Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  Abbie leaned against the cool glass where it met the wood and looked at the face of the Irish fighter. He had a streak of blood across his right cheek and his lips were curled into a snarl. But it was the eyes that drew her gaze as if they were magnetized; the crystal blue irises drawing in the light from the yellow bulbs deep into their sockets and charging them with some kind of lunatic energy. The man looked as if he were in a trance.

  “The locals objected to the depiction of the Fenian soldier. This hasn’t been seen for fifty years.”

  “He looks … possessed.”

  “Yes. I wonder if the artist had some Anglo-Saxon blood.”

  “Why did you show this to me, Doctor?”

  His yellow teeth caught the light as he smiled. “If you really are dealing with the remnants of the Clan, if they are still active, they would represent the most fanatical members of an already, let us say, devoted organization. They are the holdouts, the Japanese soldier in the caves fifty years after the war is done. This is who you can expect to meet …”

  He nodded toward the fanatic while keeping his eyes on her.

  “The Clan would be very capable of killing whoever had strayed from the true path. In fact, they’d enjoy it. For them, you see, the war really isn’t over.”

  Abbie turned to look at him. He sat there, toadlike, staring at her.

  She thanked him quickly and left by the basement door.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE AIR THAT LAY OVER THE SNOW IN CAZENOVIA PARK WAS SO CRISP IT seemed to have individual layers of cold, like layers of rock in an exposed hillside; it got colder the deeper one dropped. Marty Collins could feel the air get more frigid as the road dipped into a little valley. But his lungs were used to the punishment. He ran this route through the park every day at 1 p.m. before returning home to shower and dress for the second half of his day at the law operation known as Collins & Sons.

  He pounded round the curve of the park road, the gray light from the overcast sky barely making it down through the trees. The road echoed to the footsteps of his New Balance sneakers, answered only by crows in the distance. The park was black, empty.

  The huge oak with the enormous limbs hanging down—a victim of some forgotten ice storm—marked the end of Mile 3. His lungs were burning, but he wouldn’t slow down. This was the only time in his day, besides his solitary breakfast, that he really got to think about where his life was going. And he was thinking about Collins & Sons, specifically that there were no sons anymore. He’d lost Marty Jr. to crystal meth eight years ago that coming February—lost him three years before that, honestly, but the coroner had made it official eight years ago. And Bobby, his youngest, had faded away after his brother’s death. Marty suspected he was into something else, not meth, but something slower. Bobby walked around the house like he was haunting it. It might be good to find out what could be causing his pallid skin and his listless behavior, but Marty Collins didn’t have the heart to do the research. He’d tried to reach Bobby, taken him on fishing vacations up to East Lake in Canada, tried the man-to-man talks when Bobby stumbled in at 3 a.m., but he wasn’t sure the boy had even registered what he was saying. His eyes were usually empty, and when they weren’t empty they were hard.

  Marty Collins coughed and spit onto the frozen tarmac, then increased his pace. Nothing in the Marine Corps, nothing in the service of the Clan na Gael, nothing in life had prepared him for the loss of his sons. He’d taken up running five years ago to give himself a reason to get up in the morning, and it had saved his life.

  He saw a car approach, its headlights on in the gloomy light, weaving across the park road on the higher ground across the creek, maybe a quarter of a mile away. The road was slippery with ice. He moved off onto the border, felt the cobblestone gutter under his feet, and then the softer ground that in summer was covered with grass. The car came closer, and the headlights swept by, blinding him temporarily. Then it was gone, its tires making the sound of hot oil in a skillet on the wet road, and the park returned to shades of black.

  Maybe I’ll take Bobby out on the runs with me, he said to himself. We can talk about what he’d like to do, whether he wants to try college again and maybe law school after that. Marty had built the law firm for his boys. Maybe he’d pushed Marty Jr. too much to follow in his footsteps—he’d always been a terrible student. It came hard to him, English especially. But Marty had pushed him because his father had done the same, and because of his father’s toughness on him he’d built a big house on Potters Road and drove a new Cadillac every three years. In Buffalo, in the County, that made him a king.

