Killing Down the Roman Line (27 page)

“It’s late, Mister Corrigan. And I’m leaving.” She motioned towards the door. “Please don’t make me call security.”

“Jimmy Hawkshaw uncovered the confessions of the men who killed my family,” Corrigan said. He sidestepped the desk. Blocked her path. “He said they were left somewhere safe. That means you.”

“Get out of my office.” Kate lowered her own voice to equal his menace. “Now. Before I call the police.”

Corrigan snatched the phone from its cradle. “Let’s call them. Maybe they can find the evidence you’re hiding.”

She backed up, one hand digging for her cell. “Get the hell out.”

“All I want are the documents.” He scanned the room again. “Where are they?”

What was the number for the pub?
It was just around the corner and Kate knew that Puddycombe would be here in seconds if she called. A hell of a lot faster than the OPP office or even Ray Bauer, who was still on duty here in town. Keefe, Hitchens or anyone else in the pub would come running if she called. Even Berryhill.

He sighed. “Don’t play hard to get with me, Kate. It’s unseemly in a woman of your… experience.”

She stalled for time, remembering only half of the pub’s phone number.
What the hell was the rest?

“What is that smell?” Corrigan’s nostrils flared. Like a hound, his nose tracked to the fireplace. The thing resting in the old grate, coiled up and blackened to a brittle crisp.

The hearth was limestone, four feet wide as it was tall. The last time she had lit a fire, the place smoked out because the flue was blocked with a bird’s nest. It had been cleared since but it didn’t matter. All she needed to burn this time was a little paper and cracked leather.

Corrigan knelt on the flagstone and reached into the grate. The carbonized paper fell away under his fingertips, blowing through the air like black snowflakes. All of it disintegrated save for the charred leather spine.

He roared and Kate winced at the awful sound. All black rage and venom. She crept back and made for the door while his back was turned.

He spun around. “You evil fucking witch!”

The look in his eyes. Not human. She ran for the exit.

Corrigan ran faster.

25

CLICK.

The shotgun locked shut with a firm snap. Solid and heavy in his hands. Travis seated the stock into his shoulder and brought the barrels up. Cheek flat against the grain and one eye lined down the sight, he swung the gun over the room and drew aim at the door, the window, the desk. Puffing out a gunshot sound with his teeth, pretending to shoot up the room. The gun slung huge in his hands, sleek and intoxicating, but it grew heavy and he couldn’t hold the aim any longer.

He pushed the lever and broke it at the breech. The barrels empty. He had looked for the shells but couldn’t find where Mr. Corrigan had hidden them. He slid the gun back onto the mantelpiece just as he’d found it.

Already bored but he didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to deal with his mom. She’d just insist they talk about what had happened. She’d ask him about his ‘feelings’. Wanting him to cry just so she could feel useful. Any little bruise and she was all over him like a wet blanket. Treating him like a baby, smothering him. It was enough to make you puke.

No doubt his old man was in the pub drinking with his loser friends. Probably bragging about how he’d given his boy a good backhand. With any luck, Travis thought, the stupid prick would ditch his truck and snap his motherfucking neck.

Evil thoughts. For sure he was going to Hell.

The old house ticked and creaked around him. Something scuttled under the floorboards and something other chittered behind the walls. It was the house that did it, made you think evil thoughts. Jesus. How many people were murdered in this place? Six or seven? Ghosts lurking in the dryrot walls, floating in the rafters.

A stab of light flashed in the window, blinding him. The headlights arced through the room and then cut out. The thump of the door closing. Travis felt a sudden itch to run. He couldn’t remember why he’d come here in the first place.

The door flung open. Corrigan clomped into the house, breathing heavy as if he’d just run the whole way. He froze when he spotted Travis. Neither moved, two statues in the house.

Corrigan teetered, his mouth souring. “What do you want?”

Travis smelled the tang of booze roll across the room. He should have run when he had the chance. His shoulders jumped to his ears. “Needed to get away. So I came here.”

“Get out.”

“I didn’t touch nothing.” Travis felt his cheeks puff up. “Just had to go somewhere.”

Corrigan teetered but said nothing. His face was marred by raw marks down his cheeks. Angry red lines. “Did you get cut?” Travis asked.

