by Declan Burke
‘At a guess,’ he said, ‘I’d say it’s because she can make him money.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s just a guess.’
32
I asked Jimmy if he’d mind wearing his peaked cap while he drove me back to Herb’s, and he asked me if I wanted to lose my other eye, and after that we motored along in a companionable silence until Jimmy got us off the country roads and headed back to town.
‘So where’d you pick us up?’ I said.
‘Finn’s place.’
‘You were there?’
He jabbed a thumb at his eye. ‘A patch,’ he said, ‘can fuck with what you can see. You think you’re scoping everything but, y’know …’
He was being generous. ‘How’d you know I’d be at Finn’s?’
‘Gillick reckoned you’d turn up there sooner or later.’
‘He knew about the laptop.’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘So why didn’t you brace me there?’
He tapped ash out the window. ‘Because I rang Gillick when you came out, told him the score.’
‘That Maria was with me.’ He inclined his head. ‘And he told you not to jump in, just see how it played.’
‘Something like that, yeah.’
‘Just so we’re clear,’ I said. ‘I was at Finn’s picking up the laptop for Saoirse Hamilton. Gillick knows this, right?’
‘He knows.’
‘Does he know she’s paying twenty grand for it?’
He nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Get him on the blower.’
‘What for?’
‘I want to be sure, if he wants the laptop, he has twenty grand cash lying around.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’
‘I’m a worrier, Jimmy. Get him on the phone.’
‘Don’t sweat it. He’s Saoirse Hamilton’s bagman. You think she has twenty gees stashed under the mattress?’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me in the least.’
A flash of white teeth. ‘I wouldn’t mind a tumble in that mattress,’ he said, ‘just to find out.’
We came over the hill at Cartron and down onto Hughes Bridge. The traffic a trickle, but steady. Across the bridge and up the bypass, cutting right at the train station and out along Strandhill Road. Jimmy cleared his throat. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that’s hard lines about your kid. How’s he doing?’
‘Alright, yeah. Stable.’
‘Is he a fighter?’
‘He’ll be grand, Jimmy. He takes after his mother.’
A sympathetic grimace. ‘I’ll light him a candle,’ he said, ‘first chance I get.’
‘Appreciate the thought.’
The traffic was slower on Strandhill Road for some reason, the cars dawdling along like a fat kid early for school, but I was still trying to picture Jimmy hulking over a bank of flickering candles in the back of a church when he pulled in at Herb’s gate. I took his phone, rang Herb, told him I was outside. The gates swung open and in we went.
Herb cracked open the front door, had a quick scan left and right, ushered us in and through to the living room. Maria, still bedraggled, still luminous, was slumped in an armchair facing the TV. Grainne was perched in the corner of the couch, her eyes vacant orbs, as far from Maria as it was possible to get without actually hanging herself out the window. The green cotton bag tucked between her and a cushion. The mood was tense, possibly because Herb was holding a gun, and maybe because they’d been wondering, having dived out of the Mini Cooper, if I’d ever resurface. And maybe it was because the TV was tuned to a Coronation Street repeat, mousey Sally having yet another affair. It really is the quiet ones you have to watch.
As for Herb’s gun, I presumed that was because he was half-expecting a frontal assault from the McConnells. It looked square and blocky, like a cut-down SIG.
‘Where’d you get that?’ I said.
‘Toto,’ he shrugged. ‘Where else?’
‘Toto gave you a rod?’
‘He sold me a rod, back when we hooked up.’
Jimmy was more intrigued than put out. ‘Toto McConnell?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Herb said. ‘You know him?’
‘You could say that, yeah.’ He sounded cautiously impressed, as if Herb had announced he kept a tiger in his kitchen, was thinking about letting it out for its afternoon romp. He made a point of glancing at his watch. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’d love to stay and shoot the shit, but, y’know …’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Maria? Hey, Maria?’
It took her a few moments to tear her gaze away from the TV. She’d been crying, and had reapplied the mascara with what must have been a shaky hand, leaving her looking a lot like a sultry Sioux racoon. Whether the look was intended as camouflage or war paint was hard to say. ‘You want to take Grainne through to the kitchen?’ I said.