  Marty Jr. had broken under his pressure like a rotten plank of wood. Only Bobby remained. And his wife.

  Which meant only Bobby remained. That bitch was back in East Aurora with her sister, waiting for him to call her. She’d have a long wait.

  His legs began to cramp, and he smiled at the pain. He’d always had a high threshold for it, his first girlfriends amazed that he could hold a lighter under his overturned palm for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds. You could actually hear the flesh begin to sizzle before the girl would cry out and pull the lighter away. Why isn’t that kind of toughness genetic? he wondered. Why wasn’t it passed down to my sons as it was to me, allowing me to stand my father’s completely random and indiscriminate beatings?

  Mile 4 approaching.

  He heard another car come up from behind him and again he moved off the road, his sneakers sending clouds of snow as they struck firmly into the ground. The car came closer and he looked idly over his shoulder to see if he might know the driver. But the headlights never made the turn and suddenly the engine revved higher. Before he could jump aside, the car smashed into him and he felt his right thigh snap like a dry branch and pain unlike anything he’d ever felt arc up through his groin.

  He blacked out before he heard the animal sound leave his throat.

  Abbie drove slowly down Seneca, feeling worn out. Her brain was muggy, fogged up. What was she even doing out here? Billy Carney was the only one in the County who would talk to her, and he’d disappeared. Or been disappeared. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and started at the sight. The flesh beneath her eyes looked bruised, her hair was a wild mess, and she looked exhausted, the eyes drained from within. The sinews and joints and the deep muscles ached when she turned her arms or adjusted herself in the driver’s seat. She needed a massage in the worst way. It was time to visit the Koreans over on Genesee Street, the hard-handed women with the peasant faces who beat the kinks out of her muscles and put her into a deep, sweet sleep.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Abbie grimaced and gingerly pulled out it with two fingertips.

  “Kearney,” she said.

  “It’s Billy.”

  She pulled to the side of the road.

  “Are you okay? I was out front of your house but you never came back.”

  “I know.”

  His voice sounded dead.

  “You do?” Abbie put the Saab in park and left the car running, concentrating on Billy. “How did you know I was waiting for you?”

  “Listen, I called to tell you that everything is okay. The phone calls have stopped.”

  “Okay,” said Abbie. She thought for a moment, then drove slowly along the street, letting cars pass on her left. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Yeah, I feel a lot better about things. Must have been drinking too much Scotch.”

  Billy hadn’t been drinking Scotch at the park. He’d been drinking beer.

  “Since when?” she said casually to Billy.

  “What?” Billy said.

  Abbie saw what she was looking for and double-parked the car.

  “When did the calls stop—hold on, I got a civilian flagging me down.”

  She got out and walked quickly to a telephone pole with a squat blue box affixed to it at shoulder height. Abbie looked at the old-fashioned police call box. There were a few left in Buffalo, though the mayor had threatened to cut
the funding for them the year before. His advisers had told him that some people in Buffalo were now so poor that they couldn’t afford cell phones, so the boxes were their last lines of defense against crime. The funding was grudgingly restored.

  Just work, Abbie thought as she pulled her keychain out of her pocket. Don’t let the crackheads have stolen the wires for copper. She found the small silver key, nicked and battered with use; every cop was issued one. She inserted it into the keyhole and opened the heavy door. The phone was black and thick and appeared to have been sitting there undisturbed since World War II, but it looked intact.

  She picked up the phone and held it to her ear while she listened to Billy with the other one. A click, a buzzing, and then she heard a 911 operator.

  Abbie quickly gave the operator her name and what she needed her to do. Thirty seconds later she was back on with Billy.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “What are you doing, Ab?” Billy sounded shaky.

  “My job. I’m a cop, remember?”

  “Okay, okay. Just don’t mess around.”

  “You were saying the calls had stopped.”

