Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  Billy ducked his head and peered into the gloom of the hallway bathroom. The moonlight was coming through the window and the porcelain sink was glowing. As he edged farther along the wall, he could see the shower curtain was stretched taut. Hadn’t he left it pulled back to the wall when he showered that morning? He tried to think back but couldn’t remember.

  I hope you’re in there. I’m going to put one through your eye socket and watch you die.

  The sweat on his chest felt cold. He was afraid, sure, but …

  Billy’s face tensed and then he strode into the bathroom, ripping the curtain back. It was empty.

  He breathed out with a “Haaa,” and the gun smacked down on his thigh. His body seemed made of rubber.

  Then he noticed the window. The bottom of the chintz curtain was rippling in a silent breeze.

  The window that had been shut for three months against the winter cold.

  The Sig came up, shaking. The moisture in his mouth disappeared and his tongue felt as dry as a lizard’s. Billy backed out of the bathroom, his spine a column of ice. He looked wildly up and down the hallway.

  Nothing.

  Then he heard it again. The scraping. It was coming from the bedroom this time.

  Billy turned. The white trim around the open door seemed to glow in the gloom.

  He ran to it, sliding the last few feet on the polished floor. When he hit the doorjamb, he slid down to his knees, then brought the Sig up and around, rotating it fast toward where he’d heard the sound. He hugged the doorjamb as he brought his right eye around to follow the gun.

  The scraping stopped.

  Billy whipped his head around the doorframe. Curtain blowing again, but nobody there.

  He heard footsteps crunching in the snow.

  Billy took a deep breath. I’ll call it in, he thought. No need to be a cowboy, he thought. I’ll get Mick over here, and Tommy—

  BOOOOMMMM. BOOOOOMMMM.

  Someone was banging on his front door.

  The sound seemed to send concussion waves back to where Billy was crouched on the floor. Something was trying to knock the door down. Knock the fucking house down.

  He got up, his eyes painfully wide, and brought the Sig up. The door was directly in front of him along the glossy length of hallway. He could see it shiver as another blow hit it.

  The lock rattled.

  He got up and began walking toward the door.

  BOOOOOMMMM.

  He brought the Sig up and the right corner of his eyelid began to tic.

  Suddenly the green glass in the door window exploded inward. The Sig waved wildly as Billy stopped at the entrance to the living room. He could see the snow in his front yard through the hole and feel the thin current of cold air streaming into the room.

  A black-gloved hand came snaking in.

  The hand began to search for the lock, tapping against the wood like a blind man.

  Billy hissed in a sliver of breath and felt the ridges on the Sig trigger tighten against his index finger. He took aim at the center of the door and he visualized the hole that would be blasted there and the scream of the fag—

  Before he could complete the thought, the door shot open. A blast deafened him and his vision went white. He coughed hoarsely and was reaching for his eyes when something slammed into his thorax and pile-drove him back to the floor. It landed on top of him and drove the air out of his lungs. The butt of the Sig bounced hard against the floor, and the gun went skittering away.

  Gasping for air, Billy struggled wildly but he was pinned to the floor by the animal strength of the thing pressing down on him. He felt the hot muzzle of a gun pressed to his forehead. He opened his eyes and saw the white ceiling. Directly above him, a gaping hole had been blasted in the plaster and dust was drifting down.

  He shook his head wildly, trying to get the dust out of his eyes. Finally they cleared enough to see Abbie Kearney sitting on his chest. Her eyes were hard and not quite sane.

  She moved the gun from the middle of his forehead and jammed it into his open mouth.

  I’m going to die, he thought.

  “Where … is … my … goddamn … father,” Ab said. But it wasn’t her voice. It was the moan of a crazy person who hears nothing and sees only darkness.

  “He’th okay, he’th okay.”

  The gun barrel twisted. He could feel the muzzle rotate on his tongue, the circle hot.

  “Show him to me, Billy. Or you die.”

