CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
When the shots ring out, they explode into the darkness, shoot like fireworks inside Danni’s brain as she lies on the floor next to Stella. Downstairs, the living room windows shatter, and Stella’s screams follow, ringing out in the upstairs hall. Danni rolls over clinging to her as the window above the benchseat implodes, glass fragments spraying over their bent heads. That sound is part of her life: shattered glass, breaking lives, the raw, primitive scream of fear and pain.
Still clinging to Stella, Danni glances up to Johnny, sees him flat up against the wall still, silhouetted in the darkness. He is somewhere else, she knows, somewhere inside his own head. Alert. Waiting. He is not focusing on the window, or what’s outside, but on here, on the upstairs hall, the gun trained over the stairwell waiting for a figure to appear. But nobody appears.
Danni hears an engine roaring outside, the squeal of tyres. She lifts her head. Johnny is watching the car disappear up the track, lights blazing now, lurching forward at speed.
“Just a warning then,” he says thoughtfully. He looks at the two women. “Wait,” he says. “in case they’ve left anybody,” and he keeps the gun outstretched in front of him, going downstairs in pitch black to check the unnatural silence that sits, thick and dark, around them.
Stella bolts for the toilet and suddenly Danni’s had it, reached the limit. She rolls over and puts her face on the carpet, feels the hard tufts against her skin, and the cold, sharp sliver of glass against her mouth, and she sobs uncontrollably. She does not hear Johnny return up the staircase, only becomes aware of him kneeling beside her, lifting her into him, wrapping long arms around her. And maybe if he had said nothing she would have remained there against his chest, limp as a rag doll, listening to his heartbeat. But she feels his head against hers, hears him whisper, “I’m here Danni. I’m here,” and the memory of Marco in the hospital surges back suddenly and she struggles free of him and yells, “Don’t say that!”
She heads for the bedroom and slams the door, leaving Johnny behind in the darkness, kneeling in fragments of broken glass.
She hears the phone ring from behind the closed door. The hesitation before he answers.
“Yeah?” Johnny says tersely and then there is a long silence.
“Listen Pearson …” she hears him say eventually, and she creeps nearer to the door, standing behind it, straining to hear the low tone of his voice. “You don’t frighten me. You never have. Stop trying to pull … my … fucking … strings.” Behind the door, Danni holds her breath, suddenly chilled by Johnny’s tone. She barely recognises the voice as his.
She presses her ear closer to the door as his voice drops.
“You will get what’s coming to you before I do, Pearson.”
Silence. Danni hesitates, waiting. Johnny has begun to pace in the hall. She can hear the crunch of broken glass under his shoes.
Tentatively, Danni reaches out a hand to the door handle, pauses, then presses down. The door clicks, creaks as it swings open. Johnny is standing amongst the glass, eyes fixed to the floor. He looks up as she is revealed in the doorway and there’s an embarrassed silence between them, a legacy from her earlier display of temper. Danni folds her arms like she’s cold.
“I heard …” she says. “What did you mean about Pearson … about getting what’s coming to him?”
Johnny tilts his head to one side and looks at her through hardened eyes. “What do you think I meant Danni? That I’d go round there and blast a bullet through his head? Old habits die hard, eh? Is that what you think?”
She shrugs, unable to hold his eye.
“God knows he deserves it. He wouldn’t be worth wasting any tears on. But no, that’s not what I meant.”
He watches as she turns and goes back into the bedroom. She doesn’t close the door but perches on the end of the bed. Johnny moves inside the doorway, leaning one hand each side of it.
“What I meant …” he says, then stops and lifts his phone back out of his pocket. “I’ll show you what I meant.”
He punches in a number, presses ‘speaker on’, and waits. Danni frowns.
“Hello?”
“Parker?”
“Yeah?”
“Johnny O’Brien.”
“Sorry …?”
Johnny walks into the bedroom and closes the door.
“Do you forget everyone you stick inside?”
Oh my God, Danni thinks. He’s been in prison. There’s been more than the Glasgow bomb? Johnny ignores her stare.
“Oh, Johnny O’Brien … Lands Road bomb?” she hears the voice say.
“No … but that’s the one I went down for.”
“Is that right Johnny? That’s what all you guys say though, sure it is?”
“Some of us mean it.”
“Well you’re out now aren’t you? I heard yous all got out early – you and McCann and Seamus Barclay.”
“I’d never met McCann or Barclay in my life before that trial. Did you know that Parker?”
There’s silence at the other end. Danni sinks back on the bed, flat on her back, shielding her eyes from the light. Inside. He’s been inside. Well what did she expect?
“Anyway,” says Johnny, “I’m not really phoning to talk about old times with you. I’m sure that won’t surprise you.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“I’ve got some information for you. Remember you wanted me to give you information? Said you’d see what you could do about the sentence?”
“You’re about five years too late, are you not, Johnny?”
“I’ve got information of a different kind for you. About corruption involving one of the most senior figures in the Northern Ireland judiciary.”
There’s a pause.
“Yeah?” says Parker, but even Danni, who is not part of the conversation, who is lying on the bed motionless, can hear an alertness, awakening interest.
