Buried

by Graham Masterton

  She turned to John. He was biting his knuckle so hard that blood was sliding down his wrist and his eyes were crammed with tears. He was in so much pain that he couldn’t even look at her.

  She laid her hand gently on his forehead again and then she said, ‘That’s it, John. They have to call a doctor for you. You need to be in hospital.’

  John took his hand out of his mouth and said, ‘Please, Kyna, for the love of God. I can’t take this take any more. I don’t care if they kill me. Just make it stop.’

  Kyna stood up and went to the living-room door. She banged on it with both fists and shouted out, ‘Open the door! Open the door! We need a doctor! You have to send for a doctor!’

  She stopped, and listened, but all she could hear was the muffled sound of a television in another room.

  ‘Open this fecking door, you bastards!’ she screamed, and beat at the door panels even harder. ‘We need a doctor! This man is dying in here! Open this fecking door!’

  She waited again. This time she could hear the television suddenly become louder as a door was opened, and then footsteps coming along the corridor outside. The key was turned and the door pushed inwards, so that she had to step back two or three paces. Ger was standing there, beaky-nosed, smoking, barefoot, in a crumpled striped shirt with no collar and his usual raspberry chinos. He was still wearing his huge dark glasses, and even indoors he was wearing his stained white hat.

  ‘What the feck is this all this fecking commotion for, girl?’ he demanded. ‘Jesus, you’re making as much noise as ten pigs stuck in a gate!’

  ‘It’s John,’ said Kyna. ‘He needs a doctor, urgently. Look at his foot. I mean, look at it, will you, he’s going to die of the blood poisoning if we don’t get him treated.’

  Ger wrinkled up his nose and looked at John over Kyna’s shoulder. ‘Mother of God, I don’t have to look at his fecking foot, I can smell it from here. Worse than a knacker’s flange. I don’t know how you can stand it. Except you don’t have the choice, do you?’

  ‘You need to call for an ambulance,’ said Kyna.

  ‘Oh, is that right? So I call for an ambulance and then what happens? The paramedics will want to know what happened to your man’s feet and who he is and what he’s after doing here, won’t they? And I don’t suppose you’ll be keeping your bake shut either, will you, Sidhe, or whatever your fecking name is?’

  Kyna tried to snatch at Ger’s sleeve and pull him into the room so that he could see close up how badly infected John’s feet were. He wrenched his sleeve free from her and said, ‘Away to feck, would you? There’s feck all I can do about it. If I call for an ambulance, the next person who’ll be needing a fecking ambulance will be myself, don’t you have any doubts about that. And you, too, more than likely.’

  ‘At least fetch me a bowl of hot water and something I can bandage his feet with. And maybe you have some disinfectant – iodine, anything will do. And some Nurofen, if you have it, or aspirin. Anything. He’s in terrible pain.’

  ‘You have some nerve, you know,’ Ger told her. ‘Making out you’re some skanger and all the time you’re an undercover guard. My sense of smell fair let me down then, I should have smelled bacon the minute you walked into the pub. Mind you, it’s come back since. The stink in here is pure mank. I’m not codding, I’d feel sorry for you if you weren’t a shade.’

  Kyna was close to tears. ‘Have you no heart in you at all, for God’s sake? Look at the state of him. All I’m asking you for is some hot water and some disinfectant, and a few bits of old torn-up sheet or something to bandage his feet with. If he dies, you’ll be done for manslaughter at the very least.’

  ‘If he dies, darling, nobody will ever find him, or know what became of him, and the same will go for you, too. The Big Feller doesn’t like to leave evidence behind him or people to open their yaps and say what he did.’

  ‘Please,’ Kyna begged him.

  After thinking and smoking for a few moments, Ger nodded and said, ‘Okay. I’ll see what I can do. But, you know,’ and as he said this he looked Kyna up and down, ‘maybe there’s something that you can do for me in return, do you know what I mean, like?’

  Kyna said, ‘Please, whatever you want. Just fetch me something to clean his feet.’

  ‘That’s a promise, like?’

