The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

The Ring of Kerry by Dennis Mcfadden

FROM New England Review

AS A GIRL, Eena one day heard someone make mention of the Ring of Kerry. To her childish mind then, a title so grand could never be given to a thing so ordinary as a route for tourists to traipse; a magnificent name such as that could only be fit for a splendid piece of jewelry, a ring that might grace the finger of a queen. Even after the mundane truth became known to her, there was always a spot set aside in her heart for the real Ring of Kerry, the genuine, golden, gem-laden article of fabulous beauty and imponderable worth.

And so the first time she laid eyes on her grandmother’s ring, there it was. “You should have seen the thing, Mister,” she told Lafferty. They were in the bed of her room above the restaurant, she with the sheet up to her chin to hide the flatness of her chest. She was a stray, a mutt, skinny as a reed, unruly red hair immune to the brush, ears that stuck out like the handles on a jug, and brown eyes so big they could occupy her face entirely. Thin light from the cloudy afternoon squeezed through the blinds of the window, and he could hear the warble of a tin whistle from the Commodore Pub across the street. “The grandest thing I ever seen,” she said. “Fine, delicate carvings, little circles and twirls all around it, they might have been etched there by the angels. Lovely emeralds like clusters of green stars, and gold thick and shiny as the icing on a cupcake.”

“The Ring of Kerry,” said Lafferty. “Old, was it?”

“Ancient. My great-great-grandda discovered the thing one day in the bog when he was gathering turf for his fire. In a rotted old leather packet, as though it had been hid there long ago and somehow forgot.”

“Whatever become of it?”

“That’s the thing of it, Mister. My grandda buried it with her.”

He caught his breath. “In the ground?”

She nodded. “Like the bloody Egyptians. He said how she loved it, her only treasure in the world, and he buried the bloody thing with her in her grave.”

“Surely someone would have…”

She shook her head. “He told no one, you see. Folded her hands just so.”

“He told you.”

“I was a lass on his knee. Forever talking about the Ring of Kerry. And doesn’t he let it slip out of himself one day when he was well in his cups.”

At that moment the possibility had already unfurled itself before him. He could persuade her to go away with him, to retrieve the ring from the grave of her granny, and they’d run off together, just the two of them. He could do it, he was certain, easy as persuading a flea to hop, for he was aware of his own powers of persuasion with members of the gentler gender, attributable largely to the sincerity of the dimple on his chin.

But would it be right? He was not keen to use the innocent young thing for his own greedy gain. She was a waitress, or tried to be. After his meal at the Sugarshack Restaurant, the first time in the spring he’d ever laid eyes on her, she’d followed him out into the street. “Wait, mister,” she’d called. Ever since, he’d been Mister. “Wait-you’re after leaving your money on the table in there.”

“Why, that’s yours,” Lafferty had said. “That’s your tip.”

“Tip?” she’d said, her freckles all up in a bunch.

There were other considerations as well. His wife, Peggy, for example. The degree of their estrangement notwithstanding, they were still man and wife, and for all the cause he might have given her, she’d never once betrayed him. Lafferty drew the line at betrayal.

And there was a man, Lafferty had learned, an abusive man by the name of Ray, from Dublin, a criminal of some sort, though the exact nature of his criminality remained a bit of a mystery. What Eena was was on the run from him, which would account for how she’d ended up in godforsaken Kilduff, in the heart of County Nowhere. Ray was in Portlaoise Prison, she’d told him, and Lafferty, aware of the high-security nature of the place, concluded that he was not your garden-variety shoplifter.

Destiny struck one day late in the summer when Jelly Roll in the eighth at the Curragh came in at fifty to one. There was no reason on God’s green earth he ever should have, and Lafferty never would have given the horse the time of day, but Eena liked the name. She was fond of strawberry jelly. Lafferty’s turf accountant, Mickey G, was suspicious and reluctant, his nose bright red with worry, but he forked over the tidy sum, and Lafferty headed off to fetch Eena for a proper celebration. The timing was serendipitous, as Peggy was off on her monthly shopping trip to Dublin with her girlfriend Judy, leaving Lafferty free to borrow her little brown Ford, Peggy being reluctant to lend it. She was fiercely possessive of the thing, owing no doubt to the time Lafferty’d borrowed it, unbeknownst to herself, and the unfortunate incident with the innocent donkey. Eena was reluctant to miss her shift at the Sugarshack, displaying what Lafferty considered an unreasonable degree of loyalty toward the pitiful place. “Tell ’em your granny passed away,” he said. “You won’t be lying at all.”

