The Dead Yard

by Adrian McKinty

  I open the letter box and shout through it:

  “Hello, is there anyone home? Hello?”

  No answer.

  Aye, she’s gone. Probably bloody bird-watching in Maine. That’s exactly the kind of support you need when you’re an undercover on a dangerous assignment.

  Another silly woman.

  “Hello, is there anyone home?” I try for the final time.

  I’m about to go when I see a shadow appear at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hello? Who is that?” I shout again.

  The shadow walks towards me.

  It’s Touched.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  He opens the door.

  “No, the more pertinent and important question is what are you doing here?” he asks, pointing a silenced 9mm at me.

  “I came to get some chocolate for Kit,” I tell him.

  “Is that so?” he says suspiciously, closing the door behind me.

  “Uh-huh. We had a bit of a fight.”

  “You often shout into the letter box of closed stores? Eh?”

  “The wee lady who runs the place told me she’s open till nine every day,” I say.

  His face is cold. His eyes are the color of granite slabs cut for tombstones.

  “How well do you know this wee lady?” he asks in a voice with no emotion.

  “Seamus, Jackie, and I were in here yesterday and Kit took me in here once to get clotted cream,” I say as calmly as I can, for I realize now that he’s killed her. That somehow he’s found her out. But she didn’t tell him anything. I know that because I’d be dead too by now, or if not dead, shot in both kneecaps and being dragged screaming to the back room to be tortured lovingly and long.

  “Aye, I remember that. Well, you better come see this,”Touched says.

  “What’s the gun for?” I ask him.

  “Excuse me, Sean, but I’m going to have to watch you very closely for the next couple of days. Too many wee things happening at once. Suspicious, so it is, very fucking suspicious.Last night going wrong like that and now this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Something has come up, Sean,” he says soberly.

  “Like what?”

  “Upstairs with me and you’ll see. You first, mate,” he says.

  I walk up the stairs.

  I can smell the blood from the second step.

  On the landing, at the top, I turn right and walk into her bedroom. She has been gagged and tied naked to the bed. Her eyes have been cut out of their sockets and she has been slit open from her vagina to her throat.

  But not deeply, not enough to kill her straightaway.

  Blood is everywhere. On the sheets, on the walls, even on the skylight. There is still a scalpel blade embedded in her thigh and Touched’s little green toolbox is open between her legs. It’s not a toolbox at all, but is in fact a dissection kit. His instruments: knives, scalpels, retractors, covered with skin and gore—well used.

  My knees buckle and I throw up in my mouth.

  “Oh God,” I say.

  “She was smart,” Touched says. “She had no paperwork of any kind. And she denied everything, right to the end.”

  “What the fuck have you done? Who is she?” I manage.

  “She’s been spying on us. I’d seen her twice. I’m always watching for new people. I wasn’t sure, though. Even tonight.

  I just wasn’t sure and for a while I thought I’d made a mistake.”

  He laughs.

  “Jesus, yeah, thought I’d really fucked up and she was just a dumb tourist, nosing around the biggest house on the island. I really thought that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was on my way to Portsmouth and I saw that big Jag parked outside the shop here, and when I came in to see who owned it I saw her. First thing that bothered me was that I was smoking a cigarette and she didn’t ask me to put it out.

  No Smoking signs everywhere and she didn’t ask me to put out me fag. Why?”

  He looked at me. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He wanted me to think about it.

  “I don’t know, Touched.”

  “Why? I’ll tell you fucking why. Because I’d put the wind up her, thrown her, she was afraid of me. Why would she be afraid of me when she doesn’t even know me? Aye, Sean, I can smell it, you know. Fear. I can fucking taste it.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Aye. So that was the first thing. And so then I asked her about herself. And it turns out she’s only been here a week or two and she’s British. Ask her all these questions and she doesn’t say ‘Stop wasting my time’ or ‘Are you going to buy something?’ Ever see a shopkeeper who just wants to chat? She gave herself away, mate. She was too friendly.Overcompensating. And I realized I’d have to probe this further.”

