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I draw a deep breath and fill my lungs with the cool dampness of the evening. Even the smell of the air in Dublin is uplifting in a new and exciting way.
“Onward and upward.”
Music and the steady rumble of voices drift out of a dark green building farther along the street. My stomach growls at the prospect of a hot meal.
I glance up at the black and gold sign painted over the door. Jimmy Frances Pub.
This is the place.
The paint on the pub’s wooden exterior is peeling, but the flowers in the window boxes are full and beautiful, adding the pop of color needed to keep the exterior looking cared for.
Two couples exit the double doors as I move to go in, and I duck under the gentleman’s arm as he holds the door for me. “Evening Miss.”
“Good evening.”
The doors bump to a gentle close behind me and I straighten, hit by a wall of warmth. The air is heavy with Celtic rhythms and the scents of pub fare and beer. It takes a moment for my eyesight to adjust, but I move to the ‘wait to be seated’ sign and do just that.
“Ginny’s on her break, duck. Sit anywhere you like.” I follow the man’s voice to the brawny fellow with tattoos and a scruffy beard wiping down the weathered wooden bar.
He’s in his late fifties now, but still has the frame of a man who was built like a brick shithouse in his youth. A boxer maybe…He looks like a fighter.
“Perfect.” I scan the seating, searching for an empty spot.
The place is busy, the golden glow of hanging lights illuminating groups of people chatting and laughing from the bar to the tables to the booth wall that runs down to the back.
Shaking the raindrops off my long hair, I walk towards an empty booth about halfway back. After carefully setting Mom down, I toss my purse along the bench seat and take off my damp jacket to hang it on the hook at the end of the booth.
Settling in, I reach for a menu from where they stand wedged behind a condiments caddy, and eye up the posters and photographs hanging haphazardly over every inch of the wood-paneled wall.
All the faces smiling back at me are enjoying their time here in the pub, and I wonder if they are famous people or regulars. Not being up on the Irish celebrity scene, it’s impossible for me to know.
My stomach growls and I get back on track, opening the menu with focus.
CHAPTER FOUR
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Sitting on the sofa in my office, cigar in one hand and whiskey in the other, I watch through the one-way glass wall as the pub fills up with the Friday night crowd. Jimmy Frances Pub is the place to be in Dublin these days.
And that’s grand.
After dedicating over forty years of his life to protecting my father as Da built the Quinn legacy, Jimmy deserves all the success I can help him achieve.
I swirl the tumbler I’m holding in my lap, the ice cubes clinking as they dance in the amber bliss of liquid sedation.
Moments of quiet reflection are rare these days.
Since Da passed, there has been a constant push and pull of power in Dublin. Money-grubbing lowlifes seem to think that the Quinn territory is vulnerable because of the loss of our patriarch.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
Da started grooming us to run the family business from the time we could sit on his lap and read. He taught us the players, he drilled in the importance of balancing violence with humanity, and he made sure we understood that the ‘family’ in the term ‘family business’ meant more than his five sons.
The people of Dublin are our family, and it is both our duty and our honor to watch over them.
In the first months after Da’s death, a few minor players came at us, but with Sean running the MC and Brendan and Bryan itching to bust heads and put aggressors down, the uprisals soon stopped.
To hear that Mattie McGuire might be planning to make a play is both disappointing and worrying.
