Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  When she got within a few feet of the doorframe, she saw that the black wooden door was wide open.

  Abbie pulled out her gun, pushed the door with her foot, and stuck her head around the doorframe. There was a worn set of stairs directly ahead, and a doormat on the floor that read “Good Morning Sunshine.” She walked quickly up the steps, pushed a door with her toe and found an empty bathroom. To the other side was the kitchen.

  The house gave the feeling of emptiness. She walked through the first floor briskly. In the living room, sparsely furnished with mismatched chairs and a pale green couch, she saw a coffee table with a whiskey bottle and a pack of Marlboro Lights and an ashtray. In the ashtray, a cigarette butt was smoking and a piece of paper gave off a thin wisp of smoke.

  “Abbie?”

  “In here.”

  Z came up the stairs and was standing beside her. Abbie picked up the paper, blew softly on the edge, and pressed it gently between her fingers.

  “What is it?”

  She held the paper up to the light. A blackened section flaked away and fell to the floor, but a one-inch-square piece was just browned over and not completely burned. Z craned to have a look.

  “Marty … Collins,” he read.

  “Billy told me one of the members of the Clan was named Marty. So this is him. Find out where he lives, will you?”

  Z nodded and began to punch some numbers into his cell phone, ducking out the front door for better reception.

  Abbie studied the note. It had apparently been written very fast. The strokes got lighter at the end, with the last letters almost unreadable. It was the way you wrote if you had to use one hand. Or if someone was standing nearby who wouldn’t have been pleased to see you scratch out a few words.

  You had five seconds to write something and you wrote “Marty Collins,” she thought. Why didn’t you tell me where they were taking you, Billy? I’d rather save you than this Marty Collins. I’d rather save both of you but if I had to choose I’d choose you. Is this note the equivalent of going to your execution with your head held high and in total silence, so your executioners later shake their heads in admiration? Really, you shouldn’t have bothered.

  Or did you tell me where to find you and they burned that part of the note? Bad luck. Lousy, no-good, rotten luck, the same you’ve had for all your life.

  The note was half-burned. But Billy didn’t smoke. He still had that ex-athlete’s thing of trying to look healthy at least.

  So he’d had an escort.

  Z walked in.

  “Martin Collins is a County lawyer who works out of his home.”

  “Where?”

  “Fifty-four Potters Road. Right on the park.”

  She was past him and out the door.

  The Saab’s engine was revving so loud it sounded like parts were going to come up through the hood. Abbie braked, took a corner onto Abbott, moving the wheel half an inch at the last second, just avoiding a silver-haired woman in a checked coat who was crossing the avenue going south.

  “Easy!” Z yelled.

  She accelerated. As they came to a red light, she hit the horn and didn’t even touch the brakes. On her right she saw a cement truck jerking to a stop, its hood popping up and down, and heard the muffled sound of air brakes letting out a huge SSSHHHOOOOO.

  She came to Shenandoah and made the right, streaked down the small street in five seconds, two-story homes flashing by on both sides, then another right onto Potters. She checked her mirror and hit the accelerator. The park was on her left, the snow lit violet by the afternoon sun. Collins’s house was three blocks away.

  She swept past a line of parked cars, then suddenly hit the brakes. The car rocked to a stop.

  “It’s three houses down, Ab.”

  “I know. But Billy Carney said he’d been followed by a green Taurus. And look what’s sitting out front.”

  Z raised his eyebrows. Abbie pointed her chin toward 54 Potters Road, about twenty yards ahead on the right side. Z spotted the green Taurus sitting by the curb, the last in the line of parked cars. Smoke was wisping from its tailpipe.

  “Got it,” Z said.

  Abbie pressed the gas and coasted up to the Taurus. Two heads, white males, in the front seats. She was out before Z had opened his door.

  Gun out and pointed down thirty degrees. Watching the driver’s head. He saw her coming, a coffee cup rising slowly to his mouth. When it was at his lips, she tapped on the glass with the tip of her gun.