Her eyes seemed to swim a backstroke as she focused on me.
‘What?’ she said.
‘We’ve had a wee, ah, chillum,’ Herb said. ‘Just to take things down a notch.’
‘Ah.’ That would explain Grainne’s dislocated stare. She was out to lunch, in Rio. ‘Alright, let’s take it next door.’
We trooped through to the kitchen, Herb gesturing for Jimmy to go first, me bringing up the rear. Jimmy perched a butt-cheek on the kitchen table, said, ‘So where’s this laptop?’
I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. ‘Grainne has it, it’s in that green bag on the couch. But let’s be cool, alright? We try to take it away from her, she’s liable to start—’
Herb’s phone went off, a tinny ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ pealing through the kitchen. He held up hand, apologising, as he slipped it from his pocket, answering as he went out into the hallway, closing the door.
Jimmy tapped his watch. ‘Time’s money, Rigby.’
‘Fucking everything’s money lately, Jimmy. I just want to be sure—’
‘And that’s twice now,’ he nodded at the closed door, ‘I’ve had rods pulled on me in the last hour.’
‘He didn’t pull any fucking rod, for fuck’s sake. He had it out when you came in.’
‘I’m just saying, I get nervous around guns when it’s other people have them.’
‘You want mine?’ I hauled the .38 out of my belt, held it up. ‘Will that make you feel any—’
The door opened. Herb stood there, SIG in one hand, phone in the other. He seemed to have lost weight in the few seconds he’d been gone, most of it around the shoulders and chest. His eyes bright and dead as they found mine.
‘Fuck, Harry …’ he croaked.
And I knew.
33
It hit like cold lightning. I buckled at the knees and staggered back, reaching for the countertop. For a split second I thought I was having a heart-attack, couldn’t breathe past the pain, the tectonic plates grinding in my chest.
From a very great distance I heard Herb say, ‘Harry, I’m so fucking sorry, man, Jesus,’ but faintly, very faintly, from the heart of some roaring storm. The world gone black, shot through with blood.
Then came a single thought, a question, piercing:
Would Ben have died had Gonz killed me?
The storm dropped away. The clarity was surreal. Herb, frozen in place, a helpless expression etched on his face. His lips were moving but I couldn’t hear a word.
My lips felt numb, throat locked shut. But from somewhere I heard, ‘Herb? It’s Ben?’
He nodded.
‘He’s dead?’
Herb closed his eyes. ‘That was Dee. She said,’ he swallowed hard, ‘that you might want to know.’
The tectonic plates began to grind again, some deep Antarctic fault line I’d never even suspected was there. Beneath, a poisonous lava bubbling up a vicious brew. A cold and savage rage.
It was just Jimmy’s bad luck he was there.
Bad luck that he felt moved to say, ‘Hard lines, Rigby. Sorry for your troubles.’
Bad luck he’d offered to light a candle for Ben.
‘How’
d you know, Jimmy?’
‘What?’
‘About Ben being in hospital. How’d you know?’
He came up off the table with his hands out, palms facing me. Watching my eyes, the .38. ‘Wait a minute, Rigby. You’re not thinking—’
‘I wasn’t thinking, Jimmy. Too fucking worried about laptops and twenty fucking grands to think straight. I’m thinking now, though. So how’d you know?’
‘Back the fuck off,’ he said, and it was only then I realised I was moving. Something flickered in my peripheral vision, Herb raising the SIG, and it was Jimmy’s bad luck, again, that he let himself be distracted. By the time he came back to me I’d reversed the .38, was smashing its butt into the bridge of his nose. A squelchy crunch. He went down hard, as only big men can, bringing a chair with him, tangling himself up. I stomped his face, once, twice, blood spraying up my shins. Bone cracking. He tried to scream but it came out a choked gurgle, and I reared back and booted him up under the chin. His head flopped back, leaving his throat open, so I got myself a good grip on the table for leverage and stomped down on his Adam’s apple.
