by Declan Burke
“Say again?”
“Four-MTA. Four-methylthioamphetamine, if you prefer. It’s what the Dutch boys started on, when the authorities put the boot into PMA.”
“PMA?”
Brady looked like he was enjoying himself.
“PMA is a primer for MDMA. Ecstasy, like. When the punters started dropping like flies a couple of years back, the vice boys in Holland tried to stamp PMA out. The lads making E just switched to Four-MTA, came up with Flatliners. It’s supposed to be a super-E but it’s more of a super-Prozac. Gets your serotonin off the charts but doesn’t reabsorb it back into the brain. Worse, Flats take about two hours to kick in. Some punter thinks he has strong E that isn’t going off, he drops another. Half an hour later another one goes down the neck. By the time the first one starts coming off, there’s four or five down the hatch and ready to dance.”
I said, dull: “Gonzo had five tabs tonight.”
“That’d be right. And once you peak on Flats it levels out. There’s no up and down, like E. Once you’re up there you think you’re coming down again. So you pop another one. And so on. The heart develops arrhythmia trying to keep up and the other organs start to overcompensate. Everything heats up. Meanwhile, the brain is drowning in serotonin. You’re dying but you’ve never felt better in your life.”
“Sounds like a good way to go.”
“If you want to go. Anyway, we think Conway has diversified into Flats but we can’t nail him until we catch him red-handed. No one says fuck all about a new drug. Dope, E, smack, coke – every fucker’s talking about those. But a new buzz, people keep it under the duvet.” He tapped the plastic wrap. “Eddie was lucky,” he said. “Don’t let Conway get lucky too.”
There was a knock on the door. A garda stuck her head into the room. She jerked her head at Brady.
“Phone.”
Brady got up, stubbed his smoke.
“Think it over, Rigby. Think about what you owe Frank Conway.”
He left. I thought it over. Gonzo was back in town to put the bounce on Conway, that much I knew. Which was why Conway had been checking me out, trying to work out if I was in cahoots with Gonzo. All that added up.
Gonzo falling for dodgy E didn’t make sense, though. Gonzo knew his Class A inside out, although it was possible Flatliners had passed him by while he was on the inside. But even if everything Brady said fell into place, there was still the matter of Helen Conway and Tony Sheridan. The last thing Frank Conway had expected me to find was the first thing I’d tripped over. No one gets that lucky first try. I never got that lucky, period.
I rubbed at my temples, the side of my head a fire of dying embers. Stifled a yawn, too tired to think. I had the feeling of watching a car pull away from me, late at night, its taillights fading, watching it go with nothing left under the bonnet.
Brady came back into the room. He said, soft: “Rigby.”
His tone told me everything I needed to know but I lumbered down the corridor to the phone anyway. Dutchie was on the line. He had something wedged sideways in his throat.
“Harry?”
“It’s me, Dutch.”
“Jesus, Harry.” He choked. “Jesus.”
I was aware that Brady was watching me. I focused on the poster thumb-tacked to the wall above the phone. Four tacks: three red, one blue. The blurb on the poster wanted information on criminal activity, had a free-phone number in bold red numerals underneath with a guarantee of anonymity for the caller in the small print. I wondered who the poster was supposed to target, stuck away in the back of the bacon factory. My voice wandered in from somewhere out over the Aran Islands.
“What happened, Dutch?”
“Don’t know, Harry. I don’t fucking know. They were pumping him out, no worries, and he just took a fit. Started thrashing around on the table, foaming at the mouth. They fucked me out, and then this Paki came and asked if I was family. I said yeah, he’s my brother, he said Gonzo had gone into arrest and he was sorry, he’d done everything he could.”
“They give him penicillin?”
“Jesus, I don’t –”
“He’s allergic, Dutch. We’re both allergic.” I thought, briefly, how an hour ago was the time to lay that one on Dutchie. “He wasn’t wearing tags?”
“I don’t know, Harry. I wasn’t –”
There was no reason why Dutchie would have been wearing tags. I didn’t wear tags. It was just one of those things you never get around to doing, like buying limescale tablets for the kettle. I bit my lower lip, and maybe that was why my eyes started to water.
