Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  Abbie smiled, trying to hold back tears.

  “Dad, the picture.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head gently.

  “Come here, my girl.”

  She stood up and went to his side, tears in her eyes.

  “Dad—”

  “Shhh.”

  He reached up and stroked her hair, which she’d forgotten to pull back in a ponytail.

  “Black as Cromwell’s heart, that’s what they used to say about your hair.”

  She nodded. “I know. I heard it enough.”

  “But not me. I always thought it was handsome.”

  She gave him an accusing look. “You mean ‘pretty.’ And I never heard you say that.”

  “You’ve forgotten! Of course I did.”

  “Maybe in the shower you whispered it.”

  He laughed. “I knew that Easter that you’d join the Department. I could see it in your eyes, standing there with the egg and the hundred-dollar bill.”

  Abbie took a deep breath and let it out.

  “I wanted you to see me, Daddy.”

  “I did. Course I did. And I knew that you’d be as good as I was. Because you saw what lay behind things. And that frightened me to death.”

  “Why?”

  “I made a mistake, Abbie.”

  The look—fear, guilt?—came to his eyes and stayed put. He shook his head and looked away from her.

  “What mistake, Daddy? Tell me. Why is someone hunting the Clan?”

  From over her shoulder, she heard the door open and felt a rush of disinfectant-smelling air spill into the room. She didn’t take her eyes from her father’s, but he only smiled.

  “Mr. Kearney!” a voice said.

  Abbie turned to see a thick-bodied nurse with curly dirty-blond hair spilling over her white uniform.

  “You’re awake.”

  “Shouldn’t he be?” Abbie said.

  The nurse looked at her. “It’s time for his shot.”

  Abbie watched the nurse as she walked to John Kearney’s side and began to pull open a syringe from its paper casing. She took the clear bottle and held it up at eye level, then dropped it to her waist and placed the needle tip on the rubber lid.

  Abbie walked around the foot of the bed and came close to her father from the other side.

  “Dad—” she said, softly.

  Her father nodded. He was still smiling, but the energy had drained from his face.

  “Soon, Abbie. Tomorrow we’ll talk all about it.”

  Abbie watched the nurse give him the shot, and waited until his eyes fluttered shut again.

  When she left the hospital, clouds were beginning to cover the sun. Sleep was impossible. Driving always helped her think, so she got in the car. She replayed every word of the conversation in her head as she drove, first through the County, up Abbott and down McKinley and over to South Park. She found she couldn’t focus on the case, only on her father’s words. Was it the drugs doing the talking? He hadn’t been that sweet to her since … Well, since forever.

  Well, if it was the drugs, she didn’t care. She remembered every word he said.

  She decided to drive to the Lucky Clover motel in Niagara Falls, where it had all begun. Maybe visiting the scene would spark something in her, help her assemble the jumble of puzzle pieces in her head.

  Clouds fully obscured the sun as she drove over the Peace Bridge and into Niagara Falls. She drove to the Lucky Clover’s parking lot and turned off the engine. Her angle gave her a clear view of the action. The Clover was busy today, mostly with transients and prostitutes. She watched the alkies stumble out of their rooms and the businessmen johns hurrying out of their company cars for a quick session before going home to dinner and the kids. When they left, the whores hung by the open doors of the rooms and gossiped awhile before collecting their things and heading back toward Niagara Falls Boulevard.

  She needed to eat something. A headache was gathering at the base of her neck, sending exploratory waves of blackness behind her eyes.

  Was Kane the killer or the next victim? Was the Clan out to kill him or to protect him? If he was the killer, could they really mean to cover for him, to keep him out of her grasp and let the murders of two of their own people go? What could he possibly have on the County Irish to hold that kind of power?

  Or had Kane already been taken care of, marched out of his house, taken to a farmer’s field, shot in the back of the head and buried? Nobody would think twice about a gunshot out in Eden. Hunting was a way of life out there. Like the mountain man who scavenged the roadkill, people didn’t involve the authorities unless it was absolutely necessary. If he was in a fresh grave in some cornfield, she’d never know about it.

