Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  “Now, what does this date include?” Abbie said, nodding to an Amish man with a beard.

  “I told you,” Mills said, guiding her away from the railing. “It’s called the Total Canuck. A leisurely walk along the promenade here, a trip on the Maid of the Mist, dinner at the Skylon Tower—the food sucks, but the view? Knock the eyes out of your head.”

  Abbie smiled.

  “A carriage ride and then home to my—”

  She laughed. “What happened to the Indian casino buffet?”

  “The buffet? That’s after you meet my mother. You don’t get the buffet just like that.”

  He took her hand. It was easier now to have him touch her.

  Mills had turned out to be the ideal boyfriend for the last six months. He’d dealt with people in shock before. He’d done three years in the Canadian Coast Guard, he told her, pulling fishermen out of the freezing Baffin Bay north of the Arctic Circle, cutting their survival suits off with a diving knife, which was made easier as they’d usually lost weight in the sea, thrashing around for hours and burning off fat. In the rescue boat, as their teeth chattered together, he remembered their eyes, blank and searching at the same time. It was like the last few hours had emptied their eyes out, and they needed to be refilled with something other than scenes of ice and water.

  For the first three months, he’d said, Abbie had that same look.

  The first time they’d gone out, two months after she’d found Michael, Abbie had felt she was in a trance. They’d simply sat in Tim Hortons—his idea—and sipped hot chocolate. Mills told her later it was like sitting next to a hospital bed with a person who is heavily sedated and wants only to know that you are there, that you’re physically present. But you cannot touch her, because every part of her skin has been torn up or burned.

  She hadn’t wanted to talk about Michael. Four months later, she still didn’t want to.

  But he’d gotten the facts, she knew. He’d been pulled into the case once they’d made the connection between Michael Minton’s killings and the Outlaws massacre. He knew that the Billy Carney murder had been pinned on O’Halloran, pretty conclusively. O’Halloran’s cell phone had pinged off a tower two blocks from Billy’s house twenty minutes before the murder, when O’Halloran was supposed to have been home thirty miles away. And on a second sweep by techs, his DNA was found on a windowsill; he’d most likely come through the window to cut Carney’s throat. The motive was simple prevention: Carney had called around the County asking about the Clan, and O’Halloran knew that soon enough the trail would lead back to him. The cop had placed the listening device in Carney’s house and knew that he was about to reveal his suspicions to Abbie. O’Halloran could have been sent back to England to face justice. Billy had to die.

  The ironic thing was O’Halloran had probably believed that Abbie really was the killer, that she’d returned to Buffalo for revenge.

  He hadn’t been trying to frame her; he’d been trying to convict her. He didn’t want to kill her, because snuffing out an active-duty Buffalo cop was too much of a risk for a man living under an assumed name. So he’d waited. And then he’d seen a way. He’d set up her meeting with Z by the grain silos, and tried to kill them both. Maybe he was going to say she shot Z and then he shot Abbie to save himself.

  The Outlaws slaughter had been closed, too, and the killings officially attributed to Michael Minton, along with the murders of Jimmy Ryan, Marty Collins, Joe Kane, and John Kearney. A Buffalo fireman had reported his jacket and helmet missing the day Kane was found—Michael had stolen them and disguised himself on the Peace Bridge, even fooling Abbie as he made his escape. And it was Michael’s blood, not Abbie’s, at the Marty Collins crime scene; because they were brother and sister, the genetic profile was 95 percent identical, a maternal match. Three more toy monkeys had been found tucked in an old coffee can in the abandoned building on Main; Michael had apparently scooped them up when John Kearney had arrested him, remembrances of his little sister to take along with him to hell.

  And when he’d returned for revenge, he’d placed the toys as mementos of the crime committed against him—and as messages to his little sister, the detective. Reaching out even as he killed the men who’d separated them.

  The rest of the details were still filtering in, Abbie knew. Dolores, the IRA killer living in Buffalo, had survived her wounds and was in the process of being deported back to Ireland. It was clear from John Kearney’s letter that he’d gone to the rendezvous in the nature preserve expecting to meet O’Halloran and kill him. But her father had missed his target. His service revolver was missing one round. He was an old and feeble man, and his aim was off.

  Niagara Falls PD had sketched out most of Michael’s last twenty-nine years through bits and pieces of Outlaw club gossip and the evidence found in the dungeon. Mills had told her about the interviews he’d done with the surviving Outlaws. Now that all the officers of the club were dead, Mills had told the other members they would face charges on the kidnapping of Michael unless they cooperated. And so parts of the story had spilled out.

  For the first two years in Canada, Michael had been forced to live in the pit. During the autopsy, his back was found to be crisscrossed with torture marks. The weals were pink and thick, made by amateurs with spoons carved into brands and heated over a fire. There was a skull, the blazing guns of the Outlaws’ insignia, but also a big cock and balls burned into the flesh and maybe a dozen cigarette marks and the circle of old-fashioned car lighters. Mills believed that a couple of the Outlaws were probably gay and had visited Michael for late-night rape sessions when he was brought to them as a teenager. There were other theories out there but he wasn’t buying them. He suspected that that was the intention all along. The Outlaws just wanted a boy of their own. Abbie believed he was right.

  After two years, Michael had stopped fighting back and they let him out of the pit. Then they put him to work, doing the Outlaws’ dirty work. For example, cutting up bodies of Chinese illegals the gang had smuggled into Canada in shipping containers and who’d suffocated or died of thirst on the way over. Michael dismembered them and the Outlaws had buried them in the woods north of Fort Erie. Niagara Falls PD hadn’t been aware that the motorcycle gang had been into human trafficking.

  After a few years, the Outlaws found that Michael had an appetite for violence as strong as, if not stronger than, their own. By the late eighties, Michael Minton had become the gang’s enforcer.

