“What’s going on, Killian?” Sean asked.
“Everybody’s dead. He killed them. He got the info and killed them.”
“He knows where Rachel is?”
“If her da knew, now he knows.”
“Do you know?”
“No.”
“He killed Rocky?”
“Aye.”
“Ach, for Jesus sake.”
“I know, poor Rock.”
“Doesn’t make any sense. Why kill them? I mean he let you live? What the fuck could have happened?”
“It’s bloody obvious what happened. Rocky came in to play hero. Ivan shot him in the gut, disarmed him, questioned him, topped him. After killing Rock he had no choice but to ice the parents.”
“Jesus Christ, I’ve got chills, man, fucking time-tunnel back to the bad old days.”
“Aye and you’re not alone here. Christ, Sean, it’s a gigantic cluster fuck. I ballsed it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s a cross. How could you know there’d be a man on the man.”
“For half a million. Should have seen it. Also half a million? Who pays that for their weans? Even for Coulter, it was dodgy. I’m sorry mate. I should have stayed retired, declared bankruptcy, got a fucking job.”
“Okay. That’s enough. Don’t beat yourself up. We did our best. It’s over. Time to move on. You better get out of there.”
“Aye, I will. I’m gone. One thing to do first,” Killian said.
“No. No things to do. Just go. Are you sure our boy’s gone?”
“He’s away.”
“Rock had three bairns. Remember to take his mobile, we can’t have this coming back to us.”
“Ivan may already have it,” Killian said, but when he looked inside Rocky’s raincoat pocket there was the phone. And something else. A piece of paper.
He unfolded it.
“JGI 3245,” Rocky had written. The licence plate from Ivan’s Range Rover.
“I have the phone,” Killian said.
“Dump it in a deep dark place.”
“I will.”
“Now get out of there.”
“I’m hanging up, I still have that one thing to do.”
The one thing to do was go upstairs.
He took the stairs two a time and he was breathless when he made it to the landing. He turned on the light. Blood had oozed out from one of the bedrooms and was pooling in the varnished pine floor. There was an acrid burnt aroma to go with the sweet smell of a kerosene heater and all that coagulating blood.
He caught his breath and licked his dry lips parrot fashion.
He walked along the skirting and went to the murder bedroom and turned on the light.
Both of them were naked from the waist up. They were younger than Killian had been expecting. The man was late fifties, the wife slightly younger than that.
She had blonde hair, his was black with only a few grey traces.
They were on the bedroom floor.
She’d had her hands cuffed behind her back. Her face had not been smacked about but her ghostly, pale, still lithe body was covered with cigarette burns. The mortal wound was a single gunshot to the forehead. He was untouched except for the gunshot wound above his ear. Ivan had tortured her to get the information from him.
The father had talked.
The thing about it was that as bad as the wounds were, clearly Ivan had been dialling it down. He hadn’t raped her, he hadn’t sawn anything off. He probably would have let them live if Rocky hadn’t come in. Ivan didn’t want trouble. He wanted the pay day and his instructions were to go easy – this case involved a millionaire who owned an airline and a casino, who hobnobbed with Richard Branson and who was going to be the first potato-eating Mick in space.
“Go easy,” Killian thought as he looked at the dead woman with only half a brain.
Dick Coulter’s former mother-in-law. This level of violence made no sense.
But it was Rocky who had caused this. Ivan might have been happy enough to tie them up in the basement to give him time to find Rachel.
He was heavy mob, yes, but Forsythe wouldn’t have recommended him if he was a total loon. Killian examined the wife. The cigarette burns were fresh. In the last half hour.
He sat on the edge of the bed and recapitulated everything up to two minutes ago: Ivan flies to Ireland, follows him, breaks in to his house, knocks stupid old Killian for six, gets Rachel’s da’s letter, drives up here and ties up the two old folks, starts bracing them in a fairly scarily conventional way until Rock comes blundering in with a six-shooter and then it all goes to fucking shit.
Aye.
Something like that. He kills Rock and then, pressed for time, strips Mrs Anderson and burns her till her husband talks.
“Probably missed them by a matter of minutes,” Killian said out loud. He looked into the lifeless face of Mrs A.
What he’d actually missed was being killed along with them by a matter of minutes, for with no gun or weapon of any kind Ivan would have taken him down too.
The phone rang.
“Aye?”
“You’re still there aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Get the fuck out. Go. It’s not your fault. Get in your car and go.”
Killian shook his head. “Something’s not right about this, Sean. This can’t be about custody. It can’t be about the kids. I’ve been thinking about it. Forsythe wouldn’t have sent a guy like Ivan for a wandering-daughter job.”
“Half a million dollars.”
“Forsythe gets a finder’s fee? Twenty-five grand. Chicken feed to him. Bridget’s worth millions. All legit too. No. This is something else. Something we haven’t clocked to yet.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it in the car.”
