Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  BARELY A CRIME

  BARELY A CRIME

  A Novel by

  Robert Ovies

  IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

  Cover images from iStockphoto

  Cover design by John Herreid

  © 2016 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-62164-089-9 (PB)

  ISBN 978-1-68149-698-6 (EB)

  Library of Congress Control Number 2015939071

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  PROLOGUE

  Kieran Lynch was born in a pine bed in his parents’ lower flat in West Belfast, Ireland, on a night that was, for the middle of summer, unusually cold.

  His mother, Maureen, cried and laughed out loud when she saw her new son wailing in the Widow Shea’s fat hands, free of his umbilical cord and his purple coloring, his hair already as black as pitch.

  Kieran’s father, who was called Thomas rather than Tom and who had stayed downstairs in the kitchen with Kieran’s four-year-old sister, Colleen, let out a whoop at the sound of his firstborn son crying and his wife laughing. With little Colleen bouncing in his arms, he danced like the sailor he had been for more than ten of his forty-seven years, wheeling in tight little circles toward the stairs leading to the upstairs bedroom, where he knew that everything was surely better than fine.

  A sharp knock at the back door interrupted his dance and his momentum; a knock at the back door meant friends or relatives, for sure.

  Thomas hesitated, undecided about the moment’s highest priority.

  A second knock sounded as the Widow Shea rushed red-faced and beaming down the stairs and fairly shouted to the proud new father, “Well, for heaven’s sake, you’d better come see your own handsome son, man!” She rushed to gather up Colleen as Thomas’ wife called his name from upstairs and laughed out loud again, bright as a bell.

  But the knock sounded again, this time more insistent than before, so Thomas exclaimed, “God’s breath. This’d better be good!” and took four quick steps to open the door.

  He recognized Brandy Shane instantly, although it had been nearly twelve years since he had seen him, and although he had heard that Brandy had died in prison, where he had been sentenced on the strength of Thomas’ testimony for what they both thought at the time would be the rest of Brandy’s natural life. The charge had been murder, after all, and the dead were Alice Faye Shanahan and her daughter, Faith. While Alice Faye was notorious and a criminal herself, as both Brandy and Thomas had been at the time, poor little Faith had barely turned five.

  Thomas stopped smiling, but he did not move, even after Brandy’s first shot passed through his stomach. With the second shot he staggered backward, aware of the widow’s screaming in the background and even more desperately aware, in the flash of that single moment, that he had not yet held his only son.

  He fell with the third shot, which passed through his heart.

  Kieran Lynch had been less than four minutes old when his father died without holding him. Kieran spent much of his next twenty-two years trying to get those four minutes back.

  1

  It was one of the world’s great feelings: lips as full and soft as bath towels breathing warm whispers against Kieran’s ear.

  Brenna Stack’s long arms were wrapped around his shoulders from behind his chair as she pressed her cheek to the side of his head and used the nickname that only she used, “I know we can’t forget what they say, Kiero, about things that sound too good to be true.”

  He moved his fingers lazily through the easy, red curls spilling past his shoulder and onto his chest. He nodded, but just slightly, as though not wanting to brush her lips away. “Right,” he said. “They usually are.”

  “Mmm hmmm,” Brenna murmured. Then, with a sudden smile brightening her voice, she added, “But the key word is ‘usually’. Which means, you see, sometimes they’re not.”

  Kieran raised his eyebrows and turned his head.

  Her green eyes were smiling too. She said, “So I’m thinking this is going to be one of those times that it’s not too good to be true. I can just feel it, honest to God.”

  “It could be.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a treat for a rainy day?”

  “We’ll see,” Kieran said. “I’m sure gonna see.”

  He was a lean and broad- shouldered twenty-two-year-old with deep black hair that he let Brenna cut short and then left largely untended. His eyebrows were set low on his brow, as if with a weight of their own, over darkly quiet eyes. He wore faded blue jeans, a gray T-shirt and black boots. Kieran Lynch was a young man who had stopped caring about clothes, and about a lot of other things, a long time ago.

  He sat facing their kitchen window at the only table he and Brenna owned—a metal-legged card table with a permanently wrinkled green and white plastic tablecloth, which was pressed tightly to the wall of their small East Belfast upper flat, not far from Trident Port.

  Softly, almost absentmindedly, he laid his left hand on Brenna’s arm as his attention focused again on the open letter that lay in the middle of the green and white checks of their tablecloth. Its top fold was raised and facing him, as though it was studying him in return.

  He could read the day’s date and the words:

  Mr. Lynch: I invite you to join me for what will be something less than one-quarter hour of light work fifteen nights from tonight, on March 18. I have also issued this invitation to your friend Mr. Crawl Connell. My guarantee to you both is that there will be no robbery, there will be no weapons involved, no one will be harmed in any way, your risk will be largely nonexistent.

  He took another swig of his Guinness stout and opened the second fold with the little finger of his bottle hand.

