The Searcher

EIGHTEEN

The wind blows itself out, and dawn comes to the window cold and still in a clear gold-green. Cal has been dozing off and on, in between watching the fire die down and checking on Trey by the light of his phone. As far as he can tell, she never budged once all night, even when he got close enough to make sure she was still breathing.

In the first light Lena takes shape, curled up in the armchair with her face buried in her elbow, her hair a pale scribble. Outside, the small birds are starting to toss out scraps of morning conversation, and the rooks are bitching at them to shut up. Cal is sore at every point where his bones pressed into the floor, and a lot of points in between.

He gets up, as quietly as he can, and heads to the sink to fill the kettle. He’s light-headed with tiredness, but not in a fuzzy way; the chill and the dawn give everything a spellbound, airy lucidity. In his garden the rabbits are chasing each other in circles through the dew-wet grass.

Lena stirs in the armchair and sits up, arching her back and scrunching up her face. She looks baffled. “Morning,” Cal says.

“Ah, Jaysus,” Lena says, shielding her eyes. “If you’re planning on having guests on the regular, you need curtains.”

“I’d need a lot more’n that,” Cal says, keeping his voice down. “How you feeling?”

“Too old for this carry-on, is how I’m feeling. How about you?”

“Like I got hit by a truck. Remember back when we’d crash on people’s floors just for kicks?”

“I do, yeah, but I was an awful eejit back then. I’d rather be old and have sense.” She stretches, hugely and with appreciation. “Is Trey still asleep?”

“Yeah. I figure the longer she sleeps, the better. Can I make you some breakfast?” Cal finds himself hoping she says yes. Lena may not be the most accommodating person in the world, but she alters the balance of the house in a way he likes. “I got toast with bacon and eggs, or toast without bacon and eggs.”

Lena grins. “Ah, no. I’d better head. I’ve to get ready for work, and I’ve to feed the dogs first, let them out. Nellie’ll be going mental. She loses the head if I’m out past bedtime; by now she’s probably et half the furniture.” She unfurls herself from the chair and starts folding the duvet. “Will I call by here on my way in to work? Bring Trey home?”

“I’m not sure,” Cal says. He thinks about what kind of scary it would take, to make a mother do that to her kid. For a second, before he can turn his mind away, he wonders what it would have taken to make him or Donna do that to Alyssa. “I’d rather get things cleared up a little bit first.”

Lena tosses the folded duvet over the back of the armchair. “Here was me hoping by morning you’d have got sense,” she says.

“I’m not gonna do anything stupid.”

Lena’s glance says this is a matter of opinion, but she doesn’t comment. She pulls her hair band off her wrist and twists her hair back into its ponytail. “So I’m not bringing her home.”

“Maybe later. OK if I see how the day goes, give you a call in a while?”

“Away you go. Have fun.”

“If I needed you to stay here one more night,” Cal says, “would you consider it? I’d run into town and buy an air mattress, so you wouldn’t be back on that chair.”

Lena startles him by bursting out laughing. “You,” she says, shaking her head, “you’re some tulip, d’you know that? And your timing is shite. Come back to me later, once the aches and pains wear off, and we’ll see.” She pulls on her shoes and her jacket and heads for the door.

Cal waits till he hears her car drive away. Then he takes a walk around his garden. He can’t find any sign of intruders, but then he wouldn’t either way. The evidence of the night’s wind is everywhere. Leaves are scattered lavishly across the grass and banked high against walls and hedges, and the trees have a raw, defiant bareness. Under his windows, the earth has been scoured smooth.

He goes back indoors and starts cooking breakfast. The smell of frying bacon brings Trey out of the bedroom, barefoot and crumpled. Her fat lip has gone down some, but the eye is even more spectacular in daylight, and there’s an ugly bruise on her cheekbone that Cal didn’t notice before. Her hoodie and her jeans are crusted with patches and smears of dried blood. Cal looks at her and has no idea what to do about her. The thought of sending her out of this house makes him want to barricade everything and spend his time with his gun pointing out a window, in case someone comes for her.

“How you doing?” he asks.

“Shite. Hurts everywhere.”

“Well, I took that for granted,” Cal says. The fact that she’s walking and talking fills him up with a relief that makes it hard to breathe. “I meant apart from that. You sleep OK?”

“Yeah.”

“You hungry?”

The kid looks like she wants to say no, but the smell is too much for her. “Yeah. Starving.”

“Breakfast’ll be ready in a minute. Sit down there.”

Trey sits, yawning and flinching as the yawn stretches her lip. She watches Cal while he turns the bacon and butters the toast. The way she’s sitting, with her shoulders high and too much weight on her feet, reminds him of the way she used to stand when she first started coming around: ready to run.

“You want another painkiller?” he asks.

“Nah.”

