Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2)

by Cindy Brandner

  “George Barclay said to tell ye—”

  Whatever the man had been about to say was cut off by the screech of car tires at the head of the street and the sound of an engine gunning directly their way. Pat didn’t dare look round, though the man’s eyes flicked up at its approach, a look of surprise flitting across his face.

  “Pat, get in the car, he’s going to kill you!”

  Pat started back, the car was coming up rapidly. He half turned toward the voice, knowing it was David, scared to take his eyes off the man in front of him. The car was in his peripheral vision now and driving erratically. He chanced a look to the side, saw that David’s right arm was coming up and that he had a gun in his hand.

  “Get in!” David yelled, car still moving. Pat hesitated, momentarily paralyzed, until he saw the man reach into his pocket.

  David was half out of the car now, a pistol leveled across the roof at the man. When he spoke his voice was even and calm. “Patrick, get in the car. Now.”

  Pat didn’t waste another second on thought, he ran and yanked the car door open then leaped into the passenger seat, barking his shin hard on the frame as well as giving his head a good knock. A metallic whine shot past his ear and exploded out the opposite side of the car as David swung back into the car, pistol leveled at a man running toward them. Pat was vaguely aware of the man dropping to the street, a splotch of red on his forehead before his vision was blurred by the speed of the car.

  The car careened around the corner, tilting for a split second onto two wheels. Pat hung onto the dash for dear life as David floored the gas pedal, sending the little car hurtling down the rutted street. He slowed slightly as they approached an intersection.

  “It’s too quiet,” he said, just as a car emerged on their right side, pulling into the street and effectively blocking them off. David stomped on the brake, the car squealing in protest and throwing them both forward.

  “Back up, and do it fast,” Pat said, adrenaline shooting directly to his chest and making his heart pound madly. “They know yer Army! For fuck’s sake,” he yelled, “back up!”

  David shifted the car down hard, glancing behind as he rammed his foot on the gas. “Christ there’s someone blocking up there too!”

  Pat twisted around and saw that two men had stepped out of a car that was t-boning off the top of the street. Each held an Armalite in the crook of his elbow. “It’s a setup—Jesus—” He pounded the dash trying to think through the panic flooding his brain.

  “Here.” David tossed a pistol on Pat’s lap, then cranked the wheel of the car hard to the left, causing the car to spin madly. It banged hard off the corner of a warehouse, but its end swung into the narrow alley backing an ancient building.

  “What the hell do ye want me to do with this?!”

  “Use it,” David said tersely. “We’re in a blind, there’s a wall at the end of the lane.”

  “We’re stuck in here,” Pat said in disbelief, as the car ricocheted back and forth down the dark, overhung laneway which ended in a high, very solid brick wall.

  “It forces them to come in after us,” David replied, seeming remarkably cool, considering four killers were even now converging on them.

  The car screeched to a halt, lurching them both toward the dash. David swung his door open and rolled out onto the stinking pavement. “Get out and keep your fucking head down!”

  Pat did as he was told, coming up with the pistol just as he heard the first shots crack out at the head of the alley.

  He shot blindly, with no idea of whether he was aiming at the men or merely giving the walls a good thumping. He heard a howl of pain from the head of the alley, another sharp report from David’s pistol and an answering volley, which sounded as if the gunman were advancing toward them. He could no longer tell which bullets were incoming and which were leaving David’s gun. The tang of cordite was thick on the air, air which pulsated with the high-velocity thump of ammunition. A brick exploded by his head and a sharp pain lanced through his neck. For a moment he thought he was hit, but then realized a small sharp chip of brick had cut across his collarbone.

  Suddenly it was over, the silence more unsettling than the gunshots had been. The nerves in his shoulders were jumping, his heart still pounding fit to come out of his chest. He turned his head to the right, afraid of what he might find.

  David was still cautiously crouched behind the car door. He seemed miraculously free of blood or inconvenient holes in his anatomy.

  “Are you alright?”

  Pat nodded, brick dust coating his throat and rendering it immobile.

  “Good. I’m going to go move the bodies and then we’d best get the hell out of here. When I wave, pull the car up and be ready to drive out of here.”

  David walked to the head of the alley with his pistol still drawn and cocked, keeping his body tight to the filthy brick walls. Pat held his breath, waiting for another burst of gunfire to erupt into the disturbing stillness. A minute later David waved him up and bent over to pull the first body out of the street opening.

  Pat swung down into the driver’s seat, closing the door and popping the clutch simultaneously. The car rolled forward, the sudden movement startling to his shattered nerves.

  David yanked the driver door open when he hit the head of the alley. “Get over, I’ll drive, you don’t look in a fit state for it.”

  Pat got over quickly, despite the car’s cramped interior.

  David swung the car out into the street. Pat looked about, there didn’t seem to be a soul around and there was no sound of sirens in the distance either. It was, in fact, eerily quiet other than the hum of the car’s motor as they headed north along the street.

  They didn’t speak for several minutes. Pat finally managed a terse, “What now?”

  “I’ve got to get us good and clear of Belfast and then I’ll figure out what to do.”