  Kyna closed her eyes and nodded. She couldn’t imagine that Ger could do anything worse to her than Bobby Quilty.

  When Ger had gone, she knelt down beside John again and held his hand. John was still trembling, but he managed to glance at her quickly two or three times and say, ‘Katie – does Katie know about this?’

  ‘I’m sure she does. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly where we are, but she’ll find us. You know she will.’

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘Not exactly. But we must have been driving for at least three hours, and judging by their accents I’d say we’re north of the border somewhere. Probably South Armagh, because that’s where Bobby Quilty comes from originally.’

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, my feet hurt. Even if they won’t call for a doctor at least they must have some painkillers.’

  ‘I’ve asked him. Whether he brings some or not, I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘I walked out on her,’ said John.

  ‘Katie? Yes, I know.’

  ‘Did she tell you why? She was expecting another man’s baby and I was jealous. Seems petty, doesn’t it, when you look at me now? Hurting so much that I can hardly think and expecting her to come and rescue me.’

  ‘She lost the baby.’

  ‘I know. I heard. I know one of the radiographers at CUH.’ He paused and clenched his teeth, his face a mask of a suffering. After a while, though, he relaxed a little and said, ‘Comes in waves. One second I feel better, the next I feel like I’m being cremated alive, feet first.’

  He clenched his teeth again and groaned in the back of his throat. Then he breathed out and said, ‘She didn’t – she didn’t get rid of the baby because of me, did she?’

  Kyna said, ‘No. She was going to keep it. We even talked about names. Brendan, she was thinking of, if it was a boy, or Cliona if it was a girl. She liked the idea of naming a little girl after a fairy.’

  ‘I was worried it was my fault.’

  ‘Then you don’t know Katie very well, do you? Katie takes total responsibility for everything she does, no matter how bad it is. No – she had a serious scuffle with some scummer while she was trying to make an arrest and got herself kicked. She hasn’t got over it, even now.’

  John turned his head and looked at Kyna through eyes that were slitted with pain. ‘You almost sound as if you know her better than me.’

  Kyna squeezed his hand and tried to smile, and said, ‘I love her.’

  They heard the key in the door again and Kyna stood up. Ger came into the room, followed by one of the men who had helped carry John into the house on a stretcher – an unshaven, narrow-faced man in a dark grey turtleneck sweater, his hair brushed forward in a widow’s peak.

  Ger was carrying a grubby white flannelette sheet over his arm. He rolled it up and threw it over to Kyna. ‘There, that’s the best I can do you in the way of bandages.’

  ‘This is filthy,’ said Kyna. ‘This is only going to make the infection even worse.’

  ‘Well, in case of that, I fetched you some disinfectant,’ said Ger. He turned around to the man with the widow’s peak, who handed him a blue plastic bottle of Domestos bleach, with the top already taken off. He walked over to the couch where John was lying and held up the bottle as if it were the Olympic torch.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Kyna. John looked up at him in pain and bewilderment.

  ‘First aid, that’s what they call it, isn’t it?’ said Ger, and poured undiluted bleach all over John’s exposed left foot.

  The only scream that Kyna had ever heard that was higher and more agonized than the scream John let out then was when a young woman had thrown herself in front of a train at
Heuston station in Dublin. He arched his back and dug his fingers into the seat cushions and kicked his left leg again and again as if he were trying to kick it off. He was incoherent with pain.

  Kyna dropped to her knees and twisted the sheet that Ger had given her around John’s foot. She tried frantically to dab the bleach out of the blackened, pus-clogged cavity that Chisel’s drill hole had now become, but every time she touched it John’s whole body went into a spasm and he started to pant as if he had been running to the point of exhaustion. At last he clutched at her arm and said, ‘Stop, stop, Kyna, leave it, leave it, don’t touch it any more!’

  ‘Oh, Kyna, is it?’ said Ger. ‘So that’s your real name? You’re not Sidhe then, after all?’

  ‘Fetch some hot water!’ Kyna told him, standing up. ‘You could have killed him with shock, doing a stupid thing like that, you gowl!’