  “Yeah. And remember the car I told you about?” Billy seemed boyishly eager now.

  “The green one?”

  “Yeah, it—”

  “What was the make on that again?”

  “Uh, it was a Ford, I think. Maybe a Taur—what does it matter?”

  It mattered because she was trying to drag out the phone call and give HQ time to run a trace, assuming Billy was on a landline.

  “I may want to run it. Don’t be so touchy.”

  “Listen, I saw the green car and knocked on the window. It was some guy doing surveillance for an insurance company on a neighbor of mine. You know, fake …”

  There was a pause, and the muffled airless sound you hear when someone is holding their hand over the receiver.

  Finally, Billy came back.

  “Fake workmen’s comp. Classic, right?”

  “Which insurance company?”

  “What? What the fuck does it matter which—?”

  He took a breath.

  “Listen, the point is that they weren’t after me.”

  “That’s great news, Billy,” Abbie said. “Can we meet and talk? I just found out something that I think will make your whole situation a lot clearer.”

  “I, uh, I can’t make it right now. Got to get ready for this Vegas trip.”

  “You’re going to Vegas? That’s very sudden.”

  “No, I had it planned for months.”

  The muffled sound again.

  “Listen, Ab, I gotta go.”

  Abbie, listening to the 911 line, heard only static. They couldn’t have traced the line that quickly. She had to keep him on.

  “Who’s with you, Billy? Why don’t you let me speak to them?”

  “There’s no one here. Why would you say that?”

  “Right, there’s no one there. But if someone is listening, I want you to tell them something for me. Okay?”

  Silence.

  “Tell them that if you should disappear, I’m going to find every member of the Clan na Gael in Buffalo—make that in western New York—and I’m going to build an airtight case against them. I’m already halfway there. Are they listening now?”

  All she could hear was Billy breathing and the background noise of traffic on Seneca.

  “And they’re going straight to Attica. Do you know what they call that prison, Billy? The inmates have given it a special name.”

  No answer.

  “They call it Africa. Because the people who run the prison are the Crips and the Bloods from downstate. And not as nice as our Crips and Bloods. Believe me, I’ve been through there. And I’m going to prepare a welcome for them at Africa. I’m going to spread the word there that the Clan isn’t some ancient Celtic bullshit spelled with a ‘C,’ it’s really the new code name for the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “Ab.”

  “What they do to middle-aged white guys from Buffalo is not something you’d ever want to see. What they would do to Clan members would be much, much worse.”

  Silence again. Then Billy spoke, his voice seeming farther away.

  “Ab.”

  “Yes, Billy?”

  “Go back to Miami.”

  The line went dead.

  She swept the call phone up to her ear.

  “We have a trace,” the operator said.

  “Where?”

  “The 200 block of Woodside, between McKinley and South Park.”

  “Get Zangara there and any available units. Tell them we’re looking for an abduction victim named Billy Carney. Six foot two, 210, sandy brown hair, most likely in the company of other men. Tell them to start knocking on doors and checking backyards.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ABBIE JUMPED IN HER CAR AND SPED TOWARD THE SKYWAY, SLOWING ONLY briefly for red lights before shooting through. She tried to play out the different scenarios in her head. If someone told Billy the Miami line—wrote it on a piece of paper and held it up for him to read—then he was as dead as Jimmy Ryan. If he’d said it himself, maybe there was a chance.

  The wind rocked her car as it crested the top of the Skyway. Eight minutes later she slid to a stop next to the curb on Woodside and got out.

  Every third or fourth home on the block was vacant. There were old political posters in some of the windows—“Vote for O’Neill,” a mayoral candidate from three elections back—and yellowing newspaper in others. Dogs barked from behind rusting fences.

  Abbie hustled up the block, looking for anything out of place. She ducked into the first backyard and saw nothing.

  “Who’s that?” someone yelled. Abbie looked up; a woman in a nightdress was staring at her from an open second-story window.

  “Buffalo PD. DO you know Billy Carney?”