“Okay, Sean,” Killian said, utterly defeated. He hung up, took out his handkerchief and wiped his prints from the light switch. He walked back downstairs past Rocky and back to the kitchen. He wiped the hall light switch, the kitchen light switch and the water glass.
He wiped his prints from the kitchen window and slipped outside.
He scuffed over the footprints in the roses and wiped his prints from the gate.
When he reached the Ford Fiesta the first hint of sun was rising over Scotland. He got in, stuck the gear stick in first and drove past the Renault and the death house in the direction of unlucky Slemish.
Sean called.
“Please tell me you’ve left.”
“I’m in the car driving to Larne.”
“Good. We’ll forget this ever happened. I’ll tell Tom that you were the victim of a break-in and you’ve been shook up and we’re dropping the case. Okay?”
“Well, there’s no way we can go on is there?”
“No.”
“We’ll have to return the retainer.”
“That’s okay.”
“I don’t see how Tom keeps this out of the papers.”
“Oh, they’ll blame the paramilitaries. They always do.”
“Aye I suppose you’re right.”
“Are you okay, mate?”
“It’s funny I was feeling so good after New Hampshire. I handled that well. Not a drop of blood. Everybody happy. I thought I was getting my groove back. I’m too old, Sean. I don’t have the stomach for it.”
“Aye, I know. Don’t worry about it. Circumstances beyond your control. Go to bed and try and get some sleep and get that window fixed if you can.”
“There’s one other thing though, isn’t there?”
“What?”
“Well, he’ll probably kill Rachel now, won’t he? Now that he’s off down this road he’s got nothing to lose.”
“That’s someone else’s problem, mate, not ours. Come and see me in Belfast tomorrow, okay?”
“I will.”
“Get some sleep if you can.”
Killian hung up.
The Larne road wa
s deserted but there ahead of him was the North Channel and all of Galloway. He could see the ferries and blue mountains and even the lights of planes on the approach to Glasgow.
He drove through a whitewashed traditional village he didn’t know existed, through chimneys curling peat smoke over thatched roofs. There were horses in fields. Big hunters and fine racing mares.
Of course because it was early morning he got caught behind a herd of cows on their way to milking. A kid driving them about eleven years old in jeans and Barbour jacket and a flat cap.
The kid was smoking. Killian was time travelling. To cattle markets and horse fairs of his youth. He still didn’t know where he was, except that Slemish was in the rearview now. The satnav was showing blankness and even the Welsh girl was suspiciously quiet.
The cows were going slow and Killian stalled the Ford Fiesta.
Of course Sean was right. Go to bed. Sleep. Forget about it.
Sean was older than him by fifteen years. Killian had gone to work for him when he was twenty-one after he’d returned from America.
Sean had become a kind of surrogate dad.
His real father, of course, would have given him completely opposite advice to Sean: The tinker code did not rely on paper. Your word was everything. Your name was everything. Duty was more important than right. You fulfilled your obligations above all else. Even unto death…
Killian had read a thousand books since Sean had taught him his letters. He had tried to transcend that code.
But he knew better.
You are where you came from.
There are no disembodied selves. There are only humans embedded in practices, places, cultures. The man without a culture is a myth. No such being exists.
In the Pavee code of honour a life is given meaning by the narrative each narrator imposes on himself within the story.
Killian’s journey could not end at this place. It just wasn’t possible.
He called Sean.
“Yes?”
“I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I’ve got the licence plate of the Range Rover: JGI 3245. I’ll bet it would be pretty easy to get the guy’s credit-card details through the hire-car company. Find out who he is.”
“Aye, probably.”
“And it’s bound to have satnav, isn’t it?
“Aye.”
“If he’s running it, which as a stranger to Ireland, he probably is, the car rental company can trace the car through it, can’t they? We can find exactly who he is and where he’s heading.”
“Killian, you’re not thinking of—” Sean began but Killian cut him off.
“Aye I am thinking of. Call me back when you’ve got a bead on this motherfucker.”
“It’ll cost us. I’ll have to lay out a couple of grand.”
“Lay it out.”
“You can’t let it go mate, can you?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Is this some sort of fucking tinker thing?”
“Yeah. It is some sort of tinker thing.”
A long pause.
“I’ll call you back when I have anything.”
The Fiesta had reached the edge of Antrim Plateau now and beneath him was the ferry port of Larne. The sea had white caps and a navy helicopter was flying close to the water churning spray as it searched low for some lost comrade or missing boat or dog walker swept out to sea.
Up here in the high country, however, everything was calm.
chapter 10
the high window
THE PHONE RANG IN APARTMENT 14D OF 1738 EAST TROPICANA. Marina was on the balcony watching the planes carve big ellipses in the azure air above McCarran. It had been a full morning. She had ridden her bike to her class at UNLV and on the way back had bought fruit at the Safeway. As usual she was the only cyclist in any direction. When she got back to her apartment building a bus had collided with a jeep right outside the Liberace Museum. No one was hurt and the cops were just standing around. Broken glass had made it to the sidewalk on the north side of Tropicana and she’d gotten off the bike and carried it gingerly into the lobby.
