Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“If you’re wrong about this, Touched, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.”

He looks at me to see if I’m threatening him, but my face is expressionless, blank. He lets it go and I watch her breaths grow fainter and fainter until they finally stop.

Death has ten thousand ways.

And in the minute it takes Samantha to pass, I imagine that, on Earth, about a thousand other human beings are making that mysterious transition from life to lifelessness. Still, Touched is a master of this art. Touched is Death’s apprentice. True, there are old people in Buenos Aires who for a time in the 1940s were killing tens of thousands every day; and there are men in Cambodia and Rwanda who have personally slaughtered hundreds with their own hands. He will never match those individuals in terms of body counts. He doesn’t need to. He’s a specialist. Quick and lethal or slow, dreadful, and terrifying. With Samantha he took his time. An hour or two, perhaps longer. He tortured her, horribly, and there can be few alive who take such pride in the pain they inflict in the commission of their work.

And a coup for him. A British agent. A woman agent.

Sweet.

I lean on the wall to steady myself.

Breathe in, exhale. Breathe in, let it all go.

And then the fear begins to leave me and I open my eyes to memorize the scene. The tiny precise cuts all over her body. The eyes. The smell.

Aye. One thing, Touched. You can’t know that I also am a favored son. That I, too, have welcomed many into the arms of Death.

Oh yes.

Let me look at you. You’re calm, relaxed, confident.

It’ll be a match, you and me, we brothers of the sword.

On that day of reckoning.

Put down that gun and you’ll have it now.

He doesn’t move.

But that’s fine, Touched.

You’re already dead. Here, in this room, as we live and breathe, and as you stare at me with distrust in those granite eyes, and I look back to you, a cipher, I vow to meet you in an unfair fight and spare no quarter and butcher you and cut you down.

Aye, my friend.

Joyfully, with mine own hand, will I despoil your corpse and throw your tattered carcass onto that black barge that Death steers into the silent sea, from which none return. The day will come.

And it can’t come soon enough.

Touched pulled down the blinds and dimmed the lights, all the while, casually, keeping me in eyeline, his itchy trigger finger pointing the 9mm at my chest.

Big-eyed, bloody, his face a sunburned brown, his disordered graying hair a grisly crown of pride. He was pleased with himself. Happy.

He looked at the body.

“Aye, she’s dead now, Sean. You ever seen someone die before?”

I shook my head.

“No, I suppose not. Ok. Well, it’s only a first step. The night’s not over yet. You’re about to get a valuable learning experience,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, keeping the lid on the pressure cooker.

“Clean up. Have you touched anything since you came upstairs?”

“You know I haven’t, I’ve just been standing here,” I said.

“And I was wearing these for most of the evening,”Touched said, showing me his black silk gloves.

“I see,” I said.

“Sit down on that stool and don’t do anything for a minute,” Touched ordered.

I sat down. Touched pulled out his mobile phone and speed-dialed a number.

“Aye, Gerry, it’s me… Yeah, I took care of it. I’ll want you to come by with Jackie, and we’ll get rid of her. Bring plastic sheets, that big sail bag, cleaning supplies, and overalls… Nah, no problems… Listen, mate, interesting sidelight, young Sean showed up looking to buy chocolate biscuits. He was shouting through her letter box. I’m not sure if I like it.There’s a chance that she was the FBI agent on the outside and he’s the inside man, so we’re going to have to watch him, interrogate him. I think he’s kosher, he’s a good lad, but you know me, Gerry, fucking caution is my middle name… Aye.

Listen, the sooner the two of you get over here the better. You best tell the family we’re going to have to go up to the cabin, especially if you still want to do plan B… Aye, until all of this cools down… Ok, see you, mate.”

He clicked off the phone and looked at me.

“You don’t have to worry about me, pal,” I said.

He smiled, rubbed his chin.

“Listen, Sean, I think you’re ok, but Jesus, we have to be careful. We don’t really know you from Adam. So after we get rid of this bitch we’re going to have to give you a bit of the old fucking third degree, ok?”

I said nothing.

Touched leaned against the wall, shook his head, got a glimpse of Samantha out of the corner of his eye, grinned.

“Yeah, Sean, it’s like this. Gerry and me have already decided we’re going to split town for a few days. We can’t do anything with the FBI breathing down our necks and they’re going to get nervous when their agent disappears. We’ll dump her body and we’ll clean this place so it’s spic-and-span even under the UV lights but, still, they’ll definitely increase surveillance on us when they realize that she’s missing. But we’ll have the drop on them. We’ll be up in Maine at Gerry’s cabin, which he has kept off the books and no one even knows about. It’s a fantastic spot. Aye, remember we talked about it? He calls it the Dead Yard because of the trains. Even if they are looking, the FBI wouldn’t find us in a million years. “

“What’s up there?”

“Nothing’s up there. Except us. We’ll be up there and hopefully with a wee surprise, too.”

Touched looked at his black T-shirt, speckled with blood and saliva and God knows what else.

“This T-shirt’s ruined,” he said, leering, itching to tell me details. How she was an uncooperative cow, how she bled so easy, how she screamed under the gag…

He coughed, blinked. Motioned me to get up and go downstairs. I went ahead of him down the steps and into the shop. He went to the door, checked the street, pulled the blinds, grabbed a Flake bar, threw it to me. I shook my head and forced a hurt and disappointed look onto my face.

“Eat your chocolate,” he said. “That’s why you came in.”

“I came in to get some for Kit, we had a bit of a fight.”

“Eat it, you’ll need energy for later.”

I shook my head.

“What’s the matter with you? Are you upset about her upstairs?”

“If she was a British agent, she got what was coming to her,” I said.

“Are you pissed off at me for doubting you?” he asked.

“No, it’s not that either. It’s just, you know, things look like they’re getting a bit out of control,” I said, to show him that I was a naive immigrant who knew nothing of this violent world he inhabited.

Touched was sympathetic.

“I know, Sean. I know. From your perspective things probably look really fucked up about now. But you gotta believe me, mate, these are just setbacks but they’re not fatal setbacks. Ok, so we don’t know what the hell happened to Sea-mus. If you ask me, he’s either dead or he’s on his way to fucking Australia by now. Doesn’t matter, unless that soldier boy IDs you and Jackie, and the news says he can’t do any descriptions, then we can draw a line through that episode and forget the whole thing. And this, well, you could almost see this as a good thing. Now we know the feds are keeping tabs on us, so we’ll all have to be more careful,” he said.

I nodded, unconvinced.

“Come on, mate, cheer up, you don’t want to look this blue when the lads show up,” he said, giving me a wink.

Touched seemed a different man than the morose and depressed character of this morning. A couple of hours of rape and torture had clearly invigorated him.