Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  Hallway, a leather couch and loveseat, a green carpet that seemed too expensive for the house. And there was Dolores Riordan positioned beside the front door. She was a petite brunette woman dressed in a red-and-white-checked apron and dark jeans, her back arched as she held the gun in her left hand, aiming out through the blown-out picture window. As Abbie watched, Dolores leaned her head out to get a better look at the Dodge.

  Beyond her, Abbie saw neighbors on the sidewalk in front of the house, uncertain of what was happening, their pale faces staring, mouths opening and closing.

  Abbie brought the Slammer up and centered the sight on Dolores’s pretty brown hair.

  “Hold it right there.”

  The woman froze.

  She spoke. Gaelic again, the thick sounds coming from deep in her throat.

  Abbie shook her head slowly as she kept her gun trained on Dolores Riordan’s head.

  “I told you, I’m not IRA. I’m Absalom Kearney from the Buffalo Police and I’m not going to hurt you. Put the gun down.”

  The woman’s head sank a couple of inches, as if Dolores were listening intently.

  “I came to get a name from you. The name of the man who killed my father.”

  Dolores Riordan breathed deeply.

  “Don’t do—”

  Dolores swiveled her hip back and the gun barrel came up. Abbie flicked the tip of the Slammer left and fired.

  Dolores Riordan hit the doorframe and went down. Abbie covered the distance to her in three steps and banged her gun on Dolores’s wrist, knocking the pistol out of the assassin’s hand. It went spinning away and Abbie crouched over Dolores’s face, her eyes wild.

  The bullet had caught Dolores in the shoulder. Blood welled up through her white blouse. The woman was breathing with a faint rasp. Abbie leaned down, the Slammer next to Dolores’s left temple.

  “Who is Fergus MacBrennan?”

  Dolores Riordan gurgled something and shook her head sharply.

  Abbie took Dolores’s hair in her right hand and banged her head sharply on the floor.

  “I’m guessing the IRA gave you all cover names when you worked for them. Operational names. One of them was a Fergus. What was his real name?”

  She said nothing. The eyes were black, strangely depthless. Was she in shock, or just preparing herself to die?

  “Do you want to bleed to death or do you want to see your kids again?”

  Suddenly Dolores coughed and red drops sprayed out from her lips, a few landing on her pale cheek. Her eyes went wide with fear.

  “I must have nicked your lung. Sorry about that. But it’s filling up with blood now, which means you’re going to die faster than I thought. Come on, Dolores.”

  The woman tried to say something.

  “What was that?”

  Dolores gasped for breath.

  “We called him Houdini.”

  Her voice was strangely light when she spoke English. Even musical.

  “Why?” As she spoke, Abbie pressed her left hand on the woman’s shoulder wound to slow the bleeding.

  “Because … made people disappear. A magician. Loved to cut up the bodies. When we needed someone gone, an informer or such, we’d bring them to Fergus in his basement in Derry.”

  Abbie heard voices now, yelling Dolores’s name. Soon the neighbors with the guns would take the lead. Abbie reached over and pushed the front door shut with a terrific bang.

  “What was his given name?”

  “They didn’t tell us.”

  “But you know it,” said Abbie.

  Dolores’s mouth opened like a fish flopping on the shore, and she sucked in a whistling breath.

  “Go fuck yourself, you dirty bitch.”

  Abbie took the pressure off the wound. Blood gushed up through the apron fabric and Dolores’s eyes went wide.

  “I feel—”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Dolores. Fergus was from Derry. You’re from Derry, or somewhere close. I hear it in your accent. Too many nights in the Gaelic Club for me to miss that.”

  Eyes staring.

  “You knew him growing up, didn’t you? Before the IRA gave him a new name?”

  The lips bloodless in a grimace. Then a nod.

  “And you saw him once he came over? You even know his new identity here in America, don’t you?”

  “Dolores, are you okay?” A deep male voice from outside.

  Abbie looked down.

  “Last chance.”

  “Dolores, is she in there with you?”

