Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“He’d probably be a jerk anyway,” Kit continued. “I always think of him as one of those idiots who tries to do kung fu on the lions at the zoo or falls into a vat of molten chocolate or dies from urinating on the third rail,” she said with a laugh.

I laughed, but I found her examples of stupidity disturbing, not amusing. There was a hardness in Kit that she got from her adoptive da.

“Ok, so who else is going to be there tonight?” I asked.

“Just Jackie. You know about him. He’s my boyfriend,” she said, playing it straight.

“He’s still your boyfriend?” I asked innocently.

“Yeah.”

“I thought I told you he wasn’t good enough for you.”

“You’re wrong. Jackie is really nice and you’ll like him.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound disappointed but not obsessively disappointed so she didn’t think I was a perv already in love with her or something. Hard to convey all that meaning in one syllable, but I did my best.

“He’s a bit like you,” Kit said almost defensively.

“Handsome, smart, funny, and brilliant, you mean?”

“No, he’s Irish, real Irish like my dad. He came over to South Boston about five or six years ago.”

“South Boston. Yes, I’ve heard about that place. North of the river is Cambridge, racially tolerant, attractive, full of geniuses, and South Boston’s the counterweight.”

“Who told you that?”

“What I heard.”

“It’s not true. I have a lot of friends from South Boston and they’re smart and they’re not bigots. At least not all of them.”

“I stand corrected. Where’s he from in Ireland?”

“I think he said Sligo.”

“Oh dear, well that I do know about, they’re all cow fuckers over there.”

Kit punched me on the shoulder.

“Ok, that’s enough,” she said, laughing.

I sat back on the sofa, edged my arm towards her, rubbed my lip. Considered a move right here and now.

“Come on, dude, tie your shoes up,” she said, interrupting my schemes.

“Ok. Well, look, one more track, the next one’s ‘Karma Police,’ you’ll really like it,” I said.

“Karma Police” came on. Kit really liked it. She made me play it again. Not that surprising. Many magazines would vote it the best track on the best album of the year. I was starting to get nervous so I finished the Sam Adams and popped the last one in the six-pack, chilled, listened to the track, and sat with Kit. These were the moments you lived for. A beautiful girl, good music, good beer. As she watched the sun set, I studied her until I feared she would catch me at it again, so I looked out the window too. The sun completely gone now and the sky amber and gold all the way west into the Berkshires and Vermont. Oystercatchers and gulls on the bay. Kites down at the headland and higher up a light plane skating along the coast, a white single-engined craft with a trailer on the back of it that read “NH Fireworks Shack-Sail Sail Sail This Sunday.” A bad speller but a good pilot. He did a final spectacular dip over the beach and banked the plane lazily towards the New Hampshire border.

We watched the plane until it was a mere speck in the opaque sky, lost in the pattern of cirrus clouds and the regular plough lines of the high jet vapor trails. Its engines long gone in the soporific drone of the fairground generators and the light booming of the water against the seawall.

The music faded. Silence. I turned off the stereo. We looked at each other. We both knew what was going to happen, but I had to ask.

“Why mention the boyfriend?” I asked.

“Just, like, so you know,” she said.

“Is it serious?” I asked.

“As serious as you can get at my age,” she said, grinning, and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek to let me know that that was all it would ever be. Another thank-you for Boston. She had her boy and I wasn’t him and she was just happy to see me.

But she wasn’t going to get away with that.

I took her face in my hands and kissed those soft pillowy lips and pulled her down beside me. I ran my fingers down her back. Her skin was smooth and electric. She was gorgeous.

She put her arms around me and held me tight. I wanted her to touch me, I wanted her to hold me. And I wanted to possess her.

We kissed and when she was out of breath and her mouth was opening and she caught herself pushing her crotch onto my leg she froze, opened her eyes, and pulled on the hand brake. Stopped herself. Moved back.

“I’m serious, I have a boyfriend,” she whispered, like a mantra.

I didn’t say anything.

For once I was utterly speechless.

Kit stood.

“Come on, we really should go.”

I nodded.

“We’ll go.”

She must have remembered about my foot because it drew the mothering instinct out of her and she gave me her hand and pulled me up from the sofa. She let go immediately I was up.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

And I looked at her. Drew in every essence of her. And oh my God. She was beautiful and charming, and I knew, god-damnit, that because of her the mission was going to be much harder, much more complicated, and ultimately much more dangerous.

Salisbury was the very last town in Massachusetts and the End of the State Bar was actually just over the state line in New Hampshire. Massachusetts had strict gun controls, bans on fireworks, high taxes on cigarettes, blue laws, and other regulations. The “Live Free or Die” state had none of these things. Booze was cheaper, you could drink all night if you wanted, the blood alcohol limit was higher, and if you were driving home drunk, smoking your cheap cigarettes, and letting off fireworks, you weren’t even required to have car insurance.

The pub was packed full of youngsters with fake IDs, as well as fishermen, illegal immigrants, frat boys, tourists, and the regular town drunks. The lighting was poor, the ventilation nonexistent, and the jukebox would have you believe that the greatest epoch in popular music was the era of hair bands and Englishmen playing synthesizers.

I spotted Simon at the bar, talking to some girl, and I saw Gerry McCaghan up in a corner booth that had walls on two sides and afforded a view of the whole establishment. He was with Sonia McCaghan, Touched McGuigan, and Jackie O’Neill.

People Kit thought I had never seen or heard of before, but already I was pulling up the briefing notes on all of them.

Kit let go of my hand and waved at Jackie.

“When you meet everyone don’t, like, go mental if Dad winds you up a bit, and whatever you do, don’t fuck with Touched. You’ll like him but seriously don’t mess with him,” she said, concern dripping into her voice and those cornflower blue eyes taking on an anxious iodine tint.

“Understood,” I said.

The Sons of Cuchulainn had never been a big group. About nine or ten “volunteers” at its greatest extent. Samantha said that following the hit on Gerry there had been several defections and that now she thought it was down to a rump of about six or seven. Kit, Gerry, Sonia, Touched McGuigan, Jackie, Seamus (one of the two bodyguards I’d seen that night in Revere), and possibly one or two others. But Touched and Gerry were the only two I was concerned about.

Gerry, fifty-five, an old-school hard-nosed Provisional IRA man from Derry. Violent, clever, charming, unpredictable. In the 70s, responsible for more than a score of bombings and attempted bombings. British Intelligence couldn’t be precise about these things but they reckoned he’d killed and maimed at least three dozen people in his career.

Gerry wouldn’t hesitate to cut out the cancer or risk civilian casualties, and you couldn’t be fooled by his girth-you didn’t need to be a lithe man to pull a trigger or push the button on a radio-controlled bomb.