The Searcher

FIVE

Trey does come back the next day, and the ones after that. Sometimes he shows up around mid-morning; sometimes it’s mid-afternoon, which gives Cal the comforting impression that he does occasionally go to school, although he’s aware that this may be deliberate. The kid sticks around for an hour, or a couple, and mostly for some food. Then—in response to some mysterious inner alarm clock, or maybe just when he gets bored—he says, “Haveta go,” and leaves, tramping up the garden with his hands deep in his hoodie pockets, not looking back.

The first rainy day, Cal doesn’t expect to see him. He’s stripping wallpaper and singing the odd half line along with Otis Redding when a shadow crosses the light, and when he looks around, there Trey is at the window, watching him from inside a disreputable wax jacket a couple of sizes too small. Cal is momentarily dubious about inviting him in, but with rain dripping off the kid’s hood and the end of his nose, he doesn’t feel like he has much choice. He hangs the kid’s jacket on a chair to dry and gives him a scraper.

On sunny days they go back to the desk, but sunny days are getting scarcer as September runs itself down. More and more often, rain whips the house, and wind packs sodden leaves at the bases of walls and hedges. The squirrels are in a hoarding frenzy. Mart announces that this means a bastard of a winter ahead, and provides dramatic accounts of years when the townland was cut off for weeks and people froze to death in their own homes, although Cal fails to be properly impressed. “I’m used to Chicago,” he reminds Mart. “We don’t call it cold till our eyelashes freeze.”

“Different kind of cold,” Mart informs him. “This one’s sneaky. You wouldn’t feel it coming, not till it’s got you.”

Mart’s opinion of the Reddys turns out to match Noreen’s, only with more flourishes. Sheila Brady was a lovely girl from a decent family, with a fine pair of legs on her; she was planning to move to Galway and train as a nurse, except before she could get that far she fell for Johnny Reddy. He could talk the cross off an ass and never held a job for more than three months in his life, because nothing that would take him was good enough for him: “no kind of worker,” Mart says, with a depth of scorn that Cal and his squad reserved for granny-muggers. Sheila and Johnny had six kids, lived on benefits in some relative’s dilapidated cottage up in the hills—Mart does explain the relationship, in detail, but Cal loses track after three or four degrees—and now Johnny has fecked off, Sheila’s people have all died or moved away, and the family is as close as this place gets to trailer trash. Mart agrees with Noreen and Lena that the kids are unlikely to be above a little petty crime, but equally unlikely to have the capacity for anything high-level. “Holy God,” he says, amused, when Cal gives him the worried-city-boy spiel, “you’ve too much time on your hands. Get yourself a woman, like I told you. Then you’ll know what worry is.”

In fact Cal has more or less ruled out the possibility that the kid is planning on robbing him, given that he would be going about it in the dumbest possible way, and from what Cal can tell he appears to be far from dumb. Now that he knows a little bit about Trey’s probable family, other, more likely scenarios present themselves: the kid is getting picked on and needs protection, the kid is being abused one way or another and wants to tell someone, the kid’s mom is a drunk or on drugs or getting beat up by a boyfriend and he wants to tell someone, the kid wants Cal to track down his wayward daddy, or the kid is looking to establish some kind of alibi for something he shouldn’t be doing. Cal feels that the locals, biased by Johnny Reddy’s fecklessness, may be underrating his son’s abilities in that department. And, while he has every reason to know that kids can on occasion rise above a shitty family, he also has every reason to know that on most occasions it doesn’t turn out that way.

He pokes around the subject of Johnny Reddy a little, giving Trey an opening if that’s where he’s headed, but Trey shuts that down right quick. “Yeah, we can use this,” Cal says, examining his first attempt at chiseling out a groove. “You’re pretty handy, kid. You help out your dad with stuff like this?”

“Nah,” Trey says. He takes back the shelf and gives one end of the groove a few extra taps, squinting low over the wood. He likes things done right. Stuff that Cal would be fine with, Trey shakes his head and goes back over it two or three times before he’s satisfied.

“So what do you do with him?”

“Nothing. He went off.”

“Where to?”

“London. He rings us sometimes.”

This pretty much confirms Trey as a Reddy, unless London is a common destination for the local deadbeat dads. “My dad went off a lot,” Cal says. He’s aiming for rapport, but Trey seems unimpressed. “You miss him?”

Trey shrugs. Cal is getting the hang of Trey’s shrugs, which are many and nuanced. This one means the subject is closed due to lack of interest.

