Angel face, p.1
Angel Face, page 1
Angel Face
The Erin O’Reilly Mysteries
Book Eighteen
Steven Henry
Clickworks Press • Baltimore, MD
Also by the Author
The Erin O’Reilly Mysteries
Black Velvet
Irish Car Bomb
White Russian
Double Scotch
Manhattan
Black Magic
Death By Chocolate
Massacre
Flashback
First Love
High Stakes
Aquarium
The Devil You Know
Hair of the Dog
Punch Drunk
Bossa Nova
Blackout
Angel Face
Tequila Sunrise: A James Corcoran Story (coming soon)
Italian Stallion (coming soon)
Fathers
A Modern Christmas Story
* * *
The Clarion Chronicles
Ember of Dreams
Copyright © 2022 Steven Henry
Cover design © 2022 Ingrid Henry
Cover photo © 2022 under license from Shutterstock.com (Credit: Zwiebackesser/Shutterstock)
NYPD shield photo used under license from Shutterstock.com (Credit: Stephen Mulcahey/Shutterstock)
Author photo © 2017 Shelley Paulson Photography
Spine image used under license from Shutterstock.com (Credit: Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock)
All rights reserved
First publication: Clickworks Press, 2022
Release: CWP-EOR18-INT-E.ALL-1.2
Sign up for updates, deals, and exclusive sneak peeks at clickworkspress.com/join.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-943383-99-3
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-88900-000-6
Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-88900-001-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For the first responders, the ones who run toward the gunshots and into the fire.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Ready for more?
Sneak Peek: Italian Stallion
About the Author
Also by Steven Henry
More Great Titles from Clickworks Press
Angel Face
* * *
Combine 1 oz. No. 3 gin, 1 oz. applejack, and 1 oz. apricot liqueur with ice in a mixing glass. Stir until well chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel and serve.
Chapter 1
Even if you were wearing a bulletproof vest, getting shot hurt. The bullet’s energy, instead of traveling through your body, expended itself on the Kevlar weave of your body armor. The feeling was about the same as taking a full-force swing from a baseball bat. Paradoxically, wearing armor made you more likely to get knocked over, since the bullet wouldn’t keep going. You might crack ribs, and you’d have one hell of a bruise.
The pain from a Taser was worse, but also more temporary. It was a deep, intense burning sensation that radiated out from the electrodes. Your muscles locked up and you couldn’t move as long as the juice was flowing. But at least once it was over, you could get up and get on with your business. The only souvenirs you’d carry would be a couple of little punctures and contact burns that would itch as they healed.
Even taking a punch was no picnic, not if the guy hitting you knew how to do it. A professional boxer’s fist could shatter your jaw or knock you unconscious. Brain trauma could mess with just about everything upstairs, including motor functions, short-term and long-term memory, sensory input, and cognitive capacity. Concussions played hell with your faculties. You might get full use of your brain back, but you might not.
Erin O’Reilly had been punched in the head by a professional boxer. She’d also taken a Taser jolt, and had even been shot a couple of times. She liked to think she was tough, but she had no desire whatsoever to repeat any of those experiences. Still, given the choice, she might pick any of the three over the torture she was currently undergoing.
She tried not to squirm, not to give anything away. She was a trained police detective, experienced in interrogations. She looked down and to one side of the couch where she sat. Her partner Rolf sat bolt upright at her elbow, stern and serious. He returned her look and cocked his head questioningly. At a single word from her, he was ready to spring into action. He’d fight to the death to protect her. But he was no help here.
Erin sighed inwardly and forced herself to turn away from her K-9, back toward the matter at hand. If she could handle a high-speed car chase, an unexploded bomb, or an armed felon, she could deal with this.
“Now, here’s Erin on her first day back from the hospital,” Mary O’Reilly said, pointing to the photo album on the coffee table. “Look at that face. A perfect little angel. Isn’t she just adorable?”
“Aye, she’s a fine wee bairn,” Morton Carlyle agreed. He was sandwiched between Erin and her mom on his living-room couch, upstairs from his pub. On the table in front of him, Erin’s whole childhood was piled into three hefty albums. The three of them were currently looking at baby pictures.
“Her brother was so sweet,” Mary went on, flipping the page to show a very young Sean O’Reilly Junior holding baby Erin. “I swear, you could tell even at that age, Junior was going to be a doctor. I’m only surprised he didn’t go into obstetrics.”
Erin tried not to wince at the picture. In it, her face was scrunched up as if she was about to sneeze, scream, or possibly fill her diaper. Her eyes were squinting and her tiny mouth was open.
It wasn’t that the pictures were so bad, all things considered. No, Mary O’Reilly’s complete lack of subtlety was the really painful thing. Erin’s mother had come down to the city, ostensibly to visit her grandchildren, Sean Junior and Michelle’s two kids. But the O’Reilly matriarch had come to Manhattan armed with the albums, and Erin knew why.
