Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2)

by Cindy Brandner

  She raised her eyebrows, feeling a hot core of anger opening inside her. “Like what? Lingerie? Champagne? I already feel like a whore, I don’t want a wallet left on the dresser to confirm it.”

  His face remained implacable, “I thought you might want your husband removed to somewhere safe.”

  “Safe for whom? Him or me?” she asked, feeling a scalding rush of tears damming up at the back of her eyes.

  “For the both of you, I imagine. You may want to give some consideration to where you want to be when all this is over.”

  “I suppose Boston is out of the question,” she said sarcastically.

  “I’d avoid the entire Eastern seaboard,” he said, with a slight twitch of his lips that might have been a smile. “Your husband’s an Irish citizen.”

  “Are you suggesting we go back to Ireland?” she said incredulously.

  “Do you want my honest opinion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put an ocean between yourself and what’s happened here. When Love Hagerty goes down there’s going to be an awful lot of unhappy boys in the neighborhood looking for a scapegoat. You don’t want to be in that line of fire. I used to work homicide in the North End. Twenty-four corpses in a six month period, burned, strangled, cut from ear to ear, and all of it the Bassarelli family’s handiwork. Hagerty’s going to want to cut a deal, and that means ratting out his contacts in the North End.”

  “And they’ll want their vengeance?”

  “They’re Italian, aren’t they?” he said and this time there was no sign of humor in his face. “When they’re done in Southie there won’t be a man left standing. We’re expecting a bloodbath and we’re rarely wrong about these situations. This is your chance to get out before we put the fire to the mob’s feet, probably the only chance you’re going to get.”

  She nodded, slightly dazed by the revelations of the last hour. “How much time do I have?”

  “It’s got to be in the next month, sooner if possible, we’ve got agents out there undercover that need to be pulled back in before someone sniffs them out. You pick a target date, tell me and I’ll get it set up.”

  “That simple, hey?” she said, wanting nothing more than to go home and shower. She knew the filth of the day was going to take more than hot water and soap to clean off though.

  “For us,” he said, “yes. For you, no.”

  “Alright,” she took a deep breath, “give me a week to figure this out. Mr. Hagerty’s going to be suspicious if I spring this on him. I’ve been resisting his advances for months. Give me a week and then get my husband the hell away from here, somewhere they can’t find him and he,” she pressed the dewy bottle to the burning skin of her cheek, “can’t find me.”

  “Done,” Agent Gus Spencer said, thinking he’d never put in a harder hour for the Bureau than the one he’d just gone through.

  He swallowed the last of the liquid in his bottle and then held it away from him, the vagrant sunshine curving thickly through waves of pale green glass.

  “Coca Cola designed this bottle to feel like a woman’s body—see how it’s nipped in at the waist—so that subconsciously a man would connect it with the female form in his mind and like the snug of it in his palm.”

  “Seems to have worked,” she said, wondering if he had a point or was just making conversation.

  “I’ve always thought females were the ones with the real power,” he said quietly, turning the bottle around in his hand, “it just comes with a price. Is the price going to be too high for you?”

  “Considering what’s at stake, no,” she said, “it’s just a body after all, right? Mine to give if I so decide.”

  “It’s a lot more than that and we both know it.”

  “Try not to remind me of that too often,” she said bleakly.

  He looked at his watch, uncomfortable now that she’d agreed to consider his deal. She wondered if he’d ever be able to look into her eyes again.

  “I’ve got to get back to the field office,” he said awkwardly, and she felt a certain detached sympathy for him, knowing he was an honest man simply trying to catch a dishonest one, and that he didn’t like the methods he’d had to resort to.

  She sat for a long while after the agent’s dark-suited form had disappeared from view. Sat while couples strolled past arm in arm and mothers headed home with sleepy babies. In the distance, she heard the distinct crack of tight leather against a bat. She knew she had to get back to work before Love wondered what had happened to her. She couldn’t afford to raise his suspicions now.