  “Christ. You killed her because she was polite to you?”

  Touched smiles sadly and pats me on the back, all the while keeping the gun pointing at my belly. He runs a gloved hand through his hair and grins, licks the blood from his lips.

  “Aye, Sean, for a while there this evening I thought I’d made a mistake. Tied her up, gagged her, had my way with her, searched the place. Nothing, fucking nothing. And really that was another mistake. I mean, everybody has to have some personal stuff. Driver’s license, passport, library card, letters, anything. And she had nothing.”

  I shake my head.

  “But fortunately, Sean, my instincts were right. At the very end, at the very fucking end, I take the gag off her, and she’s hurting, oh yeah, she’s hurting and she begs me to finish it, begs me. She says, and this is the kicker, Sean, ‘Please, Touched, kill me, just kill me,’” Touched repeats, his eyebrows raising in a look of triumph.

  “I don’t get it,” I tell him.

  “No one calls me Touched. Except Gerry and the Sons of Cuchulainn and the lads back home. She was FBI, Sean, or a British agent working for the FBI.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. And that’s why I don’t like to see you shouting through the letter box as if you and her are best pals. And that’s why we’re all going to have to split town for a while. Get rid of this bitch. Switch to plan B like Gerry says. This is when they’ll be least expecting it. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, reeling.

  “Yeah, well, whatever we do I’m going to have to keep an eye on you, mate. Very close eye,” he says with a grim face.

  “I met this woman twice in my whole fucking life,” I protest.

  Touched nods sympathetically.

  “Sean, put yourself in my shoes. You just can’t be too careful.”

  “I know her about as well as Kit and Jackie know her,” I say.

  “Aye, but they have several years of trust in the bank with me. You have less than a week. And a bad week at that.”

  I catch his eye and nod.

  “You’re right. I’d do the same thing myself.”

  He grins.

  “You’re a good lad. At least I hope for your sake you are.”

  And we stand for a moment and stare at the bed. And suddenly I notice her chest moving up and down.

  “She’s still alive,” I gasp in horror.

  “Aye, but not for long now,” Touched says clinically.

  He’s right.

  She has bled all over the floor.

  Her cheeks dead white, her teeth smashed in, the breath exhaling from her body in frothy bubbles of crimson blood.

  There’s nothing I can do and anyway he has the gun.

  But if you can hear me, Samantha, if you can hear me, hear me.

  “If you’re wrong about this, Touched, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.”

  He looks at me to see if I’m threatening him, but my face is expressionless, blank. He lets it go and I watch her breaths grow fainter and fainter until they finally stop.

  Death has ten thousand ways.

  And in the minute it takes Samantha to pa
ss, I imagine that, on Earth, about a thousand other human beings are making that mysterious transition from life to lifelessness. Still, Touched is a master of this art. Touched is Death’s apprentice. True, there are old people in Buenos Aires who for a time in the 1940s were killing tens of thousands every day; and there are men in Cambodia and Rwanda who have personally slaughtered hundreds with their own hands. He will never match those individuals in terms of body counts. He doesn’t need to. He’s a specialist. Quick and lethal or slow, dreadful, and terrifying. With Samantha he took his time. An hour or two, perhaps longer. He tortured her, horribly, and there can be few alive who take such pride in the pain they inflict in the commission of their work.

  And a coup for him. A British agent. A woman agent.

  Sweet.

  I lean on the wall to steady myself.

  Breathe in, exhale. Breathe in, let it all go.

  And then the fear begins to leave me and I open my eyes to memorize the scene. The tiny precise cuts all over her body. The eyes. The smell.

  Aye. One thing, Touched. You can’t know that I also am a favored son. That I, too, have welcomed many into the arms of Death.

  Oh yes.

  Let me look at you. You’re calm, relaxed, confident.

  It’ll be a match, you and me, we brothers of the sword.