Erin was thirty-six years old, never married, no kids. She’d been seeing Carlyle since New Year’s, over nine months now, and had been living with him for almost half that time. In Mary’s books, that meant it was time to start thinking marriage and children, the more and the sooner the better.
Accordingly, Erin’s mom was mounting a full-court press. She probably thought she was being delicate and polite. And Erin supposed, compared to Carlyle’s business associates, she was. But then, those associates were the O’Malley Irish Mob, a motley crew of murderous thugs, racketeers, and smugglers. Their idea of subtlety involved back alleys and tire irons. It was a low bar to clear.
The worst part of it was, Erin didn’t need to be convinced. She liked kids, adored her niece and nephew, and was completely on board with the idea of having her own one of these days. But not yet, and she couldn’t explain her hesitation to her mom. Mary O’Reilly thought Carlyle was an ordinary publican, a well-to-do gentleman who’d made his money as a successful small-business owner. But Carlyle had two secrets.
The first secret, widely known in the New York underworld, was that the Barley Corner, in addition to being a thriving watering hole for blue-collar Irishmen, was also a front for the O’Malleys, a money-laundering operation, and a haven for sports bookies. The second, known to fewer than ten people, was that Carlyle had turned informant and was compiling information to use against his boss Evan O’Malley. He’d made the choice out of love for Erin, desperation after a near-fatal shooting, and the long-shot hope of personal redemption.
Mary O’Reilly could probably forgive Carlyle his shady past. But she didn’t know how much danger he and Erin were currently in. Until they’d brought down the O’Malleys and could go for a drive without needing to check the underside of Carlyle’s Mercedes for car bombs, marriage and children were off the table. And they couldn’t tell her this, because Mary was a generous, loving, open-hearted woman who didn’t know how to keep her mouth shut.
So Erin was doomed to suffer through an interminable morning of thinly-veiled hints about the joys of motherhood, her mom thinking Erin was dragging her feet while her biological clock ticked down toward zero.
Erin glanced at the living-room clock and unclenched her jaw. She slipped her hand out of Carlyle’s and stood. Carlyle, ever the gentleman, also got to his feet.
“Sorry, Mom,” she lied, following it up with the truth. “I have an appointment. Work.”
“I thought you were off duty today,” Mary said.
“I am. But I need to be in court. There’s an arraignment, a Mafia guy, and I was one of the arresting officers.”
“Mattie Madonna’s lad?” Carlyle said. “Alfredo?”
“You know a Mafia goon?” Mary asked.
“I knew his father, some years back ,” Carlyle said smoothly. “I’d hardly call us friends, but we were acquainted with some of the same people. I’d heard the lad was in a wee bit of trouble.”
“Parole violation,” Erin said. “I promised his dad I’d look in on him, see what I could do for him. Sorry to run out on you like this.”
“And we haven’t even gotten to her grade-school pictures yet,” Mary said, pouting a little.
“I’m going nowhere, Mrs. O’Reilly,” Carlyle said. “I’d be happy to see more of what Erin was like as a wee lass.”
Erin shot him a grateful look and made for the exit. Rolf bounded alongside, tail wagging. The German Shepherd didn’t understand why humans made such a point of sitting indoors all the time when they could be running around outdoors. The world was full of bad guys to chase, smells to investigate, and rubber toys to chew on. It was time to get out there and patrol their territory.
“Sorry, kiddo,” she told him at the top of the stairs. “We can’t have you in the courtroom. The lawyers would call it intimidation. Bleib.”
Rolf froze, one paw raised. He couldn’t believe it. His partner was going on adventures and he couldn’t come. He gave it a moment, seeing if the instructions changed, but Erin turned away. Rolf was a good boy, so he stayed put, as instructed, but he gave her a reproachful stare as only a dog could. His intense brown eyes bored holes in Erin’s back as she fled down the stairs and out of the apartment.
Erin didn’t like going to court. As far as she was concerned, her role in the legal system was to collect evidence, arrest the perps, and hand them over to the District Attorney. After that, they became his problem. Erin distrusted lawyers, even prosecutors, and found courtroom proceedings incredibly boring. She also knew that sometimes guilty guys got off the hook, and there was nothing she could do about it, which was doubly infuriating. Being a detective had enough frustrations without that, so she steered clear of trials unless called on to testify.