  She began to nod off in the parking lot, feeling spacy. The mist from the Falls was running down the Saab’s sloping hood in thick streams.

  Abbie woke up, freezing, curled in the front seat of the Saab. She could hear water. She was still in the parking lot, but the motel was lifeless now, the doors closed and the only light coming from the office.

  Everything was dank and gray. A freezing rain was lashing down from a sky roiling with black-edged clouds. It was a storm coming in from over the lake, and from the looks of it the rain was going to get a lot worse.

  Abbie turned the key and the Saab revved up. Cold air blasted out of the heater vents, and her portable police radio, charging in the cigarette lighter, switched on. Several big yawns creaked her jaw open and she shivered in the cold.

  The hoped-for epiphany hadn’t come. The pieces of the case were still unconnected in her mind. No flash of insight. She turned the heater to full hot and thought of calling Z.

  She heard dispatchers sending out calls on her portable radio. Her mind tuned in, but it was all chatter: kids stealing beer from a 7-Eleven, a domestic off of McKinley. She checked her cell phone—no messages from Z or anyone else.

  She decided to get something to eat.

  Abbie was reaching to turn on the car radio when she heard the dispatcher’s voice rise an octave.

  “Unit Six, Unit Six, report of an EDP on the Peace Bridge, American side. Car parked in the right lane.”

  Abbie’s hand paused on the radio knob, then dropped back to her lap.

  A voice answered the call: “Dispatch, this is Unit Six. ETA is twelve minutes. Got anyone else?”

  “That’s a negative.”

  “All right, then. Unit Six responding.”

  Abbie’s brow creased. An emotionally disturbed person on the bridge? It wasn’t known for suicides, like the Golden Gate in San Francisco. In fact, she’d never heard of anyone jumping off the Peace Bridge. Especially in the middle of winter.

  Abbie shifted into drive and eased the Saab out of the parking lot. She’d take the back streets back to the U.S., to avoid the casino traffic. She looked for signs to the bridge.

  Something veered into her thoughts. The killer crossed the bridge to murder George Decatur in the motel. Jimmy Ryan came over it to escort an IRA man back to America. Marty Collins took the case.

  The bridge was part of every single killing, if only in a small way. It was the thing that linked them together.

  Abbie saw a sign saying “Peace Bridge—U.S.A.” and merged into a three-lane street, traffic moving fast. The turbo kicked in and the opposing traffic on her left whipped by in blurs of color.

  Abbie saw the arc of the Peace Bridge approaching ahead, black against a gray-black sky. An arrowhead of bright yellow crash barrels flashed through the windshield of a slow-moving Impala ahead of her.

  “Unit Six, status?” the dispatcher called on the radio. “EDP no longer in sight. May have jumped.”

  No one jumps from the bridge into that freezing river, Abbie thought. Not willingly.

  Abbie jerked the wheel right, accelerating as she went, blew past the Impala and got back in the left lane. She shot into the bridge lane and the road inclined up. Traffic was bunched at the entrance ramp, with a gap to the left next to the colli
sion barrels.

  Abbie slammed on the gas. The Saab slid on the freezing road and began to fishtail. The collision barrels flared up in her side window at ten feet and closing, and she swore, then punched the gas hard. Her wheels sent a terrifying thump up through the floor of the car as they passed over the warning bumps. The car groaned as it came out of the skid and jumped a curb, then shot up the ramp, the bridge’s superstructure looming in the twilight.

  The traffic was thicker here and she began weaving through cars, hitting sixty miles per hour, laying on the horn furiously. Ahead were the bridge tollbooths, with red lights winking as cars waited to pay their way into the U.S.A. Abbie touched the brake and rolled her window down, then punched the gas and barreled toward a lane with a red X blinking above it. As she swept through, she had the image of the toll collector’s pale white face on her right.

  A startled Canadian cop, standing just in front of the custom official’s booth, turned, his hand reaching toward his gun.

  “Buffalo PD,” Abbie shouted, slowing to flash her ID. He nodded and waved her on up the incline. She shot past the customs booth and pressed the accelerator.

