A Man With One of Those Faces (The Dublin Trilogy Book 1)

by Caimh McDonnell

  For the second time in 24 hours, Paul looked down the barrel of a gun. His growing familiarity with the sensation wasn’t breeding contempt just yet. It wasn’t the gun that was the truly scary part. It was the face behind it. The eyes. One look into the eyes of Gerry Fallon and you saw it. Not fear, not excitement, not doubt – just a cold brutal certainty. He’d do whatever he considered needed to be done and not think twice about it.

  Behind Fallon stood a face Paul knew all too well. No, not a face, an expression. The sneering jackal grin Johnny Carroll wore was all too familiar. He’d seen it on dozens of kids, the little weasel ones just standing to the side of every big kid who’d ever loomed above him. The memory brought back the taste of blood to his mouth. Most people say they hate bullies. Paul realised in that moment that who he truly hated was the person standing behind them, glowing with the joy of not being you.

  The fact that Carroll had a gun in his hand too didn’t seem important. Fallon was more than enough to kill them.

  Fallon’s eyes were fixed on Bunny, who still held the hurley over Fiachra’s head, poised to strike.

  “Drop the hurl.”

  “Why?” asked Bunny.

  “Did you not notice the gun?”

  “I did. And am I supposed to believe there’s a version of what happens next that doesn’t involve you killing me?”

  Fallon shrugged. “No.”

  “Then if it’s all the same, I’d rather batter some manners into this whelp on my way out.”

  Fiachra whimpered and threw his hands up around his head.

  “Let me put it another way,” said Fallon, turning the gun so it pointed at Brigit instead. “Lay a finger on him, and I’ll shoot her in the gut, so you can watch her die. Slowly.”

  Bunny looked from Fallon to Fiachra to Brigit, then he dropped the hurley on the ground. “Well, if you’re going to take all the fun out of it.”

  Fallon pointed at the door to the storeroom. “If you could all stand over there please.”

  As they shuffled across, Fiachra darted from his hidey-hole and went to cower behind his brother, his chain jangling as he scurried across the room. Blood was oozing from his nose, which looked bent out of shape following its meeting with Mabel. He rubbed his forearm across it, succeeding only in smearing the blood across his beard. Paul’s stomach lurched at the sight of it, and he felt light-headed. Don’t look at him. Focus on something else. Stay in the game.

  Fiachra crouched low to the ground and tugged upon his sibling’s trouser leg. “Gerry, Gerry, I said no visitors without Gerry, I said, I said, didn’t I say? I said.”

  Paul concentrated on looking at Gerry Fallon instead, so he noticed the grimace of revulsion on the older brother’s face as he pulled his leg away. “I know, Fiachra, I know.”

  “I said, I said.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Are they…” Paul saw Fiachra’s face light up as he beamed across the room at them, “special guests, Gerry?”

  Fallon looked down at his brother for a long moment, an unreadable expression on his face. “Sure.”

  Fiachra clapped his hands and whooped with glee.

  “Shush,” barked Fallon. Fiachra obediently put a finger to his lips and fell silent, his eyes still wide with a childish delight.

  Fallon turned to Carroll. “Turn that off,” he said, nodding his head towards the TV. “Then go and get his things.”

  Carroll nodded, obediently walking over to turn off the TV before heading back up the tunnel towards the entrance. Fallon looked down at his brother again, “And you go clean yourself up.”

  Fiachra scampered over to his bed and wiped his face on a towel beside the basin, much to Paul’s relief.

  “So, you two must be Mulchrone and Conroy? I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul, “Grinner McNair sends his regards.”

  “So, he did talk?”

  Paul laughed bitterly. “You paranoid arsehole. He didn’t say a word, at least none that made any sense.”

  “So how’d you end up here?”

  “By necessity,” said Paul. “If you were going to kill us no-matter-what to protect your little secret, the only way out was to find it before you found us.”

  “Ah well,” said Fallon shrugging, “no use crying over spilt milk. I had to protect my brother’s location, couldn’t take the chance.”

  Paul jumped with surprise as Bunny burst out laughing. Fallon’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “Is something funny?”

