The Dark Path

by Kevin McManus

  Klein piled in the car, started the engine, and headed west, Morrigan trailing not far behind him, a feeling of weightlessness tugging in the pit of his stomach as he contemplated how far he’d fall down the rabbit hole before finally hitting the bottom.

  24

  Death is not the End

  Morrigan waited outside the steakhouse in Queens he had followed Klein to. It was a regular Joe joint. Nothing fancy. A red awning with the name Joanne’s settled over a pair of wooden double doors.

  Morrigan checked his watch: 7:46pm.

  I can’t stall any longer…

  He examined his Sig, checked the rounds, stuffed it into his jacket pocket and exited the car.

  Morrigan moved inside the restaurant—slow, on guard, uncertain as to how the whole event would play. The place was tacky with red leather booths, wooden interiors, and an accumulated scent of millions of pounds of steak that had been cooked there throughout the years.

  He walked to the chirpy looking hostess at her desk. “Hi.”

  “Hello, sir, would you like a table, are you on your own or are you meeting somebody here?”

  “Yeah… I’m meant to meet a friend of mine here, Anthony Klein. Has he arrived? I think I’m running late,” Morrigan said, flashing his ID.

  “Mr. Klein has arrived, he is in one of the private rooms at the back. Follow me and I’ll bring you there.”

  Morrigan followed the hostess through the main hall, then through the kitchen, and finally found himself standing in a cramped area cordoned off from the rest of the restaurant.

  Seated at a table with a slicked-back crop of dyed black-hair tinted silver at the sides just for good measure was a well-polished middle-aged gentleman with a pearly white smile, a gold ring on his pinky finger—and Anthony Klein seated directly across from him. They were sipping beer and didn’t bother looking up as Morrigan arrived at the table.

  “Lieutenant Morrigan, this is an unexpected pleasure,” Klein said. He gestured to the seat next to him. “Please. Have a seat. Order something. Do you want a drink?”

  Morrigan planted his feet. “I’m good. And I’ll stand.” He leveled his gaze at the older gentleman across from Klein. “Who the hell are you?”

  The man placed down his glass, wiped his mouth delicately with a cloth napkin, and stretched out his hand. “Senator Robert Connolly,” he said, forced goodwill seething through his teeth.

  Morrigan didn’t bother to shake his hand.

  “Where’s Petrovic?” Klein asked, his focus on Connolly as they shared a grin and already having a sense of Petrovic’s fate.

  “He killed Hackett,” Morrigan said, his voice just above a hush. “Didn’t he?”

  A shrug from Klein.

  “He also tried to kill me,” Morrigan continued.

  “Well,” Klein laughed, “I’m glad you survived. His orders were to not touch you. You must’ve really said something to piss him off.”

  “I talked about his heritage.”

  A grave nod. “Yep. That’ll do it…”

  “Enough!” Morrigan hissed. “I want answers, you motherfuckers, I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  Klein and Connolly’s self-effacing smiles turned to frowns, nervous that Morrigan would project his voice too far across the room. “Take a seat, detective,” Connolly ordered. “And keep your damn voice down, you idiot.”

  Morrigan reluctantly slid into the booth.

  Connolly took another bite of his food before speaking. “You know,” he said, intertwining his fingers and positioning himself on the table as if it were a podium, “when I was six, I was a track runner. Damn good at it, too. After a while, I’ll admit, the success of winning as much as I did went to my head. I thought that being good at one thing meant that I could be good at everything. So, the next fall, I tried out for football, going in with all the confidence in the world with this crystal-clear picture painted in my mind about all the success I would have, and what a big star I would be, all of it. And you know what happened? I got knocked unconscious within the first ten minutes of tryouts.” He clapped his hands. “Boom. Done. Out of the game.”

  Klein laughed with Connolly.

  “It was in that moment,” Connolly continued, “that I came to realize something. You know what that was?”

  Morrigan shrugged.

