Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

I could take the evidence outside the RUC, to Special Branch in England, and forever live my life a fugitive, knowing that one day they’d get to me, they always do.

One bright morning in Perth, Australia, I go out to get my paper and a man with an Irish accent says hello, Alexander, and shoots me in the head.

Or I could bury the case, pretend it never happened.

Maybe I am a coward. I sat on it, in indecision, and that night…

Pat comes in with tea. Chitchat. I stroke my beard. I have a beard again. It’s been days. Weeks?

“You were saying?” Pat asks, liking when I talk, he says it helps me.

“That night…”

Heavy fog had smothered the wind and for once the gossipy yachts, dinghies, and small craft were silent.

My apartment at the marina. The quiet woke me. Gulls and distant foghorns up in Belfast. I sat in the bed and weighed my options. I was sweating, afraid. Death and exile on the one hand, or do nothing and forever live in shame. I heard the sound of hobnail boots on the marina pontoons. I grabbed my service revolver, but I put it down again.

The interrogating room. Classic twist. The roles reversed.

“I’m saying nothing until I see a lawyer.”

“You won’t be seeing a lawyer, Alex, you’re being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.”

“I want to speak to Buck McConnell.”

“Chief Superintendent McConnell has taken early retirement as of this morning.”

And I knew if I blabbed they’d kill me. They suspected that I knew the names of the corrupt cops but if I confirmed it, I’d be dead. They held me for two days and I said nothing and they released me. It gave them and me time to think.

What do I do, go to Scotland Yard, Special Branch, to the newspapers? I’d be hunted, killed. Say nothing, wait for the shoe to drop, I’d be hunted, killed. Run? Where?

I walked home from the barracks, afraid of every passing car.

Yes…

Pat sponges me down and cleans me off. Gives me green tea that he says is loaded with antioxidants, I throw it up. Why was it so hard going off junk when I wasn’t a junkie? Pat helps me to the toilet and I drizzle diarrhea and sob.

The bed.

The apartment overlooking the boats. Death one way. Death the other. Racking my squirreled-up brains.

And I hit upon a solution.

A third way.

Brilliant. The scourge would save me. The biter bit.

I found my undercover stash and like I’d watched, but never done, I injected myself with heroin and tracked up and down my arm until it looked like I was a junkie. Hit, rest, hit, rest, needle marks. And then I signed into the police station, broke into the evidence room, and got caught stealing half a click of heroin under my jacket. I was arrested on the spot. They found the track marks and it was such an obvious cliché, they bought it, the drug squad officer who uses. Maybe to establish credibility with dealers undercover, maybe because he was tempted, maybe he was weak. But it happened. Pathetic. Caught fucking red-handed. Where do these eejits come from?

And the higher-ups saw too. I was a junkie drug-squad officer. Caught stealing. How to handle it? Prosecute me?

No.

I would resign in disgrace, my file would be closed, we would hush it up.

Perfect. If I shut up and behaved myself, we’d leave it at that. And if I tried to whistleblow, I would have no credibility, no one would believe me, a junkie peeler caught stealing ketch from the police evidence room.

No need to kill me now. I wasn’t blabbing, I wasn’t going to anyone. I could never make my case. I had a record and no moral weight and I would live.

I had saved my life. And every day I kept using and I kept buying and I was safe.

Heroin had saved my life.

Or it had for six months till Commander Douglas from the Samson Inquiry came along and made me an offer I had to refuse….

Pat nods. Rambling and arse backward, but Pat has got the gist of it.

“So why can’t you go home now?” he asks.

“They think Commander Douglas will compel me to testify anyway, my evidence alone would not be credible, but it will add to the overwhelming weight of evidence Samson has compiled. They have to plug the hole in every dyke. Have to kill me, just in case. I’m not safe anywhere.”

“That’s why, Alexander, it’s better that you stay here and do nothing and get well,” Pat says.

“Pat, I have nothing there, I have nothing here. The reason I’m getting well, the reason I’m quitting junk, is so that I can fucking shoot Charles Mulholland, the killer of my two friends. Don’t you see, man’s crazy. Gotta be stopped. I’ve got to do it before the announcement on August sixth, before he gets to run for Congress. If I can do it, I can wipe the slate clean.”

Pat wipes my brow and cleans me with a sponge. Spoons tea into my mouth and shakes his head.

“Alex, the announcement was yesterday. You’ve been here for ten days. It’s too late. Congressman Wegener has already announced that this will be his last term. The mayor of Fort Collins isn’t entering the race. It’s a coronation. Charles Mulholland will be running for the GOP nomination unopposed. It’s all over. It’s too late. Let it go.”

“What? Too late? Oh yeah, I forgot, I forgot, that’s not the plan, new plan, kill him at the fund-raiser, kill him then.”

“Madness,” Pat mutters. “You didn’t listen to me before, listen to me now.”

I owed Pat a lot. He had operated on my leg to remove a shotgun pellet and then kept me alive despite the fact that I’d been suffering hypothermia, shock, blood loss, and then junk withdrawal. Pat was no surgeon, either, a paramedic, and paramedics aren’t trained for that kind of thing. But he’d done enough. And in any case, I didn’t hear him. I was taking advice from a higher authority. The verse of the Gita echoing in my skull: O Arjuna. Why give in to this shameful weakness? You who would be the terror of thine enemies.

The terror of thine enemies.

It had taken several more days until I felt confident about walking the streets of Fort Morgan again. I had kicked heroin and my leg was healed and I could walk and run. We had looked out for dodgy characters, but there were none. The hired guns had seen me sink in the South Platte and, as Pat says, but for the two years of drought and the river’s historic low level, I surely would have drowned.

But, anyway, I was in the clear. They thought I was dead for the second time. You can’t ignore a chance like that. My next move was the story on Channel 9. Charles was having a fund-raiser, a summer “white attire only” ball at the Eastman Ballroom in Denver. It showed Charles’s savvy. The historic Eastman Ballroom hadn’t been used for several years, everybody said a big event like this might help keep away the developers. Regardless. That’s where I would set the world to rights.

And I was certain about Charles and I knew it was him, but one thing troubled me still. What had happened in the cemetery made no sense. Charles would never have hired contract killers to ambush me. First of all, how could he have met them? Every third hit man in America is an under-cover FBI special agent. Second, as I’d thought at the time, what was to stop them blackmailing Charles once he became famous?

Something wasn’t right.

So, free of junk for the first time in nearly a year, I told Pat, “We have to go back to Denver.”

He protested, raged, refused.

We packed our stuff. Rode the bus, arrived at Denver, took a taxi to Pat’s old apartment building. The Ethiopians were gone, the lobby smelled of urine and was filled with garbage. Someone had tried to break the new locks on the inner door but fortunately had not succeeded.

We settled into Pat’s place. I couldn’t go back to the apartment where John had been killed….