  She gathered her uneaten lunch, her unread book and the bottle of soda that was still three- quarters full, then set them back down and closed her eyes for a moment against the brightness of the sun. She took a breath, the smell of crushed ferns so pungent that she could taste it on her tongue.

  Once she’d asked Jamie how he’d borne the pain of his marriage, the loss of three children and the sanity of a woman he’d loved most of his life. How he’d managed not to question the existence of a God who would allow such pain. He’d replied quietly that love didn’t ask a lot of questions, it just provided the answer that made life bearable. She could see him suddenly in her mind’s eye, with a sharp clarity that she had not allowed herself in a long time.

  “Oh Jamie,” she whispered forlornly, “what do I do now?”

  Against her hand, she felt a sudden tickle of movement and opened her eyes to find that a ladybug, jarringly bright and cheerful, had landed on the upturned palm of her left hand.

  She watched as the bug spread its bright lacquered wings and a stray breeze set loose a waxen rain of chestnut bloom, tipping the glossy bug forward into the crease where the lines of heart and life merged.

  “Don’t bother flying home, lady,” she said cupping her hand to shelter it from the wind, “the house is already in ashes.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Whale Road

  THE SNOTGREEN SEA. The scrotumtightening sea.

  Casey Riordan, standing on the deck of Jeannie’s Star, recalled the words of his famous countryman, and thought Joyce had definitely been onto something in his description.

  The contents of his own scrotum, had they the choice, would have gladly climbed up into his body and stayed there until he was back on land. Oddly enough, he had found his sea legs quickly, and after the first day hadn’t experienced any nausea. But a natural born sailor he would never be.

  Jeannie’s Star was an old tug, once used to haul warships and barges across the North Atlantic. She’d been found, bleeding rust and lying low and dull-eyed in the Scottish harbor of Perth. The inexperienced eye would have passed her over for junk, destined to go to a watery grave in a North Sea port. But Jack Blythe, a seaman from Petty Harbor, Newfoundland, saw the spirit in the abused tugboat and bought her for a song, had her refitted in Perth, and then took her home across the icy road of the North Atlantic. Once tucked in the rocky inlet of Petty Harbor, she was converted to a fishing boat.

  At one hundred and fifty-six feet, and 650 gross tonnes, Jeannie was oversized for a stern trawler, but that was what she was fitted out as. Her below deck spaces were generous, with the living quarters aft and the freezers to the stern. She had a big open deck space to land and begin the processing of the fish on. Her hold would take 400 tons of cod. In Newfoundland, and on any boat that ported out of her, fishing meant cod fishing. The word fish itself was synonymous with cod, other fish would be called by their individual names, but a Newfoundlander who said fish meant one thing and one thing only—cod.

  Jeannie’s crew consisted of fifteen men, an oddly assortment of men from the brutal northern shores of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Labrador. There was also an Icelander named Hallbjorn, which roughly translated, Casey was given to understand, meant rock-bear. The name was apt, as Hallbjorn was an enormous man with a well-furred face and hands the size of dinner plates. He was as silent and taciturn as the rock he was named for, but when it came to sussing out the weather, he was akin t
o an Old Testament Prophet. As far as Casey could tell, the man didn’t speak to anyone other than Captain Jack, and even that was only when strictly necessary.

  Olie had assured Casey, though, that the big Icelander liked him well, for he would occasionally clap Casey on the shoulder, fix him with a hard gaze and nod. This, Olie told Casey, was a sign that Hallbjorn considered him one of the crew.

  Olie himself was of Norwegian descent, though his family had been in Petty Harbor for three generations.

  “We were the only Norwegians in a miniature Ireland. Accents on the people there—three, four generations away from the old country an’ ye’d think they’d just come from Ireland the day afore.”

  Casey wisely forebore to mention that Olie’s own accent sounded as though its roots were square and deep in the soil of County Kerry.

  Olie had the ruddy skin of a seaman, and the intense blue eyes of his Nordic forebears. And like so many of those Norse ancestors, the sea flowed hard through his veins. He had fished all his life and the taste of saltcod was mother’s milk to him.

