Authors: Stephan Talty
“Did you come here to judge me, Absalom? I got you out so that you could make something of yourself.”
She looked up at him. “The police in Niagara Falls found a dungeon in the Outlaws’ basement, weeks before the killings started.”
The Reverend turned quickly toward her.
“
What?
What dungeon?”
“The dungeon you sent him to, Reverend.”
“The robberies stopped, Abbie.”
“You sold him off and you sold me off.”
The Reverend shook his head slowly.
The room seemed to lift and swirl about her. She knew now. She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands.
“Where is he?”
“Where is wh—”
“Michael.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me. Not anymore.”
“I haven’t seen him in almost thirty years. In fact, I think I may be next on his list. But I won’t run. I will never run.”
“Back in the day, at the time of the fires, where did he live?”
The Reverend shook his head. “In an abandoned SRO hotel on Main. Sometimes he’d sleep rough there when your mother kicked him out. He was lost to us. You must understand that.”
“Where on Main?”
“Corner of Hertel.”
She turned to leave.
“Absalom.”
She wouldn’t turn.
“Absalom, he’ll kill you before he goes to prison.”
M
AIN
S
TREET WAS DEAD QUIET AS SHE WALKED PAST OFFICE BUILDINGS AND
the old apartment towers, wooden boards in the windows and For Sale signs ripped and fluttering gently in the wind. Downtown Buffalo was practically deserted, a few office workers who’d stayed late walking with their chins jammed into their jackets. A club on her right opened its doors and a drunken frat boy wearing nothing but a UB T-shirt and jeans, feet bare, was flung out by a bouncer, who checked that the man facedown on the sidewalk was breathing before turning and strolling back to the doorway.
The trolley bell sounded from blocks away. Above her, the streetlamps buzzed as she walked, hands in pockets. She felt as if she’d stepped back into another decade. She headed west until she saw the street sign for Hertel Avenue.
The building was dark, no lights visible in its six or seven stories, the top of it indistinguishable from the night sky. The cotton-swab-shaped streetlight in front of it had been vandalized, the plastic shell with a jagged hole at its center. She smelled urine and, for some reason, mildewed bread.
Abbie pushed hard on the front door, made of heavy steel. It relented with a rusty groan before jamming against something inside. There was just enough room for Abbie to squeeze by. Once inside,
she clicked on her flashlight. The beam danced over the floor of the building. Plastic detergent jugs, old diaper boxes, so old the lettering and color had been leached away. Snow was falling inside the building, small columns of it circling down from holes in the roof. The quiet was deep. It seemed like she was disturbing a place that hadn’t been entered for years.
Her flashlight swept over boxes of rotting cardboard. An orange plastic corsage with fake baby’s breath, still in its box. A black patent leather shoe. She wondered if the front of the building had held a wedding store or a tuxedo rental place.
Something shifted above her. Abbie froze.
“Michael?”
A movement, shuffling. A rat? Could rats climb inside the walls to the other stories? She’d heard stories of rats swimming across the river to get to Buffalo when Niagara Falls had become too deserted to support them. If they could do that, they could climb beams.
She swept the walls and saw wigs, naked mannequins, and an old poster on the wall. “Make Your Special Day Extra-Special,” it read, above a picture of a bride in a seventies-style wedding dress and tiara. “Rothman’s Bridal” was printed at the bottom of the sign in capital letters.
Twenty feet ahead, something rustled beneath the garbage. The beam of her flashlight played over the mounds of cardboard and junk. The crest of one mound shifted.
“Michael, is that you?” she called.
Laughter from the far recesses.
“Michael, is that you?”
someone called back, the voice high and mocking.
Her Glock made a snicking sound as it came out of the leather holster. She straightened her arms out behind the gun and flashlight, held together, and walked slowly toward the voice, glancing now and again at her footing in the piles of trash. Behind the studs of a now-vanished wall, she saw a pile of clothes heaped in a corner. Watching where she placed her feet, she moved closer. Her gun came up.