He knew of a place in Naas, not far from Dublin, scarcely more than an hour’s drive, a place called the Oyster Tavern, where he’d celebrated a similar stroke of good fortune a number of years before with Peggy. It seemed proper and poetic. Eena wore a pair of high heels and a cocktail dress, the likes of which he’d never seen on her before, the likes of which he was surprised she possessed. She looked like a schoolgirl dressed up for show, and she was giddy as a schoolgirl, forever wanting to peek at the big wad of bills Lafferty had stuck in his pocket, wanting to touch it and smell it, the brown eyes of her filled with the wonder. In possession of a small fortune they were, high on the wings of escape, and her dear old dead granny having played a part-Lafferty allowed the notions to entangle themselves, just as he knew Eena was doing, and sure enough, nearly to Naas, doesn’t she come out with it.

“Mister,” said she. “If we could think of a way to get the ring up out of my granny’s grave, we could go to the Oyster Tavern anytime we pleased.”

He’d been waiting the months for her to suggest it. “And how might we go about that?”

“Why, we’d have to dig it up, I suppose.”

Lafferty pulled in the reins on his smile, which was chomping quite fierce at the bit. “But wouldn’t that be… I don’t know… sacrilegious?”

He glanced away from the road to see her eyebrow go up. “Oh, I don’t think so, Mister,” said she. “Only a wee desecration is all.”

They laughed. She’d come far since the spring, when she’d been incapable of deciphering his humor at all. The deal was all but sealed. All that remained was for Lafferty to decide how best to accommodate the matter of Peggy. Betrayal was not his currency, but there were degrees of betrayal, and accommodations could often be reached, given the right rationale.

The Oyster Tavern was a splendid old stone edifice with a doorway of dark heavy oak and, inside, a grand dining hall with beams in the ceiling, a magnificent stone fireplace at the far end. Crisp white linens, waiters in black jackets, and the finest steaks within a hundred miles of Dublin. Candles on the tabletops, music in the air. They settled in to study the menu, Eena hanging on his every word and wisdom, just as she always did, full of trust, safe in his hands. Lafferty was up to high living when he had to be, and he ordered a rare Merlot, had it opened by the table to let it breathe. He couldn’t escape her eyes in the candlelight. He held her hand on top of the tablecloth, where it squirmed like a tiny bird.

When the soup arrived steaming hot, he asked her what she judged the ring to be worth-had her grandda ever mentioned it in passing? In response her hand darted from beneath his own to hide in the shadows of her lap. “Mister,” she whispered.

“What is it?”

“Over there. Is it not herself?”

Back over his shoulder he looked. Herself it was indeed. Peggy across the crowd, Peggy and a man, a man he’d never before set eyes on, leaving the place together, a couple, laughing, tipsy, her arm about his back as she smooched his cheek, his hand on the full of her fine, round rear.

Lafferty listened to the blood clambering in his ear, the sound of a deal being sealed.

He parted the coarse green curtain, raising up a cloud of dust. Rattigan’s Motor Court, an apt appellation. He was accustomed to cheap rooms, some of the happiest moments of his life had been squandered in cheap rooms, and he could only hope this would prove to be another. The hardest part was the waiting. Keeping the girl on an even keel. Keeping himself on one as well, his heart still smarting at the revelation of his wife’s perfidy. But Lafferty, ever the optimist, viewed it as motivation, pure and simple. Opportunity beating his door in. Outside the twilight lingered till he thought it would never come to an end.

The little motorway in front led into Ballybeg, on the outskirts of which lay the church of St. Brigid, behind which lay the moss-covered graveyard, within which lay Mrs. Bernadette Moore, the granny of Roseena Brown. They’d driven by so he could see for himself the lay of the land, exactly as she’d described, the isolation of it, isolation enough at any rate, after midnight. Now the trick was getting midnight here. And Lafferty with his bowels raging perilously.

