a lot this week. Real full of themselves, you know? All piss and vinegar. Sometimes they pick up ladies, sometimes they just sit in the back and make fun of American beer and baseball and shit.”

  Lucas Bell pulled an envelope out of his pocket and produced eight more photos, all taken at British prisons. It hadn’t taken him five minutes on the computer to come up with O’Meara’s likely collaborators. “Do you recognize any of these men?”

  The bartender scanned them all. He selected three. “Yeah. These guys hang around with the first guy.”

  Ray said, “Were they in here last night?”

  “Yeah.” The bartender didn’t seem too happy about it.

  “Was there trouble?” Lucas asked.

  The big man shrugged. “One of them made a bet, is all. He cleaned at least three hundred out of my regulars, made ’em look like chumps, really laughed at ’em. People come in here to relax, you know? They don’t want to be made fun of or nothing.”

  Ray said, “Sure. Any idea where we can find these guys?”

  “I don’t know what they do for a living but they been hanging out in this neighborhood for about a week now. They buy groceries down at the corner and they eat at Mario’s, across the street.” He pointed out the front window. “They’re like cockroaches. Big, mick cockroaches. They’re everywhere.”

  He paused, his eyes narrowing. “No offense. You’re not Irish, are you?”

  Ray said, “Well, I’m not . . .” and nodded toward Lucas.

  While the bartender pondered that, Ray slid the first photo back into his pocket, then handed the bartender his business card. “If you see these guys, call this number, please. And don’t tell them we’re looking for them.”

  The bartender said, “You got it. Ship ’em back to fucking Ireland, I say.”

  The FBI agents started to turn away. Ray turned back. “Out of curiosity, which guy won the three hundred bucks off your regulars?”

  “That big blond guy.”

  “Yeah? Can I ask how?”

  It was a good question. It was the kind of detail about a suspect that could lead to an arrest.

  “Damnedest thing.” The bartender shook his head. “This guy bets us that the top story on TV would be a disaster. Some kind of crash, he said. Lots of deaths. I’ll be damned if they didn’t break in to the news with a . . . what do you call it? A breaking story. Seems some airplane crash up in Oregon or Washington or some such.”

  He smiled and shrugged. His smile wilted when he realized that the two FBI agents were staring at him, their mouths open.

  The bartender said, “What?”

  Ray turned to Lucas and said, “Christ almighty.”

  21

  THE AFTERNOON-SHIFT GROUND CREW at the airport wore bright orange jumpsuits with THE SULTAN
S OF SWING stenciled on the back. As they arrived for that day’s work, they were greeted by a shift leader, officials from the airport, and representatives of their union. Angela Abdalla, of the Port of Portland’s incident-investigation team, was there with a black guy who was going a little gray and wearing the windbreaker and ball cap of the National Transportation Safety Board. The black guy thumbed through a stack of papers the crew recognized as the Vermeer’s transit check: the routine maintenance reports, consisting of not much more than walkarounds and topping the fluid levels, which occur every seven days or thirty-five flight hours.

  “People,” Angela Abdalla said, getting the ball rolling. Those who knew her, or who just had seen her around the airport, thought she appeared exhausted and rumpled, rather than her usual, sleek executive look. “This is Isaiah Grey. He’s with the NTSB. We need to figure out what happened with the Vermeer yesterday, and he’s going to need your help.”

  “He needs to figure out how us dumb ground crews fucked up?” one of the men shouted back. The others rumbled, too.

  “Yup,” Isaiah cut in mildly, and the honesty surprised everyone. Not looking up from his clipboard, he gave it two beats. “Maybe you did screw up. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe the pilot was stoned. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the plane missed its last maintenance rotation. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe a guy named Yousef was sitting at the end of the runway with a Stinger missile in the back of a Jeep Cherokee that he bought, cheap, in Uzbekistan.”

  Isaiah clicked open a pen. Signed something. He still hadn’t looked up. When he did, he said, “The Stinger, not the Cherokee. And maybe the guy’s name was Jim Bob and he fired it to protest gay rights. What I’m saying is: we don’t know what the hell happened yet. But we’ve got to figure it out, and you know I’m right. For good or bad. Okay?”

  The crews weren’t happy about it, but their crew chief stood up and crossed his arms across his barrel chest. “Listen up! We’re gonna help this guy and get back to work. That’s the plan. Got a problem with it, tough. Let’s get busy.”

  And they did.

  LOS ANGELES

  From their sedan, Ray Calabrese and Lucas Bell called the federal building and got Assistant Director Henry Deits on the line. Deits turned it into a conference call, with all of his top brass.

  “The bartender identified O’Meara and three known associates of the Red Fist of Ulster,” Lucas said into the handheld radio. “All four were in a bar down here, near the garment district, last night. One of them, John Padraic Riley, DOB nine four seventy-seven, made a bet at the bar. He said the top story on last night’s news would be a major crash with lots of deaths.”

  The agents could hear FBI brass mutter a couple of curses.

  “Are you declaring this a terrorist incident, Agent Bell?” Deits asked.

  Ray and Lucas exchanged glances. Ray took the handheld unit. “Sir, we have a correlation between known terrorists and the downing of an airliner in Oregon. Again, it’s a correlation. We don’t know for sure that they caused it, but one of them predicted it. We don’t want to declare a known terrorist incident yet, but we want to bring these guys in as soon as humanly possible.”

  “Agreed,” Deits said. “Liz is here. Liz, how many agents can you get down to the garment district?”

