The Bloomsday Dead

11: THE WRATH OF ODYSSEUS (THE KNOCKAGH-JUNE 16, 10:15 P.M.)

Silver light along the motorway. A darkening horizon. A gray road. The moon a yellow sickle above the sea.

Salt haze. Deserted shore.

Vehicles leaving the city. And farther, behind those hills, a gang of hoods and a sobbing, terrified kidnapped girl.

Something up there. Shapes just outside my field of vision. The songbirds are down. The seabirds, too. And, as per instructions, the helicopters are landing-abandoning the night to the insects and the doves navigating the magnetic field.

Something that’s bigger than dragonflies, pigeons.

A look of recognition.

Ahhh, I know what they are.

Imaginary things-specters, furies, impatient gods hovering above the car. Watching me, hurrying me.

“Faster, faster.”

They know it’s barely started. Pain behind. Pain ahead. They feed on it. It nourishes them. Go ahead, dip your talons, have a taste.

“We’ll assist you, death bringer.”

The taxi driver left a thermos. I open it and drink some lukewarm tea. Another morphine pill. No more of those. In the army they’d ink an M on your forehead by this stage. Ignore the creatures, smell the night, the lough. Relax.

My palms on the steering wheel. My fingers loose. My fingers. Look at them. Aye. Those hands were not made for reaping wheat or serving food or welding steel.

Death bringer is right.

I don’t know what I’ll do when I have to stop, but for now I’ll let them do what they do best. A trigger squeeze. A knife flash.

Yes…

Fifteen minutes along the motorway and I was approaching Belfast again. This morning I’d been excited about coming home. But not now. I’d been inoculated against nostalgia. An RPG attack and a good kicking will do that for you.

I wound down the window.

Rain and briny water and cold air.

But no magic. Belfast, a place like any other. A few landmarks. A few memories. The aircraft factory. The airport. A big poster advertising the book Evolution: The Fossils Say No! On my right the massive cranes of Harland and Wolff shipyard, where they built the illfated Titanic and her equally doomed sister ships, Britannic and Olympic. My father had worked in the shipyard. His father too, before going off to sea. Where was my da now? Did he still live here? My beloved nan was dead and she was the woman who had really raised me. No, my ma and da weren’t relevant anymore. I didn’t care. The psychic weight of the city wasn’t pulling me in. I was just passing through. My home wasn’t Peru, wasn’t America, but it certainly wasn’t here.

Still, Bridget had been correct to call me. Correct in her assumptions. Even after all this time it was as much my city as anyone’s and she was right to think that I was the man who could find her kid. Her goons couldn’t have gotten this close. Never. Throwing money is the Yank cure for everything. But in a society like Ulster or Afghanistan, money won’t do it. Not the peelers, either. In Belfast if you’ve a real problem, you don’t call the cops.

Aye, even now, I knew how the city ticked. I could feel my way through the streets. It wasn’t geography, it was just the way things worked. Same as New York, and Lima, too, come to that. Probably everywhere in the world. The same five hundred people at the top, the same five hundred people at the bottom. And everyone else in between. Little people. Extras. I could feel it out. I had felt it out. The trail was good. It was simple. There were three acts. She had given me a job to do and I was doing it. And the third act would work out too. Oh yeah. Deus ex machina. Me as both God and the instrument of destruction.

Over the motorway and through the city.

New roads that I didn’t know how to negotiate.

New buildings.

But eventually the signs took me out onto the M5, which led northeast along Belfast Lough. Traffic roaring by at eighty miles an hour.

The motorway had been built on reclaimed land. Four or five artificial lagoons created to prevent the road from being eroded by the lough water. Had this been here when I’d been here? I couldn’t remember. The lagoons were full of herons and oystercatchers stretching, squawking, settling down for the night.

Birds. Water. Clouds. Me.

The big sopping city retreating behind. Belfast receding in the mirrors for what could be the last time in my life.

I could just keep driving north to the ferry port at Larne.

I could. But I won’t. Bridget, Moran, the cops, everybody wanted me to stay out of it now. Time pressing and the kidnappers couldn’t have been more explicit. But Moran was wrong. I had never fucked up anything I’d tried. Clumsy sometimes and I’d taken hits, but I’d always seen things through. Maybe that’s why she’d asked for me. She understood that. Her speaking voice might be saying “I want everyone to pull back, to keep out of it, we should all do what the kidnappers say,” but the secret message to me was “Michael, I love you, I trust you, you can do this. Do it for me, Michael. Find my girl. Find her…”

I let this thought sit with me for a moment, and then I laughed at my reflection in the windshield.

“Always the fantasist,” I said.

Still, I’d had it up to here with words and memories. I was full. There wasn’t any room for insults or accusations. From Moran or Bridget or anyone.

Slán agat, mudflat city.

Slán abhaile. I won’t be returning. I know that.

But I wasn’t so proud that I wouldn’t look back in the rearview mirror.

And I was eager to know how things were playing out. What were they doing there? Had Bridget convinced the cops to stand down? Of course she had. That imperious red hair and that cold smile and bending body. She could be the offspring of Elizabeth and Essex. She could be Queen Boudica. She could be… Fuck it, she could be the most powerful female mobster in the United States.

