Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

It was noon. Ninety-two degrees and the flies liked the taste of a Belfast boy.

The cool blue waters of the Atlantic a few feet away.

Instead this.

“So it’s bloody mutiny, is it?” I asked the leader of the Portuguese insurrection, who wagged his finger in my face and accused me of being the offspring of Satan and either a kind of donkey or, more likely, a prostitute. At least that’s what I gathered from my shaky command of the Romance languages.

“You listen to me, you fool, I am at my wits’ end, you either start digging or it’s back to the Azores,” I told him in broken Spanish. The Portuguese looked at me with disgust.

Seamus lay snoozing in the hammock. Seamus was supposed to be the foreman but when he had shown up for work, all he’d done was sleep off his hangover and tell me to get the “dagos” back to work.

It all began so promisingly. The day after I met the crew, Seamus and Touched came to see me in Salisbury. They formally offered me a job in Gerry’s construction firm. I packed my bags and drove with them down to Plum Island. They introduced me to a bunch of Portuguese guys and said I’d be living with them in a house Gerry was renovating. The house was the first bad sign. A timber-frame sweatbox with mattresses on the floor, no ventilation, poor plumbing, and also apparently the major breeding ground for every type of bloodsucking insect in New England. The job itself was a piece of piss. Twelve bucks an hour and uncomplicated and anyway I figured it wouldn’t be long until Touched checked out my rap sheet with the Boston PD.

But then nothing after that.

No contact, no pledge of loyalty to old Hibernia, no secret torchlight induction ceremony à la Riefenstahl. No news of any kind. Just getting up and working all day in the hot sun, liquid lunch with Seamus, more work, a quick dye job on my hair, and going to bed in the fly-ridden hell house full of drunk Portuguese men all of whom, it transpired, hated me.

I’d been to see Samantha once at her lair in the All Things Brit store, ostensibly going in to buy English candy; but she had been aloof and very unhelpful. “Just keep at the job and sooner or later they’ll swing by and recruit you. They’re desperate for manpower, bound to be what with the defections they’ve had.”

“What if, Samantha,” I said bitterly, “the Ra has scared the shit out of them and they have decided to pack in the life and disband their organization? How long am I going to have to do this sweaty, annoying job before you tell me that I’ve finished my bloody assignment and can go home?”

“Oh, we’re not close to that time yet,” she said. “Now if you don’t mind I have to get back to the shop. I’m quite enjoying working here. I might take early retirement and open a place like this for myself,” she said, arranging a box of tea towels.

No erotic fumbling, no swooning looks. All bloody business.

No joy from Samantha, and I hadn’t even seen Kit at all in the last four days. Four days, seemed like forty.

August had ended and it was now September. Princess Diana had died in Paris, not that the Portuguese or Seamus gave a shit, but Samantha had put black drapes in the windows of All Things Brit and, in a canny business move, doubled the price of the Princess of Wales mugs and commemorative wedding plates.

I’ve described Seamus once before, but I’ll recap. He was the one that did the shooting in the Rebel Heart back in Revere. His pal, Mike, as Touched had explained, had the be-jesus scared out of him and left Gerry’s employ, but Seamus was seeing it all through at least until his trial, when he’d be convicted of assault or attempted murder, probably the former, and get a couple of years inside. Serve him right.

Seamus was a disillusioned beat cop, about fifty-five. An old-school racist, with gray skin, salt-and-pepper hair, and a body wrecked by his sixty-a-day habit, which he’d been maintaining through thick and thin since he was fifteen years old. In a series of depressing lunchtime conversations, I quickly ascertained that the highlights of Seamus’s life had been the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the abandonment of court-ordered busing in the 1980s, the blowing up of Mrs. Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference, and the glorious run of the Celtics under Larry Bird. The low light: game six of the 1986 World Series. I suppose his loyalty to Gerry was less ideological and more an attempt to give his pathetic and useless existence some meaning.

I’m being hard on Seamus, partly as a defense mechanism, because a week after I met him for the first time, in circumstances that were less than pleasant, I had to shoot him in the head from three feet away with a whopping Colt.45 hand cannon, the round at that range blowing his skull apart and sending his brains, blood, and bone all over me and a hapless squaddie standing nearby.

But we’ll get to that.

Seamus lying there in the hammock, snoozing while green-heads and horseflies sucked the blood out of his pasty legs.

But for the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s bird sanctuary (and that do-gooder DFW alum Rachel Carson), they would have nuked this whole island with DDT years ago and made it bearable for thin-skinned Paddies like Seamus and me.

“Seamus, are you awake?” I shouted.

He didn’t budge.

“Seamus, the Ports are saying they’re on strike,” I tried again, but Seamus was in a deep drunk sleep.

“Get your bloody backs into it,” I said to the Portuguese men, but none of them moved a muscle. I didn’t blame them, really. Our job itself was a KKK dream or a good Catholic’s nightmare. Demolishing Plum Island’s small Roman Catholic church to make way for housing. The church had suffered declining attendances for years and the land was worth a couple of million, so the diocese must have thought, what the hell, it’s coming down.

McCaghan’s firm had been contracted to do the demolition and the Church had already sold the lots for three five-bedroom houses to be built on the former hallowed ground, the prospective buyers obviously having learned nothing from countless Stephen King films. Not so the Portuguese navvies, who were all superstitious illegals from the Azores. To say they didn’t like demolishing a Catholic church would be understatement, and for days they’d been working slow and acting stupid.

They were supposed to be shoveling a straight path through the sand, the loam soil, and the concrete foundations to let the bulldozer in to demolish the church. A nasty job but one that could be done in a day if everyone’s heart was in it.

The Portuguese rebel stood on his pickaxe and mumbled a remark about my mother, which, if he had but known, was remarkably accurate.

I walked over to Seamus, who was still snoring in the hammock slung between a generator and a portable toilet.

“Seamus, wake up, they’re on strike. They’re refusing to budge,” I told him with a kick in his arse.

Seamus groaned, slapped at the flies on his ankles, and looked at me with annoyance.

“Why did you wake me? You total bastard.”

“Now that we’re close the Portuguese are refusing to dig the final bit of the path. They think it will bring down a rain of curses on them.”

“You speak dago, tell them to get a fucking move on.

Touched won’t stand for it.”

“Why don’t you call Touched and tell him to come over here.”

Worry slipped across Seamus’s face.

“Nah, he won’t like that.”

“Well, you get them to bloody move, I’ve had it,” I said and slumped down in the shade next to the chemical toilet. Seeing me sit, the Portuguese all found places to sit too. Seamus lit a cigarette.

“Ok, suppose I better take care of it. Help me out of this thing.”