“He’s dead?”
“I’m sorry, Harry.”
“Dutch? He’s dead?”
“He’s dead, Harry.”
I pursed my lips, sucked at my cheeks. My eyes prickled. Someone had let a bear into the building and he had my ribs in a hug, crushing my chest so I couldn’t breathe.
“Alright, Dutch. Hold on there, I’ll be about twenty minutes.”
“You’re coming here? Why?”
I didn’t know. It just seemed the right thing to do.
“Don’t they need someone to identify the body?”
“They will, yeah, but tomorrow morning’s plenty of time. You okay?”
“Never better, Dutch.”
“Yeah, stupid fucking question. I’m not thinking straight. I’ll meet you back at the pub, I need a drink.”
“Not for me, Dutch.” My voice sounded hollow, but it might just have been a bad connection. “I’m getting home. Dee should know.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Jesus.” Dutchie choked up again. I tried not to notice the tremble in his voice. Dutchie and Gonzo had been good mates once, a long time ago, but mates are mates. Time and distance don’t change that kind of thing.
“I’m sorry, Harry.”
“Wasn’t your fault, Dutch.”
I hung up. I felt limp, battered and bruised, body and soul. My knees trembled. I didn’t know where to look, what to do. Brady was still watching me.
“No luck, Rigby,” he said, quiet.
“Fuck you, Brady.”
“Rigby –”
I turned to face him. Arms out wide, palms up, daring him to come on. I wanted to hit something, anything at all, and Brady looked softer than the wall. Not by much, but enough.
“Step up or step back, Brady. Come on.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. He said, harsh: “Don’t get tough, Rigby. You might get to like it.”
“It suits me just fine. And I’m walking out of here right now. You want me to stay for breakfast, do something about it. And bring your mates.”
I brushed by him, digging an elbow into his chest. He let it skip, followed me down the corridor into the reception area. The garda behind the desk looked up from his newspaper, looked away again.
“I’m letting you go, Rigby, because Galway said so. But don’t go taking holidays. Galway’ll be looking for you.”
“I’ll be found.”
Brady called something out as I pushed through the door but I didn’t hear it. I was too busy listening to the bells of The Friary tolling four o’clock and realising it was Christmas Eve.
15
The night was cold, clean, fresh. I walked quickly through town, breathing hard in short, white plumes. My fists were balled, cached in the pockets of the Puffa. Shaking, but not from the cold. Trembling with fear, anticipation, the adrenaline rush. I detoured past the kebab house, feeling evil.
The street was deserted. The shutters of the kebab house were down, the neon signs dead. Through the shutters I could make out someone sweeping the floor. I punched the metal grille. She looked up, brushed the back of a hand across her forehead, started sweeping again.
I shuffled through the slushy streets towards the taxi rank. Head down, hoping to be jostled, ears pricked for a catcall. No one spoke. No one looked in my direction. I was drifting.
When I got to the top of the street I hesitated, listening to a perverse instinct that wa
nted to see Gonzo, maybe touch his cold body. I made about a hundred yards up the Mall towards the hospital before turning back. There was no chance of seeing Gonzo, the body would already be in the morgue. Besides, the truth was that I didn’t want to see Gonzo, it was just that I should have wanted to see him. Gonzo was dead, end of story. I was alive, living happily ever after.
I trekked back down the Mall, headed for the quays. The taxi rank looked like every taxi rank looks at four in the morning, cold, empty and mocking. I stood around for twenty minutes or so, kidding myself, stamping numb feet. Then I struck for home, crunching through the discarded chip wrappers, heading out across the new bridge.
I jumped the wall on the far side, making for the wooden bench, the frosted grass crackling like Krispies. Looking back out over the bridge to the bay beyond, next stop Iceland. I rolled a twist, not caring about the wet soaking through, staring out across the sheer drop of sixty or seventy feet. It was quiet as a new hearse, only the litter moved. The lights changed from green to amber, to red and then back to green, for an encore. I sparked the twist and tried to remember why I should care that Gonzo was dead.
