Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  He’d been waiting for the knock for weeks now, on Abbie’s door or this one. He knew the name of the man who was coming. So John Kearney had one last mission to perform for the Clan, to wipe out its only great mistake.

  And then his account with the old country would be paid in full. Ireland had given him nothing. He hadn’t joined the Clan for Ireland. He’d joined because he’d broken his father’s heart by leaving Clare.

  His father had been a strong Republican. Though the words were never spoken, John knew his father had helped the cause as much as a poor farmer could. When John would come home from hunting rabbits, a cold dusk in the sky, strange men would be collapsed in his cot, his mother whispering, “You’ll sleep in your sister’s bed tonight.” The TB bed. Him staring at the men, their muddy boots hidden behind the stove, the air rank with sweat and fear, the men gone in the morning before he got up. He knew they were IRA fugitives. And then he found the guns in the stone fence, while looking for foxes with his best friend Pádraig, from down the road. First they’d looked at the foot of the haystacks to see if any had made their homes there, then by the crooked tree that they’d thrown stones at for target practice, then in the fence that bordered their property. And there they found the black gleaming guns, two pistols wrapped in heavy oilcloth. The kind of pistol, he later learned, that you couldn’t buy in the Republic, issued only by the British Army in Ulster. And so taken from dead men.

  And he felt, not heard, his father behind him, come charging out of the house. Pádraig running away without a word, his brown hair waving in the wind as he dashed for home, away from the beating that was sure to come. And when John turned, his father’s face purple with fear and rage.

  Ah, Dad, are you waiting for me? It won’t be long now.

  The nurse turned from the table.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m giving you something.”

  Had he said something?

  She came closer to him. But it wasn’t a nurse. She was wearing scrubs, but her face was familiar. Wasn’t this James Byrne’s girl, Rosemary? He’d known her as a child. He didn’t know she was a nurse now; the last he’d heard she’d been working downstate at some prison. Good Lord, the thought of a girl going into that pit of hell. Had she moved back home? No, he would have heard.

  “I won’t talk, Rosemary,” he said, but he knew he’d let out another moan from the look of pity on her face.

  A bee sting in his arm. The bees in Clare died in the wintertime. Darkness, darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ABBIE PARKED THE SAAB IN THE LOT OF THE SMALL BOAT HARBOR AND walked past the bait and snacks hut, its windows shuttered for the winter, onto the weathered wooden dock. The ice lay below it, the lake frozen right to the shore. Abbie walked to the end of the dock, reached for the wooden pole driven deep into the lake’s bed, and stepped off onto the ice. The General Mills silo was to her left, the highway behind her, and the expanse of the lake, frozen and silent, straight ahead.

  The light was just murk, everything a hostile shade of blue. Even the ice looked pale blue and fluorescent, as if it were one of those long bulbs dying out and giving off its last rays. Abbie shivered as she walked due north, her feet crunching on the ice. These winter mornings unnerved her somehow. Everything was blue and black and gray, like the world was encased in ice and silence every morning until the sun could warm up the earth enough to coax a bit of color out of it. Now, with the sun just a slit of pale fire on the horizon, the cold was winning. It was pressing down on everything; it was making her lungs ache with the effort of walking.

  She glanced up ahead and to her right. She could see a group of ice-fishing huts, bare specks, a shade darker than the ice. The person who’d written the note was probably out on the ice already. Most of these huts were for weekend fishermen—only the craziest ones took a vacation from work and stayed out here for days on end. And they’d be sleeping off the Molsons from the night before.

  The ice was as solid as city pavement, but with ridges and small breaks in it cut by the wind. There was a dusting of flourlike snow on top that she kicked up as she walked. The huts were growing larger, but she saw no figures, no signs of life. She left her Glock on her hip.