This leaves Cal with two main possibilities: Trey is doing something bad, or something bad is being done to him. So far he hasn’t come up with a good way to broach either of those. He’s aware that, if he fucks it up, Trey will be gone for good. This is fine by Cal if Trey is the one making the trouble, but his newfound talent for letting things be doesn’t stretch to an abused kid. So he’s dealing with Trey the same way he did at the start: going about his own business, and letting the kid come closer in his own time.

His own time turns out to be around two weeks. It’s a rainy morning, cool and soft, with a small breeze that wanders in the open windows smelling of pasture. Cal and Trey between them have finished sanding the living-room walls smooth, they’ve painted primer along the edges, and they’re taking a break before they get started on the main job. They sit at the table eating chocolate sandwich cookies, Trey’s contribution—he’s taken to showing up with cookies some days, or one time an apple pie. Cal is pretty sure where this stuff comes from, and he feels a mild twinge of guilt about eating it anyway, but he figures things will be more peaceful if he doesn’t get into that.

Trey is working his way, methodically and with intent, through the cookies. Cal is trying to knead a knot out of his neck. It’s from the mattress; his muscle aches and pains have mostly faded. His body is getting accustomed to the work, and Cal likes that, the same way he liked the aches to begin with. At first he wondered if he might be too old to get accustomed to it at all, but his body has come through for him. He feels younger than he did six months ago.

“Squirrel,” he says, pointing out the window to the garden. “One of these days I’ll shoot me a few of them and make us a squirrel stew.”

Trey considers this, watching the squirrel scrabble under the hedge. “What’s it taste like?”

“Pretty good. Gamey. Stronger’n chicken.”

“Squirrel bit my sister once,” Trey says. “On the finger. I’d eat ’em.”

“When I was about ten,” Cal says, “I was staying with my granddaddy, and me and three of my buddies, we used to camp out in the woods back of his place. The first time we did it, my granddaddy told us we oughta be careful, because there was a thing called a squatt living out in those woods. Cross between a squirrel and a cat, but bigger’n either one, and fiercer. It had great big claws and fangs, and orange fur, and it’d go either for your throat, if you were sitting down, or for your balls if you were standing up. You could tell it was getting ready to attack because you’d hear it making this weird noise. Like growling mixed with chattering.”

He demonstrates. Trey listens, watching him and scraping the filling out of a cookie with his teeth. Cal has gotten into the habit of telling Trey whatever comes into his head, purely for companionability, without paying much heed to whether or not he gets a response.

“We camped out anyway,” he says, “but we made ourselves a big pile of rocks in the tent, just in case. Late at night, we were just getting comfortable in our sleeping bags, we heard a noise outside.” He makes the noise again. “We about shit ourselves. We snuck out of the sleeping bags, got ourselves a big handful of rocks each, and came out of the tent firing. Got in a few good hits before we heard my granddaddy yelling for us to stop. Someone got him right in the face, split his lip open.”

“It was him,” Trey says. “Making the noise.”

“Sure was. No such thing as a squatt.”

“What’d he do? He beat you?”

“Nah. Laughed his ass off, cleaned up the blood, brought us out a big bag of marshmallows.”

Trey digests this. “How come he did that? Pretended?”

“I guess he wanted to see what we’d do,” Cal says, “if a bad situation came up. Seeing as he was letting us stay out there all by ourselves. The day after that, he started teaching me how to shoot a rifle. Said if I was gonna go fighting things that scared me, I might as well do it right, and I better know how to be damn sure what I was shooting at before I pulled the trigger.”

Trey considers this. “Can you teach me?”

“I don’t have a gun here yet. When I get one, then maybe.”

Apparently this is good enough: Trey nods and finishes his cookie. “Bobby Feeney says he seen aliens up the mountains,” he says, out of some train of thought of his own. “I heard in school.”

“You planning on shooting an alien?”

Trey gives Cal his idiot look. “There’s no aliens.”

“What, you figure Bobby made it up to mess with people, like my granddaddy?”

“Nah.”

Cal grins, drinking his coffee. “Then what’d he see?”

Trey shrugs, a one-shouldered twitch that means he doesn’t want to discuss this. “You don’t believe in aliens,” he says, watching Cal to check.

“Probably not,” Cal says. “I like to keep an open mind, and I figure they might be somewhere out there, but I haven’t seen anything that would make me think they’re coming visiting.”

“Have you got brothers and sisters?” Trey demands, out of nowhere. The kid hasn’t mastered the art of small talk. Every question comes out sounding like part of an interrogation.

