Page 8 of The Irish Redemption

“Please! I haven’t done anything, I haven’t, I swear. I don’t know anything. Please let me go. Please, please, I’m sorry!”

When her eyes drop to the handgun resting against my thigh, she screams louder and then trails off into a sob. Whoever she is, the police think she’s important, which means I have to find out if that’s true. If she has worth, she will live. If she doesn’t, then I will kill her and move on to the next stone. And the next, and the next, until mybrother’s killer is in front me begging for their life as desperately as she is.

“Your name is Evelyn Morris,” I say. “Twenty-four. Lives alone in a dogshit apartment not fit for a squirrel. Your mother, Amy, has lived alone since the death of your father eight years ago. You’ve spent the past two years cleaning up grime for the Sunset Motel. You’re single, no pets, and you eat at the same Vietnamese restaurant every Friday.”

I recite what we’ve learned in the time she’s been unconscious, and with each word, Evelyn grows quieter. A different kind of fear overtakes her, and I see it in her eyes. The moment she switches from blind fear to cold terror is like a switch flicking in her mind, and her wails fall silent.

“How do you know all that?” Evelyn gasps, wetting her lips with her tongue as tears pour down her cheeks. “What are you, cops? Is this a s–scare tactic or something?”

“I’m not a cop.” I stand slowly, and Evelyn’s eyes snap to the gun in my hand. “I’m letting you know that I know everything about you so that you will think very carefully about how you answer my next question.”

Swiftly approaching her, I wind one hand into her dark hair and jerk her head back. With the other, the gun rests lightly against her collar bone, and Evelyn whimpers in terror while more tears spill past her dark lashes.

“I d–don’t know anything,” she whimpers, trembling like a fragile leaf in my hands. “Please, I know nothing. I’m a nobody, I’m no one! I’m not important!”

“Nine hours ago, you found a body in that shitty motel you work at. I need to know what you saw.”

“What? Th—The body?” Her trembling makes her words jerky, and her mouth struggles to obey her desire to talk.

I tighten my grip, drawing more of her hair into my first and forcing her head back further until a whimper of pain claws its way out her throat.

“I won’t ask again. Tell me about the body.”

“The body? The body… I don’t know, okay! It was a body. He was just dead in the bathtub and—and there was blood everywhere and his throat was slit open, and that’s it, okay? That’s it, I swear, there’s nothing else. It wasn’t me. I just found him!”

His throat was slit.

I release her and turn away, barely hearing her terrified sobs as her description snakes through my mind like poison. He was murdered and dumped in the tub like he was trash. The coils of wire around my heart tighten, and for a split second, nothing exists inside me but pain. I want to scream and roar. I want to pound my fists into something until all of my anger has faded and there’s nothing left but a hollow emptiness.

I can’t.

But fuck, I want to.

“His throat was slit?”

“Yes!” Evelyn wails. “Wide open, and it was horrible, and that’s all I saw, okay? I ran out and called the cops right after!”

“What was he doing there?”

“Huh?”

I grab her neck, forcing her to look me in the eye, and she sobs openly. The anger blinds me so I don’t care how tightly I grip her or how I’ve pulled her up so that both she and the chair teeter on one leg.

“I said, what the fuck was he doing there?”

“I don’t know,” she sobs. “I n–never saw him, I never spoke to him. M–My boss leases rooms all the time with no names, no nothing. I don’t know him and I don’t know why he was there, okay? I don’t know anything, please! Please don’t kill me, please, I don’t want to die!”

When I release her, she collapses back into the chair, and it rocks back once but doesn’t tip over. She really appears to know nothing, nothing helpful, at least. Since she discovered the body, it explains why the cops were so interested in her. She’s just a witness, not a suspect.

She’s no use to me.

I pull back the safety on the gun, and Evelyn wails, but just as I lift it, the door opens and warm light pours in from the hallway.

“Cormac.” My sister, Saoirse, stands there with her phone in hand, leaning against the door handle.

“Please,” Evelyn begs weakly as I step away. “I have money. You can have all my money. You can have my car, my apartment, everything, please! Just take it. I don’t want to die, please.”

Ignoring her, I approach my sister who regards Evelyn with a curl of distaste. Once I’m close enough, her dark brows pinch over her green eyes. “Detective Gogs isn’t one of ours.”

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