16. Dairo
Chapter sixteen
Dairo
Eoghan
“ F lying commercial, are we, Dairo?” I greeted across the terminal when my cousin finally made his appearance. “How far you’ve fallen, boyo .”
He stopped in front of me, his duffel bag over his shoulder. He eyed me up and down, with a stern face that matched my own. It was like looking in a fucking mirror. The only difference was that instead of deep, dark black eyes, Dairo had baby blues - in that way we were opposites.
That, and our overall personality.
I was far more charming.
He dumped his bag on the ground with a loud thud, as the crowd around us gave us a wide berth.
Even if they didn’t know why, most people had the animalistic instinct to understand that the two of us radiated danger. We were a live wire, that no one wanted to be anywhere near.
Dairo’s stern scowl suddenly turned into a smile, as he pulled me in for a loud, clapped embrace.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said in that crisp, annoying British accent. “You’ve been in America for almost thirty years and you still insist on that lilting little Leprechaun accent.”
“And I’m damn proud of it.” I purposely made my voice thicker, for his benefit. “The ladies like it more than yours.”
I pretend to sip invisible tea with a snobby frown, making fun of the British. Then I made a gagging sound, as Dairo rolled his eyes.
“Come here, you eejit, ” he said, as he clapped me in another embrace.
We probably held on longer than needed. But it was good to have him on American soil. To have him on the same continent! He was a prodigal son coming home.
“I need a drink. They had nothing but cheap, tiny wine on the damn flight.” He shuddered in disgust.
“The driver’s waiting outside,” I said with a laugh. Of course, I had brought a driver. I never drove drunk, and we were about to get right bluthered like a couple of college boys.
I didn’t have to tell him where we were going. There was only one choice - Four Green Fields Bar. The same hole in the wall that we had gone to a dozen times in our youth, throwing around our weight as Green heirs to drink under twenty one.
Tommy Makem played on the overhead speakers, crooning about a foggy dew.
“Martini,” Dairo ordered, with a quick raise of his hand.
“Absinthe,” I said to the bartender.
The skinny, tattooed fella went back to the bar, pulling what we wanted from the top shelf - because of course he’d give us the top shelf stuff, even though we knew that we weren’t paying.
“So, what’s the craic , Dairo?” I asked, finally, pulling a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, and tapping the top of it against my newly-wounded palm. The sting of the carton against the cut sent a warmth through me, the pain of it giving me the slightest sense of strange catharsis.
“This is a non-smoking establishment,” Dairo smirked.
I rolled my eyes, as I pulled a Dunhill cigarette out, and placed it between my lips. Rowan came with an ashtray, placing it on the table in front of me without a word. I raised a brow at Dairo, who then rolled his eyes, as I lit my cigarette.
“You want one?” I asked, offering him the pack. He shook his head. “So what brings you back home, Dairo?”
He smirked, shrugging his shoulders.
“Can’t a cousin come for a visit?” Dairo leaned forward, resting his elbow on the table.
“When the cousin is you, no.” I chuckled, blowing smoke right in his face as he tried to wave it away.
He had been named after my father, Alastair. Born a year ahead of me, my uncle decided to name him for a beloved brother that could not have an heir.
For a year, the princely crown of Green Fields Enterprises was placed on his head… until I was born.
It was uncanny how we were practically twins, apart from the color of our eyes.
Maybe the color was why we saw the world through different lenses. To him, the world was a kind, and good place, ready to be ruled by men of strength and cunning.
To me, it was a dark world where tragedy lurked around the corner.
Tragedy was a simple fact of life, like death and taxes.
As much as my father wanted to pit me against Dairo, believing that competition bred strength, it never happened.
We were the oldest and best of friends. If my father offered him all the world’s riches, and every bit of power in existence in exchange for him putting a bullet in my head… he’d turn the gun on my father. I knew that. I knew that if the world came for us, we’d stand back to back against the demons that nipped at our heels.
“Are you coming back to Green Field’s Enterprises?” I asked, leaning forward, pursing my lips to the side.
He had recently left the British Army - the bunch of traitorous bastards - and maybe he was making his way back home.
He lowered his head and chuckled, before his crystal blue eyes looked back at me. “I’ve taken a job at a security company. I’ll be a part owner, with a man I served in the SAS with.”
