The Searcher

FOURTEEN

During the night, something happens. It reaches Cal through his sleep, a snag somewhere in the night’s established rhythms, a disturbance. As he comes awake he hears, away across the fields, a hard savage howl of pain or rage or both.

He goes to the window, cracks it open and looks out. The cloud has cleared some, but the moon is slim and he can see very little except different densities and textures of darkness. The night is cold and windless. The howl has stopped, but there’s still movement, far off and ragged, ruffling the edge of his hearing.

He waits. After a minute or two, the sounds grow and sharpen, and his eyes pick out a shape among the grass in his back field. It’s loping towards the road at a good pace but with an odd ungainly gait, like it’s injured. It could be a big animal, or a hunched-over human being.

When it moves out of his sight line, Cal pulls on his jeans, loads his rifle and goes to his back door. He switches lights on as he goes. Mart has a shotgun, presumably P.J. does too, and the other thing might have or be anything. Cal isn’t aiming to take anyone by surprise.

He sweeps the fields with his flashlight, but it’s not strong enough to make much of a dent in this dark. The hunched shape is nowhere to be seen.

“I’m armed!” he shouts. His voice spreads out a long way. “Come out with your hands where I can see ’em.”

For a moment there’s sharp silence. Then a cheery voice yells back, from somewhere off on P.J.’s land, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”

A narrow beam of light flicks on and bobs across the fields, getting closer. Cal stays where he is, keeping the rifle pointed down, until a figure stumps into the pale spill of light from the windows and lifts an arm in a wave. It’s Mart.

Cal goes to meet him in the back field, making a few more sweeps with his flashlight on the way. “Holy God, Sunny Jim, put that away,” Mart says, nodding at Cal’s rifle. His face is alive with excitement and his eyes glitter like he’s drunk, although Cal can tell he’s stone-cold sober. He’s holding his flashlight in one hand and a hurling stick in the other. “D’you know what you sounded like there? You sounded like something off that Cops show. You’d make a great aul’ Garda, so you would. Are you going to tell me to get down on the ground?”

“What’s going on?” Cal says. He clicks the safety on, but keeps his finger ready. Whatever that creature was, it went somewhere.

“I was right about that yoke coming after P.J.’s sheep next, is what’s going on. And there was you doubting me. You’ll know better next time, won’t you?”

“What was it?”

“Ah,” Mart says ruefully, “that’s the only hitch. I didn’t get a good look. I was otherwise occupied, you might say.”

“Did you get it?” Cal asks, thinking of the creature’s lopsided run.

“I hit it a coupla good skelps, all right,” Mart says with glee, slapping his hurling stick against his leg. “There I was, sitting up in your bitta woods, thinking I was outa luck again. I’ll be honest with you, I was almost nodding off there. Only then I heard a bit of a kerfuffle down among P.J.’s sheep. I couldn’t see a feckin’ thing in this dark, but I snuck down there nice and quiet, and sure enough, there was a sheep down, and something on it. So busy it didn’t even hear me coming. I caught it a great aul’ clatter, and it let a howl out of it like a banshee. Did you hear that?”

“That’s what woke me up,” Cal says.

“I was aiming to knock it out, but I must not have got it right. I took it by surprise, though, anyhow. I got in another skelp before it worked out what was happening.” He hefts the stick, savoring the weight of it in his hand. “I was afraid I mighta lost the knack with the hurl, after all these years, but it’s like riding a bike: it never leaves you. If I’da been able to see that creature, I’d say I’da took the head clean off it. Sent it flying halfway to your door.”

“It do anything to you?”

“Didn’t even try,” Mart says, with contempt. “Maiming sheep is all it’s fit for; the minute it was up against something that’d fight back, it turned tail and ran. I went after it, but I have to face facts, I’m no T. J. Hooker. All I did was banjax my back.”

“Shoulda thrown the stick at it,” Cal says.

“Last I saw, it was heading your way.” Mart looks up at Cal, his face creased into a guileless squint. “You didn’t happen to get a good look at it, did you?”

“It didn’t come close enough,” Cal says. Something about Mart’s look bothers him. “It was pretty big, is all I saw. Coulda been a dog, maybe.”

“D’you know what it looked like to me?” Mart says, pointing his stick at Cal. “If I didn’t know better, I’da thought it was a cat. Not a little pussycat, like. One of them mountain lions.”

