Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“What one wee thing.”

“Well, ach, it’s nothing, it’s just that you’re a bit too good to be true, you know? You’re cool and you’re clever and you’re young. And you fell in our lap at just the right time. Do you see what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“No. Well, it doesn’t matter. The thing is, I want to believe you and it’s easy to believe you.”

“You should believe me ’cos I’m telling the truth.”

“Aye, so you say. You probably are. It’s nothing to do with you and I’m going to tell Gerry that. It’s my fault, I’m just a suspicious old dog,” he said with a mechanical wink.

He gave me a cup full of water. I drank it and leaned back in the reclining chair. Touched rubbed his face.

“It’s morning,” I said, looking out the basement window.

“Aye, we’ve been at this all night, and I still have to go and check up on Jackie and ring my wee pal in Portsmouth Harbor. Fuck it. Ok. Ok. I think we’ll call it right here,” Touched said with weary eyes.

“Fine by me,” I said. “You wanna undo the cuff?”

With him tired and the cuff off and the gun in the other corner of the room I could fucking kill him right now. But Touched was an old pro.

He backed away, got his gun, and took another drink of water.

He shook his head.

“Like I say, I’m a sussy oul dog. But still, we’re on the job today and I’m going to have to keep you under close observation until then. Do you mind?” he said, sounding a bit ashamed of himself.

“You got to do what you think is right,” I said like a good little disciple.

Touched stood, threw me another set of cuffs, and motioned me to fasten my wrists together. Only then would he undo the chain to the radiator.

“Ok, what time is it? Let me see, six, ok, I can hear them moving around upstairs. Well, what I suggest is this. You and me go upstairs and get some breakfast and I’ll buzz Jackie and we both have a big bloody sleep for four or five hours. Let them do all the packing and hard work. We’ll kip, have some lunch. Go to Portsmouth, get our man, and head to the cabin.What do you say?”

“Sounds good to me,” I muttered.

“It wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“I’m wrecked, Touched, totally wrecked. I hope you did all this with Jackie and Seamus, too, and all the others,” I said.

He put his arm round my shoulder.

“Come up for breakfast. Got to keep those cuffs on ya until after the op or at least until I’m sure. Do you think you can sleep with them on?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Cuff your good ankle to the bed. What about that?” Touched said in an attempt to be tender.

It made me hate him all the more.

“Whatever you say, mate,” I told him.

He led me upstairs. He threw me the key so I could eat breakfast, but he was sitting at the other end of the table and he had the gun in his pocket now.

After I’d forced myself to swallow some toast and eggs, he made me cuff myself again, took me to my old room upstairs, and handcuffed my ankle to the iron bedstead, only then undoing the wrists. Suspicious old dog was right. And from his extreme caution, it was not impossible that he’d seen through my act and actually he was the one fooling me, not vice versa.Not impossible, but not likely.

Touched waved goodbye, shut the door, and I lay back on the bed.

I closed my eyes. But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t come down from the high plateau of concentration. One wee slipup and I’d be joining Samantha in a hole in the salt pan.

Samantha.

Oh my God, Samantha.

What a hero she’d been. Saying nothing, when it would have been so easy to give me up to end her pain. If I got out of this alive I’d make sure the Brits knew about her courage.

I stared at the cloud patterns through the window and watched the tide come in, and then, despite everything, I did manage to doze for a while…

Two, three hours later?

The door opened.

Gerry was standing there.

He walked to the bed and undid the handcuff at my foot.

“We won’t be needing that anymore,” he said.

I was free.

I sat up, rubbing my ankle to get the circulation back. Gerry was easy, even if he was armed. A dropkick to the sternum. Get him on the floor, rip that revolver from him, grab a pillow to act as silencer, shoot the fucker twice, one in the gut, one in the head, run down through the house looking for Touched. But where was Touched and the rest of them?

“Where is Touched? I should really tell him that there’s no hard feelings.”

“Oh, he’s gone already, and listen, I want to talk to you about that, better that he’s not here.”

“Go ahead.”

His big frame lumbered up beside me and his sad eyes blinked slowly.

“Sean, I just want to let you know that I’m very sorry about all of this. This is not how I customarily treat my guests,” he said.

I don’t know what was worse, Touched’s suspicions or Gerry’s constant fucking apologies.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I had no idea he had shackled you and it will not happen again… I want to let you know that I for one never doubted you.”

“It’s ok,” I said, standing up and balancing myself.

“No, it’s not ok. Goddamnit, you saved my daughter’s life.And I was moved by that more than you can ever know, Sean,” Gerry said, his eyes getting all watery. “Touched doesn’t want me to tell you this, but I feel so terrible about the way he’s been abusing you in the hospitality of my house. And he even wants to…” Gerry’s voice trailed off.

He’d certainly piqued my bloody interest, though, and I couldn’t let it stop there.

“What?”

Gerry sighed. “Oh, I suppose it’s nothing really. But I wanted to let you know that he’s asked our friends in Belfast to check you out too. We should have word back in a couple of days and then the cloud will be gone permanently. We’ll do a proper induction ceremony into the Sons of Cuchulainn and after that, my boy, you’ll start to see how we really work. What the FBI don’t realize is that we’re not lunatics or chaos merchants, we’re smart, and we’re long-term thinkers, and we’ll get it right, you’ll see.”

I hoped I wasn’t showing any emotion. There were two ways they could check me out back home. They could look into the police computer files, school records, that kind of thing and Sean McKenna would be fine. Six had sorted all that out for him. But the other way might be more tricky. If these “friends” actually went to the trouble of asking questions in the alleged neighborhoods where I used to live, went to the schools I used to attend, talked to the men I supposedly knew, well, then things could be quite a bit hairier.

I shrugged and smiled.

It didn’t matter to me anyway. I had already made up my mind. I was staying in until I butchered him and if it meant I had only a couple of days of safety, well, then that rapist-murderer had only a couple of days too.

We stood in the driveway while Gerry lowered the flags. The van was loaded up, and the two vehicles were ready. Kit was wearing a black trench coat that didn’t suit her, a wool sweater, and a Boston Red Sox wool hat.

“How far up is this cabin? You look as if we’re going to the North Pole,” I asked her.

Kit looked at me and smiled. She was goofy but she could get me killed, that girl. One blab to Touched about the army and I’d be dead meat.

“You’d be surprised how cold it can get. You ever look at the weather reports in the papers? On days when it’s ninety degrees in Boston, a hundred degrees in New York, check out Mount Washington and it’s like forty.”

Sonia laughed.

“She’s exaggerating, Sean. It won’t be that cold. And the cabin isn’t even in the mountains. We won’t be anywhere near Mount Washington,” she said.