“If you’ve come to cry on someone’s teat, you got the wrong house, boy.” Corrigan crossed the room right towards him. As if to wring his neck. Travis crabbed backwards but the man strode past him.

Mr. Corrigan rummaged a can from the fridge and popped it. Wiped his mouth and looked at the boy standing in the doorway, watching him with little bird eyes. The boy nodded at the iron contraption on the workbench. “What is that stuff?”

Corrigan flung the can at him. Travis ducked and the missile hit the wall, spraying him with foam. The man’s face twisted into something demonic. “Fucking little snoop.”

“I wasn’t.” Travis stuttered, tripping on the consonants. Making him look the liar.

“You filthy little spy. That’s why you keep coming round, isn’t it? Who put you up to it? Your old man?”

Travis denied it. Unconvincing even to himself.

“I thought you were a friend.” He was quick, bunching the boy’s collar and pushing him into the wall. “You’re no better than the rest. You’ve betrayed me. Sold me out.”

“I didn’t!”

Travis felt himself lifted off the ground, shoes scuffing the floor and Corrigan’s knuckles digging into his collarbone. He screamed at him to let go.

“Get out!” He flung the boy away, bowling him across the floor. Kicked his arse when he didn’t get up fast enough. “Get out of my house!”

Bolting for the door, feet tripping on the sill. Travis went ass over tea kettle down the porch steps. The crazy drunk chasing him across the yard. “Go back to your worthless father! You’re all the fucking same, you! Bastards and liars!”

Travis rabbitted over the crabgrass, fell and ran on. South into the dark of the fields, away from the road. He wanted the darkness, the nothingness of pitch black and no stars. To slip into a void and vanish.

~

How do fix a whopper of a mistake like beating your own child? You don’t, and right enough.

Jim wheeled aimlessly through town, drifting up Bleeker Street, down Chestnut. Nowhere to go except home but not wanting to go. Unwilling to face his sins. He turned back onto Galway and drifted to the curb, killed the engine. Leaned back against the bench seat and watched the dark street.

He still couldn’t shake the look on his son’s face at being smacked. The image stung like a wasp trapped inside his ribcage, lashing out with its nettle.

Travis would never forget it, of that he was sure. Just as he had never forgotten the lashings and the fists doled out by his own father. It was a legacy, a birthrigh from his father, now given to his son. A vicious little gene passed down the bloodline like haemophilia. A reverse philosopher’s stone, taking something golden and turning it to shit.

The blow kept playing itself out in a never ending loop in his head. His hand against the boy’s face. Unable to shut it down, he forced his brain to focus on something else, anything, to cut the endless replay. Running numbers in his head, he calculated acres to yield for corn, then soy. No effect. He thought about sex. Emma peeling off her clothes before bed. Fucking in the grass one afternoon when Travis was at school. The way Emma looked on top of him, back straight and hips grinding. The saltiness of her neck.

It worked and then it didn’t. His erection withered when the reverie was broken by the flash image of another blow. A memory so old he had convinced himself it had never happened. He had hit Emma once too. Ages ago.

Drunk, fighting like cats over God knows what. He’d swung back and broke the flat of his hand across her mouth. She hit the floor like a dead weight and the fight was over. Tears and apologies. Jim vowing on his mother’s grave that he’d never do it again. After that night, they had never spoken of it.

Jim stared through the rain spackled windshield at the dark sky. That enormous abyss looked back at him, whispering things he didn’t want to hear.
No better than your old man. Worse. A violent boozer. Hitter of women and children.

The neon sign in the pub window was still on. Puddycombe pushing last call. He swung out of the pickup and hopped over a puddle to the pub door. It was a bad night for peeling back unwanted truths. Drink it deep.

~

Joe Keefe knew smoke.

He had been with the Pennyluck Volunteer Fire Department for eleven years, the last four as Deputy Chief. His days were spent on job sites or in the cramped office of his construction company but his nights belonged to fire. There wasn’t a lot to do but when the alarm went and they bolted into gear, it was unlike anything else. Going to war, squaring up battle lines against the monster, the crew working together. Orders hollered out and shouted back, each man roasting inside the heavy gear.

