The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1) (5 page)

Would it be terribly inconvenient for the police to come back?

“You find all of this amusing?” Papa asked.

And suddenly, to her surprise, Irene did. She laughed, tossed off the scrap of blanket with its ruined lace, and stood up. “You lied to them.”

“Preposterous. You’ve been desperate for attention since the minute you came back, Irene. The way you carried on at the Andersons’ picnic, and the late nights, and that horrible scene with Mr. King—”

“He has children who are grown women,” Irene said. “He should learn to keep his hands to himself.”

Papa looked like a strangled blueberry. Fat fingers worked at his collar. His other hand still rested on the revolver. Then he said, “I see that you and I have come to the same conclusion. It is time that you left this home, Irene. A trip is in order.” Some of the color faded from his face, perhaps the result of relief from the too-tight collar. “A good, long trip, my darling girl. Europe. Yes. I think Paris would do nicely. I will make the arrangements tonight. Your mother and I will be heartbroken, but it’s for the best.”

He patted the butt of the revolver once, as though saying goodbye, and disappeared through the door.

For a minute longer, Irene waited. Then she grabbed her hat, and her clutch, and her coat and she started for the door. Halfway down the hall, she retraced her steps and retrieved the revolver.

She had a red-haired man to find.

Cian dodged a line of wagons laden with Bevo casks, and then he dodged the horse droppings that plagued Kerry Patch, and then he tried to dodge a puddle of dirty, half-frozen water. He missed this last one and plunged into the water ankle deep. Foul, oily water rushed to the top of his boot and wormed its way in through the holes along the stitching. Cian pulled himself free and continued down the street. He gave some serious thought to whistling, but then, this was Kerry Patch, and so he thought better of it.

One hundred dollars. Good, solid money. Money to quiet the Doyles, money to put something decent in Cian’s stomach, money to keep him in good, Canadian moonshine until his eyes burst. That last part was the most important. He needed something to get the clinging dust of sobriety from his mouth. His headache had faded to a pinprick at the back of his head, but that only made it easier for other things to burrow in: memories and recriminations and thoughts of that girl.

He wanted the taste of her out of his mouth too. Fine-boned, pretty if you liked a woman without a scrap of flesh on her, and dripping money and entitlement like a wet rag, the woman had put a stick up Cian’s ass from the first minute. That last bit, shouting back at her from the drive, had been pretty sweet thought. Even from a distance, he’d seen the look on her face. That had almost made it all worth it.

Of course, the hundred dollars did their fair share to set everything right as well.

As he drew closer to Seamus’s, the activity in Kerry Patch escalated. It was late afternoon now, the warmest part of the day, and even those folks who didn’t have work had stirred from indoors and were filling the streets. At times like this, Kerry Patch came its closest to being respectable. Cian’s people, for all the drinking and fighting and robbing, had a tendency to look out for each other. If you kept clear of the worst streets, if you held your head up high, you could count on a neighbor to pass you a quartered chicken, if you were wanting, because the next day you might do the same. People like that, Cian thought, never forgot the church spires stitching the sky.

Even the atmosphere inside Seamus’s had improved. The air still had the welcoming sting of spirits, but now heat and coal smoke poured from the stove, and a lively game of cards had picked up at one of the tables. Men and women crowded around the players. Eileen was one of them, a fan of cards held in front of her, her nose wrinkled in concentration. When she looked up and saw Cian, she winked and returned to her game.

Bobby stood behind the bar, a filthy towel over one shoulder, his eyes on the game.

“Afternoon,” Cian said.

“Go on back,” Bobby said. “He said he wanted to see you as soon as you got here.”

“Something interesting?” Cian said. “These people look like they’ve never seen a game of poker before.”

“Eileen’s taking the shirts off every one of them. It’s got a few of the boys so mad they can’t think straight.”

“Trouble?”

Bobby shook his head with a smile. “No, Eileen’s done it plenty of times before. Left me without money for rent one time. My own damn fault. I don’t play with her anymore, but I keep on eye on things, make sure the newcomers don’t do anything stupid.”

“Enjoy,” Cian said.

“Always do.”

Following the hall led Cian to the massive, silent man who waited outside Seamus’s door. When he saw Cian, he leaned forward, his chair squeaking in anguish, and rapped on the door. A minute passed, and then Seamus’s voice came. “Send him in.”

Cian stepped into the room, and the big man shut the door. The first thing Cian noticed was that the nailed-shut window was open, flapping in the darkness like a broken wing and letting in streams of light and cold air. The second thing he noticed was Seamus’s blank, twitching face. The third thing was the man with the gun.

He was a rail of a man with a face like a quarry, hard and pitted and eyes lost in shadow. He stood two feet away from Seamus’s chair. He held a gun aimed at Seamus’s head.

“Go ahead and drop that bar,” the man said. He had a hard voice, like a cop or a thug, and he wore a dark suit and hat. His eyes never left Seamus.

Cian reached back and lowered the bar in front of the door.

“Good,” the man said. Then he pulled the trigger.

The clap of the gun shocked Cian, but not as much as he expected. Old training took over. He hauled out the Colt, drew a bead on the man, fired.

The first shot went wide. The second clipped the man’s shoulder. He stumbled back. His gun swung towards Cian.

An explosion of wood from behind Cian, splinters scraping the back of his neck.

