Ken Bruen - Bust

Since Bobby got paralyzed he hadn’t tried to act at all. But he knew that for what he had planned with Victor at the hotel, he was gonna have to have his acting skills sharp as a fucking tack or the plan would have zero chance of working.

Bobby opened his old Riverside Shakespeare book to a random scene in Macbeth. He took a couple of minutes to memorize the line, then he looked in the mirror, trying to look tough, like DeNiro in Taxi Driver, and said, “Come to my woman’s breast and take my milk for gall you murthering ministers, wherever in your sightless substance you seek peace…”

He tossed the book away, realizing this was a waste of his fucking time. He still had the magic.

The townhouse was a lot bigger than Dillon had expected. He knew it would be big, but he didn’t know it would be like big big, like a feckin’ palace. There were three floors and the whole place was filled with all kinds of rich, ugly shite – couches, tables, chairs, mirrors, God-ugly paintings on the wall. Dillon couldn’t wait till he was livin’ in this gaff – then he’d make some serious changes. First he was going throw out all this ugly shite. Then he was going to put in a Shebeen bar downstairs with one of them giant screen TVs – like the kind they had in the sports bars – and then he was going to have his own feckin’ club – call it A Touch of the Green. Every night he’d be blasting the Pogues with his own private DJ, and he’d invite all his boyos to come down, and they’d rock the place with jigs and reels. He might even teach some bollix how to play the spoons. He already knew how to play the odds.

Dillon still couldn’t believe that all this was going be his just for killing some rich old lady. Jesus, he’d offed fookers for the price of a pint.

It was funny – before all this started he was getting tired of Angela and was thinking about dumping her when she came to him with this great idea. At first he thought it must be some kind of joke – it all seemed too easy. She said all she’d have to do was “fool around” with the guy and get him to want to marry her. The funny thing was, he didn’t care if she took him on and ten of his friends, just as long as he got the dosh.

Dillon didn’t know why Angela thought that they were going to get married someday. Yeah, he had considered asking her to marry him, but what the hell did that mean? He’d asked lots of colleens to marry him – it was just something fellahs said to women to make them shut up. He’d a supply of silver Claddagh rings. Angela also wanted to have kids, buy a house in the country or some shite. Dillon had three kids already, that he knew about, and he had four separate wallets with snaps of them. And if he really wanted to have a wife and kids, he would’ve stayed with Siobhan, the girl he got pregnant in Ballymun. There was woman, fiery and able to sink the jar like a good un and cook, she made black pudding to die for.

The only reason he was with Angela at all was because of the way she was in that pub that night. Usually, he liked dumb women, but Angela looked good there, giving mouth to the ugly bartender. He’d been planning to take off after a couple of weeks, but he couldn’t afford rent yet, so he figured he’d live with her till he found a decent score.

He told Angela a lot of lies, afraid if she knew the truth she’d throw him out. He told her he was a scout for the RA, thinking sussing out schemes for the boyos was a patriotic ideal she’d understand. The truth was he was what is known in Ireland as a Prov-een. When the Irish want to diminish something, somebody, they add een, making it diminutive. You call a man a man-een, you’re calling him a schmuck, a wanna-be. The Ra had many guys who hung on the fringes, did off jobs for The Boyos but were never seriously considered part of The Movement. They were mainly cannon fodder, used and discarded and if they managed a big score, no problem. Dillon had actually made some hits for the Boyos, but it didn’t get him inside, not in the inner circles where it mattered. He knew where they hung out in New York but he didn’t know what the level of operations was. They kept him on a strictly need-to-know basis and a loose demented cannon like Dillon, he needed to know precious little.

There were two other other things he lied to Angela about – one was big, the other small. The small thing was herpes. He said he’d caught it off her, but the truth was he’d caught that shite a long time ago, back in the eighties. The big lie was that he’d only killed a few people before. Actually, he’d killed at least seventeen people – some memorable, some not. Like all his race, Dillon was deeply superstitious. All that rain, it warped the mind, added a mountain of church guilt. What you got was seriously fucked up head cases or as they called them in Dublin, “head-a-balls,” which doesn’t translate in any language yet discovered.

The one that gave Dillon pause was a tinker he’d killed, not that the guy didn’t need killing; he did, but you didn’t want to mess with a clan who knew a thing or two about curses. It was in Galway, a city of serious rain, it poured down with intent and it was personal. That town had swans and tinkers, and culling both seemed like a civic duty. There’d been a case in the place, swans and tinkers being killed, and the citizens were outraged about, yep, the swans. Dillon had been drenched, lashed with wet, the week of the Galway Races. Fookit, he’d lost a packet on a sure-fire favorite and then in Garavans the tinker had snuck up on him, doing the con, going, “How are ye, are ye winning, isn’t it fierce weather?” Like that. The whole blarneyed nine and then lifted Dillon’s wallet, headed out of the pub. Dillon caught him at the canal, rummaging through the wallet, so intent on his fecking larceny, he never heard Dillon coming. A quick look around, no one about, then Dillon gave him the bar treatment, a Galway specialty. You zing the guy’s head off the metal bars lining the canal for as long as it takes to say a decade of the rosary, keeping the deal religious. Thing is, you murder a tinker, you’re cursed – they have a way of finding out who did the deed and then damn you and all that belongs to you. Still gave Dillon a tremor when he thought about it.

Todd, that was the tinker’s name. Dillon would like to have lots of things in his past changed, and knowing the tinker’s name topped the list. Knowing the name made it, like, personal and shite. You didn’t ever want murder to be personal, you might start to take it serious, think it meant something. He felt the karma would come down the pike and hit him when he least expected it. He never shared this hibby jibby with anyone, but Todd was engraved in whatever passed for his heart forever. Wasn’t that curse enough?

Oh, yeah, and he’d committed one murder in New York. He cracked some guy’s head open against a brick wall because the guy had that plummy Brit accent.

Dillon had only gotten busted for one of his murders – a guy he’d cut for looking at his woman – and did five hard years in Portlaoise, where they kept the Republican prisoners. His first day, he’d found the Zen book on his bunk, left by the previous inmate. He’d picked it up from boredom and got gradually hooked. Hooked up quickly too with the Provo guys and got his arse covered though again, he wasn’t privy to any of their councils. They’d look out for him but didn’t feel any great need to stretch it.

He continued to ransack the downstairs of the townhouse. It was fun turning things over, destroying shite. A rush like when he was in his teens and the Brits came at them with rubber bullets, those suckers bounced off you, you hurt like a pagan for a week. The first time they got an armored car on fire and got the soldiers to crawl out, crying for their mammies, with a sniper picking the fookers off, one by British one. Fook, it got him hard just remembering. Those Brit accents, sounding polite even as they roared. Dillon was convinced then that he was one of the real Boyos. In fact, there was hardly a kid in the city who hadn’t been bounced by a rubber bullet – it came with the territory.