Aye, she’d tell them to get lost and it would just be her at that phone box near the Albert Clock. I could see the scene. The rain’s stopped. The streets are slick. She’ll pull up in a rented Daimler. She’ll get out. She’ll be wearing a raincoat and carrying the briefcase full of cash. Her face haunted, worried, cautious, pale. You ever see Odd Man Out or The Third Man?-it’ll be like that. It’ll be in black and white.

That clock, the touchstone for someone. Not a Belfast native. Unlikely anyone from the city would pick an exposed location like that, even for a preliminary phone call. But I’d bet a little money that that old man on the phone, that first voice we’d heard, had thought of that famous landmark as a good place to have Bridget wait. An old man, who maybe was from here originally but had spent many decades abroad.

Speculation.

In any case, now when I looked in the mirror, the city was almost completely gone. Only the choppers landing and the lights distorting on the black lough water. Even the traffic diminishing. Everything easing down on this, another wet Wednesday night in June.

Good.

A green Toyota taxi weaving up into the hills. Farms dotted around the fields. Stone-made. Whitewashed. Buttressed against the elements. Slurry pits and green plastic over the hay crop. The road narrow. The low gears having difficulty on the higher inclines. The driver’s side: bog and black bags tangled on the wire, lights weaving down to the Irish Sea and eventually dissipating into the hazy outline of the island of Great Britain. It’s pretty, sickeningly so in the present circumstances. For I’m close now.

Toy boats on the lough. The outlands of the islands and the hills that make up southern Scotland. A green backdrop, a Celtic sky, and the indigo water setting everything in place like a quilt or jigsaw map of this portion of the world.

Big sky, big land, big sea, and then, suddenly, it’s all just too much. Overwhelming. Those lights in front of my eyes, my head pounding, my cracked ribs throbbing, a dazzling feeling of vertigo. I dry heave. I put my foot on the clutch, slide the gear stick into neutral, slam back the handbrake, open the door, and climb out of the car.

I stumble to the grassy verge, sit, and try to get a breath. Hyper-ventilating. I lie backward on the grass, my arm falling in a sheugh. Not that it matters. I suck in the damp Irish air, rip my jacket off.

Get back in the car, get back in the car, the voice commands.

But still gasping, I lie on my chest and spread my arms. The over-powering smell of slurry, silage, and sheep shit.

I begin to breathe easier.

Where am I?

The hill country leading up to the Antrim Plateau. On the way to Knockagh Mountain. Aye, that’s right. A slight drizzle and the sky its usual lowkey gray-green shading into black. The stars when they all come out will be different from those I’ve become accustomed to in the last few months.

Gusts of wind wheedling their way down from the peaks. A williwaw. I stand and walk a little along the road, away from the car. My breathing almost under control.

Are you ok now? What happened there? Were you losing it? You can lose it at 12:01, but not now. After it’s done, but not yet. Get a grip, you son of a bitch. It’s not just your life at stake. Another human being might be depending on you. A girl. A mother.

“Just another minute,” I say, sitting again, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. Flies buzzing at the puddles in the ditch. Clegs and midges. And that smell. That dungy brew of cows and damp. I’m underdressed and cold. But the fag will help. Marlboro Lights, weak-kneed, but I hardly ever smoked now anyway. I light a ciggy and hold it between my thumb and my fingers, the way I used to before I quit, feeling the anticipatory heat of it in my nostrils in contrast to the crisp cold air on my fingertips. I drink in the smoke, cough, close my eyes. Oh yeah, that’s what it was like. I remember. The tobacco warming my lungs, toasting them with its flavor. Burnt and sharp like ocher. Aye. Is that the ticket to keep away the cold.

I take another hard draw and walk back to the car.

I’m ready.

That won’t happen again No…

I drove deeper into the Belfast hills and eventually found a sign pointing to a narrow single-lane track that might be the Knockagh Road. An old lady with a Scotty dog.

I leaned out the window.

“Excuse me, does this go up to the Knockagh?”

The dog was taking a dump and the old lady was trying to pick up the droppings with a cellophane bag over her hand. She couldn’t bend down too well because of osteoporosis and the dog wasn’t too happy about her interfering with its rear end before it was done with the business. A man in less of a hurry would have been amused.

“Does this go up to the Knockagh, this road?” I asked again.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“There’s an Orange Lodge near the Knockagh, I need to be there for a meeting.”

“There’s no Orange Lodge up there, I can tell you that,” she said.

“Well, is this the right road, at least?”

“Aye, this’ll take you there,” the old lady said, and breathtakingly slowly got out of my way. I resisted the temptation to run her over. She gave a friendly wave, and I sped up toward the mountain.

After a few turns, I saw that it was indeed the right road. Blocks of managed forest began appearing next to the farms. Dense, fast-growing pine trees, where you could probably hide out for months without anyone ever finding you. I hoped the mysterious lodge wasn’t buried deep within one of those.

I drove higher still until I was right at the top of the plateau. The big granite war memorial was hard to miss standing up about a hundred feet from the mountaintop. I got the car as close as I could, parked it, and ran to the monument. The view was of the whole of Belfast Lough and the surrounding countryside. From up here in the western hills you could see a lingering, fragmented sunset, but in the east, down to water the sky was black and already most of the settlements around the lough had turned their streetlights on.

I climbed on top of a wall, scanned the surrounding fields. No ruined buildings, no parked cars, no secret hiding places, no arches, no fucking lodge. Nothing.

I’d cocked it up.

Moran was right after all.

I should have taken the kid with me. Dinger. Should have made some fucking excuse and grabbed the wean. Oh Christ. He could have shown me exactly where his brother had taken him.