  ‘What did you fecking call me?’ Ger demanded. He brandished the Domestos bottle in front of Kyna’s face and said, ‘How would you like a splash of this straight in your eyes, Miss Undercover Shade?’

  ‘Just stop acting the maggot, will you, and fetch me some hot water,’ Kyna screamed at him, ‘If you don’t, I’ll go fetch it myself and damn you!’

  Ger swung back the bottle. Before he had the chance to throw any bleach at her, however, Kyna spun around and kicked him in the face, her right heel hitting his left cheekbone so hard that his neck jerked sideways. His sunglasses snapped and his dirty white hat flew off. He staggered backwards in a complicated dance, dropping the bottle of bleach so that it emptied down one leg of his chinos. He nearly fell over but the man with the widow’s peak made a grab for his upper arm and he managed to regain his balance.

  Without his hat, Kyna saw that Ger was almost bald, except for a few stray clumps of wild grey hair. Without his dark glasses, she saw that he was blind in one eye. His right eye was totally white and bulging in its socket, like a hard-boiled quail’s egg.

  He bent down and picked up his hat, jamming it back on to his head at a rakish angle, as if he had done it for comic effect. The man with the widow’s peak found his dark glasses on the floor and handed them to him, but the right lens was missing and Ger slung them across the room in a fury.

  He advanced on Kyna, holding up both fists. Kyna stayed where she was, tense but calm, her knees slightly bent and both hands lifted, and it was obvious that she wasn’t afraid of him at all – not in a fair fight, anyway.

  Ger’s chin was tilted upwards and his one good eye was wide open, staring at Kyna without blinking.

  ‘Ger – don’t try it, Ger,’ Kyna warned him. ‘It’s not worth it. You won’t prove anything except that you’re older and slower and blinder and that I can give you a fierce bad beating if I want to.’

  Ger thought for a moment. He opened and closed his mouth as if he were about to say something, but then thought better of it. He slowly lowered his fists, stepped back and said, ‘No, maybe you’re right, girl. Maybe you’re right. I wouldn’t stand a chance in hell against all that martial arts jiggery-pokery of yours, now, would I? That take-one-door or whatever the feck you call it.’

  ‘Now can I have some hot water?’ said Kyna.

  ‘Sure, yes. Absolutely. Of course you can. Grady, there’s a plastic bowl under the sink in the kitchen. Fill that up with hot water, will you, boy, and bring it back here, quick as you like.’

  The man with the widow’s peak left the living room. Kyna knelt down beside John again and took hold of his hand. ‘John?’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  John’s eyelids were fluttering and he was licking his lips as if he were thirsty, but he was only barely conscious and he didn’t answer. Very carefully, she unwound the towel that was still wrapped around his right foot, and when she lifted it away she could see that his right foot was even more seriously infected than the left one. It was charcoal-black from his toes to his ankle and glistening with thin liquid pus, as if it had been varnished.

  Ger was standing close behind her. He whistled and said, ‘Jesus Christ on a fecking wagon wheel! That feller’s going to be needing some replacement plates of meat, if you ask me.’

  The man with the widow’s peak came back with another, younger man, who was carrying a blue plastic washbasin half filled with steaming water. The younger man set it down beside Kyna and grinned at her as he did so. He had fair curly hair thick with dandruff and raging red spots and he was wearing a red baseball cap backwards. He smelled strongly of skunk.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kyna.

  ‘Oh, you’re very welcome,’ he told her. As he stood up, however, he seized her left arm, gripping it very tight, and at the same time the man with the widow’s peak took hold of her right arm.

  ‘You – bastards! Let – go of me! Let go!’ she shrilled at them, trying to wrench herself free, but the two of them were far too strong for her and they hauled her up on to her feet. She bent her knees so that they would have to drop down to the floor, but she weighed less than fifty kilos and they easily held her up between them, even with her feet in the air. They turned her around to face Ger and she could see by the look on his face that he hadn’t forgiven her for kicking him and breaking his dark glasses, not one bit. His left cheekbone was crimson and swollen now, and his one good eye was beginning to close up.