  The rain whipped down in sheets and Abbie heard thunder rolling in from the American side. As she gunned the engine, all that was visible ahead was the flick of an occasional brake light. The river to her right was high and thrashing against the boulders in the river. All she could see ahead was steel-gray darkness and the occasional flash of light along a black strut.

  Traffic on the bridge was backed up near the crest of the bridge. Abbie skidded to a stop behind the last car and pushed open the driver’s-side door. A gust of wind exploded into the car. As Abbie put her foot down, rivulets of water pouring down from the crest splashed up her ankle. She stood up and the wind bucked against her. She slammed the door shut, immediately turned her back to the wind, unzipped the hood of her jacket from its compartment around her neck, and pulled it free. The wind tore at it and a drumming noise filled her ears, but she finally managed to yank it over her head and cinch the cords tight.

  Brake lights bobbed in the darkness as the rain lashed across her eyes. Abbie angled toward the railing on her right. She groped in the blackness until she found the top bar of the railing and swung herself over. For a horrible moment, she thought she’d misjudged and this wasn’t the inner railing but the outer one, and she was going to plunge into the dark water that roared beneath her, but her shoes smacked against a metal grate. There was a narrow pedestrian path ahead of her, sectioned off from the traffic lanes on her left. Abbie straightened up, turned to lean into the howling wind, and began to climb. The bridge hummed through the hood as the metal cables seemed to vibrate to the gathering storm.

  She ran, but the slick metal grate almost caused her to go face down on the walkway. She pulled out her gun and held it tight against her right thigh and hurried ahead, trying not to slip.

  The sound was deafening and ahead was blackness with a line of red brake lights on her left. Abbie couldn’t even see where the bridge ended and the sky began. The rain speckled her vision the few times she lifted her head up to check her progress. But the incline was slowly leveling out.

  Suddenly she saw a figure moving away from her on the walkway, dark, bent, and moving fast toward the American side.

  Abbie pointed her gun and shouted, “Buffalo Police!” but the wind tore the words away.

  The figure seemed to merge into the blackness and disappear. Then suddenly she caught its outline against the lights of Buffalo. Abbie dropped to one knee to frame the outline against the glow and saw that it was a man, head down.

  “Stop and put your hands up! Police!”

  The figure turned, reached into its pocket, and pulled out a black object.

  Abbie yelled, “Stop right there or I’ll shoot!”

  A blaze of light shot from the figure’s midsection, then flicked up. She could see a bright yellow coat with three bands of white reflector paint. The flashlight was pointed at the figure’s bright yellow jacket and the logo “Buffalo Fire Department.” Under the yellow helmet and visor tilted down against the wind, she saw the bottom half of a male face, stubbled with dark hair.

  Abbie blew out a breath in relief, stood and holstered her gun. She waved the fireman closer.

  “Could be …,” the fireman yelled. He was holding on to the rim of his helmet, trying to stop it from blowing off. The wind was whipping by so hard she could hear only some of what he was shouting.

  “Could be what?”

  He said something that sounded like “Sue-thide.”

  “You see it?”

  He nodded.

  “How long ago?”

  His words were mangled by the shrieking wind. He tried again but Abbie only shouted, “What?” and cupped her hands over her ears to show she couldn’t hear.

  The man nodded and held up ten fingers.

  Abbie nodded back. A gust of wind bucked her up against the outer railing and she caught a glimpse of white surf forty feet below.

  She pushed herself closer to the fireman and shouted, “Did he leave ID?”

  The fire helmet shook back and forth and the man’s lips turned down at the corners.

  Abbie nodded and began to move past him. The fireman grabbed her arm as she passed. He yelled something but the wind was shrieking up the roadway and its pitch rose with his voice.

  “What?” she yelled.

  “… help orrr …”

  “What?”

  The storm seemed to be roaring into a hurricane. She was able to catch only part of what the fireman was shouting.

  “Someone helped him over the railing?”

  The fireman nodded.

