“Jesus, Lynn, have you lost your mind?”
The blows stopped raining down suddenly.
“Ah crap.”
Paul dared to peek out.
“I broke a bastard nail.”
“Sorry for your trouble.” As soon as he said it, he regretted it. Lynn’s fist was cocked back. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Just… what the hell are you doing here?”
“What the hell am I doing?” Lynn sat back. “That’s rich.”
Paul tried to sit upright. Conscious that he was sleeping naked, he gathered the duvet to cover himself. “I don’t understand why you’re angry,” he said. It sounded pathetic but it had the advantage of being true.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t, you selfish bastard.”
She was no longer shouting at him while hitting him, which had the odd effect of making the words hurt more.
“I don’t…”
“Thanks to your idiotic behaviour, your company is getting sued and Phil is going to lose his bleedin’ job.”
“What?”
“Yes, did you not realise your actions might have consequences?”
“But…”
Lynn turned around and sat on the edge of the bed. “He’s two weeks away from becoming a dad. He’d got himself a job he was actually good at and now look – look what you did. Jesus, Paul, you were supposed to be his friend.”
“I don’t understand, we’re being sued?”
“Bunny threatened to chuck some bloke out of a window. Phil says you sent him there instead of doing it yourself.”
“Oh God.”
“Yeah. You’ve royally messed this up.”
“Me? It’s those bastard Kellehers!”
Lynn looked at him and shook her head. “Oh, for God’s sake, Paul, when are you going to grow up? Brigit, Phil – they were doing fine until you went off to wage your little war.”
“But the Kellehers…”
“The Kellehers, the Kellehers. For God’s sake. Listen to yourself, would ye? Everything is someone else’s fault, isn’t it? Phil said he’s been trying to ring you, but you’ve not been answering.”
“I was…” Paul stopped talking. What he had been doing was wallowing. He’d not answered the phone to Phil. In his head, it was dramatic. In his head, Phil was reporting it back to Brigit. In his head, she’d realise she was way out of line and come crawling over to apologise.
“Oh Christ, I’m an idiot.”
Lynn nodded. “You’ll get no disagreement from me.”
“I thought you’d gone to Spain?”
“I had. I flew back, didn’t I? So much for my plans. Abdul had asked me to move there, for good, with him. There’s too much of my Paddy in this town. Too many memories. Over there, fresh start.” She glared at Paul. “Can’t do that now, can I? I’ve got to sort Phil out. He loved that job, y’know. First thing he’d been good at.”
“Look, I’m going to…”
“Oh shut up.” She didn’t even sound angry now, just disappointed. Somehow that was much worse. “D’ye know something, you were a good kid, Paul. God knows you had it tough with your ma and everything, but I really thought you’d turn out to be a better man than this. I always felt bad that I didn’t help you more – then and, y’know, with that thing a couple of years ago. Maybe this is on me. Karma’s a bitch.”
“I’ll sort this, Lynn, I promise.”
Lynn stood up. “Sure you will.” Her voice was edged with bitterness. “Just do me a favour and keep Phil out of any more of your bright ideas. Knowing you, you’ll get him sent down. That baby of his needs a da and we both know how important that is.”
She looked around. “And for God’s sake, clean up your flat. It’s a pigsty.”
She had a fair point.
“How did you even get in here?”
Lynn glanced back at him. “Do you think you spend twenty years married to the finest burglar in the country without picking up a few things? I got through your locks with a hairpin.”
“Oh. Right.” Then, for the want of something to say, he added, “I like your new hair, by the way.”
“Yeah, it was all part of the new Spanish me.” Lynn gave Paul a long look. “Why do you think it is, that when someone else messes up, Phil is the one who always suffers?” She turned towards the door. “And it stinks in here.”
“It’s the dog.”
She walked out of the bedroom. “Sure it is. Sort your life out.”
Paul sat there in silence as, a second later, the front door slammed. He looked down at Maggie, who’d sat there calmly watching the whole thing.