As great and tempting as the reward might be, the cost was steep. There was, for one thing, the matter of the manual labor necessary to dislodge six feet of good, solid Ballybeg earth; Mrs. Lafferty had not raised her boy to work with his hands, and he’d always found hard labor distasteful. Not to mention the grisly and ghastly nature of communion with a corpse.

“Mister.” Eena curled on her side in the bed, blanket pulled up to her chin. Underneath she was naked, quiet and still and lost in her thoughts, every bit the opposite of himself, pacing the floor in his boxers. “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea at that. Maybe we should call the whole thing off.”

Lafferty paused at the window, giving the twilight another dusty glimpse. The first notion that popped into his mind, he was not proud to admit, was of himself carrying on, on his own, without her assistance at all. He knew everything he needed to know, the ring was there waiting like a potato in the ground, and how much assistance could she offer at any rate, wee little thing that she was. He would have to do the heavy lifting. But he overcame his selfish inclination. He was nothing if not a moral man. He looked at her there curled in the bed, the size of an orphan. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said, crawling into the bed behind her, gathering her up in his arms.

“I’m scared,” she said, her heart pounding the cage of her ribs.

“Aren’t you after telling me your granny would want you to have it? That she’d give it to you herself if she could? After all your troubles, all you been through, all the torment your man Ray has caused you, look at it as your just deserts.”

She was still, a captured kitten.

“Think past today. There’s a good girl. Think past the unpleasantness to the rewards that’ll follow. Think of us free and easy on our own, living the good life.”

She was quiet for a long while, and he hoped the idea was soothing her, though still he could feel the working of her heart. “And what about Peggy, Mister?”

What about Peggy indeed. His face began to burn. “Her just deserts as well,” he said.

“How did you end up with the likes of her in the first place?”

“Young and ignorant, I suppose. Seemed at the time like the proper thing to do. She was up the pole, so it was the honorable thing.”

“And where’s the child then?”

“After all that, she lost it.”

Eena never turned. Her ear sticking up through her hair like a cookie there for him to nibble on. “Lost it,” said she, “or told you she lost it?”

In the shadows of the hedgerow Peggy’s little brown Ford was invisible from the motorway. He wondered if she’d called the cops to report it stolen. Behind the church of mossy stone, the steeple glimmering in the black of the night with the light of a hidden moon, the graveyard climbed along a sloping hill. Beside it a row of trees all slanted and hunched from the wind through the years, like fingers pointing in from the sea. Lafferty waist-deep in the grave of Mrs. Bernadette Moore, his shirt clinging to his chest with the sweat, stinking of it, his hands on fire from the handle of the spade-Peggy’s spade he borrowed from her garden. Eena perched on a neighboring stone, sitting morose and worried, knees clapped together, fiddling with the torch in her hand she never once lit, like the candle on the chest in her room.

“Could you spell me a minute, love?” said Lafferty, wiping the sweat from his face.

She tried, but she was useless as tits on a bull, every other shovelful tipping and falling back into the hole. The spade was lanky in her hands, and she wielded it as though she were uncertain which end to stick into the ground. Reminded Lafferty of her awkward and clumsy way with a tray full of dishes, or how she was in the bed whenever he tried to teach her a new trick, forever shy and clumsy, ill-equipped for the task at hand. But by God earnest and eager. When she was embarrassed, or hard at work, or deep in thought, the tips of her ears became red.

