Angels in the Moonlight_A prequel to The Dublin Trilogy

by Caimh McDonnell

  Her right eye was starting to close.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she mumbled. “Please, I’m sorry.”

  The world kaleidoscoped around her. The throbbing pain in her right cheek whirled sickeningly with the stench and déjà vu. The terror. The helplessness. The guilt. The shame. The oh no, oh no, oh no.

  Never be a victim again. Never be a victim again. That had been her mantra. She’d sworn it. Damn it. How had she let this happen?

  Her hands scrabbled for purchase amongst the wet bin bags. She turned her head to look behind her, causing a sharp pain to shoot through her neck. She squinted to try and clear the blur in her vision. Over her shoulder, she saw Nathan, one hand over his injured eye, standing over her.

  “Cock-teasing whore.”

  He pulled his hand away and then there was a moment, a helpless moment. In his face she saw the angry sneer twist a little.

  She sucked in a lungful of stagnant air. She could scream.

  Both of his hands were on his belt now.

  Then . . .

  In a blur of movement, Ryan was gone. Disappeared, as if simply erased from reality as a terrible mistake.

  Simone painfully turned her aching head in the other direction to see a confusion of bodies tumble down the slope towards the dumpster at the end of the alley. Ryan was now on top of the other figure, punching furiously at the back of their head. With a roar, the new arrival reared up and crashed an elbow into Ryan’s chest, sending him rolling backwards.

  The lights from a passing car rolled briefly across the alley, catching a frozen moment. Ryan, a different kind of animal now. A trapped one. Cowering. His hands stretched out before him, trying to push the night away. Advancing on him, a wild fury in his eyes, was the big fella, Bunny McGarry.

  Ryan backed away towards the corner. He picked up a metal bin and hurled it at Bunny, who fended it away with a contemptuous swat of his arm. Then Bunny was on him, slamming Ryan into the dumpster at the back of the alley, his right hand grabbing the other man’s jacket collar as his left threw a couple of haymakers into his stomach.

  Ryan crumpled to the floor.

  Bunny raised his left foot.

  “Stop!”

  He turned his head and for a moment Simone saw the pure fury in Bunny’s face. He looked momentarily confused by her presence.

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  Bunny looked between the two of them, then reached down and grabbed the still groaning Ryan by the lapels. The chef was a big man by most standards, but McGarry lifted him effortlessly, turning him around and slamming him back against the dumpster.

  Ryan whimpered. “Please, I . . .”

  “I am arresting you for the assault and attempted—”

  “No!”

  Bunny looked down at Simone, still amongst the bin bags. “But . . .”

  She tried to get back up. “It was just a misunderstanding.”

  “What?”

  “He was . . . we were kidding around and I . . . slipped.”

  Bunny looked back and forth between the two of them as Simone gingerly pulled herself up, clinging to the wall. Her dress was damp, her hands were sticky and she could feel a trickle of blood coming down from her right nostril.

  Bunny shoved Ryan’s head down. “You stay right there.”

  “Look, I—”

  He leaned into his ear. “Nobody gives a flying fuck what you have to say, sonny boy. Move and see what happens. Please, give me an excuse, I’m begging ye.”

  Bunny took a few steps towards Simone and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You’re in shock. I’ll call an ambulance and—”

  “I don’t need an ambulance. I’m fine. It was just a misunderstanding.”

  Bunny softly laid a hand on her arm. “You’re OK, he can’t hurt you now.”

  “Just . . . forget about it.”

  Bunny looked into her face, eyes filled with concern. “He was assaulting you. He was going to—”

  She shrugged his hand off. “I’m fine. I don’t want to press any charges.”

  “But—”

  Ryan turned slowly around. “See. I’m . . . I’m leaving.” He moved to go, his steps jerky with terror. Bunny surged forward, his left hand cocked back.

  “Let him go!” She nearly screamed it.

  Bunny looked back at her, eyes filled with incomprehension. She looked down, unable to meet his gaze. “Just let him go. Please.”