The cigarette was half-smoked when I heard the car, not really paying attention. Then I realised it was coming up fast behind me, roaring out of town along the river. It screeched to a halt. I stood up to get a better look and the passenger door flew open. Everything slowed, the last few seconds before the kettle finally boils.
The first thing I noticed, he was wearing a scarf across his face, a baseball cap with the brim pulled low. The second thing was, he was cradling what looked like a sub-machine gun. The third thing was, he was unslinging what looked like a sub-machine gun, kneeling down and taking aim.
The sheer drop into the river was right behind me, but I took the step backwards anyway, stomach churning. I laughed a dry, brittle cough that got stuck halfway out, put my hands out, palms up, to ward the gunnie off. Still not convinced it wasn’t all some kind of sick joke. And then a tiny voice in the back of my head confirmed it – yes, it is a joke – but the tiny voice didn’t laugh. Or maybe it did, and the clock-click of what looked like a sub-machine gun being cocked drowned it out.
I had one place to go and I couldn’t swim but if I didn’t learn fast I wasn’t going to learn at all. I threw myself backwards and heard two flat cracks, nails being punched into a biscuit tin. Then I was looking down at the oily-black surface of the river, wondering how I’d been spun around. Then I felt the branding iron in my gut.
The somersault crashed me feet-first into the river. I went deep and touched bottom, felt the mud give, sucking me down. I struggled, knowing I should, but I didn’t have much air in my lungs when I jumped and taking the bullet on board hadn’t helped. Hitting the water squeezed out the last of the cool, pure oxygen. My lungs burned hot and raw, began to melt.
The last thing I thought was, ‘O Jesus, this is it.’ Then my heart blew and a million needles shot into my brain. The blackness came down, and there in the shadows I saw a couple of friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, a lifetime. My father was there too.
All told, it wasn’t such a bad deal.
16
How you drown is, you’re underwater, not breathing. You lose consciousness. Carbon dioxide overwhelms the oxygen in the blood. The brain sends out a message that oxygen is required. You breathe. Water floods your lungs. You drown. It’s not pretty.
Not everyone drowns that way. Sometimes the involuntary breath causes a laryngospasm. The flood of water touches the vocal cords, triggers a reflex action. The throat seizes up. Nothing gets by the blockage. You suffocate. That’s no prettier.
That’s how people drown. But I’d been shot, too.
The branding iron in my side dragged me back to consciousness. I might have been down there five seconds or five minutes, ankle-deep in the mud, when I finally realised I wasn’t dead. If I’d been dead, I wouldn’t have known I had a branding iron melting my flesh. I wouldn’t have been able to wish I was dead, either.
Breaking point arrived. My brain shut down all auxiliary functions, focused on kicking my left foot free of the sucking mud. The mud gave. The Puffa did the rest.
I broke the surface like a porpoise in heat, felt the air on my face, body convulsing, coughing up a lungful of river. I was deaf and blind, the whole world pitch black. When I finally grasped that I was under the bridge, the current sweeping off the bend, carrying me across the river rather than out to sea, the panic subsided. That gave me a chance to think, to come up with a plan that might keep me alive.
The moment passed. I started panicking again.
I paddled for the far quay, frantic, battling the current to stay under the bridge, the Puffa buoying me up at the waist. Thinking that, whoever they were, they were pros. There were no shouts, no wasted bullets fired at imaginary targets, nothing to let me know where they were, what they were doing. Which was just as well, there wasn’t a damn thing I could have done to stop them and I had other things to worry about. Like, if I didn’t get out of the water quick smart, the cold was going to kill me quicker than any gunnies.
It took twenty minutes to reach the far quay, three yards forward and two yards back, every second a bullet in the back of the head. When I finally got there the stone was smooth, slimy. I let myself be carried downstream, buffeted by the swell between the dock and the huge coal-freighter moored just beyond the bridge.
