Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (117 page)

Getting the arm up and into position was another matter. Sweat ran in beads off his forehead, down to mingle with the drying blood, and his vision blackened on him more than once as he lifted the arm up.

He closed his eyes and threw himself against the beam as hard as his abused body would allow. The shoulder popped in, accompanied by a fresh spurt of blood down his back and he let go a howl that would have shivered the roots of a man’s soul, had any been conscious to hear it. The pain reeled him out, threatened to drop him to his knees, then he recovered, head pressed against the beam to stop the world spinning. On the other side of the conveyer belt Robin was moving and making an odd noise, like a beached fish with vocal chords. Casey opened one eye and turned toward the noise, mystified.

It wasn’t what he expected. Robin was laughing. Exhausted, bleeding, reeking of fish and sweat, but laughing.

“Mad bastard,” Casey muttered through lips still tingling from pent-up oxygen.

“Now that’s the pot callin’ the kettle names,” Robin said, still flat on his back and still laughing. “Jaysus, ye’ve knocked a tooth out, cracked my collarbone an’ broke my nose. Yer Da’ was right, yer head is bone right through.”

Casey grunted in reply. “Where’s the torch gone?”

“Don’t know,” Robin replied, “rolled off in the scuffle.”

“Scuffle,” Casey snorted, flexing his right hand carefully, wincing at the red-hot wires of pain that shot through his arm as a result. “I’ve not a square inch left to me that isn’t broke, bleedin’ or painin’.”

“Ye gave as good as ye got,” Robin said, laughing again with an ominous gurgling undernote.

Casey had been moving quietly as he spoke, and now his foot struck something solid which rolled ahead of him across the floor. He bent down, his ribs creaking in virulent protest and crawled under the conveyer belt, feeling on the floor for the torch. He found Robin’s hand instead and flinched back as if struck by a cobra.

“It’s above my hand, rolled into my ribs.”

Was the man trying to trap him? He’d have to take the chance. He couldn’t continue on in the suffocating darkness another minute. He grabbed for the torch and switched it on immediately, eyes lighting on Robin’s face.

“Christ, yer a sight,” Casey said, appalled by what the dark had hidden from him.

Robin’s nose, canted off to the left, was leaking a bright, steady stream of crimson, his right eye almost swollen shut, lips puffy and torn, the rest a slowly weltering mass of broken blood vessels. Robin peered up with his good eye. “Yer not exactly lookin’ like ice cream on Sunday yerself, boyo. Now help me up, I can’t breathe proper.”

Casey eyed him warily, but Robin merely gave a watery snort in reply. “I’ll not do anything, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Give me a minute or two to go back on the defense, I’m not sixteen anymore.”

“Aye,” Casey responded dryly, “I don’t need remindin’ of the fact.” He hooked his good arm around Robin’s chest, bracing against the inevitable pain in his body as soon as he applied any force. “If I help ye up, can ye make it over to where that bundle of sacking is?”

“Aye,” Robin replied grimly, though he sounded less than convinced. It took three tries, a great deal of grunting, and an undignified scream on Robin’s part before Casey managed to get him on his feet. Then, with Robin’s arm looped around his neck, they managed to hobble over to the sacking, where Robin promptly collapsed, gasping for air in the cloud of dust that arose from the burlap bags.

“Well if ye came here to kill me, I’d say the job is about three-quarters done,” Robin said, once he’d recovered his powers of speech.

“Luck’s with ye,” Casey replied wearily, “for I’ve not the energy to finish off the last quarter. Can ye breathe comfortable now?”

“Comfortable would be stretchin’ the point beyond its limits, but aye, I can get enough air for the moment.”

Casey stood facing Robin, body too far past its boundaries to understand just how fatigued and damaged it was. He was still tensed, uncertain of what Robin intended, only knowing he didn’t have the strength at present to continue what had begun, and must be ended here.

“Would ye take the torch out of my eyes fer Chrissakes,” Robin said, “there are things I would tell ye, an’ I’d rather not feel that I’m bein’ interrogated.”

A primal fear shot up Casey’s backbone at his words. He had a feeling that up to now, all the words and actions had merely been a prelude to Robin’s real purpose for calling him out with that photo. He was about to find out why he was really here. Despite his dread, he moved the torch, allowing its light to form a shallow pool on the sticky floor.

“Pamela was right about yer Da’s death.”

“What?” Casey felt something cold and heavy settle in the very marrow of his bones.

