by Josh Lanyon
“Me? I didn’t do much. I’m the muscle.”
“You were good to that kid. I was ready to throttle him.”
“No way.”
“Way. I… You’re just a solid human, Tom. I should have followed through a while ago and asked you to do something. I’m not particularly adroit at this.”
“A—what?”
He snorted. “Adroit, you fucker.” His thumb stroked the back of my hand. “Truth? The thought of going to my car skeeves me out.”
“Yeah. Me too. Maybe we can chuck those as well.”
Beyond the neutral zone, people were on the move. A light flared, then another, and growing noises carried from the parking lot.
Jonah leaned into me. “You want to have dinner tomorrow?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’d rather have breakfast.”
“Done.”
***
A good-looking EMT in a crisp uniform covered me with a blanket after strapping me to a gurney. Red, white, and blue lights streaked the sky above, and as Thor is my witness, not the way I envisioned my evening ending. Not really my best self at that moment. Especially when Vinnie appeared and harassed the EMT. “Hey, man, can you give us a sec?”
The EMT looked at him incredulously. “What? No. I can’t.”
“We’ve been through an ordeal, dude. Seriously. Step off. He’s not dying, and I need a minute with my brother. Our mom is going to be so worried.” Vinnie wore his I’m-ex-military face—the I-would-never-ever-lie-because-I’m-a-Vet face—and as soon as the EMT, narrow-eyed, stomped away, Vin leaned close and whispered, “You want some CBD, Tommy? Take the edge off? It’s been a shit night for all of us, and it’s a proper dose. It’ll help.”
How was Vinnie completely unscathed? Not a drop of blood or a speck of ash on him. I bet he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He did have crumbs on his chest, and they looked suspiciously like flakes of pastry. Or Pop-Tarts.
“I hate you.”
“Nah. You love me. But you’re sure?”
“No. I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t know. Will it show in a piss test?”
“No way. I do this all the time. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout.” I believed him about the piss test, plus I no longer cared. My ankle had swelled so big, it needed its own zip code. “Sure. I bet Carl could use some too.”
“Who the fuck is Carl?”
***
Parkway Mall was resurrected. A rainbow of multicolored lights bathed the building, and law-enforcement types marched industriously about, every one of them with distinct and important purposes. There were cars, and trucks, and reporters—and coroners.
Rain sizzled on the pavement, and I could swear I heard a helicopter in the distance. My friends gathered around me. Chris relaxed on the end of a gurney with an ice pack on his shoulder and an IV dripping from a bag Piper held in the air. She’d lost her cap.
“That was fun,” she said.
Everyone murmured their agreement.
We’d freed a kid, killed a serial killer, I’d made out with the guy I had a thing for, and while I lay there with a foam stabilizer encasing my foot, Jonah and I held hands for the fifth time.
Life was good.
Across from us, Carl sat sideways in the back seat of a police cruiser, wrapped in a silver blanket, drinking from a Styrofoam cup, and speaking with a very attractive police officer.
That’s the picture forever burned into my mind from our night. Not the bad shit. Just a kid. Alive and safe. Drinking coffee. And smiling.
We’d done that. The six of us. Carl had my phone number in his pocket, and I had his sincere thanks in return.
Not bad for a Friday.
Piper swung the saline bag. “So next week? Same time?”
“Yeah, I think I can do Friday,” Chris said. “I’ll have to check my phone, you fucking idiots.”
Dougie waved to the EMT, who stalked over to cart me on my way. “I was telling Tommy there’s this farm upstate…”
And I drifted away, the CBD doing its thing, and Jonah holding my hand.
THE END
A Country for Old Men by Dal Maclean
Inspector Calum Macleod has returned to the Western Isles of Scotland to bury a part of himself he can’t accept. But the island has old secrets of its own. When a murderer strikes, Calum finds his past can’t be so easily escaped.
Chapter One
It was all about discretion. Making the effort not to be noticed. It was about not letting anyone down.
