Angie woke me at five in the morning, warm palms on my newly shaven cheeks, her tongue opening my mouth as she kicked the tangle of sheets off us and covered as much of my body as possible with her own.
“You hear the birds?” she said.
“No,” I managed.
“Me, either.”
After, we lay with the dawn gradually lighting the room, my body spooned behind hers, and I said, “He knows we’re watching.”
“Scott Pearse,” she said. “Yeah, I got that feeling, too. A week straight of tailing him, he never so much as stops the truck for a coffee break. If he’s going through anyone’s mail, he isn’t doing it there.” She turned in my arms, a smooth slithering of her flesh that felt like lightning in my blood. “He’s smart. He’ll wait us out.”
I lifted a stray hair off her eyelash.
“Yours?” she asked.
“Mine.” I flicked it off the bed. “He said time was an issue. That’s why he met me on the roof and tried to either buy me off or back me off—because he’s pressed for time.”
“Right,” Angie said. “But we can assume that was when he thought he had a deal with the Dawes. And now that the deal’s off, why—”
“Who says it’s off?”
“Christopher Dawe. Christ, he destroyed their daughter. They’re not going to pay him after that. He’s got no more leverage.”
“But even Christopher Dawe figured he’d come back at them. Go after Carrie, try to destroy her like he did Karen.”
“But where’s the profit in that?”
“It’s not entirely about profit,” I said. “I think Christopher Dawe was right about that. I think it’s a matter of principle to Pearse. That money he was extorting? He thinks of it as his already. He’s not going to let it go.”
Angie ran the backs of her fingers over my abdomen and chest. “But how would he get to Carrie Dawe? I doubt that if she were in therapy, she was using the same therapist as her daughter. So Pearse can’t go the Diane Bourne route. The Dawes don’t live in the city, so he can’t fuck with their mail.”
I propped myself up on my elbow. “Pearse’s standard MO is to infiltrate through one psychiatrist and one postal area. Okay. But that’s just what’s on hand, the buttons he can press easily. His father was a professional mind fucker. The son was Special Forces.”
“So?”
“So I think he’s always prepared. And more than that, I think he’s always ready to improvise. And he always, always works off private information. That’s the foundation of everything he is and everything he does. He knew enough to pay the right people to get information on us. He found out I cared about Bubba and used that. He found out you were untouchable because of your grandfather, and when he couldn’t get to me through Bubba, he went after Vanessa. He’s limited, but he’s seriously smart.”
“Right. And what he knows about the Dawes, he learned from Wesley.”
“Sure, but that’s old info. Even if Wesley is still around, bankrolling Pearse, who knows—his information is ten years dated.”
“True.”
“Pearse would need somebody who knew the Dawes well and knew them now. A close associate of the doctor’s. The wife’s best friend. Or a—”
I looked down at her and she raised herself up on both elbows and we said it together:
“A housekeeper.”
Siobhan Mulrooney walked into the parking lot of the commuter rail in Weston at six that night, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder, head down, steps quick. As she passed Angie’s Honda, she saw me sitting on the hood and picked up her pace.
“Hey, Siobhan.” I rubbed my chin between my thumb and forefinger. “What do you think about the new look?”
She looked back over her shoulder at me, paused. “Didn’t recognize ya, Mr. Kenzie.” She pointed at the light pink scars along the jawline. “You’ve scars.”
“I do.” I slid off the hood. “Guy gave them to me a couple of years ago.”
“Whatever for?” Her shoulders jerked slightly as I approached, as if each side of her body wanted to run in the opposite direction.
“I had figured out he wasn’t who he appeared to be. It made him angry.”
“He tried to kill you, yeah?”
“Yeah. Tried to kill her, too.” I pointed behind Siobhan at Angie standing by the stairwell that led up to the station.
Siobhan looked back at her, then at me. “Nasty man, then, I’d say.”
“Where you from, Siobhan?”
“Ireland, of course.”
“North, right?”
She nodded.
“Home of the Troubles,” I said, throwing a brogue around the last word.
She dropped her head as I reached her. “You don’t make light of it, Mr. Kenzie.”
“Lost some family, did you?”
She looked up at me and her small eyes were smaller still and dark with anger. “I did, yeah. Generations of them.”
I smiled. “Me, too. Great-great-great-grandfather, I think it was, on my father’s side was executed in Donegal in 1798, when the French left us holding the bag. Now my maternal grandfather—me Ma’s Da,” I said with a wink, “they found him kneecapped in his barn with his throat cut and his tongue cut in half.”
“He was a traitor, then, was he?” Siobhan’s small face was clenched into a defiant fist.
“A stoolie,” I said. “Yeah. Either that or the Orange did him, wanted it to look that way. You know how it is in a war like that, sometimes people die, you can never be sure why until you meet them on the other side. Other times, people die for no real reason, because the blood’s up, because the more chaos, the easier it is to get away with it. I hear that since the cease-fire, it’s really nuts over there. Everyone running around, taking off heads in revenge hits. Do you know, Siobhan, that more people were killed in South Africa in the two years after apartheid than died during it? Same thing with Yugoslavia after the Communists. I mean, fascism sucks, but it keeps people in line. The moment it’s over, all that bad blood people have been holding in? Forget about it. People get whacked for things they forgot they did.”
“Trying to tell me something, Mr. Kenzie?”
I shook my head. “Just running off at the mouth, Siobhan. So, tell me, why’d you leave the Old Sod?”
She cocked her head. “You like poverty, Mr. Kenzie? You like losing well over half your earnings to the government? You like dreary weather and endless cold?”
“Can’t say I do.” I shrugged. “It’s just a lot of times, people leave the North and can’t ever go back because there are too many people waiting to fuck them up when they step off the boat. You?”
“Have anyone waiting back there to hurt me?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” she said, her eyes on the ground, shaking her head as if by doing so that would make it come true. “No. Not me.”
“Siobhan, could you tell me when Pearse is going to move against the Dawes? And maybe how he plans to go about doing it?”
She stepped back from me slowly, a weird half smile playing on her tiny face. “Ah, no, Mr. Kenzie. Have yourself a nice day, won’t ya?”
“You didn’t say, ‘Who’s Pearse?’” I said.
“Who’s Pearse?” she said. “There now—ya happy?” She turned and walked toward the stairs, her overnight bag swinging on her shoulder.
Angie stepped aside as Siobhan reached the dark stairwell and began climbing it.
I waited until she reached the landing midway up.
“How’s your green card status, Siobhan?”
She stopped, froze there with her back to us.
“Did you somehow manage an extended work visa? Because I hear INS is really cracking down on the Irish. Particularly in this city. Kinda sucks, too, because who’s going to paint the houses once they ship them back home?”
She cleared her throat, back still to us. “You wouldn’t.”
“We would,” Angie said.
“You can’t.”
“We can,” I said. “Help us out here, Siobhan.”
She half turned, looked down the staircase at me. “Or what?”
“Or I’ll call a friend of mine in INS, Siobhan, and you’ll celebrate Labor Day in fucking Belfast.”