Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“Put your hands up,” Touched whispered.

The kid began to tremble.

“What do you want?” he asked in a frightened British accent.

Touched put his fingers to his lips.

“Put your fucking hands up. Where’s General Blackwell? Is he sleeping?” Touched whispered.

“Are you the IRA?” the kid asked.

“Where the fuck is he?” Touched asked, louder this time.

“He w-went to Boston,” the kid said.

“What?”

“Boston, he’s in Boston.”

“Fuck,” Touched muttered to himself and then turned to me.

“You and J., make sure he’s not lying.”

Jackie and I searched the boat, but the kid was alone.

Jackie didn’t see me pick up a pen and slip it into my pocket.

My own wee plan B.

“Nobody here,” Jackie said.

“What’s your name, boy?” Touched asked the kid.

“Peter.”

“Peter Blackwell?” Touched asked. “You’re his son?”

“Yes. I’m the youngest,” he said, too frightened even to lie.

“Keep those hands up,” Touched said, and he turned to Gerry. “What do you want me to do?” Gerry shook his head.

“When does your father get back?” Gerry asked.

“I don’t know, I think tomorrow, he’s meeting the crew and they’re all supposed to come up tomorrow.”

“We could wait overnight, get the jump on him tomorrow,”Touched whispered to Gerry.

Gerry looked doubtful.

“How many crew?” he asked Peter.

“I don’t know, I think five or six,” Peter said honestly. If it had been me, I would have said a dozen.

Gerry sat down on the edge of a foldout bed.

“I think we’ll have to abort, the better part of valor and all that, six men plus Blackwell, it’s got all the makings of a disaster. We’ll have to shut this one down,” he said.

Touched was furious, his face contorting with rage and frustration.

“No way, no way. I planned this out meticulously. We cannot afford another defeat. The way things have been going, this will be the end of us,” Touched said.

“What do you suggest?” Gerry asked.

“Kill him as a message. Or the original fucking plan, take him instead. Even better this way, exert real moral pressure on the Brits. They’ll cave, fucking Blair will cave.”

Gerry considered it.

“We would ask for the same prisoners?”

“Absolutely. Same deal. Give them forty-eight hours and we let the kid go,” Touched said.

“I don’t have anything to do with Northern Ireland, I’ve never been there or anything,” Peter pleaded.

“Shut up. You’re coming with us,” Touched said.

If he came with us, he was dead. I knew it and Peter knew it. It was not likely that the Brits would give in to this kind of intimidation, especially not a new prime minister who was perceived as weak on foreign policy.

“Fuck it, there’s no point bringing him. This wasn’t the plan. He’s no good to us at all. Look at him. He’s barely out of his teens,” I said.

I could feel Touched’s look. I turned and sure enough those cold gray eyes were boring into me. After all the good credibility I had built up overnight, I had made him suspicious yet again. Goddamnit, Michael, that mouth of yours is going to get you killed one day.

“Yeah, please, you can’t take me. No one gives a shit about me, just leave me and I won’t say anything, I promise, just let me go please,” Peter begged.

“Shut up, Englishman. We decide, and you shut the fuck up,” I yelled and smacked him hard on the skull with the butt of the revolver.He crumpled to the deck like a Chinese lantern folding up. “I think you killed him,” Jackie said in horror.Touched leaned down and checked the pulse at his throat.

“Nah, he’s alive.”

“Well, what do you think, take him or leave him?” I asked Touched cheerfully.

He didn’t answer me. He stood, nodded to Gerry.

“Let’s get this bloody show on the road,” he said and nodded at Jackie and me to pick him up. We lifted him. The second person I’d had to carry like this in twenty-four hours.

“What do you think?” Gerry asked sotto voce.

“Gerry, you take a situation. You roll with the punch. I think it’s ok. I think we’re finally doing things right,” Touched said.

Jackie and I carried him out onto the deck.

“You think we should get some of his clothes? We can’t really keep him in his robe?” I asked Touched.

Gerry shrugged, looked at Kit, then back at me.

“You might as well grab a pair of trousers or something,”Gerry said.

I ran to the rear cabin, closed the door, wrote “FBI Michael Forsythe Gerry McCaghan’s cabin Maine” prominently on one of the walls, grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and ran out.

They had Peter in the dory now. I handed Gerry the jeans and helped him into the motorboat.

A tight squeeze but we got to shore without incident. We lifted Peter out of the dory, dressed him, tied him up, gagged him, and chucked him in the back of the van.

Touched watching me every step of the way, very wary of me again.

Touched locked the van’s doors from the outside and made me sit in the back with Jackie and Peter.

Gerry drove so that Touched could keep an eye on me.

But I chilled and didn’t do anything else stupid to raise his suspicions. Instead, I lay down on the floor, put my rolled-up jacket under my head, and pretended to sleep for the four or five hours it took us to get up to Gerry’s cabin in the woods of Maine.

We finally stopped.

The van doors opened.

An exhausted stumble-around in the darkness, a big house somewhere deep in the forest. I could tell we were miles from the nearest town because the stars were brilliant and unobscured.

Touched took care of me first. He led me upstairs to a bedroom and handcuffed my foot to a cast-iron bed.

“Piss pot under the bed if you need it, see you in the morning,” he said brusquely and left.

Later. Noiseless outside. Then a door banging at an outhouse or a barn. Men speaking.

“… do for him” is all I can catch.

Inside, the rest of them, excited, nervous.

Talking, laughing, timber chairs scraping on the timber floor.

The voices in murmurs. A few loud good nights then footsteps on the stairs. A tiny voice singing to herself in French.Sonia going to bed.

A door closing. Movement, and then one by one everyone else comes upstairs.

Jackie first, muttering to himself. Then Kit, almost making no sound at all. Finally Gerry, wheezing as he goes.

And the last man up. Touched. I flinch as he stops outside my door but he doesn’t come in.

A few more timber creaks and groans but in an hour the house is quiet. Fantastically silent. A deep nothingness.

Just the room, the bed, the window, me.

Starlight.

A hill cutting off the bottom of the constellation Pegasus. The smell of wood, resin, old sheets, rusting iron, mold spores, damp.

Peace distills into my soul.

And I know that this is the place for the final chapter.

This is the place where it will end. Where Samantha will be avenged or I will die.

Here in the woods. In blades and bullets, with the seasons poised as they approach the equinox. I can see it, because I will make it.

I’ll be there, outside in the cold air. Under the trees.

Birds wheeling diagonals. An iodine sky. Chevroned pines. Oaks as old as the republic itself. Corpses sprawled on the cold earth.

It will be done. The diorama of death around me.

I don’t know how. But I will make it happen. And though I’m bound and watched and unarmed, I wouldn’t be in their shoes.

No. Only her will I spare the slaughterhouse. The screams, the blood. The salt tears dripping into the wet earth.