Shit on a stick.

“You eejit. You brainless twat.”

I railed at myself for thirty seconds, got a handle on it.

Ok, calm it, cool it, what if I went and got him now? Aye. Get him. Get the wee shite. His ma would fucking sell him to me for a hundred quid.

I looked at my watch. Nearly ten. There was no way I would ever make it to Bangor and back before midnight.

“Damn it.”

And now, just for good measure, a haar fog was descending over the plateau, coating everything in wetness and a damp cloak of invisibility. Not that there was anything to see: scrub grass, heather, and bog.

A complete dead end. In the dying light, I desperately tried to find a building, but there was nothing that even remotely resembled an Orange Lodge. There were some ruins, but not Orange Lodges; these were little crofts that had lain bare and deserted since the time of the Great Hunger: all that remained were four gray walls. The whitewash long gone, the thatched roofs caved in. They weren’t for human habitation and farmers used them now as sheep pens.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. To get so bloody close,” I cursed and sat down. Took out the pack of cigarettes. Changed my mind, threw it away.

Ok, what now? No point lingering around here. Back to the car. Somebody must know about an old Orange Lodge nearby. Yeah, ask around. There might have been a few funny comings and goings the last few days.

I ran to the Toyota and drove back to the main road.

But it was just a country track and there were no signs of life. No houses, no cars, no tractors; now and again an insomniac cow wandering along munching at the verge.

The fog grew thicker, the night descended.

Taking no chances on an accident, I slowed to five miles an hour.

Not a single bloody farm.

I crossed a stone bridge over a stream and turned into a bleak wetland that no longer had fields or fences or any trace of a life at all. I drove up and down looking for anybody, anything. Getting farther and farther away.

Hit the brakes.

Holy shit, this was all wrong. I was just driving aimlessly. Had to get a plan. Had to get help. I rummaged for my cell phone and dialed the operator. I couldn’t get a signal, but when I climbed out of the car and onto the roof, mercifully, I got through.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi, I’m driving and I’m lost. I need the number of the car help people,” I said rapidly.

“You’re driving and you’re lost? Do you want the AA?” the operator asked.

“Bloody hell, is that your solution to everything in this country? Alcoholics Anonymous? I said I was lost, I’m not bloody wasted.”

“The Automobile Association,” the operator said with a hint of world weariness.

“Oh, yeah, AA, aye sure, terrific, fire it on over, love,” I said.

She gave me the number. I dialed them up and explained my predicament.

“Look, I don’t know if you can help me, but I’m completely lost; I’m up somewhere in the hills near Belfast. Two minutes ago I was at the Knockagh Mountain; I’m looking for a pub or a hotel or a police station or anyone who can give me directions. Is there anything you can do to help? You must have a big map of Ireland with a list of pubs and gas stations and stuff. Is there anywhere like that around here?”

The man had a soothing County Kerry accent.

“Well, can you tell me what road you’re on, while I call up the map on the screen here.”

“I don’t know what the road is, it’s a very narrow road, single lane.”

“Is it a B road?” he asked.

“That’s very possible,” I said.

“Ok, I think I see roughly where you are. You say you were at the Knockagh viewpoint a few minutes ago?”

“That’s right.”

“Well then, you must be on the B90.”

“Ok. So what do I do? I need a gas station or a bar or something. Anything.”

“Well, if it really is the B90, you should go north and turn left at the very first junction you see. About a quarter of a mile down that road, there’s a place here on our map that we’ve given a star to,” the man said.

“Yeah, mate, unfortunately I can’t tell north from south, it’s dark and there’s a fog,” I explained.

“Just keep going the one direction. If you don’t come to the junction within, say, ten minutes, turn round and go the other direction. It’s called the Four Kingdom View Pub and Restaurant.”

I thanked the man, got his name in case I had to call again, and hung up. I climbed down off the roof, got in the car.

I put the fog lights on and followed the road as it grew narrower, the car weaving between and almost touching bramble bushes. I was about to give it up as a bad job, do a U-y and try the other bloody direction, when I saw the junction. I turned left and almost immediately came to a large posthouse-style mansion. White walls, a thatched roof, hanging baskets of flowers under the eaves, and tiny stained-glass windows on the ground floor. A small hand-painted sign said “Four Kingdom View Pub and Restaurant.” Thank God. I pulled into the driveway and parked the car.

The path around the side of the restaurant ended on a rocky out-crop that overlooked a garden of neat hawthorn hedges and a pile of garbage.

“Charming,” I said, and went inside.

A low-ceilinged, timber-framed room. A tiny kitchen giving off a smell of old socks and rat poison.

Through the tobacco haze I could see that I was in yet another sinister little pub, with unhelpful-looking locals eyeing me from the shadows. Barely half a dozen people in the place. All of them farmers wearing tweed jackets and flat caps. No one sitting next to anyone else. Everyone left to their own morose thoughts and reflections. It was your typical suspicious, superstitious, closemouthed, dour Irish country pub. The sort of pub you never see in the tourist ads for Ireland but which are just as common as the singing-and-dancing happy pubs celebrated on the screen.

The only way the Automobile Association could have given this place a star was if the proprietors had threatened the reviewer with a ritual murder.

It certainly wasn’t the sort of place to come blazing in, asking questions about a ruined Orange Lodge. Asking any questions, come to that. They wouldn’t kill me like they would have earlier in the Rat’s Nest, but they wouldn’t rush to give me the Heimlich maneuver, either.