  The cop glanced left, his blue eyes aware of the gun. Then he turned to look straight ahead and was lowering the coffee cup to his lap when Abbie pulled the door open. As he turned, she recognized him. She’d seen him downtown coming out of the Chief’s office, striding through headquarters looking important. They called him Q. A beat cop, obviously moonlighting for the boys at the Gaelic Club, protecting the secrets of the County.

  He looked at her like she smelled bad.

  “Where’s Collins?” Abbie said.

  “You have a warrant, Kearney?”

  “Where is he?”

  The other man leaned over.

  “How’s your dad?” he said.

  Brown mustache, older.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Tell him I said hi.”

  “I will. What’s your name?”

  The man’s face went blank and he sat back in his seat, staring straight ahead.

  “Where’s Marty Collins? It’s urgent.”

  Q raised the cup of coffee and both men looked as if they were watching a drive-in movie through the dirty windshield.

  Abbie grabbed Q’s collar and leaned back, then jerked him head-first out of the car, the cup teetering back and the hot coffee spilling down his shirt.

  “Hey! You crazy or something?”

  Z had the other guy out by then, pushed up against the car. He whispered something Abbie couldn’t hear. She had Q spread-eagled on the hood of the car, facing the park.

  Abbie leaned in over his shoulder, her lips two inches from Q’s ear.

  “Where’s Collins?”

  Q shook his head. He was beefy. Looked like he lifted weights, but his neck was thick with fat.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What were you doing out here? Bird-watching?”

  “You know who I am?”

  “I know you were the one who was supposed to be watching Marty Collins when the killer cut his face off.”

  His head snapped left and one big blue eye swept over her face before he looked back down.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Collins is next. It’s happening. Soon. Maybe even now. Is he inside?”

  Three beats.

  “Yeah.”

  Abbie called to Z and they hustled the men into the house. The front door was open and Kearney left Q in the front hall as she ran up the wide staircase and checked upstairs. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, all tidy and empty. She did a second look-through, saw the little door cut into the hallway ceiling, got a chair from the second bedroom and pulled it underneath. She reached up and pulled the handle down.

  The attic smelled like mice and Christmas, and it was empty of everything except boxes and spider webs.

  Z met her at the foot of the staircase.

  “Nothing here. Basement’s clean.”

  Abbie stared at Q, who was standing by the front door, leaning against the jamb. He stared defiantly back.

  “He has to be here. No one’s gone in or out.”

  “Does he ever leave the house, for any reason?”

  “Just to go running, but we follow behind in the car.”

  “Did he go running today?”

  Q shook his head. “No, he said he hates the smell of the exhaust when the wind changes.”

  “So maybe he went running without you. Check upstairs for his sneakers and whatever he wears when he goes out.”

  Q looked at Brown Mustache.

  “Now.”

  The two m
en moved up the stairs, and Abbie went to the kitchen window. The house backed on Cazenovia. She could see a triangular flag fluttering in between pale branches. The golf course.

  The stairs pounded above her head.

  “His running gear is gone, but I swear …”

  Collins could have gone out the back, cut through the trees and straight onto the golf course.

  “When does he usually go running?”

  “One o’clock”

  Abbie checked her watch. “That was three hours ago. You dumbasses have been guarding an empty house for three hours?”

  “Let’s go,” she called to Z.

  When Abbie swung out and made the right into the park, she saw the Taurus pull in behind her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MARTY COLLINS CAME TO, BREATHING RAGGEDLY, HIS HEAD HANGING DOWN on his chest. His eyes swam with tears clotting with the cold, then focused on the New Balance logo on his blue zippered sweatshirt. Past the sweatshirt, the snow was red and pitted. A second later the pain cleaved into his brain and he screamed and screamed.

