The Death of an Irish Tinker (19 page)

FOOLISHLY, SINCE THE Toddler had established himself in her Raglan Road house whole hours before Cheri Cooke and Tag Barry were brought back by Hannigan. And before guards were posted outside.

He’d even had time to wire electronically front and rear doors, a small red and a green light on a monitor strapped to his left wrist informing him whenever either was opened.

Also, he had conducted an exhaustive search of the place, attic to cellar, where he discovered a coal chute that had been used in earlier times. He had slipped the latch and worked it open to provide himself with an avenue of escape, should he need it. It was there he remained—deep within the coal bin of the basement—until his cell phone rang, the sound muted in the pocket of his black pile combat jacket.

But once Hannigan informed him that he “had it on good authority—the bloody
best
!—yehr woman is headed back to the house there. Ward just called it in. She should be arriving within the hour,” the Toddler moved up the stairs toward Tag Barry, who was maintaining his own beery vigil at the kitchen table.

Bottle in hand, a television blaring on a counter by the fridge, he’d been ensconced there since his return, getting up only for further drink or the jakes. The Toddler despised drunks even more than he did junkies, alcohol being an even sloppier addiction than dope.

“Who’s that?” Barry asked, not bothering to turn to the cellar door that the Toddler had opened. “You, Cheri? Sit yehr sorry arse down here and have a beer. It’ll do ye a world of good. Ye’re an old, gone cow, and you should get used to it.” All said in a sloshy northern accent.

“Or is it you, Bid? If it is, you listen good. I’ve got somethin’ to say.” He paused dramatically, a drunken edge to his voice. “You’ll want to be speakin’ more respectful like if I’m to stay here.”

“I really don’t think she wants you to,” the Toddler replied, walking past Barry to the fridge. “You should read her diary. The spelling’s wild, but one thing’s perfectly clear. You’ve slipped from prince to putz. She now hates your ass. Big time.”

The Toddler opened the fridge door, pulled out a longneck Bud, and pried the cap off.

He set the bottle in front of Barry. “Drink up. It could be your last.”

The young man’s eyes remained focused on the Toddler’s hands and the whitish condom-looking rubber gloves he was wearing.

From the freezing compartment the Toddler removed the packet that Hannigan had placed there and would link the Garda chief superintendent to whatever transpired in the house, in case there was a cockup.

Pulling open the tie string of the package, the Toddler dumped the Dan Wesson .44 on the table, then stuffed the waxed wrapping paper with Hannigan’s fingerprints, gun oil, and gunpowder all over it into a pocket. Hannigan, who was despised by his staff and whose usefulness to the Toddler was now over.

Next he pulled a box from the pocket of his tight black shooting jacket—the Biddy’s flat-nosed shells that he had found above the door leading down into the basement. Like the very best of omens, the discovery had pleased him greatly. The entire operation was falling into place with a facility that was almost artful.

Flicking open the cylinder, he loaded the immense weapon that was every bit as powerful as it looked.

“That Biddy’s?” Barry asked.

The Toddler shook his head. “But the nice part? It’s enough like hers to be hers, if you know what I’m saying. Right down to the ammunition. And guess what?” He clicked the chamber shut and glanced up at Barry. “I’m going to make her a present of it. I plan to leave it here when I’m through.”

“And take hers away.”

The Toddler’s eyes widened. “Very good! Very good indeed, Mr. Barry! For a drunk like yourself. But I can imagine you’re now suddenly sober.”

Barry had no reply. He was still staring at the gun. After a while he asked, “Are yeh goin’ to shoot me?”

“Eventually, but not for—oh, fifteen or twenty minutes, I’d hazard. You’ve got time. Drink up. You know the saying: Sure, he died, but he died drunk and happy. So, drink.”

Barry’s head turned to the two bottles in front of him, one half empty, the other full. “Are yeh not havin’ one yehrself?”

“Poison. Never touch the stuff. Only fools do.”

Barry took that in for a moment or two. “What if I was to say, I never would either? Again.”

“I wouldn’t believe you, and you wouldn’t yourself. So, go on. Enjoy, while you can.”

Barry shook his head. “I can’t I’ve lost me taste for it.”

“Then stick out your neck.”

“Stick it out how?”

“Like you’re showing me the label at the back of your collar. And not to worry. You’ll hardly feel a thing.”

“Will I, like, come to? Sometime?”

The Toddler canted his head, considering. “After a fashion. But not like your old self, since my plan is to have you stay right here at this table until I need to have you dead.”

Barry’s eyes were now roaming the kitchen wildly, his brow beaded with sweat. “What if I said—I mean, I
promised
—I would? Stay right here until—”

“I wouldn’t believe that either, nor do you.”