She called his name again. A rag was brushed aside and suddenly there was a human face atop the mound of clothes. White, gaunt, a woman. The eyes were yellow-green beneath a swath of greasy gray hair and they regarded her calmly.
“Where’s Michael?” Abbie said.
The woman only smiled brightly.
“Can you hear me? I’m looking for a man in his early forties. Have you seen anyone like that here?”
But the woman just stared at Abbie. Then she reached a hand deep into the coats that topped the pile and, a second later, produced a half-eaten chicken leg. She took a bite, her yellow-brown teeth feeling for the meat. Then she began to chew slowly. Her eyes fogged over.
Doesn’t even know I’m here
, thought Abbie.
Something thumped to the ground behind her. Abbie swiveled, her heart beating fast.
It was a paper bag, wrapped with a yellow string. Tied to one end of the string, now swinging lazily from the impact, slowly losing velocity, was something small that glinted in the gleam of her flashlight.
She turned and began walking toward the bag. As she got closer, she saw that the thing on the end of the string was a toy monkey.
Abbie stared at it, then pulled back her jacket flap and holstered the Glock.
She looked up.
“Michael, come talk to me.”
Nothing, just snow drifting down and moonlight on black struts. She walked to the bag, nearly tripping on a rusty pipe jutting up from the garbage.
If I fall
, she thought,
I’ll sink into the mess and never get out
.
She spread her hands out away from her body and picked her way carefully toward the bag. The monkey had stopped swinging. She reached down, pulled the string, and the top of the bag eased open. She looked inside.
She took out a bib. A green pelican on a white background. She
didn’t remember it. She brought it to her nose. It smelled faintly of pears.
She heard footsteps, the rusting stairs groaning out a rising note as the person stepped off them. She didn’t look up. It was him. He was coming to her.
The flashlight lit up the inside of the bag. Next was a photo of a young woman in a cheap black frame, the picture slightly out of focus, as snapshots from the seventies always seemed to be. Abbie lifted it out. Her mother was dressed in a paisley dress, her hair up, wearing some Aztec-looking earrings with cheap green stones.
You looked happy, Mom
, Abbie thought.
Were you a little bit high or just glad to be with someone who wanted a picture of you? Was the man behind the camera my dad?
Abbie tried to pick out the features that resembled her own, searched for her face in the blurry snapshot. Then she carefully returned the framed picture to the bag.
Inside was one last item: a paper. The last page of her father’s confession.
Michael had killed her father, not O’Halloran. O’Halloran had only done Billy Carney, afraid he’d found out the truth about his IRA past. The rest of the killing had been done by her brother: Gerald Decatur, lured to the same room at the Lucky Clover motel where the swap for Michael had been made decades ago. And Jimmy Ryan and Marty Collins and Joe Kane and her father. After Michael had turned on the Outlaws and settled his score with them, he’d come home to avenge himself on the Clan.
She sensed the figure twenty feet away, then saw his right shoulder outlined in a window fronting on Main Street.
The figure made a sound. Abbie shivered, then looked up, playing the words over in her mind until she could make sense of them.
“I have a place,” it had said.
She looked up. It was the man from the videotape at the Lucky Clover, dressed in a green-and-black-checked jacket, dark jeans, and the black ski mask, the dark eyes pinning her to the ground. He was very still.
You’re the reason I came back to Buffalo
, she thought.
Somehow I must have known about you, though it seems impossible
.
“They cut out half your tongue, didn’t they, Michael? The Outlaws? So that you couldn’t tell anyone who you were?”
She didn’t want to put her flashlight on him. She was afraid of what she’d see.
His eyes were just visible through the round holes. But she couldn’t read the expression.
“Michael, I’m your sister. Do you … remember me?”
The head was still. Traffic noises.
Then a small nod, up and down.
She felt a rush of warmth in her chest.
Don’t cry, Absalom. He wants you to be strong, to be the answer he’s been searching for
.
“I didn’t even know you existed. You know that, right? Please tell me you knew that.”
“Youf horgot me.”