The way it moved didn’t look like a cat to Cal. He says, “Main thing I noticed was it looked like it was limping. You musta got it pretty good.”

“I’ll get it better if it comes back,” Mart says grimly. “It won’t, but. It’s had its fill.”

“How come you decided on that?” Cal asks, nodding at the hurling stick. “Me, I’da brought my gun.”

Mart giggles at him. “Barty’s right about you Yanks. Ye’d bring your guns to mass, so ye would. What would I want a gun for, at all? I’m out here trying to save P.J.’s sheep, not shoot the poor feckers because I can’t see a yard in this dark. This yoke here did the job grand.” He examines the hurling stick with satisfaction. There’s a wide dark smear near the tip that could be mud, or blood. Mart spits on it and wipes it on his pants.

“Guess it did,” Cal says. “How’s the sheep?”

“Dead. The throat’s taken out of it.” Mart arches his back experimentally. “I’d better go give P.J. the news, before this stiffens up on me. You go back to your bed, now. The excitement’s over for tonight.”

“Glad all that waiting paid off,” Cal says. “Give P.J. my condolences on his sheep.”

Mart tips his cap and heads off, and Cal turns back towards his house. Inside the garden gate, he switches off his flashlight and moves into the thick dark under the rooks’ oak tree.

The night is so still that the patches of stars and cloud don’t even shift in the sky, and the cold has an edge that cuts through the sweatshirt Cal has taken to wearing in bed. After a few minutes, a light goes on in P.J.’s house. A minute after that, two flashlight beams bob and crisscross their way across the fields, stop and focus in on something on the ground. Cal hears or imagines he hears, very faintly, the low, anger-filled rhythms of their discussion, and the restless jostling of the unsettled sheep. Then the two beams work their way back to P.J.’s place, more slowly. Mart and P.J. are dragging the dead sheep, a leg each.

Cal stays where he is and watches the land. A few late moths whirl in the light from his windows. Nothing much else is moving, only the usual small things in the hedges and the occasional call from a nightjar or a hunting owl, but he waits and watches anyway, just in case. Whatever Mart met, it might have taken cover when Cal came out, and it might be patient.

The unease that started with Mart’s innocent inquiring look has grown and worked its way to the surface. Mart knew that, out of all the sheep in Ardnakelty, this creature would go after P.J.’s.

The more Cal thinks about it, the less he likes that hurling stick. Only a fool would risk getting up close and personal with something that rips the soft parts out of sheep, when he has a perfectly good shotgun that would let him keep a safe distance. Mart is no fool. The only reason he would have left his gun at home was if he was expecting to meet something he wouldn’t shoot. Mart was sitting up in that wood waiting for a human being.

Cal finds himself afraid. He feels the fear first, and understands it only gradually. It has to do with the kid, and the way people around here treat him and his family like shit, and the way his brother leaving threw him into a savage, desperate tailspin. It has to do with the matter-of-fact, unflinching neatness—which seemed like a good quality at the time—with which he killed and butchered that rabbit. He couldn’t handle causing suffering, but then the sheep didn’t suffer, or only for a second or two.

Cal thinks, That’s a good kid. He wouldn’t do that. But he knows that no one has ever made it clear to Trey what, exactly, good and bad mean, or the importance of finding the line between them and staying on the right side.

After a while, a lone flashlight beam makes its way up the fields from P.J.’s place to Mart’s. A while after that P.J.’s lights go out, and finally Mart’s do too. The countryside is dark.

Cal heads for home. On his way up the garden he shines his flashlight over at the stump. Something has taken away the remains of the rabbit, clean as a whistle, not a scrap left behind.

When Cal gets to the meeting point, at three-twenty and by a long rambling route, Trey isn’t there. The mountainside is so deserted that he feels like an intruder. Along the way grazing sheep turned their heads to stare at him, and he passed fragments of lichen-mottled field walls; but up here the only signs of human existence are the dirt track he’s been following, with weeds growing tall along the middle, and the occasional dark scar in the heather where someone was cutting turf sometime.

Last night’s unease builds higher. The only way the kid would miss this is if he was hurt too badly to come.

Cal turns in a circle, scanning the mountain. The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.

When he turns back, the kid has materialized on the road above him, like he was there all along.

“You’re late,” Cal says.

“Doing my homework,” Trey says, with the edge of a sassy grin.

