Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  “Not this time,” Abbie said. “He’s around.”

  “Which intuition is it this time, women’s or Ivy League’s?”

  “Cop’s,” she said, cutting her eyes at him. “Ever heard of it?”

  Z laughed.

  South Park was rutted with deep grooves in the ice, navigated by rusting cars. It seemed like the only new cars were the ones owned by city agencies, Health and Human Services or Sanitation. A new car on South Park looked like some kind of visitor from the future.

  They split up and took opposite sides of the street. It had snowed that morning and many of the houses were draped by a blanket of white, like the felt sheet that wrapped the foot of a Christmas tree.

  The houses looked drearily alike. Frozen in silence, their owners out working at Wal-Mart (where they’d be floor workers, not managers), at one of the few remaining auto parts plants out at the lake, in the firehouses, or in the bars. There were no bold colors splashed on the fronts. God forbid you should buy a whimsical mailbox, Abbie thought. The County tended to think alike.

  She covered one block, then two. A slow mist of intense cold seemed to filter into her black riding boots, freezing the toes first. She’d chosen fashion over warmth, always a mistake in Buffalo. Abbie stamped them on the hard sidewalk and kept moving on.

  Abbie glanced into a backyard, then another. She got to the end of the block and crossed over, kept walking, then stopped. Her eyes swiveled back slowly to the second driveway on the block and she turned and retraced her steps. There on the fresh snow were what looked like a series of squirrel droppings.

  “Hold on,” she called across to Z.

  Abbie headed down the driveway. Suddenly, she shot the right flap of her down jacket back and unholstered her Glock.

  Abbie saw Z start toward her from across the street, dodge a UPS truck, and then hurry to the sloping driveway.

  “Blood trail,” she said as he hustled up.

  The trail was ruby-red and fresh. It hadn’t soaked down into the snow yet. The drops started two feet into the driveway off the street, just where two tire tracks ended at a narrowing of the fence.

  He couldn’t get the truck all the way back to the garage, Abbie thought. It was too wide across. Had to carry the body in from here.

  The home had a sunken look, light blue with black trim and a swaybacked porch. She put her back to the opposite house and held the gun out in front of her, two-handed stance, as she sidestepped down the driveway. Z had his gun aimed at the house, alternating between the side door and the front entrance, which was reached past a chain link fence. The trail was leading toward the garage, a dilapidated shed of no discernible paint color with two broken windows looking mournfully out at the street.

  Something snapped to her left. Abbie swiveled her gun to the sound, but it was shingles on the garage flapping up in the wind. She stepped carefully through the snow until she reached the single garage door. She pressed her back against it, turned and stood on her tiptoes to see through the filmy windows into the interior. But they were covered with old newspaper taped to the inside, and all she could glimpse through the holes was milky gloom.

  Abbie looked down. The blood trail led straight under the garage door.

  She pointed to Z, then to the handle of the door. Abbie pulled out her flashlight and held it up near her right shoulder, the gun leveled beneath it. She nodded to Z. He took a breath and reached for the handle. Z gripped it with his enormous right hand, turned to look at her, and pulled. The door came shooting up with an ungodly shriek.

  Eyes—red, green, and brown—glinted at Abbie from the darkness. She whipped the gunpoint from one to the next in quick succession. But the eyes didn’t move. Lifeless, a constellation of dead things.

  Abbie’s shoes made a crinkling sound as she stepped onto a blue tarp, smeared and speckled with blood, that covered the floor. Another one hung from the wooden beams of the ceiling and shrouded the right corner of the garage. Carcasses were spread out on work-tables, bones shining dimly in the murk. She caught her breath.

  “Behind the tarp,” she said.

  Z moved toward it, but stopped as his foot slid in something red and wet.

  “Fuuu-uucck. What is this?”

  “Animals,” she said, dropping her gun to her thigh, doing a quick inventory: deer, fox, bear. “They’re probab—”

  Abbie felt the air shift and instantly began to pivot. The hanging tarp had snapped back and a man was charging at Z, a knife flashing in his hand.

