The Bloomsday Dead

by Adrian McKinty

  “That’s what I thought, Scotchy,” I said, raised the revolver to his temple, pulled the trigger.

  It clicked. I pulled the trigger again. The chamber rotated, the hammer came down. No bullet came out. Goddamn misfire. What do you expect with half the Atlantic in your pocket? I smacked the pistol butt into the side of Scotchy’s head and screamed at Bridget: “Hit the fucking deck.”

  She dived on top of Siobhan. I smacked Scotchy again as hard as I could and ripped the Pecheneg out of his grip. He fell to the ground. Bullets tore up the inside of the cave. Marty fired at me and Scotchy. I shot the Pecheneg for a count of two full seconds at Marty’s chest. It tore a hole the size of a volleyball in his abdomen and as he fell backward, his intestines were flung into the air like silly spray from a joke can. Aghast, he scrambled to put his bloody guts back inside and died doing it.

  Cassidy was too afraid of hitting Scotchy to shoot at me. Standing there paralyzed.

  I aimed the Pecheneg high and gave him a burst that ripped his head apart.

  Scotchy was on his feet. He had a handgun. He was pointing it at me. He was pulling the trigger.

  Bridget leaped on top of him.

  Fire in the barrel of the revolver. Scotchy pulling the trigger, rage contorting his face into even more hideous postures.

  I dived for cover but thumped immediately into the cave wall. I couldn’t hear. Lights. Blood. Silence. Blackness coming down like the fucking guillotine.

  One second, two seconds, three seconds. Trade seconds for years, I wouldn’t have known.

  Bridget shaking me. Her face bruised, her lip bleeding.

  “What the fuck?” I moaned.

  I sat up. Two dead bodies in the cave. Marty and Cassidy.

  “Scotchy?” I asked.

  “Gone, grabbed Siobhan, I shot him in the back. Come on.”

  She pulled me up.

  “What happened?”

  “I jumped him, he punched me, I grabbed the gun and he grabbed Siobhan, I shot him, he ran, come on.”

  I sat up. The briefcase was gone too. He’d taken the time to lift that, too. And so, despite his words, this was a little bit about the money.

  Bridget hauled me to my feet. I lifted one of the Pechenegs from the floor.

  We ran to the cave mouth and I saw Scotchy running up the steps to the top of the cliff, dragging the girl after him. Not a bad feat for a skinny motherfucker like Scotchy.

  “Are you sure you hit him?” I asked Bridget.

  “I hit him.”

  The rain was easing, but the steps carved into the cliff face were slick with water, seaweed, and spray.

  Rifle fire from the lighthouse sparked across the rocks. The tracer helping the shooter to get a bead on us. Bullets ricocheting on the path dead ahead.

  “Harry,” I said. Gang member number four.

  And I saw that once Scotchy got to the top of the cliff, we were fucked. He could shoot us from a dozen high-angled positions around the lighthouse. And Jesus, if he couldn’t get Bridget he could still throw Bridget’s daughter off the cliff. Bridget’s daughter? Mine own precious darling girl.

  Yes, I’ll move the Earth.

  I ran the steps two at a time.

  Pecheneg rounds smacking off the steps in front of and behind me.

  I ran faster, slipped, got up.

  But it was too late. Scotchy made it to the top. Harry passed him a revolver, they pushed the girl to the ground, and they both began to shoot. I stumbled and fell, dropped the machine gun. The only sensible policy now was to retreat back to the cave. But I kept fucking going. I sprinted the last of the bastard stairs.

  Twenty feet from the top. Scotchy shooting a 9mm semi, Harry shooting the machine gun. I probably would have lasted a heroic two or three seconds more had not the briefcase in Scotchy’s left hand, at that exact moment, exploded in a huge ball of fire and white light.

  A thunderflash, she’d fucking booby-trapped it with an army-issue thunderflash.

  That’s my lass.

  Scotchy screamed as his arm caught fire. Harry pushed him to the dirt and tried to roll him out. I made it to the top of the stairs just as Scotchy was getting to his feet.