  ‘Do you know what happened to the last old doll who tried to hit me?’ he said, and gave her a grin. ‘I have to say tried, because you’re the only old doll who’s ever succeeded. But even though she only tried, she got herself beat up so bad that her own mother couldn’t recognize her when we dropped her off home, and I’m not shitting you, I promise.’

  Kyna lowered her feet to the floor and took a deep breath. ‘Let me tell you this, Ger. I was shot in the stomach less than six months ago. I’m still recovering. Look here, if you don’t believe me.’

  Even though the man with the widow’s peak was holding her arm, she was able to lift up her TROUBLE T-shirt to show him the swastika-shaped scar next to her navel. Ger stared at it and then said, ‘All right, doll, I believe you. What the feck does that have to do with the grass and the goose on the side of a mountain?’

  ‘If you beat me, I’ll start to bleed again internally and you won’t be able to stop it and I’ll die. You probably won’t give a damn yourself, but Bobby Quilty will. Why do you think he’s gone to all of the trouble to keep me and John here as hostages? In fact, if you kill me, he’ll probably kill you, and if he doesn’t they’ll find my body whatever you say and you’ll be done for murder.’

  Ger couldn’t stop himself from grinning. ‘Fair play to you, girl, I think that’s the best fecking excuse for not getting beat up that I ever heard anybody come out with.’

  ‘You can call it an excuse but you know it’s true,’ Kyna told him. She was trying to sound brave, but her heart was beating so hard against her ribcage that it hurt, and she had wet herself a little.

  Ger came up very close to her so that she was almost suffocated by the smell of stale tobacco and alcohol. She had always dreamed that she would die in some loving woman’s arms, with the sun going down and filling the bedroom with its last tangerine light – not beaten to death in a shabby living room by a one-eyed criminal with poisonous breath.

  ‘No beating, then,’ said Ger. But then he grasped both of her shoulders and tilted his head back. For a split second she wondered if he were going to give her some kind of mock-benediction, but then he butted her hard in the face with his forehead. Her nasal bone snapped and blood gushed out of her nostrils, and her knees gave way from under her. The two men let her collapse on to the floor, concussed, both of her eyes rolled up like Ger’s one blind eye.

  John was still unconscious, too. Ger looked over at him and then down at Kyna, and said, ‘There. Let that be a fecking lesson to the both of them. Don’t try messing with Ger Daley because that’s what you’ll get. Grady – find my glimmers for me, would you, boy, and the lens that dropped out of them? See if you can’t stick them back together f
or me.’

  He left the room. Grady and the spotty young man scouted around the floor for his sunglasses and the missing lens, giggling to each other like children, and once they had found them they left the room, too, and locked the door behind them.

  More than twenty minutes passed before Kyna became aware of her surroundings again. She was seeing double and her head was banging so hard that she could barely think. She was struggling to breathe, too, and when she put her hand up to her face she found that the blood had dried hard around her mouth and chin like a Hannibal Lecter mask. With extreme caution she touched the bridge of her nose, and sucked in her breath when she felt the broken bone crunch inside it.

  ‘Mother of God,’ she whispered to herself, and awkwardly sat up. John was still lying on the couch with his eyes closed, his face an asbestos grey, although she could hear him softly snoring.

  She wanted to sob, but she bit her lower lip hard to stop herself because it would have hurt too much. She had never felt so hopeless and abandoned in the whole of her life.

  Thirty-one

  The rain began to ease off as they took Barney for his walk up to the Carrigaloe Rushbrooke pier. On the way back the wind was blowing dry and cool and the ferry terminal lights glittered on the river. Katie began to feel calmer and more composed than she had for days.

  In the back of her mind she was still fretting about Kyna and John, but she knew that Alan was right. So long as they remained alive, Bobby Quilty had a guarantee that the Garda would turn a blind eye to his cigarette-smuggling business and that they wouldn’t try to implicate him in the murder of Detective Barry or the shooting of Darragh Murphy.