“Nah? Anything hurt worse than last night?”

“Nah. I’m grand.”

With her face messed up, Cal finds it even harder than usual to tell what’s going on in her head. “Here you go,” he says, bringing the plates to the table. “Cut it up small, and don’t let it touch that lip. The salt’ll sting.”

Trey ignores that and attacks the food, still keeping a wary eye on Cal. Her hand is better; she holds the fork clumsily, trying not to bend her fingers, but she’s using it.

“Miss Lena just left a few minutes back,” Cal says. “She’s got work. She might be back later, depending.”

Trey says brusquely, “Sorry I came here. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No,” Cal says. “Don’t be sorry. You did right.”

“Nah. You told me not to be coming around any more.”

All of Cal’s relationships, which seemed perfectly straightforward and harmonious last night, appear to have got themselves out of joint while he wasn’t looking. Never mind Brendan Reddy: the real mystery to which Cal would love an answer is how, while doing everything right as far as he can tell, he somehow manages to fuck everything up.

“Well,” he says. “This was an emergency. That’s different. You called it right.”

“I’ll go after this.”

“No hurry. Before you go anywhere, we need to decide what you want me to do.”

Trey looks blank.

“About last night. You want me to call the police? Or CPS—child protective services, whatever you call it?”

“No!”

“CPS isn’t the boogeyman, kid. They’ll find you somewhere safe to stay for a while. Maybe get your mama some help.”

“She doesn’t need help.”

The kid is glaring, holding her knife like she’s all ready to stab Cal with it. “Kid,” he says gently. “What she did to you wasn’t OK.”

“She never done that before. She only done it this time ’cause they made her.”

“So what if they make her again?”

“They won’t.”

“ ’Cause what? You learned your lesson, now you’re gonna behave yourself?”

“None a your business,” Trey says, with a defiant glance.

“I’m asking you, kid. I need to figure out what to do here.”

“You don’t need to do anything. If you call child services, I’ll tell ’em you done this.”

She means it, too. “OK,” Cal says. Seeing this amount of fight out of her makes his spine go weak with relief. He got up this morning afraid to see her in case he found her smashed inside, a girl-husk that stared right through him, that had to be steered stumbling from place to place and sat with a bite in her mouth till she was reminded to chew and swallow. “No child services.”

Trey eyeballs him for another minute. Apparently she believes him, because she goes back to her food. She says, “I know that was all bullshit, what you told me. About Bren going to Scotland. So’s I’d fuck off and leave you alone.”

Cal gives up. Whatever he was trying to do there, it hasn’t worked. “Yeah,” he says. “Donie gave me sweet fuck-all. Only I was bullshitting you about the leave-me-alone part, too. Truth is, I got no problem with you coming around. I enjoy your company.”

Trey looks up at that. She says, “I don’t want your fucking money.”

“I know that, kid. I never thought you did.”

She goes still, rearranging her mind around that. The loosening in her face hooks Cal right under the breastbone. “So how come you said all that shite?” she demands.

“For Christ’s sake, kid. You think no one noticed what the two of us were up to? I got warned to back off. This right here”—he points his fork at Trey’s face—“this is exactly what I was trying to avoid.”

Trey gives an impatient hitch of her shoulders. “It’s no big deal. I’ll be grand.”

“This time, you will. Because they got your mama to do it, and she only went as far as she thought would satisfy them. Next time, they’ll go after you themselves. Or after your mama. Or your little brother and sisters. Or me. These are serious guys, doing serious business. They don’t fuck around. They didn’t kill you because they don’t want the attention a dead kid would get, but they will if they have to.”

The kid blinks fast at that. She goes back to shoveling food into her face, head down.

“Jesus Christ, kid,” Cal says, suddenly right on the edge of blowing up. “What the fuck is it gonna take to make you knock it off?”

Trey says, “When I know. For definite. Not some bullshit that someone made up to get rid of me.”

“Yeah? That’s all you want? Just to know for certain?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. If you find out for certain that Brendan skipped town, you’re gonna want to find out why, and then you’re gonna want to track him down. If you find out for certain that someone ran him off, you’re gonna want to get back at them. There’s always gonna be just one more thing left to do. You gotta know when to stop.”

“I do know. When—”

“No. When to stop is now, kid. Look at you. If they have to come after you again, what are they gonna do? When to stop is now.”

Trey’s face turns up to him like she’s drowning. She says, “I wanta stop now. I’m tired to fuckin’ death of this. At the start, when I first came here, it was like you said: I’da kept going forever. Now I just want it gone. I wanta never think about him again. I wanta go back to doing my own things that I usedta do before. But whatever happened to Brendan, he deserves for someone to know. Just one person, even, to know.”