Barry nodded; it was the truth. Given an opening, he’d bolt. And should have with Biddy when she left. Why hadn’t he heeded her warning? He glanced down at the bottles and knew why. “Then I’ll be dead after I stick out me neck?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I said you won’t be dead until I shoot you, which is some minutes off.”

“I suppose I don’t have a choice in that either.”

“Not unless you like pain, which I can and will supply if you resist. But do what you will. You’re the boss.”

With a drunken sigh, Tag Barry wagged his head from side to side, muttered something like “Just me fookin’ luck,” and stuck out his neck. Chopping down with his free hand, the Toddler broke it for him, fracturing vertebra C-4. It meant that while still alive and able to breathe on his own, Barry had suffered instant paraplegia. He would definitely stay put until the Toddler was able to return and make noise.

Catching the head before it could thump down and topple the bottles, the Toddler laid its cheek on the table. That eye was still open. “Blink if you can hear me.”

It did.

The Toddler stepped back quickly to keep the urine off his shoes; it was spilling over the front of the chair and pooling on the tiles around the table, as the young man’s muscles lost the signal from his brain, and all the beer leaked out. “Good lad. See, I wasn’t lying. I’ll be back for you in a bit.”

Taking the stairs up to the second floor two at a time, the Toddler moved right to the master bedroom. There Cheri
Cooke was sleeping in the Biddy’s bed, hat on and snoring at the ceiling, like a spinster out of an old movie.

After carefully lowering himself down, the Toddler slid under the bed to wait for the old woman’s erstwhile paramour. Who might be arriving sometime soon. Listening to the old woman’s noisy rumbling only a foot or so above him, he felt suddenly elated in a way he hadn’t experienced for a long time, not since the night of the Bookends, when after he’d killed them, McGarr had visited him in his granny’s kitchen.

And he wondered if all along it wasn’t the killing that he enjoyed most but rather the idea of taking revenge in a way that left him blameless. The art of it, the process.

But the little red light now began flashing on the monitor that was clasped over his left wrist, indicating that somebody had opened the back door of the cubby.

From under his belt, the Toddler pulled the long barrel of the Dan Wesson. He then heard the interior door open, and the Biddy—it could only be—utter a little cry of pique on seeing the mess that was Tag Barry.

The Toddler smiled. Payback time being only minutes away.

“TAG! TAG BARRY, you sot,” Biddy Nevins said when she stepped into the kitchen and saw the young man sprawled on the kitchen table, the bottles spilled and piss pooling around his chair.

“Look what you’ve done. You’re a lazy, boozy piece of work, and I want this cleaned up and you out of here by morning.” It was then that she noticed his eyes, which were open, blinking wildly.

“What?” she demanded. “Are yeh conscious? Can ye not even speak?” She waited for a moment, before turning away in disgust and moving toward the hallway. “You’re a loss, Tag. A dead loss.”

Exactly, thought the Toddler, now able to hear her. And you will be too, my dear, sooner than you think. He thumbed back the hammer of the Wesson.

Biddy could scarcely climb the stairs, she was so tired, beaten and bruised from her encounter with the Toddler earlier in the day and then having to throw herself out of the car before the force of the explosion blew her down into the wet bog. And simply from the stress of it all. She almost wished the whole thing were over, one way or another.

But when she entered the bedroom, she stopped suddenly.

From under the bed the Toddler could see her legs silhouetted against the glow from the chandelier in the hallway that could be controlled by a rheostat on the wall by the door, like a kind of night-light. The Toddler had discovered it on when he entered the house. And had left it dim, just for this purpose.

“Ah, Christ Almighty, the inmates have taken over the asylum. Cheri! Cheri! Get yehr arse out o’ me bed this instant. I’m hammered, destroyed. And I need to sleep. Cheri!”

Little could she know how destroyed, thought the Toddler. But he would wait to fire his own minicannon at her in the very same way that she had fired at him: up from below when she was least expecting it. Which was the reason he was under the bed.

And low. He’d whack her someplace low so she wouldn’t die right away and would know it was him.

“Cheri!”
she bawled, advancing on the bed and shaking the older woman. “Up! Up!”

“Biddy, you’re back,” the woman managed to say in a groggy voice. “You’re back. Come to me. You don’t know what I’ve been through: the police, a jail cell. Give me a kiss.”

“What? What
you’ve
been through? Don’t bother me with that. Just get up—git, git—and go. I must sleep, and I don’t want you hanging all over me.”

“I can’t and I won’t.” The old woman’s tone had changed; it was now petulant and whiny. “I’m after taking a tablet, and I dreamed I heard a man’s voice speaking to Tag. I’m frightened, I need you. Look, I’ll move all the way over here. You can have as much of the bed as you please. I just want to be
near
you. That’s all I ask.”

The Biddy sighed audibly. “What in God’s name could I have done to deserve this! So help me, Cheri, if I feel you touching me in any way, I’ll give you the thumpin’ of your life.”