“Sure you were,” Cal says. He can’t see any bruises or gashes. “You get home OK last night?”

Trey gives him a suspicious look, like this is a weird question. “Yeah.”

“I heard noises, later on. Like an animal got hurt, maybe.”

The kid shrugs, implying that this is both possible and not his problem, and turns to head up the road. Cal watches him walk. His long, springy lope is the same as ever; he’s not favoring anything, or holding himself like anything hurts.

Some of the worry goes out of Cal, but a residue stays. He’s more or less satisfied that the kid isn’t the one hurting sheep, but this no longer seems like the central point, or at least not the only one. It’s been brought home to him that he’s not clear, or anything like clear, on what Trey is and isn’t capable of.

Beyond the bend Trey strikes off the path, upwards into the heather. “Mind yourself,” he says over his shoulder. “Boggy bits.”

Cal watches where Trey puts his feet and tries to match him, feeling the ground sink under him here and there. The kid knows this terrain better, and suits it better, than Cal does. “Shit,” he says, as the bog sucks at his boot.

“You haveta go faster,” Trey says, over his shoulder. “Don’t give it a chance to get holda you.”

“This is as fast as I go. Not all of us are built like jackrabbits.”

“Moose, more like.”

“You remember what I told you about manners?” Cal demands. Trey snorts and keeps moving.

They pass between gorse bushes, around old turf-cutting scars, under a sheer cliffside where tufts of grass sprout in the cracks between boulders. Cal keeps an eye out for watchers, but nothing moves on the mountainside, except heather stirring in the wind. This isn’t a place anyone would stumble across by accident. Whatever Brendan was doing up here, he wanted to do it undisturbed.

Trey takes them up a slope steep enough to use up Cal’s breath, and plunges into a thick plantation of spruces. The trees are tall and neatly spaced, and the ground is padded with years’ worth of needles. The wind doesn’t reach them here, but it rakes the treetops with an unceasing restless mutter. Cal doesn’t like the stark contrasts in this terrain. They have the same feel as the weather, of an unpredictability deliberately calculated to keep you one step behind.

“There,” Trey says, pointing, as they step out of the trees.

Brendan’s hideout is below them, sheltered from the worst of the winds in a slight dip, with its back up against the mountainside. It isn’t what Cal expected. He was picturing one of those clusters of raggedy stone-wall scraps with maybe a piece of roof here and there, left to nature’s slow devices for generations. This is a squat white cottage no older than his own, and in much the same shape as his own was when he arrived. Its door and window frames even have most of their red paint left.

Cal finds this more unsettling than his original image. A derelict two-hundred-year-old house fits into the ways of nature: things have their time and then fall apart. For a relatively new and usable house to be abandoned seems to imply some unnatural event, sharp-edged and final as a guillotine. The place has a look he doesn’t like.

“Wait,” he says, putting out a hand to block Trey as he starts towards it.

“Why?”

“Just give it a minute. Let’s be sure no one else had the same idea as your brother.”

“That’s why Bren came here. ’Cause no one else ever—”

“Just wait,” Cal says. He moves back, nice and easy, to stand among the spruce trees. Trey rolls his eyes impatiently, but he follows.

Nothing comes from the cottage, neither movement nor sound. The weeds growing high against its walls have been trampled away on the path to the front door. Its windows are mostly broken out and plenty of its roof slates are missing, but someone has been trying to remedy this, not long ago: a tarp has been tacked down over one patch of roof, and there’s plywood in the windows.

“You said you’ve been in there since Brendan went,” Cal says. “Right?”

“Yeah. Coupla days after.”

That means they’re unlikely to walk in on his dead body. A pair of swifts skim in and out under the eaves, unhurried, practicing their acrobatics in the cool air. “Looks OK,” Cal says, at last. “Let’s go take a look.”

Down in the dip, sound is condensed in a way that comes as startling after the open space above. Their steps are sharp and loud on the grit of the path. The swifts set up an angry chittering and dive for cover.

The door has a big splintered dent near the bottom, where someone has kicked it in with a nice combination of precision and dedication. Not too long ago: the broken wood is only starting to discolor. A steel hasp, its padlock still attached, hangs loose from its staple; there are holes in the door where it was wrenched free. Cal pulls his jacket sleeve down over his hand before he pushes the door open.

“Was it like this last time you were here?”

“Like what?”

“Kicked in. Lock broken out.”

