by David Mark
“The explosion, I know.”
“He was still alive afterward. Tried to cut his arm off with a cleaver. Didn’t say a word.”
“He died . . .”
“I know. Mine was the last face he saw. And the next one was never going to be Saint Peter’s. He was going straight to hell.”
“No,” says Molony, shaking his head. “He made his confession. He met God with a clear conscience.”
“And so will you, yes?”
Molony smiles, wide and happy. “Please.”
Claudio raises the gun. Molony raises his eyes skyward.
The door comes off its hinges as McAvoy throws himself against the wood. A huge figure in a dirty black coat, he slithers onto the grimy floor in a shower of splinters. Without a word, Claudio turns. Fires. The bullet thumps into the smaller, red-haired man who stands in the open doorway.
Molony lets out a screech of frustration and grabs for the knife.
On the floor, clutching his arm, McAvoy tries to get to his feet. He slips on the snow that billows in through the open doorway. Behind him, he hears Valentine crying out in pain. Red pours from the wound in his shoulder like spilled Communion wine.
McAvoy scans the room. Sees Molony, naked and horrifically scarred. Swivels his gaze to the other man. Old. Tanned. Blood dripping from a head wound and a gun in his hand.
McAvoy pushes himself upright as Claudio pulls the trigger. The bullet whistles under his arm and through the tails of his coat. McAvoy hurls himself sideways as Molony slashes at him with the knife. McAvoy lashes out with a boot, and something snaps in the Penitent’s knee. He howls and falls back.
Claudio catches the stumbling Molony by the wrist. He spins him, takes the hand that holds the knife, and turns it back upon Molony.
Close enough to kiss, close enough to see each other’s souls, Claudio forces Molony’s hand back and into him. The blade enters the Penitent’s heart in slow increments. His soul does not leave his body until the hilt touches skin.
In his dying moments, Molony sees his own hand holding the blade. He knows himself a sinner. His last vision is of Claudio, face emotionless. His last thought is the absolute certainty of his damnation.
Claudio lets the body drop to the floor and turns to where McAvoy lies in a carpet of leaves and snow.
“Amen,” says Claudio, and he slips to the floor.
EPILOGUE
TWO DAYS LATER . . .
He didn’t cry,” says Roisin. “Walked out of his church the way people do in the films when they’re walking to the gallows and want to show they’re not afraid. I don’t know I’d have been so brave—not with all the cameras and guards.”
McAvoy listens to her voice. There is a sadness to her words. It sounds as if she is describing a funeral.
“I don’t know how much of what he did is a crime,” says McAvoy, just as solemnly. “How do you charge a priest for absolving sins?”
Roisin stays quiet. McAvoy is pressing the phone into his face so hard that it is leaving an impression upon his cheek. All he wants is to touch his skin to hers. All he wants is her closeness.
“They said he had helped set up fake charities. He’d been complicit in money laundering. Is that the right word? Complicit?”
McAvoy nods. He can’t find any words.
“You’re coming home,” says Roisin suddenly. “Right away? Straight to Ireland? I can get a flight to Humberside, even if it means going via fecking North Korea. I need you. My skin isn’t my own, Aector. It’s yours. And you need to press yourself against it.”
McAvoy rubs a hand across his nose. “It was dumb luck,” he says quietly. “Don’t go thinking I did anything impressive, I just blundered around. That’s all I did. I bumbled into a situation . . .”
“Shush your bollocks,” says Roisin, and there’s a smile in her voice. “Valentine’s coming home. The Teagues and the Heldens are drinking together and my husband is the king of all of it. When I see you, it’s going to take a team of firemen to peel me off you.”
McAvoy finds himself grinning. “A team of firemen? You had to spice the pot, eh?”
Roisin laughs, and when she speaks again, he can hear tears in her words.
“I love you so fucking much, I think I could fly,” she says.
“I love you back,” says McAvoy, and he realizes he is shaking. “Always.”
He ends the call and turns back into the hospital room. Ronnie Alto has the good grace to pretend he has only just arrived.
“Would have been nice if he’d woken up,” says Alto, looking down at Brishen. “Doctor says there are good indications in his brain patterns, whatever that means.”
Leaning by the wall, McAvoy gives a nod. “Travelers are clubbing together to have him flown home. Private facility. The Church is going to contribute.”
“I bet it is,” says Alto, turning away from Brishen. Two days on from the incident at Crow, Alto looks exhausted. He has had to write a lot of reports and tell a lot of lies. In Trish Pharaoh he has found an excellent tutor. Over the course of several Skype chats, they have nailed down a plausible story for what happened. In it, McAvoy’s role is diminished to little more than an observer, but the bosses at both the FBI and the Seventh Precinct are sufficiently impressed to allow him to fly home without handcuffs. Valentine is unlikely to be extended the same courtesy until he is finished being debriefed by the feds on the size and scale of the underground fight scene and the role of the Russian Mob within it. He seems to be enjoying the attention, and intends to have the bullet that lodged in his left shoulder turned into a replacement tooth for his upper row.