A sharp midmorning summer breeze blew away the sounds of Calum’s heavy car door clunking shut and the tailgate opening and closing to let out his father’s ecstatic dog. Then, after a shifty look around, Calum set off with long-legged strides toward the beach, the dog trotting at his heels.
He’d parked his Subaru 4x4 off the main road at the Braighe, two bays separated by a narrow strip of land, where the Minch chewed into the eastern peninsula of Point from both sides.
When Calum was a child, he’d always hoped they’d drive up the road one day and find the sea had won; that they’d be living suddenly on another island, all of their own. But twenty-odd years on, the road was still there, and the medieval Ui chapel, and Aignish cemetery nestled next to it, all still defying the ruthless grey water.
The cemetery was the reason for Calum’s stealth. His father and mother were at church, attending the funeral service of the graveyard’s next occupant, a bodach—an old man—called Murchadh Toddy, and Calum’s mother had made it very clear she didn’t want the mourners to see her son jogging happily along the beach in the background.
So Calum had negotiated the kind of compromise he’d become used to since he’d come home. He did some of the things he wanted, but he made sure to hide them. A step-change from his time on the mainland, if he thought about it, when he’d felt safer conforming on everything. Now that he was back on the island, these little, pointless, harmless rebellions seemed to help.
Calum clambered down over the spew of big rocks at the end of the path, the dog mincing gracefully ahead of him, until they both jumped down onto the sands of Broad Bay. The sun climbed behind broken clouds, forcing thick poles of light down through the grey gaps, not sunshine in the accepted mainland sense of golden warmth and happiness, thinner and colder than that. But still…better than nothing.
The beach was long, pale gold, empty, as beaches in the Outer Hebrides tended to be, and the tide was advancing, breakers ten-deep, cresting far out from the shore, then rolling in, in foaming, frozen perfection.
The wind felt even sharper so close to the Minch, laced with salt and ozone; perfectly, inhumanly fresh. There was no pollution, no smoke or stench, just the pure, clean, hungry sea. It was so easy to imagine Viking longboats hitting the shore there, as they once had, or reaching the land clearly visible on the far side of the bay, at Back.
Calum began to run, fast and hard, earbuds in but no music playing yet to cover the sound of his trainers thudding on the compacted sand; his deepening breath. He had the morning off, he was running in absolute freedom, and he could convince himself that he’d been totally right to move back home.
The dog—Shep—raced joyously alongside him. Little imagination was wasted on the islands for something as trivial as naming a dog. But Shep was a personality in himself, a clever, cowed collie who’d been raised with strictness and absent, occasional affection by Calum’s parents. To them, he was a working dog, a kind of organic tool.
Taking Shep for a walk or a run was a mainland conceit—he got more than enough exercise on Calum’s parents’ croft. But Calum had returned from his years away with his modified view of dogs as pets deserving attention, and Shep could hardly believe his luck. Calum’s mother said he was ruining the dog. His father, as usual, said nothing.
Calum glanced up at the high ground on his left as he belted past it—a long grassy hill shored up by an elderly stone-and-cement wall.
The church service would be over by now, and th
e funeral procession would have begun, the coffin carried from the nave on a bier on the shoulders of relatives and village men, and out onto the road. Everyone who wanted to would take their turn, for up to a mile of slow, marching farewell, before sliding the casket into the hearse and breaking for their cars to begin the snaking trail to Aignish.
His parents, like many people on the Island of Lewis, were unflinchingly, morbidly serene about death, with all the confidence of the deeply religious. And even before he left at eighteen, Calum had seen too many funerals, taken along as a matter of course. He’d helped carry the coffins of numerous neighbors and his own grandparents, and stood looking down into their graves on the bleak mound of the cemetery, blown by the sea gales on both sides.
The last funeral he’d been to had been his grandfather’s, on a glorious July day, hot and clear and rare, just before he left for university.