The rusty ladder embedded in the quay came at me fast. I bobbed by, reaching. I didn’t make the same mistake the second time, crashing in on the ladder with a sodden clang. I clung to the rungs for a minute or two, until the branding iron seared into my side, and then I let go again. I passed the next six ladders. By the time I got to the seventh I was down at the deepwater, two hundred yards from open sea, and fainting. My fingers were numb, the ladder rungs icing over. Twice I fell back into the water. On the third attempt I hauled myself out onto the dock, giddy with achievement.
I limped across the quay on jelly legs, crawled into the doorway of an abandoned warehouse. Unzipped the Puffa, pulled my shirt up, stared at the second belly button that had appeared just above my right hip. Felt for the exit wound, praying there was one, walked my fingers around it, right leg kicking uncontrollably. Ducked under my elbow to find a raw hole the size of a squash ball where I had always thought my kidneys were supposed to be. The blood was thin and black against the blueish, goose-bumped flesh.
I dug my keys out of the Puffa’s pocket, unhooked the leather keyholder. Folded it over, bit down hard. Then I balled my handkerchief, twisted it into a knot, took a deep breath and poked it into the hole. An electric shock shot down through my leg and bounced back up to fry my brain. I gagged on something hot and sour, collapsed back into the doorway, waiting for sirens to sound on the clear night air.
Noises wafted past the outer limit of my consciousness, strange noises, sounds I had never heard before. I realised I was talking to myself in a guttural tone, the words chopped up, blocky. My eyes blurred and cleared, blurred again. Sweat poured down my face, soaked my back, warm against the chill. I wondered, idly, if I was shaking from cold, or shock, or septicaemia.
I imagined a blazing log fire, a mute television screening Willy Wonka, a Christmas tree blinking in the corner. Ben a warm lump sprawled across my chest. A black hole in the corner of the room that seemed to be oscillating, expanding and contracting, enticing me to investigate further; warmth came in waves from its core. The temptation was too much. I put Ben to one side, carefully, so he wouldn’t wake. Got off the couch, struggling towards the darkness, feeling my body starting to thaw. Something nagging at the back of my mind, something important, something I couldn’t afford not to remember…
Ben.
And then it was dark and cold again, and I was jammed in the doorway of a deserted warehouse. Dying, shivering so hard parts of my body were splintering, I could hear them shatter. Slowly, precisely, I started putting the pieces back together again. There were some parts left over when
I was finished so I just left them out, pretending not to notice.
I sat up, eased my shirt back into my jeans, zipped up the Puffa, hands trembling. Peered around the corner of the warehouse. Four hundred yards away, the bridge was deserted under the orange streetlights.
I knew there were at least two of them and that they were pros. I knew they had a sub-machine gun and that they wanted me dead. That was all I knew but that was plenty to be getting on with, if they were still around I didn’t need the news to get any worse. All I had going for me was that they couldn’t be certain I’d made it out of the river, which meant they’d have to split up to search both shores. It wasn’t much, but I was alive, which just about gave me bragging rights over Gonzo.
A shiver passed through me, top to bottom, that had nothing to do with my sopping clothes, the biting wind. I didn’t indulge it, I had Ben and Denise to make safe. I was guessing that, if the pros knew I’d be crossing the bridge, they’d know that the bridge was taking me home.
There was a public phone-box in the industrial estate, on the far side of the docks, which gave me a simple choice. Cutting through the docklands would get me to the phone quicker, but also increased the chances of bumping into the pros again, and I was pretty sure I’d already used up all my nine lives. Avoiding the pros meant going all the way down to the end of the deepwater quay, away from the bridge, doubling back up the far side, coming into the industrial estate from the rear. Which was twenty minutes in a flat-out sprint, and I wasn’t even sure I could walk straight.
I thought of Ben, asleep in bed, his behind sticking up in the air. When I had him fixed in my mind I pushed myself up out of the doorway, took off at full tilt.
I was doused in sweat after fifty yards. After five hundred, my lungs were on fire again, the branding iron wiggling around in my side, legs useless stumps of marble. It was maybe five hundred yards more before I remembered Gonzo’s mobile, when it started ringing deep in the inside pocket of the Puffa.