“You got the results,” says McAvoy quietly. “I know you did.”
“An unauthorized blood test? Without his permission? That would be a disciplinary matter.”
“Please,” says McAvoy. “I’m too tired to argue.”
“He’s Sal Pugliesca’s,” says Alto, nodding at Brishen. “And Alejandra Mota Valverda’s. She was fourteen. Sal liked them young. Whether she thought he was her boyfriend or whether he raped her without preamble, we don’t know. Best we can surmise is she was six or seven months pregnant when Tony took her. She gave birth prematurely in that hole. Died there, too. True miracle that the baby lived. That place was something out of hell, Aector. It was a madman’s vision. We’re only just scratching the surface and we’ve found enough bones to convince you there’s true evil in the world. Alejandra must have seen and felt things in those last days that you wouldn’t wish on a monster.”
McAvoy swallows. He shakes his head.
“Do you think Tony took her because of Sal?” asks McAvoy.
Alto shrugs. “The things that poor bastard went through, I don’t think we can ever make sense of his motivations. He could only talk among the dying, so he took people and made his confessions while they breathed their last. Kept all his confessions in a box for Father Whelan. Maybe he thought he was helping Sal—maybe he thought he was giving his God a more perfect sacrifice. Maybe he was fucking nuts.”
“And Claudio?”
“Your testimony will see him go down for killing Sal Pugliesca and Tony Blank in nineteen eighty-one.”
“For killing a rapist and a serial killer,” mutters McAvoy. “What about Paulie Pugliesca?”
“Doubt we’ll get him but we can get his money. Molony kept detailed accounts. We’ve got some very clever people with glasses and questionable personal hygiene poring over old manuscripts and church passages, trying to make sense of the code he used to hide the different account numbers. They’ve never been happier. Pugliesca’s not showing it, but he’ll be breaking his heart over this. People will start to doubt the power after a while. We’re already hearing whispers. And Claudio might just cough to killing Sal and Tony on the old man’s orders.”
“I can’t make sense of Claudio,” says McAvoy gloomily. “You said he ha
d a stepdaughter?”
“Don’t get hung up on it,” says Alto tiredly. “He’s a very bad man, Aector. He’s killed so many people.”
“He saved my life.”
“Not really,” says Alto. “You saved his. How would he have gotten away and got medical attention if he shot Molony? He’d be dead.”
“I thought I’d left it too long. Listening to him talk—hiding by the door. I needed to hear it all, even if it cost him his life.”
Alto shakes his head. “You did everything right.”
McAvoy closes his eyes. Even after endless showers, a change of clothes, and a shave, he still looks as though he has been dragged behind a truck. The bruise beneath his eye is the color of overripe bananas.
“Whelan,” says McAvoy. “How much did he know?”
“Your NBCI is having some interesting conversations with him. He seems quite relieved. He’s been confessor to the Mob for decades, and his soul sounds like it weighs more than his church.”
“I can’t work him out, either,” says McAvoy.
“I think he was like any of us. Thought of himself as a good man and then didn’t know how to save himself when he realized he’d made mistakes. He certainly seems to have done his best by Brishen. But even thousands of miles away he couldn’t really get free. He was valuable to Pugliesca. Valuable to all of them. He thought he was saving souls and he was just giving them a Get Out of Jail Free card.”
McAvoy swallows. It hurts to do so, but looking at the Miracle Man in the hospital bed, he refuses to feel sorry for himself.
“The problems at home are sorted, yeah? No blood feuds? No warring gypsies?”
McAvoy smiles tiredly. “All best friends again. Valentine phoned from the ambulance. They’ll all be laughing about it over Guinness before Shay’s body’s in the ground. I don’t mean that in a bad way—it’s just how they are.”
“And you?”
McAvoy looks away before his blush betrays him. “She’s pleased. She’s happy.”
“I’d love to meet her, your Roisin.”
“She’d have been happy even if I failed,” says McAvoy, and coughs when he hears his voice crack. “I don’t know who I’d be without her.”
“Or her without you, my friend.”
McAvoy feels too embarrassed to say anything else. He changes the subject. “Do you think he did it?”
“Who?”
“Paulie Pugliesca? Do you think he ordered his own son to be murdered for informing?”
Alto takes his glasses off and rubs them on his shirt. “We have to ask Whelan about that. If Whelan knew what Sal was . . . if he knew about Tony Blank. If he’d received those tapes of confession . . . you think he might have broken the seal of the confessional?” McAvoy shakes his head. Sometimes it seems as though the darkness is like cold water and today it is reaching past his neck.
“How many bodies?”
“Eight. Ali was the last one. Starved to death like the others. We’re piecing together Tony’s movements over those last days. Maybe Sal found the bodies and told everything to Father Whelan in confession.”
“How? Tony didn’t speak.”
“He could speak in the presence of the dying. That’s what Molony thought.”
“Psychologically, is that possible?”