  “Bruce, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Scotchy yelled in a confusion of betrayal, rage, and disappointment. But there’s a time for talking and a time for not talking. Instead of giving him an answer, I jumped the fucker, threw him into Harry, rolled to the side, got to my feet.

  Harry recovered, raised his Pecheneg. Bridget got to the top of the stairs and shot at him twice.

  “Michael,” she screamed.

  Harry turned to fire at her. I charged him, barreled him to the ground, knocked his rifle away, stabbed a finger in his eye, punched him in the throat, threw him over on his face, put my arm around his fat neck and my knee on his spine, and twisted his neck hard back-ward until it snapped and the life instantly went out of him.

  Scotchy’s right hand was burned. But with his trembling left he found his gun, fired the rest of his clip at Bridget, every shot missing by miles. He slotted another clip, but I was on him. I head-butted him on the nose, breaking it. I grabbed his weapon hand and bit him on the thumb.

  “Traitor, you traitor, Bruce,” he snarled, spitting the words out, kicking me.

  “My name’s not Bruce,” I said and bit through his thumb, right to the bone. He screamed, dropped the weapon. I fell on him and we scrambled for the gun. I kicked it away from him and kneed him in the head. Somehow he rolled to one side and got to his feet. His skull cracked, his face covered with blood. He ran at me screaming with incandescent rage. I let him run, and I moved to the side like a fucking matador, grabbed him, threw him.

  The poor bastard never had a chance.

  His feet scrambled for purchase in the cold sea air and then he fell. Down, down, a hundred feet, into the sea, his body smashing to pieces on the razor-sharp rocks. There would be no resurrection this time, my old mate.

  I sank to my knees.

  I slumped forward, wavered for a moment, and cried. . . .

  A minute passed.

  Bridget stroking my face.

  Holding me.

  Siobhan, dazed, looking at her ma. The spit of her mother. Right down to the crimson hair and the eyes like a forest glade. Still under, drugged, baffled, wondering what was going on. She wouldn’t remember a lot of this.

  “It’s going to be ok, it’s going to be ok,” Bridget was saying.

  “Mommy,” Siobhan said.

  Bridget crawled next to me and all three of us held one another on the clifftop in the wind and rain.

  “Michael, there’s something I have to tell you,” she said. “I lied about Siobhan. I didn’t tell you the whole story. I didn’t want it to be true. Oh God, I didn’t want it to be true. But it is.”

  I nodded.

  “Michael. It’s you. You’re her father,” Bridget said softly.

  And as my fingertips reached for her fingertips and the blood dripped from my hand to her hand, I turned to her and said: “I know.”

  The cliff path under the lighthouse. The sea had receded and the rain had ceased and turned to mist. The wind had slunk back to its box in Iceland. The scene was done and the sympathetic fallacy was back in force. Stars. I looked for the Southern Cross, but it wasn’t there. That was another hemisphere. Another time.

  The girl was sleeping now. My daughter. Sleeping after all this. How could you not love her? I carried her wrapped in both our jackets. Behind us, shrouded in fog, the lighthouse keeping ghost time in broad beams across the sea.

  We walked and Siobhan slept and we stopped at the first house we saw. A white timber frame with palm trees up the drive. Palm trees in Ireland. A thing that always made me smile. I carried Siobhan between the trees and up the gravel path. Bridget knocked on the door.

  A kid answered. Big guy in jeans and Metallica T-shirt. He looked at me, Bridget, and then Siobhan.

  “Has there been an accident?” he asked.

&
nbsp; I nodded.

  “You better come in. Do youse need an ambulance?” he asked calmly.

  “We’re ok. The girl’s shaken up, she’s sleeping, but she’ll need a doctor,” I said.

  “In to the left, have a seat, I’ll dial 999.”

  We went in. The kid phoned for the authorities and a few minutes later brought towels and chocolate biscuits. He told us his name was Patrick. He was about nineteen, alone here tonight as his parents were at a Handel concert in Belfast.

  I nodded, unable to speak. That adrenaline crash was coming. Exhausted, I could have slept right there on the couch.

  Four of us sitting there.

  “Do you want a blanket or anything for the girl?” he asked.

  “Aye,” I said and gave him a wee look. The sort of look only a gunman can give. He took the hint.