  He reluctantly lowered his fist and Ryan moved swiftly past him. He looked at Simone and then back at Bunny. “You’ll be hearing from my solicitor.”

  Bunny feinted towards him and Ryan almost tripped over his own feet, scurrying away towards the top of the alley and off into the night.

  There was a moment of near silence, save for the rumble of distant traffic. Simone looked around, down at the ground. Looking for something, but she didn’t know what. She hadn’t been carrying a handbag. She checked her pocket for her keys. In the dim light from the distant streetlight, she could see various stains on her blue velvet dress. The hem was ripped.

  She was aware of Bunny standing there, unmoving. She could feel his eyes on her, full of questions.

  “Thanks for your . . . I’m fine.”

  He spoke very softly. “You need to see a doctor.”

  “No,” she said, raising her voice, “I do not. Stop telling me what I need to do.”

  “But he—”

  “I’m fine. I was handling it, just – leave me alone.”

  “But—”

  “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. I’m not some cat stuck up a damn tree. Who asked you to get involved anyway?”

  He stepped back as if she’d slapped him. “I didn’t need to be asked. He was hurting you. He was—”

  “Just forget it. Leave me alone.”

  She moved to walk up the alley and stumbled on her broken heel. “Damn it.” She reached down and removed first one shoe and then the other, before continuing to walk up the alley.

  A stab of pain ran through her left foot as a shard of glass wedged itself into her heel. She yelped in agony. He rushed to her side as she staggered to the wall. Leaning on it for support, she raised her foot to see rich red blood rushing forth, spreading out across the sole of her foot and running across her upturned ankle. “Damn it!”

  Bunny kneeled down beside her and cleaned the blood away with a handkerchief. Then he pulled the shard of glass – from the broken brandy bottle – out of her foot, pressing hard against the wound to stem the flow and then knotting the handkerchief in place.

  He looked up at her. “I could just drop you to the hospital?”

  “No hospitals. Thank you for your concern.”

  She tried to place some pressure on the foot and winced as pain shot up her leg again, biting her lip until it eased. “Could I get a lift home?”

  He nodded and stood up, extending his arms. “C’mon, I’ll carry you.”

  She looked at him. “I meant in a car.”

  “No kidding. It’s around the corner, but unless your feet have become any more glass-proof . . .” He pointed down at the ground where shards of glass twinkled in the faint light.

  Reluctantly, she allowed the man whose help she didn’t need to sweep her up in his arms.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bunny stared out the window at nothing.

  They were in the usual mid-morning lull where a zen level of absolute nothingness happened. Gringo sat in the passenger’s seat, Bunny in the driver’s, neither of them going anywhere. Across the street, Tommy Carter’s house did absolutely nothing.

  The first couple of hours of the daytime shift had flown by in comparison. The book they were running on who got post today diverted attention for a good fifteen minutes just after the school run. Gringo was that far ahead, Bunny was starting to suspect he was sending people letters himself. The school run was, of course, invigorating in itself; delightful cherubs and their doting parents scampering by, only stopping to hurl abuse at the Gard
aí parked outside their tribal warlord’s house. It had been decided by those on high to ignore the verbal abuse, but any spitting or physical contact with the vehicles would need to be acted upon. It was fair to say their presence was not being warmly greeted by the locals. The only upside of the day shift was that it was slightly more exciting than the night shift. Starsky and Hutch never had to put up with this shit.

  Bunny pointed out of the window. “I think that grass has got longer.”

  “What?” said Gringo.

  “The grass,” said Bunny, pointing to the lawn outside 17 Crossan Road, “I think it’s gotten longer.”

  “We’ve been here for over a month now, of course it’s grown. Welcome to how the world works. Up next – why the sky is blue.”

  “My point, ye sarky bollocks, is that I think it is noticeably longer. We’ve been here that long, I’ve actually watched the grass grow.”