Cal wasn’t sure, until this moment, whether she understood the size of the chance that Brendan is dead. They sit there, listening to it settle into the crevices of the room.

“Then I’ll stop,” Trey says. “When I know.”

“Well,” Cal says, “there you go. You were asking about having a code. There’s the beginning of it.” He looks at that beat-up, half-comprehending face and feels his throat thicken for all the things the kid is just starting on, all the rivers she’ll have to struggle across that she hasn’t even glimpsed on the horizon. “Finish your breakfast,” he says. “Before it gets cold.”

Trey doesn’t budge. “So are you gonna help me? Or not?”

“Truthfully,” Cal says, “I don’t know yet. First I need to track down the people who came calling on your mama yesterday, and have a talk with them. Once I’ve done that, I should either know what happened to your brother, or at least know whether we can keep looking without getting ourselves killed.”

“What if we can’t?”

“I don’t know. We’re not there yet.”

Trey doesn’t look like that satisfies her, but she goes back to scraping up egg yolk with her toast. “Tell me something,” Cal says. “You think it was Donie who got your mama to do this?”

Trey snorts. “Nah. She’d tell him to fuck himself.”

“Yeah, me neither. But these guys came calling two days after you talked to Donie. That’s not a coincidence.”

“You said if I talked to Donie, you were outa this.”

“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “Things change. How’d you get hold of him?”

“His mam goes to half-nine mass in town every day,” Trey explains, with her mouth full. “She gets a lift with Holy Mike. I waited in the hedge by Mike’s lane till I saw his car go off, and then I went across Francie Gannon’s fields to Donie’s back door.”

“You see anyone on your way in or out?”

“Nah. Someone could’ve seen me, but. From a window. Nothing I could do about that, only go fast.”

“Listen,” Cal says. He gets up and takes the plates over to the sink. “I gotta go out for a little while. Not long. You gonna be OK here by yourself?”

“Yeah. Course.”

The kid doesn’t sound entirely happy about the idea. “No one knows you’re here,” Cal says, “so you don’t need to worry. But I’m gonna lock the doors just in case. If anyone comes calling while I’m gone, don’t answer, don’t look out the window. Just sit tight till they go away. You got it?”

“You going to talk to Donie again?”

“Yeah. You gonna get bored? You want a book or something?”

Trey shakes her head.

“You could take a bath if you want. Wash last night off you.”

The kid nods. Cal figures she won’t do it. She doesn’t look like she could manage anything that complicated. Just getting up for breakfast has tired her out; all of a sudden her face has a kind of exhaustion that’s unnatural on a kid, a slack droop to her one good eyelid and deep grooves from nose to mouth. She looks, for the first time, a little bit like her mama.

“You just rest,” he says. “Eat whatever you want out of the kitchen. I’ll be back soon.”

Cal heads for Donie’s by the same route Trey took, down the back roads and across Francie Gannon’s fields. The wind has ripped branches off trees and thrown them, scraggly and splintered, into the roads; the long gold autumn light laid over them gives them the look of a deliberate, sinister harvest. Cal heaves the bigger ones into ditches on his way. He knows he must be tired, but he can’t feel it. The walk and the crisp air are shaking the aches out of his muscles, and he still has that light-headed clarity buoying him on. The only thing in his mind is Donie.

The farmers must have finished their morning rounds and gone in for breakfast; Cal encounters no one except a bunch of Francie’s sheep, who freeze in mid-chew to fix him with indecipherable stares as he passes, and keep gazing after him for a disconcertingly long time. He still gets over Donie’s back wall quicker than anyone could reasonably expect of a guy his age and size, just in case the neighbors look out a window or Francie decides to investigate what’s paralyzed his sheep.

Donie’s garden is a decrepit patch of overgrown grass, with wind-scattered plastic patio furniture that looks like it came from a supermarket giveaway. Through the window, the kitchen looks empty. Cal jimmies the back door with a loyalty card from his favorite Chicago deli, pushes it open nice and slowly, and steps inside.

Nothing moves. The kitchen is old, beat-up and ferociously clean, with an exhausted shine coming off the oilcloth and the linoleum. A slow drip falls from the tap.

Cal moves quietly through the kitchen and down the hall. The house is dim and smells powerfully of flowery cleaner and damp. It has too much furniture, most of it dumpy varnished pine turning a tawdry orange with age, and too much wallpaper with too much pattern. On the living-room mantelpiece, a dull red light flickers in the chest of a fey-looking Jesus who points at it with one finger and simpers reproachfully at Cal.

Cal keeps to one side of the staircase and puts his weight down gradually, but the steps still creak under him. He stops and listens for movement. The only sound is a faint, dedicated snoring coming from one of the bedrooms.

