Page 50 of The Dangerous Dance

"Thank you," I say.

I go down the stairs and out into the three-in-the-morning street and walk to where I parked, and the city is suspended around me in the specific pause of its deepest hour, and I think about what it means to deal with Declan finally and in a way that ends the question.

I think about it the whole drive home.

I don't arrive at anything clean.

But I arrive at what I'm going to do, which is sometimes all you get, and which will have to be enough.

CHAPTER 18

Liam

Ailish comes to me, for once.

She lets herself into the compound at nine in the morning without calling ahead, which is her right — she has always had her right to walk into this house, which I gave her years ago and have never had reason to revisit — and she finds me in the study with the Maspeth reports and a coffee that has been cooling for longer than coffee should be allowed to cool, and she sits in the chair across from my desk with the air of someone who has been deciding what to say for several hours and has arrived at a version she can commit to.

"Tell me how bad it was," she says.

I tell her.

She listens the way she always listens — entirely, without interrupting, without performing reaction. She has a quality of attention that I've relied on for so long it's become structural, part of how I think things through. When I finish she is quiet for a moment, and then she says: "Connolly."

"Possibly." I turn the Maspeth report. "I'm having it looked into."

"By whom."

I look at her.

She holds my gaze. "By whom, Liam."

"By someone with the relevant expertise."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I have right now."

She looks at the desk between us with the specific expression she uses when she's deciding whether to push or to accept what she's been given and return to it later. She accepts it. Not because she's satisfied but because she knows me well enough to know when pushing will produce less information rather than more, and she calculates that this is one of those moments.

"Declan," she says.

"Yes."

"You're going to confront him."

"I'm going to end it," I say. "One way or the other. I should have done it weeks ago. I kept — managing around it, trying to find the approach that didn't require forcing a conclusion, and in the meantime three of my men are down and someone has been leaking routes and Connolly is still in his ear." I set the report down. "It ends."

"How."

"Old way," I say.

She is quiet for a moment. "A fight."

"A fight. One on one. No weapons. Winner is the head of the Irish and the loser accepts it." I meet her eyes. "It's how our father settled it. It's the language Declan understands and I need him to understand the outcome."

"You could get hurt."

"I could." I look at the report. "He could too. Neither of us will do permanent damage. We know each other too well."