  The letter continued:

  Your payment and your friend’s payment upon completion of this single, perfectly planned operation will be fifty thousand pounds, which I will pay each of you in either cash or as a deposit in the account of your choice anywhere in the world one hour prior to your undertaking the task at hand.

  If you are interested, we will meet at Mrs. Dougherty’s Dining Room, with which you and Mr. Connell are both familiar, at nine o’clock tonight, Monday. You will both come alone, as will I. Mrs. Dougherty will leave as soon as I arrive, at five minutes to nine. She will stay away until ten o’clock in the evening, which gives me more than enough time to pay you handsomely for the time spent in our initial meeting, and for letting me detail my simple request.

  Even the name was typed, not signed, by someone calling himself “Mr. Day”.

  Kieran released the fold of the letter. His hand drifted from Brenna’s arm and his mind drifted again to the serious discomfort of being promised too much money for an unspecified job that would, regardless of promises about risk, weapons or safety, have him back in a place he had been working hard to avoid: the breaking of the law. Worse, the proposal had been hand delivered by a messenger he hadn’t seen and so had no chance of questioning. And it had been delivered late in the day, practically too late for any clear thinking.

  Brenna watched Kieran reread the letter, then kissed him lightly on the ear and eased upright. She stood five feet eight inches tall, four inches shorter than Kieran. Like him, she was athletically trim. Waves of scarlet hair hung over her faded yellow shirt, which
was open to the third button. Her skin was milk white and her features sharp, although gently so. Her lips, deep red even without lipstick, offered a thoughtful smile. “Oh, that’s a lovely, fat pile of money,” she said, drifting into the chair on Kieran’s right.

  Kieran nudged the fold of the letter one more time, as if testing to make sure it wasn’t alive. “It is if he’s not just a deranged grocer or something. Somebody who figures he knows how to steal the Queen’s jewels.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a grocer,” Brenna said. She leaned forward and picked up the letter in her right hand. She snapped it once, hard, to hold it open. “Grocers write on shopping bags or order slips. This is expensive paper, Kiero. This is an intelligent man, who’s obviously put a lot of time and thought into something important to him.”

  “Could be a trap, like Crawl says.”

  “Crawl sees traps every day or two, from what I remember.” She didn’t take her eyes off the letter. “Very expensive person here,” she mused, “this Mr. Day or whoever he is.”

  Kieran stared out the window on the opposite side of the table with narrowed eyes. He didn’t respond to Brenna. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink.

  Brenna noticed and grew silent. Kieran wore that far-away look she had seen in him more often than she liked. After more than a minute passed, she glanced at her black Timex and said quietly, “Pretty soon now, you should go.”

  She waited another fifteen seconds, then added, “When you come back, if it looks good, you can pick up something to party on. How’s that sound?”

  “Yeah,” Kieran said softly. But he didn’t turn to face her. And he didn’t say anything more. He simply stared through a light-falling rain at the flat, four- and five-story buildings squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder on the opposite side of Glenreed Street.

  All of them were old, with brightly colored trim and shutters; greens and reds and bright blues. All had struggling little shops or markets or pubs on the first floor and little flats for struggling people on the second, third and fourth floors. All had noise all day, every day, and well into every night. Most had their windows lighting up as the sun set behind Lagan Bridge by the docks and the evening clouds grew thick and aggressive.

  A horn sounded in the street below and an angry man’s voice shouted what sounded like, but wasn’t, “The same sewing trailer you went!”

  Kieran recognized the sadness that sometimes came back to him when it rained as it was raining then, especially when it was cold. It spread from the inside out and seemed to touch everything and everybody. He hated its coming, although he knew it would pass. It came without face or body or voice, yet he invariably found himself thinking of it as “the ghost.” It wasn’t just a feeling to him anymore; it was the ghost that rose up from places too deep to fathom, unidentified and unwanted, to cover his world like a shade. If he ever did see the ghost, he had long ago decided, it would have black hair matted down by a cold rain just like this one.

  He flicked a glance at Brenna, winked without smiling, then looked out the window again. The wink had not been playful, more a gesture saying, bear with me, girl, but don’t talk to me right now. Just give me these last few minutes to think, then I’ll join you again and be just fine.

  And so she did. But she was no longer smiling.

  The flat they shared was rented on their combined hit-and-miss paychecks. It had just three rooms, the living and kitchen areas combined into one. The only art on the tan walls was an old movie poster taped above a gray couch: Odd Man Out, starring James Mason. The rug was an oriental imitation with no padding, four feet by five feet and worn badly. An eighteen-inch television set was the one costly thing they had purchased since they had moved into the hard streets of Belfast’s east side three months earlier, in December, just two days before Christmas.

  In an upstairs window across the street, Kieran saw a light go on between green shutters and a fat man in a brown shirt raise his shade, squint out at the rain and gathered darkness, and lower it again.

  He circled his left fist around his bottle of stout. “Here’s what happens,” he said quietly, reaching for Brenna’s arm with his right hand. “I go. And I listen to the man. Me and Crawl both. We listen is all.”