  At thirty yards away, she spotted the red roof and adjusted her path toward it. The hut itself was just unpainted plywood nailed together, not one of the prefab things you could buy and set up. No windows. There was a black Ski-Doo snowmobile next to it. The hut lay past two yellow-painted fishing cabins that sat ten feet apart from each other; she’d have to walk through the gap to reach the rendezvous.

  The morning was still and the sound of traffic was fading away more with every yard she walked. They would hear her coming.

  She stopped a short distance from the gap between the yellow huts, watching for any movement.

  “Hello?” she called.

  Her voice echoed out across the ice.

  She looked over her shoulder. No one at the Small Boat Harbor; she could just see the Saab in the parking lot, all alone. She turned back.

  “Hello?”

  She thought she heard a footstep crunching the snow.

  “Is anyone there?”

  Suddenly a curtain of snow came rushing toward her. Abbie raised her hand to her face but the wave of snow crystals rushed up from the ice, stinging her face and filling her lungs. She gasped and whipped around, turning her back to the wind. The wind seemed to inhale suddenly, tearing at the clothes on her body, and then the gust was past her. The crystals dropped back to the ice and lay there innocently, sparkling in the morning sun.

  Abbie turned. Beyond the yellow huts, a man was standing, unmoving. He had to have been hiding behind one of the huts, then stepped out when the snow cloud swept by. He wore a red ski mask, pulled tight against the skin, a dark blue boiler suit, and brown snow boots. And he was watching her.

  Abbie tried to slow her breathing. Was this the figure from the video? This one looked thicker in the chest somehow.

  The man tapped his hip.

  “Put the gun on the ice.” The voice was deep and somehow familiar. White male, Abbie thought. Forty or forty-five at least.

  “That’s not going to happen,” she said.

  Steam leaked out of the mask’s mouth hole.

  “Then I jump on my Ski-Doo and you never catch the psycho.” The man seemed to be trying to control his voice. No expletives, no rise and fall in the voice.

  Abbie took a step toward him.

  “Turn around,” she said. “And raise your arms up.”

  The figure raised his arms, then twirled slowly. The pockets of the boiler suit were flat against his body. If he had a gun, it was inside the suit. If he went for it, she could get to him before he could reach the pistol. It was worth the risk.

  Abbie unholstered her Glock, bent over, watching the man all the time, and laid it on the snow.

  “You wanted to tell me something,” she said, standing up. “I’m ready to listen.”

  The man stared at her.

  “How do you know the men of the Clan?” he said accusingly.

  The sun was coming up on the lake rim. The man was outlined sharper against the light now.

  Abbie raised her hand to shield her eyes. The man hadn’t moved; he seemed rooted to the ice. “I followed the dead bodies,” she called out. “I didn’t know who they were until I found them.”

  Smoke out of the mouth hole. The man’s head barely moved. “Who else is being hunted?”

  “Aren’t you here to tell me that?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  That voice. Where did she know it from?

  Abbie slitted her eyes against the sunlight.

  “The fourth man is next. Is that you? Is that why you’re here meeting with me?”

  Snow kicked up around the man’s feet and his legs disappeared in white. His torso seemed to float in the air. Abbie blinked rapidly; crystals were blowing into her eyes. Each time one hit, her vision warped and her eyes began to tear u
p.

  The man began to reach for something in his right pocket.

  “Stop!” Abbie cried, ducking toward the Glock.

  The man pulled out a silver key that twinkled in the sun’s rays.

  “I have to show you something,” he said in the same dead voice. “Bring the gun if you want.”

  He turned and began to walk toward the red-roofed hut. Abbie turned and scanned the ice behind her. No one approaching from behind. The cars on the 90 were like fast-moving toys, the sounds of their engines barely reaching her.

  The man disappeared behind the hut. She hesitated.

  “Come on.” His voice seemed far away now, blocked by the hut. She edged to the right and finally caught a glimpse of him. She could see the profile of the red mask, bent down as he fiddled with the lock.

  Abbie picked up the Glock and began to walk between the yellow huts.

