Black Irish (32 page)

The cry—
the fools, the fools, the fools!
—seemed to ring in her ears. Was she one of them? Another outsider blind to the patterns?

Concentrate, Absalom. What we need is a name
.

She turned her eyes to the list of coded names. The first column would have his Irish name, and the second his American one, his cover name given to him by the Clan. She began translating the first cover name.

She picked up her cell phone.

“Z. Everything you got on a William Preston. Look for anyone in his fifties or sixties who applied for everything at once: Social Security card, driver’s license.”

Z told her he’d call back within the hour.

“M
ILLS
.”

“It’s Kearney.”

She’d had an idea. If she was being framed, who was to say the killer wasn’t a Buffalo cop? There were too many coincidences: the blood swab, the monkey face traced on the Saab minutes before she left police headquarters. While she waited for Z to call back, she would run down one hunch with the cops in Niagara Falls.

“Hey.”

She could tell by his voice he didn’t know she’d been arrested, and that he still wanted that date she’d been putting off. Either that, or he was an incredible actor.

“How’s the Outlaws thing?” she said, hoping to keep things casual.

“It’s demented, is what it is. The more I know about these people, the less I want to know. The Warlocks lead didn’t pan out. They swore up and down they had a peace treaty with the Outlaws and had no reason to kill their officers. So we think it’s an internal split, a power struggle, but the fucker killed everyone standing, right?”

“Right, but—”

“So we go back to the Outlaws headquarters and this time go over it like King Tut’s tomb and what do we find in the basement?”

“I don’t—”

“A fucking
pit
. They held one of their members in a little hole in the ground with a rebar screen over the top. Must have been for punishment. We found old chicken wing bones and Pepsi bottles down there. Maybe the fucker gets out and he decided to give them some of their own. I can’t blame him. Gunned down the whole leadership, and the two newbies who pulled up on their bikes at the end.”

She heard a creaking sound and the end of a yawn.

“Christ, I’ve barely slept since going through that shithole.” Mills sighed. “But you have your own problems. What can I do for you?”

“You said you ran the plates of every car caught on closed circuit near the Lucky Clover. I need to know if you came up with a Buffalo plate.”

“They were almost all Buffalo plates. Casino traffic.”

“But anything from Buffalo PD?”

Silence.

“Buffalo PD? What would they have been doing trailing Decatur?”

“Can you just check?”

“It’s a good thing you’re hot, Kearney. When we both catch our killers, how about that dinner?”

“I’ve had the casino buffet, thanks.”

He laughed and hung up.

Z called back with the details on William Preston. He was fifty-two and employed by Temp Solutions at 1899 Oak Street. Abbie drove the Saab to the nondescript seafoam-gray building. She walked through the doors praying no one would recognize her. A receptionist with brown mousy hair and a simpering expression watched her approach the front counter.

“We’re not accepting applications.”

“That’s nice, but it’s not what I’m here for. I’m looking for William Preston.”

“Bill? But he’s not here anymore.”

“Where’d he go?”

“He just didn’t show—”

A thought visibly dawned on the receptionist’s face.

“Hold on, I better let Mr. Carney answer that.”

Abbie nodded. As the receptionist pushed back her chair and turned toward the back of the offices, Abbie spotted a tall blond woman two desks behind the reception area. She had a bouffant hairdo with black roots and her eyes were shadowed with light blue eye shadow. Those eyes were now following her, the corner of the woman’s tongue visible over the frosted pink of her lipstick. It wasn’t a friendly look.

Abbie turned quickly and walked to a display that showed multicultural young people working at a variety of jobs but smiling emphatically under the slogan “A WORLD of Talent.”

“Like I said, we’re really not taking any applications. We’re full up.” The receptionist had returned.

Abbie nodded. “I heard you the first time, thanks.”

“Can I help you?” A thickset black man in a tan long-sleeve dress shirt and a brown-and-cobalt-blue-striped tie appeared from behind the receptionist. He was squat and had a perfectly straight mustache; he looked more like a drill sergeant than an office manager.