“And I think I can help you with the inquiry into the murder of the prostitute Myra MacIntosh. It’s all connected.”
“What …? This person … this senior figure you mention, murdered Myra MacIntosh?”
“No. No … well, I don’t think so. Not directly. I think she was murdered to protect him.” Johnny can hear the sound of paper rustling, a page of a notebook being turned. Parker is taking notes.
“You know Sean Pearson?” Johnny asks.
“’Course I know him. We all know him. What I don’t know is how the bastard gets away with half the stuff he does.”
“Well I do. He’s got friends in high places.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“I’m not telling you over the phone. I want to meet you, get an agreement about protection first.”
“You never struck me as someone who watched his back much, Johnny. Quite the opposite.”
“There are other people involved now.”
“I see.”
“This isn’t going to be easy for you either,” Johnny warns. “Not with the name I’m going to give you.”
Parker says nothing.
“Are you prepared for that? You want to meet me?”
“When?”
“Soon as possible.”
“Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter where I am. Someone just blasted my windows in with a shotgun so I’m not going to be here for much longer. I’m not sure where I’m headed. But I can meet you in Belfast in the morning. 9.30.”
“Where?”
“I’d rather not say right now. I’ll phone you at 9 and give you a place. And listen, Parker?”
“Yeah?
“Are you serious about taking this on?”
“If it’s true, too right.”
“Yeah,” Johnny says softly. “I thought you’d be interested. You might have stuck me inside for something I didn’t do but in your own twisted way you were kind of honest. I’ll call you.” He clicks his phone off.
“You’d better get your things together,” he tel
ls Danni, and leaves the room.
Stella is sitting alone on the bench seat outside the room.
“Can I go in?” she asks, like a child seeking permission.
“Yes of course. Sorry, Stella. You okay?”
She smiles at him, a grateful smile.
Downstairs, he sits alone for a moment. He’s trying to include Danni in everything. The gun. The police. He’s trying to be honest. Except it’s not honest, he thinks, this pretence of transparency. He has things to hide. Oh Danni knows all right, about him being a Provisional. Maybe she even knows some of the reasons for it. But she doesn’t know the stuff he didn’t go to prison for. She doesn’t know about Angelo Piacentini.
It was in prison that he first began reading physics. He became fascinated by black holes, the idea of an abyss from which nothing, not even light, escaped. Fascinated by existence and non-existence. The funny thing is that people think that if you’ve killed somebody you’ve lost God. When in fact, it was only after he realised that somebody’s eyelids had closed for the very last time because of him, Johnny O’Brien, that he found the concept of God which had eluded him most of his life … well almost believable. Certainly hell became believable. But then he was a Catholic so that explained that. Hell was part of the iconography of his childhood. Perhaps hell was one of those black holes. And perhaps he was going there.
He read physics to understand the universe, and psychology to understand his own mind, and in the end resorted to fiction because he understood neither. The discipline he embraced, the myriad of small, uncomfortable choices, was merely suppressed guilt. Intellectually, guilt didn’t exist. When he joined the Provos he believed everything they stood for. Unlike Pearson who joined for something else entirely, because it rose up and met something rotten in him, something that just kept on festering. Johnny believed his country was at war, and while some wars were just, there were still always casualties. Which intellectually was all well and good, but when he closed his eyes at night, it was still the eyes of a child he saw, the dark, brown, haunting eyes of Angelo Piacentini.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Danni does not see his head go down onto the steering wheel. One minute they are waiting at traffic lights on the road into Belfast and the next she hears him mutter, “Oh my God.” She thinks less of what has prompted the phrase than how Irish his voice sounds in those three little words. She drags her eyes from the side window of an Italian delicatessen on the street corner, where rich red and gold square boxes of panettone are piled in an artless heap. Johnny’s head is forward on the steering wheel, his forehead resting against his crossed arms.
“Shit,” she hears him mutter.
“What?” Danni says.
She’s trying to pull her thoughts towards him as she drags her eyes from the window display. When she married Marco, his parents gave them a big fat cheque tucked inside a box of panettone. They didn’t want to spend the first night of their married life in a hotel. Marco’s parents offered them a night in a five star hotel but they went back to Marco’s flat instead. The next morning she remembers slipping naked out of bed, putting on Marco’s wedding shirt that was lying on the floor, and going into the kitchen. They didn’t have proper food in the house but Marco had cut chunks of panettone and put it in the toaster, and she had sat on the wooden kitchen table with her bare feet on one of the chairs, and a bread board on her knee, buttering slices as he handed them to her, watching the butter melt into the yellowy dough, browned with the heat and studded with peel. And she had laughed suddenly and for no reason, and Marco, understanding the impulse, had merely smiled, and then he held out a chunk of panettone, and she had taken a bite from his fingers.
She’s looking now at the top of Johnny’s head.
“What?” she repeats, almost irritably, unwilling to be drawn back to the present.
Johnny lifts his head.
He nods at the newsagent’s in the row of shops across the road.
Danni bends her head to look through his window.
On the billboard: BELFAST PRIEST MURDERED IN CHURCH HOUSE.