“Well, you were a massive help.”
She responded by farting loudly.
Chapter Eighteen
“Yada, bollocks.” Noel took off his glasses, wiped the lenses and then put them back on his face. Sadly, it did nothing to improve the state of the spreadsheet he was looking at. He could see it fine; he just didn’t like what he was seeing.
Thankfully, he didn’t need Charlie’s jazz bar to make a profit due to his savings, but it still couldn’t keep losing money quite this fast. The speed it could lose money was entirely dependent on how long Noel was going to live for. He had kept it to himself, but he was turning eighty on Christmas Eve. He was in reasonably good nick, considering. Tourette’s was not known to be fatal and his blood pressure was high, but he had a pill for that along with every other damn thing. It seemed he couldn’t go to the doctor without coming out with another new prescription. He was surprised he didn’t rattle when he walked. The GP seemed determined that Noel was going to live forever, regardless of whether he could afford it or not. The rheumatism now meant that he didn’t play piano in front of people anymore, which he missed. He had never liked performing, but he did like sharing. It wasn’t like he’d ever been great at it, but sometimes, just sometimes, he’d touched good. That had always been more than enough. His life was the music. For all the regrets he’d stored up, he had never regretted that. He still played in private, and on a good day his fingering was still there. On a bad day, well, he just had to try and remember the good days.
He hated this time of year. The birthday made him feel old and then Christmas made him feel lonely. All those ghosts of Christmas past swirled around him and brushed against his bruised soul.
The office door behind him burst open.
“There is crazy man in bar.”
“Remember how we talked about knocking, Svetlana?”
She walloped the open door twice. “Is crazy man in bar.”
“When you say ‘crazy’, it isn’t my friend Peter again, is it? As discussed, having Tourette’s does not mean you are crazy.”
“No, is different kind of crazy. Talking to himself.”
Noel sighed. Svetlana was a good barmaid, and in five years she had never missed a day’s work. He appreciated her reliability, because he certainly wasn’t keeping her around for the sense of joy and frivolity she brought to the place.
“OK, ask Joey to have a quiet word with him then.”
“Is no Joey. Is Wednesday night.”
Noel looked across at the calendar. Was it really Wednesday already? Where did the time go?
“I said we needed Joey,” continued Svetlana, “but you say we no can afford. I suggest we fire Hugo and put on record instead, but you say we cannot do. Now crazy people taking over bar.”
Noel pushed his fingers up underneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t going to have this argument again. Hugo might be flaky, and a tad too fond of a vodka martini, but he could play and without someone on the piano they were a jazz bar in name only, in which case he might as well accept one of the offers to sell. Svetlana didn’t agree with this, or indeed understand that, as an employee, she didn’t actually have a say in it.
“Alright,” said Noel. “I’ll be right out.”
With a wince, he stood and straightened his back out as best he could. Maybe he’d head home early tonight, stick on some Miles Davis and soak in the bath. If he wa
s going to live forever, he might as well try and enjoy it a little.
He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been this. As the man turned his head slightly, Noel could see that he had a beard now, but even from the back, he was unmistakable.
Noel glanced up at the collage of pictures above the bar and saw her smiling down at him from the past. It was one of only two pictures he had of her. It was what? Good God, eighteen years since Simone had disappeared from his life. Noel still didn’t know the how or why of it. He’d only been assured by the Sisters of the Saint that she was fine, that she’d had to go home suddenly, and, while it was never said in so many words, she wouldn’t be coming back. He’d always known she was running from something – he just hoped she was alright. Well that, and hoped against hope that someday, maybe, she might come back. On the few occasions Bunny had dropped back in, he’d had no other information. In truth, Noel felt like he was intruding and tended to leave Bunny to himself. He better than anyone knew why Bunny was here. It was a pilgrimage. This was where her memory was strongest. In a quiet moment, Noel could close his eyes and still remember what it had been like to hear that voice swirl around this room. It had been beautiful. So much so, that the memory hurt. They had both loved her, in different ways, of course, but each man with all his heart. Noel didn’t like to look into Bunny’s eyes, where he only saw his pain reflected back at him.
