by Gregory Ashe
“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.
Home was just a place to wait until the drink stopped hitting quite so hard.
As he came
out onto the stairs, Cian collided with someone. A bristly beard scratched his face, and the other man stumbled. Then a jab at Cian’s side, aiming for the kidney. Cian twisted back and crashed into the door. His jaw snapped shut. Cian tasted blood. Another blow from the man caught Cian in the gut. Cian’s breath turned into a brick.
Then Cian’s brain started working. He brought one elbow up, inside the other man’s arms, and caught the man on the jaw. The man’s head snapped to one side. Cian drove his foot down, onto inside of the man’s knee, and then smashed his forehead into the man’s face. Cian felt cartilage fold and snap and then heard a choked grunt, and the man slid back against the wooden rail.
With a low, throbbing twang, the rail snapped, the man fell. He screamed for a heartbeat. Then, at the same time, a thud and silence.
Cian’s head hurt like a bitch. He felt a goose egg rising on his forehead, and split skin with blood running down his temple. His tongue had grown three sizes, and the back of his head was throbbing, and something sick was kneading his gut with its claws. Cian pulled out the Colt, managed his way down the steps, and ran.
No raised voices. No bloom of lights. No calls for help.
In Kerry Patch, Bobby Flynn lay dead, and no one would bother until morning.
Cian hoped that would be long enough.
Night moved into St. Louis like an old, female relative with cold feet. An aunt, perhaps. Or maybe more like Irene’s own grandmother, on Papa’s side, who was missing a toe and had insisted on having Irene share her bed until Irene was twelve. That was how tonight was: clinging and icy and smelling like death.
The heavy fur coat Irene wore buffered her from the worst of the cold, but it also drew unwanted attention, especially in this part of St. Louis. More than a few men had stared after Irene as she passed—men in trousers worn out at the knees and coats with more patches than a mangy dog. Men who were not, Irene was fairly certain, admiring anything below the coat. It was slightly offensive. The weight of the revolver in her clutch kept Irene walking though, as did the thought of Papa’s face, and the absolute certainty that he was lying.
Irene had never been to Kerry Patch. It wasn’t safe for decent people, and while Irene hadn’t thought of herself as decent since she’d gone to Oberlin, she’d never had a reason to risk the Patch before tonight. The man who had come to deliver the box, though, had had all the rough edges of the Patch, and he’d looked as Irish as they came, and so Irene thought her best chance at finding him was to start in the Patch. The Irish clung together like pups at a teat. One of them would know him. If she were lucky, one of them would be willing to point Irene in his direction.
And Irene wanted to find that man, because she was certain the red-haired man had been the one to murder Sally and steal the box. It made sense, after all. He had come to the house, he had seen her, and he must have thought she was alone and that the house would make an easy mark. Then he’d gone around to the back, to steal the box and anything else he could carry. He’d stumbled across Sally. She’d been surprised, never had a chance to make a sound.
The red-haired man was a brute. It would have been easy for him to snap Sally’s neck.
As Irene moved deeper and deeper into the Patch, the street lamps dwindled, tiny sacks of flame and warmth swallowed up by the growing darkness, until only the moon and the stars held a chilly vigil over the streets. From the deeper shadows that fell in the alleys came muffled sounds that might have been fighting or love-making or both, and watchful eyes, and the occasional clatter of something small and furry scraping through piles of refuse. The smell of coal and wood smoke mixed with burnt garbage, and the odors clung to Irene’s hair, to the fur coat, to her skin. She wanted a bath and her bed and, although she wouldn’t admit this to anyone else, her Papa. Instead, she slipped her hand into her clutch, felt the weight of the revolver again, and thought about Sally.
Ahead, a blackened lantern hung in front of the place she was seeking. One term for the place might have been speakeasy, but this deep in Kerry Patch, there was no need for pretense. To judge by the swell of voices from inside the rambling log building, there was no need for speaking easy either. A wooden sign above the door had been carved with a lone clover, its green paint chipped, and the name Patrick’s.
If you needed to find someone in Kerry Patch, you started at Patrick’s. That’s what the paperboy had told Irene, and she hoped the boy had known what he was talking about.
She pushed open the door, stepped inside, and was hit by a wave of sound and heat. The roar of voices seemed to be on an eternal crescendo, rising and rising, fragmented into laughter and shouts and swearing and then laughter again. Bodies packed the low-ceilinged room, filling the air with the scent of sweat and lust and men who worked twelve hard hours. There were women too, more than Irene had expected, many with the fair hair and coloring she expected in the Patch, but plenty of women with hair and eyes as dark as Irene’s own. Against the far wall stood a row of massive casks, and between the press of bodies Irene glimpsed the bar, and she began to push her way towards it.