“I’m looking for Mr. Preston.”

“He doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“I got a call on Monday. He said … he said that he was taking his family and moving to Atlanta.”

“Did he say why?”

“Yes, he did. It made me wonder if he was really going to Atlanta or if he was headed to some kind of mental institution.”

Abbie looked at him quizzically.

“Why’s that?”

“Because,” the man said, his gaze studying her clothes before jumping to her face, “he said he was leaving for a very unusual reason: There was a demon on the loose. Exact thing he said to me. And
that he wasn’t going to be around when it knocked on his door four times. What the hell’s he mean by that?”

“I have no idea. Did he leave a forwarding address or number?”

“No, he didn’t. I went by his house to drop off his last check and the house was dark. I looked in the window and everything was gone, except for a kid’s bike and an empty Samsonite. Looks like they left in a real big hurry. I kept the check.”

Abbie laid her card on the counter. “If you get a forwarding address, will you let me know?”

The man nodded. Abbie’s gaze shot past him. The tall blond woman was gone from her desk. Was she off somewhere, quietly calling the police? Abbie’s eyes must have betrayed her concern, because the man turned, following her gaze, then swiveled back around.

“Everything o—?”

The front door slammed back against the wall and Abbie was halfway to her car.

As Abbie drove back, Mills called her back. No cop cars on their list from the Lucky Clover. As soon as she hung up, the phone buzzed again.

“Kearney.”

“It’s Reverend Zebediah. I just got a call for you.”

“From who?”

“He said he was your father.”

“My fa—? My father’s in the hospital, unconscious. Are you sure, Reverend?”

“Now, how would I be sure, Absalom? The man said he was your father.”

“He didn’t remember my number?”

“No. Apparently not.”

His voice sounded strained. The tension must be getting to him, too.

“What did he say?”

“I have no idea if he’s in his right mind, but what he told me was, ‘Reverend Zebediah, tell Absalom to come to where the black rabbits run.’ ‘Where the black rabbits run’ is what he said.”

Abbie nearly plowed into a car crossing in front of her. She realized she’d blown through a red light. A furious blast from a car horn grew distant in her ears as she considered what she’d just heard.

“Absalom?”

“Yes?”

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t know, Reverend,” Abbie said as she spun the Saab into a U-turn.

T
HE TAXI PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT OF THE
T
IFFT
N
ATURE
P
RESERVE
and parked in front of the little caretaker’s hut. It was the only vehicle in the tiny gravel lot. John Kearney got out and stared at the preserve.

The taxi driver was yelling something.

“What’s that?”

“Twelve eighty,” the man said. He was fat and a thick growth of black hair crawled up from his open shirt to his neck and up his cheeks.

“What d’ye mean, twelve eighty?” John said. Was this guinea trying to steal from him?

“The fare!” the man said angrily. “For driving you here.”

“From where?”

The man looked away, then his gaze swung back to John angrily, as if he wanted to kick his teeth in.

“From the hospital, and your house.”

“
What
hosp—”

And then it was there, clicked back in place, the memory of the hospital and the tubes and the nurses who weren’t real nurses.

He let the insult slide away into nothingness. He was past all that now.

“Never mind, never mind. Take this.”

He pulled a twenty out of his wallet and handed it to the man and began to walk toward the arched entrance to the preserve. He heard the driver yelling. John wanted no change, had no use for it, but he didn’t turn to tell the driver this. His mind was clearer than it had been in days, the sedatives having almost completely worn off. He’d had to wait until the cop sitting by his door had gone for a bathroom break, but he’d made it out of the hospital with his clothes and one other thing now stuffed in the pocket of his good cardigan. He guessed the cops had been looking for someone trying to break into the hospital, not out.

The taxi pulled away, kicking up bits of gravel, and zoomed off. John looked up. The sun, glowing orange and red, was setting over the lake, and its beams as they bounced off the water were split by the struts of the Skyway. As he watched, a Canadian goose broke from the reeds and banked away from the lake, heading south.

He had to keep his mind clear for the next part, keep the Alzheimer’s away, push it back like you would a flood of water under the door, push it back until he was done.