“I said she was right. In fact, she got so close to the truth she’s lucky to still be breathin’. ‘Twas fortunate ye made her stop when ye did. She was close to stumblin’ across that bastard Morris Jones while tracin’ the Brotherhood.”

“Ye know about the Brotherhood?”

“Aye, though maybe not so much as yer friend up on the hill.”

“What are ye sayin’?”

“That the organization still exists, though it’s more secretive than ever. An’ that yer man on the hill runs the show nowadays. Now there’s a ruthless bastard if ever I’ve met one. Man thought I was sneakin’ about watchin’ yer house while ye were locked up on that ship. He questioned me for hours. Didn’t hold so much as a gun or knife on me, but I tell ye, I’ve rarely sweated out a time as I did that one.”

“Do ye know how my Da’ died, then?”

“Aye I do, didn’t have anything to do with the Brotherhood in the end, though he did belong—though ye’ll know that, for ye’ve the ring.”

Casey tried to breathe and found he could not. “Do ye know who killed him?”

“Aye, I know. Yer Da’ spent a deal of time tryin’ to find out what happened to my sister. Durin’ the course of his searchin’ he found out about the things goin’ on at Kincora. He was goin’ to go to that wee friend of his that worked for the newspaper. The names he’d come across played like a Who’s Who of British aristocracy, government ministers an’ celebrities. Men have been killed for far less. They had him shot out in a field. They say he asked no quarter an’ gave them no satisfaction.” Robin swallowed as though he had a rusty nail lodged in his throat, “Twas my father who had the shooting of him.”

“What?” Casey felt horribly sick, as though the world had tipped out from under his feet without warning.

Robin met his eyes, and Casey saw something old beyond counting in the man’s face and knew there were things that time did not have the power to heal.

“And I killed my father, gave him the same treatment as he gave yer Daddy. Took him out in a field in the dark an’ made him beg for his life, an’ he did beg. An’ then I shot him. Don’t know why he bothered with beggin’, he saw his death in my face from the minute I found him.”

Casey shook his head slowly, the knowledge of things coming at him too quickly. His daddy on his knees—what had he felt knowing his death was imminent? Christ, he couldn’t think of it now, he had to stay clearheaded, had to stay level, stay standing just a little longer.

“But ye said that yer father died on the street, choked on his own vomit.”

Robin shrugged. “I lied, seemed best then, rather than tellin’ ye what had truly happened. Then yer wife kept diggin’ about for the truth an’ I knew it would have to come out. Yer Da’ was kind to me, an’ he was maybe the only adult that gave a damn when Jo disappeared. I owed him vengeance for his death.”

“How did ye know all this?”

“Casey, ye know what it is, I’m surprised ye never worked it out before. Maybe it’s only that ye didn’t want to see it.”

“Yer workin’ for the Brits,” Casey said, disbelief still strong in his mind. He could hardly connect this with the man he thought he knew, and yet it all fit, every piece that hadn’t seemed to form a picture before, now snapped tightly into place. The scenario it presented made him queasy.

“The MRF was runnin’ me. I got cozy with Joe an’ fed back to them. Now an’ again I took somethin’ back to Joe, just to keep his trust. It made certain other information easy to come across. They never knew I’d come upon the pedophile ring, that I knew about their filthy parties over the water with all those young boys. I’d have been dead months ago if they knew that. But now I’ve outworn my usefulness an’ they’ve made it apparent that my services are no longer required.”

Casey swallowed back a sick surge. The MRF was the Military Reconnaissance Force—the agency that gathered intelligence and ran agents in Northern Ireland. To work for them, as a Republican, meant you had a pretty big death wish.

“What the hell were ye thinkin’, man? Ye can’t play those games in this neighborhood, ye know that as well as anyone who grew up on these streets.”

“I didn’t know the Brits would cut me loose when it was over, I thought I could play both sides for all they were worth an’ walk away the winner. Forgot you were the lucky bastard, not me.”

“Jesus Christ, Robin, eight hundred years of them throwin’ us to the wolves wasn’t enough for ye to know how it’d end?”

“Doesn’t much matter anymore, man, I know too much to be comfortable for either side. We both know what happens next.”

Casey nodded, there was no answer needed, they both did know, and a little too intimately, just what happened next. Robin had always known where this path led, and yet had chosen to keep walking it.