  “He’th thafe, Ab.” The gun pinned his tongue to the floor of his mouth. The pain was making his eyes water and the tears leaked down toward his sideburns. He bucked against her thin form but she ground her thighs and butt into his stomach and he found he couldn’t lift her off. Her thighs were like tensed steel springs.

  His ears still ringing, Billy took a breath. Then he stopped bucking and relaxed his body. A gentle look came into his eyes and he slowly reached up with his hands. When the palms touched the cold outer layer of Abbie’s down jacket, he pressed her shoulders gently.

  “Okay, Ab, okay.”

  Her eyes seemed to swivel and then focus, like an old-fashioned film camera changing lenses. Slowly she took the gun from his mouth. Billy felt his tongue unclench painfully. He looked at Ab’s eyes, the bruised flesh around the eyes. My God, what’s happening to her?

  “He’s at Mercy Hospital,” he said. “Room 1014. He passed out. He’s under sedation.”

  The look in Abbie’s eyes changed from madness to terrified worry.

  “How do you know this?” she whispered.

  “We had a guy watching your house when you were out. He was in the hallway. He heard the thump of your dad hitting the floor.”

  Abbie rested her palm on his chest and the weight of it startled him, as if she were about to collapse on top of him.

  “My father was in the Clan,” she said in a dazed voice.

  Billy nodded.

  “Who’s the other one, Billy?”

  He took a breath. “I don’t know.”

  The look came back into her eyes.

  “Ab, I do not fucking know.”

  She raised her knees off his chest and began to stand, her butt high in the air.

  Billy took a breath. “Jesus, you had me sc—”

  She grabbed his shirt and pulled him up, his shoulders seeming to levitate off the floor. Her strength startled him.

  “Ab, what were you—”

  With a grunt, she pivoted sideways, slammed her hip into his crotch, and threw him over the couch.

  Billy crashed through the coffee table and felt the glass cut deeply through his right forearm.

  “Ab!”

  She was going to kill him.

  He stood up as she came racing around the couch. Her hands came slamming against his cheek and the two of them careened toward the living room windows. At the last minute, he swung her around and pinned her with a cry against the window.

  “Ab, listen to me!” he shouted.

  She opened her mouth to speak and then swiveled her neck and tried to bite his hand with her teeth.

  He pushed his forearm into her neck, pinning her knees with his legs. His crotch was pressed against her stomach.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you—if you’ll calm the fuck down.”

  She began to breathe fast, then her eyes came back and locked on his. They were almost sane now and he breathed out.

  “Okay?”

  She nodded.

  He dropped his arm away from her. He winced, the pain of his gashed arm coming to him sharply. It felt like there was a shard in there still cutting him from inside.

  “You’re a fucking sick one, you know that? I ought to tie you up.”

  She looked at him, the mascara smeared around her eyes.

  “Who is he?”

  “Fuck you. Shoot me.”

  She dropped the gun to her side.

  “Who, Billy?”

  Billy took a deep breath. “His name’s Joe Kane,” he said. “We just found this out
. Nobody knew except one source who finally gave up the name. He used to be a cop. He disappeared four days ago.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “We don’t know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SHE CALLED THE HOSPITAL AND SPOKE TO A DR. SINGH. HER FATHER WAS indeed under sedation. No diagnosis yet. He told her they would know more in the morning. It wasn’t a stroke, that they did know. And she could see him tomorrow at the earliest.

  When the phone call ended, her body seemed to droop. This was the third fainting spell in the last six months. But at least he was safe.

  She put her cell phone on the frame of the shattered table. Then she looked over at Billy.

  “He’s doing okay.”

  Billy nodded.

  A hank of disheveled hair hung over his forehead. The dish towel wrapped around his right arm was beginning to leak through. A drop of blood spattered silently on his dirty carpet.

  She tilted her head and looked at it, then up at his face. Her brows arched.

  “Even?” she asked.

