Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

Footsteps, the gate. Ahh, I see. Consequences. Someone has come to murder me.

In an hour or two, the sun will set and then it will be dusk. The best time to be in this city. Yellow and brown and gold lines will weave the clouds into a picture. The sunsets in Los Angeles… It was not always so. Father Henriques Ordóñez of the Santa Barbara Mission, writing in the 1790s, describes night falling quickly, the sun disappearing like a ghost into the Pacific. Spectacular now because the polluted air scatters the light into its lower frequencies. All this is true. Obvious.

The juice sitting there, sipped, but otherwise untouched. The air conditioner spitting, whining. Another plane. The dog louder now. A picture of the desert. A banana. Oranges. CDs on a shelf: Undertones, Ash, Therapy, U2, Van Morrison, Irish bands all, nostalgia no doubt, pathetic really.

The juice. The dog. A dying lemon tree. I’ve tried with it. Watering. Starving. Moving from out and back into shade. The tap.

He comes. He has prized the lock on the gate. Prized not picked. This is not going to be about savoir faire. He is medium build, a light gray suit. Pinstripes. Cheap but expensive-looking shoes, slippy soles. White sport socks. He is wearing pilot sunglasses and a brown felt fedora. His face is pockmarked, his nose especially. He is about thirty, but with the skin and the uneasiness he seems older. He is steady on his feet, but clearly he’s a drinker. After this job he’ll go to a bar and take a shot or two before heading back to report. The weapon is in a shoulder holster. A longish pistol, perhaps a machine pistol or maybe the length is a silencer, or maybe it’s both. He has another gun around his ankle. A revolver. His trousers are too short. In fact, the whole suit looks too small for him. If he were Latino, I’d say that the suit was perhaps his brother’s. But he’s not, he’s Caucasian. He walks up the path on the left-hand side. A Brit, a Mick. Maybe just a leftie. No, the gun is over his heart. He’s a fucking Paddy, I know it.

He won’t be sure about the city. The heat bothers him. He’s wearing a stupid hat. He’ll be easy. He’s not being particularly cautious, even though this isn’t his town. How have they been briefed? I’m drugged and asleep? Why hadn’t Carolyn been more insistent about me taking my vitamin C? Nervous, she didn’t want to put too much emphasis on it. Raise suspicion. But the dose was too big. Clumsy, clumsy lass, never could do anything right.

We’ve been dating for about half a year. We met at the firm where I worked briefly as a security consultant. Carolyn’s her real name, but she wants everyone to call her Linnie. That should have been a clue right there. She’s no Bridget, though she is pretty. Pale, thin, blond, fragile. She’s from Athens, Georgia, but likes the B-52’s rather than R.E.M. Another clue.

It was clever that they would come to me through her. She’d be afraid of them. Wouldn’t tell me, wouldn’t tell the cops. Must have got to her yesterday. Was she weird last night? I don’t remember. How? We’ve got your mother, your brother, we’ll get you… I don’t know. They’d question her. What’s he like at home? What’s his routine? Ok. Well, we only need you to do one thing. Slip this in his orange juice and go to work. Don’t act weird in any way. Don’t do anything different. She hadn’t, nothing I’d picked up on anyway.

Yeah, come through her. They’d be wary of me, the man who killed Darkey White. You’d think you could just hit me in the street but somehow it would fuck up, better to get at me from the inside. The weak spot. Yeah, I’m drugged and asleep and here he comes…

Well, you can’t say I haven’t been patient. I have. Ten years I’ve been waiting. Eleven. Aye, I did the dirty, I had to. The peelers came, lifted me, and I gave them every goddamn Mick I could. Everyone who wasn’t already dead. Or murdered in a different way: Bridget, me. It’s been so long. So tedious. I’ve begged them. I’ve dreamed them here. I’ve dreamed me there. Seamus Patrick Duffy, get off your arse. Do your duty.