“Three,” Cal says. “Two sisters, one brother. ’Bout you?”

“Three sisters. Two brothers.”

“That’s a lot of kids,” Cal says. “You got a big house?”

Trey blows air derisively out of the side of his mouth. “Nah.”

“Where’re you? Oldest? Youngest?”

“Third. What’re you?”

“Oldest.”

“Are you close to the others?”

This is the most personal Trey has ever got. Cal risks a glance at him, but he’s focused on taking another cookie apart. He has a fresh buzz cut, but it looks like maybe he did it himself: a patch towards the back of his head got missed.

“Close enough,” Cal says. In fact his are half siblings, he’s never met any of them more than a couple of times, and there could well be more out there somewhere, but none of this information seems like it would be useful here. “How ’bout you?”

“Some of them,” Trey says. He shoves the cookie abruptly into his mouth and stands up: break is, apparently, over.

“Drink your milk,” Cal says.

“Don’t like milk.”

“I bought it. You drink it.”

Trey throws back the milk, grimaces, and slams the mug down on the table like he’s just taken a shot. “OK,” Cal says, amused. “Let’s do this. Hold on.”

He goes into his bedroom, comes back with an old plaid shirt and tosses it to Trey. “Here.”

Trey catches it and looks at it blankly. “What for?”

“You go home covered in paint, your mama’s not gonna be happy.”

“She won’t notice.”

“If she does, she’s gonna know you weren’t in school.”

“She won’t care.”

“Your call,” Cal says. He sets about levering the lid back off the primer can with a screwdriver.

Trey examines the shirt, turning it over in his hands. Then he puts it on. He turns to Cal, holding up his hands and grinning: the cuffs flap, the shirt comes down past his knees, and it’s wide enough to fit about three of him.

“Looking good,” Cal says, grinning back. “Hand me those there.”

He’s pointing to the paint trays and rollers, in a corner. He bought two sets; they were cheap, and he figured they would come in handy even if the kid quit showing up. Trey has clearly never seen contraptions like these before. He inspects them and gives Cal a question-mark look, brows pulled down.

“Watch,” Cal says. He pours primer, dips the roller and rolls off the extra on the grid, then gives a patch of wall a fast going-over. “Got it?”

Trey nods and copies him, exactly, down to the little angled shake to get any drips off the roller’s edge. “Good,” Cal says. “Don’t get too much paint on there. We’re gonna do a few coats; we don’t need them to be thick. I’ll start here and do the top half, you do the bottom from over there. Meet you in the middle.”

They work easily together, by now; they know each other’s rhythm, and how to make the right space for it. The rain has eased off. The cries of geese limbering up for their long journey come to them from high up in the sky; far below, in the grass outside the window, the small birds hop and dart after worms. They’ve been painting for about twenty minutes when Trey says, out of the clear blue sky, “My brother’s gone missing.”

Cal manages to freeze only for half a second before his roller starts moving again. He would know from the tone, even if he hadn’t heard the words: this is why Trey is here.

“Yeah?” he says. “When?”

“March.” Trey is still rollering his patch of wall, meticulously, not looking at Cal. “Twenty-first.”

“OK,” Cal says. “How old is he?”

“Nineteen. His name’s Brendan.”

Cal is feeling his way, toe by toe. “What’d the police say?”

“Didn’t tell them.”

“How come?”

“Mam wouldn’t. She said he went off, and he’s old enough if he wants.”

“But you don’t think so.”

Trey’s face, when he stops painting and looks at Cal at last, has a terrible, tight-wound misery. He shakes his head for a long time.

“So what do you think happened?”

Trey says, low, “Think someone’s got him.”

“Like, kidnapped him?”

Nod.

“OK,” Cal says carefully. “You got any idea who?”

Every cell in Trey’s body is focused on Cal. He says, “You could find out.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“Kid,” Cal says gently. “More than likely, your mama’s right. From what everyone tells me, people mostly do take off from here, soon as they’re old enough.”

“He’d’ve told me.”

“Your brother’s still a teenager. They do dumb shit like that. I know it’s gotta hurt, if you guys are close, but sooner or later he’ll grow up a little bit and realize it was a crappy thing to do. He’ll get in touch then.”

That stubborn chin has hardened. “He didn’t go off.”

“Any reason you’re so sure?”

“I know. He didn’t.”

“If you’re worried about him,” Cal says, “you oughta go to the police. I know your mama doesn’t want to, but you can do it yourself. They can take a report from a minor. They can’t make him come home till he’s ready, but they’ll look into it, put your mind at ease.”