Robin shifted, a grunt of pain escaping his lips along with a slipstream of darker blood that made Casey’s stomach lurch. Blood that shade was never the result of a surface injury. “There’s another thing I’d tell ye before we’re done. Do ye remember how yer Da’ used to say sometimes a man is most blind to what’s goin’ on right beneath his own nose?”

Something in Robin’s tone stopped Casey cold. “Robin, it’s too late for games, if ye’ve somethin’ to say, say it.”

Robin drew a half-breath and gasped as it caught hard upon the shoals of his smashed ribs. “Yer wife an’ Love Hagerty.”

Five simple words, but enough in their content to fell a man, to put him on his knees and make him wish he were deaf rather than hear them.

“No,” he said, throat stripped raw, heart pounding so hard that it filled his ears with the sound of a roaring vortex. Aware that it did not come as the shock that Robin had intended it to be.

“Every time ye shipped out she was in his bed. He’d an apartment for her, I think the damn fool was actually in love. Then there were the things ye’d seen that he’d rather ye hadn’t. An’ given that set of circumstances you were lookin’ like a mighty large inconvenience.”

“How—” he swallowed hard against the bitterness surging at the back of his throat, “how’d ye know?”

Robin shook his head, wiping a crusted hand across his mouth. “Hagerty was no man’s fool, though in the end he surely was a woman’s.” He held up a hand as Casey started forward. “Save it man, I can see by the look on yer face this comes as no great shock. What I mean to say is the man did his homework, he knew all about yer background an’ that’s where he found me.”

“What did he want with ye?”

Robin laughed, a bitter sound that raised the hairs on Casey’s neck. “Hired me to follow ye, if ye can believe it. Sad bastard didn’t know I was playin’ both sides of the coin, followed him too. That’s how I found out about him an’ Pamela. Watched her come an’ go from the flat in Brookline. Sometimes I’d follow him to public events and I’d see how he watched her across the room, or make reasons to be near her. He was obsessed. An’ I knew that would be his downfall, she’d only need to feed him a little rope an’ he’d hang himself. She can be mighty cold, yer wife, when the need is on her.”

“Ye’ll keep yer opinions of my wife to yerself,” Casey said in a flat tone that brooked no argument. “I’ve no proof of what ye say, but if she were to do such a thing, she’d have to have a mighty good reason.”

“She did—your life.”

“What?”

“Did ye not ever wonder why, if Hagerty wanted ye dead, he never managed to accomplish it? The man had connections up an’ down the entire eastern seaboard.”

“You mean—” Casey paused, unable to finish the sentence, a clear picture of Pamela in Love Hagerty’s bed, her body at his bidding, allowing him to touch her in the most intimate of ways. With a great force of will he pushed the picture away, heart turned to lead in his chest.

“She did it to keep ye safe an’ whole,” Robin continued quietly, eyes taking in the bleak set of Casey’s face. “I understood that after I met her, there wouldn’t have been anything else that could have induced her to do such a thing. She really loves ye, man.”

“How was he killed?” Casey asked, voice dark and hollow.

“Ye know how he was killed, the Bassarelli boys took him out. Wasn’t pretty either.”

“That’s not what I mean an’ ye know it. If ye were following her then ye must know if—if she had somethin’ to do with it.”

Robin nodded slowly. “She visited old man Bassarelli the once. Love Hagerty died later that same evening.”

The nausea Casey had suppressed earlier overwhelmed him now, his body understanding truth, though his mind refused it. Beneath his knees, the floor was thick and sticky with years of scales and blood.

“Why tell me now? It can’t serve any purpose.”

“Long time ago ye told me that if someone were to betray ye, ye’d not want to be the last to know. Both she and I have betrayed ye, an’ beyond the two of us, there’s no one else left alive who knows.”

Casey tilted his head, feeling like a cur that’s been smacked with an iron pipe. “What do ye mean none left alive? Who else knew?”

“The boy knew I was playin’ both sides. He knew I was workin’ for the Brits. Saw me one weekend, when he was slurkin’ about his old hangouts. ‘Twas just happenstance, an unfortunate coincidence.”

The world tilted again but he held to his feet, the red haze tinging the corners of his vision once again. “Is that why ye killed him? Because he saw ye playin’ out a double-cross?”

“’Twasn’t how ye thought, the boy was never in anyone’s cards. He just got in the way of things. Knew too much, Morris was afraid of him, only the more so once the boy had joined up with you.”