I slid backwards into the undergrowth.
Checked the sun, got my bearings.
The pond was about a hundred yards behind me. But the path that skirted the bank was not thickly forested. Still, if I could get there, I’d leg it. Sprint to the far shore and then just go like mad to the top of the next hill. Keep going over it, into the next valley and then east to a road or a farmhouse or anywhere.
I was almost at the pond path, but where was Jack?
He should be right here.
I moved slower.
Got ready.
The air freshened and a wind blew thick with moisture. It was going to rain at any minute. That would help me too.
Another downslope. Face first, eating dirt and all the bases.
Static from a walkie-talkie.
“Any sign of him?” Touched’s nervous voice asked.
“Nope,” Jackie said, a few feet from me on the top of a rise.
“Not yet.”
I stole a peek over a thornbush. There he was. Radio in left hand, pistol in right, back to me, head bent down out of the wind.
If I could take him out, and get a gun into the bargain, that would certainly level the goddamn odds.
Gerry couldn’t follow me up the hill, so we’d be talking one against one.
Nice.
Jackie was walking away from me, up towards a rocky outcrop from where he could survey the terrain. I crouched on all fours and made my way behind him. Six feet away, five feet, four feet.
I’d jump him. I’d land on his back, left arm round his throat, pull hard. Snap his neck, soundlessly, take his walkie-talkie, his jacket, his gun, shoot the cuffs, run for the far side of the pond.
I loosened my fingers.
Tensed.
Stood.
A huge crashing noise.
A sharp hammer blow in the back of my shoulder. I was spinning through the air. I thumped into a tree and came down heavily on a rocky outcrop, cracking half a dozen ribs.
Jackie turned. He was right above me. I’d landed at his feet. I reached out to grab his shoe and pull him off balance but I was moving in slow motion and he easily stepped away.
Lightning triage. Ribs, broken nose. I’d been shot in the shoulder and the bullet had ricocheted off my head. Flesh wounds, but it wouldn’t matter now.
“Don’t move,” Jackie said, nervously pointing a .22 pistol at me.
“I got him,” Touched shouted. “I fucking nailed him.”
“Get over here,” Jackie called out.
Touched ran over, breathless, his .38 smoking, his grin as wide as ever.
“Is he dead?” Jackie wondered.
“No way, he’s not dead. Don’t think he’ll die from that. Will you, Sean? Or whatever your name is. Just winged him, Jack.”
“Hell of a shot.”
“Aye, glad I didn’t top him. For him it has to be slow. He’s going to think that the unluckiest thing that ever happened to him in his miserable life was my bullet missing his traitor brain.”
“Fucking liar, too,” Jackie snarled.
“We may as well get started,” Touched said, and I made an effort to turn my head and stare at him. Delight on his upcurved mouth and a frenzied look in his eyes.
You may as well, I tried to say, but there was blood on my tongue. Blood everywhere: in my nose, mouth, and ears and running underneath my T-shirt.
My limbs were heavy. My eyelids drooped. Closed.
Heartbeats. Voices.
Gerry: “You got him, Touched?”
“Aye, I got him.”
“Dead?”
“No, Gerry, not dead. Not by a long way.”
“What now? Dig a hole?”
“Aye. But we’ll have to interrogate him first. We’ll take him to the smokehouse with the general’s son.”
“We could use him as a bargaining chip too.”
“Nah, we won’t be doing that, Jack. We’ll use him as a lesson. When they find him the feds will know they made a mistake. They’ll know how serious we are.”
Just leave me here, Touched, for old time’s sake, I’ll die
soon enough, I promise. Leave me.
“You want me to drag him?”
“Aye, have you got that rope?”
The birds, spooked by the gunshot, began chirping again. A rope uncoiled on my thigh. Water on my face. It was that rain at last. Icy cold rain from Quebec or the Hudson Bay or Newfoundland.
“No, Jack, a slipknot is what you need. Let me have a go.”