“What’ll ye be having, sir?” a barman asked in a not unfriendly manner. He was a tall, ungainly man in a filthy smock who moved so incredibly slowly that he was either in a partial body cast or he was drunk out of his mind and trying not to show it.

The locals were all nursing hot whiskies. That would be one way to ingratiate myself.

“Oh, I’m driving. Just a lemonade. But I’ll give everyone in the bar the same again. Have one yourself.”

“Very good of you, sir.”

“My pleasure,” I said. The barman stared at me.

“And for you, sir, what kind of lemonade?” he asked.

“There’s different kinds of lemonade?”

“Aye, there’s white or there’s brown.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked with mounting irritation.

“One’s white, the other one’s brown.”

“I’ll take white, then.”

“Fine.”

He brought me a glass of white lemonade. I put a fifty-pound note on the counter. He took it greedily.

“Drinks are on this gentleman,” he announced when he had thoroughly examined the bill.

A few of the old codgers nodded, but the rest kept their own counsel, disdaining to even look in my direction. They certainly didn’t seem a cooperative bunch despite my largesse. I’d have to try the barman. You couldn’t just ask him outright, though. I’d work my way around. At the very least, I’d try and do this without making a scene, but if things went on for more than five minutes without progress, I was willing to shoot every one of these old bastards until they told me what they knew.

“What are the Four Kingdoms?” I asked the barkeep.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re called the Four Kingdom Restaurant,” I said quickly.

“Oh, that. Supposedly that’s the view from the top of the Knockagh. Kingdom of Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and, of course, the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“That’s fascinating. Fascinating stuff. I bet you know a lot of local geography and stuff like that,” I said.

“Not really,” he replied.

“Well, uh, listen, uh, I was wondering, I was looking for this old lodge that was supposed to be around here, did you ever hear of anything like that?”

“No.”

“No old Orange Lodge, around here, nothing like that?”

“No.”

“No ruins of any kind?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Perfectly sure.”

A man came out of the toilet and sat back down at the bar. He grabbed a pint of Guinness as if it were a life belt, nodded to me. He was a younger man, thirties, wearing a tweed suit but with a yellow silk waistcoat. His slightly wild blond hair was unadorned by a flat cap. It was a stroke of luck; this level of unconformity might also stretch to the possibility of being open for questions.

“How do?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” he said.

“Well, a bad pixie must be following me around because I am completely banjaxed,” I said, coming straight to the point.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

I summoned over the barkeep.

“Another pint of Guinness for my friend here,” I said, and offered him my hand. He shook it.

“Brian O’Nolan,” I said.

“Nice to meet you, Brian, my name’s Phil, thanks for the pint,” he said.

“My pleasure, Phil.”

Phil looked at me, eager to hear the nature of my difficulties.

“Ach, I’m in a wee spot, Phil,” I said, trying not to appear too anxious.

“What do you need?” Phil asked, finishing his own pint and starting on mine.

“Well, I’m a bit disappointed, to tell you the truth.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Uh, it’s not important,” I said with a sigh.

But the man’s interest was piqued. I had him on the hook now.

“No, tell me,” he said.

I laughed.

“It’s probably a stupid thing. But me dad, we live in America now, he moved us out there in the seventies when I was just a wee boy. And, well, he used to be in the Orange Order. You’ll think it’s stupid.”

“No, go on.”

“Well, he used to go to an Orange Lodge round here, and I was coming over to Belfast for business and so he asked me if I could find his old lodge and take a picture of it for him. Well, wouldn’t you know it, business took me a little longer than I thought it would in Belfast and now it’s dark out and I’ve been driving around for a couple of hours and I haven’t been able to find it and, ach, I’m just a bit upset for me da.”

The man nodded solemnly. I had hit all the right buttons. The Orange Order, family, tradition, a son’s duty, if only I could have worked a dog in there it would have been a home run. Phil looked upset for me and gulped down his pint. I put a fiver on the counter and nodded at the barman. He started pouring another.

Phil cleared his throat.

“Well, Brian, you shouldn’t be giving up yet. I don’t know too much about that sort of thing; I’m not really from around here, but Sam Beggs over there, he knows this area like the back of his hand.”

“That guy in the corner?” I asked, looking at a haggard, blue-nosed yokel chain-smoking his way through a packet of loose tobacco.

“Yeah, that’s our Sam.”

“Thanks very much, I’ll go ask him,” I said.

Phil shook his head.

“You better not, he’s not exactly a big fan of strangers; you know how it is with some of those culchie types, wee bit sleekit, you know. I’ll just go over and ask him for ya,” Phil said.

“I would be much obliged.”

“Sure, ’tis no problem at all. What’s the details?”

“All my dad said was that he used to go to an Orange Lodge within a stone’s throw of the Knockagh; he said it might be a ruin now, could be an arch over the gate or something,” I explained.

Phil walked to the character in the corner of the room while I sipped my lemonade and tried desperately not to look at my watch. Five agonizing minutes went by as the two men chatted.

Phil came back with a smile on his face.

“See, never say die, he knows the very place. The arch you’re talking about must be what’s left of the old narrow-gauge viaduct, the lodge is the next field over. About two miles up the road from here, a wee lane you turn off and go down. The lane has a big sign on it that says “Trespassers Prosecuted, No Shooting.” You can’t see the old lodge from the road, you have to go down the lane a good bit. He says that he thinks it is a ruin, mind, but if you’ve a flash on your camera it might come out.”

