Nora was the closest thing I had to family of my own, and the way things were going, that would likely never change. There wasn't much chance of me settling down with anyone when I couldn't trust them. Nearly everyone I knew was on someone's kill list and I'd worked hard to stay off all of them. It was quite the balancing act, and I didn't need some piece of arse tipping it all in the wrong direction for me.
Anyone getting close to me would end up knowing too much, it was unavoidable. I never was good at opening up and it was even less natural when the truth in the wrong mans hands'd get me killed five times over.
It wasn't worth the risk.
Family was the only thing that mattered aside from business, and that meant Brigid and Nora.
I grabbed the plastic crate off one of the officers as he walked past and the bottles rattled as I planted it back squarely on the bar. Enough was enough.
"Unpack that."
For a minute it looked like he might argue with me. His eyes darted from me to his fellow officer and I knew he was weighing up whether he wanted to take a risk on finding out whether the rumours about me were justified. His pal stopped loading up his own crate.
"I said, unpack it. Does it look like she's got €5000 worth of booze in here?"
"We've got a warrant…"
"I don't give a shit what you think you've got. The Proceeds of Crime Act is pretty bloody clear. There ain't enough here to stand up in court. This is harassment and my lawyer's going to wipe the floor with the lot of you. Get yourself away before I make you."
Regular officers didn't carry firearms, but they couldn't guarantee the same for me. To be sure, they could have arrested me for concealment of an illegal handgun, but that'd only be as long as they managed to do that before I made use of it.
I squared my shoulders, letting my arms hang, my hand poised to reach inside my jacket for the gun I wasn't carrying. Today I was bluffing, but I knew they didn't have the balls to call it.
The second officer's hands rose up to hover by the side of his head, bare palms toward me. The poor kid was practically shaking.
Brigid crossed herself and looked away, closing her eyes. "Jaysus, Garrett."
I picked up a bottle of Jameson by the neck and pushed it square into the fresh-faced Garda's chest hard enough to make him take a step back as he automatically gripped the bottle.
"You tell your man out there he can have this on me, seein' as he's so desperate for a drink. The rest is staying right where it is. He wants to come after me, then he can come after me. D'you understand?"
CHAPTER 2
Kaitlin
Garrett Brannigan was a pain in the ass. I'd officially decided.
The only two numbers Dad had for him went to a disconnected mobile and a landline that just rang and rang. I'd known that for months, but I still tried both of them again from the pay phone in the hostel as soon as I got there.
Listening to the phone ring out had been part of my routine every day for months and it was irritatingly familiar to count the rings, thinking that maybe the next one would open up with the click of someone picking up and I'd finally get to speak to him. A small part of me hoped that given that we were now in the same country, he'd be more likely to pick up.
I knew that was some serious wishful thinking.
If I was going to be hanging around trying to find the man, I needed to get a cell phone sorted because my network wanted to charge me a small fortune, and cash flow problems were the entire reason I'd come here.
The only proof I had he existed were a couple of old photos from before Dad left that looked like they'd been taken in a boxing ring. He looked about sixteen and I had no doubt he would have changed significantly. His boyish body had the markers of someone about to start growing into themselves, and his eyes flashed directly at the camera, though I couldn't make out the colour of them. His smile was small and guarded.
That picture had been the one I looked at the most growing up, when I used to beg mom and dad to tell me all about Ireland. I'd dream of finding a boy of my own, just like that.
Well he wasn't that boy any longer and I'd grown up enough to stop dreaming.
I tortured myself for a few more seconds before I hung up and sat down heavily on the lower bunk nearest the window that I'd claimed for myself.
At least I was here. Right smack-dab in the middle of the city.
I sure as hell hadn't come all the way to Dublin just to listen to his phone ring. If he wasn't picking up, then I was going to have to go to the address on the envelope and hope that wasn't as outdated as the phone numbers seemed to be. I didn't know what I was going to do if no one knew him at that address either.
I rubbed at my eyes underneath my glasses and took a deep breath. I was practically asleep on my feet. That wasn't a good start. There were so many things I needed to do, but the bus from the airport had nearly finished me off.
First off, I squeezed my bag into the under-bed locker. No way was I risking leaving all my things for some opportunistic bag thief to take advantage of.
I'd been living out of a suitcase since they terminated the lease on the house. The things in that bag were the things I'd boiled my life down to. Boxing everything up from house and putting it into storage had made me real selective, but that didn't mean I'd be okay if the lot went missing. Besides, it wasn't just my clothes and laptop in there. I doubted anyone would be interested in taking the file with the papers and pictures of mom and dad, but that was something I wasn't going to risk. Safer to have everything locked away.
Like Dad always said, you can never be too careful.