“I’ve got the rope, I’ll tie it round him. Lift up his legs.”
“Tie it round his fucking throat, not his legs.”
“Do what he says. Round his throat.”
No, no rope. Just leave me, Touched. Out here in the woods. Leave me. I’ll die and the rain will turn to snow and cover me up and no one will find my body until the spring, when they’ll see me thawed—a vernal votive offering. Maybe they wouldn’t find me for years, just a pair of boots, a skeleton, and the well-preserved carbon fibers of an artificial foot.
“Look, he’s moving, he’s crawling, he’s trying to get away.”
“Get that fucking rope.”
Crawling. Who knew where? It didn’t matter. North. Under cover of the front. Over the Saint Lawrence and the Ottawa and the Kapiskau rivers.
“Here you go, Touched.”
A rope around my neck.
Crawling, perhaps I’d go on forever until I was in the kingdom of the bears. There was nothing between here and the pole and I could slip through unseen because I was invisible now.
Rope tightening. My breathing stopped.
“Drag him now?”
“No, Jack, we have to soften him up first.”
And the kicks came.
From three pairs of booted feet. Angry, furious, violated, betrayed. In my side, in my legs, in my back, in my testicles, in my head. I tolerated them for a minute and then I took myself to another place.
11: THE SMOKEHOUSE
The bottle is the most important thing in the world. The dirty Coke bottle on the floor. That no one notices.
Fear is my enemy.
Pain is my friend.
An image. The remains of a man, naked, his skin bruised black and verdant green and lying facedown dead in a sheugh on a one-lane road in the bog country. The rain falling and there’s a breath of wind from out of the Sperrins, a hackle of dogs howling, and the warped glass of a camera lens taking pictures. The body is not the body of a man. His genitals have been torn off, his eyes gouged out with a screwdriver, and his fingernails burned off one by one with arc-welding gear. His kneecaps have been smashed in with a sledgehammer and the synovial fluid lies caked on his shins like dry white spittle. He has been scalped and his feet wrapped in barbed wire. Electrodes have been attached under his arms, where they have burned him and cauterized him hairless. A helicopter is hovering grimly above him with the swamp grass rising to meet it as if it were some monstrous god—the hushed void of peat, vaporous and awed in its considerable presence.
I have seen this picture.
An informer shot in the temple. I have seen this picture more than once. From Samantha’s files. Touched’s handiwork in the flesh. In the washed-out black-and-white tones of the bogland.
With Samantha he exercised what, for him, was a chivalrous restraint.
I know what he is capable of doing.
Someone is shaking me.
Fear is my enemy.
Pain is my friend.
The Coke bottle. Focus on that.
A shake.
“Are you with us, brother Sean?”
A cough. I squint into the dark. I’m tied, naked against a wall. My arms stretched out and my wrists bound about the wooden support beams of the smokehouse. The cuffs wouldn’t stretch round the big beam, but this is better in any case. Tying me out like this is a stress position that’s like a slow form of crucifixion. My lungs are filling with fluid. I’m gradually drowning.
A man has
a chair turned round and is sitting in front of me.
“I can see that your eyes are open and I would assume, having some considerable experience in this field, that you are unconcussed.”
“I’m suffocating.”
“So I see.”
“You’re killing me.”
“That’s the idea, my boy.”
“Go to hell.”
“Ha, ha. I admire your pluck, but that is hardly the tone to take with me, considering your position and my position.”
“Fuck off.”
I open my eyes to look at him. It’s Gerry, of course, saying this. He’s wearing a wool cap and sipping from a big plastic drinking cup.
He’s pulled a light on above his head and I notice Peter in the far corner. Also tied to a crossbeam, but his hands are behind his back. He won’t suffocate, he’ll live until the final bullet. They’ve kept him blindfolded, Touched sustaining the pretense of being able to let him go someday.
“I see you have no trouble speaking,” Gerry says.