  She heard the lock jitter. The man cursed and she heard the door groan, as if the man was pulling at the lock and rocking the door in its hinges. Does he have the wrong key?

  Her feet crunched on the snow, sending a shiver up her leg. She edged toward the yellow hut on the right, trying to keep the man in sight.

  Why doesn’t the key fit? Abbie thought. More of the red ski mask came into view with every step. Now she could see his head and the left shoulder.

  The jingling had stopped. The man wasn’t looking at the lock anymore. He was looking at Abbie.

  And then she began to fall.

  Her scream was choked by black water. She’d gone through the ice and she was in the lake, the water so cold it first felt like burning oil. Her gun went spinning away and the breath was kicked out of her lungs as Abbie thrashed and reached for the rectangle of pale light five feet above her head, but already the current was pulling her into blackness. She kicked upward desperately.

  Her mind screamed. The water in her throat was burning, burning. She jerked her body and felt the nails of her hand scrape against the underside of the ice. She clawed at it but there was no hold there, only smooth ridges that her hands slipped across in terror. It was the nightmare of the tumble off the Skyway, the nightmare she’d envisioned a hundred times. She was going to die.

  A hand appeared, descending down from the rectangle of light. A white hand. It gestured lazily, closing and then opening and then closing again. Come, it was saying. Come.

  Her body seemed to be shutting down. Her legs were going dead and the feeling in her face and arms was fading. Kick, Abbie, she cried to herself. Kick or you will be unconscious in one minute.

  She didn’t so much kick as spasm her whole body. The last bubbles of oxygen in her lungs seemed to expire as she thrust upward and reached for the ghostly hand.

  Oh, God, let me die but let me die above the ice. I can’t take being entombed in this blackness.

  The hand came closer and she thought she saw the red mask rippling above it. Finally, the hand dipped down and caught hers and began to pull her upward. She closed her eyes and pushed toward the rectangle.

  The hand pulled her up and she broke the surface of the water. She gasped a lungful of air and screamed it back out.

  The man was squatting at the edge of the rectangle cut into the ice. He didn’t pull her out. Instead, he took his right hand and rested it on top of her hair, streaming with water.

  Abbie heard her gasping voice in her ears. She couldn’t make words.

  The man looked at her, through the holes in the mask. “Shut up, you stupid cunt,” he said calmly.

  Abbie reached up and grasped at the edge of the ice. Her hand was frozen into a claw.

  “Gettttt—” No more words could get past her chattering teeth. The man looked over, then slowly reached down and pushed her hand off the ice. She thrashed helplessly in the water.

  He stared down at her. The eyes were crisp blue in the red eyeholes. “Listen to me.”

  Abbie stared at the mask in terror.

  “Who’s next?” he said.

  “Whaaaaa—”

  The hand pushed Abbie’s head down into the dark lake, and water flooded into her open mouth. Her vision filled with blackness and the water burned her eyes.

  She came back up with a high-pitched gasp.

  “You mother—”

  The man answered, his voice almost a moan.

  “Who … is … next?”

  Abbie could only stare wildly and shake her head. The current was pulling at her body and her feet floated up under the ice, her toes bumping against the underside. She fought to stay vertical but the strength was draining from her body and being filled with a leaden blankness.

  “Who?” the man said calmly.

  Abbie gripped the edge of the ice and lay back. Her hand reached for the boiler suit, but in almost comical slow motion. She wanted to pull him in with her. She would pull him down into the inky depths and they would die together.

  The man batted her hand away, then leaned over the hole, steam flowing past the mask.

  “If you don’t get off this case,” he said, enunciating each word, “they’ll never find your body.”

  With that, he stood up. Abbie’s eyes grew wide and she grunted, “Noooo.” But the man turned and began to disappear over the lip of the ice. The top of the red mask was the last thing to vanish.