“Yeah. Just walked in.” Trey is right at Cal’s heel, like a barely trained hunting dog pulsing with impatience.

Inside, nothing is moving. There’s a little fall of weak light somewhere in the back room, but apart from that, the plywood makes the house too dark to see. Cal finds his pocket flashlight and sweeps it around.

The front half of the house is one mid-sized room, with no one in it. The next thing Cal notices is that it’s clean. The first time he walked into his own place, it was layered up with cobwebs, dust, mold, dead bugs, dead mice, forms of gunge he couldn’t even identify. This has bare floorboards with only a thin coating of dust. The wallpaper, columns of fancy pink and gold flowers, is damp-stained, but any peeling pieces have been ripped away.

In one corner is a propane camping stove, brand-new, with a few spare tanks beside it. Under one boarded-up window is a cooler, also brand-new. Along the back wall are a shitty white MDF sideboard, not new, a broom and dustpan, a mop and bucket, and a row of big plastic water bottles. There are scuff marks on the floorboards where things have been dragged in and maybe out.

Nothing moves as they step inside. “Wait there,” Cal says. He goes swiftly through to the back. Here, in what used to be a kitchen and a bedroom, no one has bothered cleaning. The floors are scattered with fallen plaster and random pieces of dilapidated furniture, and dusty cobwebs hang heavy as lace curtains from the ceiling. The back windows are unboarded, yellow-flowered weeds swaying behind them, but the mountainside presses close enough to block much of the light.

“See?” Trey says, at his shoulder. “No one.”

“So we wasted two minutes,” Cal says. “Better’n walking into trouble.” He heads back into the front room, squats down by the cooler with the kid hanging over his shoulder, and opens it through his sleeve. It’s empty. He examines the camping stove, which is set up ready to go but looks like it’s never been used. He rocks each of the spare propane tanks on its base: one full, two empty. He moves to the sideboard, pries the doors open by their corners and points his flashlight in there.

Inside the cabinet are three packs of rubber gloves, three bottles of household cleaners, a pile of dirty scrubbing sponges and cleaning cloths, a few Tupperware containers, a big pack of coffee filters, a coiled-up rubber hose, two sets of lab goggles, a pack of lab safety masks, and a stray battery that’s rolled into a corner.

Cal’s heart zigzags. For a second he can’t move. He wanted something that would burn off all the hazy possibilities and show him the solid thing in their midst. Now that he’s got it, he finds he doesn’t want it one bit.

He had Brendan wrong. He was picturing a wild kid galloping after the first and easiest idea that sprang up in his head, all hopped up on resentment and the prospect of showing everyone they’d underestimated him. But Brendan went about this methodically, systematically, taking his time and setting all his pieces in place. A half-cocked kid in a huff can get himself into plenty of shit. A kid with method is less likely to get himself into shit, but if he does, the shit is a whole lot deeper.

He can feel Trey crouched beside him watching every flicker of his face, catching the instant of stillness. “Huh,” he says easily, straightening up. “Here, hold this for me.” He hands over the flashlight.

“What for?” Trey asks. He’s coiled tight, barely containing his electricity.

Cal finds his phone and switches on the camera. “When you’re investigating, you document. You never know.”

Trey doesn’t move. His eyes are still on Cal’s face.

“Start right there,” Cal says, nodding to the front door. “Then sweep it round the room, nice and slow.”

After a moment, Trey does as he’s told without comment. He moves the flashlight evenly while Cal videos the room, then holds it steady for photos of the cooler, the sideboard, the stove, the propane tanks, the water bottles. Then Cal takes videos of the back rooms, without the flashlight. The unboarded back windows were a good call. If you’re going to do what Brendan Reddy was going to do in here, you want plenty of ventilation.

The place smells of nothing but damp, rain and spruce. Brendan never got started. He had most everything in place, maybe everything, and then something went wrong.

When they finish up the photos, Cal takes the flashlight back and walks the front room, keeping the beam on the floor. “What you looking for?” Trey asks, hovering.

“Anything I can find,” Cal says. “Nothing there, though.” He’s looking for bloodstains. He can’t see any, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there—the floor’s been cleaned not too long ago, although there’s no way to know whether it was before Brendan went or after. Luminol would still show blood, but he hasn’t got Luminol. “Take a good look round. Anything different from when you were here last?”

Trey scans every room, taking his time. Finally he shakes his head.

