Last Orders (The Dublin Trilogy Book 4)

by Caimh McDonnell

  Brigit moved closer to the exit of the cavern and listened to see if she could hear anything.

  “So, have yourself and Paulie sorted yourselves out yet?”

  She closed her eyes, trying to adjust to the darkness, then quickly peeked around the corner. She could see nothing in the tunnel as it rose up, bar the faintest of lights at the far end, where just around the bend an overcast night and God knows what else awaited them.

  She looked back at Bunny. “Is now really the time to discuss this?”

  Bunny stood up. “Trust me, Conroy, there is no time like the present.”

  “Well, alright then. If you must know, we have, actually. Just tonight. We also sorted that thing with the Kellehers, by the way, although it’s starting to feel like something of a hollow victory now that we’re going to actually die. Saving the company seems somehow redundant.”

  “That’s fantastic news, Conroy – about you and Paulie, I mean. ’Tis great. He can be an eejit but he’s a good lad. I’m glad he has you.”

  “Well, we’ll see how things go.”

  “Take it from one who knows, don’t waste time. There are no second chances.”

  Brigit held Bunny’s wonky-eyed gaze for a moment and then he looked away.

  “Of course, my love life is fairly dependent on not dying in the next twenty or so minutes.”

  “You’ll be fine. I’m going to take care of this. You just stay out of the way. This isn’t your fight.”

  She turned to Bunny, full of outrage. “Now that’s a shitty thing to say. We’re in this together. I’m not going to stand on the sideline like some helpless damsel in distress. Screw you and your kamikaze bollocks, McGarry, we will sort this out together.”

  Bunny held his hands up. “Alright, alright. Relax, would you?”

  “‘Relax,’ he says. You can be really annoying sometimes, you know that?”

  “No, to be honest, you’re the first person to mention it. Come here and give me a hand with this, would you?”

  Brigit followed Bunny over to the far wall. There was a metal bar firmly attached to it, about six inches off the ground. “I think this is where they had Fiachra’s chain attached for all those years.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah. Grab a hold of it there, would you please?”

  Brigit grabbed it with both hands. “I don’t think we’ll be able to shift this, Bunny. It’s really sturdy.”

  “It’ll be fine, just get a good grip there.”

  “OK, but…”

  “One… two…”

  Then she heard the click. She looked down at the metal bracelet wrapped around her wrist. The handcuffs. The other end was fastened to the bar.

  Bunny stepped smartly away.

  “What in the hell?”

  “Sorry, Conroy. Can’t have you getting yourself hurt. Like I said, this isn’t your fight.”

  Brigit ran the handcuffs up and down the metre-long bar of metal. “Are you out of your damn mind?! Let me out of this right this minute.”

  He pulled something out of his coat pocket and held it out. It appeared to be a wind-up toy chicken.

  “I’ll attach the key to this little fella. He’ll walk it over to you in a couple of minutes and you can release yourself. That should be enough time.”

  “Time for what?”

  Bunny bent down and picked up the hurley in one hand and the Molotov cocktail in the other. “I’m going to rush them. They won’t be expecting that. I’ll catch them by surprise.”

  “They’re armed, Bunny. That’s suicide.”

  He shrugged. “You never know, Conroy. I’ve probably lived longer than I should’ve already. At least this way, I get to go out swinging.”

  Tears of frustration were now streaming down Brigit’s face. She heaved at the handcuffs again.

  “Look, just let me out and I promise I’ll do what you say.”

  Bunny shook his head sadly. “You won’t, Conroy. You’ll try and help. It’s in your DNA. You couldn’t stop yourself if you wanted to.”

  “Let me out!”