I thanked Phil profusely, ran out to the car.

I reversed the taxi out of the pub car park, sped along the Knockagh Road, hammering down the foggy track at ninety miles an hour. A Jeep passed me doing fifty in the other direction and it distracted me enough so that I almost drove straight past the lane.

Almost.

I slammed on the bloody brakes, skidded, nearly rolled, recovered, stopped, reversed, read the “Trespassers Prosecuted, No Shooting” sign, pulled in, parked the car, and grabbed the gun.

A smell of burned gorse over by the tarn. That or a bonfire. Or perhaps someone lighting turf in an old Orange Lodge in an attempt to keep warm. The path led down to a field. But there was a haze in the glacial mouth of the valley-a gluey sea mist snaking its way up from the ocean at the head of a cold front and storm from the north. That, coupled with the fog on the mountain and the coming night, had closed the visibility to almost zero.

I felt my way forward gingerly and arrived at a second barbed-wire fence and a gate with another sign, which said “Keep Out. Trespassers Strictly Prosecuted.” This sign was new and there were tire tracks in the mud.

A big vehicle and a couple of smaller cars. I bent down to examine them. Definitely fresh, in the last day or so, I would have guessed.

The path seemed to diverge now, left along the contour of the hill, but straight on took you farther down the slope. A bite of wind came from the high bog, a cold blade moving over the shadowy hills. While I zipped my jacket, the gust opened a gap in the mist. Fences hugging the hills, separating one desolate little sheep field from another. But what was that at the bottom of the slope? A house, a ruined lodge? Definitely worth investigating. I’d have to get closer. My hands tensed on the cold fence.

I opened the gate and walked onto a metal cattle grid, got one pace, immediately skidded, slipped, and fell. One of my Stanley work boots came off and my plastic foot got caught between the gaps in the metal rollers.

“Bloody hell.”

A cattle grid is a series of metal tubes usually placed over a trench in front of a gate. People can walk on the rollers and cars can drive over them, but cows cannot cross them. The cows don’t even have to fall one time to get it, instinct keeps them away. It’s a handy device that allows you to keep your gate open without worrying about your cows, pigs, or horses bolting.

A clever contraption, and it’s the rare fucking eejit that gets his foot caught in a cattle grid. But he was here tonight. I tugged at it, but my artificial foot was completely wedged. I unhooked the straps and pulled as hard as I bloody could. It didn’t move an inch.

I removed the sock and heaved on the bastard, but there was still no way it was coming up. A better option would be to push it through the rollers. I could get the whole weight of my body behind it, but the problem there was that I couldn’t see how deep the pit went under the rollers. I didn’t want to lose my foot in a bottomless hole, not when I might need to run on it in a second. And anytime now the car with the kidnappers and Siobhan inside was about to drive up from the house.

That would be a nice fucked-up and ignominious way to end my existence on planet Earth. Hunting for my foot in a cattle grid while they drive past, stop the car, look at me in amazement, and then shoot me to blazes.

“Come on,” I said as I tried pulling it again, but it was pointless. I would have to push it through. The pit couldn’t be that deep. They didn’t want cows to break their legs. They just wanted to spook them a bit.

Have to check it out. I lay down on the metal rollers and felt underneath. I stretched my arm to full extension and touched years’ worth of sheep, cow, horse, pig, and dog shit, as well as leaves, garbage, and other assorted filth. Disgusting, but not deep.

I leaned with my full body weight on my foot. I pushed, and it sank through the rollers and landed in the shit.

“Ah, Jesus,” I said aloud.

I reached for the foot, found it, grabbed it between my fingers, and maneuvered it to the big gap in the rollers at the edge of the pit. I pulled it out, cleaned it as best I could, and strapped it back on. I spent another two minutes rummaging in the murk to find my boot. I saw that the cause of this minicatastrophe had been when the lace had broken and the boot had skittered off. The lace was neatly bisected, so I could tie up only the top four holes.

I stood. The boot didn’t feel remotely comfortable on the stump, but it would have to do.

The wind had killed the fog completely now and I found that I was looking at a one-room building. Very old, but far from being a ruin. It had a corrugated iron roof, a working chimney, and glass windows. It was a very old Orange Lodge, perhaps one of the original ones, and the fact that the kidnappers were using it made two things clear. First, whoever had kidnapped Siobhan certainly wasn’t a member of the Orange Order or the Protestant paramilitaries. They would never countenance the possibility of being traced back to an Orange Lodge. It wouldn’t look good within the community to use a semisacred place, even a partially ruined one, for a high-profile organized crime. This in itself was also puzzling because it didn’t seem likely that Catholic paramilitaries would use such a place either. They’d pick somewhere they were comfortable in, safe, a territory they knew well. An old Orange Lodge deep within a Protestant farming area? No chance. Bridget had been told the same thing from both sides and Body O’Neill hadn’t known a thing about the kidnap.

But if it wasn’t the Protestant paramilitaries and it wasn’t the Catholic paramilitaries, who in the name of God had grabbed the wee girl? Try to be an independent hoodlum in Ulster without being allied to one of the two sides and you’d very quickly end up as fish food. Was it a foreign organization? If so, they’d recruited local talent; but the masterminds could easily be from abroad-like that old guy on the phone. A risky game, but why not?

