“You’re lying. You knew it was just storerooms above that shop. What was it for? Tell her what she died for.”
McGinty’s shadow struggled with a writhing shape. Ellen jerked in his arms, still trying to break free.
“Tell that woman and her baby what she died for, Paul. She deserves to know.”
“There’s nobody there, Gerry. Don’t you understand that? She’s in your head.”
“Tell her, Paul.”
McGinty’s sigh slithered down the walls of the stairwell. “To make my mark.”
Fegan brought his right hand to his left shoulder, feeling the heat there. Blood trickled down to his fingertips. “Make your mark.”
“Yes. To make the leadership notice me. I’d been on the sidelines too long - I needed something big to get the headlines they wanted.”
“You had me plant that bomb, kill those people, for headlines? To make a name for yourself?”
“I had to, Gerry. And it worked. I saw the way things were going, even then. The politics, the elections. I had to get a leg up then, or I never would. I’d just be another foot soldier like you or Eddie Coyle.”
Fegan looked to the woman and her baby. And the butcher with his round, red face. “To make a name for yourself. They died to make your name.”
“But I did good, Gerry. Think about it. I helped build the peace. I kept the boys on the streets in line. Me, Gerry. It would’ve fallen apart if it wasn’t for me. But you’ve risked it all. Do you hear me? All those lives for nothing, all that labor, the heartbreak, the years - you might have wasted them all. And what for? For some figments of your imagination?”
McGinty’s voice had taken on that familiar color: the politician’s sheen, the twisted rhetoric.
Fegan rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, the Walther still in his grip. “What was her life worth?”
“Enough, Gerry.”
“And her baby’s?”
“Come on, you know the—”
“And the butcher. What was his life worth? Or any of them? What were they worth to you, Paul?”
“It was you, Gerry. You killed them. Nobody else.”
Fegan brought his bloodied hands to his temples, the Walther cold against his scalp. “I know.”
McGinty’s voice hardened. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it. Don’t tell me you didn’t love the power of it.”
“Shut up.”
“All that respect you got. Everywhere you went, people looked up to you. The great Gerry Fegan. And you pissed it all away. What are you now, eh?”
“Shut up.”
McGinty laughed. “You’re just a drunk who’s gone soft in the head. So you turn against your own just so you can make yourself feel like a big man again. Is that it, Gerry? Is that what this is about? You’re just a lonely, drunk has-been who’s nothing without a gun and someone to point it at.”
Fegan screwed his eyes closed. “Shut your mouth!”
“And what about when it’s over, eh? What then? What’ll you be, Gerry?”
Fegan dropped low and ducked his head out into the hallway, the Walther aimed upwards. McGinty’s revolver flashed and a bullet threw splinters and plaster dust into Fegan’s face. He fell back into the room, coughing as dust hitched in his throat. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes.
One left.
He looked up to see the woman and her baby, the butcher at their side. The infant squirmed as the woman and the butcher pointed up at McGinty. Fegan watched the shadow move along the wall as the politician paced. Ellen whimpered and moaned, seemingly too exhausted to wail as she had before.
“You didn’t answer the question, Gerry.”
Fegan got to his feet, wincing at the throbbing from his left shoulder. His arm grew heavier by the moment and his legs quivered as fatigue dissolved his strength. He had to end it soon.
“You’ve only one bullet left,” he said.
“One’s enough,” McGinty said.
“Not if it doesn’t put me down.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for her.”
Fegan looked to the shadow. The shape was becoming clearer, harder in the growing light. He could make out McGinty’s form, crouched, Ellen held close. Where was the gun?
He looked to the woman. “Jesus, where’s the gun?”
She had no answer; she just kept her fingers trained on McGinty. The politician’s shadow shifted on the wall.
“Come and see, Gerry.”
58