I wished I'd had the money for a hotel room, but given I didn't know how long I'd need to stay, I couldn't risk the extra expense. €15 a night with breakfast included wasn't a price I could argue with. The room was basic, but clean. Aside from the fact that there were seven other people sleeping in the room, there wasn't a problem. I just had to stop thinking about all those horror films that started off with a single girl backpacking through Europe.
This wasn't that. The place had excellent reviews and staff who put on free food and hosted music evenings. They were friendly, and the people hanging out in the lounge area seemed normal too. Staying here wasn't a risk. It was the sensible option.
It just made me feel sad that the group of strangers here were as close as anyone to being family to me. But that was probably exhaustion and jet lag talking. I didn't have time to cry over it. I could do that once I had my life back.
I didn't really need a hotel room. I needed a shower. I needed coffee, and I needed something to eat that wasn't airplane food before the rest of the inhabitants of the room came back and tried to drag me on the bar crawl scheduled for the evening.
Family or not, this was as much my home now as anywhere else was, so I needed to get used to it.
There was an ensuite bathroom at least. That was more luxurious than back home. After a shower I'd feel more human. I was sure about that.
One of the other occupants of the room had put their shampoo in the corner, but other than that, once I bolted the door and got my own toiletries out, it was easy to forget the bathroom was shared rather than private. There was hot water and that was the most important thing.
I'd spared valuable luggage space to pack a larger towel, but it was so worth it to have that little bit of familiarity to snuggle into, fresh and clean from the shower.
Back out in the bedroom, I took a minute to decide on my pale blue-grey stretchy knit top that toned in with my eyes and made them pop. I set it out on the bed along with a pair of proper pants in a dark grey instead of my usual jeans, and pulled out my heeled ankle boots in honor of the rain. The top clung just enough to be suggestive and although the fabric wasn't sheer, you could see the outline of my bra through it. I figured I could do with all the help I could get in persuading Garrett to do what I wanted. I was hoping the guy would be enough of a letch to be distracted enough to warm to me if I smiled and flirted a bit. Dad's business assoc
iates back home sure thought I should be flattered by their middle-aged attentions and I figured he wouldn't be so different. If it took using what I had to get what I needed, then I wasn't above doing that.
My hair was loose around my shoulders and starting to wave due to the humidity and the incredibly underpowered hair dryer that I'd lost patience with, so I decided to embrace it. The rain was going to play havoc with everything anyway, and maybe it'd come across as surf-tousled rather than messy.
I took time on my makeup. Moisturiser, primer, concealer, foundation, blush. Eyeliner in brown so it looked more natural against my pale skin than black would, shadow in a neutral colour just to wake my eyelids up, and a thin swipe of mascara before I pulled out a lipstick in a dusky, muted pink.
There was only so much you could do when you had freckles all over without looking like you'd signed up for face-painting and I'd stopped trying to cover them up years ago. All in all, I looked pretty good. A big improvement on the travelling version of me anyhow. Except maybe for the bags under my eyes. I even braved poking myself in the eye and broke out my contacts just for him.
I'd thought about this outfit carefully. I wanted to come across as more mature than other girls my age, like someone who'd have no problem looking after their own finances. That was what I needed Garrett to believe. He needed to like me and to think I was the kind of young woman who could be responsible.
Sure, I could get a job through college to pay for rent and food and anything else I might need. That wasn't a problem. College fees were, and at the very least I needed to get Garrett to agree to release my inheritance to pay them.
I didn't have the grades for a scholarship, or the talent in any other discipline. It had been hard enough to get decent enough grades to make a college application viable with all the moving around we'd done. Sure, there was community college if Brannigan decided to be an ass about it all, but that wasn't my dream.
Dad always said he'd have had a whole lot more doors open to him if he'd gotten a degree instead of dropping out of school at sixteen. He'd always wanted me to go to college - a decent one, so I could make sure my qualifications stood out and set me apart from the crowd. I wasn't going to settle for less than he'd planned. The money was there, and it was supposed to go towards my education.
I wasn't going to put that all on hold for three years because of Dad's sentimental idea of making sure I had someone to look out for me.
---
Whatever kind of place I'd expected a friend of my dad's to live, it wasn't the grey, depressing street that I found myself walking down. All the houses looked pretty much the same, except for being faced in slightly varying shades of grey concrete, or tired white paint.
A lot of them were in little rows all tacked together, with multiple front doors and low walls around the boundary of each house. They were all one up and one down, but towards the end of the street I was heading, they started having a bit more width.
I needed number forty five and from the look of all the rest of the houses on the street, it was going to share a wall with the house next to it. It looked like someone had chopped one of those little box houses kids draw exactly in half.