  Bunny wiped tears from his eyes. “Ah yeah, tis fecking hilarious in fact. I just figured it out. It really is a fairytale.”

  “Care to enlighten us?”

  “Gollum there never left the country, because Sarah-Jane Cranston never left this room.” Bunny turned to Brigit and Paul. “Have yous ever actually read the brothers Grimm? There are no Prince Charmings. What they do have, though, is lots and lots of monsters.”

  A silence hung in the cavern for a moment.

  Fallon looked across at his brother, who was placidly sitting on his bed now, staring over at the blank TV screen, as if unaware of his surroundings. “It wasn’t his fault,” said Fallon. “I mean, we knew what he was from an early age, me and my mam. We didn’t have the easiest of childhoods but… Animals, at first. He did some nasty things. Ma tried talking to him. I tried beating sense into him. Nothing worked. The badness was in him. You know what mothers are like though; she could never accept what he was. We thought he might grow out of it, especially when he got older and the women started falling all over him, but it was still there, just different. There was an… incident, I sent him away to Glasgow. Even looked at getting him help but…”

  “He fucked up over there and they sent your psycho brother right back to you,” finished Bunny.

  “Yeah,” nodded Fallon. “Eastern European hooker. Luckily, nobody was that bothered.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Bunny, bitterness lacing his voice, “big stroke of luck that alright.”

  Fallon kept talking, entirely ignoring Bunny’s interjection. “Grinner and I had been off sorting stuff for the ransom drop. We thought he’d be alright on his own. He’d been good for a couple of years at that stage, hadn’t done anything…” Fallon looked over at his brother, a look of revulsion on his face. “Grinner came back here first and found her. What was left I mean. He ran.”

  “Smart fella,” said Bunny. “You’d have killed him in a heartbeat to hide your little monster here.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” said Fallon, “family is family. Him being what he is doesn’t change that. Growing up, there was just us and our ma. I’d promised her I’d always look after him. I couldn’t y’know… but he’d gone too far, he was dangerous. I couldn’t let him go off out into the world. He’d do it again and then it’d all come out. I’d go down with him and it’d kill my ma.”

  Christ, thought Paul, what is it with all these psycho gangsters loving their dear old mammies?

  “So,” said Bunny, “you locked the little freak up here and invented a story to cover the whole thing up.”

  “And Hostage to Love,” chimed in Brigit, “was the resulting pile of crap.”

  It was Fallon’s turn to laugh. “Yeah. I told Brophy the basics, and he did the rest. He’d found out a little, you see, so I gave him the exclusive story, in exchange for his cooperation. I also put the fear of God into the little weasel. Our little fairytale really caught the public’s imagination, didn’t it?”

  Fiachra joined in without looking up from his fingers, “Colin Farrell is rumoured to be interested.”

  Paul glanced at Brigit, to see her looking back at him. They were both thinking the same thing. In a big house in the Wicklow Mountains, an old man would die wondering.

  “And fair play to you,” said Bunny, “you recovered from that early setback to have a glittering career in the field of criminal scumbaggery. There’s not a heroin overdose that happens in this country which you’ve not got a hand in.”

>   “Oh, save me the petty moralising. Wasn’t it you who dropped your boss out a three story window last night?”

  Paul looked over at Bunny. “Wait, that wasn’t a joke? You really threw somebody out a window?”

  Bunny glowered back at him. “No. I pushed him off a balcony, he was already outside.”

  “Oh, well, that’s alright then.”

  “In my defence, it was the prick who was giving this scumbag everything the police knew about you. The same prick who’d been protecting him for 30 years.”

  Fallon smirked. “Well, more like 25. The great Fintan O’Rourke. Real stroke of luck that. We found each other earlier and our little team worked out for all concerned.”

  “Yeah, he even helped keep an eye out to make sure nobody got near whatever little secret you were hiding out here.”

  “I told him it was a ‘distribution centre’. He was smart enough not to want details. I trusted him, or rather, I trusted him to save his own arse, and he knew I’d more than enough to nail it to the wall.” Fallon shook his head and grinned, as if sharing a fond memory. ”He wasn’t as smart at being dirty in the early days as he thought he was. Nobody is as thick as the cocky clever ones.”