  “I’ll bring that tea, get you towels, youse just relax now, the ambulance might be a while getting down the path; but it’ll get here.”

  He got up, gave me a nod to show that he understood my wish to be left alone.

  “Cheers, thanks,” I said.

  And when he had gone, Bridget sighed, leaned back on the sofa, began to cry. We sat in silence, listening to the waves retreating on the stony beach.

  Siobhan woke, looked at her mother and father, whimpered for a moment, and with a single caress from Bridget fell back into a doze.

  Bridget turned to me.

  “A week ago I would have given anything to see you dead,” she said.

  “Aye, and a week ago I would have given anything just to see you,” I said.

  “So what happens next? After tomorrow we wake up like Cinderella and try to murder each other again? Or does this change everything?” she asked.

  This changes everything, I thought.

  I looked at her.

  “You want to know what happens next?” I asked in a whisper.

  “I do.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. The first thing we do is get out of Ireland. Your man Moran wants me dead, so you’ll either have to talk to him, or we’ll have to kill him. Or we’ll have to give him the slip.”

  “We?”

  “We.”

  She stared at me and mused the word over in her mind. Her tired eyes processing the information.

  “We,” she said, really considering the possibility for the first time.

  “We,” I insisted. “And then you’ll retire and I’ll retire and we’ll move to Peru.”

  “Peru, are you kidding?”

  “It’s got a bad rap, but I really like it there. We’ll move there and we’ll have more kids and we’ll watch the sun set over the Pacific, and with your dough we can buy a big house with stables and trails up into the mountains and a Lima pied-à-terre in the Calle de las Siete Revueltas. And we’ll be done with the life. Done with it. And Siobhan will go to school and she’ll speak Spanish and English and be smart and beautiful and content; as will her brothers and sisters, and we’ll ride horses, and surf, and eat steak, and all live happily ever after.”

  And Bridget thought about it.

  She thought about me and retirement and what that would mean. And she thought about Siobhan. And she lived with the past too.

  That Christmas night in 1992. Me cutting her fiancé’s throat.

  She thought about that.

  I could read her. I always could, or at least I imagined I could. Her emotions like ripples on the lough, or a sidewinder on the desert floor. What was owed and what was paid. And who deserved to die and who deserved to live. And how easy it would be to kill me tonight and be done with it all. Except that you’re never done. Never.

  That was one universe of possibilities.

  But there was another. An escape from the blood feud and the vendetta and the law of honor. The alternative, a new life in a new world. I knew she had picked up Scotchy’s gun and I knew she could use it. And if it was going to happen, it was going to happen now, before the cops showed, with the witness out of the room, with her girl back safe and sound. “After all this we had a terrible accident with the gun, officer.”

  I waited, flinched. Dan’s troika arguing it out. The general, the killer, the mother. The strong, the vengeful, the weak.

  Her hand reached inside her coat.

  The lids closed on those big emerald eyes.

  Opened again.

  She produced a gun, Scotchy’s gun.

  She set it on the sofa.

  I looked at Bridget and I looked at the gun. Neither of us moved. Then Bridget reached in her coat again and found the thing she’d really been searching for: a brush. She began taking the knots out of Siobhan’s hair. She tried to say something, coughed. Her throat was hoarse from crying and she couldn’t speak, but her head bobbed the affirmative, and finally, in that husky, tired New York whisper, she said simply:

  “Yes.”

  Other Adrian McKinty titles published by Serpent’s Tail

  Dead I Well May Be

  ‘A darkly thrilling tale of the New York streets with all the hard-boiled charm of Chandler and the down and dirty authenticity of closing time…Evocative dialogue, an acute sense of place and a sardonic sense of humour make McKinty one to watch’ Guardian

  ‘The story is soaked in the holy trinity of the noir thriller – betrayal, money and murder – but seen through here with a panache and political awareness that gives Dead I Well May Be a keen edge over its rivals’ Big Issue

  ‘Adrian McKinty’s main skill is in cleverly managing to evoke someone rising through the ranks and wreaking bloody revenge while making it all seem like an event that could happen to any decent, hardworking Irish chap. A dark, lyrical and gripping voice that will go far’ The List