Oh aye. You’re an old man, but that is no excuse. Get to it. Your ancestors were schooled in blood feud, in Ulster, in the wars against the Indians; Christ, for instruction look at the early career of Andrew Jackson. Let not a man stain your honor. Listen to that siren voice. Didn’t he break his sacred oath? Only a coward blabs to the police. It’s been a long time, but we still have to kill him. Every day that Michael lives we die…

But they didn’t come, they didn’t find me. Four years ago in Chicago, I was on the elevated train, a man approached me with a gun. Late at night, empty car, one man, one gun. The train jerked and he stumbled forward. I pulled his weapon hand and broke his arm and bolted the train at the next stop. Was it a mugging? I should have checked; I ran instead, but in retrospect I think it was a robbery attempt.

Anyway. I read the papers, I keep up.

Seamus Patrick Duffy died last year. He was seventy-eight and he was in bed. He was the last of the old Irish hoods, the final sad player in a forgotten story. The obituary in The New York Times said that in the 1990s the Irish mob was broke, like the Italian mob, like the Russian mob. Now, of course, the unions in New York are incorruptible and no one gambles and no one needs a green card and no one uses drugs…

The Mick assassin takes off his fedora and wipes his face. He’s hot and bothered and all he’s done is walk from the car.

Oh, the anticipation, watching the calendar and clock. For too long, for far too long. I almost thought you weren’t coming. That you’d see that the torture was in the waiting. But really, you’re not that smart. You couldn’t probe the depth of my psychology.

Who is the boss now? I’ve heard rumors. They bleed me information. Is it you?

Maybe you’ve imagined this day. Talked it out, planned it. Well, so have I. It’s the distillation of everything that was our world. The apotheosis of our journey together. Time compressed to now. The world has moved on, but we have not. So much is different. But we’re locked in together, you and I. I know. And don’t worry, I will not disappoint. I’ve rehearsed this. Again and again. We will all of us play our parts…

I roll off the couch, crawl to the drawer beside the computer, and take out the latest masterpiece from Gaston Glock. I fit the silencer and slip out of the study and into the hall behind the sprawling yucca plant. He’s still there. Still coming. I get ready to open the front door, my hand is on the handle, about to apply pressure, and then I almost have a heart attack. There’s a creak in the back kitchen. Jesus Christ. I’ve miscalculated. There is someone already in the house. The idling car. The front gate. And of course, all the time the boys were coming in the bloody back. Up from the gulch and through the neighbors’. The house over on the other side, their Alsatian, Omar, saw the whole thing. That’s why he’s been barking like mad. Warning me. Jesus, Michael. Getting old. Stupid. Dead.

Fucking hell.

The back kitchen.

It’s all been timed. A man in front, a man or men coming in the back. There is no possibility of escape, and Linnie has told them that I’ll be on siesta. I sleep in the afternoons anyway, so the draft was just an added kick.

Pretty and with an accent that could straighten out a Jesuit, but Linnie, really, abetting assassins is just not on; if I survive we’ll have to rethink our whole relationship.

If I survive this. A big if. These guys aren’t bad. They’ve made a wee plan, got someone on the inside, and they’ve taken the trouble to come up the gulch, so I suppose they’re semiprofessional at least. And they’ve just sent Paddy here to watch the front. The lowest job available, since, after all, I’m hardly likely to come running out guns ablazing. No, I’m sleeping. Somewhere. She tells them I’m a nut about my orange juice, I’ll drink it. I’ll be in the living room perhaps or maybe if I felt really tired I’d have gone upstairs to lie down. She will have told them I do that. The kitchen boys are talking in a loud whisper. They shouldn’t be talking at all, should be pointing. They should have hand signals all worked out. They can’t be a regular team or they would. They’re a mishmash, assembled from guys who individually are pretty good; perhaps that’ll be their downfall: they’ll play like England against Norway, individual stars against a team. Except that I’m a team of one.