Tim McGregor - Killing Down the Roman Line

Miro barked something he didn’t understand and ran to chasten two boys back under the yellow tape.

“Look.” Puddycombe pointed at two crewmen stalking towards the door. Oxygen tanks and axes in hand. “They’re going in.”

The firefighters disappeared into the smoke. Everyone around Jim held their breath and then two more crewmen followed the first two inside. Someone behind Jim incanted a prayer. Nothing happened. No heroes rushing back out with a survivor draped over their shoulder. Just the pop and snap of burning wood.

Puddycombe gripped Jim’s arm, pointed again. The firemen waded out through the smoke with a stretcher in hand. Cheers and applause went up from the crowd until the firefighters turned and everyone saw the gurney. Whatever lay on it didn’t look human. A smoking lump under black canvass. The cheering choked and died.

The woman praying behind Jim turned away. Others drifted off, not wanting to see anymore.

“My God,” said Puddy. The question hanging over the crowd. “Who is that?”

Jim elbowed through the gawkers, lifting the caution tape overhead. Miro stopped him cold. “Stay back, Jim. Please.”

“Who is that?”

“We don’t know! Let the crew do their job.”

Jim swept past Miro and ran for the gurney. The crowd pressed in after him, sensing a breech in the line, sweeping Miro along its current.

Puddycombe slipped through the chaos, scrambling to find Jim. Jim stood fixed, looking down at the stretcher. Wisps of smoke roiled up from the folds of the shroud.

A firefighter knelt over the body. His mask and helmet peeled off, hair plastered up in sweat. He clocked the two gaping onlookers and barked at them to go back.

Jim stammered, spitting it out. “Who is it?”

The crewman said he didn’t know and ordered them back behind the line. Puddy barked something and Jim dove for the stretcher, throwing the sheet back. Smoke uncoiled and stung his eyes. He waved it away.

The body was carbonized, blackened to an obscene husk. The hands were charred claws, locked and soldered into place like petrified wood. The hair cindered, leaving a blackened egg of a skull. The left half of the face was sooty but unmarked, enough to recognize the features.

Jim bent and vomited over the pavement. Coughing and spitting but unable to shed the taste of burnt flesh from his tongue.

“Oh Christ, is that…”

Jim wiped his mouth. “It’s her.”

What was left of Kate Farrell lay rigid in the smoke, the eyes cooked white in their sockets.

Constable Ray Bauer folded his arms and told Jim to slow down. “Take your time,” he said in a soft tone. “Just get it out.”

Ray had arrived ten minutes after the ambulance pulled in. Helping poor old Miro crowd control until Jimmy Hawkshaw yanked him aside and blathered all over him. Incoherent and frantic, pointing to the body bag being lifted into the back of the ambulance. Ray put a hand on Jim’s shoulder and told him to catch his breath. Take it slow.

“It’s Kate,” Jim wheezed. “She was alone in the building.”

The fire was out. The firemen leaned against the pumper truck with bottles of water in hand. Guzzling it back to clear their sooty throats or dribbling it over their heads.

“Okay Jim,” Constable Bauer said. “The medical examiner will confirm all that. Can you two wait somewhere? I’ll need statements from both of you but right now I need to clear everyone out.”

Jim glared at him, fed up with the constable’s cool detachment. “You know who did this, don’t you?”

“Put it in your statement, Jim.” Bauer motioned for them to back away. “Give us some room, huh? There’s nothing for you to do here.”

Puddycombe tugged Jim’s arm but Jim stalled. Reluctant to go but unsure of what to do. Constable Bauer pulled rank, hooking his thumbs into his belt and stared at Puddy with a cop’s practiced air of impatience. “Go home,” he said.

Puddy pulled him away and they elbowed through the crowd. Cars abandoned in the street, parked crazily as their owners had rushed in to see what was going on. Galway Road looked like a disaster zone, news footage of some war ravaged city.

“You meant Corrigan, didn’t you?” Puddy pulled him to a stop. “How do you know it was him?”

“Who else would it be?”

“It was a fire.” Puddycombe shrugged. “It could have been an accident.”

“No.” Jim shook his head. “Corrigan figured it out. He went to Kate for the list of names.”

“Names?”

He told the pub owner about the confessions unearthed from the archives. He tallied up the sequence of events after that. Corrigan had tried to euchre him out of the deal, going after the evidence himself. Kate refusing to give it up. The fire was no accident, no stray match.

Puddycombe’s face went slack as the story unfolded, too numb to speak when it was all told. When he finally did, his voice was hushed. A whisper in church. “The names. The ones on these confessions. Was there—”

Jim nodded. “Michael Patrick Puddycombe.”

Puddy looked like he’d been slapped. “Christ Almighty.”

The ambulance blurted, clearing a path through the street. They watched it trundle away. Jim rubbed the sting from his eyes. “Where are you meeting Berryhill?”

“At the pub. Why?”

“Get him and Hitchens and anyone else willing.” Jim marched for his truck, patting his pockets for keys. “You meet me at the old schoolhouse on the Roman Line. You know the one?”

“I know it.”

“And bring a baseball bat.”

Puddycombe stammered. “Why the old schoolhouse?”

“It’s got a clear view of the Corrigan house. We meet there, form a plan.”

“Wait a minute. That old schoolhouse, that’s where they met before. Back then.”

“I know.”

A cell phone buzzed. Jim’s. He dug it out of his pocket and nodded to Puddy. “Half an hour.” He put the phone to his ear, watching Puddycombe make for the pub. “Hello?”

“Dad?”

The boy’s voice startled him. Travis had never called him on the phone before. Ever. “Travis.” He didn’t know what to say after that. Not after what had happened. “You okay?”

“Come home.”

Quiet and low. There was something wrong in the boy’s voice. Jim jammed the phone harder into his ear. “What is it? Travis, what’s wrong?”

“It’s mom. Just come home.”

The chains tinkled, a metal chink ringing in the dark. The tail end knocking off each wooden step. Corrigan dragged the contraption in one hand, a sledgehammer clutched in the other. The ground was still soft from the rain and the spike might not hold but there was nothing to do about it now. Counting his paces in the dark, he hummed a tune, trying to remember all the words. How did the song start?

McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed

There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head

Dropping the tools into the grass, he pulled the flashlight from his back pocket. Chased the spotlight over the grass and back to the house, eyeballing the distance. Good enough.

There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands

You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign lands

He lost the rest of the song, the lyrics too fast to remember so he hummed it out. The iron spike was heavy, over a foot long. He slotted the point through the loop of the chain’s anchor and stabbed it into the ground.

The hammer swung clean, clanging the spike with a sharp ring. The spike drove in, fixing the chain to the earth. He adjusted the base, using a screwdriver to torque the spring load. A handful of wet leaves sprinkled overtop and he was done. Still humming the tune, coming to the slow part where he knew the words.