We Were Kings (35 page)

Donal sprinted for the top of the alley and Cal continued running forward. The rain was so dense it was blinding, played tricks with his vision, and Donal was merely a gray shape in the wavering darkness, firing absently as he fled. Dante had left the shelter of the dumpster and was coming up behind him. “I'm here!” he shouted so that Cal wouldn't turn and shoot. “I'm here.”

The man on the ground was still alive, but barely. His blood turned the rainwater black. Lightning arced and brightened the sky, making everything sharp and distinct, bleached of color. The acrid smell of its discharge filled the air. The man was reaching, hand flailing, for the double-barreled sawed-off, and then his hand dropped and he was still. Cal continued after Donal. The alleyway was rushing with water and the only brightness came at the end of the street where it opened out onto Hanover, and he could see Donal racing toward the parked cars.

Donal turned to return fire and Cal emptied the cartridge into him. Donal was thrust backward by the bullets and fell in the street, writhing and clutching at his gut. As they watched, sirens sounded from other parts of the city. A dozen lightning strikes, milliseconds apart, struck the John Hancock Tower from different points, and Dante and Cal looked down at Donal in the sudden brightness. His face was pulled taut in pain, his eyes rolling back in his head. Blood smeared the side of his mouth. He was gasping, trying to breathe through the pain. His intestines were pouring out of a wide rupture in his gut, and his hands, slick with blood, were having a difficult time keeping them in.

He looked up at Cal, his eyes momentarily gaining focus, and gritted his teeth. The rain ran down his shorn skull. The sky went black again and then white and then black. They stood and watched him struggling, knowing he would be dead soon, and listened to the rain pounding the concrete, pinging off the cars. He began to gasp and Cal knelt on the ground by his head.

“We need the guns,” Donal said. “We've got to get the guns to Ireland. Just tell Butler where they are, and this will stop. Without the guns this will never end.” He hacked and thick, black blood came out.

“You're a fool for trusting Martin Butler, Donal,” Cal said. “He was your informer. He told them the boat was coming in, he even told us you were on your way.”

Donal blinked and his head lolled, his eyes opened and closed, and then he forced them wide again. There was still understanding and clarity there, and comprehension as he took in everything Cal was telling him—the last part of him burning with intensity. Cal had seen the look before, in men about to die who'd had some brief, transitory understanding of what was happening to them. He'd always thought—even in his own father's last state—that it was a sudden and final rage at God for the circumstances that had led them there. And it was a conflict and a terror for such a pious man as Donal. He struggled to raise his head and speak.

“You'll find de Burgh at his home in Quincy,” he said, sputtering. “Houghs Neck, that's where he is.” He nodded, lay back in the street, rain spattering his face. “Martin—” he began. “Martin said—” and then he stopped breathing, and then there was only the sound of the rain and they watched it falling into his open, empty eyes.

There was movement in the shadows on the other side of the cars, and footsteps coming quickly toward them, splashing through puddles. Cal and Dante raised their guns. Shea Mack's voice came to them, drawling like a Southern catcall: “Dante! Cal! You boys can rest easy now. Shea's here to take care of the bad men.”

Shea Mack, wearing a dark, full-length slicker, stepped out onto the street with four of his men. He was grinning and the water ran down his face and off his teeth, making him look like a deranged clown, and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in this. His hair was plastered to his head, and he held a long-barreled M1941 Johnson light machine gun. His men carried heavy arms, Russian-issue machine guns they'd taken from the Irish coffins.

“Hello, war hero,” he greeted Cal and then, still grinning, he said to Dante: “I told you I'd hold up my end of the agreement.”

“You took your time.”

“We was here, just waiting is all—didn't want to rain on your parade.” He looked up into the downpour and closed his eyes for a moment as the rain ran over his upturned face, then he sighed deeply and looked at them again.

“How many were there?” Shea asked.

“Eight dead altogether,” Cal said. “This one here, two in the alley, and, if my math is right, that makes five in the building.”

Shea whistled sharply and looked at them with something like admiration. He nodded, signaling his men to action. One of them moved into the lot and waved. Headlights lit the street, and a truck with canvas sides and top rumbled through the broken chain-link, over the sidewalk, and onto the street. One man lowered the gate of the truck bed and stepped out of the way while the two other men grabbed Donal roughly by the feet and legs and swung him into the back, his distended intestines catching in the gate when they tried to close it.