  “I fished with my father everyday afore school. Was good times, those. Afternoons, if the clouds come scuddin’ in, we’d have to leave school, run down to the harbor to the fish flakes an’ turn the salt cod skin side up to save it from ruinin’ in the rain.”

  Unlike Olie, Casey did not have seawater in his veins. The work of fishing was hard and often brutal, particularly when the weather took an unkind turn. Being no stranger to physical labor, however, Casey had picked it up quickly enough. Though a man, or woman as the case might be, could be forgiven, he supposed, for thinking he was completely out of his element in the undertaking of such a job.

  In fact, Pamela’s response when broached with the notion had been distinctly unflattering. “FISHING?! Fishing?! Have you completely lost your fucking mind?” The conversation had gone progressively downhill after that.

  The answer to his wife’s question might well be a resounding and heartfelt yes, Casey thought, standing upon Jeannie’s slimy deck, the reek of fish enveloping him. Hallbjorn had been on deck minutes before, had stared long at the sea, sniffed the wind, and shook his head at the horizon. As far as Casey could see, this was tantamount to a normal man breaking down and having full-blown hysterics.

  The sea was relatively calm that morning, though there was a long low swell like the ripple of birthing pains that lofted the boat and then dropped it in a deceptively gentle manner. Something about the weather made Casey uneasy, and it wasn’t just Hallbjorn’s actions, but rather an electricity that jumped along the surface of his skin. When he related these fears to Olie, the reply was succinct and not made to ease his nerves.

  “Aye, weather breeder, that’s what a day like this is, me son, damned weather breeder. Means something ugly is brewin’ herself up below the surface for tomorrow.”

  Casey gazed up at the clouds, lit like pale gray pearls on their undersides. The sea was exactly the same color; he shivered beneath his layers of fog-dewed wool, the small hairs on his neck rising. Olie was right; he could feel something brewing dark and furious beneath the surface of the water.

  “No worries boy, we’ll get ye drunk enough, ye’ll pay no mind to the weather.”

  This didn’t do a great deal to comfort Casey either. He’d already had one hangover out on the water, and didn’t relish the thought of another.

  The rum Olie had shared with him, two nights out from St. John’s, was the blackest, foulest concoction that Casey had ever drank. And considering that he was no stranger to poitin—that lethal Irish brew that many said was the cause for such an abundance of leprechaun sightings in the Emerald Isle—that was really saying something.

  When he had, in what was his last intelligent act of that night, attempted to re-cork the rum, Olie had shaken his head vehemently. Casey was quite certain he could hear the contents sloshing about in the man’s skull as he did so, though perhaps it was only his own wits trying to surface before being drowned completely.

  “Ack,” Olie croaked around a mouthful of the fiendish brew, “don’t be after doin’ that, son.”

  “Doin’ what?” Casey asked, numb brow furrowed.

  “Puttin’ the cork back in the rum, ‘tis ill luck to do so. Ye uncork it an’ ye drink it to the dregs, no mistake or the evil spirits will be loosed.”

  “I think,” Casey said, forehead still wrinkled in an effort to marshal his thoughts. “Th’ evil spirits are loosed already.”

  “Nay,” Olie shook his head with the vehement seriousness of someone in the clutches of a royal piss-up, “ye have to drink it all down so’s the bastards are trapped in yer belly. ‘Tis the only way to be certain yer safe.”

  To Casey’s reeling mind, this had the form and substance of fuzzy genius. And so they drank the bottle to the dregs. In the morning, Casey had wished—with every fiber of his being—that God would take him, quickly and without hesitation. For the demons, no doubt unaware of the rules governing these things, were trapped (and seemed very unhappy about their incarcerated state) firmly inside his skull. Where they stayed for three full days.

  A great hissing exhalation in the mist pulled him back to the present. The sound was followed shortly by the musky scent of the deeps. There, only thirty feet out from the starboard rail, was the great misty balloon of a humpback whale surfacing. He wondered if it was the one he’d taken to calling Soot, for the deep gray, speckled with paler ash, color of it. He was an old male, to judge by the numerous scars that carved a long and elaborate story in his back and tail flukes.

