Bitter Burn novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Order
Declan hands Siobhan a gun and a Sunday deadline for her husband, and at home Finbar's phone lights with a message from someone called S.
My father slid the photographs across his desk one at a time.
The first showed my husband at a diner in Fells Point.
He sat in a corner booth with a woman I had never seen.
She had a black bob and a grey blazer, and her hand rested flat on the table beside his.
"Look at the next one, Siobhan," Declan said.
The second showed Finbar passing her something small across the Formica.
The third showed three sheets of paper, each stamped with a federal subpoena number.
I knew the columns on those sheets.
I had watched Finbar build them at our kitchen table, with his glasses pushed up into his hair.
"Those are our pages," my father said.
"A friend at the courthouse sent them over this morning."
"They match the ones in Finbar's study, down to the typos he makes on purpose."
I kept my face still, the way he had taught me at twelve.
The study smelled like pipe smoke and the harbor.
Rain ran down the window behind him, and somewhere below us a crew was loading a truck.
"It could be a mistake," I said.
"It could be a woman he went to school with."
My father smiled at me, and that was worse than if he had shouted.
"You married him in August last year," he said.
"I walked you down the aisle myself."
"You think I take this lightly?"
He opened the bottom drawer and set a revolver on the blotter.
It was the old .38 he had carried when I was small.
I used to be allowed to hold it on Sundays.
"You'll do it," he said.
"Sunday night, midnight, Pier Nine."
"A man who sells the family out doesn't get a lawyer, and he doesn't get a priest."
"He gets his daughter, because that's the only kindness I have left."
My mouth had gone dry.
"And if I won't?"
"Then Tyson does it, and you stand on the dock and watch."
He said it gently.
"Dad."
"He's family, Siobhan, and that's why it has to be you."
"If it's a stranger, the crews think I'm soft."
"If it's family, they think I'm a father who finishes what he starts."
I looked at the gun.
My whole life I had known what that desk was for.
I had never once thought it would be used on my husband.
I ironed his shirts on Sundays, badly, because he liked to watch me fail at it.
I picked the revolver up.
It was heavier than I remembered.
"Yes, Dad," I said.
He kissed my forehead and told me to eat something.
I drove home with the gun in my bag on the passenger seat.
At the light on Key Highway, a tug sounded on the water, long and low.
I thought about the first night I had ever tied Finbar's wrists.
He had asked me to be sure, and then he had asked me to be certain.
Then he had looked up and said, "I trust you more than anyone alive."
I did not cry on the way home.
I made one decision, and I made it before the light changed.
I would not kill him.
I did not yet know what I would do instead.
The house on Lanvale Street was dark except for one lamp in the front hall.
It was Friday.
On Fridays I came home to the same sight, and I had agreed to it a long time ago on paper.
Finbar knelt on the rug just inside the door, in the black leather collar.
His glasses were folded on the hall table.
His hands rested on his thighs, palms up.
He wore the grey trousers he had worn to work, and nothing else.
He lowered his eyes when he heard me, because that was our arrangement.
Seeing him there, I felt something in my chest give way.
"Hello, Siobhan," he said.
"Hello, Finbar."
I set my bag on the table, with the weight of the gun still in it.
His phone lay beside his glasses, face up.
The screen lit as I put my keys down.
One message, from a contact saved only as S.
"Booth tomorrow, same time. Bring the rest of the pages."
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