Cian squeezed the trigger twice more, blind and panicked, and threw himself towards Seamus’s bed. He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up against the bed frame. Hands shaking, Cian took aim.

The man was disappearing through the window. Cian fired one last time. The bullet buried itself in the frame with a puff of dust.

With a last tug, pulling himself free, the dark-suited man disappeared.

Thunder from the gunfire lingered in Cian’s ears. The barrel of the Colt trembled slightly. Acrid air, full of gun smoke, stung his tongue and nose. With his free hand, Cian checked his face and head, patted his chest, and then got to his feet.

Not a mark. Not a single fucking mark.

Shouting filtered through the drumming in Cian’s ears. A pair of bullet holes marked the door, and the wood strained and bulged as force was applied. Then more pounding, and then voices, and the creak and crack of the planks. All of it sounded second-hand.

Cian held the Colt at his side and looked at Seamus. The bullet had entered the man’s temple at an angle, and the force of the shot had tilted Seamus backwards in his chair, his head dangling over one shoulder. Blood dripped—a surprisingly slow stream.

The shouts had grown louder. Or perhaps the echo of the gunfire had faded. A long creak came from the door, and then the protest of metal, and one of the bolts holding the crossbar popped free.

Sliding the Colt into the waist of his trousers, Cian scrambled through the window. As he hauled himself into the cramped alley at the rear of Seamus’s, he saw that the nails had been for show—a hidden latch kept the window shut, making it easy to admit guests that Seamus might prefer to keep secret.

Say, for example, like the man who had just shot Seamus in the head.

Cian’s feet hit the mud, and he slipped once, soaking his left leg in the dirty slush, and then he was off at a run.

Behind him, the shouts faded slowly into the hustle of the Patch, and the Colt’s barrel cooled slowly, but Cian still threw a glance over his shoulder at every second pace.

Because now he was a dead man.

Cian took back streets and side streets and tiny, trash-cluttered lanes that weren’t even streets at all. He circled the edge of Kerry Patch, keeping as far from Seamus’s as he could while making his way toward the room he rented from the Doyles. The sun lingered on the horizon with stubborn insistence, a swollen red eye that watched Cian’s every step, as though refusing to go to sleep until it had seen a bullet through Cian’s head.

If Cian had any say in it, though, that wasn’t going to happen today.

The problem, of course, was that there were a lot of fellows who disagreed with him. Twice Cian saw men that he thought might be working for Seamus—or whoever was running things, now that Seamus had kicked it. They were big men, the kind who liked to do the hitting first and the questions later, or never. The first time Cian saw a pair of them, he ducked into a twisting passageway that took him a half-mile in the wrong direction and dumped him just short of the Mississippi. The sun, still refusing to set, smeared orange and red across the waters, as though mocking the growing cold.

The second time Cian saw a pair of Seamus’s men, he spent forty minutes crouched between broken-down barrels at the back of St. Michael the Archangel, shivering. A priest Cian knew by face if not by name came out once, hauling a bucket of rubbish. He saw Cian, looked away, and went back into the church. Seamus’s men didn’t make their way to the back of the church, and eventually Cian peeled himself out of his hiding place and picked another route home.

At the heart of all of it, though, was the problem that no amount of hiding or backtracking could deal with: Bobby Flynn knew who Cian was and he knew where Cian lived.

When Cian finally started down the cramped dirt path that rambled in front of the sausage shop and his rented room above it, the sun had ducked its head below the horizon. A band of watery yellow outlined the houses to the west, but most of the street had fallen into shadow. Cian made his way down the street slowly, his collar turned up, hands buried in his pockets, and wishing for a hat to hide the stack of red hair that made him visible—although perhaps less so in Kerry Patch, with so many fellow micks around.

He stopped at old man Burk’s place, which was a half-brick, half-timber building that gave consumptive wheezes when the wind blew. An abandoned coach, with its doors missing and the upholstery torn out, sat on the scrap of grass in front of the house. Placing himself behind the coach, Cian stared through the empty windows, studying the Doyles’ sausage shop and the street around it. A winter-fat squirrel capered across the top off the coach, chittering angrily at Cian, but no one else seemed to notice him. Dark and cold and hunger picked the street clean, until Cian, puffing on his hands to warm them, thought he might be alone.

Time to take a chance.

He sprinted up the path. In the dark, his footsteps sounded strangely loud, echoing back from the shacks on either side. His breath was a tornado in his lungs. Nothing moved in the darkness. Nothing lunged out at him. Everything bobbed and swam in Cian’s vision except for the staircase, and the single lighted window of the Doyles’ kitchen, and the streamers of yellow crepe light that ran across rutted dirt.

When he reached the stairs, Cian slowed, easing his way up the old wood as best he could. His door popped open easily. The room was dark. The air was closed up, heavy with the odor of dirty clothes and bedding, and only a hair warmer than the night. Cian slipped inside, fumbled a packet of matches from his pocket, and struck one. Wavy light made a cone around him.

Alone. So far. He grabbed a stub of candle, lit it, and the light grew steadier. Dresser drawers had been torn free, clothes scattered across the room, the bed overturned. Whoever had searched here hadn’t found anything. There hadn’t been anything to find.

Cian made a bundle of shirts and trousers, tossing in his last rounds for the Colt, and then blew out the candle. There was nothing else left for him in that room. A lot of bad nights, a lot of worse mornings. Once or twice, a girl he’d forgotten by the week’s end.