“Not yet.”
“That’s good, we want you to talk. Come on. Look, let’s make it easy on ourselves, shall we? Just tell me your name,” Gerry says cajolingly.
“Sean.”
“Your real name.”
“That is my bloody real name.”
“You told Kit your name was Michael.”
“I lied. I was trying to impress her. It was all a lie. I’m Sean McKenna.”
“Why would you say your name was Michael? I know you want to talk. You’re itching to. All those pent-up feelings, emotions. We want to know your real name, and your contacts and what you’ve told them about us. We do know one very important thing, though. You haven’t been out of our sight for two days, so obviously they don’t know about this place. No one is going to rescue you. You’re going to die here unless you cooperate.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Gerry. I was just trying to impress her. I think Touched made a big mistake with that woman in Newburyport and I think you saw that too. This is a big mistake too, Gerry. I was bullshitting Kit. I was trying to scare her a little bit, that’s all, and I—”
“Enough.”
He pushes me back against the wall, a simple push, but there’s a sharp stab of pain from the ricochet wound in my shoulder and head. I suppose I’d been lucky that it hadn’t embedded itself in me, festering, breeding bacteria. Adding yet more pain. But as Touched said, probably in a while I’d be praying that it had killed me.
Gerry tugs my hair, looks at me, disappointed.
He must have told Touched that he could get more out of me with the gentle approach. Softly, softly, catchee monkey, and all that malarkey.
Well, perhaps it’s an opportunity.
If I can drive a wedge between Gerry and Touched, the rest will go with Gerry. Sonia and Kit must be appalled by what’s been happening and Jackie didn’t look too impressed with what Touched did to Samantha. It’s a thought. A possibility.
“Gerry, I want you to believe me. I made that all up for Kit, I’m not what you think I am. But it doesn’t matter, I know you’ll kill me no matter what; Touched killed that woman he thought was an agent. He’ll do the same to me. But I’m no agent. I’m a builder. A navvy. I’m on your side, Gerry. It’s the truth, I’m telling you the truth,” I say as convincingly as I can.
“So you’re not going to open up to me?”
“I am, I have been,” I insist.
“Sean, you don’t want me to let the boys play with you anymore. You already look like yesterday’s dog’s dinner. Tell me your name and we’ll go easy on you,” he says.
“It’s Sean.”
“Do you want a drink of something? Tell me and I’ll give you a drink. Help me here, Sean, work with me, come on,” he says, holding out the plastic cup.
“How can I help you when I keep telling you the truth and you won’t fucking believe me?”
Gerry leans forward with the cup, which seems to contain iced tea. I’d sell my soul for one sip.
“Come on, you want a drink.”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, tell me your name,” he says softly.
“I’ve told you, Gerry. I’ve told you the truth.”
His patience slips away. He puts the cup down, gets laboriously to his feet.
“Listen to me, you wee fuck. How stupid do you think we are? We know everything. We know you are called Michael, we know you were working for the FBI. We know that woman Touched killed was working with you. You are fucked, mate. What can you possibly hope to get out of this?”
He slaps me across the face. I recoil from the blow and the waves of pain. It throbs through me for a minute or more.
“To stay alive as long as possible,” I say in answer to his question.
“And you think the longer you hold out, the longer—”
“Yes,” I say, interrupting him.
“We’ll make you talk in the end.”
“Probably in the end I’ll say anything Touched wants me to say. I’ll confess to fucking anything to stop the torture.You know that, Gerry. I’ll say I’m a British agent. I’ll say I shot JFK. I’ll say I faked the moon landings. I’ll tell him anything.”
“So why not make it easier on yourself? Tell me, tell me the truth, let’s keep him out of it,” Gerry says.
“I’ve told you the goddamn truth.”
“We’re deadlocked then.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not convincing me.”
“Or you convincing me.”
“No,” he says and almost laughs.