Donie’s room has nothing in common with the rest of the house, except the pine furniture. Most of the surfaces are occupied by dirty clothes and video-game cases. One wall is taken up by a TV the size of a picture window; another one has a high-end sound system whose speakers bulge in every corner like roided-up biceps. The air is practically solid with the interleaved smells of sweat, cigarette smoke, beer farts and crusted sheets. At the heart of this accretion is Donie, spread-eagled facedown on the bed, wearing an undershirt and Minion-patterned briefs.

Cal crosses the room in three strides, gets a knee on the small of Donie’s back, grabs his fat neck and shoves his face into the pillow. He keeps him there till Donie’s bucking gets an extra edge of desperation, and then hauls his head up for one long gasp. Then he does it again, and then again.

Donie comes up the third time squealing for breath. Cal puts more weight on his spine, lets go of his neck and twists one arm high behind his back. Donie has the consistency of a wetsuit full of pudding.

“You dumb shit,” he says into Donie’s ear. “You fucked up.”

Donie wheezes and writhes, and finally manages to ratchet his head around and get a look at Cal. The first thing across his face is relief. This isn’t what Cal is aiming for. Fear is one of the few things that will spin Donie’s hamster wheel. If he’s more scared of someone else than he is of Cal, that’s a problem. Luckily, Cal is in the right mood for fixing it.

“Brendan Reddy,” he says. “Start talking.”

“Don’t know what you’re—”

Cal pulls open the drawer of the bedside table, shoves Donie’s fingers in and slams it shut. When Donie howls, Cal plunges his face into the pillow again.

He waits till he’s sure Donie’s done howling before he eases his grip so the little shit can turn his head. “You know what I want for Christmas?” he says, into Donie’s face. Donie pants and whines. “I want you mopes to quit being so fucking predictable. I’m fed up to the back teeth of ‘Uhhh, dunno what you’re talking about, never heard of the guy.’ You know exactly what I’m talking about. I know you know. You know I know you know. But still, Donie, still you gotta come out with that shit. Sometimes I feel like, I hear that shit one more time, I’m not gonna be able to control myself.”

He lets go of Donie, gets off the bed and upends a chair to dump a bunch of nasty tracksuits onto the floor. “Sorry to lay my personal troubles on you,” he says pleasantly, pulling the chair over to the bedside. “But every now and again it seems like things build up just a little bit higher than I can be expected to put up with.”

Donie heaves himself up to a sitting position, holding his fingers and blowing through his teeth. A glob of pale hairy belly pops out between his undershirt and his briefs. The eyebrow gash from his encounter with Mart’s hurling stick is only half healed. Donie is having a tough couple of weeks, beating-wise.

“Looking good, son,” Cal says.

“My fucking hand,” Donie says, outraged.

“Shake it off. You’ve got some talking to do.”

“You fucking broke it.”

“Ouch,” Cal says, leaning in to inspect Donie’s fingers, which are purple and swelling, scored with deep red grooves. The middle one is bent at an interesting angle. “I bet if someone stamped on that, it’d hurt like all hell.”

“What the fuck do you want, man?”

“Jesus Christ, son, you miss the day they taught English in school? Brendan Reddy.”

Donie considers going back into know-nothing mode, assesses Cal and thinks better of it. He doesn’t look scared, exactly, but he looks a little more alive than usual, which for his kind is the same thing. “Who even are you, man? You in business? Or a cop? What?”

“Like we said before: I’m just a guy who needs a hobby. I’m not gonna pass this conversation on to anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about. Unless you piss me off.”

Donie runs his tongue around the inside of his lip, where the pillow mashed it into his teeth, and examines Cal with those flat pale eyes. “You want me to convince you some more?” Cal asks. “We got at least an hour. I can be real convincing in an hour.”

“Why d’you wanta know about Brendan?”

“Lemme get you started,” Cal says. “Brendan was setting up as a meth cook for your buddies from Dublin. Take it from there.”

“Little prick thought he was outa Breaking Bad,” Donie says. “‘All ye have is the shake-n-bake shite, I can make ye the pure stuff . . . ’ Fuckin’ tosser.” Cal watches his eyes in case he has a weapon stashed somewhere, but his focus is on his fingers. He examines them at various angles, experiments with flexing them and grimaces.

“You weren’t a fan, huh?”

“I told them all along. Useless little prick, thinks he’s the dog’s bollox. He’ll let you down.”

“They shoulda listened to you,” Cal agrees. “Woulda made all our lives a lot simpler.”

Donie goes for the littered bedside table. Cal shoves him backwards onto the bed. “Nope,” he says.

“I need a smoke, man.”

“You can wait. I don’t wanna breathe that shit; this room stinks bad enough already. You do anything useful for these Dublin boys, or they just keep you around for decoration?”

Donie picks himself up, carefully keeping his sore hand uninvolved. “They need me. You can’t run the game without local lads.”