He’s silent, Johnny, like the world has stopped, like it’s frozen, and all the action is inside his head. If he hadn’t been careless, if he hadn’t allowed himself to be followed, McConnell would have been safe. Another one. Another life to be responsible for. Another death.
“Jim McConnell,” he says, his voice low. “I know it.”
“It might not …” she says and her voice trails away into oblivion.
Behind them, a row of cars begins to honk impatiently.
“Johnny,” she says.
Honk, honk, honk.
“Johnny …”
Johnny is visible through the glass of the café window. The window is framed by green leaves that start in a plant pot in the corner behind his chair and creep like ivy across the top of the glass. The leaves have been trained, clipped into position, thinks Danni. Perhaps they are plastic. It is hard to tell behind the double layer of glass. She is parked right outside, just feet away, watching through the car window, through the café window, two panes of glass that separate her. Stella is beside her. Johnny parked the car outside and told them not to move. Stella chews gum and says this is stupid this, sitting here like two stooges in the freezing cold. What’s he doing anyway? Who is that guy? Danni shrugs.
She turns the key in the ignition and switches on the heater, then turns to watch Johnny, who is visible in a box, like he is an image trapped in a television without sound. She feels agitated, has a strong sense that talking to the police isn’t going to end things. What if they don’t believe him? He’s a convicted terrorist. Who’s going to take his word against someone in the legal profession?
Beside her, Stella pulls the gum absentmindedly from her mouth, wrapping it round her finger then putting it back in her mouth. “Why was Johnny so upset about that priest guy?” she asks, but Danni says nothing.
The gun is in her bag. And yet … she knows her emotions won’t steady her arm enough to use it. She swings between … between what? She doesn’t want to admit it. Between anger and understanding, attraction and guilt. She stares at the pavement outside the car, unable to lift her eyes, pinning the thought and not allowing it to escape. That’s the truth. And up to now, every time that guilt has kicked in, she has tried to think of Marco bending down to Angelo, and the arc of the brown paper bag as it was tossed into the air, and she has hated Johnny all over again. Truly hated him, not least because it has filled a need in her, fitted a pattern that has become embedded in her life and is hard to change.
She has to be careful. She has to work out what she really feels here. Is the attraction some arbitrary consequence of being thrown together onto the same side against Pearson? A false sense of being part of something together? Johnny, after all, is the only person she’s had to turn to. Worse, is it a kind of perverted glamour, the same instinct that makes women – what she always thought of as sick women – write to prisoners on Death Row?
She looks back to the café. The way they are sitting, she has a better view of Parker than Johnny. Parker’s face has the soft spread of middle age, but somewhere in the jowls and flab, the boy buried there is still evident. Pink, fresh-faced. There is a boyish untidiness too: an unruliness about the mop of sandy coloured hair, a less than pristine quality to the beige raincoat, and a carelessness about the collar that is half tucked in and half out. He sits round shouldered at the table, hands clasped round the outside of his cup and saucer, shoulders hunched, like his body is keeping in secrets, but there is an alertness about him.
Danni watches their faces trying to guess what is being said. Johnny has handed Parker a piece of paper. It is not Parker’s reaction, but the lack of it, that speaks of the importance of the name, his absolute stillness, a rigidity almost. And then Parker sits back in the chair for the first time. Johnny glances out to the car to check on them. She sees the tiger stain flick, his eyes turn on her, rest longer than they need to, and then he looks back to
Parker.
“I’m starving,” complains Stella.
She is agitated, fidgety, her bare foot shaking up and down inside her stiletto shoes. She’s wearing a leather jacket and when she crosses and uncrosses her arms, the leather squeaks. Danni glances at her, then rests her head back on the chair and closes her eyes. Stella sighs.
“For God’s sake,” she says, the chewing gum stretching like a line of floss from her mouth to her finger.
When Danni opens her eyes Stella’s gaze is trained on Johnny in the café window. Like she’s naked, that look, Danni thinks, startled. She hadn’t realised. Stella looks away.
“You like him?” Stella asks a moment later.
“Eh?” Danni says, buying time, uncertain what else to say.
Stella glances at her. “He likes you.”
“I …”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Stella.
“Of course it matters,” says Danni quietly.
“Guys like him never …”
Her expression is one of resignation.
“It doesn’t matter …” she says again.
“He’s too old for you, Stella.”
“I’ve lived more than my age.”
“So has he.”
“He’s killed someone …” Stella says, looking curiously at Danni. “You know that?”
“I know that.”
“He didn’t mean to.” Stella rummages in her bag for a scrap of paper and puts her chewing gum into it.
“How do you know he didn’t mean to?” Danni asks.
“When he was sick. You were asleep in the chair and he kept talking about a boy who died. Then he said something about Pearson making him. I don’t know. He was … what do you call it … delrius.”
“Delirious,” Danni says vaguely. Her insides have turned to ice. A boy who died. So neutral. Her Angelo.
Stella dips her head down to see past Danni through the window. Johnny is pushing his chair back. He and Parker shake hands briefly across the table. Danni sits up, putting her seatbelt on again. Outside, the two men barely acknowledge one another, each going their separate ways.
Kiss the Bullet Page 23