  Billy looked up. “Even?” he said.

  “Yeah. Even?”

  “What the fuck do you mean, ‘even’?”

  “For junior prom. Are we even now?”

  Billy threw up his hands and collapsed back into his chair.

  “I was half a second from blowing your head off. Half … a … second.”

  “And I was half a second from doing the same to you. Like I said, even.”

  He looked at her and wondered how he could even consider forgiving her. The madness in her eyes was gone and it had been replaced not by remorse but by a bruised sadness. He stared into their depths, his anger draining away. He brushed the rest of the plaster dust off his clothes and looked Abbie up and down for the first time that night. She turned toward him, hitched her leg up on the couch cushion, rested her elbow on her knee and her chin on her palm, and looked at him levelly.

  His eyes drifted down the length of her, seeing her for the first time not as the thin and intense schoolgirl from Mount Mercy, but as an electric thing. The memory of her body pressing down on his, its sinews and muscles, was still imprinted on his mind, and a thin pall of heat seemed to cover his stomach and crotch where she had ground into him. His eyes came back up, noticed the silky material of the shirt straining at the button between her two upturned breasts, and his eyes continued up the torquing flute of her neck, the curve of her lips—had she applied lipstick before coming to nearly kill him, or did she do it while she was on the phone?—the full cheeks and the blue eyes, now calm with the power of her body.

  They watched each other for a moment, and the sound seemed to vanish out of the room and all he could hear was her breathing, not his.

  “You put your gun in my mouth,” he said.

  She smiled, a wicked look in her eyes. Arching her back, she stood up slowly and walked over to him. He noticed for the first time that her thighs had filled out since Mount Mercy days and the skin was mimicked by the thin gray wool of her slacks so that she appeared naked. His eyes got no higher than her thin red belt as she stood in front of him.

  She placed her hands on top of his as they gripped the arms of the leather chair. And she slowly bent down.

  “I do believe,” she said, “I can make that up to you.”

  As he led her to the bedroom, Abbie felt the last tendril of blackness leave her mind. She didn’t remember much of the past twenty minutes. But now her eyes and mind were aligned and tracking in slow motion. She could hear the tap of her footsteps on the oak floor, hear the hum of the refrigerator, the wind in the eaves of the house next door. She reached up and touched Billy’s sweater, on his back between the shoulder blades. Her jacket lay on the floor behind her.

  The grief that had shot through her on hearing her father was sick had left her body aching for comfort. Billy was here, and he was lovely and warm. And she didn’t question it at all.

  When they got in the room, it was dark and the white sheets on the bed glowed lavender in the moonlight. She knew he was going to be aggressive, to reclaim something she had snatched away for a moment, and she was happy as he turned and reached to her right breast and mashed it with his big hand, tweaking the edge of pain as he pinched her hard nipple. She groaned and pushed her body against his, curling her hand around the back of his neck. Her middle finger reached far enough to feel his jugular and the blood racing beneath her fingertip and she bit the flesh next to it.

  It was like she’d pressed a button inside him, and he bit her lip as he pulled her down onto the bed. She began to surrender to him now.

  He was rough with her, in the beginning. Instead of unbuttoning her blouse, he put the edge of his right hand at the neck and ripped downward, the buttons disappearing into the dark and making tiny sounds as they hit the floor. He grabbed her by the neck and threw her against the bed and he covered her with his body as if she had caught fire and he wanted to put out the flames.

  She let him. She let him pull her hair back and bite the flesh of her neck. She let him sink down, leaving tiny bites along the muscles of her stomach as she pushed her fingers through his beautiful hair. She let him because she wanted it, too.

  When Abbie opened her eyes, Billy was on his stomach, asleep. She propped herself on one elbow and looked at his body, the wide shoulders and the small indentations of his spine leading down to his naked ass. How fun it would be to slap it and wake him for another turn. But that was in the future. That was for Sunday mornings, in another future, one of many possible futures. Not now.