He could remember as if it had been branded into him, a phrase from a Gaelic psalm that had been sung…precented…in the church, before they set off with Seanair—grandfather—on their shoulders, all matched for height so that the coffin and the body inside didn’t slip or slide. If he closed his eyes, Calum could still feel the oppressive weight of the oak, and the symbolism of it—the boy carrying his father’s father to his grave.
That phrase had stuck with him…the description of where Seanair was going…an talamh trom…the heavy earth. And taking his own handful of it, the heavy earth, and his turn to throw it onto the coffin, before he took up a spade with the other men and began to shovel banks of clay soil back into the hole, on top of Seanair, as the sun shone in a Mediterranean-blue sky and the sea stretched and waited.
He’d decided then and there, that was going to be his last funeral, though it was a hopeless hope. But at least he could resist funerals as social occasions. His mother, on the other hand, had become steadily more religious, so anything church-related—funerals, Worships, communions, services—had her full attention.
Shep, now soaking wet, grinned his thrilled doggy grin as he danced ahead of Calum with a poor excuse for a stick gripped in his jaws. But even with the whole expanse of sea and shore stretching for miles in front of him, all his, Calum found he wasn’t in the mood for a chase.
Maybe the first euphoria of moving back for good—making that final decision and leaping into it—had started to pass.
Maybe it had been the grinding familiarity of watching his mother that week in her dark-blue hat and coat, and sensible, thick, flesh-colored tights, setting off, Bible in hand, for every night of the pre-funeral Worship at Murchadh Toddy’s house.
Maybe it was the claustrophobia of the feeling that he’d never really left; never absorbed anything solid enough to distinguish him from his culture.
Maybe it was that all his experiences away from here were starting to feel like someone else’s life.
Or maybe it was the knowledge that he’d walled himself in by choice, willingly mortared in each brick, watching dangerous freedom slowly disappearing out of view through the gap.
He jerked to a halt and turned around sharply, furious with his own melodrama, then started back along the beach, full tilt, eating up the distance toward the point he’d clambered down.
He was panting, but he got his breath back quickly as he and Shep climbed back up over the rocks.
Running was something else his parents side-eyed as pointless, but he was determined to keep his peak fitness through that, and his visits to a gym in Stornoway. Maybe it was vanity; maybe it was survival.
The short drive back to his parents’ house in Shulibost was accomplished before the funeral procession could reach the village. But as he was about to turn into the lane up to the house, an elderly woman waved him down; raincoat on, handbag on shoulder, newly disembarked from the Stornoway bus.
Chrissie Goirt Macdonald had been a fixture of Calum’s childhood. She’d be in her seventies now, white-haired, bespectacled and still full of relentless energy. She lived with her awkward husband, Angus, and their awkward middle-aged son, Norman—Tormod in Gaelic—bizarrely nicknamed Lucky. And theirs was the same dynamic as Calum’s family: a lively, dominant, charismatic woman and quiet men bobbing in her wake. As a child, Calum had believed every family was like that.
He wound down the driver’s window.
“Is that you wasting energy running nowhere again, a’ Chalum?” Chrissie teased as she crossed the narrow road to his car. “You can do my floors if you want.”
Calum laughed. He couldn’t help but love Chrissie. She was less religious than his mum, more accepting of new ideas. She, for example, hadn’t gone to Murchadh Toddy’s funeral.
“You’re like a tourist with those runs and walks. That dog must be bewildered.”
After ten years away Calum heard the Lewis accent almost like an outsider would hear it—a kind of flat, exaggerated singsong, like nothing else. Maybe he was more of a mimic than he’d thought, because he’d been told by locals that he now sounded like an Englishman.
“I must have been infected on the mainland,” he said.
“You must.” Then, slyly, “Your mam was telling me you went out with a girl from the town.” Chrissie grinned as if what she was saying was terribly risqué. But it explained why she’d stopped him. “That’s the spirit. The only way to deal with a broken heart is just get over it.”
The whole brisk, stiff-upper-lip island psyche was there—just get over it. If only Calum knew what it was he was getting over.