“And I’m sure they appreciate you the way you deserve. You have anything to do with Brendan?”

“Hadta help the little prick clear out the aul’ house where he was setting up. Get him what he needed.” Donie bares his too-small teeth like he wants to bite. “Sending me out with a shopping list, like a fuckin’ servant.”

“Like what?”

“Sudafed. Batteries. Propane tanks. Generator. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.”

“Anhydrous?”

“Nah. Little prick said he’d do that himself, I’d only fuck it up.” Donie sniggers. “He was the one that fucked it up.”

“How?”

Donie shrugs. “How would I know? Took too much, maybe. Anyhow P.J. Fallon spotted it and called the Guards. Little prick musta talked him into sending them home again, but—”

“How’d he do that?”

“P.J.’s soft in the head. Anything’d do it.” Donie puts on an unpleasant whine: “‘My poor aul’ mammy, if I get sent down she’ll be all alone . . . ’ Only the little prick musta let slip to P.J. where he’d put the anhydrous.”

“Which was where? His lab?”

“‘Lab,’” Donie says, and sniggers. “Aul’ tip of a house up the mountains. Little prick swore no one else knew about it. P.J. and a few of his mates went in and cleared it out. Not just the anhydrous. Generator, batteries, anything worth anything. Five, six hundred quid’s worth, easy.”

Cal doesn’t need to ask who P.J.’s mates included. Mart, that know-it-all fuck: he really did know it all, or most of it anyway. All the time Cal was babbling on about big cats, and all the time he was wandering around asking innocent questions about wiring, Mart knew exactly who each of them was looking for, and why.

“The Dublin guys find out?” he asks.

Donie grins. “Ah, yeah.”

“How?”

“I dunno, man. Maybe they had a lookout on the place, check for themselves was it really as safe as the little prick said.” Donie’s grin widens. He seems surprisingly at ease with this conversation, now that he’s got accustomed to the idea of it. Cal has met people like Donie before: people who barely registered even pain or fear, let alone anything else, like their emotions never grew in right. None of them improved anyone’s life in any way. “Little prick was shitting himself. I’d say he’d been hoping to keep it on the QT that he’d been snared. Try and get hold of the cash to replace all the gear before they found out.”

“What’d they do?”

“Had me set up a meeting. Them and him.”

“Where?”

“That aul’ house.”

“To do what?”

“Give him a few slaps, probably. For being a thick cunt and drawing attention. Only the little prick didn’t show. He done a runner.”

Donie’s eye is wandering to the pack of cigarettes on the bedside table again. Cal snaps his fingers in his face. “Focus, Donie. That all they woulda done to him? A few slaps?”

“Long as he paid it back, yeah. They wanted him to do the work for them.”

“He know that?”

Donie shrugs. “Fuckin’ eejit didn’t know his arse from his elbow. He was in over his head, know what I mean? You wanta work with these lads, you haveta be smart. Not fuckin’ chemistry shite. Street smart.”

“Were you at the meeting?”

“Nah. Other stuff to do.”

Meaning he wasn’t invited, and meaning he doesn’t know whether or not the Dublin boys were telling him the truth about Brendan not showing up. Brendan was an optimistic guy; he could have gone bouncing out the door figuring he was about to put everything happily back on track, and only found out different when it was too late. Cal says, “Did the Dublin boys ask you where he could’ve gone?”

“How would I know? I wasn’t his fuckin’ babysitter.”

“They go after him? Catch him?”

Donie shakes his head. “I’m not thick, man. I didn’t ask.”

“Come on, Donie. How pissed off were they?”

“What d’you fuckin’ think?”

“Right. You figure they’d just let Brendan ride off into the sunset?”

“Don’t wanta know. All I know is they told me to put the frighteners on those aul’ fellas. Make sure they knew to keep their mouths shut, stay out of our business from now on.”

“The sheep,” Cal says.

Donie grins again, an involuntary grin like a spasm.

“Well, that musta been rewarding,” Cal says. “Finally, something that made the most of your God-given talents.”

“Just getting the job done, man.”

Cal looks at Donie, sitting on the edge of his bed with his pudgy bare knees wide apart, poking at his broken finger, sneaking the odd speculative glance at Cal. Donie is keeping something back.

He didn’t like Brendan one bit, which is understandable. Donie had been doing the donkey work for this gang for God knows how long, and all of a sudden Brendan came riding in, just an uppity kid talking big, and Donie was stuck being his errand boy. He wanted the little smartass gone, and Cal gets the distinct feeling that he took steps to make that happen. Maybe he told Brendan that that meeting would involve a lot more than a few slaps, scared the shit out of him, nudged him into skipping town. Or maybe he just accompanied Brendan along the way, and picked a lonely stretch of mountainside.