  “And all this time,” added Paul, “you’ve been hiding the family’s dirty secret under a rock. Wondering when it’d come back to haunt you.”

  “I wasn’t that bothered to be honest, not after the first few years. The one thing I hadn’t expected was Grinner not having the sense to stay dead.”

  “Well sure, ye know what it is like near the end,” said Bunny, “people get fierce sentimental.”

  Carroll appeared in the doorway, holding a sports bag in one hand and his gun in the other. Fiachra grinned excitedly at the sight of it.

  “You’d be in the perfect position to know,” said Fallon.

  “I just figured something else out,” said Bunny, looking at Carroll. “Big part of the Gerry Fallon legend. People he didn’t see eye-to-eye with were always disappearing.”

  Fallon actually looked bashful. “Well, if I couldn’t fix Fiachra’s little problem, figured we might as well use it. He has had quite a few special guests over the years, as treats. There’s an awful lot of bodies buried in these fields.”

  And there it was. It wasn’t like it was a surprise. Paul knew it was coming, but he’d been avoiding thinking about it. They were all going to die here, and it probably wasn’t going to be quick. They were to be the playthings of the monster buried under the rock. It didn’t sound like a fun way to go.

  He didn’t know if your life was really supposed to flash before your eyes just before you died, but the moment did come with a great dollop of stark clarity.

  “Before whatever is about to happen… happens, can we have a brief private word?” he asked, pointing at Brigit.

  “I’m on a bit of a schedule here,” responded Fallon. “Whatever you’ve got to say, say it now. No whispering.”

  Paul looked at her. She smiled back at him nervously. The terror that was rising in him, he could see in her too. He could also see her fighting it. Her determination to control the situation, rather than letting it control here.

  “That…” he looked around at the four other men watching them, “that game of Risk from a couple of nights ago.”

  Brigit looked confused.

  “The one we didn’t finish.”

  She looked even more confused, then blushed as realisation hit.

  “I want you to know, I really did want to play…”

  “It’s alright. You were tired.”

  “No, that’s – that’s not it. I just, I freaked out because I wanted to win so much you see…”

  She nodded.

  The room was silent for a long moment.

  “Are they talking about shagging?” asked Bunny.

  Paul blushed and looked at the ground. “Jesus Bunny!”

  “What kind of a freak calls it Risk?” asked Carroll.

  “Shut the fuck up,” growled Bunny, pointing at him. “You’ve got a record that indicates romance isn’t exactly your forte.”

  Fiachra giggled. Bunny pointed at him. “And as for you…” Fiachra flinched back. Bunny looked around the room, lost for words until his eyes came to rest on the poster of Samantha Fox. “She’s a lesbian now.” Fiachra gawped at the poster in shock, his big eyes pools of innocence once more, “so she’d have no interest in your little psycho pecker.”

  “Actually,” said Brigit, “that isn’t even in the top five reasons that women would not be interested in him now.”

  Bunny nodded. “Fair point.”

  “Enough,” said Fallon firmly.

  “Yeah,” said Paul, “you’re on a schedule. About that… you got here awful fast, didn’t you?”

  “Shut up.”

  Paul kept talking but he didn’t look at Fallon, he looked at Carroll standing behind him. “You locked your brother up for 30 years to protect yourself. You’d McNair’s daughter killed, to protect yourself. You tried to have us killed, several times in fact, to protect yourself. And, even if Johnny here rang you straight away after he captured us, you must’ve been most of the way here from Dublin already.”

  Fallon pointed his gun at Paul. “You three love the sounds of your own voices. If you’re so clever, how come you’re here?”

  “Because,” said Brigit, looking at Paul, “we’re loose ends, and more than anything, you hate loose ends.”

  “That’s right,” added Bunny. “These two have been running about blabbing their mouths. You don’t know who knows what now. The genie is out of the fecking bottle.”

  Paul, Brigit and Bunny were now all looking at Carroll, whose rodent eyes were dancing around wildly, the gun jittering nervously in his hand. Paul figured Carroll wasn’t the brightest but he really didn’t need to be.