  They continued north, leaving the city behind them. Pat felt strangely blank; the beginnings of shock he supposed. Yet there was a slight horror at the back of it all that he didn’t feel more appalled by what had happened. Then again, if David hadn’t happened along when he did, it would be him lying in a heap in the street right now.

  “How did you happen to come along just then?” he asked, seeing that it was too coincidental to be happenstance.

  David did a swift survey of rear and side mirrors before answering. “I had information that you were pissing off some members of the Black Roses. We’d been watching one of them and when he went missing this morning I figured they might have come looking for you.”

  “The Black Roses?” Pat swallowed, throat suddenly as tight as if it had been neatly noosed. “I thought they were just an unpleasant rumor.”

  “Unfortunately not,” David said grimly. “There’s not many of them, but like sharks they don’t really need large numbers to do a great deal of damage.”

  The Black Roses were a radical splinter group that had broken off in the wake of the Provisional split away from the Official IRA. Their name derived from the flowers they often sent to those they had marked for death. The Provos had disowned them and their methods, which bordered on the psychopathic. They were not a group a man wanted to have notice him.

  “Why in the hell would they want to kill me?”

  “They had a nice little graft situation going on with the construction company that was building your little utopia. When you got the construction company fired they lost their side income. Didn’t know what you were starting when you got them fired, did you?”

  “No,” Pat said rather weakly. It was hard to imagine the domino effect such a minor action could have, but very small things could ripple out in this country, until a man was caught in a riptide of events that drowned him. Or was in a getaway car wondering how many deaths out of four he was responsible for.

  David flicked him a sideways glance.

  “If it’s any consolation, you didn’t hit anyone, though there’s a few bricks that will never be the sa
me.”

  “It’s been a lot of years since my Da’ taught me to shoot. I didn’t like it then, an’ I can’t say my feelings have changed much over the years. My brother was a crack shot though, never missed a target. My da’ used to say Casey could take the eye out of a mosquito at sixty paces.”

  “Can’t say that surprises me,” David muttered. “On the few occasions I’ve seen him, he always looks as though he’d like to shoot me.”

  “Yer British an’ yer army. It’s not a combination an Irish Catholic can trust.”

  “Then why do you?”

  “Ye’ve given me no reason not to.”

  David laughed. “I’d think I’ve given you every reason not to.”

  “Exactly. Which told me one of two things, either ye were dead awful at yer job or ye weren’t actually tryin’ to cultivate my trust. I’ve reason to think, particularly after today, that yer not inept at whatever it is ye actually do.”

  They drove up the Antrim Coast, past the small fishing village of Carnlough and continued north along the coast. Fifteen minutes beyond the village David slowed the car.

  He turned down a narrow rutted lane that dead-ended in a crumbling pasture fence. He stopped just shy of the fence, shifted the car down and turned off the ignition. The sudden quiet filled the small space between them. Pat could feel the density of it in his lungs. David left the car without a word, the driver door open behind him.

  Pat opened his own door and stood, knees feeling distinctly rubbery. The field was dry and thick with overgrown spurge. He stayed by the car for a minute, watching David walk toward a bank crowned with a small stand of stunted birch trees, that lifted suddenly out of the flat pasture.

  His entire body felt slippery, the residue of adrenaline pooling in his joints and muscles. He took a few deep breaths before following the trail David had left through the tall plants and new grass.

  “Going to have to talk to them about equipping the cars with stun grenades,” David said, before flopping onto the ground and lying back in the long grass. “Do you have any cigarettes on you man?”

  “Jaysus Christ,” Pat sputtered. “We’ve left a heap of dead bodies behind us, an’ believe me there’ll be some ugly retribution for this, an’ ye want to know if I’ve cigarettes? Christ!”

  “Well do you?” David persisted.

  “No, I don’t smoke, an’ nor do you. I’m not in the habit of carryin’ them about should I need a post massacre hit of nicotine.”

  David merely raised his eyebrows, before closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.

  “Are ye havin’ a nap now?” Pat asked in disbelief at the man’s calm exterior.

  “No,” David said patiently. “I just need a few minutes to get myself back together here before I set fire to the car and we start the walk back.”

  “Before ye set fire to the car?”

  “Yes. Forensic evidence you know. It’s not likely their deaths will be questioned that closely as they were all Black Roses, violent death is merely an occupational hazard for them—still, it’s best to err on the side of caution.”

  Pat sat down beside David, legs shaking fit to drop him where he stood. “Grass is wet,” he said inanely, feeling like he’d been hurtled without warning into an alternate universe.

  “A damp arse is the least of our worries at present,” David said, tone still annoyingly calm.

  “Ye don’t say,” Pat responded with no little sarcasm. “Ye’ll forgive me if I note that ye don’t seem over concerned about anything at present.”

  “Patrick,” David replied wearily, “I’ve just shot four men, driven like a maniac for an hour and been certain about three times that I was a dead man. I need a minute or two to sort it all out before I have the appropriate hysterics.”