“It’s a shame your old girlfriend couldn’t come with you. But…once the cianalas takes hold, a’ bhròinean, no Gael can help coming home. Your mam and dad are happy you’re back, though. And you have such a good job!”
Calum made a noncommittal noise and held his smile. Invasive personal remarks and ignoring privacy were so much part of his experience growing up, that his own defensiveness startled him. Everyone knew your business here. Or thought they did.
“Your mam said your new girl’s related to the Eoripe Morrisons,” Chrissie swept on. “The Reverend Alexander Morrison?”
She sounded genuinely impressed by the church connection, which was why Calum’s mother had told her, he supposed. That, and his mum’s desperate eagerness for Calum to settle down and give her grandchildren.
“We’ve only been out once, Chrissie,” Calum said. He knew he had to nip this in the bud before news of an imminent engagement spread, the way his last desultory relationship had attained a gossip-status of Tragic Romance. “I might end up an old bachelor.”
“Oh, mo chreach, you can’t let that happen! A handsome fellow like yourself. What was it they called you at school? Orlando Bloom!”
Calum glowered. “I look nothing like Orlando Bloom.”
Chrissie peered down at him assessingly as he clenched his jaw, then relaxed it at once. Because, okay, perhaps he had a sharp jawline. And yes, maybe, he had large brown eyes. And his hair was… Okay, it was dark brown. And a bit wavy. But that didn’t mean he looked like Orlando bloody Bloom.
Chrissie didn’t usually get vibes, but she seemed to decide not to push the point.
“Well, in any case, a’ gràidh, tha u glè snog.” Calum shook his head in despair. Snog meant pretty. “All we used to get from our Julia was Legolas this and Calum that. And you wouldn’t go out with anyone!” Julia was Chrissie’s only grandchild, the offspring of her daughter Seonag—Joan. Chrissie shrugged. “Co dhiù, she got over it. And I’d better get on. Tìoraidh, a’ gràidh!”
She didn’t wait for his mumbled goodbyes, but strode back across the main road and up the hilly side-road toward her own house, her stocky figure radiating energy and imperturbable good humor.
Calum looked after her, feeling as if he’d just been slapped around the head; then he put the car in gear and drove up the lane to park outside the house.
The sun had given up the struggle for the day; the sky was grey, and the air was full of the chatter of the starlings sitting on the roof of the weaving shed and lining
the telephone wires.
Orlando Bloom. Calum had the name attached to him now as if it had been branded on his forehead.
In the islands, over the centuries, because people had tended—until recent generations rebelled—to be named after their parents and close relatives, and with a limited number of choices, most had nicknames, to tell one John Morrison or Murdo Maclean from another.
People inherited their family nickname, like Calum’s father and grandfather—both Donnie Maiseach, from the first man in the family dubbed ‘maiseach,’ Calum’s great-grandfather. Though the fact that maiseach meant beautiful, lovely, or handsome hadn’t made Calum’s life any easier at school.
Chrissie, on the other hand, had married into her nickname. Goirt meant ‘sore,’ since Angus’s father had been viewed as a hypochondriac.
But there were also unfortunates like Calum, landed with their own, personal nickname on top, attached randomly and ruthlessly for any small peccadillo, and unshakable to the grave. He, Calum Maiseach, would also be known as Orlando Bloom until he was an old bodach with no hair. Though, he supposed, gloomily, Orlando would get there before he did.
Calum let himself and Shep in through the back door of the house, heeling off his trainers in the modest porch.
They lived in a 1980s bungalow, built on the family croft near the Old House, the now-empty shell his grandparents and their parents had lived and died in. The New House, as the family still called it, had been extended over the years, and it was relatively comfortable and warm, but far from beautiful. Aesthetics came near the bottom of the list of local priorities.
Now Calum could see clearly how dated the furniture was, how twee the ornaments and little religious plaques on the walls. But, it was home. Childhood. Safety. Certainty. A removal of temptation. And…his parents were getting older. He was their only child, and they were incredibly close, the three of them. They’d need the help soon enough.