Black Irish (22 page)

He’d barely known his two girls and one boy except as targets for his late-night rants on the subject of their mother’s whoredom and their probably being the offspring of some guinea trashman (the coloring on Margaret, his oldest, had always seemed suspiciously dark to him, her cheeks dusky even in the deepest winter).

He’d made a
hames
of his marriage, as they said back in Cork.

And yet he’d had a sterling career as a cop, retired now twenty years. Proved what you could do with a hickory nightstick and a mean disposition. And in his fourth day off the job he’d sworn off the drink. It made him wonder if it was alcohol that had cursed him, or the streets of Buffalo. After he’d left them, he’d never felt the urge to lose himself in a bottle.

But he’d survived it. His second girl, Colleen, like her mother, was even talking to him now, over the phone. Who knew, he might get to see his grandkids one day.

He let his eyes drift across the crowd and settle on John Kearney, sitting across from him now, his old partner in the First Ward.

“Did you see the car he pulled up in?” John said.

Sean looked over to see where John had indicated with the nod of his head and the gaze of his steely blue eyes. Ah, Patrick Carduzzi. Half-Italian and half-Irish, but he preened around the Club like the son of Saint Patrick. The fool.

“Was it a big Cadillac?” Sean said.

“Course,” John Kearney said, and they laughed. “You can take the guinea out of a person, but …”

Sean caught John’s slitted eye and they both cackled. How right he was. On St. Patrick’s Day, the man practically painted himself green. Just awful.

Through the crowd, Sean saw a strange black-haired woman approach. A look of incomprehension spread across his face. What was she doing in the Gaelic Club? His eyes narrowed before he realized that, of course, it was Absalom Kearney. She’d brought him here today. He was losing his mind, too.

He liked Absalom. Hardworking, a good daughter to John. She had no choice about who she was, after all—she’d been taken from
her natural surroundings like an orphaned kitten—and Sean accepted that. Hot-tempered when roused to it, but wasn’t he the same way himself?

He took another drink, and nodded at Tom Murphy, the embezzler.

Sean remembered the day John told her he was adopting an orphaned child, the absolute shock of it. “Y’ are not!” he’d blurted out, but John had gone silent and grim and his eyes were like coals from the bottom of a turf pit. John would never discuss it afterward. For him, it was some kind of holy obligation. What else could possess an Irishman in 1982 to adopt a gypsy-looking child and give it his own name?

John had looked exhausted, worn down to a shadow, the day that he carried Absalom home. In one arm he’d carried the toddler, wrapped up in a dirty green blanket. The other hand held an old Bible with a cordovan cover and a photograph album with a faded green cover, taken from the mother’s things.
It’s more than a Bible you’ll need
, thought Sean at the time.

But he’d never asked why John had done it. It was none of his business.

“Gentlemen,” Abbie said as she placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, the cup making a tinkling noise against the saucer. She did the same for her father, tea with milk. John never drank coffee. How well Sean knew that, after twenty years of buying the man a Red Rose tea every morning without a cent in payment.

“Good girl, Abbie,” Sean said, giving her a bright smile. John nodded curtly and ignored the tea. Sean, a touch embarrassed, smiled up at Abbie, who for some reason was looking rather intently at him.

At a loss for something to say, he nodded toward the crowd at the bar.

“Don’t bother with us, now. Go find yourself a young man.”

The girl laughed, richly, deep in her throat.

“Thanks, Mr. MacCullahy. But the youngest man here just had both his hips replaced.”

He smiled.

“Have everything you need?” She leaned over and smiled, staring him directly in the eye.

“Fine, fine,” he said, again a little confused.

The girl was trying to be her father’s daughter. She’d always tried.

Sean rearranged the coffee so it wouldn’t spill if someone bumped the table, then looked up to see Absalom talking to a tall man in an Irish rugby shirt, with his back turned to the table. She was, Sean noticed, tapping her breast absently as she talked. He watched her hand flutter for a second, a long-buried erotic urge pushing at his bowels.

She looked over at him. He stared back, trying to decipher the look in her eyes.

“Oh, Jaysus, I forgot,” he said suddenly, looking at John.

Sean reached into his lapel pocket and casually pulled out a photo.

“I found this picture in my drawer in the workshop. Couldn’t remember where it was taken. You and Marty Collins, God rest his soul.”

He slid the picture across to John Kearney, who was pulling his gold-rimmed reading glasses out of the LensCrafters pouch he carried in his front shirt pocket.

“Marty?” he said, an edge of concern in his tenor voice.

He picked up the photo shakily and studied it.

“And that other one. Jimmy Ryan. Looks like it was taken out at the lake.”

“ ’Twas,” John said, and his eyes grew big behind the powerful lenses.

