Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

I hopped up again and finally got the door open. At the other side of the flipped-over car was a man in a suit, a gun beside him, blood leaking from a hole in his temple. Through the lowered driver partition, I saw the side of the black driver’s motionless torso.

They killed themselves, I thought as I stared, shocked, into the car. How can this be happening? How can Chayefsky and his driver have just committed suicide?

My radio blooped as I staggered in a daze through the debris back onto the sidewalk.

“Doyle! Did you find the girl?” I called into the radio. “Tell me you found her!”

“We found her. She was in the basement. We just brought her out.”

“Is she OK?” I said.

There was a pause. It was too long. Way too long.

“I thought we could save her, but she’s dead, Mike. They killed her. Two to the head. The bastards. They killed her.”

It took seven minutes for the first fire truck to come. The cop and the fed and whoever else had been there were long gone. Arturo had grabbed a tablecloth from a dining room table set up inside, and we covered Iliana’s body with it.

Arturo and Doyle, staring down at the body, looked a little shook up but were hanging in there, holding it together. I was proud of them. They were both going to be really great cops.

That was when I saw the limo approach the gate. I ran toward it, my hand on my holster, as squad cars began to pull up behind it.

Inside, behind the driver, I spotted a famous man, a television personality, along with a group of smiling, laughing, rich-looking men and women.

“What’s going on?” the driver said. “These guests are here for the party. They’re here for the underground dinner party.”

I shook my head back and forth. At the driver, the city lights, at Iliana now being wheeled into an ambulance. I didn’t think I’d ever stop.

“Sorry,” I finally said sadly as I fished out my gold shield.

“Party’s over.”

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 110

AFTER THE LAST PRAYERS had been said and the last pints had been lifted, Mary Catherine found herself alone back at the old farmhouse where she’d been born. Her brother, Timmy, and Uncle Jerry, who’d come in from London together, were staying until Wednesday, but they had gone out with some old football friends who had come to the funeral.

It seemed like just about everybody in the town had come to see Mrs. Flynn off into the great beyond, but it wasn’t so much her they were honoring as Mary Catherine’s father, dead these last ten years, who had been a famous footballer in his own time and a town leader. The first to tell a joke or to tip a hat or to pitch in if any of the neighbors needed help with a lost calf or cutting the hay in August.

Mary Catherine looked out through the drizzle at the farmyard. Her mom had put up a good fight in keeping the old homestead together, but her age and illness had left their mark in the weeds in the vegetable garden, the holes in the henhouse roof by the apple orchard.

She thought of her mother standing at this very window as the six of them ran about like packs of wild geese. They were a rambunctious family, at least when Da wasn’t nearby. When her father was home, a calming solemnity came home with him.

She went into the parlor. It was as if she’d just left it on the day she left for America. The same photos on the wall, the ribbons for her father’s prize horses, her mother’s collection of country-western albums.

She sat, sorting through the old records. Eddy Arnold, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis, of course. Her mother had loved American music, country and the early rock and roll. They all did and knew every song by heart.

When she got to Buck Owens, she smiled and slid the record out of its sleeve. Her mother had been right mad for Buck Owens and his sad, jangly cowboy love songs. Even her father had liked him after a few glasses of lager on a Saturday afternoon, singing along in a perfect American country accent in his good tenor voice.

She had just put it on, the first strains of “Together Again” ringing through the empty old house, when she heard the tires on the gravel driveway. She thought it might be her brother and uncle home early from their homecoming pub crawl until she looked out the window and saw the florist van up from Clonmel.

More flowers. Probably some long-lost cousin in Australia; her mom’s family from County Down had been massive. A long-lost relation only now just hearing the news, she thought, going back to the albums in her lap.

“Just come in and put them in the kitchen, please,” she said to the knock on the mudroom door.

The screen door creaked open at the same time she heard the van suddenly pull away.

“Hello?” she called.