Instead he sighs, looks around the smokehouse, shakes his head. He kicks away the chair and leans in. His breath bad, smelling of onions and some kind of spirit.
“Ok, goodbye now, Sean. I’ve given you a fair chance for a quick death. It’s all been me. I took you into my home, I gave you a job, and this is what you do to abuse my trust.”
“I didn’t abuse it—”
Gerry puts a meaty paw around my throat and squeezes hard to cut me off.
“Abused my trust, fucker. And a worse piece of shit I have never seen in my life. And when I do blow your fucking head off, Michael, I’m going to go back to Ireland and find your ma and cut her throat too. Your ma and da and brothers and sisters. I’m going to top them and burn their houses down and make them wish they’d never heard of you. Do you hear me?Do you fucking hear me?”
He releases the grip on my throat so I can answer him.
“You won’t be going back to Ireland, Gerry. You won’t be going anywhere but a fucking federal prison,” I say as smugly as I can.
“What does that mean? Open those eyes. Look at me, god-damnit.”
Thumbs grub into my eyes and open them in a violent tug.That fat face staring at me.
“I’m going to tell you something, traitor,” Gerry says and pauses to catch his breath.
“Anything but one of your Latin maxims,” I reply and even manage a little smirk.
He grins, but only for a second and then a hard punch in the mouth jerks my head backwards forty-five degrees, thumping it into the back of the wooden wall.
Blackness.
Awareness.
The pain dissipating so that it becomes localized and specific, rather than one huge seething mess.
An hour or more since he was here.
My lungs seething.
But he’s left the light on.
The kid in the corner, hooded, gagged. A dirt floor. Meat hooks in the ceiling for smoking venison and pig. A Coke bottle in the corner. A retro, old-fashioned bottle made of glass.
Big one. Liter bottle with a broken neck.
Little pockets of pain.
Check it.
The burning gunshot wound. And the lads worked me over pretty good. The pain is bad in the testicles, where I must have been kicked hard. A stabbing soreness that jags and dissolves into the more general numbness around my lower torso.
The ribs. Head. My drowning lungs.
Above all, thirst.
The door opens.
A brief glimpse of light and the woods and the house. It’s dusk. The deadline will be up in the morning. Peter and I have one more night. A shadow in the doorway. He comes in.
The bottle, focus on the bottle.
Because it’s him.
It’s Touched.
His big, menacing silhouette dominating the frame, overwhelming my field of vision.
The door closes.
He sits on the seat and lights a cigarette.
“Hi,” he says quietly.
The good ones know you don’t have to raise your voice to get things done. To make your presence felt. Let the weak yell and shout and waste time and emotion. The strong can devastate with a whisper.
“I’m going to have to kill ya to learn ya, is that right, Michael?” he says in an Irish purr.
Two can play at that game.
With him I will not speak at all.
That’s the rule that will control him and beat him.
“I said I’m going to have to learn you to talk, am I right?”
I gave him a smile.
“Oh-ho, you’re playing a game with me. A game with me? Dear oh dear. Big mistake, my friend,” he says, a twinkle in those cold eyes.
My grin widens.
“Fuck me, Michael, you are fucking brave. Have to wipe that smile off your face. . . . Now, we’ll try again. What’s your full name?”
But I shake my head.
He waits.
The silence annoys him. Gets his goat. Makes him think that I’m smarter than he is.
He rubs his chin.
There are to be no imprecisions of belief permitted here and Touched must say something to cover the hesitancy and convince himself.
“No, Michael, you can’t speak, because I have to teach you a whole new language,” he says at last.
He gets up, and I look at the cigarette, flinch.
He spits. Shakes his head.
“So you think I’m here to burn ye with me fags, do you? Well, don’t have any worries on that score. I just want to talk.See, we want this over with just as much as you. You’re boring me. We just want to know what you’ve told your bosses in London and Washington. What you’ve told them about us.”
The Dead Yard Page 28