  Dolores Riordan nodded.

  “We thought,” she whispered.

  “You thought what?”

  “Thought he was cured.”

  Two sharp blows on the front door, which shook in its hinges.

  “He wasn’t cured. He’s killing again. What’s his American name?”

  Dolores Riordan’s eyelids fluttered up and the black eyes were growing distant, looking straight through Abbie.

  “O’Halloran,” she whispered. “Dennis O’Halloran.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE THREE-QUARTERS MOON WAS RUFFLED BY DARK GRAY CLOUDS. THE weather reports on the car radio warned of another squall.

  Abbie made the call from her cell phone. She had to call information to get the number. Once the operator had it, Abbie told her to make the connection.

  The phone rang three times.

  “Gaelic Club.”

  Fiddle music and the babble of voices behind it.

  “I’ve seen that bitch everyone’s looking for.” In her best County voice.

  The sound of voices was closed off on the other end, like the speaker had cupped his hand over the phone.

  “Who is this?”

  “Can’t tell you. I don’t want to be part of a lynchin’.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Down by the lakeshore, past the Small Boat Harbor. At the foot of the grain silos.”

  A pause.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  She hit the red button and the call cut off.

  Enormous slate-colored rocks littered the shore. Silvery flecks in the boulders gleamed in the moonlight. Abbie felt the sandy surface of one craggy rock as she leaned to take a look at the Skyway, the lake frozen and silent behind her. A city dump truck—yellow against the gray—passed along the elevated highway, as small as a child’s toy, probably on its way out to pick up a load of salt to do the roads. A small red compact car was going the other way. Their headlights crossed like lances and then they were past.

  The whole city was laid out in front of her, downtown to her left, the lights of the auditorium and the sandstone slabs and long chestnut-brown windows of the Buffalo News building. Tifft and the approach to the County was straight in front of her. To the right, the massed shapes of the old steel mills and their enormous slag heaps. Behind her, the frozen lake; a man walking across would be visible from half a mile. Only the looming presence of the old General Mills grain silo behind her blocked a perfect view of the ice, as it threw a hard-edged shadow over everything around her. But no one was going to walk over from Canada to kill her tonight.

  I’ve had enough surprises, she thought. Enough and more than enough.

  For a moment, she considered calling Z and laying out the whole case against O’Halloran, getting him to talk to Perelli, allowing the justice system to work. O’Halloran’s past as a killer in Northern Ireland would work against him. He had probably been the one who had opened those windows in Billy Carney’s house, trying to find out what Billy was going to tell her. Had he heard the call where Billy talked about the new information he needed to give her? It was the only way it made sense.

  She remembered O’Halloran’s face when she’d walked into Billy’s house, the bulging eyes. It wasn’t fury over Billy’s fresh corpse, it was the thrill of the murder slowly ebbing away.

  O’Halloran had access to the County machinery. He could have gone to the EC Med Center and gotten a vial of her blood—most cops she knew kept
a supply on hand there in case they got into a firefight and needed a transfusion. He could have brought it to the little bramble patch where Marty Collins had been hung and dabbed a bit on the branches, or slipped a swab into the tech’s samples from the scene. Not hard to do. He was working the night the monkey face had appeared on the Saab hood; he could have left the note in her wheel well and gone back upstairs. And he fit the description of the man who’d nearly drowned her under the ice the next morning.

  As an Irish cop in good standing, he was hooked into the newswire and the County machine. He had eyes everywhere throughout the neighborhood. A thousand little informants feeding tips to the killer himself. O’Halloran must have loved it, sitting fat and pretty at the center of the web, able to track her every move.

  But why kill her father and the other Clan members who’d brought him to America? Her father had probably gotten him a job with the police department. They’d risked their careers to get him across safely. Maybe he just liked killing, and he wanted to extinguish his past so that he’d never go behind bars again. Wiping out the last people in Buffalo who knew his real identity.