How many hours did he practice to be able to speak this well, down in the hole? How many years learning to talk again?
Abbie shook her head back and forth.
“I didn’t forget you, no, not that. I never remembered you. That’s different. I was too young. Please believe me.”
She saw his fist compress, the knuckles growing pale. He said nothing, but his shoulders slumped.
The figure slowly shook its head. In its right hand she saw a knife, its blade dull in the weak light.
He was too damaged to go into the world. He would kill again. But she could find him a place where he wouldn’t suffer as he had suffered in that pit …
“I can’t let you go, you know that.”
“Yeth, you can. We can go ’gether. I have a place.”
A place? Was their reunion part of his plan?
“Michael, why did you kill those men?”
“WHY?”
It was a scream of rage and disbelief. She saw the cords in his neck stiffen and the knife turned in his hand.
“For uth. For what they did.”
So he’d killed to bring them back together. This was the ending he’d wanted; the two of them together again.
“Michael? Michael, please listen carefully to me. I can’t let you go.”
His body stiffened and she thought she heard a breath escape his lips.
“But you won’t go to prison, you’ll go to a hospital. And I’ll visit you every day, I promise you that.”
She stepped toward him, carefully placing her feet in the uneven trash so as not to fall and startle him.
“Michael, can you take off your mask? I want to see you.”
Do you look like me?
The blade turned in the dim light.
“Let me see your face,” she said. “Please? I’m your sister.” It was all she could think to say.
He reached up and violently pulled off the hat in one motion, as an angry child would. His hair sprang up unevenly, matted down on the right, uncut now for months.
Michael Minton had a long face, a thin nose like her own, and darting, wide-set eyes beneath a wrinkled forehead. He looked, she thought, like some kind of backwoodsmen from frontier days, and younger than his forty-three years. Abbie stared at a face in which pieces of her own were present but distorted in a squint of fear and hatred. Michael’s mouth was working, the lips pressed together.
It was like someone who was angry had smashed her face and put it together again—maliciously.
The Outlaws had branded the number “1” above his left eye, the pink flesh as wide as a finger and uneven. One for one percenters, it meant in biker language, the one percenters who rejected authority. But what it really meant was that Michael was their property. The ridged tissue looked painful even now.
Even if she wanted to let him go, where would he run to with that mark on his face?
Her eyes shifted and met his, childlike and defiant. He looked away and down.
“Michael, will you come with me?”
He shook his head.
“I’ll protect you. Nobody will
ever
hurt you like that again. Believe me, Michael, please.”
Michael’s eyes met hers and terror flashed through her.
What is he seeing in my face? What he would have looked like if I’d been the one taken, and not him?
He will kill me
, she thought.
I’ve destroyed his dream and he knows it now
.
Michael mumbled something.
“What was that?”
“Came back furroo—”
I came back for you
.
“Michael, listen to me. I know you came back for me. And I’m so thankful you did. We’re going to be together now, just like it should have been. You’re not going back in the hole.”
She shouldn’t have mentioned it. He stepped backward.
And then a dark space seemed to open under her feet, like it had on the lake. In that instant, she knew what he would do.
Snowflakes cut across the beam of light as she saw him staring at her, the eyes wide and fearful. Suddenly the knife flashed at his waist and appeared to rotate at her through the blackness, coming at her face, the thick blade blinking light and dark as it turned. She cried out, falling backward, desperately ducking away. The flashlight in her hand bounced off the ground and snapped off.
She heard him gasp.
“Michael!”
Everything was black except the stars in the missing roof. Abbie got to her knees, scrabbling in the rubble for the flashlight.
The bulb is burst
, she thought to herself,
it’s no use
. She turned and, in the dim moonlight, saw Michael splayed backward on a pile of rubble, his eyes open wide, and blood seeping down under the collar of his jacket.
“Oh, no, please no.” Abbie scrambled up and moved toward her brother, nearly losing her balance on a rotten beam of wood. She
clambered past it and touched his leg gently, then moved up toward his face.