  ‘Adrian McKinty is a big new talent – for storytelling, for dialogue and for creating believable characters…Dead I Well May Be is a riveting story of revenge and marks the arrival of a distinctive fresh voice’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A pacy, assured and thoroughly engaging debut…this is a hard-boiled crime story written by a gifted man with poetry coursing through his veins and thrilling writing dripping from his fingertips’ Sunday Independent

  ‘Careens boisterously from Belfast to the Bronx…McKinty is a storyteller with the kind of style and panache that blur the line between genre and mainstream. Top-drawer’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘McKinty’s Michael Forsythe is a crook, a deviant, a lover, a fighter, and a thinker. His Irish-tough language of isolation and longing makes us love and trust him despite his oh-so-great and violent flaws. When you finish this book you just might wish you’d lived the life in its pages, and thought its thoughts, both horrible and sublime’ Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead

  ‘If Frank McCourt had gone into the leg-breaking business instead of school teaching, he might’ve written a book like Dead I Well May Be. Adrian McKinty’s novel is a rollicking, raw, and unsavoury delight — down and dirty but full of love for words. This is hard-boiled crime fiction with a poet’s touch’ Peter Blauner, author of The Last Good Day and The Intruder

  ‘McKinty has deftly created a literate, funny and cynical antihero who takes his revenge in bloody and violent twists but at the same time, methodically listens to Tolstoy on tape while on stakeouts. He rounds out the book with a number of incredible fever-dream sequences and then springs an ending that leaves readers shaking their head in satisfied amazement’ San Francisco Chronicle

  Hidden River

  ‘McKinty is a cross between Mickey Spillane and Damon Runyon – the toughest, the best. Beware of McKinty’ Frank McCourt

  ‘A roller coaster of highs and lows, light humour and dark deeds…Once you step into Hidden River, the powerful under-current of McKinty’s talent will swiftly drag you away. Let’s hope this author does not slow down anytime soon’ Irish Examiner

  ‘[A] terrific read…this is a strong, nonstop story, with attractive characters and fine writing’ Morning Star

  ‘This is genuinely hard to put down until its conclusion is reac
hed’ Buzz

  ‘Fast-paced thriller…McKinty’s short, sharp delivery manages to make Hidden River an engaging read’ Big Issue

  ‘From an impressive debut to a rock-solid second, neither will disappoint and I am seriously looking forward to number three’ The Barcelona Review

  ‘A dark, lyrical and gripping voice that will go far’ The List

  ‘McKinty follows up his acclaimed Dead I Well May Be with an outstanding and complex crime novel that should appeal to fans of hard-boiled Celtic scribes such as Ken Bruen and Ian Rankin… This is not only an expertly crafted suspense novel but also a revealing study of addiction’ Publishers Weekly

  The Dead Yard

  It’s been five years since Michael Forsythe slaughtered Darkey White and his crew of thugs in Harlem. Five years spent in the Witness Protection Program with a price on his head and not much to do with his days. Allowed to take a holiday at last, Michael heads to Spain, but he’s arrested after a football riot between Irish and Brits and brought to a Spanish prison. Enter British intelligence agent Samantha Caudwell, who offers Michael a deal: spend ten years in jail under new riot laws, or go on a special assignment to infiltrate an IRA sleeper cell in New England.

  ‘Adrian McKinty has once again harnessed the power of poetry, violence, lust and revenge to forge a sequel to his acclaimed Dead I Well May Be’ The Irish Post

  ‘McKinty’s literate, expertly crafted third crime novel confirms his place as one of his generation’s leading talents…McKinty possesses a talent for pace and plot structure that belies his years. Dennis Lehane fans will definitely be pleased’ Publishers Weekly

  ‘The Dead Yard is a much-anticipated sequel to Dead I Well May Be and every bit as good. McKinty crackles with raw talent. His dialogue is superb, his characters rich and his plotting tight and seamless. He also writes with a wonderful (and wonderfully humorous) flair for language, raising his work above most crime-genre offerings and bumping right up against literature’ San Francisco Chronicle