The Bloomsday Dead

by Adrian McKinty

  I hope he sees my ironic grin. I mean, I know two people have been murdered and it’s a pretty serious situation. But even so there’s no need for coarseness or incivility.

  In my day the police had been called the Royal Ulster Constabulary and were a largely white male Protestant force. After the Patten Report their name had been changed first to the Northern Ireland Police Service, which had an unfortunate acronym, and then to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Supposedly, now they are less white, less male, less Prod, and more responsive to the public.

  Old habits, however, clearly die hard.

  I sit down on the deck and dangle my legs over the side.

  I’d be smoking if I had a cigarette.

  The lead cop decides to pretend I’m not there. That’s how his authority will survive my disobedience of his direct order. I see it as a small victory for the general public. Bloody cops. I lean my head back against the cabin behind me.

  Blink.

  And then there’s something I miss.

  The stiffening of the air. A sudden tension. Violent thoughts leaking into the atmosphere.

  For the last ten years I’ve been a wanted man. Hyperaware. Able to take in everything within my field of vision. Able to siphon out the chatter from the real data. Able to see what is relevant and what is not. Whether people are potential threats or harmless individuals going about their lives. Unlike Bridget, I haven’t had bodyguards, armored cars, lackeys. It has kept me cautious, suspicious, paranoid. It has kept me alive. I’m always looking for the assassin carrying the handgun under the bunch of flowers.

  Bridget, however, has changed things.

  She has given me an escape from that kind of thinking. Away from that life: if you find Siobhan the slate is wiped. You’re clean. Safe.

  The killers will be withdrawn. You don’t have to sit next to the wall at the back of the bar. You don’t have to count the exits and memorize them. You don’t have to move house every single year. You can live like a normal man again.

  An attractive proposition.

  It would be nice to sit outside in a café, it would be nice to day-dream, to let people come and go.

  And with these thoughts ebbing into my consciousness, it could be that my guard has fallen a little. The promise of that. That little chink of hope.

  And perhaps that’s why I don’t see the van drive up an alley between the apartment complexes. Maybe that’s why I don’t notice the two men in ski masks getting slowly out.

  The chugging of a river barge, birds, clouds, footsteps. Feedback through the police radios.

  A midge lands on me and begins sucking my blood.

  My mind preparing the talking points. I’m a private investigator working for Bridget Callaghan. I got a tip-off about a man called Barry who lived on a boat called the Ginger Bap. I came here to check him out, the lock on the cabin was already broken, so I went down and I found these bodies. I told Donnie over there to call you guys. Don’t worry, I’m a professional, I didn’t touch a thing.

  Aye, that’ll do.

  As they come closer, the air is so inert I can hear their entire tedious cop conversation. Zapata is talking about the decline of modern music.

  “All just a beat and a backing track. No bloody talent needed for that. I remember when you could actually hear tunes and there were decent lyrics.”

  “What are you going on about, there are A1 bands about these days, so there are. Fact is, you never listen to anything but the bloody Beatles. Love me bloody do, for Chrissake,” one of the other cops replies.

  “Load of shite; tell ya, boy, I know more about it than you and your Downtown Radio country special. Garth Brooks and all that oul shite.”

  The midge continues sucking my arm. Only the female of the biting species of midge eat blood. They need fats and protein to make eggs. Sperm is cheap. I let her get on with it. The cops are nearly over.

  I stand.

  “You were talking about rap a minute ago. Now what are you whittering on about? You should listen to modern stuff sometime, PJ Harvey or the White Stripes.”

  “Same oul balls.”

  “Gentlemen, please,” the woman says, mocking them.

  “I used to be in a band, drummer in a three-piece,” the peeler who hasn’t spoken yet begins, but before anyone can say anything more, the rocket-propelled grenade aimed at me explodes ten feet short of the boat, right in front of the four cops.

  Disastrous noise.

  A clenched light-cone warning a second before the hail.

  I literally hit the deck.

  Talk, invective, all sucked away and burned in the air, like a record scraping off.

