The Emerald Lie

Park was cruising in his aunt’s BMW, relishing the feel and control of the car. It was like the rules of language, rewarded proper usage. He headed out toward the bay and, as he cleared the promenade, opened her up, letting the speed rise to eighty.

Chirp... the beep of the siren and he saw the Guard car in his mirror. Considered giving them a run but sighed and slowed, pulled into the verge.

Waited.

Watched as Sergeant Ridge sauntered toward him, arrogance in all her bearing. This woman was becoming a serious nuisance, like an apostrophe in all the wrong places. She signaled for him to roll down the window, said,

“License and registration.”

He took a deep breath, letters spun and whirled before his eyes. He had to push down the compulsion to grab her and smash her head against the road. He said,

“It is my aunt’s vehicle. I, alas, don’t have my own license with me.”

She gave a hollow laugh, said,

“Now that is too bad. Get out of the car.”

Waited a beat,

Then added,

“Sir?”

He got out slowly, a cloud of letters dancing before his eyes

K H e

i

r ll

He stared at the formation and Ridge took a step back, not liking the expression of fascination on his face.

He cupped his hands and arranged the letters.

Exhaled as they danced, whirled, then formed,

Kill

Her.

He said,

“Not yet.”

Ridge put her hand on the baton fastened to her tunic, asked,

“Are you all right, sir?”

He gave her a beatific smile, said,

“Completely.”

She composed herself, shaken more than she wanted to admit, said,

“As you have no license, I’m afraid I will have to forbid you from driving this vehicle. I could bring you to the station but your lawyer would throw a fit.”

Park stared at her, a dreamy slant to his eyes, said,

“You are right about that.”

She asked,

“What?”

“Being afraid.”

Sergeant Ridge was more rattled by Park than by anyone else in a long time. For a Guard, threats were a daily occurrence. You took note of them without letting them run riot. You were supposed to log the threat and time at the station lest, God forbid, you got hurt. That way they had not only evidence but a written record.

She didn’t log it.

There was something so radically different about this case. It kept her off balance and she had the uneasy feeling that Park was so off the radar that normal rules didn’t apply. Back at her apartment, she tried to relax, had a glass of white wine, but her taste ran to something with more bite. She’d been born and raised in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of Connemara. Wine was viewed as penance, what you had when you gave up drinking for Lent.

Jack Taylor had introduced her to the joy of books and had been guiding her in the canon of crime writers. Had said,

“You can’t go wrong with James Lee Burke.”

She put the latest Burke aside, and paced her living room.

Taylor.

AWOL.

Again.

Word was that he’d gone on a mighty skite. Few could lash the booze like him. Her feelings toward him veered from outright hatred to an affection she couldn’t fathom. Their great friend, a Zen-practicing former drug dealer, had been killed and she blamed Jack’s negligence for that.

Stewart.

Just to speak his name scalded her heart. She’d made a connection with him unlike any other. As the modern idiom put it,

He got her.

There was a lot to get. A gay woman in the Guards. Didn’t come much more difficult than that. Add her habitual simmering anger and she made a hard person to befriend. She had so many defenses and buttresses that she no longer even knew what she was so fucking angry about.

He cut through all that.

By kindness.

The only other man who’d been kind in her life was her dad. He had that basic integrity that is so rare as to be mistaken for altruism. Sad now as she recalled the expression on her father’s face when she announced she was joining the Guards. He’d flexed his fingers, a sure indicator, with him, of being both vexed and bitterly disappointed. He said, and worse, said very quietly,

“I’d prefer you to be a fucking nun than a Guard.”

Later, when he’d heard she was coming out as gay, he’d asked,

“Why do you have to tell the world?”

Indeed.

She, to her shame now, had lectured him on honesty.

Jesus.

He had very little, as James Lee Burke characters might have said,

“Book learning.”

But he could rise to near elegance when he was moved. He said with infinite sadness,

“There are valid reasons almost for poverty but none for ignorance.”

Rigid even then, she’d pushed,

“What does that even mean?”

He had looked her full in the face, said,

“True poverty is a dedicated selfishness disguised as polished principle.”

Her mother had said,

“Your father will come round.”

She was wrong.

At his funeral, Ridge, still seeking endorsement, had whined to her mother,

“I was a disappointment to him.”

Never, ever seek false endorsement from fierce Irishwomen. They won’t tell you what you want, they will tell you what they think, and it is never pretty. She answered simply,

“You were.”

Live with that.

Later, after her mother had given his clothes to St. Vincent de Paul, she said to Ridge,

“You may want his rosary beads?”

Not really.

I mean, WTF?

She said,

“I would love that.”

They had been blessed by one of the popes or indeed many of them and had touched the hem of Padre Pio, thus acquiring a slight aroma of roses. Her mother relayed all this with a very tiny note of skepticism, as in hedging her eternal bets.

As Irishwomen are expert at.

The beads were truly beautiful, a heavy gold cross and white ivory links. She said,

“Try not to think of them as handcuffs.”

Thus scoring many points with one simple utterance. They were on the small table by Ridge’s bed until one of her lovers asked they be put away as they induced guilt.

Surely the whole point.

Ridge was unable to settle. She replayed the arrest of Park so many times that she could actually see the expression on his face, a blend of arrogance and a surprising kind of naïveté. Later, she’d gone back to the house as the crew collected anything that might be used in evidence. They desperately needed this to be a sure thing.

On a bookshelf was just about every volume on grammar ever published. The books seemed obscure and impenetrable to her. Irish was her first language and English literally the language of work. She was ignorant in the workings of both and cared less.

She’d run her hand along the middle shelf and a sheet of paper fell out. She’d scanned it and, with a jolt, felt it could be vital. But she didn’t trust her male colleagues to credit her with this and needed to think on it further. She had stuffed it into her jacket and now unfolded it, read anew.

From

The Serpent Papers By

Jessica Cornwell.

Like this:

...

A groans like dried blood

R regal, dark

D as indigo

I makes a bright light

E is the color yellow

She muttered,

“The shite does this mean?”

She could imagine producing this in court and the lawyer annihilating her. Once upon a time, she could have shown this to Jack and he would have made some sense of it. She felt more alone than ever and then shook herself. Fixed her face, did her hair, put on a white silk T she’d been saving

For what?

There were no more special occasions. Grabbed her short leather jacket, black with studs to get the dyke vibe out there. And for some reason, that sailed the bitch Emily into her head.

Jack seemed completely smitten with the idea of the woman.

Ridge felt that Emily had perfected the Devil’s greatest trick, persuading the world he didn’t exist. Emily seemed to live large in Jack’s imagination.

Freudian thought?

“What-the-fuck-ever,”

She muttered.

Managed to block that cow out of her mind and head out. The night was young and full of hopeful peril.