“Oh?” I asked, taking a pull of my cigarette and narrowing my eyes.
He needed to come home, and take his place by my side. One day, he would take his rightful place at my right hand. I’d wait, if I had to. But this detour into security? It was absolute bollocks.
“I get twenty-five percent shares in a company with my mate, Callum MacLachlan.”
“Is that so?” I leaned back in my seat, and observed my older cousin with a critical eye. “What's the company name?”
Dairo groaned, placing his head in his hand. Then he looked at me with his baby-blues, as if he really did not want to share this information.
“What? How bad could it be?” I leaned forward, feeling the effect of the drink on my body, as I swayed on my elbow. “Bollocks Bodyguards? Fuck the Fenian Security?”
Dairo tapped his finger on the table, shutting his eyes and taking a deep breath. “Caledonia Security.”
I scoffed. “Really? You’re going with the Scots now?”
He rolled his eyes and leaned back on the fake leather back of the booth, as he rubbed his fingers against this forehead. “I knew you’d make a thing of it.”
I threw up my hands and laughed.
“I’m just saying, you’re not Scottish, not as far as I’ve ever seen–”
Like brothers, we spoke over each other with complete reckless abandon.
“Look, I have no wish to get back into the life of crime–”
“Green Fields Enterprises is a legitimate enterprise. We’re legal. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it!” It was all bloody true, too. I had signed up for the LLC myself. We had a Tax ID, and lawyers. We were incorporated.
We offered construction equipment and solutions throughout the tri-state area, and sometimes as far north as Vermont.
The money was clean. Well, at least most of it was….
Okay, some of it.
“It will be,” Dairo said, leaning forward. His blue eyes bored into me. “It will be a legitimate organization, one day.”
He wiped his face, leaning back into his seat. I let his words sink in. He knew more than anyone what it was that I wanted for myself, for my children. For the family I had yet to have.
“I have absolute faith in that, cousin. I do. You will bring our family from the shadows and into the light but…”
“We are in the light,” I insisted, slamming my hand down. “Four Green Fields does nothing against the law.”
At least nothing we could be prosecuted for, so it was legal. We hadn’t done anything illegal in years.
Sure, I was raising an army to wipe out Eugenio Durante and his cronies. I was ready to fight a war with the Bratva. But until that first bullet was fired, every person was hired with a W-2, as a security guard. The weapons were legally obtained, and the permits were cleared.
“Really? Nothing against the law?” Dairo raised one quizzical brow. “You think that this… thing… with the Durante’s is completely legal? Using due process and all that?”
I clamped my mouth shut.
I had forgotten about the bodies I dumped in the Hudson. When you killed as many people as I had, they tended to blend into one forgettable mass.
“I just find it curious that an Irishman–”
“ Half Irish,” Dairo corrected. “My mum’s British.”
“... Would decide to place his name with a Scottish company. Do you forget that they lost their war?” I pounded my chest, where I knew my heart beat Emerald Isle green. “We won ours.”
“For fuck’s sake.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “This is ancient history –”
“The Good Friday Agreement was in 1998, lad, not 1798.”
“– why must everything be politics with you?”
“Because they’re still occupying Ireland! They’re still in Derry, man!”
Dairo started to laugh, his chest bubbling with his oh-so-British humor. You’d never know he was only half British on his mother’s side. His father had been my uncle, by blood. Uncle Cormac Green was a proud member of Green Fields Enterprises, and a member of the bloody IRA. Here was Dairo, turning his back on the whole thing.
“My point is, that you can tell my Uncle Alastair that I will not be coming back.” I felt his words like a fucking bucket of ice cold water. “I have found employment elsewhere.”
“Well, then…” I reached out to take the glass of absinthe in my hand. “That required a visit, did it?”
Dairo narrowed his eyes at me, then looked at the bar around us. An Irish pub, in the middle of Irish territory.
“Well, in truth, I came to see an Underground match, held over in the Russian territory, but…” He let out a long-suffering sigh. The man was a bloody martyr. “I also wanted to check on you.”
He swirled the martini in his hand, and looked at the liquid.
“Is everything okay with you, cousin?” he finally asked. He stared right at me with those unnerving arctic eyes, and I wondered what he was getting at. “I felt the need to… visit.”