  A civilian would perhaps have been killed by the explosion. The cops, even lulled as they are, still have a fast reaction-response time. The white flash of the blast gives them an instant to get down. An instant, it is hardly quantifiable. The time it takes for me in free fall to clatter to the wood. Three of the cops even get hands up to their faces before the shock wave rains debris and fire over their bodies and blows out four pairs of eardrums. The monstrous sound is metal twisting and advanced chemical morphology. An ammonia flare of Soviet-made fire, a smell like chaff igniting.

  The shock wave rocks the boat and slides me across the deck right onto the port side.

  The guy that fired the RPG on the embankment sees that he’s short and hurriedly begins to load another grenade. And now I notice him, when it’s too bloody late. And there’s a comrade next to him with some kind of heavy machine gun.

  The grenade attached, the shooter gets down on one knee and aims at the boat, at me, not at the cops. So this isn’t an attack on the peelers by the IRA or a Republican faction, this a hit on yours truly.

  The grenade launches, flies through the air in an instant, and hits the stern of the Ginger Bap.

  A terrifying rip of noise and flame, the entire fiberglass rear of the boat exploding into pieces. This time I’m not quite so lucky. I’m thrown against the safety rail on the starboard side, the metal supports scouring into my back, the plastic rail gouging into my shoulder. I lie there stunned for a second and then I’m drenched in burning fiberglass.

  I lose consciousness for a moment.

  Blackness.

  Pain.

  Light.

  Fingers. Arms. Pelvis. Stomach. Chest. Shoulder blades. Neck and head.

  Motion? Yes.

  A verb. Yes. A verb in my mouth.

  Lips back. Tongue spit. Air migrating through my voice box. “Help.”

  I try to sit up. I brush the burning embers off my body.

  The peelers are hit too. Kevlar flak jackets kindling in the afternoon air. Hair and skin burning. Blood pouring out onto the swept street from unspecified multiple wounds. The blast echoing off the embankment like timpani fading diminuendo.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” I mutter in disbelief. “What the—”

  A crater where the rear hull of the boat had been and a rain of fragments.

  I’m alive. Singed, but in one piece. The boat is sinking. The RPG man is preparing his third grenade.

  Get overboard, Michael.

  I try to move. Stuck. Pinned. Huge chunks of what looks like the cabin roof lying on my legs. I start pushing them off.

  Look up.

  The RPG man: still trying to load the grenade. The coppers: the first hit got them bad. It seems to me, though, that no one is actually dead. At least not yet. One of the boys has lost his shoe and by the looks of it a couple of toes. White-hot pieces of shrapnel embedded in the others—wound marks on their arms and legs. All of them yelling. Shouting into their radios. The young policewoman screaming about her shoulder. Something red sticking out of her uniform. Their words melded together in a patter of confusion. Crackled voices speaking back, telling them help is on the way.

  The woman cop’s hat floats down among the smoldering flakes of metal confetti and lands burning on the deck, where other fragments have been dumped by the explosion.

  In th
e split second between grenade launches and while I’m attempting to get the cabin roof off my legs I’m oddly fascinated by her. With her hat gone she looks like a person now. Her bob of yellow hair lying in a divot of rainwater, a scarlet trail oozing into the blond from a laceration on her scalp. She’s dazed and flailing, but now she’s doing the only sensible thing of the five of us.

  She’s going for her gun.

  What a damn fine idea.

  I stop kicking the cabin roof and pull out the .38. I level it with a steady hand and take a shot at the grenade launcher.

  He’s fifty yards off and it looks like I’m not even going to be close, but at least I won’t be alone. Blondie, with blood in her eyes and a hurt hand, somehow gets to a kneeling position and starts shooting her Glock 9mm semiautomatic.

  “Die, you fuckers, die,” she screams.

  She fires nine shots, I fire six, all of them missing.

  We start to reload.