“Don't you go yanking on that thing there, Curly,” Shea called out.

Cursing, one man reopened the gate and pushed the bruised-looking organs back into the dead man's stomach, then shook his hand in disgust.

“Cal, Dante. You two sure had some fun here.”

The truck rumbled across the street and into the alley and then the only sign of it was its lights flickering through the dark. After a moment its engine gunned again and it moved toward the far end of the building.

“We'll take care of the dead,” Shea said, looking at the two of them. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Cal. Cal stared at it, unmoving. “You're bleeding,” Shea said.

Cal felt his face—there was no pain; merely the lack of feeling, a dull numbness, and he wondered if the nerves there had been damaged. He took the handkerchief and held it to his cheek. What he'd taken for rainwater was blood, and within a minute he could feel it seeping through the cloth.

“What are you going to do with the bodies?” he asked.

“I don't know yet.” Shea grinned. “But I've got an idea.”

_________________________

Houghs Neck, Quincy

IN THE WAKE
of the storm, the city and suburbs were coming alive again. Driving along Quincy Shore Drive, Cal and Dante passed the Squantum and then the Wollaston yacht clubs, their docks ablaze with lights and the sound of calypso coming from the open windows and screened-in decks. Cyclists pedaled slowly through the puddles along the promenade, and there were swimmers sitting on the wet seawall and some standing at the water's edge up to their calves, trying to stay cool but also wary of the jellyfish that teemed in the brownish waters, floating now with night coming on, glistening orbs on the surface of the sea. Sheet lightning whitened the sky and the rumble of thunder sounded from far out beyond the harbor islands and at the edges of the bay. McGettrick's Bar, the ice cream parlor, and the clam shack were doing great business, dozens of people standing in line and in throngs around the outdoor tables.

Cal had the car above the speed limit just to generate some airflow, and the damp air tugging at them through the open windows was just enough to make the heat bearable. Past the beach the shoreline changed to mudflats and rock, and sea grass, tall spears in the darkness. They pulled into the gravel driveway of the de Burgh estate on Houghs Neck and sat for a moment watching the house in the car's headlights, and then Cal killed the engine and they stepped out.

They entered the house through the two-door garage, an old oil smear on the concrete where the car had been the only stain in an otherwise pristine space. The house was also empty. The four-poster beds in the six bedrooms were made up, decorative pillows arranged fashionably on the quilts, and the countertops in the kitchen shone as if recently scrubbed, but there was a staleness to the air and a stillness that made them both pause in the large parlor and listen. They looked at the portrait of de Burgh that hung directly above the mantel of a wide granite fireplace and stared down at them. In the brass grate three ash-wood logs sat, like something captured in a still life. Cal looked at the painting of the swans and the boats with their red sails slicing through the white, high-topped waves, then turned to the billiards table, its balls set in the triangle rack on the green felt top.

“No one's lived here for a while,” said Dante.

“No, but someone's worked hard to make it look like they have.”

Cal noticed another smell beneath the staleness; it was sharp and cloying and barely there, but the more he focused on it, the stronger it became.

They walked down the hall, opened the door to the basement, turned on the light, and stood at the stair top. “Can you smell that?” Cal asked.

Dante lifted his head, sniffed at the air like a dog. “No. I don't smell anything.”

Their footfalls on the stairs stirred dust, and motes spiraled upward and trembled in the air. At the center of the finished floor multiple cracks and veins showed darker than the rest, where damage had been filled in with fresh concrete, perhaps for plumbing to the ancient pipes that ran underground to the septic tank. Out here Cal doubted they were connected to the city's sewer. He could smell the sea as if it had seeped through the bedrock and into the foundation, and there was another smell as well. Dante turned toward it and frowned.

“It's lye,” Cal said, “that smell. It's what they use in concrete, and in getting rid of bodies. We used it when we were burying our dead in the war.”

He nodded toward the floor. “That look like a professional job to you?”

“No, someone was in a hurry.”

Cal limped to the workbench against the far wall where tools gleamed dully, looking as though they'd never been used. He took off his shirt, folded it neatly on the tabletop, and hefted a pickax off the wall.