  “Z!”

  Abbie snapped her boot out and kicked the man’s knee as he went by. The knife swooped down and missed Z’s arm by two inches as the man collapsed sideways and hit the tarp.

  “Don’t shoot!” she said, grabbing Z’s arm.

  “Who the fuck—”

  Abbie took two steps toward the man—a burly six-footer with a bushy red beard, a ripped Carhartt jacket, and oil-stained jeans. He was clutching his left knee and his eyes glowed crazily in the gloom.

  “Drop the knife,” Abbie said, her voice calm and her gun leveled at the man’s forehead.

  “Fuck you. Get the fuck out of my garage.”

  “Buffalo Police,” Abbie said. “I said drop … the … knife.”

  “Police?” the man said. “We ain’t got any bitch detectives in the County.”

  Abbie heard Z snort behind her.

  “I’ll introduce you to my fucking boot and—” he said.

  Abbie made a small movement with her free hand. She took her case out and flipped it open. Her badge glinted in the weak light.

  “So? The fuck you want with me?”

  “Drop … the … knife, sir. I’m not going to tell you again.”

  The knife—a ten-inch blade that looked like a prop from a gladiator movie—bounced off the tarp.

  “Sit up.”

  The man muttered and sat on his haunches, straining to sit up over his belly. He looked at Abbie with hatred.

  “You live here?” Abbie said, the muscles in her shoulder finally relaxing.

  “I think you broke my damn knee. Hell yes, I live here.”

  Abbie studied him. He looked like some kind of mountain man, sawdust and small twigs in his hair, his eyes wild, goggling.

  “What are you doing with all these carcasses?”

  “It’s called survival, bi—”

  Abbie brought the gun barrel up and centered it between his eyes.

  “It’s called survival, lady.”

  “Try ‘Detective,’ ” she said. “Detective Kearney.”

  The man made a “psssh” sound and his pupils seemed to grow even smaller. Abbie wondered if he was on meth.

  “Answer the question,” Abbie said.

  “It’s roadkill. Something gets hit on the highway, I got a trooper friend who calls me or maybe a trucker on his CB. I go and get it.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t have to give you that.”

  It was the needless aggravation that wore you down in the County. People here—even the Poles and the few Lithuanians who’d wandered in—seemed to have an ancestral memory of being oppressed in a country they’d never been to, and they carried it with them always, like their mother had been truncheoned the day before.

  “Actually, you do. Or you’re taking a ride with us.”

  “Fascism is coming. Sure as we’re standing here.”

  “Your name.”

  “You’d just look me up in your computers anyway. Joseph Wardinski.”

  “What do you do with the carcasses, Mr. Wardinski?”

  “I bring ’em back here, skin ’em, empty ’em out, and sell the meat. Or we freeze it.”

  “And the heads?”

  “Stuff ’em. It’s called paxadermy.”

  Z snorted but Abbie’s expression didn’t change.

  “Somebody buys those?” she said.

  “People up north. Farmers. Real Americans.”

  The last was said with a narrowing of the eyes.


  “You got a license for any of this?” Z said.

  “License? This don’t have nothing to do with the government.”

  “This isn’t the Yukon country, sir,” Abbie said. “You need a license. Stand up.”

  “The Yu-kong?” the man said as he struggled off the ground. “The fuck’s that?”

  “This isn’t the frontier is what I’m telling you.”

  The man just stared at them, his mouth working silently.

  “Listen, Mr. Wardinski. Just take a deep breath and listen.”

  Abbie holstered her gun.

  “Some of this wild game carries disease. Trichinosis, other bad stuff. If you want to poison yourself, go right ahead, it’s a free country last I heard. But you don’t want to be feeding this stuff to your kid.”

  “How’d you know I have a kid?”

  “The Dora stickers on the third-floor window.”

  The man said nothing.

  Their radios blared in stereo. “Detective Kearney, come in.”

