Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“No, I’m not going to tell you that,” she said softly and with a nervous laugh. “Let’s talk about you, though. Why are you over from Ireland?”

I had to be quiet now as I exited Route 1 and joined the 1A, via the 133. The 1A was a narrow two-lane road, not much traffic, that made its way through little white clapboard towns, swampy grasslands, boggy woods, and big wet marshes near the tidal shore.

“What are you doing in America?” Kit asked me again.

“Apart from beating up cops and saving girls?”

“Yeah, unless you do that full-time? You’re not Superman, are you?”

“Superman digs the police. I’m here just the same as everybody. Looking for work. Someone told me this morning that I might have a job opening up in Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts,” I said, hastily recalling what Samantha had told me of the second part of the plan.

“Doing what?”

“I’m not sure what exactly, probably bar.”

“Salisbury? Well, I don’t think you’ll have a problem with gunplay up there, it’s not exactly the most happening of places.”

“Hope not. Christ, twenty-five years in Belfast and I’m safe as houses, a week in America and I’m in a bloody gun battle.”

Kit said nothing. She rummaged in her bag and found a cigarette.

“Smoke?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Filthy habit,” she agreed and lit herself one.

“Not so much that, I had a hard time quitting; I was addicted and I don’t want to start again,” I said.

“I’m just a social smoker. Addictions are for the weak,” Kit announced with condescension.

I grinned inwardly and said nothing.

“At least everyone’s ok,” Kit said more to herself than me, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that now her hand was starting to shake.

Well, yes, it had been scary, and after all she was little more than just a kid. No Mexican prisons on her résumé.

“Yeah, everyone seemed fine,” I agreed.

The woods thinned and the road went over a narrow perfumed river winding its way uneasily into the black sea.

“The feds had it all staked out,” she muttered to herself.

“I suppose so,” I concurred, staring at her.

“I should have known those guys were feds, they didn’t tip,”

she said.

“And I was suspicious of that guy with the assault rifle from the start,” I said.

“Why?”

“He was drinking lite beer,” I said. “Don’t you find in your professional capacity that lite beer drinkers are generally wankers?”

“Now you come to mention it,” Kit said, drawing in the tobacco smoke and relaxing a little.

We drove in silence and she smoked her cig, lit another, and was soon chill enough to become the proud amateur tour guide.

“See the road to that beach?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s where they filmed a Steve McQueen movie, the one with Faye Dunaway and he’s a bank robber.”

“Don’t know it but it sounds good,” I said.

“And down there is where the famous writer John Updike lives.”

“John Updike? Sounds like a porn name,” I said.

“Joan Updike would be more appropriate… Oh, and see over there, that’s where Jackie did a hundred and five in the Porsche and got caught by the state police.”

“Who’s Jackie?”

“My boyfriend,” Kit said breezily.

“Nice boy?”

“Who cares about nice?” she said in her best Madonna.

“Well, I’m sure he’s perfectly charming, but I can tell you one thing about him that you don’t know.”

“What?”

“He isn’t good enough for you,” I said.

Kit turned her head slightly and looked at me.

“Are you making a pass?” she asked with a smile.

My lack of an answer was my answer and it unsettled her in a way I found I liked a lot.

At Ipswich we approached a well-lit place called the Clam Box, where you could smell fried fish through the Toyota’s sunroof and broken window. Dozens of cars. Perhaps fifty people waiting outside.

“Look at that place, it must be good,” I said. “I’m hungry.

You wanna pull in?”

“Best fried clams in New England,” she said.

“Really?”

“You ever have a fried clam?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the best. Huge lines all summer. Ted Williams goes there.”

“You want me to stop the car?” I asked, slowing down.

Kit shook her head.

“I should get home,” she said.

We drove on and as we got closer to Newburyport, farther from Boston, she regained more of her composure and beamed at me.

“Not good enough for me,” she mused. “Who do you think you are, mister?”

She seemed happier. I patted her knee and she didn’t seem to mind. I was impressed. I mean, I don’t how I would have taken it if someone had tried to assassinate my da half an hour ago, but I doubt I could have been as cool as this. Clearly, a tough wee soul lived under the late-teen veneer.

“Where you living in Salisbury?” she asked.

“Not sure yet, everything’s a bit up in the air.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m twenty-five, twenty-six in a month or so.”

“Twenty-six? You’re, like, seven years older than me.”

“So?”

“You’re totally an old man,” she mocked.

It made me wince a little. No one wants to hear something like that from a pretty girl and this girl was very pretty.

“How old are you? Nineteen?”

“Nearly twenty,” she said.

“You’re a mere child,” I mocked back.

She looked at me with fake annoyance.

“What’s your name? I know you said it but I forgot.”

“Sean.”

“No, your second name, I remembered the Sean.”

“Sean McKenna. Oh my goodness, what’s yours? In all the excitement I forgot to ask.”

“Katherine, but everyone calls me Kitty, or Kit; I used to hate it, oh my God, I used to hate it, but I kind of like it now. Kit, I mean.”

“I suppose it’s because of Kitty O’Shea,” I said.

“Who was that again? The name’s familiar,” Kit asked.

“You don’t know who Kitty O’Shea is?”

“No.”

“That’s what I was about talking about when I said you were a mere child,” I said.

She wanted to ask but she was too pissed off and I enjoyed watching her fume. We came to a road junction in the small town of Rowley. We could either go left or straight on.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Straight on, oh wait, I can hardly bring you home, Dad wouldn’t like that. What are we going to do with you? Where are you staying, in Salisbury?”

“Nah, for the moment I’m still back at the youth hostel in Boston.”

“I’m sorry, Dad wouldn’t like me to bring you home. Do you want to drop me and then you can take the car back to the city?”

“I don’t want to drive a stolen car, it’s freaking me out a bit, to be honest. I don’t want to be deported after my first week in America.”

“Ok, then, we should go straight on, we’ll go to the bus station in Newburyport. I definitely can’t leave this car at Dad’s house. Sonia can pick me up and you can get the bus back to Boston. I can’t drive you, I’m pretty messed from when you fell on top of me,” she said and winced at her own lame excuse.

“You don’t have to say thanks or anything,” I said.

She fought the urge to thank me, her punky little pride unable to accept the fact that she had been in danger and I’d helped get her out of it. We drove in complete silence for the next couple of minutes. Dark now, but I could tell that the landscape had become swampy. It smelled of marsh gas and seawater.

Mosquitoes and a million types of fly bouncing into the windshield and a sign that said “Newburyport, Plum Island- 5 Miles.”