Trey is looking at him like he can’t believe anyone this dumb is still breathing. “What?” Cal says.

“Guards won’t do anything.”

“Sure they will. It’s their job.”

“They’re fucking useless. You do it. You investigate. You’ll see: he didn’t go off.”

“I can’t investigate, kid,” Cal says, even more gently. “I’m not a cop any more.”

“Do it anyway.” Trey’s voice is rising. “Do the stuff you said, for finding people. Talk to his mates. Watch their houses.”

“I could do that stuff because I had a badge. Now that I don’t, no one’s gotta answer my questions. I stake out someone’s house, I’m the one who’s gonna get arrested.”

Trey isn’t even hearing him. He’s holding the roller high in a clenched fist, like a weapon. “Tap their phones. Check his bank card.”

“Kid. Even when I was a cop, it wasn’t around here. I don’t have buddies where I can call in favors.”

“Then you do it.”

“Does this place look like I have the technology to—”

“Then do something else. Do something.”

“I’m retired, kid,” Cal says, still gently, but with finality. He’s not going to leave the kid hoping. “There’s nothing I could do, even if I wanted to.”

Trey throws his roller across the room. He rips off Cal’s old shirt, buttons popping, and stuffs it deep in the can of primer. Then he whips round and smashes the dripping shirt into the cubbyholes of the desk, with all his weight behind it. The desk goes over backwards. Trey runs.

The desk is a mess. Cal straightens it up and uses the shirt—which is a write-off anyway; no laundromat is going to deal with that—to wipe away the bigger globs of primer. Then he wets a cloth and cleans off the rest. Luckily it’s water-based, but it’s got right into half the joints, where no cloth can reach it. Cal goes at it with his toothbrush, calling Trey a little bastard under his breath.

In fact, he’s finding it hard to actually get mad. First the kid’s daddy, then his big brother; no wonder he wants an answer that would bring one of them home and wouldn’t involve him deliberately walking out without a backwards glance. Cal just wishes he had come out with this earlier, instead of building his hopes in secret all this time.

What he is, he realizes, more than mad, is unsettled. He doesn’t like the feeling, or the fact that he recognizes it and understands it perfectly; it’s as familiar to him as hunger or thirst. Cal never could stand to leave a case unresolved. Mainly this was a good thing, making him into a dogged, patient worker who got solves long after most guys would have given up, but on occasion it was also a failing: hammering on and on at something that’s never going to break gets a man nothing but tired and sore. Cal scrubs harder at the desk and tries to recapture the light-headed freedom of not caring if Trey plays hooky. He reminds himself that this isn’t his case, and in fact is almost certainly not a case at all. The unsettled feeling doesn’t budge.

In his head Donna says, Jesus, Cal, not again. Her face isn’t laughing this time; it’s weary, dragged into downward lines that don’t fit there.

A scrawny young rook has flapped down onto the windowsill and is eyeing the room speculatively, considering both the cookie packet and the toolbox. Cal has finally been making progress with the rooks: he’s got them as far as settling on the stump to eat his scraps while he watches from the back step, although they eyefuck him and make dirty jokes about his mama while they do it. Right now, though, he’s not in the mood. “Keep moving,” he tells this one. The rook makes a noise that sounds like a raspberry, and stays put.

Cal gives up on the rook, and the desk. He wants, suddenly and powerfully, to be out of the house. The only thing he can think of that seems like it might settle his mind is catching his own dinner, but he doesn’t feel like sitting on a riverbank all day getting his ass damp on the off chance of catching a perch or two, and his damn firearm license still hasn’t come through. In general, taking into account some of the people he’s known to own guns and the fact that Donie McGrath didn’t have the option of whipping out a Glock in the pub, he can see the reasoning behind the restrictions in these parts, but today they piss him off. He could have got married or bought a house quicker, both, in Cal’s opinion, undertakings considerably more hazardous than owning a hunting rifle.

He decides to head into town and see if the guy at the station can give him an update on that license. He can hit the laundromat while he’s at it, and buy himself a new toothbrush, as well as a heater so Mart’s sneaky cold doesn’t get him. On his way out of the house with his trash bag of clothes, he locks the door.

The rain has picked up again, long curtains of it sweeping the windshield. Cal catches himself keeping an eye out for Trey. A few miles up into the hills, Lena said, which would be a long walk in this weather. But the road is deserted, just the odd cluster of cows sheltering against low stone walls and sheep dotted around the fields grazing, unperturbed. Branches droop low and swish along the sides of the Pajero. The mountains are dim and ghostly under a heavy veil of rain.