“OK,” Cal says. He puts his phone away. “Let’s go take a look around outside.”

Trey nods, hands Cal the flashlight and heads for the door. Cal has no idea what he’s making of all this. He can’t tell whether this is just because the kid is the way he is, or whether Trey is deliberately keeping his thoughts to himself.

They walk the overgrown area that used to be the yard, but there’s no convenient stash and no sign of digging. All they find is a midden from the house’s inhabited days: a little heap of broken crockery and glass bottles, half buried under years’ worth of silted-up dirt and weeds.

Trey finds a stick and beats down nettles. “Knock it off,” Cal says.

“How come?”

“I’d rather not tell the world that someone’s been here.”

Trey glances at him, but says nothing. He throws the stick onto the midden.

Up here has a silence that separates it from the lowlands. Down below, there’s always a lavish mix of birds fussing and flirting, sheep and cattle conversing, farmers shouting, but up here the air is empty; nothing but the wind and one small cold call like pebbles being tapped together, over and over again.

They work their way up the sides of the dip, poking into clumps of long grass, going systematically back and forth to make sure they miss nothing. They find a rusted garden hoe with half a handle, and a snarl of barbed wire, also rusty. When they reach the top they crunch through the spruce grove, kicking at piles of fallen needles and squinting up into the branches for caches. A couple of old nests make them look twice.

Cal knew from the start it was hopeless. There’s too much space up here for one man and a kid ever to cover. What he needs is a CSI team swarming all over the house, and a K-9 unit combing the mountainside. He feels like the world’s biggest fool, out here in a foreign country playing cop with no badge and no gun, and a thirteen-year-old kid and Officer Dennis for backup. He tries to imagine what Donna would say, but the truth is, Donna wouldn’t say anything at all; she would give him a stare where sheer incredulity beat out a number of other things for top spot, and then throw up her hands and walk away. Even Donna’s extravagant supply of words and noises didn’t contain anything to cover this.

“Well,” he says, in the end. “I guess we’ve seen about all there is to see around here.” It’s time to go. The light is starting to shift, the spruce shadows stretching down the side of the dip towards the house.

Trey looks up at him sharply, inquiring. Cal ignores that and heads deeper into the trees. He’s glad to get away from this place.

After a minute or two, he realizes he’s walking fast enough that the kid is trotting to keep up. “So,” he says, slowing down. “What do you make of that?”

Trey shrugs. He jumps to snap a branch off one of the spruces.

Cal feels a powerful need to have some idea of what’s going on in the kid’s head. “You know Brendan,” he says. “I don’t. That house give you any idea what he might’ve been planning?”

Trey whips the branch against a trunk as they pass. The hiss and smack are compressed by the trees all around. Nothing flaps or scuttles in response.

“When I went there,” he says, “after Bren went. I thought maybe he was living there. ’Cause I saw how he’d fixed it up, the roof and all, and the cooker and the cooler. Those didn’t use to be there before. I thought maybe he’d got sick of us and moved in there. I waited all night for him to come back. I was gonna ask could I come too.” He whips the branch against another trunk, harder this time, but the sound still flattens to insignificance. “I only copped on in the morning: I was fucking thick. There’s no mattress or sleeping bag or nothing. He wasn’t living there.”

This is the longest speech Cal has ever heard the kid make. He’s not surprised Trey didn’t mention the cottage earlier, not after that long night and that stinging slap of disappointment. “Doesn’t look like it,” he says.

After a shorter silence, Trey says, glancing up at him sideways, “All that stuff in the sideboard.”

Cal waits.

“Cleaning gear. Brendan coulda been meaning to do up the rest of the place. Rent it out, on the QT, like. To hikers, backpackers. Only the people who own the house found out, and they got pissed off. And that’s who Bren was going to meet. To sort it. Give them cash.”

“Could be,” Cal says, ducking under a branch. He can feel the kid watching him.

“And that’s who took him.”

“You know who owns the place? Who lived there last?”

Trey shakes his head. “But some of them up the mountains, they’re rough.”

“Well,” Cal says. “Looks like I might need to have a look at property registers.”

“You’re gonna find him,” Trey says. “Right?”

Cal says, “I’m aiming to.” He doesn’t want to find Brendan Reddy any more.

Trey starts to say something else, then checks himself and goes back to whacking tree trunks with his branch. They make their way through the spruces and back down the mountainside in silence.