“Did I take it?” Sean said, looking away. “I can’t remember now.” He’d always been an able liar. Came with being a drunk.

“No, you weren’t there. I …”

John’s cheek, webbed with blue veins, suddenly began twitching.

“Sean?”

“Yes?”

“Where’d you say you found this photo?”

“In my workshop, back at the house. In my old fishing box.”

John’s eyes were dangerously aflame.

“Then you’re a born liar. What the hell is this?”

He threw the photo faceup on the table, then clouted it hard with his open hand. The slap rang in the air like a bell clap, and the buzz of conversation dimmed, faces at the bar turning to look. John’s entire face was red now and his pale lips were set in a straight line, like a petulant boy.

“Where you goin’?” Sean said. “Sit down—”

“Where’d you get that picture?” Yelling now.

“John, calm down and have your tea.”

But John Kearney pushed his seat away and stumbled back. Then he turned toward the door and was lost in the crowd.

A few seconds later, Abbie slid into the chair.

“I tried my best, Absalom.”

“I know you did.”

Sean looked down at the photo, studied the three men. He sighed; he was sure he hadn’t been there. And he couldn’t understand why it was so important to know who took it.

“Couldn’t you just ask him yourself?” he said finally.

He regretted it instantly, for the sharp look of pain that came into her bright blue eyes.

A
BBIE SPENT THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON TRAWLING THE BARS OF THE
County for information on missing men in their fifties or sixties. She started in the bars of South Park, dank, dark rooms even in the middle of the day, lit only by the yellow lights over the pool tables and the red and white glow of the cigarette machines, with shadowy figures moving beneath stark cones of light. There was usually someone holding their face with a busted paw, victim of a fistfight, or muted sounds of couples battling in the alleyway behind. Abbie didn’t bother to ask about the blood and the noise. Maybe the County was beginning to work on her, finally, as everyone predicted it would. She ignored the wounded and asked each bartender about regulars who’d gone missing.

The answers she got drove her mood down further. There were about three dozen men gone in South Buffalo. There was a crane operator who’d lost his job and disappeared last week, leaving his German shepherd to starve to death. There was a fireman who’d never got back on the plane from the Vegas “training convention,” which was really a whoring and gambling spree paid for by dollar bills placed in buckets of men going door to door in their metal hats. He hadn’t been heard from since. Maybe he’d stayed in Vegas because he liked the novel sight of the sun in January. His neighbors had rung his wife’s doorbell to see if there was anything they could do, but the
woman had told them to fuck off, he was no good anyway and she was moving to North Carolina. There were barbers, insurance agents, Costco managers, and a whole squad of unemployed that had gone less dramatically, slipping away in a swirl of rumor and unpaid bills. And none of them had left a forwarding address.

By the end of the night, the soles of her shoes were sticky with rancid beer, and her hair smelled of cigarette smoke. Maybe Billy Carney had been right with his talk about the Rez. An invisible war was under way that she was powerless even to interrupt, a war of attrition.

When she came home, she was about to put her key into the lock when she noticed something by the hallway light. Something stuck under her door. It was white, the corner of a piece of paper. She dropped down and studied it. The paper was blank, but there was clearly more of it under the door. Abbie took the corner and began to pull.

As it came out, she saw writing in green—but it wasn’t a note. It was the packaging for a 50cc syringe, made by Hamilton.

Abbie stood up quickly and stuck the key into the lock. Turning the door handle, she burst into the room. And she knew from the quality of silence that her father was already gone.

Billy Carney was watching the Buffalo Sabres lose again on TV. A can of Molson Export sat on the coffee table next to his cell phone and the Sig Sauer. The volume was turned down low. It was the third period and the Sabres were down by one against the Maple Leafs. Billy watched the figures of the players sway and dash, willing someone to put the puck in the net.

When he heard the noise, it sounded like it was coming from the side of the house toward the Riordans. He scooped up the Sig and slid to the wall in two steps, reaching over to kill the light switch, all in one herky-jerk motion. His eardrums seemed to throb as he listened in the dark, the plasma TV glowing as Rick Jeanneret called the play-by-play. Billy found he was calm.

The sound had come from the bathroom. A scraping noise. He
slid his back along the wall until he came to the hallway. Suddenly, he turned back and looked at the TV screen, then bent over double and padded over to the coffee table. He hit the power button and the picture died. The quiet of the house surged into the room.

You think you’re hunting me, you coward?
Billy thought.
You got it backward. I’ve been waiting for you
.

The Sig felt snug in his hand as he padded quickly to the wall and threw his back against it. Billy’s heart was pumping painfully. He felt the edge of the wall and made the turn slowly into the hallway, the tube socks on his feet—Bishop Timon green and gold stripes around his calves—masking the sound of his movement.

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.