  “Fascinating,” said Gringo, not even looking up from his newspaper. “What’s up with you this morning? You’re like a bear with a sore head.”

  “Nothing. Don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Which is it? Is it nothing or is it something you don’t want to talk about?”

  “Ara . . . I’ll tell you later.”

  Gringo looked at his watch. “Fine, take your time. I won’t be going anywhere for at least four more hours. In the meantime, what’s a nine-letter word for ‘not a jam’?”

  “What?” said Bunny.

  “Nine-letter word for ‘not a jam’,” repeated Gringo.

  “That’s stupid, every fecking nine-letter word is not a jam. Jam is a three-letter word. Put any nine-letter word.”

  “That’s not how it works. It’s cryptic.”

  “’Tis idiotic is what it is. ‘Crocodile’, there you go – that’s nine letters and not a jam.”

  “The second letter is an A.”

  “Just spell it wrong and move on with your life.”

  Gringo tossed the newspaper up on the dashboard. “You know what your problem is? You need to learn to relax. Take a lesson from Mr O’Donnell.”

  Bunny snorted in lieu of a response.

  They’d been on John O’Donnell, aka the Iceman, for most of last week. The subject of their surveillance was regularly alternated to prevent boredom, but seeing as this mostly meant watching a house two streets over from Carter’s, it didn’t do a great deal to alleviate the tedium. It got lively when O’Donnell went for a run, mainly because he was impossible to keep up with. At least he ran the same route every day, up around the canal and back. The man was a machine. While Moran, his ex-Ranger buddy, was all tattoos and steroid-enhanced muscle, O’Donnell was a lean athlete. Indeed, for two men with similar military backgrounds, they couldn’t be more different. Moran, with his shaved head and bodybuilder physique, seemed to view his surveillance detail as a captive audience. He regularly lifted weights topless in the front room; it looked like one of those late-night TV adverts for chatlines. To liven things up, he would occasionally sprint out of the front door and down to the corner of his street, only to stop and walk back home, laughing all the way. He had started to time how long it took the surveillance car to catch up with him. Things like that were how he occupied his time when not entertaining his harem of girlfriends. Two weeks ago, Pamela “Butch” Cassidy and Dinny Muldoon had sat outside Moran’s house while he opened the blinds of his bedroom and stood grinning at them while clearly having sex. They had debated trying to take him in for public indecency but he was in his own house and he had been smart enough to keep the girl out of view. Butch had suggested in the weekly briefing that they get a picture of his ma blown up so that they could hold it up if he did it again. That’d put him off his game.

  O’Donnell, on the other hand, was like a ghost. He lived alone and had minimal contact with anyone, bar the classes he taught at his dojo. He trained, he read books, he ate, he slept. He didn’t even own a TV, which Gringo had suggested was strike one on the psycho scale right there. O’Donnell had never so much as acknowledged his surveillance. The closest he’d come was last week, when he had come out mid-morning and placed a yoga mat down on his lawn. He’d then proceeded to sit there cross-legged for two hours solid, hands placed palm-up on his knees, staring across at the car containing Bunny and Gringo. Bunny had checked the exact weather afterwards: six degrees it had been. And O’Donnell had sat there in a vest and sweatpants, calmly staring at them. It’d been funny to start with – they’d pulled faces, trying to put him off, then Gringo had got out and asked him directions to Leopardstown Racecourse. He’d sat there, barely blinking, staring right through them. By the end, it had become unnerving, which was exactly the point. He was showing them that he was a man of greater will than them. After two hours, he’d suddenly stood up, rolled up his mat and headed back inside, not even a smile or a nod in their direction.

  Gringo drummed on the dashboard excitedly. “I just remembered, I’ve not told you yet!”

  “What?”

  “Butch reckons Tommy Carter and John O’Donnell might be, y’know . . .”

  “What?”

  “A couple.”

  “Bollocks,” said Bunny. “Butch thinks everyone is gay. If she was right, we’d be running out of people by now.”

