Black Irish (34 page)

She came up on Spaulding fast, skidded as she put the Saab into a right turn. The house was six down on the left. She eased down on the brake as she pulled up. Another cape, shingled front, painted a light blue. A black Dodge pickup truck with dried mud sprayed up on the side was parked in the driveway. The street was empty except for two lank-haired teenagers walking toward her, eight or nine houses away.

Abbie pulled out the Slammer and opened the driver’s-side door. She got out slowly, eyes scanning the street. No curtains parting at the windows yet, no curious neighbors asking who the woman at Dolores’s house was. That wouldn’t last very long. She approached the house with the gun down by her side.

Suddenly the picture window shattered and exploded outward. A splinter of glass nicked Abbie’s cheek and she whipped her head back and fell to the ground. Instinct drove her behind the Dodge truck; she crawled toward the rear wheel as two more shots sparked off the concrete driveway. When she got to the back tire, she reached up to her cheek. Her finger came away with a heavy drop of blood coating the skin.

Abbie crawled along the side of the Dodge, her left hand touching the truck’s cold metal. A gun boomed and the rear tire inches from her foot blew out with a loud bang. The echo of the gun’s report drummed in her ears.

The IRA trains them well
, she thought.
That was close
.

Abbie ducked up and peeked through the Dodge’s passenger window. There was a figure next to the blown-out window, the shape of a head tilted in from the frame.

“Dolores!” Abbie shouted. “I just want to talk.”

Two fast shots and she felt the whisper of a bullet past her temple. The truck lurched sideways and pressed against her side. Dolores had shot out the front right tire with the second bullet.

“Put down your gun and just talk to me,” Abbie called out.

She felt along the ground beside her. There was a half-deflated football lying in the small strip of yard next to the chain link fence that separated the Riordans’ property from their neighbors’, but nothing else.

Dolores Riordan shouted out something, but Abbie couldn’t understand a word. Thick, brambled words that rang a distant bell in Abbie’s memory.

Gaelic, the damned woman was speaking Gaelic.

“I’m not IRA, Dolores,” Abbie called out, cupping her right hand around her mouth. “Do you hear me?
I’m not IRA.
”

The next bullet whined above her head before exploding into a maple tree on the street with the sound of an axe slamming into a block of ice.

Abbie looked at the bricks bordering the concrete drive. She bent down and felt along the line. At the same time, she turned to eye the door, estimating distances.

The first two bricks were firm. The third one gave a little as she rocked it back and forth.

With a jerk of her shoulder, she brought the brick up. Abbie felt the rough edge of the brick and began to count.
One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand
. On four, she took a deep breath and hefted the brick toward the front door, gasping as it left her hand. The brick crashed into the screen door, and the sound of falling glass was swept away by the boom of a gun. But by then Abbie was sprinting toward the side door.

She threw her back to the shingled siding, the Slammer down by her side, and quickly jogged to the corner of the house, then turned into the backyard. There was a patio back here, and she found the glass door that should lead into the kitchen from the back. It was unlocked.
Sloppy, Dolores. The killer would have slit your throat by now
. Quietly Abbie pulled the door open and crept inside.

Abbie eased into the kitchen, the Slammer leveled in front of her.

A plate of sugar cookies was cooling on the kitchen counter. The fridge’s motor kicked on as Abbie searched the shadows for Dolores. Quietly, she slipped across the linoleum floor and placed her back to the doorframe leading into the living area. She heard breathing and slowly brought her head around to see into the next room.

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.”

T
HE THREE-QUARTERS MOON WAS RUFFLED BY DARK GRAY CLOUDS
. T
HE
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
.