  Connolly pointed a finger, accusatory, in big bold fashion. “That sometimes you’re just out of your league. That sometimes you walk into a situation with big ambitions and a can-do spirit that will only get you a foot in the door before you’re knocked flat on your ass—reality checks, detective. That is what I’m saying. I had the luxury of learning early on in my youth that I needed to scope out a prospect or idea or goal before charging head-first into it. I needed to know what the odds were so that I could navigate and proceed, or back off entirely…”

  Connolly took a break from talking to chew on a mouthful of steak and wash it down with a swallow of beer. Then he put down his fork and wiped his mouth to begin addressing Morrigan once more.

  “You speaking to me… shooting your mouth off… all guns blazing in such a public setting, in my favorite restaurant, reminds me of my failure and the football tryouts, detective. Right here, right now, I am giving you your reality check. I am telling you that you are way out of your league, out of your depth, and that sniffing around the death of Detective Hackett and the case he was involved in is tantamount to your destruction. You’re too close, detective, and I’m giving you the courtesy of a heads-up before you’re too far into something you can’t walk away from. I shouldn’t have to spell it out to you. It would be easy to get rid of you, but I’m trying to do things the cordial way.”

  He nodded to Klein who produced a thick envelope and sat it on the place setting next to Morrigan’s left arm.

  Connolly pointed. “That,” he said, “was Petrovic’s weekly payout. It’s yours now. You work for me. Now go back to nabbing the rapists, murderers, and dealers plaguing our streets. Until I tell you when I need you.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Morrigan snarled.

  “No. I’m not fucking kidding, Morrigan. Because no matter how hard you push, or where you put your nose that you shouldn’t—you work for us. I was initially going to kill another member of your department tonight as a lesson, maybe that female officer you are close to. What is her name Anthony?”

  “Andrea Bukowski.”

  “Yes, that’s her, she is one pretty lady.” Connolly grinned. “But…” he patted the envelope, “I want to try a more…” he thought about it, “positive approach. It’s your choice. You can take it—or I can go about initiating another repercussion for you.”

  Morrigan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. But he wasn’t going to play the game. He believed that he was still one of the good guys. Even though his sins against Damian Huerta would land him in hell, he had enough good bidding left to do before he was sent to the underworld.

  With a depleted sigh, Morrigan stared Connolly square in the eyes, pushed the envelope aside, and said, “I’ll see you around, senator,” before standing up and removing himself from the situation.

  Connolly and Klein watched him leave, both of them settling into the booth as Connolly nodded to Klein and said, “Okay, a lesson it is then. Make the call.”

  Klein lifted his phone and dialed.

  Morrigan was jittery as he rounded the corner and shuffled back to his Subaru, slid inside and kick-started the engine. He knew that he was too far into the thick of it now to back off. He threw the car in gear, did a one-eighty, and set off.

  As Morrigan pulled away, a black Chevrolet trailed from a safe distance. Inside the vehicle a Beretta equipped with a silencer rested comfortably on the lap of the driver.

  25

  A Demon’s Whisper

  Morrigan parked his car around the block from his apartment. Took all of twenty minutes for him to nab a parking spot, and by the time he did he was huffing and puffing and swearing that he woul
d slap every commuter in the city square in the face if they didn’t “shape the hell up.” As he opened the door of the Subaru—his phone rang, and the caller ID flashed the name of his soon-to-be ex-wife, Helen.

  “Fuck me…” He sighed and answered. “Yeah?”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Helen responded.

  “I could ask the same.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. I get that I was a tough act to handle but why the hell did you trade down to that fucking moron you’re seeing?”

  “John—”

  “Seriously, that prick is the exact kind of trash you used to bitch about—”

  “John.”

  “What?”

  A pause. “It’s been over a year.”

  Morrigan rolled his eyes. “I’m aware.”

  “Then why do you insist on hating me?”

  Morrigan took a breath. He didn’t hate his ex-wife—he just couldn’t help from feeling pissed over the fact that she ditched him. It was such a stark reality for him to endure, a pill that was harder to digest than most of what life forced on him.