Cal considers getting the full story out of Donie, who is now removing fluff from his belly button. He decides against it, on the grounds that right at this moment he doesn’t actually give a shit what happened to Brendan Reddy. He needs as much of this story as it takes to find out who made Sheila beat Trey, and why. The rest of it can wait.

“And once you got the job done,” he says, “everything went back to normal.”

“Yeah. Until you came sticking your nose in. I want a fucking smoke, man.”

“Speaking of people sticking their noses in,” Cal says. “Trey Reddy.”

Donie’s lip lifts. “What about her?”

“She came to see you the other day, asking about Brendan. And then someone beat her up pretty bad.”

That makes Donie snigger. “No harm done there. The bitch was ugly to begin with.”

Cal punches him in the stomach so fast Donie never sees it coming. He doubles up and collapses sideways onto the bed, wheezing and then retching.

Cal waits. He doesn’t want to have to hit Donie again; every time he touches the guy, he’s not sure he’ll be able to stop. “Start over,” he says, when Donie eventually drags himself back up to sitting, wiping a trickle of spit off his chin. “Get it right this time. Trey Reddy.”

“Never touched her.”

“I know you didn’t, moron. You told someone she’d been here. Your Dublin buddies?”

“Nah, man. Never said a word to anyone.”

Cal pulls back his fist again. Donie scoots his ass backwards on the bed, yelping as he forgets and puts weight on his hand. “Nah nah nah, hang on. I said fucking nothing. Truth, man. Why would I? I don’t give a shite about her. I told her to fuck off, forgot the whole thing. End of. Swear to God.”

Cal recognizes the specific sense of injury that pours from a chronic liar who, for once, is being accused of something he genuinely didn’t do. “OK,” he says. “Anyone see her here?”

“I dunno, man. I wasn’t looking.”

“The Dublin boys got anyone else working for them round here?”

“Not in Ardnakelty. Couple up in town, one over in Lisnacarragh, one in Knockfarraney.”

Except Donie might not know, specially not if the Dublin boys suspect him of causing trouble around Brendan. If they have someone keeping an eye on him, he definitely wouldn’t know. Cal wishes he had waited till nighttime and found a way to catch Donie outside, instead of going off half-cocked, but it’s too late now.

There are two phones on Donie’s bedside table, in among the ashtrays and the weed baggie and the souring mugs and the snack wrappers: a great big shiny dickswing of an iPhone, and a shitty little My First Dumbphone. Cal picks up the burner and goes into the contacts list, which has half a dozen names. He holds up the screen to Donie. “Who’s the boss?”

Donie eyes him. Cal says, “Or I can just phone all of them, and tell them where I got their numbers.”

“Austin’s the boss. Of the lads who come down here, anyway.”

Cal copies Austin’s number, and the rest, into his own phone, keeping one eye on Donie in case he decides to get smart. “Yeah? Austin due in town any time soon?”

“There’s not, like, a schedule, man. They ring me when they need me.”

“What’s Austin like?”

“You don’t wanta fuck with him,” Donie says. “I’m telling you now.”

“I don’t want to fuck with anyone, son,” Cal says, tossing the phone back onto the bedside table, where it lands in an ashtray with a dispirited puff of gray powder. “But sometimes life just turns out that way.” He gets up and dusts the residue of Donie’s chair off his pants. He feels like he needs a decontamination shower. “You can go back to sleep now.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Donie informs him.

The flat eyes say he’ll do it, if he doesn’t fuck it up. “No you’re not, you moron,” Cal says. “You do that, you’ll have a dozen detectives crawling all over this townland, interviewing the shit out of everyone about every piece of mopery that goes on in these parts. What do you think your Dublin buddies’ll do to you if you bring that shitstorm down on their heads?”

Donie may be dumb as a bag of hair in most ways, but he has an expert’s grasp of the intricate ways of trouble. He gives Cal a stare of pure vicious hatred, the kind that only comes from someone who’s no threat.

“See you round,” Cal says. He heads for the door, kicking a ketchup-crusted plate out of his way. “And clean this place up, for Christ’s sake. You make your mama live with this? Change your fucking sheets.”

On his way out Cal has himself a nice long wander around the lane behind Francie Gannon’s fields, taking a deep interest in the verges and checking to see if anyone is watching Donie’s place. He has a story about his lost sunglasses ready to go if anyone comes along asking, but the only person he sees is Francie Gannon, who waves cheerfully to him and calls something unintelligible, on his way somewhere with a bucket that looks heavy. Cal waves back and keeps looking, not urgently enough to make Francie come help him out.