  “But think about it, we’ve not seen either of them with a woman.”

  “I’ve not seen you with a woman recently either.”

  “True, but—”

  “I mean,” said Bunny, “they could be, I suppose, but they’re keeping it very quiet if they are.”

  “Well, like they said on that course, a lot of people are still nervous about being ‘out’ and all that.”

  “Well, George Michael came out last year so, y’know.”

  “Yeah, but George is an international pop star, Tommy and John are criminal hard men, it might not go with the image.”

  “One of the Krays was gay.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yeah. I read that somewhere. The proper mental one too. Alexander the Great – there’s another.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “Aristotle.”

  “Ah sure, the Greeks invented it.”

  “In fact,” said Gringo, “get this. Aristotle and Plato were lovers.”

  “Were they? God, imagine that. Their pillow talk must’ve been something.”

  “Oh yeah. Great thinkers the gays, well known for it. And our own Oscar Wilde, of course.”

  “Well obviously Oscar. Goes without saying. Poor fella got all kinds of abuse for it though.”

  “Locked up.”

  “As was poor Alan Turing. The man cracks the Enigma code, basically wins World War Two for the allies, and then they do all kinds of terrible things to him.”

  “Shocking.”

  “’Tis not right.”

  Bunny glanced in his wing mirror. “Speaking of ‘not right’. . .”

  Gringo peered into his own mirror to see what he was referring to. On the pavement behind them, they could see at least twenty young kids walking in a large group, each dressed in the uniform of the nearby St Kevin’s School.

  “Youth – and a lot of it,” said Bunny. “Is school out yet?”

  Gringo looked at his watch. “Nah, it’s only just after two. Unless it’s some kind of half day or something?”

  Gringo got out of the passenger seat to stand by the car and watch the approaching kids. They seemed in very high spirits. He looked at them and then over at Carter’s house. “Bunny.”

  Bunny turned to see Tommy Carter emerging. He was about to turn the key in the engine when he noticed that Carter didn’t seem intent on going anywhere. He had a deckchair with him, which he opened and set down on his lawn. Gringo looked in through the open door at his partner. “We’re about to get slapped.”

  Bunny reached down and picked up the radio. “Control, this is alpha twenty-nine. We have eyes on the primary. Carter is currently sitting outside his house and . . . there are a load of kids.” He felt
foolish as he’d said it. Mammy, the other children are being mean to me.

  There was a crackle at the other end, then a pause, followed by, “Can you confirm, alpha twenty-nine, is this the same group of children that alpha twenty-seven are seeing? They are on subject Jimmy Moran.”

  Bunny looked over at Tommy Carter, who shot him a jovial salute and a smile.

  “Ara shite, what the . . .”

  Gringo moved down the pavement towards the large crowd of rapidly approaching children, mostly boys with some girls thrown in.

  “Sorry, kids, you can’t come this way.”

  They ran past him and surrounded the car, joining hands to form a giggling chain of pre-pubescent protest.

  Bunny glanced over to see that Carter now had a video camera out and was filming.

  “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way . . .”

  “Alright,” said Gringo, in his best authoritarian voice, “move now or you’re all under arrest.”

  Nobody moved. Gringo looked around exasperated, like a supply teacher considering a drastic change in career.

  Amidst the enthusiastic if undisciplined carolling, Bunny’s radio became a confusion of words.

  “Alpha twenty-seven, Moran is on the move, we are attempting to pursue, however car is currently surrounded by . . .”

  “Alpha twenty-four on Doyle, we have the same.”

  Gringo was outside and was trying to move kids from in front of the car by unlocking their hands.

  “Gringo!”

  He made eye contact with Bunny, who nodded urgently in Carter’s direction. Gringo saw the camera and understood. Video of a guard throwing kids out of the way or driving a car towards them – hello, six o’clock news. Gringo shook his head and sat on the bonnet.

  “This is control. Doyle and Moran are gone, can you pursue, alpha twenty-nine.”