Declan Burke - Slaughter's hound

It was a rare fine night for a stroll down by the docks, the moon plump as a new pillow in an old-fashioned hotel and the undertow in the turning tide swushing its ripples silvery-green and a bird you’ve never heard before chirring its homesick tale of a place you might once have known and most likely now will never see, mid-June and almost midnight and balmy yet, the kind of evening built for a long walk with a woman who likes to take long walks and not say very much, and that little in a murmur you have to strain to catch, her laughter low and throaty, her humour dry and favouring lewd, eyes like smoky mirrors of the vast night sky and in them twinkles that might be stars reflecting or the first sparks of intentions that you’d better fan with soft words and a gentle touch in just the right place or spend the rest of your life and maybe forever wondering what might have been, all for the want of a soft word and a touch gentle and true.

It was that kind of evening, alright. That kind of place.

You ever find yourself there, say something soft, and be gentle, and true.

Me, I found myself hunched over the charred dwarf that had once been Finn Hamilton, parts of him still sizzling in a marinade of oily flesh and melting tar, and all around the rank stench of singing hair and burnt petrol, seared pork.

Midnight, and balmy yet.

I’d seen him jump. Pacing the yard below, phone clamped to my ear. ‘Listen, Ben, she’s under pressure at work, okay? You need to take that on- What? Yeah, I know. But look, sometimes your mum says things she-’

I heard him, first. Faint but clear from nine storeys high.

‘ Bell jars away …’

From instinct I glanced up with the next line already forming, let’s be fearless with our promises , but by then he’d jumped, a dark blur plummeting, wings folded against the drag like some starving hawk out of the noon sun, some angel betrayed.

I guess he punched through the cab’s roof so hard he sent metal shearing into the petrol tank. All it took was one spark.

Boom …

The blast smashed me ten feet into a heap of scrap metal, left me deafened and half blind, limbs rubbery as I scrabbled around ripping my hands on rusty steel. Stunned and flopping in the aftermath of a quake that tore my insides apart

lie down stay down

lungs pounded by hammers O Jesus breathe, breathe and a roaring in the ears of blood tortured to a scream

‘Dad?’

coming tinny and distant

‘Dad? Are you there?’

the phone two feet and a million miles away, dirt thick in my teeth

‘I think you’re breaking up, Dad …’

and the taste of roasting flesh and metal thick on my tongue.

A hot knife pierced my ribs as I reached for the phone.

‘Ben?’ A harsh grating. ‘Ring you back, Ben.’

I lurched to my feet on spongy knees and stumbled across the yard towards the blaze. The air all a-shimmer so that his feet looked submerged, some weirdly wavering polyps. One of his moccasins came away as I pulled him free and at first I thought I’d ripped him in half. Then I thought he’d dropped a dwarf on the cab. Strange the things you think when you’re trying not to think at all, dragging a man from a torched wreck and his flesh frying in lumps on the melting tar.

As I twisted my head, guts already heaving, I realised why he seemed so short.

He’d dived, come down arrow-straight, in the final instant pulling back his arms so that the impact drove his head and shoulders back up into his chest. There was still some remnant of what had once been his neck but the head had pulped like so much ripe melon.

I puked until the heaves came dry and then rang it in. Globs of grey grease spitting on the cab’s skeletal frame.

How it began was a balmy night, twenty past ten, the caller ID flashing Finn-Finn-Finn . I put down the book and turned on the radio to check his mood. Tindersticks, tiny tears filling up a whole ocean.

Not promising.

Still, business is business. I picked up.

‘How goes it?’

‘Good, yeah. You busy?’

‘Not right now.’

‘How’s the weather?’

‘Balmy. You off on holidays?’

‘Hoping to.’

‘For how long?’

‘Three weeks, if I can swing it.’

‘You deserve it, squire. See you later.’

‘Alright.’

I knocked off the cab’s light and turned out of the rank, heading west on Wine Street, across the bypass and out along the Strandhill Road. Switched off the radio. Finn played good tunes but you had to be in the mood. Some nights he went off on a jag: Santa Claus with a straight razor in his mitt, black dogs howling down the moon. Spend long enough driving a cab listening to Finn and you’d wind up with a Mohawk cruising underage whores trying to think of a politician it’d be worth the bullet to plug.

Five minutes later I was turning up Larkhill and into Herb’s driveway, zapping the security gates. A stately semi-D, two bay windows to the front, five bedrooms upstairs and a cellar that wasn’t on the plans. A double garage on the side. Herb’d had most of the front garden ripped out for tarmac, the better to allow the cabs come and go. Mature sycamore and horse-chestnut fringed the high red-brick walls of the perimeter.

I drove around the back, opened the garage door, eased in beside a Golf I didn’t recognise, a three-year-old model that meant Herb had company. Tapped the four-digit code into the pad on the connecting door, waited for the high-pitched beep, pushed on through to the kitchen. Knocked on the kettle.

‘Herb?’ I called. ‘I’m making a brew. What d’you want?’

‘In here, Harry.’

From his tone I was expecting trouble but even at that Ross McConnell, in person, was bad news. Standing up as I crossed the hall and went in through the arch into the living room, making it look like he was being polite, waiting to be introduced, not making a fuss about being on his feet, his eyes level with mine.

Herb had a mop of curly red hair not generally seen outside of Stephen King books about killer clowns. He sat building a spliff on the coffee table, the plasma TV on with the sound muted, watching black-and-white grainy documentary footage of what might have been the Russian Front.

‘Ross,’ he said, ‘this is Harry. I don’t think you met him before.’

‘Don’t think I have,’ he said, sounding faintly adenoidal. He took his time putting out his hand, taking in my black shoes and black pants, the white shirt and loosely knotted black cotton tie. A respectable ensemble, from a distance at least.

I guessed, from the way his lower lip twitched, that he approved more of my ambition than the actual style. ‘Ross McConnell,’ he said. We shook. A dry, solid handshake. Not limp and not a power-play, nothing you’d remember after except that he’d shaken your hand and met your eye doing it.

He was nothing special, Ross McConnell. A little taller than average, wearing beige chinos, brown deck shoes and a crisp pale blue shirt over a V-neck white tee. A plain gold band on his ring finger but otherwise no jewellery or gewgaws. Ross McConnell, better known as Toto, a joke name he’d been stuck with as a skinny kid because he fancied himself as a prospect, a gimlet-eyed striker in the mould of Toto Schillaci, aka the Sicilian Assassin who’d ended Ireland’s hopes in the 1990 World Cup, Ross sixteen or seventeen at the time. Except Ross, aka Toto, had been nothing special. Pushing forty now and no longer skinny but not running to fat either, no sign of gym pumping or anywhere slack, the brown hair neat under a number four blade and all of it where it should and needed to be, but no more, no less. Nothing special. The eyes no harder than a bank manager’s on a Monday morning and no colder, really, than that last crawling yard to the Pole. But nothing special, no.