Кен Бруен - In the Galway Silence

“Righty-ho. Gretchen is acting more than a little flirtatious.”

The sheer obscenity of that. I said,

“You are going to die slowly, I swear.”

“So anyway, Jack. I’m no kiddie fiddler but it is a little awkward to keep rejecting her, um, advances.”

He now sounded like a stand-up guy, bewildered by feminine wiles. I near screamed,

“She’s nine years old.”

That evil chuckle again, with,

“I’ll do my best to end her off.”

Before I could reply, he said,

“Two for Justice.”

“What?”

Now he laughed loudly, said,

“The two deadbeats you sent to, um, deal with me? Had some car trouble, I hear.”

I could hear voices behind him and he said,

“Got to run, woman to satisfy and, speaking of women, shame about the widow.”

Pierre Renaud’s wife?

I asked,

“You hurt that woman?”

Long beat, then,

“Grief, they say, is a bitch, am I right?”

And he clicked off.

Leaving me in a hundred different tones of dread.

I headed for O’Connell’s pub on Eyre Square.

When the original owner died, she left the property to Saint Vincent de Paul. The estimated value of this was conservatively

Twelve million.

Needless to say, an intricate messy legal war ensued.

I had a great affection for this bar. It was where my dad drank. Not that he ever drank anything like I did. He’d go on a Friday evening with his mates, have, at most, three pints.

He’d bring home fish and chips, in newspaper, smelling like heaven. My mother, the bitch, would cause unholy hell, roaring,

“How dare you come into this house smelling like a brewery?”

Fucking rich.

She’d have been home, sipping sweet sherry like a banshee, three sheets to the quasi-religious wind. Most times, she’d snatch the fish supper, fling it in the bin. She’d turn on me, snarl,

“What are you looking at?”

Once, I’d answered,

“Not much.”

And meant it.

She’d beaten me to an inch of my life and not for the first time.

But the pub was reopened and still retained most of the character of the original, plus they drew the almost perfect pint, one that was a joy to behold, the cream top, the sheer blackness in all its pristine glory.

I was sitting on a high stool, savoring my first pint, when a guy slipped onto the stool beside me. He greeted,

“How ya, Jack?”

I nodded, noncommittal. Chat was not on my menu.

I had made a decision.

To kill Michael Allen and real soon.

The guy said,

“Not sure if you remember me. We played hurling together?”

I said,

“Oh, yeah?”

Weighing it with enough indifference to halt a Sunday Mass. Undeterred, he plowed on.

“I’m Tommy, Tommy Foyle.”

I was about to shut him down when he asked,

“You ever were anointed, Jack?”

WTF?

I asked,

“You mean like the last rites?”

When I was a kid, if you heard,

“Call for the priest,”

You knew the poor fucker was a goner — not the priest, the patient.

He said,

“Yeah. I was on my last legs, and the priest came. I was never, like, real religious but when he put the holy oils on me I had such peace like you’d not believe.”

I stated the obvious.

“You recovered, I see.”

He laughed, said,

“I’m like a young lad now.”

For a horrendous moment, I thought he said,

“I’d like a young lad.”

I said,

“That’s great.”

I half meant it.

What the hell, I bought him a pint. He asked,

“Do a chaser with it?”

Yeah, he was better.

Behind me I heard a man speaking Irish, a rare to rarest thing.

He was saying,

“ Bhi fachtious orm ” (I was afraid).

I thought,

Me, too.

The other speaker said,

“ Och, no bac leat .”

The literal translation is, “Ah, never mind him.”

But you get grit behind the words, utter it with force, it’s,

“Fuck him.”

Needless to say, I prefer the latter usage.

I left the pub, stood on Eyre Square for a while, watching the skateboarders, and, hands down, we have the worst, the very fucking worst, boarders on the planet. Maybe it’s just not an Irish thing and constant rain would deter the most ardent skater, but it was almost painful to see how downright awful they were.

Almost.

I shook myself. I had a rifle to steal.

A sixty-four-year-old accountant booked a room on the thirteenth floor of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. He somehow managed to bring over thirty weapons along.

An open-air country and western festival was taking place below him.

He shot fifty-six dead and injured over two hundred others before turning the gun on himself. He had planned to hit fuel canisters alongside other hotels and create a fireball of epic size.

A woman in the UK used her dead husband’s ashes to have a ring made so she could literally wear him.

Harvey Weinstein fled to Europe after numerous women accused him of all kinds of sexual harassment.

Catalonia attempted to declare independence and the Spanish government reacted with violence to a peaceful demonstration.

The above is just part of a daily litany of horror we were witness to in this year of our Lord 2017.

Stephen King turned seventy and had half a dozen TV and film adaptions on release.

James Lee Burke at eighty had a new Robicheaux novel published.

My mind was too fucked with rage to read but if I ever got to higher ground I had a list of old / new favorites to savor:

The Redemption of Charlie McCoy by C. D. Wilsher

Caught Stealing , Charlie Huston

A Lesson in Violence , Jordan Harper

And an old favorite from way back in 1996,

My Ride with Gus by Charles Carillo.

Such idle musings floating in my head as I side-minded the fact of having to procure a rifle and got to my apartment. There was a black envelope pinned to my door.

Black!

Now that was not going to be glad tidings.

Got inside, poured a large Jay, and carefully opened the envelope, a gold-embossed card with Gothic letters

Like this:

“Await

   the

     Dead

        of

         Jericho.”

I tossed it aside, figuring I’d worry about it later.

The radio was on with the terrific Marc Roberts. He played

Don Stiffe,

Followed by as near perfect a pop song as I’ve heard, titled

“Perfect”

By Ed Sheeran.

I looked out at the bay as the song played softly behind me.

Such longing for I don’t know what suffused every part of my being.

Stir of echoes.

Back in my fledgling days as an investigator, I really had no idea what I was doing.

I achieved a limited amount of success due mainly to luck, most of it bad, and sheer chance. I became friends with a Ban Garda, Ni Iomaire. To her constant annoyance, I always used the English form of her name.

Ridge.

She was a strong gutsy lady. You needed all of that to be a woman in the Guards, not to mention gay. Would that she had lived to see a female Garda superintendent. For a few years, we had a kind of embittered friendship. She did the friend bit and I supplied the bitterness.

In spades.