Ah, so it was that strange intuition we had. That funny little feeling, like we were twins, tugged to one another. He could feel me, and I could feel him.
It wasn’t a perfect science, of course. But it was real.
The day he was blown in by a roadside, I had woken up screaming at the exact moment of the explosion, feeling a sharp heat on my side. The day I was stabbed in the hip by an Italian guard, he had called me, saying that a sharp pain in his stomach made him puke out his dinner.
I wondered what magic my mother had woven over our crib when we were babies, to link us in this way. Had she sprinkled us with wishes, asking us to be brothers?
“Is Uncle Alastair’s madness getting worse?”
I nodded, as I finished the cigarette, down to the stub. I crushed it in the glass ashtray, and pulled another one out of the pack.
“Aye, it is,” I admitted, as I let out the smoke.
He bit his lower lip, looking to the side. There was a woman at the counter in short shorts. Her lower ass creases were plump, appealing, and hanging out from beneath the roughly cut denim.
“I don’t think that’s what led me home,” he said, tapping a finger on the table. “What else is going on with you, Eoghan?”
I went into the pack of cigarettes, and pulled out another stick. I placed it in my teeth, lighting it with the zippo with a green clover etched on the side, and took a deep inhale.
“I… met someone.”
“You meet a lot of people,” he said with that dry British wit of his. It was the least likable of all his traits.
“Her name is Kira, and…”
“She’s Irish?”
“No, she’s not…”
“That’s a problem.”
“I know, but I don’t...”
“Alastair will never allow it.”
“For fuck’s sake man,” I said, slamming my hand on the table to stop his interruptions. “You don’t understand. She’s… she’s…”
He took his martini in hand and downed it in one long gulp.
I let out a long sigh. He knew as well as I did that for all my begging for Kira to marry me, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. And maybe that’s why I wanted her so badly.
I was expected to marry a nice Irish girl. Preferably one from the long list of Irish families that had been a part of Green Fields Enterprises. But I had no interest in any of them.
Kira was Mary… the Virgin and Magdalene. She was everything.
Without saying anything more, Dairo leaned back.
“I understand.” That was all he needed to say.
I let out a relieved sigh.
The bell above the door chimed, as a loud group of men in bad black suits walked in, their loud voices drowning out the soft Irish music in the speakers. They took a corner booth across the way, and the waiter went to get their drink order.
As Rowan passed us by, I lifted my finger for another round. Rowan nodded, then gave a significant look at the newcomers. I followed his gaze.
“Will you look at that, Dairo?” I said bringing a cigarette to my lips.
Dairo’s eyes turned toward the Armani-clad men at the bar. Their preposterous belts, and their terrible, overly gelled hair cuts. They were Mafia, through and through.
“Are we about to have a spot of trouble?” he asked with a small smile.
I could feel a bar fight coming on. My blood thrummed in my veins, and I smiled, eager to get my knuckles bruised.
Those bastards had an annoying habit of trying to test the waters, to see if they could walk into Irish territory and cause trouble without any retaliation. It was a little bit of aggression, just to see how we’d react.
I put out my cigarette, swirling it around in the glass ashtray.
“Best we let them start it,” I said with a small laugh.
Rowan deposited our drinks before he headed to the Italian table. To his credit, Rowan kept his head held high, even though this game was becoming old hat for him.
If I didn't step in, then any of the other men drinking here tonight would. I considered myself lucky to be the man to deliver a message to Eugenio Durante in the form of bruised egos and broken hands.
As Rowan deposited their order, he walked away without a word, but the head Mafia man snapped his fingers. Rowan ignored him.
“Hey! Stronzo !” one of the men said, snapping his fingers. “Get back here. I wasn’t done with you!”
His light Italian accent wasn’t lost on anyone. Italian. In Irish territory. And drunk.
I could smell the blood in the water.
Sweet, sweet blood…
Dairo stretched his neck one way, then the other, before he grabbed his fingers, pulling them back to stretch them too, then clenching a fist.
“I dare you, Eoghan,” Dairo said with a little laugh. “I dare you to tell them what’s what.”
I bristled, wanting to grab one of the Italian men by the collar and stomp him on the curb.
