Read Black Irish for Free Online Page B

What if he finds them and beats the little girl, because the pamphlets he can’t read triggered a world of rage and shame inside?
    She thought back to Miami, and the memory caused her to twist uncomfortably in the car’s worn vinyl seat. After six months there, she’d had a nice career with an upward trajectory, a condo overlooking the sparkling Atlantic, even an article in the
Herald
that called her a crusader for abused children. Six months after that, she’d woken up one morning in Liberty City crying her eyes out. She was fifty thousand dollars in debt because she bought things she didn’t need and paid school tuition for the children of violent crime victims. In her spare time, she was stalking suspects in unsolved child abduction cases. She was lost.
    Can’t go down that road again
, Abbie thought to herself now. She glanced again at the third-floor window. Then, with a sigh, she started the engine. Illiteracy was beyond her means at the moment.
    The neighborhood seemed to ooze bad vibes. Where were the kids playing on the sidewalks? Where were the men shoveling snow or shouting to each other as they took down the Christmas lights from their front porches? There was a string of blue and white colored lights blinking in a picture window two doors down, but they didn’t alleviate the gloom of the street. Two of the bulbs had burned out, and they were the wrong color anyway.
    As much as she’d resented being an outsider here growing up, she’d always known that the Irish were as thick as thieves with each other—and she’d envied that. Now it seemed even that was gone.
    A phrase she’d heard in the Cuban neighborhoods of Miami came back to her: “Man,” they said there, “is wolf to man.”

    Abbie drove home and pulled in front of her apartment building on Elmwood Avenue, close to downtown and a good fifteen miles from the County border. Kids from the University of Buffalo were roaming the street in pleasantly wasted gangs, on their way to the bars on Chippewa Street. She pulled her coat around her as she searched for the key. When she was inside, she kept the lights low and walked softly across the bare wood floor.
    She peeked in the second door.
    “Hi, Dad,” she said.
    Her father looked up from the leather recliner set next to his bed. Detective John Kearney had turned seventy-eight the year before, but his arms still looked like cords of cherrywood, red and thick, and his chest was broad. His eyes were sharp and the bluest blue she’d ever seen. It was his mind that was going.
    “Is it you then?”
    “Yes, it’s me.”
    He put down the book of crosswords he’d been doing. She sat next to his recliner, on the bed.
    “Did you eat your dinner?” she asked.
    “Some of it. I don’t need much these days.”
    He didn’t look at her, his eyes pointed toward the corner. When he talked to her, it was always as if he was listening to another, more interesting conversation.
    “I had the scanner on,” he said, his accent still bearing the traces of County Clare in Ireland. “You found a body at St. Teresa’s?”
    “Dad, please turn on the radio instead of that thing. It’ll only send your blood pressure up.”
    “What kind of animal would kill somebody in a church?” John Kearney demanded, the cords on his neck standing out.
    She sighed. “It might have been just an abandoned building to them. We don’t know yet.”
    “I know a construction worker who lives across the street.”
    “Was his name James?” Abbie deadpanned.
    Her father looked up sharply. “And how did you know that?”
    His eyes were oddly aflame.
What’s he so worried about?
Abbie thought.
    “Just a joke, Dad. Do you remember his last name?”
    “James … James …” He searched the patterns in the crocheted blanket on his lap. “He was from Connemara,” he said finally.
    He’s probably been dead thirty years
, thought Abbie.
    “Did the neighbors see anything?” her father mumbled.
    “It’s the County, Dad.