Kilcarrow town is old and comfortable, with rows of creamy-colored houses fanning out around a market square, and a hilltop view over fields and the twisting river. It has a couple of thousand people, which, factoring in the satellite villages, adds up to enough traffic for stuff like a hardware store and a laundromat. Cal hands in his clothes and makes for the police station with his head tucked down against the rain.

The station is in what looks like an oversized shed, sandwiched between two houses and painted white with a neat blue trim. It’s open a few hours here and a few hours there. In the back room, several people on the radio are talking over each other about potholes. At the desk out front, a uniform is reading the undersized local paper and scratching his armpit with real dedication.

“Afternoon,” Cal says, wiping rain off his beard. “Some weather out there.”

“Ah, sure, it’s a grand soft day,” the uniform says comfortably, putting his paper away and leaning back in his chair. He’s a few years younger than Cal, with a round face, a belly under construction and an air of having been scrubbed shiny-clean all over. Someone has mended a rip in his shirt pocket with tiny, careful stitches. “What can I do for you?”

“I applied for a firearm license, couple of months back. Seeing as I’m in town, figured I’d check if there was any update on that.”

“You should receive a letter within three months of the application date, one way or the other,” the uniform tells him. “If you don’t, that means you’ve been refused, officially. But sure, sometimes they do get a bit behind. Even if you don’t hear anything, you could be grand. I’d give it an extra month before you start worrying. Two, maybe.”

Cal has met this guy before, in various forms. He’s out in the boondocks not because he’s a dud or a troublemaker, or a wannabe detective chafing with frustrated ambition, but because he’s happy here. He likes his days unhurried and unsurprising, his faces familiar, and his mind unclouded when he goes home to his wife and kids. He’s the cop who Cal, in some or possibly most ways, wishes he had decided to be.

“Well, I don’t guess I have much right to complain,” Cal says. “When I was on the job, paperwork went straight to the bottom of the pile and stayed there. You’re not gonna mess around with some guy’s dog license when you’ve got actual police work to do.”

This has the uniform’s attention. “You were on the job?” he asks, making sure he has things straight. “On the force, like?”

“Twenty-five years. Chicago PD.” Cal grins and holds out his hand. “Cal Hooper. Pleased to meet you.”

“Garda Dennis O’Malley,” the uniform says, shaking his hand. Cal was betting on him not being the type who would see this as a dick-measuring contest, and he bet right: O’Malley looks genuinely delighted. “Chicago, hah? I’d say you saw some action there.”

“Some action and a lotta paperwork,” Cal says. “Same as everywhere. This seems like a good post.”

“I wouldn’t swap it,” O’Malley says. Cal can tell from his accent that he’s not from round here, but he’s from somewhere not too different: that rich, leisured rhythm didn’t come out of any city. “It wouldn’t suit everyone, now, but it suits me.”

“What kind of stuff do you get?”

“A lot of it’d be motor vehicles,” O’Malley explains. “They do be hoors for the speeding, round here. And for the drink-driving. Three young fellas went into a ditch coming home from the pub, Saturday night, up beyond Gorteen. None of them made it to hospital.”

“I heard about that,” Cal says. Noreen’s cousin’s friend’s husband was the poor bastard who came across the aftermath. “That’s a damn shame.”

“That’d be about the worst we get, now. There’s not much other crime. Oil does get robbed, now and again.” At Cal’s uncomprehending look: “Heating oil, out of the tanks. And farm equipment. And we’d get a bitta drugs—sure, they’re everywhere, nowadays. Nothing like what you got in Chicago, I’d say.” He gives Cal a shy grin.

“We got plenty of MVAs,” Cal says, “and drugs. Not a whole lot of farm-equipment theft, though.” And then, before he knows he’s going to say it: “Mostly I worked Missing Persons. I don’t guess you’ve got much call for that around here.”

O’Malley laughs. “Ah, Jaysus, no. I’m here twelve years, and we’ve had two people go missing. One fella came up in the river a few days later. The other was a young one that had a row with her mammy and flounced off to stay with her cousin in Dublin.”

“Well, I can see why you wouldn’t swap this place,” Cal says. “Thought I heard a guy did go missing on you this spring, though. Did I hear wrong?”

This startles O’Malley into sitting upright. “Who’s that, then?”

“Brendan something. Reddy?”

“Reddys from up by Ardnakelty?”

“Yeah.”