When he reaches the conclusion that the place is clear, right now anyway, he walks home in a state of mounting irritation, more with himself than with anyone else. He reckoned all along, after all, that there was more going on underneath Mart’s quirky-yokel shtick; he just never put things together, which for someone in his line of work is an unpardonable level of dumb. Cal supposes he should be grateful for Mart’s protective herding, even if Mart was mainly motivated by the desire to prevent Cal from bringing down more trouble on the townland, but he’s not fond of being made to feel like a fool.

The morning has turned lavishly beautiful. The autumn sun gives the greens of the fields an impossible, mythic radiance and transforms the back roads into light-muddled paths where a goblin with a riddle, or a pretty maiden with a basket, could be waiting around every gorse-and-bramble bend. Cal is in no mood to appreciate any of it. He feels like this specific beauty is central to the illusion that lulled him into stupidity, turned him into the peasant gazing slack-jawed at his handful of gold coins till they melt into dead leaves in front of his eyes. If all this had happened in some depressing suburban clot of tract homes and ruler-measured lawns, he would have kept his wits about him.

He needs to talk to Austin. Austin sounds like a fun guy. If he’s the boss man, though, even just regionally, there’s better than a fifty-fifty shot that he’s the calculating subspecies of psycho, rather than the rabid kind. In this situation, unlike many, Cal considers that a plus. If he can convince Austin that Trey is no threat, then Austin is likely to abandon his silencing campaign as an unnecessary risk, rather than keeping it up just for entertainment. There’s even an outside chance Cal can persuade him to give Trey some level of answer in exchange for guaranteed peace and quiet. In order to gauge Austin well enough to wrangle him, though, Cal needs to do this face-to-face. He’s going to have to phone Austin and set up a meeting, pick his strategy on the fly depending on what he finds, and hope his meeting goes better than Brendan’s did.

The house and the garden look the same as they did when he left, and the rooks are happily doing their thing, making conversation and combing the grass for bugs, undisturbed. Cal unlocks the front door as quietly as he can, figuring the kid will likely be asleep again, and peeks into the bedroom. The bed is empty.

Cal spins round, his head blooming with fully fledged abduction scenarios. When he sees the bathroom door shut, he switches to picturing the kid collapsed on the floor, bleeding into her guts. He can’t believe he didn’t haul her to a hospital last night.

“Kid,” he says, outside the bathroom, as calmly as he can. “You OK?”

After a bad second, Trey pulls the door open. “You were fuckin’ ages,” she snaps.

She’s electric with nerves. So is Cal. “I was talking to Donie. Did you want me to do that or not?”

“What’d he say?”

The flare of terror in her eyes disintegrates Cal’s irritation. “OK,” he says. “Donie says your brother did get mixed up with the drug boys from Dublin. Not selling, you were right about that, but he was gonna be making meth for them. Only he fucked up, lost a bunch of their supplies. He was planning to meet up with them and make it right, and that’s the last Donie heard of him.”

He’s not sure if some or all of this is going to be more than Trey can take, but he’s done hiding stuff to protect her: look how well that worked out last time. The kid has a right, paid for and branded onto her, to true answers.

She absorbs it with an intentness that stills her jittering. “That what Donie actually said? No bullshit this time?”

“No bullshit. And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t bullshitting me, either. Not sure he told me every single thing, but I reckon what he did tell me was true.”

“Didja hurt him?”

“Yeah. Not too badly.”

“You shoulda battered the fucker,” Trey says. “Shoulda danced on his fucking head.”

“I know,” Cal says gently. “I would’ve loved to. But I’m after answers, not trouble.”

“You haveta talk to them, the lads from Dublin. Didja talk to them?”

“Kid,” Cal says. “Slow down. I’m gonna. But I need to work out the best way to go about it, so neither of us winds up with a bullet in our heads.”

Trey thinks that over, biting off skin from around her thumbnail, wincing when she catches her lip. In the end she says, “Didja see Mart Lavin?”

“No. Why?”

“He came looking for you.”

“Huh,” Cal says, mentally kicking himself. Of course Mart would have clocked Lena’s car and headed straight down here, truffle-hunting for gossip, the second he got a chance. “He see you?”

“Nah. I saw him coming, hid in the jacks. He went all round the house, when you didn’t answer the door. I heard him. Checking in the windows. Saw his shadow.”

The kid is starting to twitch with adrenaline again at the memory. “Well,” Cal says peacefully, “good thing my bathroom’s got that sheet over the window.” He takes off his coat and hangs it on its hook behind the door, moving nice and slowly. “You know why I put that up to begin with? ’Cause of you. Before we ever met. I knew someone was watching me, so I nailed that sheet up there to give me a little bit of privacy where it counts. And now it’s coming in useful to you. Funny how things turn out, huh?”

Trey gives a one-shouldered shrug, but her jittering has slowed down. “I know what Mart wanted, anyway,” Cal says, “and it’s got nothing to do with you. He saw Miss Lena’s car here, and he wants to know if me and her are hooking up.”