  The woman slammed the window shut.

  She turned and headed back toward the street. Z’s black Ford Explorer was just cruising up to the curb. The window slid down and Z turned to look at her from the driver’s seat.

  “What’s up?”

  “Billy Carney called me, sounded like he was under duress. We tracked the call here. Take the other end, see if anyone saw a man, mid-thirties, being hustled to a car. I need to find him.”

  “Righto,” Z said. The Explorer’s engine revved and he moved off toward McKinley.

  Turning, Abbie spotted a couple of young boys, clearly brothers, sitting on the steps of a swaybacked porch two houses east of her. They were watching her closely. She walked toward them.

  “Hi, guys,” she said, reaching the bottom step and propping her foot on the third one, leaning on her thigh.

  They nodded solemnly. The younger one, maybe four years old, was petting a fawn-colored guinea pig. He smiled. The other boy, four or five years older, didn’t.

  “My name’s Detective Kearney and I’m with the Buffalo Police and I really need your help. Have you seen anything strange here in the last thirty minutes or so?”

  “Strange how?” the older boy said. He was dressed in a powder-blue down jacket torn at the sleeve, with down feathers sticking out. His face looked like it had built up several layers of dirt and there were streaks of jam around his mouth. The green eyes were mistrustful.

  “A group of men, maybe, leaving in a hurry. Strange cars on the street. People you haven’t seen before. Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “You mean them guys—” the younger boy blurted out. The older one snapped his head left and hissed something under his breath.

  “It’s okay,” Abbie said. “No one will get in trouble.”

  The younger boy looked at his brother, then dropped his eyes.

  “It’s okay. You can tell me, really.”

  “Nuthin’,” he said resentfully.

  The older boy turned to look at her, his face deadened, the eyes sharp. Abbie didn’t know if it was because her clothes weren’t secondhand or because she didn’t live on th
e block or because she was a cop. Such a plentiful buffet of resentments in the County.

  “Listen, if you saw something, you need to tell me. I’m trying to help somebody who may be in a lot of trouble.” She looked at the younger boy, caught his eyes just as he was burying his gaze in the guinea pig’s fur. “If that were true, you’d want to help them, wouldn’t you?”

  His mouth opened and he gave a tiny nod.

  The older boy looked away down the street. “We just came out. We’ve been watching TV.”

  She turned to the younger boy, raised her chin, then looked at the guinea pig. “He’s a cute one. What’s his name?”

  “Gilbert.”

  Abbie nodded and reached out to pet him. Slowly she pushed her fingers forward until she found the little boy’s hand resting in the guinea pig’s fur. He looked at her quickly and she smiled.

  Abbie nodded to reassure him, then mouthed the word “Where?”

  His eyes darted to the back of the older boy’s head, then flitted back to hers. They were wide with fear and the boy’s desire to help. She felt his index finger rise, sticking out of a hole in his mitten. He laid the finger over hers and held it there for a moment, warm and nervous. Then the boy slowly lifted the finger, his eyes on her all the time, and pointed past her left shoulder.

  Abbie squeezed his finger and then dropped her hand to her side.

  “Are you sure you didn’t see anything?” she said sternly to the older boy. “I don’t want to have to talk to your mom and dad.”

  “My mom don’t talk to cops. And my dad’s in Forest Lawn.”

  The cemetery. She nodded, the older boy turning to look at Z knocking on a door. Abbie mouthed “Thank you” to the little boy and walked away. “If you hear anything, tell me or my partner.”

  The older boy laughed dryly.

  She went to the house next door, knocked on the door. It was ridiculous to waste time protecting a five-year-old informant, but in the County he could be branded for life. After waiting for a minute or two, she stepped down the porch stairs and headed across the street.

  “I’m going to try this side,” she called to Z. The house the little boy had pointed to was a shabby two-story affair, painted dark green with white trim. As she walked up the driveway, she saw the screen door at the side flapping open. She pulled back the flap on her jacket and hugged the side of the building as she approached.