  “An’ ye call Irishmen crazy,” Pat said. They both laughed and the charged atmosphere began to dissipate. “I can’t believe the security forces didn’t descend on us,” Pat said, watching David’s face for any change of expression that would give him a clue to the things that were puzzling him about the aftermath of their shootout.

  David merely shrugged, eyes still closed, hands now crossed over his stomach.

  “I thought the cars were equipped with panic buttons,” he persisted.

  David opened his eyes and gave Pat an odd look. “Most are. Mine isn’t. It’d be frowned upon if I was to call in the cavalry, so they make certain there’s no temptation to do so.”

  “What do you mean frowned upon?” Pat asked, with a queasy feeling that he knew exactly what David meant.

  “I don’t exist for all intents and purposes here in Northern Ireland. If you were to go looking for me, my superiors would deny any knowledge of me. Nine times out of ten if you passed me in the street, you wouldn’t recognize me.”

  “Seriously? Then how—why—in the jail I thought ye were regular army, or SAS.”

  David shook his head, plucking a piece of grass from the verge and rolling it back and forth between his fingers. “No.”

  “Is that all the explanation I’m to expect?”

  “It’s all that’s safe for you to know,” David replied.

  “Who the hell are ye? James Bond?”

  David smiled grimly. “That’s about as close as you’ll come. I’d have a hard time explaining it myself, what I’m doing here. And in the end, it’s just best if you don’t know.”

  “That leaves me a wee bit puzzled as to why ye took such an interest in myself, to begin with at least,” Pat finished awkwardly.

  “I wasn’t there in any official capacity. They seemed to find you of particular interest, due more to your family history than anything. I can pull rank when I need to, so I offered to conduct the interrogation.”

  “Too bad you didn’t offer a few days earlier,” Pat said.

  “Yes, I apologize for that.”

  Pat laughed. “Ye sound very prim an’ British at times, ye know.”

  David smiled. “I suppose because I am very prim and British when it comes right down to it.”

  “Ye still haven’t answered my question.”

  David sat up, sun lighting his hair gold. He took a deep breath and looked Pat in the eye.

  “Because my career, for lack of a better term, makes friendship, or any sort of relationship really, pretty much impossible. When I saw you in the jail, when I fed you that day, I recognized something in you. I guess I just liked you. It was that simple. And,” he looked down at the green stains on his palms, “I was lonely.”

  “Oh,” Pat said quietly.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “What?”

  “That I looked at you and saw something in your face that told me we were destined to be friends? That I was reckless enough not to consider my position or yours, that I didn’t see an Irishman when I looked at you, but just a human being?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” David asked, sounding rather surprised. A soft flush lit his fair skin, and he bent his head, suddenly absorbed in a leaf he’d plucked off his pant leg.

  “It’s ironic,” Pat said, voice strangely soft.

  “What is?” David asked, putting the pale green leaf to his eye.

  “Yer supposed to be my sworn enemy, but somehow, without my willin’ it, ye’ve become my friend. An’ that’s the real answer to the question of why I trust ye.”

  “War makes strange bedfellows at the best of times, and as this is the strangest little war in a strange little country, I don’t think our friendship is surprising at all.” David reached across and put something in Pat’s hand. “Here take this.”

  Pat looked down to find a book of matches. “What’s this for?”

  David grinned. “I just thought, being that it’s the property of the British Army and all, that you might like to be the one to set the car on fire.”

  Part Seven

  The End of Ordinary Life

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Just Another Day in Paradise

  THE FIRST OF T
HE BOMBS WENT OFF at precisely ten after two in the afternoon. The last at three o’ five. In between there were twenty-five others. It was a short timetable for terror, and yet extremely effective.

  It wasn’t the first time Pamela had been called in to photograph the aftermath of a bomb. But she had never seen the sort of devastation that surrounded her now.

  She picked her way carefully along, noting bits of cloth, and a pair of eyeglasses that had somehow miraculously survived the explosion, and lay whole and glimmering on top of a chunk of brick. There were other things amongst the rubble that she was afraid to look at directly, though she knew she would have to in a matter of minutes.

  The Oxford Street bus station had only been one of the twenty-seven separate explosions that had rocked Belfast to its core only an hour before. The explosions had taken people unawares, and many had run for safety only to find themselves in worse peril. Both men and women were crying openly in the streets, as plumes of smoke still rose around them on the air of a summer afternoon. Most bombs had been set off in cars left parked at the various locations.

  The office block adjacent to the bus station was destroyed, the front wall having been blown clear off. Beams, black and smoking, hung in midair or lay shattered on the ground. The station had been crowded when the bomb exploded. Now, other than police, firemen and corpses, it was quiet and deserted.

  The dull thuds had sounded at first like firecrackers, but as the ones closer in to the core of the city had detonated there had been a terrible intensity in the air, followed by a great vacuum that inhabited the very molecules of the atmosphere, as though time had been rent apart at its seams and destroyed.

  She walked along further, catching a flash of permed blonde hair poking out between a sheet of plaster and a great long shard of glass. She gritted her teeth and kept moving, keeping out an eye for Sergeant Wilbee or Constable Fred.