  Her father was in the hospital and the killer was still loose.

  Abbie felt lighter than she had in years. She leaned over and pressed her breasts against the warm surface of his back, laying her cheek on his and feeling the light ruffle of his breath on her nose. Her arms reached around his ribs and she gave him a quick, strong hug.

  “Goodbye, Billy,” she said.

  Twenty minutes later she was dressed and heading north toward home. She phoned the hospital and made sure there was a cop at her father’s door. They assured her there was, and another at the entrance to the ER.

  Abbie revisited the events of the night, beginning with the moment she’d awakened—that’s all she could compare it to—sitting on Billy’s chest with her gun in his mouth and his hands softly squeezing her shoulders. That gentleness had saved them from something ugly, she thought. It had called her back.

  She made an inventory of all the night’s surprises. She inventoried his physical attributes, smiled, and counted herself satisfied. He’d asked her about the shooting-the-ceiling trick and she said from her Victorian-house obsession, she’d recognized the house as a prewar model that would have plaster ceilings.

  “What if it wasn’t plaster?”

  “Then I would have shot you in the foot,” she said.

  “What if you’d missed?”

  “I wouldn’t have.”

  He told her what she was suspected was true: When he called her after disappearing two days ago, during the traced call, there had been another man in the room, some bruiser named Sheehan. He’d been armed and listening in on their conversation. The threat she’d made about the Clan and Attica Prison might have saved Billy’s life. Instead of killing him, they’d offered him a job in exchange for his silence.

  So he’d forgiven her for the madness more easily than he might have otherwise.

  As she drove, a new thought crept into Abbie’s mind, pushing in against the rush of memories, unwelcome. A frown replaced the lazy smile on her lips. Abbie tapped the steering wheel three times and her eyes went left. She pulled into an all-night 7-Eleven on Elmwood, into a parking space. She gave the two guys loitering by the door a don’t-you-dare-touch-my-car look and headed for the pay phone at the corner of the store. She didn’t want to use her own phone.

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “I heard a shot fired on Dorrance Lane.”

  “What number?”

 
; “One twenty-four, it sounded like.”

  “How many shots?”

  “One.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “Hold on, ma’am.”

  The low tone of being put on hold filled the earpiece. Abbie turned to check on the skels by the door. They were inert.

  “Ma’am, we had another call and checked that out.”

  “You checked it out? What does that mean?”

  “It means we knocked on the door.”

  Abbie was silent.

  “And it looks like we spoke to the owner. It’s been checked out, ma’am.”

  Her mind was racing.

  “And everything’s okay?”

  Billy and she had been loud, but not loud enough not to hear a nightstick banging on the front door.

  “What did I just say? Ma’am, can I get your name?”

  Abbie hung up quickly. She stared at the phone while the fluorescent lights buzzed above her head.

  Back in her car, she called Z.

  “Jesus, Ab, normal people are sleeping.”

  “I know who the third man is. It was an ex-cop named Joseph Kane.”

  “Kane?!”

  She could tell that he was fully awake now.

  “Did you know him?”

  “Yeah, I knew him. How’d you find out?”

  “I slept with Billy Carney, how do you think I found out?”

  “Very funny,” he said uncertainly. Then: “Kane. I’ll be goddamned.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Enough to never want to run into him with the lights out. Meet me in front of the house.”

  When she pulled up twenty minutes later in Williamsville, the sleepy suburb where Z lived, he was waiting in front of his house, breathing out great puffs of steam. He trundled into the passenger seat of her car and sat down heavily.

  “Where we going?” she said.

  “Eden. Kane moved there after he got out of Attica. I printed out a Google map.”

  Abbie gunned the engine and the front wheels spun and then gripped the wet pavement. The car fishtailed and shot down the street. She crossed over Transit, blowing through red lights without even slowing down. In eight minutes, she swept up the on-ramp to 90, heading south.