  “Get here, right now,” Blondie barks into her radio, while slotting another clip into the Glock. One of the front peelers, with gray hair and nearest the boat, has clearly been flash-blinded, standing up, staggering in front of me with his hands over his eyes. I nearly shoot him by accident, but neither Blondie nor I have hit anything and now RPG man has got the third grenade in the bloody launcher.

  I put him between the sights.

  One round, two rounds, three rounds, six rounds. Every one a miss.

  Flip chamber, punch ejector, reload out of the bag in my pocket.

  Blondie has her 9mm ready. She holds it in both hands, patiently squeezes the trigger, and hits the van next to RPG man just as he fires the weapon. It makes him jump, the grenade arcs high into the air and drops harmlessly into the Lagan without even exploding.

  The boat is tilting backward now, beginning to founder. We’re inclined thirty degrees off the vertical and the roof fragments start sliding off my legs by themselves. Help them with a kick and a shove.

  Obviously that’s it for the grenades because RPG man turns to his mate and starts taking ammo from a box. His buddy is a skinny figure, but he must be strong because I see that what he’s holding is an old army-issue general-purpose machine gun. A GPMG or Jimpy, as we used to call ’em back in the service—an ugly belt-fed weapon that makes up in punch for what it loses in accuracy. Two-man operation. One shoots, the other feeds the belt. 7.62-millimeter slugs that’ll come at you at 550 rounds a minute.

  These boys don’t have much experience with it because it takes them a long time to clear the breach. But then they do and when it gets going the Jimpy sings as bullets flow through the belt and spray over the embankment, the path, the river, and the boat. The shots random at first but gradually zeroing on the sinking Ginger Bap.

  Shell casings pumping out of the gun and fast-moving rounds tearing up the tarmac.

  “Shit.”

  You’re supposed to fire it from a tripod but these guys have clearly seen too many ’Nam movies, where the old M60 got used in close-order action.

  I stop reloading and lie down flat on the deck.

  Jimpy rounds slicing into the Bap’s hull like a BB into butter.

  Only way out, over the side.

  I crawl backward for the safety rail and know that I’m not going to make it.

  But I don’t need to. Blondie has her wits about her. She’s not fazed. One knee, balanced, two hands, aiming very carefully at the shooter. She fires off four shots, all four hitting the machine gunner in the chest, killing him instantly.

  His partner yells something, picks up the Jimpy, and tries to fire it single-handed. No chance. He burns himself on the stock and in the afternoon murk I watch the tracer sailing harmlessly overhead like fireflies on the river.

  A one-sided gun battle ensues.

  The hood can’t work the machine gun and I’m shooting at him, Blondie’s shooting at him, and finally beside her Zapata pulls out an enormous Model 500 Smith & Wesson .50-caliber handgun. His bullets cross the dead ground toward the machine gunner in huge resounding whomps that would put the fear of God into anyone who wasn’t shooting back from an Apache helicopter.

  A third cop joins the fray lying on his back firing with his left hand, his shots wild, but it’s all more than enough to draw the machine gunner’s attention away from me for good.

  “Fucking pigs,” he screams and tries to lower the Jimpy sufficiently to get an angle on the peelers.

  He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and even if he did, he can’t handle a gun like that by himself. In desperation he crouches low, balancing the gun on his knee, but the inevitable overheating happens, the weapon seizes and instantly bucks away from him.

  He pulls out a revolver, shoots off a couple of slugs, drops the gun, runs for the van.

  “Come back, you son of a bitch,” the policewoman yells, fires the last round in her clip and it bloody hits him, knocking him to the ground.

  Good on ya, love.

  “Cease fire,” Zapata yells.

  And the silence is worse than the noise.

  A dozen car alarms, ducks clacking, coppers moaning. Above us an army observation helicopter that has seen the whole thing. It’s unarmed, so it’s not as if they could have helped but even so, bastards.

  I take it all in in a split second: The flash-blinded peeler sitting down, Blondie and Zapata looking for a tourniquet for their other colleague, way down the river a police Land Rover tearing along the Lagan path, and up on the embankment RPG man getting awkwardly to his feet and making a shambling run for it.