  All she could see now was the gray sky. Her hearing was growing sensitive, and she heard, or thought she heard, the traffic from the 90 like a steady electric hum. Her body below her waist was disappearing. She couldn’t feel her legs, just an area of frigid nothingness where they should have been.

  Abbie took a ragged gasp of air and reached toward the ice with her shaking hands, reached past the clean-cut edge. If I don’t get out on the first try, I’ll float all the way to Canada under the ice, she thought as her mind began to dim. Her body wanted that. Her body wanted to sleep.

  Her hands rested on the burning ice. She bobbed once, twice, then with a hoarse scream she pushed her palms flat and launched out of the water. She got her torso out up to the waist, water splashing down onto the powdery snow, and her cheek sank down to the ice. She was facing north, looking out on the vast expense of ice lit by the rising sun.

  The man was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  TWO HOURS LATER, ABBIE WAS IN THE SAAB, THE HOT AIR FROM THE HEATERS just starting to reach her bones. She stared at the lake ice, turning golden in the morning sun.

  She’d managed to crawl out of the ice hole, her clothes freezing on her in the open air until it felt like she was wearing a suit of stiff leather. The crawl to the hut had taken her fifteen agonizing minutes. If it had been ten feet farther away, she wouldn’t have made it. But she’d got to the plywood structure, found the small window that looked away from shore and broken it with her elbow, then crawled through the opening and collapsed into the hut, which smelled of musk oil and the peculiar yeasty tang of Genesee Cream Ale. There was a blanket there, a smelly old army blanket, but to her it was the loveliest thing she’d ever felt on her skin. She’d taken off all her clothes and wrapped herself in it, sitting on a stool that served the fisherman when he was crouched over his hole on the ice.

  After an hour, her body temperature had returned to normal; her clothes were sodden instead of icy. She’d squeezed herself painfully back into them and walked back off the ice.

  He was out there last night, she thought, when it was snowing. He cut a long hole in the ice between the yellow huts and lay a piece of cardboard over it, or something flat. He pegged it down at the corners. He let the snow cover the trap and then led me to it.

  The man didn’t move like the killer in the motel video. And he’d asked her things the killer should know. He was probably Clan, wanting to know if his name was on the list. But hadn’t Billy said there were only four Clan members? Jimmy Ryan, Marty Collins, Joe Kane, and her father. Three dead and one in the hospital. All accounted for. So who was the man on the ice?

  A shiver knocked her teeth together in the tight s
pace of the Saab.

  After thirty minutes, Abbie started the car, headed south on the 90 and drove home. After standing under a hot shower for twenty minutes, she put on fresh clothes and headed back to the Saab. She drove to the Buffalo Gun Center on Harlem Road and replaced her Glock 19—now at the bottom of Lake Erie—with the same model. Then she drove to headquarters.

  Once there, she said nothing to the men around her. Maybe one of them was holding my head underwater three hours ago, she thought.

  I didn’t meet the killer, she thought. I met my competition.

  Abbie and the other detectives divided up the work of searching for the list of assassins. The working theory was that some Clan member must have kept a tally of those brought across the border. Her father was under sedation, so the only chance of finding a list lay with the three victims: Ryan, Collins, and Kane. Perelli had ordered them to check homes, offices, work lockers, everything.

  Abbie had chosen Collins’s home. Lawyers were record keepers, she thought. Collins gave her the best chance.

  When she arrived at the house on Potters Road, the door opened an inch to her knock and a pale young face appeared in the gap.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Buffalo PD.”

  If it was possible for a face that pale to go paler, it did.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a warrant to search the house.”

  She held it up. The whole Buffalo judicial system—beat cops, judges, prosecutors—had snapped into line. The city was terrified now. O’Halloran had been ordered to stop pursuing the killer on his own and fall in behind Abbie, and to share all information, at the price of his badge if he didn’t. She could have hauled the mayor down for questioning if she’d wanted to.

  The young man’s blue eyes went unfocused.

  “I … I, um, the house is a mess.”

  “Open the door.”