  He rubbed his temple. Sighed. His ex knew from the timbre of his exhale that he was regretful—so she gave him a moment and waited for him to reply. “I don’t hate you,” he finally said.

  “Then don’t,” she said. “I don’t want this. This isn’t good. I’m well within my rights to not have to talk to you, John, but…”

  “But what?”

  “But I care about you. I love you. I always have. I always will. Nothing will change that… but you determine how far you want to push me away.”

  Morrigan had nothing. It felt like a freight train made of raw emotion had just ran him over. All he could think of to say was: “I’m sorry.”

  A pause from his ex’s end. “Just get some help, John. Seriously. Please.”

  The line went dead and Morrigan held the phone to his ear for what felt like minutes. Eventually his hand dropped. He drew a deep sigh. This night was not going well. Then he slipped out of the car.

  After walking off his rage, he came to the front door of his apartment building and went inside just as the light above the awning clicked to life. Usually Morrigan threw a look over both shoulders before he walked into the building. He heard too many stories about guys on the job with a vendetta against them getting popped when they were relaxed and strolling up to their residences. Tommy Conway, he thought. Poor bastard got shot in the back of the head when he was coming home from a basketball game.

  But if Morrigan had checked over both shoulders when he walked in moments earlier like he usually did, he would have caught a glimpse of the blond-haired Irish guy seated behind the wheel of a black Chevrolet. That Irish guy went by the name of Pearse McNulty, and his profession was one that involved killing people for money—and John Morrigan was next on his list.

  It didn’t bother McNulty, the notion of killing people. He had experienced violence at a tender enough age and it just became second nature, like taking out the garbage or taking a piss. His father was an alcoholic prick who had beat him for his own sick and perverted pleasure since he could stand. When he was four his mother was killed in front of him by a drug dealer in Dublin. It started a chain reaction of violence that had perpetuated itself throughout the rest of his life. He killed his first human being when he was sixteen, then another at eighteen, and after that he had lost count. The tally didn’t matter. He didn’t care to recall or log the statistics.

  When he joined the Irish Special Forces, the Army Rangers, it had diluted the acts even further. Not only did he continue to kill people as a nixer, (a lucrative second occupation)—he had become rather good at it.

  McNulty had learned the finer art of lethality from utilizing the long range of a rifle all the way up to shoving a blade in a man’s belly. At close range where you could smell the victim’s fear and watch the life drain out of their eyes, or yards away at the end of a rifle scope. Murder was murder and killing came naturally to him. After his stint in the Rangers, McNulty had hooked up with all the illicit individuals who appreciated his knack for slaying and paid him handsomely to do so. That road led straight to New York and a man named Klein, who paid to have McNulty’s immigration expedited before handing him over to a man named Finlay to see if McNulty was what a man like him required.

  He recalled that particular moment more than well, in a dinky apartment in Queens about six weeks prior. He had been brought there from JFK by a man who wouldn’t give his name. He was presented to a fat and gray-haired man in front of a poker table chowing down a pastrami sandwich, his gaze completely fixated on the Yankee’s game blasting on the tube in front of him.

  Finlay cleared his throat. “You Pearse McNulty?”

  McNulty nodded.

  “Heard a lot about you from Klein,” Finlay said. “He told me you’re good.”

  McNulty nodded again.

  “Heard you stabbed your old man in the head with pickax. That true?”

  McNulty said nothing—but it somehow said everything.

  Finlay laughed. “Man. You are a bad motherfucker. I can see it in your eyes. They’re like a shark’s. Good God—I would love to know what goes on inside a head like yours…”

  McNulty, again, said nothing.

  “You have a problem doing dirty work?” Finlay inquired.

  McNulty shook his head.

  “Good. Because we got a lot of it. We need you to take care of some people. We’ll make sure to compensate you handsomely for it. We just ask that you keep your contract exclusive with us. Can you do that?”

  McNulty nodded again.