Alto sighs. “Elective mutism, or selective mutism, or whatever you want to call it—it takes funny shapes. We’ve got a profiler who says she knew a kid who could speak really lucidly while being beaten but couldn’t utter a word at other times. Tony’s parents were killed in front of him. He saw his father beaten with golf clubs. Saw his mom raped and chopped up with a bloody hatchet. Who are we to say how that would affect somebody?”
“Why did Pugliesca take him in?”
“Guilty conscience?” Alto offers with a laugh. “There are a few old informants who reckon he was to blame for the death of Tony’s parents in the first place.”
“And he just dumped him in that place on Staten Island.”
“Wherever his soul is now, it’s no worse than that place,” says Alto, arching his back. “All the evil involved in this investigation and that’s the worst of it by far. The way those kids were treated . . .”
“Who do you think he’d have been if he’d just lived a normal life?” asks McAvoy as he crosses to the window. There has been no snow for the past two days and a blue sky is doing battle with the last remaining storm cloud. As he watches the parking lot, a van with a Christmas tree on the roof pulls up. Moments later, McAvoy watches as the driver starts walking a quartet of reindeer down a ramp from the back of the van. Alto joins him by the window.
“Christmas,” he says. “They bring them for the sick kids.”
“Sick as in ill? They pet them, not stab them, yes?”
“Jesus,” says Alto. “Must be rough in Hull.”
“It’s never dull,” says McAvoy.
His plane leaves tonight. He’s flying to Galway. Roisin and the children will be there to meet him. He can already taste his wife’s kisses. Can summon the smell of his children’s skin. He feels as though he lost himself somewhere. He wants to find himself again and knows he cannot do so without them at his side.
“Give Trish my best,” says Alto, and they shake hands by Brishen’s bedside. “She’s an impressive woman.”
“She’s something,” says McAvoy.
“It’s been interesting,” adds Alto, and he gives the bigger man a look that’s halfway between bemusement and admiration. “If you’re going to come back, let us know in advance. We’ll call out the army.”
McAvoy watches him leave. Only when he knows himself to be alone does he cross to Brishen’s bedside and look down upon the man born forty years ago in a pit in the ground.
“We’re more than the sum of our parts,” whispers McAvoy. “We’re more than just our blood. You’re a survivor. A fighter. Don’t let go, Brishen. Get up. Don’t ever stop swinging.”
McAvoy pulls up a chair and sits by the bed.
He has been asleep for only twenty minutes when the bleeping of the monitor changes its rhythm.
On the bed, Brishen’s hand becomes a fist . . .
. . . and his eyes open like the gates of heaven.
Acknowledgments
As a lad from Cumbria who lives in Lincolnshire and writes about Yorkshire (these are places on a small and rainy island called England), I’m perhaps a little underqualified to pen a crime novel set in New York. Thankfully, there are nice people everywhere who were willing to overlook this fact and help me out with the extraordinary amounts of research needed to make Cruel Mercy come to life.
Some I can name. Others, who spend a lot of their time punching people in underground boxing gyms and pulling people’s teeth out with pliers, I had probably better leave in the shadows.
But I think I’m relatively safe to say thanks to the following:
Jack, the limo driver from Hong Kong; Fiz on reception at the Comfort Inn; Justin from Melbourne at Lucky Jack’s; Jenaro and Richie at Church Street Gym; Luis at Oficina Latina for a cocktail that made my ears ring; Shamar from Jamaica and Brandon from Brixton at Bowlmor off Times Square; and at the awesome restaurant Balthazar, I’d like to apologize to Lorraine the waitress for the jokes about your Fanny Bay oysters. Your tolerance was impressive.
Really, this is one big thank-you to New York. It’s a chaotic and unwieldy place that had the same effect on my imagination that a wheel of cheese would have on your sleep patterns. I thought the whole “city that never sleeps” thing was just a marketing slogan. I was wrong.
As ever, my thanks also go to the team at Blue Rider. David, you’ve been a supporter from the start and I can’t thank you enough for your continued enthusiasm and belief that someday, one of these damn McAvoy books will set the world alight. Thanks to Katie, too, for impressive efficiency and patience.
Oli, friend and agent, you actually persuaded people to publish a McAvoy novel set in America. Go light a cigar.
And thanks again to the fellow authors who have supported, cajoled, and admonished me in equal measure during a trying time. I’ll always appreciate you. Susi Holliday, you’re a true friend. Neil White, thanks for, well, you know what. Alexandra, Steph, Helen—thanks for just being who you are. Val, Peter, and Peter—thanks for throwing a kindly word my way and allowing me to think that one day I might be as good as you. Mari, Danielle, Sarah, I love the lot of you.
Finally, thanks to my safety net, the people who catch me when I fall and who put up with more nonsense than anybody should have to endure: Nikki, George, and Elora. I’ll never deserve you, but I will always know what love looks and feels like, thanks to you.
And once again, here’s to you, dear reader. Love you, you sick lot.
About the Author
DAVID MARK’s Cruel Mercy is the latest novel in the Detective Sergeant McAvoy series. Mark lives in Yorkshire, England.
david-mark.com
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