  “That’s all you can do. Just listen.” Brenna reached for his hand. “And keep an open mind.”

  “We listen,” Kieran said again. “Then I come back and we talk over what the deal is. You and me.”

  “And we take it from there?”

  “And we take it from there.”

  “Together?”

  “I’ll tell you the whole thing.”

  “You know I don’t want you getting hurt or thrown in jail, for God’s sake,” she said. “I love you. But I just know how much it would mean to us, all that money.”

  “I know.”

  “And I do think this thing, whatever it is, is going to turn out to be golden. I just have that feeling.”

  “But he’s not just going to ask me to poke through some old lady’s dressers for him.”

  She grinned. “Maybe he is. Maybe she’s the one with the money.”

  Kieran grinned lightly and rose from his chair. He started across the room toward his black leather jacket, which was thrown over the back of their couch, against the poster of Odd Man Out. “I’ll find out why he wants us, too, me and Crawl. He doesn’t know us.”

  “You can’t know that.” Brenna rose and walked toward him. “How do you know that?”

  “He’s going to pay us just to meet him, he says. Not just pay us, but pay us ‘handsomely’. How’s that for a word? Pay us ‘handsomely’. If he knew us, he’d know he didn’t have to pay us handsomely or any other way just to sit down and talk to us. Hell, he buys us a few stouts, we listen all night.”

  “He’s heard good things about you. He knows about some things you’re able to do. From the Force, probably.”

  “It’s not smart to waste money on us just for a meeting, though. If he’s not smart about that, maybe he’s not smart about other things.”

  “He wants to make sure you come, is all. Maybe he has a plane to catch. See, you don’t think like rich people think. To him, that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

  Brenna gripped the lapels of his coat and eased him close. She kissed him lightly. Her smile was back. “I swear to God,” she said. Taking his cheeks in her hands, she lowered his face closer to her own and kissed him very softly, once on each eye. “If somebody put five gold bars in your pocket, you’d say, ‘Oh, now I never have to worry again.’ But then you’d do all that quiet thinking you do, and you’d say, ‘Oh, but now if I fall off a bridge, I’ll drown for sure.’ ”

  Crawl Connell emptied his pint of Guinness, his third, and resumed his watch.

  The noise in the Long Neck Pub was picking up, the music above all, a recording with a single fiddle under a man and a woman singing “The Baron of Brackley”. Monday’s crowd was not a big one, and his table was nestled against the front window with a clear view across Tanner Street to Mrs. Dougherty’s Dining Room, where the meeting the letter talked about would take place in exactly twenty minutes, at nine o’clock.

  That is, if Mr. Day, or whatever his real name was, was going to be on time.

  Crawl had come early to sit by the window where he would be able to see the man go into Mrs. Dougherty’s. See if he got dropped off and who was driving if he did. See if he was being followed by any friends. See how he dressed and carried himself and whether or not he looked over his shoulder. See if he looked like IRA or even old military, which was a slim chance, but possible. These were the possibilities on his mind when Kieran, the boyhood friend he still called his little brother, called him to ask if he had just gotten a letter dropped off by messenger, and then added, without waiting for an answer, “So what the hell you think is goin’ on?”

  “It could be IRA history coming back to haunt us,” Crawl had said. “Could even be some ex-British military who joined the
m in the end. Settin’ us up for payback, for things still unsettled, by makin’ it sound too good for us to stay away.” When Kieran scoffed and asked why they would care after all this time, Crawl let go of the idea with, “Not likely, but it could happen.” Then he added, “Or maybe it’s just some fool proposin’ something that couldn’t happen in a million years. We’ll find out, but we’ll watch our backs.”

  With fifty thousand pounds and promises too good to be true being tossed around, anything was possible.

  He took another mouthful of warm stout and looked again at the light in Mrs. Dougherty’s door, where the closed sign hung and the glass ran with the evening’s light rain. He found himself remembering what it felt like to be trapped on a March night just like this one, trapped and afraid, hearing the terrible shouts of soldiers with his heart hammering in his chest and he just eleven years old, for God’s sake. Hiding and soaking wet. Crawling his way under parked trucks as fast as the law could chase him, which was how he got his nickname, Crawl. Clutching so hard to the underbelly of a sixteen-wheeler, his hands went numb. Grasping the drive train with his legs so that the beam from the soldiers’ torches skimmed under him back and forth. Hearing the soldiers cursing and yelling to one another, then shouting that the older members of the Ulster Volunteer Force had been taken, his father among them.

  He blinked and took another long drink of his stout. Most memories, to Crawl, were hard things. But that one was the hardest of all, and it came back to him often.

  “Nobody should have to die in prison,” he had cried to his mother after it had happened. He had even complained to God, the last time he tried that connection, but even God couldn’t fix it. His father was known to be a commander in the UVF, which had been formed in Belfast to take up arms against the IRA and other nationalists, and which continued across Northern Ireland as a vigilante group all the way into 2009, sixteen years after Crawl’s father was convicted of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, sentenced and sent to Maze Prison.