Well, we’d soon fucking see.

I crept my way closer. The lodge fifty feet away. Two cars outside. A beat-up Ford Sierra and a new Camry. Two cars-so what was that, maybe eight or ten guys?

If time wasn’t such a big factor, I would have stalked the place for at the very least twenty-four hours. In the gorse and heather there were dozens of places to hide. A pair of binocs and a notebook and I could have sussed the whole operation.

But I had no time for that shite.

Close enough to be seen, so I got down on my belly. The smell of slurry was strong and the ground was damp from a rainstorm earlier in the day. I slithered through the tuft grass until I came to a small stone wall that surrounded the building.

I looked at my watch. Ten-fifteen. They wouldn’t be on the move just yet. They’d be nervous; but they wouldn’t be shitting bricks. Keeping up one another’s bravado. I looked over the wall. Just a few paces to the lodge. If she was still alive the girl would be there with them, so I couldn’t just storm in, killing everything that moved.

There was only one way. In with the gun. Give them a chance to put their hands up, and if they tried anything, shoot the fuckers. But protect the wee lass at all costs.

I slithered over the wall.

I could hear voices now. At least two, possibly three men. I crawled my way around the lodge so that I was facing the only door.

The voices were quite distinct. All of them Northern Irish, all from the Belfast area.

“See this in the Tele, attacking the peelers again, so they are.”

“Fucking peelers deserve it.”

“Aye, you’re right, they’ve had it far too easy.”

“What’s that about a wedding, it’s not Charles and Camilla, is it?”

“Nah, it’s about Paul McCartney, getting married to yon awful woman.”

“I had one of her pies once, it was lovely.”

“She doesn’t make pies, you’re thinking of Linda. Hey, I’m going for a jimmy.”

More like three or four different men speaking. Maybe another two or three keeping their own counsel. Could be seven targets in there. I’d have to reload the bloody gun. Tricky, but you could do it if you’d practiced. And I’d have surprise. I grabbed three shells and held them in my left hand. I checked the.38. It looked clean. I eased the hammer back.

Here goes, I thought, just as the door opened. I ducked into the shadow beside the wall. A heavyset man in a checked shirt and body warmer came out carrying an old-fashioned shotgun. He didn’t see me. Even though the fog was gone, it was close to full dark now. He walked to the wall, set down his shotgun, opened his fly, and pissed.

Quietly I got to my feet, eased in behind him, put the gun to his neck.

“This is the police, don’t move a fucking muscle or I’ll top you, do you understand?” I said in a whisper.

He flinched and urinated on himself.

“I understand,” he said in a croak.

“Keep your cock out and put your hands on your head. If you make one sound I’ll shoot your dick off. Get me?”

“Aye,” he said, frightened out of his mind.

He put his hands up and I patted him down. He had a penknife in his back pocket, a wallet with some low-denomination bills, and the driving licenses of three different people.

I dropped the wallet in the mud. I knew I had to work fast.

“Ok, get down on your knees. Keep those hands on your head,” I said.

He knelt down. He was physically shaking. Terrified I was going to kill him.

“Ok, what’s the story, pal? Tell me everything in a fast whisper,” I said.

“What about?”

“The girl.”

“I didn’t touch the girl, I promise, I didn’t touch her, the-”

He was starting to raise his voice.

“You better learn how to fucking whisper pal or you’re a dead man,” I said.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

“You were talking about the girl,” I said.

“I didn’t touch her. The boss said no one was to touch her. He gave her the drugs, and we weren’t supposed to go near her, it was Slider, it wasn’t me, I didn’t lay a finger on her.”

“What did Slider do?” I asked coldly.

“He felt her tits, that’s all, I tried to stop him. He said he wanted to see if they were coming along. He made me do it. I didn’t even want to. I mean, the boss told us not to. He said we weren’t to do a thing while he was away. I only did it once. Not like Slider. She was out the whole time, mind. Well out.”

“Is she ok?”

“Where’s the other cops?” he asked.

“Never mind that. How is the girl? Is she ok?”

“She’s alive, she’s fine, doped up but fine. I promise.”

“Ok. How many people in there with you?” I asked.

“Three people.”

“Only three, don’t you bullshit me, I saw two cars out front,” I said.

“The others have left,” he said.

“Left where?”

“Left with her.”

“Fuck,” I said, biting down an urge to yell the word. “Ok, ok, when did they go?”

“Twenty five minutes ago,” he said.

“Twenty-five minutes ago. Jesus. Not in a goddamn Jeep?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

I cursed inwardly.

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I said where did they fucking go?” I demanded, pushing the revolver between folds of fat in his neck.

“I don’t know, Slider knows, he talked to the boss, he suggested the handover place, I don’t know where it’s going to be, I’m not supposed to know. I promise, I don’t fucking know.”

“Slider’s still in there?”

“Yes.”

“And the boss?”

“He left with the others and the girl.”

“You have no idea where they went? You better not be lying.”

“I don’t, I really don’t know,” he said.

“How’s your shotgun? Do you keep it clean?”

“It’s clean, but I only have the left barrel loaded.”

“Ok.”

I didn’t have time to tie him up. If I knocked him out he could come to at any time. Really, there was only one course of action. And he had fondled her breasts while she was unconscious. That was enough for me. I unfolded the penknife. I put the gun in my jacket pocket. I quickly threw my hand over his mouth and locked his head between my shoulder and arm. I shoved the blade into his throat, missing the carotid artery by an inch. It was ok, I dragged the blade through his flesh, found the artery, lifted it out, and cut through it. Blood spraying everywhere.

