Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

People were watching. Blue was impressive, that was for sure, and as Ed led him to the ring, he could not help but feel more than a little bit proud of the conditioning he had put his dog through: hours running on a treadmill to build endurance, best of food; the best of everything. Blue was a champion, a true game dog.

They approached the ring, focussed, confident, Blue out ahead, pulling like a steam train. There was blood in the air and he knew it. Ed spotted the owners of his opponent, standing by the generator just inside the shed. They knew, they had to know, their brindle was no match for Blue. Yet they would let him fight to the death.

Ed smiled at them coldly. The last of the bets where made. Hecky, resplendent in a lemon-yellow vest, stained Bermuda shorts, white towelling socks, and brogues, collected fees, cursing and laughing, ever the show man.

Ed waited.

The brindle dog was brought into the pit and unmuzzled. The handler ran his hands over the dog, and tried to jazz him up by talking in his ear and slapping him on the chest.

Lavin leaned over the rim of the pit and shook his head. “Fat fucker, look at him.”

Ed stayed where he was; Blue whined.

Hecky gathered the last of the cash and peered at him. “Are ye right?”

Still Ed made no move. A few of the men glanced at him, puzzled.

A shout went up.

“Police!”

The reaction was instant; men scattered and ran for their respective vehicles, but it was no use, two vans pulled across the entrance to the lane and hooded men spilled out carrying baseball bats and clubs

“That’s not the fucking peelers!” Hecky roared, lumbering toward the cottage at a pace that was surprising for a man of his size. Lavin and Willie glanced at each other and ran toward the BMW, which was closest to the gate.

Lavin, always a cocky dimwit, tried to talk his way out of it, holding his hands before him. He approached the lead man, yapping high and fast. He took a straight swing that rearranged his jaw and scattered his teeth across the yard. Egg never made it out of the car. Neither did the driver. Willie, assessing the situation and catching on fast, turned and sprinted past where Ed was standing; he was almost to the trees when a sleek shadow raced along the grass, leapt from six feet out, and took him to the ground in a single fluid motion. The German shepherd released Willie, and then clamped his jaws on his upper arm. Willie screamed.

Ed leaned down and scratched behind Blue’s ears to reassure him.

“What the fuck’s going on?” the guy holding the brindle asked, staring at the mayhem around the yard. “These aren’t police.”

“Stay where you are if you know what’s good for you,” Ed replied.

Unlike Lavin, this man was no fool. He stayed exactly where he was as the group rounded up the last of the participants, herded them into the pen shed, and shut the door behind them.

“Gentlemen,” Ed said, “my apologies . . . gentlemen and lady.” He bowed slightly toward the woman who was staring at him with terror and confusion in her eyes. “We are the DLA, for those of you who might not have heard of us, that’s the Dog Liberation Army.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Willie was holding his useless arm to his chest. His face was streaked in blood.

One of the masked men jabbed him with the business end of his bat. “Shut your hole.”

“What’s going on, folks, is that we’re here to right a great wrong.”

“What wrong? What the fuck are ye on about?”

“And to do this,” Ed continued, “we’re going to have us a little competition.”

Stunned silence. Hecky, who hadn’t been able to make it to the cottage for his shotgun, groaned and looked like he was going to be sick. “You’re a dead man, Ed.”

“We’ll see,” Ed countered. “So, the rules, we’re going to try to make it as fair as possible. Two go into the ring, the winner . . . well, the winner might get to go again if he—or she—is lucky.”

“You can’t do this, you can’t—”

“Hecky, you’re up,” Ed announced.

“I’m not fuckin’ fighting no fucker. What is this shite? Do you know who I am?”

Ed sighed. “You’re not going to fight?”

“No.”

“No use to me then.” Ed inclined his head.

A hooded man stepped up, swung the bat upside Hecky’s head, and that was all she wrote for Hecky.

“Willie? How about it, are you and Lavin good to go?”

Willie stared at Hecky’s brain matter and skull pieces on the bat. He swallowed and looked at Lavin, whose eyes were spinning in his head; his jaw was held onto his face by little more than muscles and skin.

“I think you could take him,” Ed said, smiling.

“If I do this . . . what then?”

“Then,” Ed said, shrugged, “then we’ll see.”

“Don’t, please, I’m begging ye, I’ve got wee kids.”

Ed squatted and let Blue lick his face. “Aye, I know you do. For your sake I hope you’ve got game.”

THE REVELLER

BY ALEX BARCLAY

Shore Road

I don’t know which disturbed me more: at night when Paddy Gillen became who he really was or in the morning when he became Publican, beloved.

His forum was the bar that bore his name, its blinkered windows on the Shore Road, its caged door on Dandy Street. Rising up and down from his gaffer-taped stool by the till, Paddy Gillen was like horse and rider: his eyes bulging with the telling of his tales, his smile equine, driving the story and being driven, blooming to fill his form.

But when the punters were gone, the only journey left was up the claustrophobic staircase to bed. As soon as his foot hit the first tread, a narrowing began, until the tall story of Paddy Gillen was pared down into the tiny space of his boyhood room, as though the steps were whetstones.

Once there, he would stand in front of the cloudy mirror above the sink and begin his ritual. He would slide the false teeth from his mouth, then the rippled hairpiece from his head. He would use the face cloth, then slide the grimy towel through the metal ring and pat himself dry. There was a lot of sliding with Paddy Gillen: his tongue across his vacant gums, money across the bar, eyes across a woman’s body, chips across a plate until all that was left was a red smear like the one he slid a man through in the public toilets on Shaftesbury Square. He left that man hollow and damaged, turned him into a braced coil of tantrums and Tourette’s on Bawnmore street corners. And only, it seemed, on corners. As if, when nobody was looking, he was whipped up and placed on the next one along.

I believe that Paddy Gillen had a deformity of the mind, a small nub of some kind where thoughts would get caught until, eventually, there was a grotesque knot of slights and grudges that were surely pressing against parts of his brain, impairing their function. For years, this squalid little cockpit had helmed his actions. And he was not a bright man, Paddy Gillen, so these trapped thoughts were rarely new. He was a pickpocket of opinions, and a mark for those who wanted their message to spread. On Paddy Gillen’s thick skin, they could brand their burning convictions and he wouldn’t even feel it. And he would pass them on, still ablaze, but unnoticed against the ice-cold of a pint glass.

Paddy Gillen’s world stank like the balled-up cloth he wiped along the bar, never washed until four in the afternoon whenever Sally-Anne, poor, desperate Sally-Anne, would arrive, her clothes and hair smelling of the next-door café. Next-door Sally with her hopeful air of next-life luck. But time was twisted and unkind to Sally; every day, she looked four days into a spray tan, every night, weeks from decent sleep. And though time should have stolen the skinny jeans from her wardrobe or the black-hole dye from the shelf under her sink, time was too busy being a revelation. Sally finally found time . . . to kiss one of the oul’ lads full on. And all she could think of after-hours as she mopped the bar was that it never would have happened if she hadn’t been inside the four lawless walls of Gillen’s where standards rose no higher than the cracks in the red tiled floor.