Except there was no lollipop tree, and no brightly shining sun and the dark windows looked like they were all scowling at me.
I'd taken a bus from the hostel, out of the touristy part of the city to get here, and I was starting to regret that. With every stop out of the centre of the city it looked more and more inhospitable. There were fewer people about and struggling shops were interspersed with empty windows, and then the residential areas started with row upon row of the same kind of housing.
I began to think I should have found someone to come with, or at least let someone know where I was going. But it was too late now.
As soon as I turned onto the road, the group of teenagers playing soccer in the street stopped to stare at me.
With the back of my neck prickling to high alert under their stares, I walked past the burned out car in the garden of one of the houses and noticed a couple of the other houses had their front windows boarded over. There was a kid on a shaggy, malnourished pony at the other end and no one apart from me seemed fazed.
The boys weren't that old. I'd guess between sixteen and twenty, and maybe I should have felt some kind of kinship with them, but all the moving around had taught me that kids could be feral. There was no way they were going to decide I was one of them standing out in my brand new clothes with my new looking handbag and my brand new umbrella.
No one said anything, but I could tell I wasn't welcome.
I carried on down the street, knowing I'd have to walk past them. Disconcertingly, they shifted to one side of the street so I didn't have to walk through the middle of them and for a minute I thought maybe I'd read them wrong.
Just because they wore old sneakers and hoodies, messing about on the street in the middle of the day, didn't mean they were up to no good. Right?
My courage slipped when I realised they'd stopped their game and were following me.
I almost turned back about a million times. Every instinct I had told me to do just that. San Francisco didn't have too many no-go areas aside from the Tenderloin, and most of the trouble there was from the homeless and drug users, but I knew the feeling of being watched.
A prickle of fear raced up the back of my neck. Despite the cold, I was sweating. Never mind getting my stuff stolen back at the hostel, there was a very real chance I was going to get mugged here.
I clutched my purse tightly under my arm and kept my head up straight. I needed to look confident. I had my passport in my bag, and all my bank cards in my pocketbook. I'd be in so much trouble if I lost them all.
The itching need to glance back won out, and I regretted it at the sly grin of the older looking guy. The group of them were walking purposefully in my direction, fast enough to know there was no use running. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the front wheel of a bicycle push ahead of me. Leaning low over the handlebars to grin at me, forcing eye contact, one of the boys prowled slowly. His low bicycle looked like it was made for someone way smaller than him - maybe a child. Some distant part of my brain registered that it might be for tricks, but I really didn't know, and I really didn't care.
"Who owns you?" he asked.
"What?"
"Don't nobody own you?"
The oldest of the boys let out a burst of laughter, and the jeering started in accents so thick and rolling that I could barely understand. The cat calls were universal though, and I knew exactly what he meant when the guy made a V with his fingers and flickered his tongue through them like some kind of snake.
Oh god. I was going to get gang raped by a bunch of spotty, scrawny teenagers on my first day in a new city. I was going to get raped, and probably murdered and I should never have come here. I should have let the lawyer milk me for every damn cent so I didn't have to find Garrett fricking Brannigan on my own.
I wanted to disappear into the pavement, but it was too late to turn back now and I didn't rate my chances of outrunning a bike, let alone the scrawny pony.
I tried to keep my steps measured and not speed up. It was a nearly impossible task and I nearly tripped over my own feet trying not to run up the path to the front door once I finally reached the right number.
Dad always used to tell me that the worst thing you could do was let someone know you were afraid of them. I was pretty sure my body had taken over on that one. It had to be obvious how badly my hands were shaking when I thumped my fist against the door.
I only spotted the bell when I'd done it, and reached out to press it with my thumb.
"What d'you want with Jackie Dolan?" The kid with the bicycle wasn't giving up.
I kept my head high, ignoring them as best I could, hoping that Garrett would damn well hurry up and open his door. I didn't know who this Jackie person was and I didn't care.
Inside, I heard movement, and I swallowed, trying to pull myself together
before I came face to face with the man I'd come here to find. With the gang of boys loitering right on the other side of the gate, it felt like forever before the latch turned and the door opened.
A woman snarled at me through the small gap of the opened door.
"Hi." I tried a smile, but it wouldn't stay in place. All I wanted was to get as far away from the gang of boys as possible. I glanced over my shoulder just enough to indicate the boys at the gate less than two meters behind me. "Can I come in? Please.”
"What do you want?"
I heard myself let out a whimper and struggled to keep it together. "I - um. I'm looking for Garrett Brannigan."
The suspicion didn't leave her face. If anything it deepened, darkening her eyes.
Dad's Irish Mafia Friend (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 110) Page 2