That would kill him in two minutes, but I didn’t have two minutes. I took the penknife and stabbed him in the voice box. Couldn’t risk a scream while he bled to death. I kicked him to the ground and let him gurgle there. I was drenched in arterial blood but time was pressing. I picked up the shotgun in my left hand, held the revolver in my right. I walked to the building and slowly began turning the door handle. No profit in kicking it in. That would just alert them. This way they’d think it was their mate coming back from his piss-give me a second to analyze the situation.

I inched opened the door, raised the shotgun.

A single room, twenty feet by fifteen feet. A fire burning in a grate. A camp bed. Recliner chairs and deck furniture. A table with a gas stove and an oil lamp. Three men. One sitting in the old leather recliner reading tonight’s Belfast Telegraph. The second cooking a plate of sausages over the gas stove. The third lying on the bed looking at a chess problem.

“Which one of you is Slider?” I asked.

None of the men answered, but the one looking at the chess set nearly leaped out of his fucking skin. I shot the one cooking the sausages with the twelve-gauge, the impact blowing his shoulder and the side of his head clean off. I dropped the weapon and with the.38 shot his mate reading the paper, the bullet sailing through the color picture of the half-sunk Ginger Bap on the front page and catching him in the stomach. I shot him twice more in the chest. Slider, mean-while, had produced a gun of his own, a semiautomatic, which he was trying to load with a clip. He got the clip nine-tenths in and attempted to pull the trigger, but the gun wouldn’t fire like that and the lead shell jammed half in and half out of the chamber.

A cool-headed man would have cleared the mechanism, slammed home the clip, and shot me. Slider wasn’t cool or fast enough. I strode across the room and knocked the gun out of his hand. I pistol-whipped him back onto the bed.

He resembled his mother more than any of his brothers. Dead crab eyes, one brown, the other blue, graying unkempt hair, lank smell, a broken nose. He was thin, but the skin was hanging off him. With a haircut he could have passed for Iggy Pop on a bad day but that wouldn’t get him on my good side.

He put his hands up, and keeping the gun on him, I patted down his dirty jeans and a suede sweathshirt that was covered with food stains.

“Are you going to turn me in?” he asked.

“I’m going to fucking kill you if you don’t tell me everything you know,” I said.

“About what?”

I shot him in the left kneecap, the noise sounding dissonant and terrible in the wee room. He screamed and tumbled off the bed. The kneecap is a nasty place to take a bullet because of the conjunction of bone, muscle, and nerve endings. Especially at close range with a.38.

“You fucker, you shot me, I’m dying, I’m fucking dying,” he gurgled, writhing in agony.

I knelt beside him.

“No one ever died because of a bullet in the kneecap. One time, many years ago, I shot a man in the kneecaps, the ankles, and the elbows. Christ, you should have seen the state of him. Well, that’s what I’ll do for you. To begin with.”

“Why, why, you bastard?” he said.

“Now listen to me, Slider. I’m not fucking around here. I’ll torture you and I’ll kill you unless you tell me where she is.”

A sudden burst of pain rode through him.

Tears were running down his face.

“What do you want to know?” he managed.

“Do you know what’s going to happen tonight at the exchange?”

“I know a bit.”

“Well, talk then.”

“Bridget Callaghan’s getting a phone call at the Albert Clock in Belfast,” he said, every word an effort.

“I know that. What happens after that?”

He groaned and shat himself. He was in agony. Goddammit. I looked around the room and saw that there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker next to the dead man who’d been reading the Belfast Telegraph. I went across the floor, grabbed the bottle, poured a full measure into a coffee mug, handed it to him.

“Drink the whisky,” I said.

He sipped and then gulped it. I let it bubble through him for a minute. He started doing a wee bit better.

I spoke softer.

“Ok, Slider, what happens tonight? Tell me everything.”

“They’re supposed to make her drive to a couple of different call boxes over the city,” he muttered.

“Go on.”

“And then there’s the swap. We’re supposed to wait here. We couldn’t all go, but we’re rendezvousing back here with the money, after Bridget and the girl are dead.”

“What are you talking about? After you swap the girl for the money, you mean?”

“Nah, I don’t think the boss wants to do it that way. I think he wants to kill the pair of them or something. Maybe for security reasons. But we get the money anyway.” Slider groaned again and I forced him to drink another mug of whisky. He sobbed a little.

“Get that down your neck, mate, go on,” I said.

He drank gratefully, looking at me as if I were an old friend.

“Tell me about this boss. Who is he?” I asked.

“I don’t know, he’s from Dagoland, probably the Mafia or some-thing, for all I know. Dead good English, though.”

“Ok, Slider, you’re doing great, now where’s the girl?” I asked.

But the whisky was working too well. Slider recovered some of his bravado. He looked at me suspiciously.

“Who are you?” he asked, his eyes still filled with tears.

“I’m asking the questions. Where the’s girl?”

“She’s gone, she’s not here,” he said.

“So I see. Listen, mate, my finger’s getting awful itchy, so you better keep talking.”

“I don’t know anything more,” he said.

“Slider, I want to know where the exchange is going to be.”