More than one man tried to intercept her—fingers sliding off her arm, fingers trailing down her back, fingers that pinched (more than once) her bottom. One man tried to slip an arm around Irene’s waist. She twisted away, saw a flushed, grinning face and a smile like a piano keyboard, more blacks than whites. Then the man disappeared back into the sea of bodies, and Irene continued her fight against the tide.
Perhaps it was the coat. Perhaps that was what provoked the touches.
But to judge by the number of hands that aimed for her hindquarters, probably not.
By the time Irene reached the bar and slotted herself between a pair of men in rough spun, clay-stained clothes, her face was red from heat and embarrassment both. The man to her right coughed into her face. The one on her left leered, staring down at her chest as though his eyes were knives, ready to skin her. Irene kept her own eyes fixed on the man behind the bar, and when he turned her way, she raised a hand.
He was a good-enough looking fellow, dark-haired and fair-skinned and with a smile that made him look more boyish than he probably was. The barest hint of surprise wrote itself in the way he bit the inside of his cheek when he saw her. He passed a mug of beer across the bar, wiped his hands, and came down to where she was standing.
“Miss,” he said. “Something to drink?”
“A sidecar,” Irene said, pulling coins from her clutch.
The barman was already shaking his head. “This might not be the right place for you, miss.”
“An old-fashioned, then,” Irene said. She slid a half-dollar across the slick wood.
A moment’s hesitation, and then the man scooped up the coin, nodded, and wandered back down the bar.
Hot breath from the man on the right scalded Irene’s neck. He had decided to join his partner in staring at her. The heat and the press of bodies combined with the fur coat to make Irene feel short of breath. Trying to make the movement seem natural, she leaned forward, supporting herself with the edge of the bar.
The dark-haired man came back with a drink in his hand. “It’s rye,” he said. “That’s all we’ve got.”
“Thank you,” Irene said, taking the drink. “I need to speak with Patrick.”
This time the surprise was more visible on the bartender’s face. “I’m Patrick.” He looked at the men on either side of her and said, “Liam. Angus. If you two aren’t going to spend another penny, you can clear some space for the lady.”
The faces of both men might as well have been molasses—surprise and resentment trickled across their features in viscous streaks. After a moment of pointed silence from Patrick, though, the men shoved their way into the crowd, leaving Irene alone. She sipped at the drink, and the rye whiskey hit her stomach like a hot coal. Another sip, and then she set the glass down, feeling the heat rumble up through her arms, her chest, her neck.
“Thank you,” she said.
“They’re cheap and mean and they d
on’t have a set of brains between them,” Patrick said. He smiled, and Irene felt the whiskey rise to a boil, and she made sure not to take another drink. “What can I help you with, miss? This doesn’t look like your part of town, if you’ll pardon me.”
“I—” Irene began, but Patrick’s eyes widened when he saw something over her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Just a moment.”
He moved to the far end of the bar and leaned forward to speak with someone hidden by the cramped bodies. Irene turned the glass in her hands, ran a finger through the beer and water and whiskey that made tiny lakes on the surface of the bar, and thought about the sliver of Patrick’s’ bottom she could see. He was a good-looking man, and God, that smile, and it had been a long time since Charlie Adair, and a longer time since she’d had a kiss that knocked her stockings off.
It had been a long time since she hadn’t felt alone.
She leaned forward, trying to get a better look at Patrick, hoping that she wasn’t being terribly obvious. And then she saw whom Patrick was talking to, their heads close together, every line of their bodies showing nerves and something that came close to fear.
The deliveryman.
Her old-fashioned forgotten, Irene pushed her way down the length of the bar, ignoring the angry looks and scattered swears. The red-haired man looked twice the wreck he’d been earlier that day, and his rough features were pale and knotted, as though he’d been put through the wringer. The noise of the bar, in its eternal crescendo, swarmed in Irene’s ears like angry bees. Her legs had become distant, ghostly echoes, and the only things that were real were the tendons and joints and muscles of one arm, then her fingers, and the silver-plated grip of the revolver.
Patrick was saying something, and the words were swallowed up in the storm in Irene’s ears, and the red-haired man had closed his hand over something on the bar. Irene pulled the revolver from her clutch.
No one saw.
She jammed the muzzle of the pistol into the red-haired man’s side. He jumped, his eyes wide, and went stiff. Patrick’s lips froze, caught in mid-syllable.