When I was happy that no one had stirred from slumber, I used the screwdriver to lever the door out of the frame, and the entire thing came loose in my hands. After jiggling the door lock free of its retainer, I carried the door out of the way and set it down. The screwdriver went in my opposite pocket, and I took out my gun, plus a Gerber knife.
The penthouse was huge, taking up most of the upper floor, but it had been separated into a number of rooms and I found myself in a utility passage. Cleaning supplies dominated one room, a laundry another. I doubted O’Neill was familiar with either space, and suspected that his live-in home helps handled all the domestic chores around the place. I moved past them and found another door. Gently I tried the handle and this one gave in my grasp. I teased open the door. All was in darkness, but at the far end of the hall shone a dim night-light, which offered enough illumination to guide me. I could smell a hodgepodge of odors, cooking smells, cigar smoke, alcohol, and men’s farts. I had expected to find the penthouse plush, but it was more akin to a crack house I supposed that money didn’t necessarily make you house-proud. I moved into the main living area. Expensive furniture was half buried beneath discarded clothing, food wrappers, newspapers, and beer bottles and cans. O’Neill and his crew looked to have been celebrating and I could only assume that it was because the threat of Candice Berry had been removed.
I turned from the room, seeking O’Neill’s bedroom.
That was when a door burst open behind me and a huge man leaned out, wrapped his arms around me and lifted me up in the air. The giant shook me like a rag doll, while someone else grabbed my gun hand and ripped loose my SIG. Before I could think of using the Gerber on them, my own gun was shoved in my face. “Drop it, asshole!”
I dropped the knife, and the monster holding me slung me down on the floor. My head ringing, I blinked up as a light came on and stark beams filled the place. Standing over me was a trio of men I recognized as O’Neill’s buddies from the day William Murray went off the roof. Thankfully, the women weren’t around. Which went to prove that I’d walked into a trap.
Another man came out of a bedroom farther down the corridor. He was fully dressed — albeit casually — in loafers, blue jeans, and a pale green shirt. His silver mane of hair, long at the back and curled at the temples, gave him a wannabe Richard Branson look. He stood gloating as he tapped the screen of his iPhone.
“When I got word of Marvin Whalen’s untimely death, was it any wonder I’d prepare for a visitor of my own?” asked Mick O’Neill. He was in his late fifties, had been in America for the best part of twenty years now, but he still retained a Dublin accent. There was some suggestion he had been a real IRA hitter in the old days.
My mouth tasted of blood. I’d bitten my tongue when O’Neill’s pet gorilla had thrown me to the floor. I swallowed before answering. “You were expecting me?”
“I was. You could have come earlier and saved me the long feckin’ wait.”
“Sorry to inconvenience you,” I said.
“Sarcastic bastard,” O’Neill said. He flicked his hand at the big man. “Get him up off the floor.”
The big man hauled me up and fed his arms through my elbows, yanking both arms up my back. The other two men pointed my weapons at me.
“What you going to do?” I asked O’Neill. “Hand me over to the police? Or will you make me take a dive off the roof the way you did William Murray?”
“You won’t go the same way as that little tow rag. You’re going out the same way as you came in. Shame, eh?” He grinned at his men. “Some burglar tries to rob my apartment, only to slip and fall to his death when cutting his way in through the window? Take this prick back down the way he just came, boys.”
I was bundled back past the utility rooms and to the door I’d lifted out of its hinges.
“Remind me to have something a bit more sturdy fitted, will you, lads? I can’t be having every Tom, Dick, and Harry swanning in and out of here whenever they like,” said O’Neill.
The four of them hemmed me into the space at the bottom of the stairwell, the big man still holding me tightly. O’Neill studied where I’d cut the glass from the window. He indicated the bulges in my pockets. “Take out his glass cutter,” he told one of the men. To the other, he said, “Go fix the door. It can’t be seen that he actually made it further inside than here.”
While one of the men went to see to resetting the hinges, O’Neill called after him, “Make sure you leave the door open for us to get back in. Everything will go to shit if we get trapped out here.”
Then O’Neill was back in my face.
“The feck’s any of this got to do with you, anyway?”
“William Murray was a friend of mine,” I said.
“He was a two-bit little thief, and he was skimming money off my profits,” O’Neill said.
“Is that it, the reason you had him thrown from your roof? He stole from you?”
“I had to make a statement to all the other little skanks who run the streets for me,” O’Neill said. “That little punk, Murray, actually came to me on bended knees, tried to reason with me. He said he was in a relationship now, he’d got hisself a girlfriend, and the extra money he skimmed was to help feed her bastard brats. The feckin’ nerve of it! He stole from me to feed a whore’s offspring? What does he think I am, the feckin’ Red Cross?”
After pulling out my glass cutter, the thug handed it to O’Neill. O’Neill took it from him, wiped it down with the tails of his shirt, then approached the window. “Have to make this look real if I’m going to fool the cops a second time,” he crowed as he pulled open the window. He leaned out, allowed the glass cutter and circle of glass to drop. A few seconds later I heard the tinkle as both hit ground. “Hell, that’s a long fall.” O’Neill grinned. “Not as far as Murray fell, but still far enough.”
“You’d made an example of Murray,” I said, “thrown him off the roof, but why kill Candice Berry?”
“I didn’t. Marvin Whalen sorted that out for me, as you already know.”
“You’re splitting hairs, O’Neill. It was your order that murdered the woman.”
“Aye, it was at that,” he said. “When we chucked her boyfriend off the roof we didn’t know he’d brought her along with him. She was down there,” he pointed toward the plaza, “waiting for him. Fair enough, she didn’t speak to anyone about what happened. She knew better. But it wasn’t a risk I was about to take. I’m careful like that. Same as when some of my boys end up murdered by some fucked-up vigilante. I take precautions. Got you dead to rights, my lad.”
“You got me,” I said, and I offered him a smile.
“What you looking so feckin’ pleased about? Another few seconds and you’re going to learn what those other two did: you don’t fuck with Mick O’Neill.”
“You got me,” I repeated. “But I’ve also got you, you murdering piece of shit.”
O’Neill was slow to catch on.
“Did you get everything you needed, Detective?” I said, for effect leaning down so I could speak closer to the hidden microphone taped to my chest. In my ear Bryony VanMeter said, “Enough to put him away for life, Joe.”
Along the hall there was the repeated boom of a ram smashing into a door as the police arrest squad began breaking their way into the fallow space.
“What the hell?” O’Neill shouted angrily. “You’re wired?”
“Yes,” I said, “and the Tampa PD just recorded your full confession.”
“Son of a…” O’Neill shook his head in despair. Then his features grew hard again. To his two pals he said, “Throw this fecker out of that window. We might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”
I didn’t bother begging for my life, or try to tell him that it was over, that he was caught. It wasn’t my style. I leaned down, said into the microphone, “Best get in here fast, O’Neill’s so distraught I’m not sure he’s going to hang around to be arrested.”