In the elevator Greghri, the Lithuanian dealer from the MGM, hit on her a little, asking about her bike and telling her that he liked her with short hair. She was feeling lonely and enjoyed the compliments. Sasha knew that Greghri often talked to her but for some reason Sasha had gotten it into his head that Greghri was gay and he didn’t mind.
She’d spread cream cheese on rye bread and made tea and gone up to the balcony to watch the accident but gradually had been drawn to the aircraft in their holding patterns. She knew Sasha wouldn’t be in any of them, not for a while yet, but she still wondered. Often he surprised her, coming home unexpectedly. She used to think he did this to try and catch her in the throes of an affair, but now she knew that he did it because he missed her and because Las Vegas was home.
At the first ring of the telephone she ran to the living room. She picked up on the second.
“Hi,” Sasha said.
“Oh, hi, darling!”
“I miss you very much,” Sasha said.
She knew he was upset because he was speaking in Russian and he was trying to hide the slur in his voice.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he lied.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine. Everything is fine. How are you?”
“I’m okay. It’s morning here. I had my class. Are you still in Ireland?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“It is place called En-nis-kill-en,” he said, sounding the difficult word in increments.
“What time is it there?”
“Night,” he said and lapsed into silence.
A Boeing 777 air-braked on its final approach.
A police radio crackled.
Sun glinted off the pyramid at the Luxor a mile to the west on the Strip.
“Do you want me to call you back?” Marina asked.
“No. No. I will go to sleep now. I have an early start in the morning. I am so tried,” he said.
Marina waited for the other shoe to drop. The confession. The tears. Sasha was an emotional man and Marina was his only outlet for these emotions. To everyone else he was Starshyna – the Sergeant – but to her he was Alexi Alexander, little Sasha of the golden hair.
Of course now he almost always shaved that hair “for the job”.
A fire truck pulled noisily up outside to deal with the accident and she closed the balcony door.
“What’s going on there?” he wondered.
“Nothing. It’s paramedics. There was a car accident.”
“Did you wear your bike helmet to the college?”
“Of course. And I always ride on the sidewalk anyway.”
“Tropicana is bad street, many drunks,” Sasha said in English.
She switched to English too. “Are you all right?” she asked.
There was another long pause.
“Yes, it was just, little tense.”
“Have you been doing your stress ball? Remember Dr Keene, Sasha. Do your stress ball.”
“I have been doing stress ball!” Markov snapped.
Marina said nothing and waited. She didn’t have to wait long.
“There was an incident. An unpleasant incident,” he said back in that Volgograd dialect of his.
“Are you hurt?”
Sasha muttered something that she couldn’t get.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Other people are hurt when they deal with me,” he said. “Old fuck, old, interfering fuck. I should have cut his throat.”
“But you didn’t – you didn’t hurt anyone that badly did you?” Marina asked.
Five thousand miles away in the Quality Hotel, in Enniskillen, Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Sasha looked at the phone as if it had just bitten him. Did she really know? Was she still buying into this de
nial? She, who was so clever that she had graduated first in her English language class and was now studying at the University of Nevada. Was he such a monster that she had to do this in order to live with him?
He smiled at the mirror above the writing desk in his hotel room.
Yeah, she did.
And worse, he had to play the game too when he was back with her. And no, not for her. For himself.
He shuddered, frowned, sat down on the edge of bed.
He bounced his rubber ball off the wall, but it didn’t help.
The old woman had screamed so sickeningly.
The man had begged him.
He hadn’t wanted to kill them.
Their daughter’s fuck up was nothing to do with them.
No good deed went unpunished. He had let the old fuck in Carrickfergus live and because of that he had to kill three people.
It wasn’t necessary. He would have made the husband talk eventually. If he’d been given the time. If the old fuck had only given him the time. That fool he had sent to do his dirty work for him. Barging through the door. Was that really the best they could do in this country? It was bullshit. This country was bullshit.
They thought they were tough? They thought they had had it hard?
They were spoiled.
“If you want to see the aftermath of a real civil war visit fucking Grozny sometime, assholes,” he muttered inaudibly.
He thought of the boy with the parachute in the McDonald’s.
And this time it came.
This time he didn’t suppress it.
“Sasha?”
But he was there. Being herded out of the Tupelov by an officer with a drawn side arm. Jumping from 2000 metres with no live jump training because they always took the strips now or landed you in helicopters. A dozen of them falling from the sky. Screams, frantic pulling at cords. The ground coming to meet him, green and brown like a wet, lethal family dog. Accelerating towards him so fast, so eager to hug him, so eager to smash him to bits, to send his tibias through his kneecaps and into his skull.
Free fall. Open your eyes maggot, open your fucking eyes.
Clouds, apartment buildings, grey evil.
Yuri face’s covered with blood. Yuri – his buddy. Falling with him. What the fuck had he done to himself?
Falling Glass Page 15