  I must have been knocked into the bushes that lined the side of the creek and caught in their thorns, he thought when he’d run out of breath. I’m going to die here. He looked up. The sun was dropping over the branches above; the afternoon was turning to dusk. How had no one found him yet?

  “Oh God, have mercy!” he yelled, and he saw a pair of crows lift from the top of a nearby tree.

  In the silence that followed, a voice answered.

  Marty Collins looked around at the gloom surrounding him. There was a figure in the snow eight or ten feet away, its back against a curtain of black brambles. It wore a green-and-black-checked wool coat and a black ski mask, and it was sitting on its haunches, watching Marty.

  “What did you say?”

  “No merthy.”

  The voice was like nothing he’d ever heard. It was like a kid with a speech impediment. Marty Collins had the uncanny feeling that he was speaking to an evil child.

  “Help me, please. I was hit by a car and—”

  He pushed his chest forward to get clear of the trees, but something was holding him back. He jerked his right shoulder forward, but there was a cord tied to his upper arm and anchored somewhere behind him. He tried taking a step, but the tiny pressure he placed on the broken leg sent a jagged explosion of pain up through his pelvis and gut. It took him minutes to regain the power of speech.

  “Just help me,” he moaned. “Just please go get help.”

  The figure said something.

  “What—”

  “Aythe driving huckar.”

  Marty tried to block out the sickening pain to decipher what the thing had said.

  “AYTHE drivin huckar.”

  “You were driving the car? You?”

  “Yes.”

  Marty Collins stared at the black eyes, and his bowels slowly went cold. A thought slipped through the agony in his brain, disappeared, then returned, more insistent.

  “You killed Jimmy Ryan, didn’t you?” he said.

  The figure just stared.

  “Listen, listen. Just get me out of here and you don’t have to see me again. I will tell them nothing, do you understand me?”

  The man in the ski mask reached behind him and took out a large knife. It flashed silver in the darkness, reflecting the glow of the moonlight and the snow. The man’s eyes, black through the slits of the ski mask, regarded him.

  “Why didn’t you run when Jimmy Ryan was found?”

  Whyn’t you run-n Himminyryne wuzfound?

  It sounded like one long moan but Marty Collins got the sense of it.

  “Why should I?!” Marty yelled, his face reddening. “I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.”

  The knife sounded along the hard ground like it was scraping flint.

  Then the lisping voice again. Was it disguising its true voice? Marty hung his head as he deciphered what the thing had said:

  “Each one chooses one. Jimmy chose you.”

  Marty Collins swept his head left and right, filled with hatred for that drug-dealing scum Jimmy Ryan. He had never wanted him on the rolls of the Gael. It was a sacred institution, and Jimmy was a useless con artist who was beneath the Clan’s history, its illustrious and unfulfilled calling. But the others had outvoted him. They needed Jimmy, they said. They had to have him.

  The scraping of the knife on the ground brought him back to the park. He looked up at the killer. If it was who he thought it was, he was as good as dead.

  “Is this how you repay us, traitor?” Marty said slowly. Hot indignation temporarily blocked the grinding pain from his leg. “We saved you.”

  The figure laughed, a booming sound that seemed to return from the trees filled with steel.

  “You have no idea what we did for you,” Marty sputtered. “You have no idea.”

  The figure stood up. It reached up and began to unzip the green-and-black-checked jacket. Marty Collins dipped his head.

  “Cut me down from here. Cut me down, you animal!”

  When Marty looked up again, the jacket was off, and the thing had turned its back to him. Marty heard the sound of a zipper, and the thing began to take the sweatshirt off. The bare right shoulder came into view.

  Marty Collins stared despite himself. His eyes widened.

  After a few seconds of complete bafflement, he understood. A gasp escaped his lips. He tried to speak but the words were just a grunt of steam into the air.