He caught his breath, looked up at the sky, gray notions of clouds scudding across it. Down across the slope past the church the village lay dark and quiet, save for the odd barking of a dog. A spot of light here, another there. Lafferty was soon impatient to take the spade from her hands. So close he could nearly taste it, the gold like icing on a cupcake, the sticky star clusters of emeralds. He considered she might be wrong, that maybe her old grandda was a liar-for wasn’t it after all too easy? A blow to his dreams to be sure, but he found, nearly to his surprise, the shattering of her dreams his foremost concern. He could imagine her all hollow and sad, imagine her shrinking, drying up, blowing away. And he found the oddest thing happening to his train of thoughts, found it twisting and heading down the side track. For it was this thing, the shattering of her dream, he was bound to deter, for if the worst were to happen he would take her, hold her, find the joy for her, somewhere, somehow. He was nothing if not an optimistic man, and in all his exhilaration, perched here on the verge of joy, Lafferty felt such a love for the girl struggling in the hole he wanted to pick her up and squeeze her. So there it was. The fortune scarcely in his mind at all, the joy the ring would bring her having surpassed the worth in value, and so he took the spade from her hands, helped her up out of the hole, and set about his business. He’d never felt more noble, and the feeling of it brought a shiver to his skin, a tear to his eye.

By the time he was up to his chin in the dirt, nobility was fading fast. Exhaustion was only the half of it. The unholiness of the whole bloody project, the graveyard, the smell of earth and sweat, the girl on the stone, the half-lit sky, the wind twisting through the trees, wasn’t it all beginning to play on his mind. Wasn’t he beginning to worry there was no one buried at the bottom of this hole at all, that he could dig all the way to Pakistan and come up empty. Wasn’t he beginning to feel the panic of being down in the grave, the prospect grabbing him by the throat and squeezing tight that he might never come up out of it again. My mam always told me I’d end up digging dirt for a living, he said. But Eena up above never uttered a word of response, causing Lafferty to wonder if he’d really said it aloud or only thought it, or maybe only dreamt it. And then to wonder if his mam had in truth ever uttered the words, though he was fairly certain she had, as she’d never had a good word to spare him or his da, when indeed his da was home with them at all. For a long time he pictured her there in front of the stove in the dark tenement, the smoke lifting the smell of frying rashers, her back to him, her hand clenched up in a fist on the side of her apron, and the sight of it stayed with him till his shovel knocked on wood.

“Are you there, Mister?”

Lafferty might have grunted. The exhilaration was back, jumbled up with a grand dollop of apprehension, as he cleared off the top of the box. He knelt on the lid, on the lower half, and when he reached up to swing it open, he hesitated. He found he couldn’t lift the thing up. There was no physical barrier to him doing so, but he found he couldn’t lift the thing up at all.

“Mister?” The whispered word sweet as an onion. Lafferty looked up at the head of her peering down. “What are you waiting for?”

Lafferty stood. “Could you give us a kiss for courage?” She had to lie on the ground to do so, and that was the way they held one another, both perpendicular against the dirt, arms embracing, cheeks touching, tears mingling. He wasn’t surprised to find her weeping, too, for now the circuit was joined, the electricity coursing through them, locked there together and for good. “Okay then,” said he. “Okay.”

He looked down at the box beneath his feet. “Will the smell of it be something awful?”

“I shouldn’t think so. She’s been down there so long.”

“Will she be dreadful? All rotted and the like?”

“I shouldn’t think so. All dried up by now, I’d suppose.”

Nevertheless he held his breath and closed his eyes and pulled up the top of the lid. Warm air rose up to his face. It was the bravest thing he ever did. It was an inanimate object in the box, he told himself, and he did what he had to do. Finally he stood, turning his face up again toward Eena, standing up looking down. “I have it.”

“From off her finger?”

“Of course from off her finger. From right where your grandda placed it.”

“That one’s the fake.”

“What fake?”

“That’s not the real one. That’s the replica, crafted to look like the genuine article.”

“You never mentioned a fake.”

“The real one’s tucked beneath her. Underneath her arse.”

Lafferty’s mind stalled in the processing of the words, as he stared at the black of the dirt, the fake ring clutched in his fist.

“Just grab it, Mister. I’ll explain it to you later.”

And so he did. He took a deep breath, diving in again. Never let the air out of him till he was standing once more. Dizzy, his mind still spinning. “Got it?” said she. He nods. “Hand it up then,” and so he did.

She tilted her head as she took it, sticking it straight in the pocket of her jeans. He drew in a great chestful of air, all the dread leaking out of him, and, reaching up to take her hand, doesn’t he glimpse the oddest flash, too feeble for lightning, and doesn’t he hear the faintest roar, too weak for thunder, a sight and a sound he could put together only after the fact as the back of the shovel coming barreling gangways toward his face at great velocity, behind which was Eena, the wee girl swinging the thing for all she was worth, like a champion hurler on the pitch.