  As he spoke, Bunny moved back over to the fire, placing the tiny gun in one pocket, the improvised Molotov cocktail in the other. “Soon enough. Sorry about all this, Conroy. Now, in a few minutes, hopefully there’ll be a fair bit of confusion outside. You sneak up to the exit and then you run. Don’t head for the cars, they’ll have disabled them. Just run as fast as you can. No matter what you see or what you hear, you run as far as you can and you don’t look back. Have your phone in your hand with 999 in it and call when you get a signal, but keep running.”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  Bunny wound the toy and went to place it on the ground, the key to the handcuffs dangling off the little plastic winding arm on its side. As he was about to put it down, he stopped and looked behind him. Then he looked at Brigit. “There’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  He stood back up. “Do you know why Paulie and me didn’t speak for all those years?”

  “Really? You want to discuss that now?”

  “Humour me.”

  Brigit sighed heavily. “Of course I do. He was playing on your hurling team and he was God’s gift to whacking a ball with a stick. A couple from down the country somewhere, lecturers or something, wanted to adopt him and you… you messed it up because you wanted him to stay on the team and win some championship.”

  Bunny nodded. “Yeah, that.”

  “Look, he’s forgiven you for all of that. Long time ago.”

  “Nah, he hasn’t. Not really. Thing is…” A peculiar look passed across his face. “It’s not true.”

  “OK.”

  “Nobody would’ve been happier to see Paulie get a chance like that than me. I would’ve been over the moon, only…” Bunny shifted the hurley around in his hand, his eyes firmly fixed on it as he spoke. “I looked into them, to be certain, y’know, that everything was on the up and up. Took some digging but it turned out the husband was a grade A fucking scumbag.”

  Brigit watched as Bunny’s face reddened at the memory. He pursed his lips and tightened his grip on the hurley.

  “D’you mean…”

  He nodded. “Yeah. So I couldn’t let Paulie, y’know…”

  There was a crack in his voice as he spoke.

  “So I stopped it. Killed it dead. I didn’t have proof – I mean legal proof. Not yet. But I knew. A friend of mine was helping me out with it. Then the husband, he died the next year in a car crash.”

  “Was that… ?”

  Bunny looked up into Brigit’s eyes. “Me? No. Actual car crash. Sometimes God beats you to the punchline. There were rumours by then, but it hadn’t properly come out.”

  “I don’t… why didn’t you tell Paul? Why leave him hating you all those years?”

  “His da left when he was a baby. His ma, God rest her, died. His Aunt Fidelma and the rest of her bloody family wanted nothing to do with him. I couldn’t have the lad thinking the only people who seemed to actually want him were… I couldn’t have that. Him hating me was easier. I could still keep an eye on him, even if he thought I was only doing so to try and get my own back in some way.”

  “Christ. All this time…”

  Bunny puffed out his cheeks. “So, up to you. Tell him, don’t tell him. I was never going to say anything but, well, he has you now. Somebody who wants him for the right reasons. That’s a good thing. The best thing. Maybe he doesn’t need to go to his grave thinking ill of me. At least, not for that.”

  “Jesus, Bunny…”

  He quickly wound the toy chicken and placed it down on the ground.

  “Please don’t…”

  He watched it for a couple of seconds, making sure it was heading in the right direction, and then turned and walked away.

  “Please, Bunny, don’t do this.”

  He stopped, the light of the fire throwing his giant shadow against the tunnel wall.

  “Remember,” said Bunny, “don’t look back.
”

  Then he was gone.

  She wanted to call out after him, scream, but she knew she couldn’t. Whatever element of surprise he might have, she couldn’t take that away. She got onto the floor and stretched her legs out – straining every fibre of her being to reach for the chicken as it slowly, painfully slowly, marched its way towards her. She kept her eyes focused on it as if was the centre of her world, which, in a way, it was now.

  In the background, she heard a roar – Bunny.

  Then a scream.

  Then a series of rapid-fire shots.

  Then another shot.

  Then nothing. Nothing but the steady whirr of the little robot chicken, diligently making its way towards her.

  Four inches…

  Three inches…

  Two more shots rang out.