  They heard the voice of the deputy assistant director in charge of terrorist activities, Liz Geddes. “I can have thirty-five people in your position in ten minutes, Ray. I’ll have LAPD SWAT back them up.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal.” He told the brass about the bar, the corner grocery store, and the restaurant known as Mario’s. He also described the general neighborhood and recommended that teams dress down in civilian clothes (“ditch all the navy blues and wingtips”) to begin canvassing the scene.

  Everyone agreed. Ray and Lucas checked the ammunition in their 9-mm Glock automatics, then opened the trunk of their sedan. Ray also checked the small, matte black Kahr K9 clipped to his right ankle.

  “Little somethin’-somethin’ should the need arise?” Lucas asked.

  “Something like that.” They doffed their neckties and suit coats and found a couple of blue microfiber jackets with Velcro-covered shoulder patches that covered the letters FBI. There also were Kevlar vests and riot guns, but they left those where they were. They left the walkie-talkies, too, relying on their cell phones. They checked the batteries to make sure they were charged. “I’ll go east,” Lucas said. “You go west.”

  Ray nodded and they headed off in opposite directions, to see what could be seen before the cavalry arrived.

  When they ran out of beer, Donal O’Meara sent the wiry little Derry man, Feargal Kelly, to get some more from the grocery down on the corner.

  Daria scrounged through her purse for the disposable Bic lighter, found it, and illuminated the basement she’d landed in. It stank of old garbage, human shit, and rats. Red eyes blinked around her when the flame appeared. She couldn’t see more than five feet ahead of her and slowly scanned the room. It was musty. Someone had drawn outrageous graffiti all over the walls; not the creative, urban-message stuff, but obscenities and cartoons. A fine layer of soot and grease covered the graffiti, suggesting that it was at least a decade old. She walked into a spiderweb, felt something skitter through her hair. She stumbled backward over an old carton and almost lost the Bic, the flame going out. She thumbed the mechanism, got the pale yellow light back. She found a doorway with no door, blackness beyond. She edged that way and entered, with no idea what lay beyond.

  Daria felt more alive than she had felt for three years.

  22

  NEITHER RAY CALABRESE NOR Lucas Bell found the first of the Irishmen. Instead, it was two FBI agents in an unmarked prowl car. They passed Feargal Kelly without slowing down or even appearing to look at him. Kelly took a key out of his pocket and ran up the three steps to an abandoned tenement building. Abandoned it might have been, but the key fit and the door opened. He disappeared inside. The two agents rounded a corner and immediately spotted Lucas trotting down the sidewalk. They pulled over.

  “Got one of your perps,” said the driver, rolling down his window. “Round the corner on Twenty-eighth. Went into one of those abandoned apartment buildings, the big brick job on the right side.”

  Lucas knelt. “Okay, good. Ray Calabrese is four blocks from here. Go get him and bring him back. I’ll keep my eyes on this guy. Hey, in Ireland, these assholes regularly monitor emergency bands. You go eyeball Calabrese and tell him what you told me, but face-to-face.”

  The driver said, “Got it. Watch your ass,” and pulled away.

  Lucas crossed the street and hit the sidewalk, heading down Twenty-eighth. He checked his watch. He scanned the windows carefully, then jogged across the street and dug lock picks out of his wallet.

  . . .

  Daria made it up to the ground floor as quietly as she could and put the Bic back into her purse. This floor had been turned into a shooting gallery, each room littered with stained box springs, syringes, used condoms. It stank to hell. Maybe, she thought, it stank of hell.

  In the gloom, Daria doffed her ruined coat, threw it into one of the rooms. She tossed her purse in, too. It contained no weapons, and she wanted her hands free. She was dressed entirely wrong for crawling through windows and skulking through drug dens—the four-inch heels would have to go, not that she hadn’t been fully trained in how to move in the stilettos better than most people could in sneakers. Besides, her years in the Israeli army and Shin Bet had taught her to be nothing if not resourceful.

  She heard noises above and crept up the first flight of stairs she found, stepping on the risers near the wall, not in the center of the stairs, where they were more likely to squeak. The noises from the supposedly abandoned apartment building were coming from the ground floor. Daria paused at the top of the stairs, noted that heavy foot traffic had scraped away a layer of dust and dirt. She was close enough to recognize the voices now. One of them was Jack’s. She didn’t know how much farther sh
e could creep without being noticed. She glanced up. Much of the ceiling on the first floor had disintegrated, and she caught glimpses of light from the next floor up. The question was: go up to the second floor and try to listen to the conversations happening below, or try to get closer to them on this floor?

  The decision was taken out of her hands. A key rattled in the ground-floor entryway and hinges squealed.

  Daria bolted up the next flight a little faster than she should have. A length of handrail had fallen off. She stepped over it carefully, trying not to send it clattering down the stairs. Risers groaned ominously under her weight and a fine salt of dust floated down onto the landing where she’d been crouching.

  She made it to the next landing and skidded to a stop—most of the floorboards were thoroughly rotted away and clearly wouldn’t hold her weight. She teetered, almost falling through, and took the risk of planting one shoe on each of the only two floorboards that looked sound. Daria straddled a gaping hole leading to the floor below. She was fully exposed, should anyone choose to look up. She flattened herself against the cobwebbed wall as best she could.

  Below her, someone clomped up to the second floor. Daria looked down between her feet through the gap in the floorboards. The man she knew as Jack approached, a silver Colt Python in his hand; he spun around the corner, pointed the massive .357 revolver at the man ascending.

  “Jay-sus!” the newcomer squawked.

  “What are you playing at, ye fuck!” Jack boomed.

  “Put that cannon away, you!”

  Jack tucked his gun into a shoulder holster. “You made enough noise to raise the dead.”

  “Pff. If isn’t Donal himself O’Meara, acting like me mother. Don’t piss yourself, you.”