“Yes, dear, I understand.”

With his eyes focused on the bottom of the mattress that he could see through the springs, the Toddler watched as the lump that was Cheri Cooke slid over to an edge of the bed.

At the bottom of which the Biddy was disrobing, kicking off her shoes, dropping her slacks over them, peeling off her stockings, her jumper, her blouse.

In her underwear—the Toddler could see when she walked down the length of the long bedroom and snapped on the light—she entered the toilet, the gun (
her
Dan Wesson) in her hand. She placed it on the back of the commode, while she ran water into the basin. Bending at the waist with her back to him, she began washing her face.

And could be taken like that, since he had a clear shot. But the Toddler was bemused by how handsome she was with long, straight legs, good hips, and daunting breasts. She was just at that stage—what? near forty—when a big woman, such as she, looked just a bit overripe and truly voluptuous.

As compared with how she’d look in only a minute or two, when the filed and jacketed three-hundred-grain round fragmented through that body.

Straightening up, she dried her face, then, reaching behind her, unsnapped her brassiere and removed it. When she turned toward him to move back into the bedroom, her pendant and heavy breasts wagged, the nipples a deep rubicund color, like blood.

After switching out the light, she walked right at him in the dark and climbed into the bed only to discover that the other woman had moved.

“Cheri, I told you!”

The mattress above the Toddler jounced, the springs squeaking as the Biddy either hit or tried to move the older woman. “Now, get over there!”

“Oh, Biddy, please. I just want to feel you again, to know you’re there.”

“No—over. Now!”

There was a pause and then: “Well, if you won’t, I will, and if you so much as touch me, I promise, I’ll beat you.” The mattress rocked; the springs squeaked again.

But the older woman said, “No need. If that’s how you feel, I’ll maintain my distance. I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Ah, don’t give me that.
You know when you’re not wanted!
I could puke.”

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“That cold thing there in your hand.”

“My pistol—what did you think it was?”

“I don’t want that in bed with me.”

“Then get out.”

“You know I can’t. You’re just being cruel. As usual.”

“That’s it! I’ve had enough! Here you either move or I move, and if I have to move you—”

“No, no, like I said—”

There was yet more violent movement only a foot above the Toddler’s face. When the springs stopped rocking, he waited for either of them to speak again, so that he could determine which protuberance in the mattress was the body of which.

But neither seemed to have any more to say, nor did the old one begin to snore. And it was while he was waiting for a sigh or a cough or whatever, the Wesson locked in both hands with the barrel pointed at the lump that the Toddler believed was at last the Biddy, that the red light on his wrist monitor came on. Followed almost immediately by the green.

Which meant? That two people had entered the house nearly simultaneously, who could only be the police with Hannigan’s men posted outside. But not Hannigan’s men since they were under orders to remain where they were.

It was McGarr then. With help.

But how much?

Calmly—in spite of the adrenaline that had jolted through him—the Toddler reset the monitor, in case others arrived. He still had a way out in the basement if he could complete the hit and create enough chaos to make his way down there.

It was time to act. Hearing no noise on the stairs, knowing that he’d need maybe five seconds to get out from under the bed and leave the room before the two came running, the Toddler took aim at the deepest protruberance of the deepest lump—the Biddy’s pretty arse, he assumed—and fired. The report was deafening in the confined space, the gun blast torrid on his face.

And when he tried to swing the barrel toward the second shape, the eight inches of steel snagged in the springs, the front-sight blade catching a coil. Tugging hard, again and again, the Toddler finally pulled it free. But the second lump was gone.

The doorway. He could see legs. Throwing his right arm down so he could fire out from under the bed, the Toddler had only touched off another round when a second, nearly simultaneous explosion occurred there and a bullet smashed into the wall near his head.

He fired again and again, wildly, not caring where, knowing he was now a fixed target, knowing his only means of escape would be to scare her, to make her run.

And it worked. Or he’d shot her. The legs were gone.

But there were the two intruders now to worry about as well. Pushing himself out from under the bed, the Toddler got to his feet and looked down at the bed.

The old woman, now dead, was on her back, her eyes open, a red wet wound in what had been her lower stomach. There the blankets were frayed, the blood already having blotted through the material. Even the tall ceiling above was splattered with blood. Drops were falling.

At the door he scanned the large square front hallway that was dimly lit by the chandelier that could be controlled by the rheostat near his hand. There was another down by the front door. But would either of the two cops know that? Not
likely, only having just arrived. It would give the Toddler the edge he needed.

Where could she be? In any one of the bedrooms or the boxroom, the door of which was open a crack, where the Toddler now saw the glint of silver appear. It was a tiny room on a landing on the stairs and was used for storage, he knew from his earlier reconnaissance. He pulled his head back into the bedroom.