  Two inches…

  She flinched as a final shot rang out.

  Then nothing.

  One inch…

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Christmas Morning, 3:15am

  Bunny watched the flakes of snow flutter down from the sky. It was like they just appeared out of thin air a few feet above his head. Magical. Dawn had only started to touch the sky in the east, the light of a new day creeping up on the night of the old one. As ways to die went, there were worse.

  All around the country, parents would be silently swearing as they assembled toys they hadn’t realised would require assembling. Kids would be lying in their beds, counting the seconds, waiting for whatever was the agreed upon acceptable time for morning to start. Everywhere, life would be proceeding as it should. Memories would be made, the kind of memories a life was supposed to be made up of.

  Not his. His life was filled with the dead and departed. Even now, they swirled around him.

  Zayas: “Oh dear, Detective, things have not gone well for you. This is most unfortunate.”

  “Yeah, well, you still died first, so one–nil to me, ye flabby-arsed goat-humper.”

  He moved his hand down to his stomach area. Pain greeted his slightest touch. He could feel his blood soaking through his jumper, sticky and clinging. He also had a wound on his neck where a knife had almost ended him. He felt cold. It was a different kind of cold to the way you usually felt from lying in the snow.

  As suicide missions went, it had not gone badly. Two out of three ain’t bad. Meatloaf had said that, although he had not been referring to the dispatching of trained killers at the time. At least, Bunny didn’t think so, but then he had never paid a great deal of attention to the lyrics. The problem with two out of three was the third.

  The tall man stood over him. “Mr McGarry, nice to finally meet you properly.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  This was the man Bunny had seen outside the flats in a baseball cap and then elsewhere in a coat with a goatee. He was clean-shaven again now. Looking at him, it seemed that the man had spent forever in the corner of Bunny’s eye.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up.”

  The man looked down at him, a calm expression on his face. His accent was a hard–to-place, generic American. “You are quite the tricky individual. We have been following you for some time now – since the bodies were discovered, in fact. I reasoned you weren’t the type to respond favourably to interrogation.”

  “Ah, you’d be right on that front. I’m not much of a talker.”

  “I thought, given your erratic behaviour, that you might be tempted to contact Ms Delamere, to warn her. We were up on your phone, house, office. We covered you 24/7, but nothing.”

  “That must’ve been awful disappointing for you.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I’m inclined to think you don’t know where she is.”

  “You’d be right.”

  “We pursued a couple of other lines of enquiry while here, but sadly they came to a dead end too. We were about to take you, before the authorities did, when you announced you were going to retrieve the tape.”

  Bunny coughed. He felt something thick and wet catch in his throat. He spat it out. “Yeah, well, I figured if you were looking for her, you were probably ultimately looking for that.”

  “Correct. Do you have it?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “That is unfortunate. If you have any information, I will promise to dispatch your lady friend quickly.”

  “Simone?”

  “The one in the cave.”

  “You’re too late on that front. When you shot at us the first time, you got her right in the head. You’ll just find a dead body in there, ye prick.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Sorry about your two buddies though.”

  He shrugged. “Merely employees. Frankly, they weren’t very good at their jobs to have been taken so easily, especially as you appear to have been mostly unarmed.”

  “Ah, I’ve got my devastating looks at least.”

  “Incidentally, whiskey doesn’t burn well enough to make a Molotov cocktail.”

  “I thought that. Luckily, your employee didn’t.”

  Bunny had charged the short fella and hurled the dud Molotov. It had at least forced him to duck, putting his head at the perfect height to taste Mabel’s kiss. A brief struggle over the hurley had followed and then Bunny had snapped the man’s neck.

  “In their defence, they had been told to try and take you alive.”

  “Ah, right.”

  The man nudged the derringer, which lay on the ground, with his foot. “I presume this is the murder weapon that dispatched Agent Zayas. How interesting.”

  There was a groan somewhere in the darkness to their left.