  Abbie blew out a breath into the blue-black night air. O’Halloran wants to erase his past, and I want to find mine. How ironic. What I wouldn’t give for a history like his—to know my roots back five generations, to have fought for the place I loved. And here he is snuffing out the little lights that trace him back to Ireland, the ungrateful bastard.

  To her left, a few small boats sat in the harbor, frozen in, the windows dark. Maybe the owners had forgotten to pay their fees and the marina’s managers had left the hulls to snap and break in the ice, as examples to everyone. The place stank of dry seaweed.

  She checked the Slammer and found the extra bullets Z had taped to the side, now loose in her coat pocket. She pulled them out and tucked them deep into her pants pocket. If she had to duck between the boulders, she didn’t want them falling out.

  The wind shifted and Abbie heard a tiny whine buzzing in the air. She looked up in the sky and scanned the horizon. Helicopter? It couldn’t be. There was nothing up there except blackness and scudding clouds.

  The wind shifted and the sound disappeared.

  Abbie raised her head over the edge of the boulder and checked the Skyway again. Three sets of headlights were heading south from the city. She watched the first one pass the Tifft exit, two hundred yards away, then the second.

  The third slowed and came down the ramp, hesitated, then nosed into the harbor entrance. Abbie watched it, eyes even with the rock’s edge. It looked like a Department car. The headlights lit up the rutted snow in the road, then gray boulders, and finally the steel bar across the entrance. Abbie had parked along the service road half a mile away, then walked back in until the silos were behind her.

  The car stopped and the lights cut out.

  Abbie heard the tinny sound again. It sounded like a small motorcycle. She scanned Tifft and the service road running perpendicular to it, but nothing was moving.

  As the car rolled up to the barrier, she trained her gun on the dark outline of the driver.

  A click. The car door opened and a figure emerged and stood behind the door, looking toward the lake. The door slammed and the figure came walking toward the guard’s booth thirty yards away. It stepped around the barrier and was twenty yards away. Fifteen. Still too dark to see the face.

  Abbie stood and pointed the gun at the figure’s chest.

  “Stop right there,” she shouted.

  The figure stopped, its hands in its pockets.

  “Hands up.”

  The figure hesitated.

  “Ab?”

  Something stabbed at Abbie’s heart.

  “Z, is that you?”

  The sound of footsteps on gravel as he came forward.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  Abbie pointed the gun at Z’s head, outlined against the sky.

  “Stop. What are you doing here, Z?”

  “I got a call from O’Halloran. Said you’d been spotted out here. Looked like you might be suicidal, going to jump down the silo.”

  The sound of the motor again, getting louder and then disappearing, whipped away by the wind.

  Abbie stood absolutely still, listening. Then her eyes snapped back to Z.

  “Z, do not move,” she said, raising the gun.

  Abbie could see his face now, gray-black in the gloom.

  “Are you pointing your fucking gun at me?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Z. O’Halloran is the killer. I’m bringing him here.”

  “O’Halloran?”

  “Yes.”

  Z came closer.

  “How could he—”

  “Do … not … move,” Abbie said. She stood her full height and stepped slowly around the boulder, the gun level with her shoulder.

  Z’s voice was louder. “I put up my house for you, where my kids live, and you have the fucking audacity …”

  “Just let me get this figured out.”

  “You think I’m selling you out, Ab?”

  “Z, don’t come any closer.”

  “I came here—”

  An enormous BOOM erupted from over her right shoulder. Z grunted and went down.

  Abbie whipped her gun hand around and caught a flash from the foot of the silos. The top of the boulder exploded behind her and she felt shards cut into the back of her neck.

  She threw herself to the ground.

  Goddamn it, that wasn’t a motorcycle engine. It was a snowmobile. He came across the ice and got behind you. Now he has you framed against the lights of the Skyway.

  Abbie reversed on the gravel and began to crawl toward Z. She could hear him moaning ten feet away.

  “I got him in the chest.” She recognized O’Halloran’s voice, excited now. “Leave him there. I’ll finish him off after I do you.”