If Herb hadn’t pawed at my shoulder, dragged me off-balance, I’d have killed him where he lay. My heel connected too high, glanced off his chin and punched into his cheekbone. His face seemed to billow, then flatten out slow.
Herb was screaming something in my ear. It took a couple of seconds to work it out, and then I realised he was saying, ‘Not here, Harry, not fucking here.’
I stepped out across Jimmy, turned and hunkered down. Reversed the .38 again, clicked the safety off. His breathing coming now in ragged bubbles.
‘Jimmy,’ I said, ‘you have three fucking seconds before I blow your fucking head off. How did you know?’
*
His face looked a lot like a melting balloon. Nose busted, a cheekbone crushed, the mouth a raw hole, both eyes swollen shut. So I guess he was literally swearing blind, in words that came slow and gloopy, when he mumbled he knew nothing about running the Audi off the road. That he’d heard about Ben from Gillick.
How Gillick knew he couldn’t say, even after I cocked the .38 and ground the muzzle into his forehead.
‘He’s not worth it, Harry,’ Herb said, and he was right, but not in the way he thought.
Herb was trying to feed me the old line. How blowing a hole in Jimmy wouldn’t bring Ben back. That revenge might be sweet, but knee-jerk retribution wasn’t worth twenty years in a cell.
Sound advice, at least where Jimmy was concerned.
Gillick, though. Depending on how he’d heard about Ben, Gillick would be a different matter entirely.
I de-cocked the .38, put it away. Herb went to get a roll of masking tape. We got Jimmy nicely trussed, ankles and wrists, then Herb pulled the Phaeton around to the kitchen door. Jimmy wasn’t exactly a dead weight but he was a big man, no easy job to cram into the boot. He lay there half-blind and snuffling.
‘What if he chokes?’ Herb said. ‘On his own blood, like.’
‘That’s on me.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘I’ll need some clean clothes.’ My jeans were spattered to the knee, shoes and socks stained red. ‘D’you mind?’
‘’Course not. Work away.’
‘And do me a favour. Find Gillick’s place, Google-map it for me.’
‘Will do. But Harry, listen to me.’ A hand on my shoulder, a faint squeeze. ‘You need to go see Ben.’
For a moment I found myself puzzling over how best to stand, where my hands should go. ‘I will, yeah.’
‘I mean, now.’
‘Not yet, Herb. Couple of things to do first.’
‘Harry …’
I shrugged off his hand and told him that there would come a time to mourn, for sure. When I’d sit myself down and acknowledge Ben was gone, and cry first for what he had been to me, the one and only good thing I’d ever known in my life, and then for Ben, for what he might have grown up to be, all the things he’d never get to do, the sights he’d never see, the music he’d never hear. For the sheer waste of it.
I told Herb that the world was already pointless without Ben in it. That in time his absence would metastasize into grief, a cancer hollowing me out from within, with no reason to go on other than my dying would mean Ben would have one less person to remember him.
I reminded him about the TV documentary we’d seen last week, the one about the Bronze Age, two guys making a sword, molten metal being poured into a mould, the fiery, viscous bronze that quickly dulled and hardened into a lethal weapon.
I told him all that with Jimmy lying there in the boot of the Phaeton, moaning, although how it sounded was, ‘I can’t see Ben like this, Herb. Not like this.’
That much he understood, so I left out the bit about pulling up at the hospital in a chariot, Hector’s body broken and bloody in my wake.
‘Don’t do it,’ he said.
‘It’s doing me, Herb. It’s doing me.’
34
The scream came while I was upstairs changing into a pair of Herb’s jeans.
I took the stairs four at a time, beat Herb through the living room door by a short head.
The sisterhood was no more, or else the initiation rituals were a lot more arcane than I’d imagined.
Grainne crouched low, coming crab-like at Maria, a scissors clutched in her right hand. Maria backing into a corner, the laptop she was using as a shield already scored a couple of times.
I hurdled the coffee table, clamped a forearm around Grainne’s throat, grabbing her forearm with the other hand. Forcing the hand holding the scissors down and around, behind her back.