  On that day of reckoning.

  Put down that gun and you’ll have it now.

  He doesn’t move.

  But that’s fine, Touched.

  You’re already dead. Here, in this room, as we live and breathe, and as you stare at me with distrust in those granite eyes, and I look back to you, a cipher, I vow to meet you in an unfair fight and spare no quarter and butcher you and cut you down.

  Aye, my friend.

  Joyfully, with mine own hand, will I despoil your corpse and throw your tattered carcass onto that black barge that Death steers into the silent sea, from which none return. The day will come.

  And it can’t come soon enough.

  9: A BURIAL ON PI

  Touched pulled down the blinds and dimmed the lights, all the while, casually, keeping me in eyeline, his itchy trigger finger pointing the 9mm at my chest.

  Big-eyed, bloody, his face a sunburned brown, his disordered graying hair a grisly crown of pride. He was pleased with himself. Happy.

  He looked at the body.

  “Aye, she’s dead now, Sean. You ever seen someone die before?”

  I shook my head.

  “No, I suppose not. Ok. Well, it’s only a first step. The night’s not over yet. You’re about to get a valuable learning experience,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, keeping the lid on the pressure cooker.

  “Clean up. Have you touched anything since you came upstairs?”

  “You know I haven’t, I’ve just been standing here,” I said.

  “And I was wearing these for most of the evening,”Touched said, showing me his black silk gloves.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Sit down on that stool and don’t do anything for a minute,” Touched ordered.

  I sat down. Touched pulled out his mobile phone and speed-dialed a number.

  “Aye, Gerry, it’s me. . . . Yeah, I took care of it. I’ll want you to come by with Jackie, and we’ll get rid of her. Bring plastic sheets, that big sail bag, cleaning supplies, and overalls. . . . Nah, no problems. . . . Listen, mate, interesting sidelight, young Sean showed up looking to buy chocolate biscuits. He was shouting through her letter box. I’m not sure if I like it.There’s a chance that she was the FBI agent on the outside and he’s the inside man, so we’re going to have to watch him, interrogate him. I think he’s kosher, he’s a good lad, but you know me, Gerry, fucking caution is my middle name. . . . Aye.

  Listen, the sooner the two of you get over here the better. You best tell the family we’re going to have to go up to the cabin, especially if you still want to do plan B. . . . Aye, until all of this cools down. . . . Ok, see you, mate.”

  He clicked off the phone and looked at me.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, pal,” I said.

  He smiled, rubbed his chin.

  “Listen, Sean, I think you’re ok, but Jesus, we have to be careful. We don’t really know you from Adam. So after we get rid of this bitch we’re going to have to give you a bit of the old fucking third degree, ok?”

  I said nothing.

  Touched leaned against the wall, shook his head, got a glimpse of Samantha out of the corner of his eye, grinned.

  “Yeah, Sean, it’s like this. Gerry and me have already decided we’re going to split town for a few days. We can’t do anything with the FBI breathing down our necks and they’re going to get nervous when their agent disappears. We’ll dump her body and we’ll clean this place so it’s spic-and-span even under the UV lights but, still, they’ll definitely increase surveillance on us when they realize that she’s missing. But we’ll have the drop on them. We’ll be up in Maine at Gerry’s cabin, which he has kept off the books and no one even knows about. It’s a fantastic spot. Aye, remember we talked about it? He calls it the Dead Yard because of the trains. Even if they are looking, the FBI wouldn’t find us in a million years. “

  “What’s up there?”

  “Nothing’s up there. Except us. We’ll be up there and hopefully with a wee surprise, too.”

  Touched looked at his black T-shirt, speckled with blood and saliva and God knows what else.

  “This T-shirt’s ruined,” he said, leering, itching to tell me details. How she was an uncooperative cow, how she bled so easy, how she screamed under the gag . . .