  Abbie pointed her gun and blasted off three shots toward the voice, then pulled herself through the freezing gravel. She heard Z’s breathing. She reached out and felt the shoulders of his thick wool coat in her hand. He was gasping now with panic.

  BOOM. The whine of a bullet snipped the air over her right ear.

  “Hold on, Z,” she whispered. “Hold on.”

  O’Halloran’s voice rang out. “Crafty bitch,” he said. He was closer now. Abbie looked wildly over her shoulder. All she could see was the gleam of the rock edges. Then a shadow. She blasted off another shot and with a grunt pulled at Z’s wool coat, dragging him toward the car bumper. She felt the seams begin to rip.

  Damn it, Z, why couldn’t you have lost some weight? We’re both going to die out here.

  A figure rose behind a rock. Abbie threw herself right, rolled, hearing the gravel explode where she’d just been.

  The figure disappeared. Abbie ran to Z, grabbed him, gave a desperate heave, and, gasping for breath, dragged him the last few feet behind the car.

  She saw Z’s lips moving, but no sound came out. She bent down to his ear and whispered.

  “Z, I’m sorry.”

  “Junior,” he whispered. His son.

  Abbie nodded. “I’m going to get you home to him. Hold on.”

  She fumbled in her pocket for her phone.

  A gun blast, and a thunk into the side of the car, which rocked slightly on its wheels.

  “By the way, Billy Carney asked about you.” The voice was closer now. He was moving right, to come around Z’s car from the driver’s side and finish her off.

  Hurry, Absalom, hurry.

  “He begged me not to hurt you.”

  If she called 911, O’Halloran would find and kill her. If she didn’t, Z would bleed out. She felt Z’s pulse. Weak and fading. Her heart surged with fear for him. Z’s face looked bloodless in the moonlight.

  “I sliced his eyeball in half just for asking.”

  The crunch of a footstep.

  She punched 911 on the keypad and hit the speaker button, thumbing the volume all the way up.

&
nbsp; Then she ducked down and crawled to the car’s front bumper and lay the phone behind the front wheel. She pushed the green button and scurried back.

  In the breathless pause, she silently pushed three bullets into the Slammer’s rotating chamber.

  Ringing. Abbie peeked above the hood, peering at the gray-black rocks.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your—”

  A shape in the blackness. She squeezed off three fast shots and heard a shout of pain.

  “Was that shots fired?” The 911 operator’s voice rose with concern.

  Abbie ran forward and scooped up the phone.

  “I have an officer down at the foot of the old General Mills silo,” she said crisply into the phone. “I need an ambulance to the Tifft Street exit. Officer Zangara is bleeding out. Get them moving now.”

  The operator blurted out the beginning of a question, but Abbie thumbed the red button. She ran back to Z and crouched over him, whipping her jacket off her shoulders and placing it over Z’s chest. She pressed down hard on the wound.

  “Ambulance on the way.”

  The pain on Z’s face was terrible to see.

  “Get him?”

  “Think so. Hold on.”

  A rattling sound came from behind a boulder striped with white. Abbie approached, the Slammer leveled at the edge. Her steps were careful as she crept up on the boulder. When she was two feet away, she eased the gun up and angled it over the top.

  O’Halloran lay with his gun resting on his blue boiler suit. Blood was pumping up from under his palm as his eyes stared madly. Abbie reached over, pulled his service revolver out of his right hand, and tossed it behind her.

  “Can you hear me?”

  O’Halloran’s eyes grew wide and shifted to her face.

  “How did you know about the monkeys?”

  The corner of his lip jerked down spastically.

  “Hel … helped bring you home. Don’t you remember Un … Un … Uncle Dennis?” A laugh escaped his lips. “Doesn’t matter, you’re fucked now.”

  “Why, O’Halloran? Tell me why you killed them.”

  Something in his eyes flared, and a confused look came over his face.

  He mumbled something.

  “What was that?”

  Abbie shook his shoulder and his eyelids flicked in pain. They fluttered once and began to close.