  “Fantastic. You don’t say much, do you? Well maybe that’s a good thing. There are too many guys around here with big mouths. All they are good for is yakking, talking crap all day long,” Finlay said as he wiped the remnants of the sandwich from the corners of his mouth and sat back. He looked at the Irishman for a long moment, saying nothing and examining him like one would a used car. “I want to hire you,” he continued. “God knows your reputation precedes you… but I need to know that you’re a team player. I need to know that you will do whatever I ask, whenever I ask.”

  McNulty squinted—what do you want me to do?

  Finlay smiled. Nodded to the man behind McNulty who had picked him up from JFK. “If I told you to slit that man’s throat behind you because he is one of those guys with a big mouth—what would you say?”

  McNulty took a breath—then he snatched up the steak knife Finlay had used to divide up his sandwich, spun around, and slit the man’s throat in the blink of an eye. The man bled out, his eyes wide and incredulous as the blood poured from the wound. He then slumped down on the floor, wheezed his last breath, and passed away into the unknown. The Irishman then cleaned the blade, placed it down in front of Finlay, and waited like a valet attendant preparing to park another car.

  Finlay stared at the dead man’s body, the slightest of smiles creeping into the corners of his mouth as he took the last bite of his pastrami, stood, and handed McNulty an envelope stuffed with ten thousand dollars in cash. “Welcome to the team,” he said. “I think you’ll prove to be a great asset.”

  Six weeks and a number of executions later—McNulty didn’t know how many, he had lost count—he was seated behind the wheel of a borrowed car with a Beretta 92F in his hand and the intention to kill John Morrigan on his mind. But it meant nothing to him. It was just another payday.

  He waited as Morrigan entered the front doors to his apartment complex. McNulty waited until the door was closed and locked behind the detective. He didn’t have to fret about getting inside: the lock pick kit he had on hand would get him in just fine. Once Morrigan was inside, he checked the rounds in his Beretta, tucked it away in the back of his pants, and slid easily out of the car.

  He checked around him, making sure that no prying eyes were witness to what was about to go down. He approached the apartment block front door, picked the lock in under five, and sl
ipped inside with the ease of a demon’s whisper.

  At the top of the stairs, Morrigan was too preoccupied with the turmoil of emotions whirling through his mind. His fingers hovered over the keys of the phone as he shook his head and battled the confusion and anger coursing through him. Christ, he thought, just when I think I’m over her I find out that I’m not.

  Eventually Morrigan pocketed his cell, sighing away his frustrations as he fished for the keys to his apartment in his jacket pocket. He made a left down the hallway and hung his head low—just as Pearse McNulty was slowing ascending the staircase and securing the suppressor for his Beretta to the barrel.

  Morrigan crept closer to his door, cracking his neck and trying his best not to think back on his relationship with his wife. He hated when that happened. As his old man would have said, “It blew chunks.” The problem was that he’d think about her, get pissed at her, remember the good times, and then get pissed at himself.

  He shook his head again. As a seasoned detective he tied pieces together, the fragmented nature of human beings and the terrible acts they were prone to admit. But the one person he couldn’t completely figure out was himself. He gave himself credit that he was aware of that fact. It was a blessing just as much as it was a curse.

  While Morrigan was doing what he could to shake himself out a state of self-pity, McNulty approached him from the rear, only fifteen feet away, making no sound with his soft-sole runners and his light way of stepping. He could control his breathing so that it appeared that he didn’t breathe at all and it complimented his specter-like presence.

  Morrigan twirled his keys and puttered his lips as he approached the door. McNulty disengaged the safety catch. Drew a breath. Slowed his pacing. Waited for Morrigan to go about inserting the key into his lock.

  Morrigan fumbled as he tried to forget his wife’s words: “Get help, John.” He had heard that insult before. But it was something about his ex-saying it that cut deep. As much as he hated to admit it, he loved her and her ability to read him. If Morrigan had not been preoccupied with such thoughts, he would have sensed the Irish assassin now ten feet behind him, raising a Beretta 92F.