Black Irish (35 page)

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.

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.

She reached over and whipped her hand across his face.

“You will NOT die before you answer my question. Why did you kill my father?”

The eyes wandered and then came back to Abbie’s face.

“Do you hear me? O’Halloran?”

A long sigh escaped his lips. His eyes closed, and the right eyelid twitched.

A siren came cutting across the wind. Abbie looked up and saw an ambulance headed straight up Tifft toward her.

The ambulance swerved through traffic as the EMT radio blared from the front. Behind them, Abbie saw the red lights of the second emergency vehicle, carrying O’Halloran. He had died without saying another word.

Z lay on a white cot spotted with blood. A female EMT was finishing
up taping the IV to his arm, but his skin still looked corpselike in the harsh interior light of the ambulance.

The EMT looked at the heart monitor, holding the inside of Z’s wrist. She barked a few numbers to the driver, who relayed them on the radio. The ambulance rocketed over a pothole and Abbie reached for the ceiling to steady herself.

The EMT watched the monitor, then nodded to Abbie, turned, snapped open a drawer, took out a syringe in its packaging and began to strip it open.

“Better talk now before I get this in him,” she said.

Abbie slipped closer to Z, kneeling on the rubber floor.

“You okay?”

He nodded. Abbie laid her hand across his forehead. He was colder than he should have been.

“Two minutes to a fat disability check,” she said.

He smiled, then muttered something. Abbie bent down to hear.

“Thought you shot me, you dumb bitch,” he said.

Abbie smiled. “If I shot you, you’d be dead, dummy.”

His eyes remained on hers, crinkled with pain. Abbie bent closer to him.

“I know, Z, I know. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. It was like everyone was out to get me. You know how it is.”

He nodded. Then he turned his head and whispered something to her.

“What?”

She put her ear down closer.

“We are the County.”

A
BBIE LAY ON HER COUCH STARING AT THE CEILING WHILE THE VOICE OF
B
OY
George filled her living room, “The Crying Game.” A song from 1990-something, but it sounded very eighties with its sweeping synthesizers. And, of course, Boy George’s hauntingly sad voice. “And then before / you know where you are / you’re saying goodbye.” A last moan from him and the song ended.

Abbie blinked twice, then hit Replay on the remote. The CD player clicked softly and the song began again.

The tenth time in a row? The twelfth? She felt like she was inside the song’s rich melancholy and she didn’t want to leave.

Wouldn’t it amuse them if you went and lost your mind?
she thought.
Wouldn’t it just be the talk of Abbott Road? Absalom Kearney, hero cop, found jabbering away on Elmwood Avenue, listening obsessively to washed-up eighties sensations until she died of dehydration. They’d laugh about it at the Gaelic Club, and they’d say that the bitch had been crazy all along, and hadn’t Dennis O’Halloran, God rest his soul, been right to try and finish her off?

It had been eight days since that night on the shore, beneath the grain silo. Eight days in which she’d been cleared of murder and gotten her badge back, along with a commendation. Days in which she’d ducked the photographers of the
Buffalo News
and spent most
of her time holed up in her apartment. Z’s wife, Linda, had dropped off two enormous pans of lasagna, and her neighbors had knocked at her door several times, softly calling out her name. Detective Mills from Niagara Falls had left two messages, joking about the casino buffet and the date she’d promised him, but his voice sounded, well, concerned.

She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She didn’t know what to say. Or to feel.

The music washed over her again and she listened the whole way through, then clicked the remote control. She was getting hungry; nothing but outright starvation, however, would get her off the couch right now.

Something was jabbing at the back of the mind, a thought wanting to be heard, as though far away someone was yelling at the top of their voice but not loudly enough to make the words clear.

It’s over
, she said to the voice.
Leave me alone to fall apart in peace
.

Finally, after two more replays of “The Crying Game,” she sighed and went to the kitchen to make tea. She got out the Red Rose tea bags and then opened the dish cabinet, managing to avoid looking at her father’s teacup, which had been moved to the back corner. She took down a green enamel mug and placed a tea bag into it as the kettle began to whistle.

Was it something Mills had said? Something in the blur of the last day that had stuck in her mind. What had he said? It was about that Outlaws case he was working. It was looking more and more like an inside job, a deadly political duel within the Outlaws themselves.

She hoped he solved the case, but it meant nothing to her.

But that wasn’t it. Not quite.

The tea kettle let out a shrill whistle and then clicked off, the sound of the water bubbling seeming to fill up her small kitchen. Abbie detached the large cylinder from its base and poured the steaming water into her mug. The water slowly turned a rich, swirling brown. She took out the tea bag, stirred in sugar and cold milk, and slowly walked to the table to sit.

The cage in the bottom of the gang’s hangout. That was it. It had lodged in her thoughts like a branch in a flooded river. But after the flood had rushed away, it lay there still, bare and unconnected to anything else. So the Outlaws were barbarians. What about it? Everyone knew that. And they’d kept a prisoner in their basement. Their women were half slaves anyway, traded and exchanged like baseball cards. There was nothing new here. Horror was everywhere.