  He’d been wrong. In his mind, the face of the man he’d thought was behind the mask dissolved, replaced by a different and more terrible one, the killer’s true face. Marty Collins understood now who the man standing before him was, and he knew that Jimmy Ryan had understood at the end, too. He realized why Jimmy had spilled his guts so quickly, and for a moment he had a flash of empathy for Jimmy that seemed to warm his shivering body. And the feeling was for himself, too, for the mutilated thing he would soon become.

  The figure advanced toward him, the black ski mask still on, the knife at his waist. When he reached Marty Collins, the figure breathed for a moment, willing Marty to raise his eyes. When he didn’t, the knife point pricked into Marty’s chin and lifted it.

  The man stared into Marty’s eyes as he dropped the knife to his stomach, just below the belly button. Then he whispered something into Marty’s ear and gave the blade a hard cutting flick.

  Abbie sat in her cubicle, a can of Diet Coke hanging listlessly in her hand. It was 10 p.m., and there was no one in the cubicles around her.

  Her mind went over and over the events of the night. After leaving Collins’s house, followed by his bodyguards, she’d driven up and down the park road three, four, five times. There was no sign of Marty Collins. Then she and Z had gotten out on foot and walked the road in the dying light, looking for footsteps leading away from the path he’d been running. There were only two that were fresh. One had led to the side door of a single-story house on the edge of the park. Inside they’d found the homeowner, Joseph Maclin, forty-six and a plumber, having a beer at his kitchen table. He’d told them his car had broken down on Abbott, so he’d come through the park road and cut over to shorten the trip home. His boots matched the tracks in the snow. And unless he’d carried Collins on his shoulders, there was no way he’d been anything other than alone.

  The other track consisted of two pairs of footsteps that led to the old brick custodian’s hut looking out over the Bowl. There they’d found two teenagers, one male and one female, with two 52-ounce bottles of malt liquor, curled up for warmth like sleeping kittens. The lock was broken and the teenagers had thrown some files around, smashed a computer screen before settling in for a nap. Runaways.

  They’d seen nothing. No cars, no runners, no blood, no suspicious ski-masked strangers lurking on the park road. They’d been sent to their families in the rich suburb of Orchard Park in the back of a squad car, half-blitzed and bitter.

  Which meant one of three things. Either Mar
ty Collins had taken a different running route for the first time in years, or he’d made it to the Seneca Street end of the park and disappeared there. Or the killer had caught him on the park road and got him into his car. Which meant he could be anywhere right now.

  She listened to her voice mails. Detective Mills from Niagara Falls PD had called to ask her out on another date. She smiled wanly and made a mental note to call him. But no dates yet. Not until she had the killer. One man at a time, she thought.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE FIRST CALL TO THE BUFFALO FIRE DEPARTMENT CAME IN AT 6:40 A.M. The second thirty seconds later. A brush fire in Cazenovia Park. The squad on Abbott Road, used to the calls for fires raging in one of the abandoned two-family homes that dotted the County, finished their coffee before walking leisurely to their open lockers and slinging on their coats and boots. Five men climbed aboard the gleaming red engine before hitting the siren and heading down Abbott to Cazenovia Park Road. By then they could see the black wisps of smoke rising from the middle of the park. They sighed. They knew the snow was deep and breaking trail to the fire with sixty pounds of equipment would leave them drenched in sweat after just a few minutes.

  The first to reach the site was Captain Edward Burns. He followed the creek, followed by three men. He could hear the sound of wood splintering in intense heat before he saw the red flames after a dogleg turn in the creek bed. When he turned and found the fire before him, it was consuming a stand of small oaks surrounding a tall elm tree. At the foot of it stood a thick bramble of black scrub, so tightly interwoven it looked like a mesh of wrought iron. To get hoses directly on the fire, they would have to go through it. But first he had to have a look.

  Burns, breathing heavily, powered his legs through the last of the ice-rimed snow and dropped down to a little path that had been stamped into the snow at the entrance to the bramble. He held a large axe in his right hand, and he broke the ice ahead of him as he lurched forward.