When they get back onto the path, at the bend where they met up, Cal slows. “Where’s Donie McGrath live?” he asks.

Trey is kicking a rock down the path in front of him, but he looks up at that. “What for?”

“I want to talk to him. Where’s he live?”

“Just this side of the village. That gray house that’s in bits. With the dark blue door.”

Cal knows it. People in the village take pride in their homes, keeping their windows clean, their brasses polished and their trim painted. A run-down house means an empty house. Donie’s is the exception.

“By himself?”

“Himself and his mam. His dad died. His sisters married away, and I think his brother emigrated.” The rock has gone off the path. The kid nudges it out of a clump of heather with his toe. “Donie and his brother, they usedta pick on Bren, back in school. In the end they bet him up bad enough that my mam went in, and Donie’s mam hadta as well. She was like, ‘My boys would never, they’re lovely lads, we’re a decent family’—even though everyone knew the dad was a drunk and a waster. Thought she was great just ’cause she’s from town and her brother’s a priest. School didn’t give a shite either way, ’cause it was only us.” He glances up at Cal. “Now, but, Bren could beat the shite outa that little scut any day. Donie didn’t take him.”

“I never said he did,” Cal says. “I just want to talk to him.”

“How come?”

“Because. And I want you to stay away from him. Far away.”

“Donie’s only an arsewipe,” Trey says, with complete scorn.

“OK. Stay away from him anyway.”

Trey kicks his rock, hard, into the heather. He gets in front of Cal and stops, blocking the path. His feet are set apart and his chin is out.

“I’m not a fucking baby.”

“I know that.”

“‘Stay away from this, stay away from him, do nothing, you don’t need to know—’”

“You wanted me to do this ’cause I know how to do it right. If you can’t stay outa my way while I—”

“I wanta talk to Donie. He’ll say nothing to a blow-in.”

“And you think he’ll talk to some kid?”

“He will, yeah. Why not? He thinks the same as you: I’m a baby. He can say anything to me; there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Cal says, “What I’m telling you is, I find out you’ve been anywhere near Donie, I’m done here. No second chances. Clear?”

Trey stares at him. For a second Cal thinks the kid is going to flip his shit, the way he did when he smashed up the desk. He gets ready to dodge.

Instead, the kid’s face shuts like a door. “Yeah,” he says. “Clear.”

“Better be,” Cal says. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Come round the day after, I’ll update you.” He wants to tell the kid not to get seen on the way, but the sleazy ring of it stops him.

Trey doesn’t argue any more, or ask any more questions. He just nods and lopes off, into the heather and gone behind the shoulder of the mountain.

Cal understands that the kid knows. He knows something happened inside that house; something solidified and came into sharp focus, and the stakes shot up. He knows that was the moment when this situation went bad.

Cal wants to call the kid back and take him hunting again, or feed him dinner, or teach him how to build something. None of those will fix this. He turns and starts to walk home, by the same meandering route he took to get here. Below him the fields are yellowing with autumn. The shadow of the mountainside is spilling onto the path, with a chill inside when he crosses it. He wonders if, a week or two from now, the kid will hate his guts.

At least now he knows what farm equipment got stolen back in March. Brendan went out with a hose and a propane tank one night, or a couple of nights, and siphoned off a little bit of P.J.’s anhydrous ammonia. Only he got busted: maybe he got sloppy and left a piece of duct tape stuck to the tank where he’d attached his hosepipe, maybe P.J. spotted the brass fitting turning green. Either way, P.J. called the cops. Cal would love to know what Brendan said to him to make him call them off.

He could probably have those CSIs and that K-9, if he went to the police—not cheery Garda Dennis, but the big boys, the detectives up in Dublin. They would take him seriously, specially once they saw those photos. Brendan wasn’t setting up some pissant shake-n-bake op in that cottage. He was going for the real thing, the pure high-yield technique, and he had the chemistry knowledge to make it work. It seems like a fair assumption that he also had the connections in place to sell the meth once he made it. The detectives wouldn’t fuck around.

Cal would be lighting the fuse on something whose blast would reverberate through Ardnakelty in ways he can’t predict.

No matter what he does or doesn’t do, he can’t see a way that this might turn out well. That’s what that shift in the air meant, the one he and Trey both felt as they squatted by the sideboard, the cold implacable shift that’s familiar to him from a hundred cases: this isn’t going to have a happy ending.