  He wondered if the humpbacks were the Sirens of the old Greek myths. The ones whose haunting song drew sailors to their death on the rocks. He shivered. Two nights before, the whales had been floating around the boat, their long misty exhalations drifting out over the strangely calm water. Overhead had been a sky drenched with stars, and all the men had stood on the open deck, silent, small and fragile. And he’d had a sense then of the planet, moving, drifting, unanchored in space, itself a lost seafarer borne along the currents of a universe so merciless that it took the breath from a man’s body in pure terror and wonder.

  Near the boat, small slick patches had formed on the water. They were the strange footprint- like shapes that humpbacks left in the wake of their dives, glassy patches on the surface of the water, as though a ghost walked upon the cold, gray waves.

  The Anglo-Saxons had called the ocean the Whale Road, and Casey could certainly see why. This realm belonged to the Leviathan, those big, half-dreamed creatures that swam among mountains higher than anything ever seen by man. Through great rift valleys and salty abyssal plains, over steaming jets and through wonders both beautiful and terrible.

  Aye, it was a water world indeed, with the continents only minor intrusions in the vast seas. So why then, out here on the limitless deeps, did he still have the sense that someone was watching him?

  He turned from the railing. It would be time to haul in the nets soon, and then he would be too busy to feel the hairs rising on the back of his neck.

  The scrotumtightening sea indeed.

  Chapter Nine

  The Nature of Love

  THE ITALIANS WERE THE KINGS of the Boston underworld. The Irish, princes in their own small principalities. The Italians ran their criminal vassals on the hard and fast rules of an army. Capos, soldiers, consiglieres. The Irish still ran on tribal rules, with the attendant internecine warfare, and thus had become subcontractors to the more powerful La Cosa Nostra. It was a reverse of natural order, for the roots of American organized crime were not in the rich soil of Italy, but rather in Famine stricken Ireland.

  The Irish countryside, long the victim of failed rebellion and squashed political uprisings, spawned many resistance societies: the Molly Malones, the Peep o’Day Boys, the Whiteboys and the Ribbonmen—underground movements in which membership was a fiercely guarded secret. They professed to be the guardians of their own communities, but were as likely to prey upon their own people as they we
re to rebel against the Crown. This was the mentality that survived the brutal Atlantic crossing and found succor in the tarnished coin of American politics.

  By the time the Italians began to emigrate in search of the elusive American Dream, the Irish mob was already established along the eastern shore of the United States. They were the gangs that strong-armed for Tammany Hall; that provided the struts for the infrastructure of a corrupt political machine. Tammany was the machine, and the Machine was the only way to achieve the dream. The Irish found their way through the cogs and wheels, becoming ward bosses, aldermen and precinct captains. Extending favors, exerting control, building a cultural dynasty that had begun in small turf-roofed cabins, muddy laneways and pestilential fields.

  Despite the initial dominance of the Irish, though, it was the Italians who seized the ascendancy in Boston during the Prohibition. When the Irish tried to take over bootlegging operations in Boston Harbor, the Italians sent them a very clear message by murdering two of their gang leaders. The Irish mob retreated to South Boston, making it their private fiefdom, and hiring out as enforcers and hit men for the Italians.

  In the early ‘70s, the Italians still ruled out of a small office in Boston’s cobble-streeted North End. Their undisputed head a tiny, aged man with glasses so thick they gave him the appearance of a myopic gnome. He looked entirely harmless, but anyone who had ever crossed him knew the lie of appearances. He behaved like an old world gentleman, but he had the soul of a Sicilian butcher. Lovett Hagerty might control South Boston, but it was only a small corner of the empire that Guilio Bassarelli ruled over, and it was he to whom Love Hagerty owed his allegiance.

  Pamela knew this acknowledgement of the godfather chafed at Love’s very soul. And that his ambition, as such fires will, was rapidly outpacing his common sense. That, as far as Pamela could see, was the biggest chink in his armor. It was here that his pride and ego might well get him into trouble from which his charm and connections could not extract him.