“Hughie?” a man’s voice called out from somewhere near the bottom of the front staircase.

“Here!” That voice was very close and somewhere in the hallway of the second floor, not far from where the Toddler was standing. McGarr must have come in the front and stayed there, while Ward entered the back and then, hearing the shots, mounted the back stairs to drive him down.

What to do?

The Toddler scarcely had to think. The situation could not be better: two cops in a poorly lit house searching for an armed perp with, now, a terrified victim cowering in the boxroom. And also armed. Which was the key.

The Toddler reloaded the gun from the Biddy’s box of cartridges in his pocket. Then back at the bed he pulled down the covers and climbed in with the old, dead woman, tugging wet bloody blankets over himself, making sure that her corpse with its gaping wound was exposed but that the frayed and bloodied covers obscured his own body, making him look as though he too had been shot.

He even plucked off her night hat and fitted it over his bald pate, then pulled her head and neck over his chest, as though while dying or being smashed by the force of the bullets, she had fallen across his corpse. The gun—his Wesson—he kept under the covers, pointed at the open door.

Would the cop, Ward, switch on the light? If he did, the Toddler would have to shoot him, which was not on his agenda. But if he was forced to, it would leave only his target, the Biddy—and he knew where she was—and McGarr, who would then have to die as well. The Toddler
did not doubt he could hunt him down and kill him, one-on-one.

He’d then do Tag Barry at the kitchen table, switch guns with the Biddy’s corpse, and leave via the coal chute, while the other cops stormed the doors.

“Miss Waters? Biddy Nevins?” the same older voice called out. “It’s Peter McGarr. Can you hear me?”

There was no answer, of course, the Biddy not wanting to give up her position, which the Toddler already knew. Stupid woman—it would cost her her life.

“If you can,” McGarr went on, “stay where you are. We’re going to sweep the house. We’ve got the exits covered, more help on the way, and the building surrounded.”

Which the Toddler rather doubted, unless McGarr meant Hannigan’s men, who would be inexperienced at this type of operation. But he believed the rest.

And there was Ward in the doorway, glancing in and stepping quickly across to peer in from the other angle with the wall for protection. Gun out, pointing with it. Cop style.

He stepped into the room, pushed shut the closet door and twisted the key in the lock, then moved to the toilet. But it was in leaving the bedroom that Ward stopped suddenly and turned his head to the old woman and the Toddler, whose eyes, of course, were open. Since he—or the corpse he was simulating—was dead.

There was a long moment in which Ward’s life hung in the balance, before he passed to the doorway. “There’s two in here, Chief—both dead.”

“Women?”

“Yah.”

“Then it’s him. Watch yourself.”

Ward scanned the hall, then moved off quickly toward the next room, continuing his sweep.

The Toddler pushed the gruesome old woman off him, pulled back the covers, and climbed out of the bed. He advanced on the doorway slowly, as quietly as he could. In
the distance he could hear sirens. Claxons. They were closing in on him surely.

Yet at the doorway with one hand on the rheostat and the Wesson pointing at the door of the boxroom, the Toddler waited patiently for Ward to reappear from the other bedroom. How long could the search of one room take? It all reminded him of Vietnam, of waiting by the side of a trail while a small army moved by you, so you could assassinate the general in the jeep at the back.

And there finally Ward was, out of the room and moving down the staircase on the far side of the square hallway toward the little room, the boxroom. There too the door was open again, a crack. He could see the glint of silver at the level of his tall Biddy’s shoulders.

The Toddler exulted. A zero-sum solution? Better than that. It would be a negative sum. He wouldn’t slaughter her. No. He’d let them do it for him.

When Ward moved beside the door, ready to kick it open, the Toddler took perfect aim. He then waited the requisite full second for his sighting to pulse in, before squeezing off two quick shots at the heavy edge of the door.

The first smashed it open. The second swung it past the Biddy, who stood there, gun locked in her hands.

Ward with his gun out too now rushed the door, ready to fire.

With the heel of a fist, the Toddler punched out the rheostat, dousing the chandelier. The hall was suddenly pitch-black.

Pop! Pow! The first report Ward’s, the second her gun, the big gun. The force of it was unmistakable.

Then Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! from below, as McGarr fired up into the boxroom at what little he could possibly see of the person who had fired at Ward.

Sprinting as well as he was able, the Toddler rushed down the hall toward the back of the house and the stairs that would take him to the basement.

Pausing at the kitchen table, he placed the barrel of his Wesson at the weal of bruising at the back of Tag Barry’s neck. And fired. The bullet nearly severed the head.

Down in the basement he took time—less than a minute—to reload, his eyes on the stairs leading down from the kitchen. If McGarr materialized there, he’d have to kill him, which would ruin everything. If he didn’t, it could mean only one thing: Ward was in a bad way, and McGarr was tending to him.