“See,” said Svetlana, slightly too loudly, “crazy man. Sit there, talking to himself.”
Noel watched for a few moments. “Leave him be.”
“What?”
“And his drinks are on the house.”
Svetlana looked appalled. “Crazy men drink for free now?”
“That one does.”
Bunny sat on the stool and moved his glass of whiskey around on the pockmarked surface of the table. What was unsettling were the changes – mainly the fact that there weren’t any. Charlie’s looked exactly the same as it had all those years ago. Like time had stopped on the day she left.
“D’ye remember that first night we came in here?”
From across the table, a dead man, a different dead man, smiled back at him. This one he wasn’t trying to avoid; this one he had come here to see.
“I do indeed, amigo. I had to drag you in here kicking and screaming.”
Bunny smiled back at Gringo. “I wasn’t exactly keen on the jazz at the time.”
“Yeah, but by the end of the evening, you were hauled out of here, smacking together the heads of a few boys who wouldn’t keep the noise down.”
“Talk about an inauspicious start.”
“You always had an admirably low tolerance for bad manners.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Bunny raised his glass and took a sip of his whiskey. He placed it down and then ran his hand over the table’s surface again, like a blind man reading braille.
“So, are we going to talk about it?” said Gringo.
“What?”
“You know what. You’re sitting in the corner of a bar, talking to yourself. Not good, amigo.”
Bunny shrugged. “Ah sure, I’m just taking a wander down memory lane.”
“This is happening more and more now though, isn’t it?” Gringo gave him that look that Bunny remembered all too well and lowered his voice in that way he had. “I’m all for sentimentality, but… after the thing last year, remember how that doctor said you should go talk to somebody?”
“Ah, what good would that do?”
“You could get some more of those tablets.”
Bunny blew a raspberry. “They made me feel funny.”
“That’s an ironic thing to say to an hallucination of your long-dead best friend.”
“Sure, if I know it’s an hallucination, what’s the harm in it? Besides, it’s not like I’ve got the time to be waiting around for doctor’s appointments, or that I could even explain the situation to them anyway.”
Gringo nodded. “You might have a point there.”
Bunny had seen the headline earlier, but this time he’d not bothered to buy the paper. Big splash across the front of the Herald: “Dead Body is FBI Agent”.
“They know who he is,” said Gringo, “and they’ll figure out why he was here soon enough, if they don’t already know. Sooner or later, it’ll lead back to you.”
“Ah,” said Bunny, “maybe it will and maybe it won’t.”
“We both know it will, and even if it doesn’t, there’s the other shoe waiting to drop.”
Bunny shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair. By definition, it wasn’t as if Gringo was telling him something he didn’t already know. Eighteen years it had been, but the memory was still fresh. Gringo, his best friend – and despite everything that had gone on, still his best friend – had helped him rescue Simone. It had been the right thing to do, but it had left two men dead. They’d buried them under the moonlight. It was Bunny who had found the wallet and passed it to Gringo, and they’d realised that the man who had been calling himself Lopez was in fact an FBI agent called Daniel Zayas. The next time Bunny had seen Gringo, he’d been dying in his arms on that beach, having got too deep into a stupid scheme to rob the robbers. He and the other two Gardaí involved had been buried as heroes, the higher-ups not wanting to ask any questions that they might not like the answers to. As they’d waited for the ambulance, Bunny, drenched in his own shame and his best friend’s blood, had checked to see if Gringo had Zayas’s wallet, but he hadn’t. Which led to the question, who did? He’d waited and worried, but it hadn’t turned up. Bunny had tried to convince himself that perhaps Gringo really had just got rid of it, but the idea had never really stuck.