  “Oh good,” said Bunny. “I’m glad she isn’t dead.”

  He had managed to take the woman’s gun out with a swing of Mabel, but not before she had shot him in the leg. Then she had come at him with the knife. She had sliced his neck and made a deep wound in his arm before he’d managed to reach his derringer and fire a shot into her midsection.

  “To be honest with you, I wasn’t comfortable at all with fighting a woman. I mean, she did have a gun and a knife. ’Tis a minefield isn’t it – is it more sexist to hit her or not hit her in that situation?”

  “Personally, I am an equal opportunity employer.”

  Bunny winced as the man casually fired two shots towards the source of the groaning, which abruptly ceased.

  “I can’t afford to carry passengers.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a shit-stain on the soul of humanity?”

  “It really is nothing personal. In an ideal situation, I’d try and patch you up and take you with me, so we could have a much longer and detailed chat, but sadly this operation is blown.” The man looked down at Bunny’s midsection. “You also don’t look like you have long left.”

  “Ah, I made it longer than I’d any right to.”

  “Luckily, you were kind enough to choose a location so remote that I’ll be out of the country by the time your bodies are discovered.” He looked up at the sky. “Still, I must get on. I need to check the cave before the sun comes up, just in case you actually did have the tape, and of course to kill your friend.”

  Bunny looked up at the sky and smiled.

  “Mr McGarry, are you listening to me?”

  No reaction, just the same smile.

  “Is there anything you’d like to offer in an attempt to save your life?”

  Nothing.

  “Mr—”

  “Shush.” With blood staining his lips, he gave a broad smile. “I can hear her singing.”

  He closed his eyes.

  The man pointed the gun at Bunny’s head.

  A final shot rang out.

  Chapter Sixty

  January 2018

  Brigit held Paul’s hands, which were wrapped around the handle of an umbrella, held over both their heads. The rain had started to come down steadily now.

  The priest was doing his best to be heard but there were far more people than he could ever reach, regardless of ho
w hard he shouted. Brigit looked around her. There were umbrellas as far as the eye could see. Most of the people under them couldn’t hope to hear proceedings but still they stood in silence, paying their respects.

  Everywhere she looked, people were crying. Kids, women, men.

  Beside them, little Lynn Chen Bernard Nellis, all of nine days old, sat in her buggy, under the watchful eyes of her parents. They had felt it was important to bring her. Phil Nellis stood hand in hand with his wife, tears streaming down his face.

  That made Brigit feel awkward.

  As if on cue, the baby started to wail.

  Phil bent down and picked her up and her cries instantly ceased. It was quite the extraordinary thing. As soon as he picked her up, without fail, little Lynn stopped crying. Babies that young can’t see, and yet she seemed to look at her daddy with a kind of wonder.

  Brigit gave a little smile and then scanned the rest of the crowd. Most people had their eyes on the ground, some on the priest, some looking at the coffin. Brigit stopped with a jolt as she made eye contact with a face she recognised. DI Jimmy Stewart (retired) was looking right at her.

  She nodded at him.

  He nodded back.

  Brigit blushed and turned back towards the grave. They had started to lower the coffin.

  In the absence of family – a proper family, at least – people had felt the need to come and express their condolences to Paul, Brigit and Phil. They’d shaken countless hands over the last hour. Paul and Phil had appeared to know at least some of them, Brigit only a small percentage. It seemed like half of Dublin was there.

  Just as things were finishing, Jimmy Stewart appeared. He grasped Brigit’s hand in a firm shake and leaned in to whisper, ”I don’t believe this.”

  Odd choice of words – it had mostly been variations on “sorry for your loss” up until this point, with more than a few “great man” and “he’ll be missed” thrown in.

  “Yes,” replied Brigit, “it came as a big shock to us all.”

  “No. I mean I think this whole thing is nonsense. He’s not dead.”

  Brigit and Paul looked at each other.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”