Was he ever truly out? He was never truly certain, for it seemed as though no time had passed at all till he found himself slumped in the corner of the hole, on the lid of the box, white stars in his head drifting away, slowly letting blackness seep back in. And all the while the sight of Peggy in his mind, standing over him with her frying pan. He crawled up out of the hole, dirt crumbling back in with a rattle on the lid. Felt the lump on the side of his head, hair matted down in the dampness there. Down across the graveyard by the hedgerow, Peggy’s car was gone. A light or two down across the village. No sounds at all now, the dog having gone to sleep, or having been murdered, just the whisper of a breeze restless through the trees. Lafferty picked up the shovel, wondered what the bloody thing was doing in his hand, and dropped it into the hole with a clatter.

He didn’t head down toward the road. He went up higher instead among the gravestones, resting himself up a ways by a mossy Celtic cross, not far from the hunched-over trees.

There he waited. Not another five minutes gone by till he saw the headlamps. Sure enough, turning into the car park. Peggy’s little Ford, the girl climbing out, Eena. Scrambling up toward the grave of her granny. If indeed it was her granny at all.

“Mister?” she cried. “Mister! Where are you? Jesus, I’m sorry!”

Down the hill, down his nose, Lafferty watched her panicky antics. Lighting the torch, she pointed it down in the hole, the beam bounding up again as if swatted away, and then all about the graveyard in a skelter of bedlam. Far too feeble to reach him. Lafferty watched, breathing in the cool night air.

“Where are you? Mister? Terrence? I don’t know whatever come over me.”

He watched. Watched the spirit seeping out of her. Saw the torch beam droop and falter, then fail altogether. Watched the shadow of her trailing away back down across the graveyard to the car. He considered showing himself, confronting her, but in the end he couldn’t do it. In the end he couldn’t be certain the passenger seat of the car was empty.

So he watched. She climbed into the car and drove away, tail lamps disappearing down the road. When they were gone, when the sound of the engine had trailed off altogether in the still night air, not until then did he unclench his fist, no easy feat, so cramped was it from the work and the will. He held the thing up. Beheld it there. Even in the black of the night it gleamed against the sky, the genuine article, the real glimmering thing, the actual Ring of Kerry.

Mrs. Lafferty had not raised her son to work with his hands. He’d always found manual labor distasteful, and so it was with travel by foot. So it came to pass an hour or two later, maybe more, when the eastern sky was beginning to give in to gray and the car came up the motorway, that Lafferty changed his plan and stuck out his thumb.

For a long while the magic of the ring on his finger had sustained him, the heft and history and beauty and sheer gold lifting him above his weariness, and he’d vowed to trek on till morning, get as far away as he could on foot, then find shelter, rest, then plan out the rest of his life. He’d have put the ring in his pocket in the first place, only there were holes there, bloody holes his bloody wife could never be bloody bothered to sew, so he’d slipped it on his pinkie instead, where it fit snug as a rubber. But the weariness at last overcame him, that and the ache of his head, and after first determining that the car in question bore no resemblance to the little brown Ford of his erstwhile wife, Lafferty stuck out his thumb.

It was a big black car, posh and polished to a gleam, that came to a stop on the side of the road. Lafferty hustled up, climbing in. A man was behind the wheel, a man all dressed to the nines with his vest buttoned up, a man with a face full of smiling teeth, his hair pulled back in a ponytail and gleaming as bright as the car. “Lonely night for thumbing,” he said.

“It is,” said Lafferty.

“Where to?”

He was totally unprepared for the question. “Which way are you heading?”

The driver had to smile again, leaning up to the wheel. “West.”

“West it is, then,” Lafferty said, pointing like a cowpoke. “West across the island.”

There came a loud metallic click, the sound of the doors being locked, and Lafferty felt a jolt. The driver wasn’t driving. He nodded toward Lafferty’s lap, where his hand lay. “Lovely ring you’re wearing.”