  Time for me to go.

  No point pissing about. The boat with a forty-five-degree list that was rapidly becoming a right angle. I crawled across the deck to the edge of the rail. The .38 slipped out of my hand and clattered down toward the cabin. Almost vertical now. Foolish to go after it. I’d be in for a dunking or worse. I climbed through the safety rail, sat on the edge of the Ginger Bap, and, like a big white rat, jumped off the sinking ship and landed on one of the fenders.

  I pulled myself up onto the Lagan path, walked over to the coppers.

  “Everybody ok?”

  Zapata was sitting up. The woman standing. The others in agony, shrapnel making them feel like they were pincushions. I didn’t see anyone dying, though. I bent down to adjust the straps on my prosthesis.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Zapata asked.

  “I’m from America. FBI. Going after that guy,” I said.

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who fired the RPG is hit but he’s running,” I had to explain so they didn’t bloody shoot at me when I legged it.

  That was all I had to say. Zapata nodded, bought it.

  “Just for the record, I think they were trying to kill me, not you. You were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said and ran up the embankment after Mr. RPG.

  I stopped for a quarter of a second at the place where they’d done the hit. The Jimpy was seething, the van was peppered with bullet holes and had two flat tires. A blood trail led down the alley. I was right, Blondie had hit him. A goddamn markswoman, that lass. She had killed the Jimpy guy and plugged this character, too.

  In other circumstances, I would have gone back and proposed.

  I followed the trail behind the first of the condo buildings, lost it on the pavement, and found it at a rusting yellow trash compactor where he’d paused for a second, leaning on it, getting a breather and revealing his position with his bloody paws.

  He’d turned left and continued running along this street, which was parallel to the Lagan.

  Worried me. If he kept going straight, eventually this road led out of these bankside condo developments and into a feeder road for the city. Once he was on that he could lose himself in the crowds.

  He had a big lead, but he was hit bad and I was angry.

  The blood drops closer now.

  He was moving slower.

  Two feet between drops.

  Then one foot.

  Then six inches.
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  I was near. I turned a corner. The trail led between two large apartment buildings and abruptly stopped.

  Had he climbed into a getaway car? No way. They had come in that damn van and the van was still parked along the embankment.

  I scanned the alley.

  Concrete walls. No doors leading into the apartment buildings and no obvious hiding places like trash bins or a skip. I ran to the end of the street.

  A field, a piece of waste ground, and one of the main roads.

  Shit. I’d bloody lost him? It didn’t make sense. Who brings two getaway cars to a hit?

  I searched the alley again.

  The condo complexes on either side of the alley were identical three-story-high apartment buildings with balconies. No doors on the ground-floor flats, and the windows that I could see were closed.

  People don’t just vanish.

  Maybe he’d taken a moment, patched himself up, and run to the waste ground. I sprinted to the bottom of the alley again, but there appeared to be no one in that featureless cinder track. He could be hiding under a bunch of newspapers or garbage, but I didn’t think so. He was back here somewhere.

  I examined the ground-floor apartment windows and saw that not only were they not open, but they didn’t open.

  The only other possibility was that he might just have had the strength to climb up onto one of the second-floor balconies. I went to the nearest one and examined it closely. Nothing. The next one.

  And what was that? A speck of red on the balcony rail. I smiled. Blood. Fresh blood.

  With a heroic effort of will he had somehow climbed up there. Bullet wound or no bullet wound. I stepped back and surveyed the balcony. The door to the apartment was shut. I couldn’t tell if it was locked but I guessed it was. The lights were off and no one was home, and if you lived on the second floor it would probably be sensible to lock the balcony door.

  My hunch was that he was still crouching up there, lying behind the concrete balcony walls, breathing hard, listening to me, hoping that eventually I would give it up as a bad job and piss off home.

  “I’ll give you five seconds to stand up and then I’m throwing the hand grenade onto that balcony. Five, four, three, two—”