  “You’re going to have the health inspector down here if you don’t keep this place clean,” Abbie said. “Check the meat before you use it. You know what to look for?”

  The man looked down at his grease-black boots on the blue tarp.

  Abbie motioned to Z and they started down the driveway. As they passed the man, he whispered something.

  “What was that?” Abbie said, her voice dead quiet.

  He stared at her, his eyes filled with a crazy urgency, and for a second she thought he would go for her gun.

  “Detective Kearney, come in now, please,” McDonough bleated on the radio.

  Z picked up his radio. “This is Zangara, go ahead.”

  “Nothing,” the mountain man said, turning away.

  “We found him.” McDonough’s voice was ragged. “He’s cut up ba—”

  “Get off the radio,” Z barked, then dropped the radio to his side. “Idiot.”

  Abbie gave the mountain man one last look and then followed Z.

  They hustled out toward Abbie’s car. Abbie jumped in the driver’s seat, turned the key, and revved the engine before swinging into a U-turn.

  She headed over to Abbott Road, then made the right into Cazenovia Park. Black clouds were gathering above the park oaks.

  “Z,” she said, turning to her partner.

  “Yeah?”

  “You see that guy?”

  Z glanced at her. “Yeah, I saw him.”

  Abbie was quiet for a minute.

  “Ever feel something’s not really right in the city? That the clocks are … running backward?”

  He made a face. “No. I never think about that.”

  “I do.”

  “Whatever. Listen, Ab. Don’t go spooky on me.”

  “Going spooky” was Z’s term for depression. They’d been through one major episode together. Her episode, of course. Zangara was a rock.

  “It’s this place,” Abbie said. She felt a wave of black-winged sadness come over her, thinking about the mountain man’s daughter—the girl who loved Dora—eating roadkill and listening to her father rant against government mind control and the coming of the Last Days.

  “You know what I say?” Z said.

  “What?”

  “Fuck this place.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MCDONOUGH HAD FUMBLED OUT AN ADDRESS ON SENECA. BEFORE THEY pulled up, Abbie knew it was St. Teresa’s, the church she’d gone to as a child. Now it was closed up, the parishioners having been shunted off to St. John the Evangelist as the Catholic population died off or went astray. The faithful had protested for months, circling in the snow in front of the church with signs and rosaries in their hands. But the parish was too poor to afford so many churches, eventually the protesters’ number had dwindled to nothing, and the church had been padlocked.

  As they pulled up and walked to the arched entrance, there were a few people looking at them anxiously, milling around the church steps.

  “Damn McDonough,” Z muttered. The County was well known for harboring police groupies. Half the people had relatives in the force and police scanners on their side tables or nightstands, running day and night, old men listening as they watched the light fade in their rocking chairs. Now the address was out, and probably the fact that they’d found a body.

  “Who’s in there?” a ragged voice called out as they hurried in. Abbie didn’t turn her head.

  They entered the gloom of the church. Light angled down from high windows, picking up dust motes. There was a scrum of people in the middle of the aisle. Abbie made out the slim form of McDonough, a fat bundled-up cop that must be Juskiewicz, and an old man in a blue jumpsuit. As they parted, Abbie got a glimpse at what they had been looking at—a thick pool of blood that had spattered the smooth flagstones, with a trail leading toward the back of the church.

  The shocked looks on their faces begged Abbie to take the responsibility for what sat at their feet. She hurried ahead of Z.

  “He’s downstairs,” McDonough said.

  Abbie nodded and the group moved off, with the thin cop in the lead.

  “Who found him?” Abbie said.

  “I did,” Juskiewicz said. His eyes seemed to apologize for the fact.

  “Tell me about it.” They reached the stairs. Her flashlight picked out stone steps circling downward.

  “I … I was doing this side of the street. I came to St. Teresa’s and looked for a place to get a peek inside. I started around to the east there and was looking in the window. I saw something on the ground, so I asked around until I found the caretaker.”