“We’re not in on that. The boss comes back here. He didn’t want to tell us the place. You know how it is, some things you have to keep secret. It was on a need-to-know basis,” he said, thinking he was pretty smart wasting time like this.

“Slider, listen. Your mate outside already told me that you know where they’re doing the fucking swap. If you don’t tell me, I’ll fucking kill you,” I said.

“You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood,” he said with a half-drunken smile and closed his eyes.

I smacked him across the face with the barrel of the gun, opened his eyes with my fingers, and made sure he saw me standing over him pointing the gun at his head. I had to end this little chitchat right now. I mean, for Pete’s sake, I was only bluffing about the torture. There was no time to torture the information out of him. I didn’t have all bloody night.

“Slider, you’re taxing my patience, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Are you a reader? I’m a big reader. Have you ever read Zeno? He’s the Greek guy that says an arrow can’t move, because it has to cross an infinite number of slices in the air between the shooter and the destination. So let’s do an experiment. You keep your head there and I’ll keep the gun here and I’ll pull the goddamn trigger and we’ll see what happens with the bullet. Fingers crossed for Zeno, huh?”

I began squeezing the trigger.

“Wait, wait, wait, oh God, wait,” he screamed. He was shaking and the terror was locked in his eyes.

“You don’t want to do the experiment?”

“No.”

“Ok. Talk. Where’s the rendezvous?”

“The boss asked Jackie to ask the boys if they knew any out-of-the-way places, you know, discreet. Well, I came up with somewhere. I used to go fishing at-”

“Not the whole goddamn story, just the place.”

“On Islandmagee, there’s a path called Black Head Cliff Path; it splits, the top path goes to Black Head Lighthouse, the bottom path works its way round to the Witches’ Cave. They scouted it out yesterday. Boss really liked it. Single route in and out. Bump Bridget over Belfast and bring her down to Islandmagee. I think that’s what he’s going to do.”

“Islandmagee, Black Head Cliff Path, lower path to a cave,” I repeated.

“Exactly.”

“Whereabouts is Islandmagee?”

“About ten miles or so from here,” he said, his face more relaxed now.

“Quickest route?” I asked.

“Drive down to the lough, go through Carrickfergus and White-head.”

“How will I find this path?”

“Ask anybody in Whitehead, you can’t fucking miss it. Right under the lighthouse, you’ll see it,” he said.

“You better not be lying, Slider,” I said.

“I’m not fucking lying, it’s the honest truth, I swear it.”

I had a million more questions. What was the girl doped with? What were the goons carrying? Tell me everything about the boss. How many in the team? What was the backup plan? But there was no time. I stepped away from him.

What I was going to do next was going to hurt.

Cold blood was cold blood.

But time was the operative word. I didn’t have the time to be smart, to make the right call.

“Well, Slider, you’ve been very helpful and I’ll be honest with you, I thought about not killing you. It’s very good the way you look after your wee brother and everything but I don’t have the time to tie you up.”

“What are you saying?”

“Slider, I can’t have the possibility of you escaping on me and alerting your boss that I’m on my way to stop him,” I said.

I was trying to convince myself as well as him. What was the less wrong thing to do? Was it less wrong to leave him and risk it? Or was it better to shoot him and rule out any possibility of him screwing with me? My watch said five minutes to eleven. I didn’t have the luxury of thinking it through.

“Y-you’re going to kill me? But I helped you. You can’t kill me.”

“I have to kill you, I’m close now. Can’t afford interference. And after all, you did assault the wee lass.”

“You’re not serious. I’m a good guy. You know I have a kid brother, I look after him.”

“I am serious. Like I say, I was in two minds about it, but this is the only prudent course of action. I’ll do something for your wee brother, I promise.”

“You fucker, you fucker, you can’t. I’ll fucking see you in hell,” Slider sobbed.

“Nah, with all your good deeds, Slider, you’ll be going to the other place,” I said and shot him in the chest and then in his stunned, half-open auburn-colored eye.

On the tabletop there was a box of shotgun shells and assorted ammo for a handgun. I grabbed what I could, picked up the shotgun, and went outside.

Raining again.

I slipped in the mud, dropped all the weapons, picked them up, walked over to the body of old-knife-in-the-neck, removed the blade, and pocketed it.

I wanted to run to the car. I had to run to the car. Time was of the essence.

But I walked.

It’s never easy.

I don’t care what anybody says.

It’s never easy.

I avoided the puddles and the mud.

Alone now, save for the hawks.

And sparrowhawks.

Rain.

A breath of wind.

One foot followed another down the Knockagh lane to where the road curved and the woods came and the path wound its way back to the other millions of souls huddled in this green lifeboat of an island in the western sea.

The taxicab.

The key.

I threw the guns in the trunk.

I started the car.

Drove.

I’ll come on the halo. I’ll come on the white water. I’ll come from the cinder sky.

Yes.

Greenisland, Carrickfergus, the small town of Whitehead.

A lighthouse above the cliff.

A storm barreling in from the North Atlantic.

I ditched the Toyota in a seafront parking lot. I popped the trunk, quickly checked the mechanism on the shotgun. It was so filthy with mud I knew I couldn’t rely on it. My pistol, however, was clean.

Slider had said that the boss had several men with him. If there was going to be a shootout, I’d have to be ready to be outgunned.

Outgunned, outnumbered, outflanked.

Exhausted, wounded, done.

I smiled.

What else was new?

I loaded six more rounds in the.38 and went to get Siobhan.