“Hey, you Irish fuck!” The Italian man said with a laugh and another snap of his fingers. “Get back here.”
That was it. I couldn't let that slide. Not that I was going to let anything slide, since I was raring for a good fight. My father might be able to beat me with impunity - but these bastards had no such privilege.
“Oh, I am ready to act the maggot,” I chuckled, getting up from the table, buttoning my blazer as I went.
I walked over to the table with a lifted brow.
“Is there a problem, here?” I asked, looking at the men one by one.
One of them laughed, his tongue darting out like a serpent as he said, “Yes, I’m sick of all the Lucky Charms sons of bitches owning this place without paying their dues.”
“Dues to who? To your little protection Racket?” I said, looking down at them with a sneer. “I think you should leave.”
I let my accent get thicker than molasses. An Irish bar in Irish territory did not need men like him in it.
“I’m a paying customer, and that motherfucker better serve me.” The fattest of the trio stood, coming to me as if he wanted to get chest to chest.
The sweet, summer child…
I wouldn't let his insult stand. Rowan was not a member of the clan by blood. But that didn’t matter. Rowan was Irish. His parents were Irish, and were one of us by blood oath. Therefore, it extended to him.
I was here to enforce that oath.
“It’s his bar, and you’re not welcome here.” I rested my knuckles on their table as the drunk one with red-shot eyes looked at me and blinked. “Get the feck out!”
“What are you going to do about it?” the man said, his nose flaring in anger, as he pushed my shoulder away, as if that would cause me to back down.
“My name is Eoghan Green.” I clapped him on the back of the neck. If my name registered, he didn’t let it show on his face. But that didn’t matter to me. “And this is my territory.”
I slammed his face down, seeing the splash of blood across the table top as his nose crunched with the impact.
Dairo came out of my peripheral vision, his fist clenched, arriving like a lightning strike on the skinny man’s throat. The fat one tried to stand as I punched him in the sternum, and it knocked the wind from his lungs and he wheezed to regain his breath.
The one with the freshly broken nose stumbled up, wiping the blood falling from his nostrils. He stumbled into his chair, and grabbed a beer glass, smashing it against the table so it shattered into a shiv.
“Oh, you maggot,” I laughed. “You’re wanting to turn a brawl into a murder.”
I laughed, lunging for him. The sharpened glass touched my cheek, narrowly missing my eye as he flailed. I grabbed his wrist and smashed it against the edge of the table, feeling the break of bone as his hand went limp, letting go of his makeshift weapon.
Dairo grabbed one by the collar, and I grabbed the other two, and we dragged them kicking and screaming out of the bar.
O’Malley sat outside, leaning against the Cadillac, while he scrolled through his phone. He gave me an amused smile, as Dairo and I dragged the three men out into the cold, kicking them on the pavement.
“They try to get back in,” I commanded. “Shoot them in the head.”
“Will do, boss,” O’Malley said with a shrug, not caring about the violence he had just witnessed.
That’s what I liked about him. He didn’t care much about anything, and took the world in stride. Whatever needed to be handled, he would handle it. The man was going to come up fast in our world.
I laughed as Dairo, with his leather-clad shoe, kicked one in the ribs.
“Leg it!” I laughed, telling them to run.
The crumbling, beaten Italian men squirmed, before they limped away from us, their hands over their hurt ribs. I started to laugh as one held his wrist at his chest, whimpering over his broken bones. Fucking gobshite.
Those stronzos may not know a word of Irish slang, but they understood what the hell I said, because they started limping faster.
Dairo and I clapped each other on the shoulder, laughing like two eejits, as we started to feel the full effects of our drinks. I pulled out another cigarette, lighting up, and was gratified when Dairo stuck out his hand, asking for one. I gave it, no question, and we smoked in silence, with O’Malley leaning on the car, playing on his phone.
“So, show me this girl, Eoghan,” Dairo said, clapping me on the back.
“What?” I chuckled, as I watched the Italians limp away.
“Show me this extraordinary girl that was, apparently, the reason why I flew home. I want to meet her.” He pulled me upright, his hand around my neck, as he growled. “I dare you.”
Oh, no. He knew that there was no way I could ever live down a dare. A dare from Dairo?
I couldn’t let that slide.