  Abbie nodded. She knew the church by heart. She’d peeked in the same window years ago to find her father when he came to St. Teresa’s alone. She’d spot him, head bowed, four rows back, tilted over slightly because of the gun that must have poked into his right thigh as he kneeled.

  They reached the basement floor. She’d only been down here twice, when she served as an altar girl. It was cold and it smelled like wax and clay.

  Five feet away, Jimmy Ryan sat in a wooden chair, his face a smear of dried blood. His head wasn’t human looking anymore; it looked like a black candle that had burned through the night, spattering wax downward. There was a yellow nylon rope clinched tightly around his neck extending down his back; it was looped around both his ankles and tied to the front chair legs, which were battered and scraped near the bottom.

  Abbie began to move around the body. The men stepped back. She saw that gouts of blood had fallen to the floor along with what looked like sheared-off sections of flesh, and she stepped carefully around them.

  “He was stuffed in this little storage room over here. I don’t know what—”

  “It’s called an undercroft,” Abbie said, walking closer to the body. “They stored vestments and Bibles here.”

  The undercroft looked like a brick-lined oven, at waist height, with a heavy wooden door, now hanging open. She shone her light inside and saw it was just barely big enough to fit a man. The floor of the space was smeared with dried blood.

  “You dragged him out?”

  “Had to,” Juskiewicz said. “I couldn’t tell if he was dead.”

  “You could have felt his ankle, you idiot,” said Z, his face six inches from Jimmy Ryan’s.

  “Oh.”

  McDonough pointed at Ryan’s face. “His eyelids—”

  “Yeah?” barked Z, still angry about the radio.

  “Well, they’re gone.”

  Abbie took her flashlight, crouched down level with Ryan’s face. His blue irises, rimmed by broken blood vessels, were staring up.

  “The killer started up in the nave,” she said. “I wonder if Ryan was made to look at anything specific. A station of the cross, a saint.” Grotesque visions of Christ in agony, Saint Stephen the first martyr—the church had the whole set. And the ceiling beams of the church were painted in gold leaf with Latin script, she remembered, but if the killer was showing Ryan something, there was no way to tell
now.

  She pointed the beam of the flashlight at his mouth. Ryan’s mouth was battered, the lips grooved with cuts and ripped at the corners. She shone the light inside.

  “There’s something in here,” she said. “Hold on.”

  Abbie reached into her pocket and pulled out a pen. She ducked down, shone the light in and, with the other hand, inserted the top of the pen inside Ryan’s mouth, angling it up past the swollen, blackened flesh of his tongue. There was something between the flesh and the roof of the mouth. She tapped on it and it made a tiny clicking sound.

  “I want to get this out,” she said to Z. “Give me some light.” Z crouched beside her and shone the light past the hacked-up lips. The object was light brown and thin.

  Gently, Abbie swept the pen tip across it and the object slid forward. After two minutes of coaxing, it brushed against the inside of the dead man’s cheek and hung halfway out.

  “Is that a—”

  Abbie withdrew the pen, laid it on the ground, then stood up and reached in her back pocket, where she kept a fresh pair of thin crime-scene surgical gloves, the talcum-free kind. She pulled one on her right hand, motioned to Z, then bent over and carefully reached with two fingers inside the corpse’s mouth.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” McDonough said.

  Z hissed at him.

  She began to pull out the object. There was a gasp and the caretaker went running for the stairs. Abbie heard him begin to vomit before he reached the outside door.

  Abbie showed Z the object. It was a toy monkey, a thin sliver of plastic with a painted face, black eyes, tan nose, red lips. The eyes were bulging and its little arms reached around and were clasped in front of its mouth.

  “Speak no evil?” Z said.

  “Maybe. Got an evidence bag?”

  “Yeah.” He produced one out of his jacket pocket with a flourish, and Abbie laid it inside.

  “McDonough,” she said. “Go out front and make sure no one gets a look in here. Press especially. Juskiewicz, keep everyone away from the side windows. Grab the custodian and tell him no talking. To anyone.”

  They nodded and hurried off.