The sheets of paper he’d taken from the nursing desk fluttered in his hand, the long sloping lines of his handwriting covering three pages. He carefully folded them once and then once again. He tucked the sheets in the pocket of the dress shirt, and began to walk.

He stepped over an ice-rimed puddle. He didn’t have his winter coat. They’d snatched him away, the Gaelic boys, before he could grab it. Who was it that had struck him with the small billy club in Abbie’s house? He’d never seen the face before. “For your own good” were the last words he’d heard.

How he’d loved this little preserve. There was nothing like it back in Clare, the ground back there too hard and rocky to spout these enormous stands of grass. Who cared if the plants sucked on poisoned water from the steel plants? Everyone said that Ireland was so unspoiled. It was unspoiled because it was poor, because it had been kept poor. Here the grass fed on the chemicals of his great adopted city, and they grew to the size of giants.

John crossed the parking lot and walked underneath the little
wooden archway that led to the trails. The sunlight was instantly swallowed up by the tall grass. He didn’t need it anyway. He knew where he was going.

He listened for a car. There was only quiet and the bass horn of a tugboat on the lake, but that meant nothing. He’d learned to respect his enemy. Too late to do the others any good, but so be it.

The reeds made a sawing noise as they rubbed against each other in the wind, the noise of a Chinese fan clicking shut when a gust drove them together. The winter had taken all the moisture out of them. He reached out and grabbed a stalk as he went by. It crackled as he bent and broke it.

There was another sound behind the sound of the reeds. He stopped to listen, his lips turned down into a hard frown. It had been a rustling noise, but it was gone now. He turned and hurried ahead.

At the first fork in the path, he hesitated, then turned right. An arrow-shaped wooden signpost had been hammered into the ground, its words lost in the dusky light.

The path was descending slightly. He tried to move his feet faster, but his knees pained him. Suddenly, he was falling, the ground rising up terrifyingly fast. He didn’t have the strength to cushion his fall, and his hand landed on something sharp as he hit the ground. He lay there a moment, expecting a blow to the back of the head, but nothing. He rose himself up on hands and knees and the reeds whispered above him as he panted. He’d tripped over a root; the palm of his right hand was bleeding. It felt as if a layer of skin had been torn away. But he had to keep going. Surely the killer was here now.

John Kearney stood awkwardly, bent over at the waist. He hurried along the path, turning left at the next fork in the pathway. His breath came faster and his knees began to ache. The reeds were reaching above his head, forming a canopy through which the weak sun only penetrated here and there. He felt the wind sweep in from the lake along the tunnel, turning the reeds to their pale side and setting his teeth to chattering.

Finally, he reached the little opening and saw the wooden bench. He staggered toward it, out of breath, and reached for the metal arm.
Here it was, cold to his touch. He’d forgotten the scraped palm and it burned on the freezing metal. His breath came in ragged bursts of steam.

I’m ready now
, he thought after a few seconds, raising his eyes to the entrance.
I’m ready for you. The last offering I’ll make to Ireland is your bloody corpse
.

There was no sound of traffic. The reeds thrashed against each other as if a small cyclone had set down yards away.

He pulled out the sheets, and looked around for a rock.

Must hurry now. Faster, John. For the love of God
.

He groped under the seat and found a heavy round stone. He brought it up and laid it on back of the bottom sheet, turned over to avoid being soiled by the stone’s underside. He let the pages go and they fluttered in the wind, but the rock pinned them to the wood.

He saw flashes of his own handwriting as the paper flailed wildly. He didn’t need to see the words to know the first line, because it had stayed in his memory: “I, John Kearney, proud member in good standing of the Clan na Gael, am responsible for the murders of Jimmy Ryan, Marty Collins, and Joseph Kane.”

The wind dropped away.

John Kearney looked up.

A figure stood at the entrance to the clearing. It wore a black ski mask and by its side was a long, shining knife.

John Kearney stood, holding on to the metal arm before letting it go to face the killer full on. His arm came up and a trembling finger pointed at the mask.