But today was different. It wasn’t just an excuse to get away from her mother’s baby blitz. She’d made a promise to a dying man that she’d try to help his son. Matthew Madonna might have been a drug-dealing Mafioso, who’d gone down in a hail of bullets in a seedy bar. But Erin had held Mattie’s hand as he died. If they hadn’t been friends, they’d shared an enemy: Vincenzo Moreno, new don of the Lucarelli Family. Vinnie had been behind Madonna’s murder, along with several others, but Erin hadn’t been able to prove it. Vinnie’s nickname was “The Oil Man,” and he’d proved as slippery as ever. Vinnie had slithered out of trouble and Mattie’s son Alfie had ended up fatherless and incarcerated.
Erin parked her Charger in one of the police spaces at the courthouse. She went through the front doors and the security checkpoint, where she showed her gold shield and handed over both her sidearm and her backup ankle gun. It struck her as a little silly that she, a decorated NYPD detective, wasn’t allowed to bring a gun into court, but the men hired by the US Marshals to provide security were. She submitted as gracefully as she could. However, being unarmed left her very nervous these days, particularly without her dog.
The day’s proceedings were ludicrous. An arraignment wasn’t a trial. A jury wasn’t going to be there. All it consisted of was the formal reading of the charges against the defendant and that defendant entering his plea. The whole thing would only take a few minutes.
Alfredo Madonna should have been arraigned within twenty-four hours of being charged. That was the rules. However, in Madonna’s case, there’d been a delay. The kid had been hospitalized. It seemed Madonna had eaten something that had disagreed with him, badly enough that he’d needed to have his stomach pumped. Erin had been distracted at the time, dealing with a budding serial killer, and he hadn’t technically been her prisoner, so she’d only gotten the information at second hand, days later.
That was why Erin was here now. She wanted to see Alfredo Madonna, and hopefully find out what had happened to him. She suspected Vinnie’s hand, but then, she suspected Vinnie of everything connected with the Lucarellis. The bastard had somehow managed to have a man killed in the middle of Erin’s own beloved Eightball, right there in the holding cells. If he could do that, he could definitely have slipped Alfie something nasty to go with his supper. The only surprise was that the kid was still breathing.
Erin was gratified to see a grim-looking Deputy Marshal outside the courtroom, keeping an eye on the corridor. He gave her a cool once-over, examined her credentials, and stepped aside.
The courtroom was nearly empty. Arraignments were public, so in theory anybody could show up, but except in high-profile cases they were not well-attended functions. There’d be the judge, the court recorder, the prosecutor, the defendant, and the defendant’s legal team. Erin had arrived a little early, so the only people in the room yet were the bailiff and the prosecutor.
Erin eyed the young man at the front of the room. The DA’s guy was just a kid, probably some wet-behind-the-ears law-school graduate on his first case. It ought to be a slam-dunk. Alfie Madonna was on parole, prohibited from associating with known felons and from carrying firearms. He’d been found in the presence of several men with long criminal records, some of them freshly dead, in close proximity to a revolver, recently fired, covered with his fingerprints. Though Alfie’s dad had sworn to Erin in his dying declaration that he’d been the one to kill all the other men who’d died in that room, Alfie had still been charged with second-degree murder in addition to the weapons and parole violations. He was looking at a big pile of years.
Erin sat a few rows back and settled in as well as she could. She didn’t have to wait long; only a few minutes later, the doors swung open and Alfie Madonna walked in, flanked by his lawyer on one side and a square-jawed Deputy on the other. Erin recognized the lawyer; Kingston Schultz, an attorney of Jamaican extraction who’d been representing Alfie and his dad for years. The lawyer had his arm around his client, helping him down the aisle.
Alfie looked rough. He was pale and hollow-eyed, like a man who’d seen a ghost. But he walked with slow, deliberate purpose, hardly leaning on his lawyer. He looked straight ahead, not seeming to notice Erin. The expression on his young face was cold and determined.
Once the defendant and his lawyer were seated, the bailiff stepped to the door behind the lectern. A moment later, the judge emerged. He was a gray-haired man, magisterial in his black robe. The few people in the room got to their feet when he entered, then sat right back down again.
The judge droned out the necessary legal boilerplate. Before he’d finished his first sentence, Erin could already feel her eyes starting to glaze over. After he’d finished, the prosecutor got up and read the charges. Erin already knew what these were, so she let them slide past her ears. She was watching Alfie. The kid was obviously still very weak, but he was showing some grit, refusing to so much as slouch in his chair. Erin really wanted to go right up to him and start asking questions, but she didn’t want to get tackled by the bailiff, so she resisted the impulse.
“Mr. Madonna,” the judge said. “You’ve heard the state’s charges. How do you plead?”
“Your Honor,” Schultz said, speaking on Alfie’s behalf. “The defense moves that the charge of murder be dropped. The State’s case is weak, undermined by the confession of Matthew Madonna. The state has produced no conclusive evidence that my client fired any shots during the fracas at Lucia’s Bar.”