The first thing he was was surprised. The last thing he supposed was the thing could be seen in the dark. He was about to respond with the first inanity that popped into his head, nothing special, when he looked at the lap of the driver, where a gun was quietly glinting.

“You’d be Ray, then,” he said.

Ray smiled even broader. “And you’d be Mister Lafferty.” He nodded again toward the ring. “Hand it over.”

“I can’t get it off.”

“What do you mean you can’t get it off?”

“I mean it won’t come off.”

The gun twitched up with impatience. “Give it a yank then.”

“I’m after giving it a yank. I’m after giving it a yank and a tug and a jerk and a pull. The bloody thing won’t budge.”

“Try spitting on it.”

“I’m after spitting on it, too-do you think I’m a bloody eejit?”

“Try it again with the spit. Only wipe it off good before you hand it over.”

To no avail again. Lafferty nearly pulling off the skin.

“Stick it over here.” Lafferty did, and Ray grabbed and yanked, yanking the finger nearly out of the socket, the shoulder nearly out of its own. Nor did twisting, prying, cajoling, and cursing do any good at all. Ray sat back and slapped the wheel, twisting his head to glare out the window at the sky growing bright. “You’re spoiling my morning, Mister Lafferty.”

“Get some butter,” Lafferty suggested. “Butter always works.”

“Mister Lafferty,” said Ray, leaning over calm and peaceful. “I have no butter. Do you see any butter? Do you think I’m carrying butter in my fucking pocket?” The volume gradually increasing, as was the redness of his face. “Do you think there’s butter in the glovebox? There is no bloody butter! No butter on my person, in the car, lying out by the road, no butter within miles of this godforsaken shithole! There is no fucking butter!”

“I should have known butter,” said Lafferty. Why, he didn’t know.

Nor did Ray. He glared a moment, then started the car with a roar, turned, heading back toward Ballybeg. He settled into silence for a while, though it was a fierce silence to be sure, the ferocity of which was exhibited by his reckless driving, the likes of which would have caused Lafferty to fear for his life, had that fear not already been in place.

Finally he slowed to a civil speed. “Mister Lafferty. Reach into the glovebox there. A celebration, a wee drop to the recovery of the ring.”

Lafferty, leery, did as he was told. It was a bottle of Powers, clear and gold.

“Well?” said your man, glancing askance at the faltering Lafferty. “Not thirsty?”

“Awfully early,” said Lafferty.

“Give it over,” Ray said. Lafferty handed him the bottle, and he took a gurgling draft, handing it back to Lafferty. “There. No poison. Now drink.”

Lafferty shrugged. “To the Ring of Kerry,” he said, tipping it up.

Ray looked at him, puzzled by the mention of the tourist trap. “Take another,” he said, and so Lafferty did. “There’s a lad,” Ray said, smiling now. He’d the face of a child, Lafferty noticed, the face of a child of the streets. Dangerous to be sure, but innocent as well, with a certain capacity for compassion. They drove for a while in time to the gurgles and swallows, Ray seemingly pensive, peering out through the windscreen at the windy little road. Nearly back to Ballybeg, he spoke. “Do you like puzzles, Mister Lafferty?”

Lafferty, puzzled, neither nodded nor spoke.

“Have another,” Ray said, “and I’ll tell you a puzzle. Eena-our mutual friend-calls me up in Dublin, what, not three hours ago, and isn’t she crying, full of grief and misery to tell me what’s happened, how Mister Lafferty has absconded with our ring. And what do you suppose is the story she tells me?” Looking Lafferty’s way again, drawing a blank again. “No guess in you then at all? Not very keen at the puzzles, are you?

“Why, she’d wanted to surprise me. To fetch the ring back to me all on her own, to atone for all the harm she done me back then.” Glancing again at Lafferty. “You’d be unaware of the harm, then? How she cost me four bloody years of my life?” And so Ray told him. How Eena, five years before, had brung the ring to his attention in the first place. How Eena, who’d been a domestic for the wealthy Mrs. Moore, owner of said ring, had botched the simple snatch-and-switch late at night when the old lady was laid out at home for the wake. How just as Ray was about to do the switch, Eena knocked over a tray full of dirty saucers and such, alerting the family, who apprehended your man beating feet down the lane with the replica, which of course they mistook for the real thing. And Eena meanwhile fleeing under cover of the ruckus, having stashed the real McCoy under the old lady’s dead arse. And how her clumsiness cost him four years in Portlaoise-from which he’d been sprung but a few days before.