His first swing was wild and the pick skittered off the concrete but when he swung again, grunting, the pick head broke through the thin layer of concrete. Within minutes he'd shattered the concrete into rubble and Dante grabbed a shovel and began digging out the hole. For a while there was only the sound of their labors and the scraping of metal against stone and then Cal stopped.

“Whoa,” he said. “Whoa.”

He threw the pick aside and knelt by the hole, pulled the fragments of concrete and dirt free with his hands. The smell of lye, of the sea and raw sewage, grew stronger. His hands touched upon canvas, chalky with crushed stone and concrete dust and turned a whitish green.

“Grab an end, would you?” Cal said, and together he and Dante lifted the canvas bag out onto the stone. A mixture of rancid gases—the odors of fecal matter and the mudflats from the shores of Quincy Bay and Rock Island Cove—came up to them, and they turned their faces from it, gagging. Cal grasped an edge of the canvas and pulled it back. Inside were the skeletal remains of a body, all of the soft tissue reduced to a sludge that stained the bones and clothes a black-brown. The skull was held to the neck by thin strands of worsted, yellowed flesh. They stared at the ruined pin-striped suit, mostly eaten away by the chemical process. In its tattered lapel, glinting dully, were two pins—a Pioneer's pin with an image of the Sacred Heart and a gold Fáinne, the kind they'd seen Donal Phelan wearing. Cal knew that the two of them were extremely close; they had to have been. Donal had been de Burgh's right-hand man for decades, and, before things had gone terribly wrong, they'd shared a faith and an intense love of their country. Cal could see Donal all those years ago being inspired by the man who was changing the futures of Irishmen and -women here and at home and then, somehow betrayed, turning against him, and Butler behind all of it.

Cal worked at something in the remains of the skeleton's right hand; as he pried the fingers open, the bones broke off and the gauze-like skin crumbled like chalk. It was a beret pin of the Irish Guards, engraved with the motto
Quis separabit.
Who shall separate us? Martin Butler must have placed it in the hand at the end, after either he or Donal killed him. Cal considered this for a moment and knew that it would have been Martin Butler who had killed him, but with Donal's assent. There would have been no other way, not after all the years spent tracking him down. The last man left alive responsible for his father's death and his brother's vegetative state.

“Mr. de Burgh,” Dante said.

Cal sat back on his haunches and breathed out. He wished there were more air in the room. The smell of lye and sewage clung to his skin. “You sad bastard, you,” he said, staring at the corpse. The king of Galway murdered and entombed in a trench three feet deep in his cellar, buried with the sewer pipes beneath Quincy Bay. Cal imagined the lye breaking down de Burgh's soft tissue and organs so that they turned into liquid, the remains of the man seeping like a poison through the stone and pipe and into the local water table.

He wiped his hands violently on the knees of his pants as if the stains and the smell might never come out.

Dante held his forearm to his nose.

“They buried him in the same place where the sewer pipes run. The smell is probably the backwash from the septic tank, that and the sea. It's not the body—it's too far gone and nothing's been in these pipes for years.”

“That's why Butler was feeding that small crap to Owen, the stolen cars with the pistols, small arms crossing state lines, all to convince Donal that de Burgh had turned his back on the Cause, that he was the one informing on them, that he'd become a liability. And after he killed de Burgh, he kept the deception going. The boat was the big one. That probably set Donal off. It was all Butler needed. After that they had to clean house with all of de Burgh's old men.”

“Madness,” Dante said. Wearily he lowered himself to the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “He created madness—no one knew who was who or who to trust.”

“Including us, including Owen.”

“And Butler,” Dante said. “Where do you think he is?”

They looked at each other; they both knew the answer.

“Long gone,” Cal said. “A new name and a new life in some other city, and with him all of de Burgh's assets. He's been planning this for some time and always focusing the attention elsewhere, away from himself. Hell, he might as well have been invisible, and who's going to go after him now? All of his enemies are gone, he saw to that.”

“All hail the new king,” Dante said.

“The new king,” Cal echoed.

Dante shook his head and exhaled cigarette smoke to the ceiling.

Cal rose slowly to his feet, wincing and reaching for his lower back. His undershirt was drenched with sweat. It had begun to rain outside and it tapped softly on the basement windows.