“You need to get out ahead of this, amigo.”
“How?” said Bunny. “We did bury those bodies.”
“For good reasons.”
“Sure, but those reasons are long gone. Everyone who knows the why and wherefore is either dead or…”
Simone. Who knew where she was now? Eighteen years and not so much as a postcard.
“You could leave?”
“And go where? Fecking move to the Costa del Sol with all the gone-to-seed gangster gobshites? No, thank you.”
“You’ll end up going to jail if you’re not careful.”
“Ah well, I’ve always fancied having a shot of them weights they seem to spend all their time doing in prison movies, see how buff I could get.”
“For Christ’s sake, Bunny. You up in Mountjoy? Can you imagine how many nutters with a grudge you’ll be surrounded by?”
Bunny picked up his drink and shot the rest of it back in one fluid motion. “That’s the problem with living too long. When all your friends are dead, all that’s left are the enemies.”
“Not all your friends are dead.”
“No,” said Bunny, loud enough for the man from the couple at the far side of the room to look in his direction. “Whatever happens, I’ve to keep this away from them. I won’t be taking them down with me.”
When Bunny raised his head again, Gringo was gone. Replaced with the smiling face of Zayas – his left eye sparkling beside the open wound where the other one should be.
“Don’t worry, Detective, I think there will be plenty of pain to go around.”
Chapter Nineteen
Detective Donnacha Wilson tried hard to keep his eyes on the road, which was a little tricky as the woman in the passenger seat of his car was currently taking her arm apart.
“Damn thing. The guy from DARPA said I must have a screw loose.”
Wilson did not know what the socially optimal response was in this scenario, or indeed, what the hell a DARPA was. He remained silent but, despite himself, glanced downwards. The arm was sitting on her lap as she turned it around, flipping open panels and tightening screws. Unnervingly, the hand occasionally clenched and unclenched as she did so.
“He said it was something to do with the whatchamacallit receiving confused signals down from the, y’know.”
“R
ight, yeah.” You couldn’t go wrong with agreeing with somebody, could you? Not unless she was being sarcastic. He didn’t think she was, but it was hard to tell. From his limited experience with American accents, she spoke in what he guessed was a sort of West Coast whine. Her freakishly smooth and tight skin made her hard to read. It felt rude to look at her face too long, but then every time he averted his eyes, he seemed to end up looking at the arm. At least he knew he could look at the road without getting into trouble. Right now, he was really trying not to think about what remained up Agent Dove’s right sleeve. It was nearly rubbing up against him. Could he use the word stump? That definitely sounded rude. Oh God, this whole thing was a bloody nightmare.
They’d spent the morning working through what leads they had, which weren’t many. The problem with a body that was eighteen years dead was that there were very limited leads. When the body in question wasn’t even supposed to be in the country where it was found, the leads were scarcer still.
In six hours, he had yet to see Dove eat anything. She seemed to live off coffee and an alarming collection of pills, which she stopped to pop about once an hour. He didn’t know what they were for, and he wasn’t going to ask. The woman was a conversation-killing machine. Oh God, he shouldn’t think of her as a machine, that would definitely be offensive, at least to the ninety-three or so per cent of her that was human. God, now he thought of it, were there any other bits of her that were mechanical? How much until you were technically a cyborg? Another for the list of questions he couldn’t ask. It wasn’t that the woman was unfriendly – if anything, it was the opposite. She smiled a lot, in fact, frankly, far too much. There was a certain level of cheerfulness that was downright creepy, and she had exceeded it. Nobody was that happy, and anyone who pretended otherwise was either secretly miserable, completely unhinged from reality, or both.
He turned onto Promenade Road and looked down again. He just realised what this reminded him of – Star Wars! Wasn’t there a scene where Luke Skywalker was tinkering with his own hand like that? Wilson looked up and slammed the brakes on – just in time to stop them slamming into the back of a cement truck whose driver had stopped to contemplate a road sign.
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