Keefe stepped out of the pub and crossed Galway to where his truck was parked. The smell of the Dublin came out with him and it took a moment to discern the acrid tang of smoke in the air from the deep-fryer smell on his clothes.

A fire, real and alive.

Smoke had different tastes. A campfire of cord wood smelled different from a field of corn torched in a controlled burn. House fires were a noxious spew straight out of the pits of Hell. Shingles and plastics, resins and paint, all of it throwing up a poisonous cloud worse than mustard gas. It clung to your hair and hid inside your pores, taking days to scour off. The devil’s own stink. Joe Keefe stood sniffing the air, the smell of smoke sobering him quickly.

Foul and true, it was a fire. Close too.

He scanned up and down Galway for a trail of it or a light in a window but he couldn’t see it. No coiling vapour or orange twinkle in a shop window but the smell was getting stronger.

That meant the fire, wherever it was, was deep inside one of the buildings. Burning hot enough to stink but not show itself from the street. Bad business.

Keefe started running, digging through a pocket for his phone. Already calling it in when he spotted it. A flickering light inside a window, all Halloween orange.

The fire was inside the old town hall.

26

THE RAIN HAD stopped but the thunderclouds lingered, blocking out the stars. Emma took the flashlight, umbrella and started down the Roman Line. Stepping around the puddles, the bunchgrass soaking her shins. Heels squeaking inside her wet sneakers.

The Corrigan house was a dark husk against the darker trees. Whatever light she had seen from across the field was gone now. Maybe it was never really there, a phantom twinkle luring in the unwary like a siren to sailors. Old ghosts, hungry for revenge.

Get a grip on yourself.

She had seen headlights turn into Corrigan’s drive earlier but there was no vehicle in sight. Did he park around the back or drive off again?

Up close, the old house loomed over her like a midway spookshow. The door agape to swallow her up. Rolling the lightbeam over the bleached clapboard, the flashlight did nothing to diminish its power. It looked like the haunted house in every movie she’d ever seen. Every Hansel and Gretel tale read from a storybook. She climbed the rotting steps and banged on the door.

Calling out her son’s name, then Corrigan’s. Nothing, just the noise of crickets starting up after the rain. She knew the door would be unlocked. It swung open on a feather nudge. She stood just at the threshold and roamed the lightbeam over the room.

“Travis?”

The light crawled over the hard scrabble chairs and table under the window. The rolltop squatting in the corner. The smell of mildew and fungus was pungent after the clean smell of rain. Something else too, a rotting smell like a carcass trapped in the walls. The floorboards creaked and dipped under each foot, threatening to snap and swallow her leg to the thigh.

Noise, sharp and out of place. She held her breath to listen. It came again, a clang followed by a thump, coming from somewhere in the house. Was it upstairs or down below? Another clang sounded. It was definitely coming from upstairs. She tiptoed to the foot of the staircase and trawled the flashlight up. The beam bounced up each step until it dissipated in the darkness of the second story. No way in hell was she going up there. Again, the butterfly thought of ghosts waiting for her. Corkscrew teeth chittering in a sooty jawbone.

“Travis?”

Her voice high and shrill, grating her own eardrums. Maybe he wasn’t here after all.

“COCKSUCKINGSONOFAWHORE!”

Blue curses tumbled down the steps to her. Emma blew out her cheeks in relief. That could only be one person. The voice upstairs bellowed again. “Who’s there!”

Bootheels thudding on wood. Corrigan materialized at the landing, shielding his eyes from the lightbeam. “Turn that fucking thing away!” he barked. “Who is it?”

“Sorry.” Emma swung the beam away, then tilted it under her chin. “It’s me. Travis ran off. Has he been here?”

“Emma?” Thundering down the steps. He wiped a forearm across his brow, his face flushed and sweaty. A hammer gripped in the other hand. “What do you want?”

She stepped back, surprised at the harsh bark. “Have you seen Travis?”

“I chased him off.”

“Chased him off? Why?”

“He’s not welcome here.” Corrigan turned and marched down the hall. “Neither are you.”

Emma followed him into the kitchen. “Hold on. Did he do something?”

“Go home, Emma” he said, tossing the hammer onto the workbench where it clattered and rolled among the tools.

“What’s gotten into you?”