  Fallon turned to look at him too. “Don’t mind these idiots, this is all desperate nonsense. You’ll have your money and be on a flight to Australia tonight.”

  Carroll nodded nervously. Fallon looked at him, sighed as he made a decision – and then shot him twice in the stomach. Fiachra howled as Carroll, a look of shock in his eyes, fell backwards out into the tunnel, his gun falling from his limp hand.

  Paul and Brigit stepped back in fright. Bunny moved forward but was quickly stopped by Fallon’s gun pointing directly at him.

  “Great,” said Fallon, “now I’ve got to dig the holes myself.”

  Fallon moved across and picked up Carroll’s fallen weapon, before looking down at his presumably ex-employee. Carroll looked up with the pathetic expression of a dog that was getting a beating he felt he didn’t deserve. Blood was seeping through the hands he held to his belly.

  Paul felt the room spin. He placed his hands back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  “What the feck is up with him?” he heard Bunny say.

  “Shut up,” snapped Brigit.

  Fiachra sobbed. “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. My friend Johnny…”

  “Quiet!” said Fallon, tucking the spare weapon into his trousers, “I don’t have time for your bullshit now.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul, taking a deep breath and opening his eyes, “he’s got loose ends to tie up. Like he tied you up for all these years.”

  “He’d never harm you though, Fiachra,” continued Brigit, “he promised your ma.”

  “Your ma, who died last year,” said Bunny.

  Fiacra’s turned to look up at his brother, his face a grotesque mask of disbelief.

  “Oh,” said Paul, “had he not told you that?”

  Fallon stepped forward and pointed the gun at Bunny’s head, a snarl on his lips. Bunny lowered his voice to a whisper that somehow echoed around the room. “Every man has his weakness.”

  Fallon lurched backwards as the chain attached to his brother’s wrist wrapped around his neck. His left hand flew out defensively, grabbing at his throat, as the right hand holding the gun weaved a haphazard pattern in the air.

  Bunny rushed
towards them and screamed out as a bullet tore into his right leg, sending him tumbling to the floor. The two brothers then fell messily to the ground. Gerry’s choking gurgles mixed with his brother’s snarls as they rolled about. Paul and Brigit both held back, unsure what to do. Fallon walloped the handle of the gun into his brother’s head a couple of times, which was greeted with animalistic howls of fury, but no slackening of the chain. Fiachra’s legs were now tightly wrapped around his brother’s waist, clinging on for dear life. Two more shots rang out, bullets ricocheting off the metal and dense stone. Paul ducked as one whistled by his ear.

  Brigit spotted a gap and darted out the door to the prone figure of Carroll lying in the tunnel. Paul’s eyes followed her and then quickly looked away at the sight of her knelt beside him, putting her hands on his bloodied mid-section. He didn’t understand why she was helping the enemy at that moment. Bunny had been shot too and he was, well, less of an enemy. Paul glanced across at Bunny. Blood from the mad old bastard’s wounded leg was smearing the worn carpet in front of the sofa, as he dragged himself towards his fallen hurley.

  Paul ducked as three more shots rang out and then something bit him in the arse. He staggered forward, his hand reflexively reaching back to the source of the pain. He felt wetness and looked back to see his hand covered in his own blood. The world swam around him. He stumbled backwards as Gerry Fallon, his face blue and bulging, reared up before him, giving his little brother a piggy-back. The younger was using what teeth he had left to rip into his sibling’s ear. The brothers Fallon hurtled backwards, slamming hard into the wall, once, twice, three times. A sickening thud echoed around the room each time. Then Fiachra fell away, slumping to the ground. A long smear of dark red blood ran down the wall to his crumpled form. His head didn’t look good, there wasn’t enough of it for a start.

  Gerry pulled the chain away from his neck and then bent forward, gasping for air.

  Paul heard a clunking noise.

  Then there was a moment of perfect silence, a sliver of perfect peace amidst the fury and the thunder.

  Paul looked down woozily and saw Gerry’s gun sitting beside his left foot. Then he looked up, and his eyes met Gerry Fallon’s.