  He coughed, blinked. Motioned me to get up and go downstairs. I went ahead of him down the steps and into the shop. He went to the door, checked the street, pulled the blinds, grabbed a Flake bar, threw it to me. I shook my head and forced a hurt and disappointed look onto my face.

  “Eat your chocolate,” he said. “That’s why you came in.”

  “I came in to get some for Kit, we had a bit of a fight.”

  “Eat it, you’ll need energy for later.”

  I shook my head.

  “What’s the matter with you? Are you upset about her upstairs?”

  “If she was a British agent, she got what was coming to her,” I said.

  “Are you pissed off at me for doubting you?” he asked.

  “No, it’s not that either. It’s just, you know, things look like they’re getting a bit out of control,” I said, to show him that I was a naive immigrant who knew nothing of this violent world he inhabited.

  Touched was sympathetic.

  “I know, Sean. I know. From your perspective things probably look really fucked up about now. But you gotta believe me, mate, these are just setbacks but they’re not fatal setbacks. Ok, so we don’t know what the hell happened to Sea-mus. If you ask me, he’s either dead or he’s on his way to fucking Australia by now. Doesn’t matter, unless that soldier boy IDs you and Jackie, and the news says he can’t do any descriptions, then we can draw a line through that episode and forget the whole thing. And this, well, you could almost see this as a good thing. Now we know the feds are keeping tabs on us, so we’ll all have to be more careful,” he said.

  I nodded, unconvinced.

  “Come on, mate, cheer up, you don’t want to look this blue when the lads show up,” he said, giving me a wink.

  Touched seemed a different man than the morose and depressed character of this morning. A couple of hours of rape and torture had clearly invigorated him.

  “But you’ve murdered one of their agents now. Won’t that make things worse?” I asked, making sure I said the word murdered, not killed.

  “No, they’ll never find her. Not where we’re going to put her. They won’t know what happened to her. It’ll fuck them up for weeks. And let’s say the feds are watching us, the last thing they’ll expect us to do is what we’re going to do next.They’ll figure we’ll be running scared. They’ll think that. Not us, mate.
You’ll see, Sean, we’ll impress you yet. And if you go back to Ireland someday, you’ll say that the Sons of Cuchu-lainn were the baddest, smartest, coolest lads you ever worked with. You’ll see.”

  Touched laughed. He was so excited and relaxed that it was making me physically ill.

  “So what happens next, tonight?” I asked.

  “Gerry, me, you, and Jackie are going to dig a hole in the salt marsh on Plum Island and dispose of that lass. Then me and you are going back to Gerry’s house and I’m going to have to question you like you’ve never been questioned before.And then, after that, as much as you were on probation before, you’ll be in purgatory now,” he said dispassionately.

  “What about the mess upstairs?”

  “I’m going to be busy with you. Gerry is not in the best physical shape, so I suppose young Jackie will have to spend most of the night doing that. I’ll swing by in the morning with my UV scanner to check it out. Be a job, but don’t worry about that, the hard work will be good for him.”

  There was a knock at the back door.

  “There’s the boys,” Touched said.

  Touched kept me in pistol shot and opened the back door. Gerry and Jackie were dressed in old clothes, carrying a holdall and a huge plastic sail cover that presumably was to be the improvised body bag. Jackie limped over and shook my hand. Gerry, too, greeted me warmly.

  “Sean,” Gerry said loudly. “I believe the shadow of suspicion has been draped over you. Not to worry. Macte nova virtute puer. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.Kit told me about the little trick she pulled, no wonder you needed some refreshment after your long walk.”

  “What are you going to do to him?” Jackie asked.

  “We’re going to have to quarantine Sean a wee bit,”Touched said. “And check him out.”

  Jackie looked upset.

  “I don’t mind it, Jackie, really, better safe than sorry. I mean, I can totally see Touched’s point of view,” I said.

  “Anyway, don’t worry. We’re going to have a grand few days. We’re going to switch to plan B and we’re going to go to the cabin,” Gerry said.