“So here’s the puzzle then. Am I to believe she was going to fetch the ring back to me? Or was she planning to make off with the bloody thing all along, go off on her own, and myself left in the proverbial lurch? What am I to believe, Mister Lafferty? Do you yourself believe little Eena Brown to be capable of treachery and betrayal? For I understand you’ve got to know her well since the day you left her the stinking little two-punt tip.”

Lafferty was stung, though he kept it to himself.

“But the thing of it is, Mister Lafferty,” said he, “the thing of it is, she could well be telling me the truth. That’s the nature of her. That’s Eena. She might well have been planning to bring me a get-out-of-jail present. Or she might have been planning to fuck me. With Eena, you just never know.”

Lafferty didn’t know, couldn’t even think about sorting the thing out in his mind. Ray nodded. “Take another drink,” he said, and Lafferty did, thankful for small blessings.

At Rattigan’s everything was gray, everything from the sky right down to the pavement beneath his feet when he stepped from the car. Something moved in the window-Eena peeping through the ratty green curtain. Peggy’s car nowhere to be seen, and only one other car in the car park, several doors down, Lafferty concluding that the owner of a rusty yellow Fiat with a dent in the fender would not possess the formidability needed to come to his aid at all.

Eena rushing to Ray where she buried her face in his shoulder left Lafferty more stricken than ever. Wounded and hollow, and lightheaded from the whiskey, not to mention the thump on the noggin. Shot through with fear and sorrow. Though how much of the burying of her face was out of love for your man, how much out of not wanting to look Lafferty in the eye? Ray gently stroked the nape of her neck under the rowdy red hair.

“Mister Lafferty,” said Ray, pointing the gun toward the bed. “Sit.”

Lafferty did. Ray handed the gun to Eena, who held it in both of her hands like a foreign object, like a spade or a tray full of dishes. Ray took off his jacket, hanging it neatly on the rack. He unbuttoned his vest, removing it as well, hanging it beside the jacket. From the pocket of his trousers, he withdrew an object that Lafferty at first couldn’t identify. When he placed it by the car keys on the rickety table, he saw it was a knife. A long knife. A long, shiny knife, and this before the blade was ever out of it. Ray removed his trousers, lined up the creases, hung them neatly over a hanger. Unbuttoned his shirt, hung it by the rest of his clothes, then stood there in his boxers and undershirt, Lafferty noticing the round pucker of a scar above his knee.

Eena looked at him as well, puzzled as well.

“The ring won’t come free of his finger, love,” said Ray. “I have to perform surgery, and I don’t fancy ruining a good suit of clothes with the blood.”

“Butter,” Lafferty said.

“Butter works,” said Eena.

Ray stamped his foot on the threadbare rug. “There is no butter!”

“There’s always butter somewhere,” said Lafferty, his mouth dry as a cobweb.

Ray took the gun. “Into the bathroom,” he said, taking Lafferty by the collar. “Eena, love, bring the knife. Gather up the towels.”

Lafferty naturally resisted. Ray naturally pressed the gun to his cheek. “Mister Lafferty. I’m not a heartless man. I’m after allowing you your anesthesia-here, have another.” He handed Lafferty the bottle of Powers from the nightstand. “Now I intend to cut the pinkie from your hand to take possession of the ring that’s rightfully mine. I paid four years of my life for it. I intend to cut it off you and leave you alive, without a pinkie, which, in your line of work as I understand it, will not be much of a hindrance. However, if I must, I will cut the finger from a dead man. It would, in fact, be a far easier trick.”

The bathroom was small, a sink with a little glass shelf and smeared mirror above it, a standing shower stall and the toilet with the lid up. “Would you like to sit then, Mister Lafferty? You might be needing to.”

Lafferty shook his head. His voice had deserted him.

“You wouldn’t have an apron in your bag, would you, love?” said Ray, looking down at his undershirt.