The look on Trey’s face makes him grin. “Are you?”

“Nope. There’s more’n enough going on without adding that in on top. You want anything? A snack, maybe?”

“I wanta see this.” The kid points at her face. “You got a mirror?”

Cal says, “It looks a lot worse’n it is, right now. The swelling’ll go down in a day or two.”

“I know. I wanta see it.”

Cal finds his beard-trimming mirror in a cupboard and hands it to her. Trey sits at the table with it and spends a long time there, turning her head this way and that.

“We can still see if a doctor can fix up that lip,” Cal says. “So it won’t leave a scar. We’ll tell them you fell off your bike.”

“Nah. I don’t give a shite about scars.”

“I know. You might someday, though.”

The kid makes Cal happy by giving him a full-bore moron stare. “I’d rather look like ‘don’t fuck with me’ than look pretty.”

“I think you got that covered,” Cal says. “You need to get out in the village. Before those bruises go down.”

Trey’s head comes up sharply from the mirror. “I’m not going down there.”

“Yeah you are. Whoever told your mama to do this, we need them to know that she did it, and did it right. That’s why she went for your face: so they’d know. You need to get seen by someone who’ll pass it on.”

“Like who?”

“Well, if I knew that,” Cal says. “Just go into Noreen’s. Buy bread or something. Give her a good look at your face, walk like you hurt all over. She’ll make sure word gets around.”

“I’ve got no money.”

“I’ll give you some. You can bring the bread back here to me.”

“I do hurt all over. I can’t walk that far.”

The kid’s shoulders have a mutinous set. Everything in her is dug in against the thought of waving her family’s dirty laundry in Noreen’s face. “Kid,” Cal says. “You want them coming back to make sure?”

After a second Trey pushes the mirror away. “Right,” she says. “OK. Just, can I go tomorrow?”

The downswirl of fatigue dragging at her voice makes Cal feel like a heel. Just because the kid’s still got fight in her, he fooled himself into believing she was more whole than she could possibly be right now. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure. Tomorrow’ll work fine. Today you just rest up.”

Trey says, “Can I stay here?”

“Sure,” Cal says. He’s been turning over ways to suggest the same thing himself. Donie would have to be a dumbass of epic proportions to go whining to Austin about their conversation, but Cal learned a long time ago never to underestimate the spectacular natural wonder that is people’s stupidity. And on the off chance that Austin does have someone watching Donie, and they spotted Cal, they know every word of that conversation by now. He thinks of the Austin variants he’s known, and of the things they’ll do to Trey if they feel the need to come back. Until he has the situation under some kind of control, the kid is staying put.

Trey yawns, suddenly and hugely, not bothering to cover her mouth. “ ’M wrecked,” she says, puzzled.

“That’s ’cause you’re hurt,” Cal explains. “Your body’s using a ton of energy on healing. Just gimme two minutes, and we’ll get you back to bed.”

He fetches his hammer and tacks, a chair and a drop sheet, and takes them over to the bedroom window. Trey follows him and collapses on the bed like someone cut her strings.

“I got beat up one time when I was about your age,” Cal says. He climbs on the chair and starts tacking up the sheet over the window.

“Was it your mam that done it?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “My mama had the softest heart in town. She couldn’t swat a mosquito.”

“Your dad?”

“Nah. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body either. My dad, when he showed up, he’d bring me little toy cars and candy, flowers for my mama, show me card tricks, stick around a couple of weeks and then take off again. No, this was a couple of guys from school. I don’t even remember what it was about. They got me pretty good, though. Two cracked ribs, and my face looked like a rotten pumpkin.”

“Worse’n mine?”

“About the same. More bruises, less blood. What I remember most, though, is how tired I was afterwards. For most of a week, all’s I could do was lie on the couch and watch TV, and eat whatever my gramma brought me. Getting hurt tires you right out.”

Trey works this over in her head. “Didja get them back?” she asks. “The lads that bet you up?”

“Yep,” Cal says. “It took a while, ’cause I had to wait till I grew as big as them, but I got there in the end.” He steps off the chair and gives the drop sheet a tug. It stays in place. “There,” he says. “Now you won’t have to worry about hiding in the bathroom if anyone comes round. You just get all the rest you need.”

The kid lets out another yawn, knuckling her good eye, and starts winding herself up in the bedclothes. “Sleep tight,” Cal says, and closes the door behind him.

She sleeps for four hours. Cal strips wallpaper in the second bedroom, at a slow, steady rhythm, so as not to make any sudden noises. Dust motes whirl and flare in the sunlight slanting through the windowpane. Out among the harvested fields, sheep call back and forth, and a flock of tardy geese sets up a faraway clamor. No one comes looking for anyone.