‘Drop it,’ I hissed.
A schoolboy error. She was a bag of drowning cats, spitting and twisting, her left hand clawing for my eyes. The point of the scissors pierced my right thigh just above the knee. A dart of pain, the shock enough to send me stumbling backwards, hauling Grainne with me as we tumbled over the coffee table and bounced off the couch. The rebound threw us sprawling onto the carpet, Grainne still gripping the scissors. I balled a fist and punched down on the back of her wrist. Her fingers splayed, the scissors fell free. I tossed them out of reach and fell back against the couch again. Her nails dug into my forearm, so I tightened the choke-hold. ‘Do that again,’ I panted, ‘and I’ll snap your neck.’
For a second or two she seemed to be considering it, weighing up the pros and cons. Then she relented, went limp. I relaxed my grip and gave her another couple of seconds, then pushed her off, slipped out from underneath. I was half-expecting her to rear up again, start lashing out, but she only turned away and stretched out beside the couch and bawled into the carpet.
By then Herb was easing Maria into an armchair. I got to my feet. ‘What the fuck was that all about?’
Maria shook her head, bewildered. ‘I just wanted to check the flight times,’ she said. Stunned, the laptop still braced in both hands, protecting her midriff. ‘All of a sudden, she was screaming, coming at me with, with …’ She broke off, shuddered.
‘Next time use your phone,’ I said. I nodded down at Grainne. ‘She’s a bit protective of the laptop.’
I sat down on the couch, pulled up the jeans to the knee. The scissors had punctured the skin but the cut wasn’t so deep I’d bleed out any time soon. I rolled down the jeans again, leaned across to pat Grainne on the shoulder. ‘Hey, are you okay?’
Muffled sobs.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘the laptop’s yours. No one’s taking it away. Alright?’
Right on cue Herb placed the Mac on the coffee table. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘See? It’s all yours.’
She told the carpet something.
‘Grainne,’ I said, ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying. And I don’t have time to be sitting—’
She turned her head, looked up at me. ‘You said we had a deal.’
‘Yeah, well, all bets are off. The laptop’s yours. I don’t want it.’
She wriggled into a sitting position. ‘B
ut it’s no good … I mean, I thought we were doing it together.’
‘That was never happening. You were paying me to give it to you instead of your mother. Now I don’t need the money.’
‘But …’
‘Forget it.’ I looked across at Maria. ‘You okay?’
She nodded.
‘Change in plan,’ I told her. ‘Herb’s going to drive you to the airport.’
‘Like fuck,’ Herb said. ‘And anyway,’ he gestured at Grainne, ‘we can’t leave her here on her own.’
‘Not my problem. Not right now.’
Herb swore. Maria snorted, like she’d heard it all before. Grainne tugged at my jeans.
‘What?’ I said, looking down at her, but she didn’t have to say anything. She was staring up at me, her expression half-hopeful, shyly expectant and desperate not to be refused. She might as well have stabbed me in the heart with the scissors.
I’d seen that expression not twenty-four hours ago, Ben glancing up at me from under his fringe, his wan smile anticipating my latest failure, the latest round in the raising and dashing of hopes. The unsaid promises, the wordless craving of a fatherless child for something he didn’t fully understand except in its absence.
‘I don’t have anyone else,’ she whispered.
I looked across at Herb. He shrugged. Maria had her head tilted to one side, eyes watchful, a sneer on the brew.
‘There’s no way I’m driving the two of them anywhere,’ Herb said. ‘Are you kidding? Fucking world war three it’d be.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’
*
Herb said he’d take care of the clean-up, burn my trousers and socks, the shoes. He didn’t say anything more about my going to see Ben. I was guessing that meant he’d only brought it up as a way of buying time, hoping the rage would burn itself out. Which was why he wanted me to be the one to take Maria to Knock, put her on a flight. The idea being that an hour there and an hour back would help me cool off. Herb with no idea the rage was ice cold.
Saoirse Hamilton rattling around my head, her voice scabrous as she asked me if I honestly believed one day might make any difference to how she felt about her dead son.