  “Hungry yet?” Mills said, taking Abbie’s arm as they walked toward the Horseshoe Falls.

  Abbie shook her head.

  She still couldn’t get the autopsy pictures out of her mind. She even imagined that she’d felt the scars through his jacket. When they’d found her in that abandoned building on Main Street, she’d been holding Michael, hugging his bloody body to hers. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she kept saying. A trick of the light, probably, the knife blade flashing as Michael brought it up to his throat. Made it look like it was coming at her.

  By his body they found the bag and the last page of John Kearney’s letter:

  Fergus, the man you know as Dennis O’Halloran, was brought to Canada by the IRA. He was drinking in a Fort Erie bar when he started a fight, purely for an excuse to kill a man, I think. But the man he chose was an Outlaw. And Fergus killed him. The Outlaws beat him half to death and were going to finish him off when he told them who he was and how much he was worth to people across the border. They locked him away and we sent Jimmy Ryan to negotiate a price. They would not talk to a cop.

  They didn’t want money. They had all the money they wanted from the drug trade. What they wanted was a man in exchange for the one who’d been killed. And they specified a young man, a teenager—they said they wanted someone to sell coke in the high schools. We had no reason to doubt them. We knew they’d find somebody regardless.

  I went to the Reverend Zebediah, who I’d known from my years working the East Side. I explained the situation. I told him
I was willing to save one if he gave me another. There were young men in downtown Buffalo that terrified their own kind, and I asked for one of them to trade with the Outlaws. For his life we would get two back—O’Halloran and any child the Reverend named.

  I didn’t know then the kind of monster O’Halloran was. And all I could think was, how could I let a soldier of Ireland die at the hands of some bikers, after he’d served his country? If I arrested the Outlaws for kidnapping, O’Halloran would be deported back to England. The escape route to America would be closed forever. There was no other way.

  The Reverend chose Michael Minton, and I agreed to adopt his baby sister, Absalom. I arrested Michael that night. But instead of bringing him to the precinct on Delavan, I took him to where he was staying and let him collect a few things. I handcuffed him and transported him across the border in my trunk. We made the exchange in a motel room called the Lucky Clover.

  I learned later that the Outlaws used him in ways I couldn’t have predicted. It made my stomach turn. We heard rumors of the marks they’d made on his flesh, and cutting off half his tongue. I would have sent no human being to that fate. But by the time the stories reached us in Buffalo—of a man kept in a cage—it was too late to do anything about it. But we closed our eyes and saw to the needs of the living.

  Now I must speak to my daughter. Absalom, I cannot say I loved you as a father should have. You reminded me too much of how you’d come to the County, and the hateful things it took to bring you there. But I watched over you. I would come into your room on many nights and watch you sleep, silent all of those years because of the many secrets I kept. It was wrong, but I loved you in my own way. Please believe me. It’s the God’s honest truth.

  Now O’Halloran has returned to killing and you are in danger from him, and from the police.

  If I don’t manage to stop this man who should never have lived, he will take my life, but I am not anxious about that. Absalom, I give it gladly for yours as any father should. I’m sorry I didn’t do better.

  John Kearney.

  The sun was setting. They stood by the railing and watched the seagulls wheel in front of the tumbling water. Abbie felt Mills’s hand cover hers.

  He followed her eyes toward the brink of the Falls.

  “Closer look?” he said, walking to a nearby two-eyed telescope on a stand bolted to the promenade. Abbie followed.

  Mills slipped two quarters into the coin slot and she stepped onto the little railing at the base of the telescope and fixed her eyes to the holes. She adjusted the focus and turned the thing slightly to the left. Mills followed the line out and saw that she was looking at downtown Buffalo, a misty shadow of buildings on the horizon, obscured by the spray.

  She stepped back from the telescope and looked at Mills.

  “I almost let him go,” she said.

  “Michael?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I wanted to.”

  Mills nodded slowly. “Ab, he was your brother. That’s perfectly natural.”

  She turned to gaze at the Falls. “Everyone thinks he came back for revenge. But I think he killed those men for me. For us. So we could be a family again.”

  Abbie held her hand over her eyes and looked at the city skyline in the distance. Her new house was back there, the small Victorian on Elmwood Avenue, badly in need of repair, that she’d bought with the money her father had left her in his will. When the contractors were done putting in the new bathroom, expanding the kitchen, and fixing the leaky slate-shingled roof, she was going to get to work making it her own. She’d already found a Shaker dining table that she loved and had her eyes on a whimsical sky-blue dresser for the bedroom, $250 in the antiques store near Chippewa. She’d already decided she would paint the exterior a bright kelly green with Richmond bisque trim. It would be a silent tribute to John Kearney and an acknowledgment of her old neighborhood, a splash of County color in the midst of Buffalo’s bohemian section. She would move in on September 1, just as the neighborhood kids began walking down her block to the Catholic school kitty-corner from her. She would sip her homemade hot chocolate and watch them parade by in their tartan uniforms from her kitchen window, and she would be home at last. She would be happy.

  Abbie took Mills’s hand and they began walking toward the roar of the falling water.

  For Edouarine Vilceus

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Linda Marrow for welcoming Absalom Kearney into the world, and Scott Waxman, for getting her there. To Asher, Delphine, and Mariekarl. And to the young men and women of Abbott Road, 1978–82.

  BY STEPHAN TALTY

  FICTION

  Black Irish

  NONFICTION

  Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day

  Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama’s Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero

  The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army

  Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign

  Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEPHAN TALTY is the author of the New York Times bestseller Empire of Blue Water, as well as Escape from the Land of Snows, The Illustrious Dead, and Mulatto America. Black Irish is his first novel.

  www.stephentalty.com