Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

Touched clicked the hammer back on his revolver.

“One more word out of you, mate, and you’re going to be fucking toast,” he growled.

Betty began to sob. Harris began to hyperventilate and backed away into a filing cabinet, which banged shut. Touched turned to Seamus, Kit, and myself.

“We’re going to have to shoot through the glass,” he said. “You two stay back. And can someone take out the bloody camera?”

Seamus shot the surveillance camera, something he should have done as soon as we’d walked into the bank.

The noise was deafening.

Betty began to sway.

This was all spinning out of control. Bank tellers are trained to give you the money. They want to give you the money. This should be easy. I put my hand on Touched’s shoulder and whispered: “Let me try.”

Touched was about to say something, changed his mind, nodded. I walked as close to the glass as I could and put the gun down on the counter so that Betty could see I was not pointing it at her.

I spoke gently: “Betty, please, pick up the bag, if you put some money in it we’ll be gone and out of your life forever and this will all be over.”

“I, I, I dropped it,” she said.

“That’s ok, you’re bound to be nervous. But don’t worry about it, you’re really doing very well. Mr. Prescott is going to be very proud of you. Now pick up the bag and fill it with money.”

She looked at Harris. He nodded.

“Come on, Betty. It’ll be something to tell the TV news and your grandchildren,” I said as kindly as I could, but hoping that mentioning the grandkids would also remind her that this was life or death.

Touched seethed impatiently beside me.

Betty looked at me for a moment, picked up the bag, opened the drawer for the twenties, and threw in all the stacks. About a dozen in total.

“What about the other drawers?” I asked.

“Mr. Prescott has the keys for those, but, but he should be back directly.”

“That’s ok, just give me that bag,” I said.

Seamus suddenly came to life.

“There’s someone coming in from the parking lot,” he yelled, eyeing the door.

I looked at Betty and Harris.

“No silent alarms, no tricks, you two just do your job and give me the bag,” I said to Betty.

She flattened the bag and calmly pushed it under the glass.

I picked it up, chucked it to Touched.

“He’s definitely coming in,” Seamus said, peering outside.

“I can’t believe this, they usually get one customer an hour,” Touched growled nervously.

Kit was rocking back on her heels, looking like she might be about to pass out. I reached over and steadied her shoulder.

“What’s he look like, Seamus?” I asked.

“Old guy in a red cap,” Seamus hissed.

“Let him come in, smack him on the head as soon as he’s through the door,” I commanded.

“I’ll do it,” Touched said, trying to assert some of his authority.

Touched walked to the front of the bank and almost immediately the door opened. An old woodsman came in out of the bright sunlight and before he had time to adjust to the interior dimness Touched had savagely clobbered him with the butt of his pistol. He went down like a puppet with the strings cut.

I turned to Betty and Harris.

“Thank you, Betty, now make sure you give us twenty minutes to get away before you call the police, because if we’re captured before then, we’ll make sure our associates kill you and Harris before the trial. They’ll torture you with arc welding gear until you’re begging for death. A good twenty minutes, do you understand?”

Betty’s eyes widened and the color drained from her cheeks. She nodded and tried to speak but could not.

“That’s about the best we’re going to do,” I said to Touched. “I think we should head.”

“Aye. Let’s go,” he said.

We ran out of the bank and into the sunshine. We sprinted through the woods and climbed into the Toyota. Ski masks off.

Kit was breathing hard and her face was white. Touched drove us up 128 like a goddamn maniac, hitting a ton before he came to an intersection. Kit threw up into her ski mask. She opened the window to dump it out, but I shook my head.

“No, just wait,” I said.

At the intersection, Touched headed us south back towards the Massachusetts border along the Alan B. Shepard Jr. Highway.

When he reckoned we were safe, Touched playfully slapped Seamus on the back of the head and looked at Kit and myself in the rearview mirror.

“You did well, lads. Did well. We did it. We fucking did it. Yeah. Jesus. Sweet and fast. Shit, yeah,” Touched said, driving now at a more sensible speed.

“Went pretty smooth,” Seamus said.

“Oh my God, yeah. So quick. Under two minutes, I reckon. Dead impressed. You all did very well…”

We drove to Route 1 and pulled the Toyota onto a swampy piece of land where Touched had left his own car, a green Mercedes, behind an old ruined factory or warehouse. We got out of the vehicle. Touched collected the ski masks and the gloves, put them in a bag and threw them in the swamp. Kit had left vomit on the floor of the Toyota.

“What about the vomit?” I asked.

“What about it?”

“Can you trace DNA through vomit?” I asked.

“Better scrape it up, Kit,” Touched said.

“I’ll do it,” I said and used the baby wipes to clean up the mess.

We got into the Mercedes. Seamus in the front, very quiet now. Touched, exhilarated, flipping through the rock channels until he found Garth Brooks. Kit looking like one of the undead, all the color gone from her cheeks and pale lips. I put my hand on her neck, rubbed the tension out of it, smiled at her. She put on a brave face and smiled back. I took her hand and held it. She’d been a lot more terrified about this than she’d been the night her father had been shot at. I suppose she’d known about this plan for a while and had been dreading it all morning.

“You did great,” I whispered.

“I didn’t do anything,” she replied.

“No, you were fabulous,” I said.

Within fifteen minutes of getting in the Mercedes we were pulling up to Gerry McCaghan’s enormous house on Plum Island. Kit held my hand all the way to the front door. I squeezed it and let go only when Gerry came in sight.

The house sat above the dunes right on the Atlantic Ocean. The previous owner, Gerry proudly told me later, was a vice president of the Penthouse company and before that it had been the summer retreat of a New England shipping family.

Gerry had extended the already “improved” Penthouse dwelling both laterally and vertically and now it was an eleven-bedroom mansion with a five-bedroom guesthouse on the other side of a four-car garage. The style was 1920s Hamptons Long Island Estate meets 1990s Internet Millionaire Monstrosity.

The original structure had an elegant wood facade, painted a dull white that had weathered into a lovely pinkish gray. The extensions were brash, futuristic abutments that seemed to be all tinted windows, harsh metallic angles, silver paint, and a few space-age air-conditioning ducts. A set of flagpoles dominated the driveway. In defiance of convention, the highest-flying flag was the Irish tricolor; slightly lower there was a “Harp on a Green Field”-an old flag of Irish republicanism-and lower still the Stars and Stripes. There was no garden, merely dunes and crabgrass on the ocean side and a sandy driveway at the back.

It was a house in poor taste and it made me wonder about Gerry’s overall judgment and certainly his construction skills; but perhaps it looked better from the sea. Preferably out beyond the three-mile limit.

Gerry had seen the Mercedes arrive and came out to greet us. He was dressed in a white Lacoste polo shirt and enormous blue shorts. His feet were bare and his Red Sox hat was on backwards. He ignored me and approached Touched. I was ill at ease, but my doubts were dispelled when, after a brief conversation, he walked over to me and gave me a hug.