  Abbie gave him a thumbs-up to show she understood, then pointed up at the top of the span. He nodded and turned into the blackness ahead of her.

  The gale blew up through the metal grate walkway and it felt like the wind was trying to lift her off the bridge and send her spinning into the Niagara. Abbie switched the gun to her left hand and grabbed the railing with her right. The lights of Buffalo bobbed ahead of her to the south, the rain whipping across her vision at a thirty-degree angle.

  A branch of lightning flashed in the black sky. And suddenly Abbie saw it.

  A white shape appeared and then vanished ten feet below her. A white shape like a face.

  Abbie backed up against the outside railing, pointing her gun down. How could someone be below her? The face had gleamed for a split second in the blue-white flash of lightning, then disappeared into the blackness.

  The rain pounded against the plastic hood as she crept forward, gun still trained downward.

  A lightning flash illuminated the scene below for a half second and she saw the face ten feet below her, not looking up. This time it was moving away from her. Her heart fluttered in fear.

  “Stop!” she shouted, but the lightning flashed away and the man was gone. She remembered that the Peace Bridge had work platforms below the roadway. But the platforms didn’t go all the way to shore; they reached only across the middle span and led nowhere. So if he was down there, he was trapped, unless he could climb back onto the main roadway and somehow sneak past her.

  Abbie bent over the railing and looked wildly left and right into sheets of rain for a ladder. She could smell the river churning beneath her. Underneath she saw the black outlines of the bridge superstructure. Then she heard something moaning in the wind.

  A white face swept past, ten feet below, moving away from her again. The face was turned toward her. But the man was walking backward.

  “Buffalo Police!” she cried, sticking her gun through the railing to try and get an angle.

  Flash, the man turning—slowly, almost as if in a dream, and retracing his steps. Abbie’s gun dipped to follow him, but again he was swallowed up in darkness.

  Abbie desperately tried to clear her eyes of the streaming water, but everything was blurred.

  “Buffalo PD,” she shouted again, but the wind whipped
her voice to shreds. Could the perp even hear her down there? The rain was drumming so loudly on the steel bridge she could barely hear herself.

  She pulled her radio out of her pocket.

  “Dispatch, five-ten.”

  Come on, come ON.

  “Five-ten, go ahead.”

  “I have a Caucasian male on the underside of the Peace Bridge. Will not respond to orders. I need units here with ropes and a stretcher.”

  “Roger that. Where on the bridge?”

  “Midway. Request expedited.”

  “Roger.”

  The dispatcher began to call more units as Abbie stood and began to feel her way forward. The top railing was round and thick and she could feel paint flake away under her hand. She slid it forward. If she was right, the perp was directly beneath her now.

  Her fingers brushed something on the rail and she snatched her hand back. Jesus Christ, she thought, is that what I think it is?

  Abbie’s fingers tapped along the railing, rain bouncing three inches off her exposed wrist, which was already beginning to freeze. She took a step and reached farther along. Where was it? Did I pass it? All of a sudden her hand touched something rough.

  She found the thick rope looped three times around the railing.

  A face flashed in her mind. A pale white face.

  Her mind dropped into a Tilt-a-Whirl spin.

  Abbie lurched over the railing and cried out “DAAAAAAD!” staring into the white-speckled darkness of the roaring Niagara, surging past like a locomotive.

  Black water rushing by. The bridge shaking in the wind.

  Then the man moved lazily into view.

  Not pacing. Swinging.

  “DAAAADDDDD!” she cried, and reached over for the rope. It was thick and fibers came off in her hand as she clawed it. But the body on the other end of the rope was too heavy. She could barely lift it a couple of inches before the weight and the wind snatched it away.

  The spray whipped her face. She felt her mind slipping, tilting into the black.

  Abbie peered into the darkness, praying, her lips moving as water pelted her face. Then lightning streaked once more across the sky.

  She saw a body on a bucking rope.

  It was white, naked. Finally, she remembered her flashlight and pulled it out of the jacket pocket. The rope popped and moaned in the wind as she clicked it on and then turned the beam downward.