“Ach, them,” O’Malley says, relaxing back into his chair. “What one’s Brendan?”

“Nineteen.”

“Sure, no surprise there, then. And, being honest with you, no loss.”

“They trouble?”

“Ah, no. Wasters, just. A few domestics, but himself went off to England a coupla years back, and that put a stop to that. I know them because the childer won’t go to school. The teacher doesn’t want to be calling in child protection, so she rings me. I go out there and have a word with the mammy, put the fear of God into the childer about juvenile homes. They shape up for a month or two, and then we’re back where we began.”

“Know the type,” Cal says. He doesn’t need to ask why the teacher won’t call child protective services for anything short of broken bones, or why O’Malley doesn’t do it himself. Some things are the same out here as they were in his childhood backwoods. No one wants the government sending down city boys in suits to make things worse. Business gets handled as close to home as possible. “Their mama can’t make them go, or she won’t?”

O’Malley shrugs. “She’s a bit . . . you know. Not mental or anything, like. Just not up to much.”

“Huh,” Cal says. “So you reckon Brendan’s not missing?”

O’Malley snorts. “God, no. He’s a young fella. He’s got sick of living up the hills with his mammy, gone off to kip on some pal’s floor in Galway or Athlone, where he can go to the discos and meet the young ones. Natural enough, sure. Who said he was missing?”

“Well,” Cal says, scratching the back of his neck meditatively, “some guy in the pub was saying he was gone. I musta got the wrong end of the stick. Guess I spent too many years in Missing Persons, now I’m seeing ’em everywhere.”

“Not here,” O’Malley says cheerfully. “Brendan’ll be back when he gets tired of doing his own washing. Unless he finds himself a young one who’ll do it for him.”

“We could all do with one of those,” Cal says, grinning. “Well, I wasn’t aiming to use that rifle for self-defense anyway, but it’s nice to know there won’t be any need around here.”

“Ah, God, no. Hang on a minute there,” O’Malley says, extracting himself bit by bit from his chair, “and I’ll have a look on the system for that license. What gun are you getting?”

“Got a deposit down on a nice Henry twenty-two. I like ’em old-fashioned.”

“That’s a beauty,” O’Malley says. “I’ve a Winchester myself. I’m not great with it, now, but I took down an aul’ rat in my garden the other week. Big fella, looking at me bold as brass. Felt like Rambo, so I did. You wait there, now.”

He ambles off into the back room. Cal looks around the warm little foyer, reads the raggedy posters on the walls—SEAT BELTS SAVE LIVES, WALK FOR SUICIDE PREVENTION, TEN FARM SAFETY TIPS—and listens to O’Malley singing along to a bread-ad jingle on the radio. The place smells of tea and potato chips.

“Now,” O’Malley says triumphantly, coming back out front. “That’s marked in the system as approved—and sure, why wouldn’t it be. You should have your letter any day now. You can take it into the post office and pay the fee there.”

“Much appreciated,” Cal says. “And nice to meet you.”

“Likewise. Call in another day when we’re closing up, sure; we’ll bring you for a pint, welcome you to the Wild West.”

“I’d be honored,” Cal says. The rain is still coming down hard. He pulls up his hood and heads out into it, before O’Malley thinks of inviting him to stick around for a cup of tea.

While he waits for his laundry, Cal finds a pub and gets himself a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich and a pint of Smithwick’s. This pub is an entirely different species from Seán Óg’s: big and bright, smelling of hot savory food, with a shine on the wooden furniture and a wide selection of taps at the bar. A bunch of women in their thirties are having lunch and a laugh in one corner.

The sandwich is good and so is the beer, but Cal doesn’t enjoy them the way he ought to. His chat with O’Malley, which should have settled his mind, has only stirred it up worse. Not that he believes for a minute that Brendan Reddy has been kidnapped by persons unknown. If anything, O’Malley confirmed what Cal thought from the start: Brendan had every reason to take off, and not many reasons to stick around.

What’s bothering him is the fact that Trey was right about one thing: the Guards are, for his purposes anyway, fucking useless. Once O’Malley heard the name Reddy, he was done. So is everyone else. Cal thinks of those rain-blurred hills, and a mother who’s not up to much. A kid that age shouldn’t be left with nowhere to turn.

The restlessness is still biting. Cal finishes his pint faster than he meant to, and heads back out into the rain.

He picks up an oil heater and a new can of primer in the hardware store, and a bunch of supplies including a new toothbrush at the supermarket. He doesn’t bother with milk. He’s pretty sure the kid won’t be coming back.