Eena bit her lip and shook her head, the tips of her ears going red.

“Pity,” said Ray. “Hold his hand there, love, tight to the side of the sink.”

“Wait,” said Eena. “Let me try.”

“You’d like to carve?”

“Let me try to get it off. I used to be able to get the things off my own finger when they were stuck.”

Ray nodded.

She came to Lafferty, her brown eyes big and close. She took his hand in both her own, raising it up to her face, taking his pinkie into her mouth.

“Easy, love,” said Ray. “You’re getting me all up.”

She didn’t hear him. Lafferty watched her eyes that never left his own, feeling his pinkie in her mouth so warm and moist it nearly stopped him trembling. Nearly. He watched her lips at their work, lips he’d never seen so skillful before, watched her cheeks suck in, felt her tongue laboring every bit as hard, the ears of her going redder and redder, his pinkie wanting to disappear down her throat. He felt the ring loosen. Felt it loosen then come free, sliding quickly away down his finger, too fast, away from his finger and into her throat, too deep, into her throat where it caught.

She drew away quickly, coughing, choking. Ray clapped her on the back, hard, once, twice, a third time, and the ring came shooting up out of her, lifting through the air, arching straight toward the toilet, where it landed with a neat little splash. Settling down to the bottom, lying there gleaming in all its golden splendor, beneath the foul water on the stained and dirty porcelain.

The three of them stared at the thing. “Get it,” said Ray.

“You get it,” Eena said.

“I’m not putting my hand in that,” Ray said. “Mister Lafferty, you do it.”

Reaching over, Lafferty flushed the toilet.

The ring disappeared, sucked down a different throat. Lafferty looked at Ray. Eena stepped back. Ray trembled, the tremble going to quaking proportions, red all over with the boiling blood, and he sputtered unintelligible syllables, and the gun in his hand came up, pointing at Lafferty, his finger on the trigger twitching. Lafferty felt his knees buckle and go under, and he was falling toward the floor.

“No!” said Eena, stepping in to knock it away, but doesn’t the bloody thing discharge with a bang that shook the shower curtain. Lafferty, concussed by the sound and the shock, took a moment to divine what was happening, for it was the oddest dance they were doing, Ray and Eena, clutched together there swaying, Ray’s little-boy face over her shoulder all white and grim and pulled back tight, and the head of Eena flopping loose and lolling.

And the red splash of blood coming down.

“God!” said Ray. “God, help me-Lafferty! Help me! Get something!”

Lafferty reached up, handing him a cheap scrap of a towel that Ray pressed to her chest. He lowered her to the floor, her eyelids fluttering, looking up from one of them to the other. “Get help,” Ray said. “Hurry-get help!”

Lafferty arose, riding his rubbery legs.

Eena, surprise lingering on her face, stared up past Ray, straight into the eyes of Lafferty. “Hurry,” said Ray. “Get help.”

Snatching the car keys from the rickety table, Lafferty galloped out the door, pulling it shut behind him. The car park was empty, no one out from the office, nor from the room near the Fiat, no one roused by the gunshot, no one wondering as to the mortal goings-on in the room at the end of the court. The morning was sleepy, motionless, as if he’d stepped into a painting, a still life, a landscape, all the trees arranged alongside the road, the house across the way with the tidy blue shutters, the clean gleaming glass of the petrol station next door, the letters on the sign so bold and red. The Audi started up in a fine, smooth purr, hitting on all cylinders, unlike his mind, for hadn’t he been sleepless the whole of the night, engaged in the most desperate of physical labors, thumped about the head, his finger nearly cut off him, his very life in mortal jeopardy. He squealed away out of the car park, heading west, west across the island, the countryside sweeping by, the rock walls and hedgerows, the tumbledown cottages, leaving it all behind him, the cold awful touch of the dead woman, the porcelain white face of Ray, the blast of the gun and the blood.

But even as he crested the hill and flew toward the next, the eyes stayed with him, the lying eyes of Eena, full of hope and truth at last, going bigger and browner as the color leached from her face. The eyes stayed with him, and the ring, the dreadful, awful, never-ending ring.