Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

But I didn’t want to work for her. Suddenly I felt trapped. Panicked. My mind sprinting through scenarios. Not Boston but not bloody Mexico, either.

Aye. Maybe there was another way.

What was it that Goosey had said? We could live out in the wilds of Tenerife forever. Fish, eat fruit, maybe escape by boat.

I formulated a tiny, desperate, pathetic plan.

Move fast.

Last thing anyone would be expecting.

Up, run at her, kick her off the chair, grab it, smash it down on that ponytailed skull. Jeremy hears the commotion, comes rushing in, let him have it with the goddamn chair too. Grab his piece, cock it, point it at the guard, put the gun in my pocket, but keep it on him, and get the guard to march me right out of the prison, telling everyone that I was being transferred or released. Walk right out, casual as you please. Take his money, steal a car, go back up into the volcano country. Wait out the search.

In von Humboldt’s book I read that the indigenous people kept going a guerrilla war against the Spanish for over a hundred years. Easy, up there on the mountain fastness. Hunt out a cave, lay low until the heat cooled down, come back into town, find some drunken German tourist, mug him, steal a passport, money, plane ticket, Tenerife to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to New York. Get back to safety in the good old USA.

Not a great plan.

Not even a good one.

But this bitch wasn’t going to threaten me.

“Since you put it that way, I suppose I have no choice,” I said, readying myself.

“Oh, I am pleased. I’m sorry about the coercive aspect of all this, it’s just beastly that Her Majesty’s gov. has to be in the blackmail business, but there it is. Indeed, it couldn’t have worked out better. Jeremy was right, what made you come to Tenerife in the first place, don’t you know it’s notorious for riots and disturbances? Vulgar, awful place,” she said with an amused expression.

“I was reading Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin and they paint it in a different light,” I replied and offered her a conciliatory hand and a big broad smile of acceptance.

“Well, bad for you, but good for us, old boy, Sword of Damocles, Scylla and Charybdis, call it what you will,” she said and gave me her hand too.

I grabbed it and pulled her violently off the chair, she screamed, dropping her pen, folder, and water bottle. I threw her to the ground, kicked her to one side, and grabbed the chair. I lifted it over my head and positioned it to bring it down on her spine.

A terrible pain in my right foot-which was not the one I’d left behind in a jungle village in the Yucatán. A searing explosion of nerve endings and when I looked down I saw a penknife sticking out of my Converse sneaker.

Jesus.

Before I could react, she’d kicked me behind the right knee and I fell to the cell floor, banging my head on the edge of the metal bed.

I groaned. Jeremy opened the door and looked in.

“Good heavens, what on earth is happening? Need any help, Samantha?” he asked.

Samantha picked up the dropped file, righted the chair, and sat down. She moved herself away from me so I couldn’t pull the penknife out and threaten her with it.

“I’m fine, darling, but young Michael is going to need medical assistance,” she said softly.

Jeremy called for the guard, produced his gun, and pointed it at me.

I pulled myself back up onto the cot.

I breathed deep, swore inwardly, pulled out the knife, and sent it clattering to the floor.

“What I’ll need,” I began between clenched teeth, “is a letter from the Spanish government stating that all charges have been dropped. So you won’t be able to hold that over me indefinitely.”

Samantha smiled.

“I’ll get our lawyers working on it immediately,” she said.

“And I’ll want a document from the Spanish, British, and United States attorneys general that I will not in the future be extradited to Mexico under any circumstances,” I said.

“I will get working on that, too,” Samantha said. “Is there anything else?”

“Aye, a guy called Goosey who was picked up with me, him out as well,” I gasped.

“I’ll also see to that.”

“I have your word?”

“You have my word,” she assured me.

“Fine, in that case. I’ll do it.”

“Good,” Samantha said and snapped my folder shut.

Within an hour, I was stitched, sutured, shaved, and sitting on a taxiing RAF Hercules transport plane that would be taking me to Lisbon. From Lisbon, the direct flight to Boston Logan.

Samantha sat beside me, organizing her briefing notes.

The big Hercules taxied down the runway. A military aircraft, tiny slit windows and you sat facing backwards.

Samantha passed me earplugs. I put them in. Looked out.

The harsh volcanic mountain, the outline of banana plantations, the aerodrome. The propellers turned, the transport accelerated, lift developed over its wings, and we took off into the setting sun.

The blue water. The other Canary Islands. Africa.

We flew west over Tenerife, and through the safety glass and smoke I could see what the hooligans had wrought on Playa de las Americas and what the concrete-loving developers at the Spanish Ministry of Tourism had done to the rest of the island. Humboldt for one would have been displeased. Samantha saw my grimace, patted my knee. Her big pouty red lips formed into a sympathetic smile.

“Don’t worry, darling. It’s going to be all right,” she soothed and, of course, as is typical when someone in authority tells you that, nothing could have been further from the goddamn truth.

The lough was dead and across the water I could hear jets land on the baking runways of Logan airport. The day dwindling to an end in heat and the ugly noise of massive tunneling machines in the vast scar of Boston’s Big Dig.

Kids playing stickball. Old ladies in deck chairs on the sidewalk. Families heading back from the beach. It was August on Boston’s North Shore. The temperature was hitting ninety degrees outside. Even the elderly mafiosi with thin blood and poor circulation had shed their jackets for a stroll along the sidewalk of Revere Beach.

I threw away my unsmoked cigarette, walked into the bar.

An Italian neighborhood but an Irish pub: the Rebel Heart. Tough one, too. Posters of old IRA men. Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams. An Phoblacht propaganda sheets. Guinness merchandise. The usual slogans: “Brits Out,” “Thatcher Is a War Criminal,” “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.”

About a quarter full. Maybe thirty people. At least half a dozen of them, I assumed, were FBI men. I sat down at the bar. An aroma of spilled beer, body odor, and sunscreen.

The assassin came in two minutes after me and ordered a Schlitz Lite, which I took to be a sign of absolute evil. Anyone drinking lite beer is suspect to begin with, but this guy clearly had no depths to which he would not sink.

He was a hard bastard who’d entered with some kind of automatic weapon under his raincoat, which he kept buttoned despite the heat. A dead giveaway. His face was scarred, his hair jagged, and either he was from Belfast or he worked twelve hours a day in a warehouse that got no natural light. Tall, stooped, birdlike. About fifty. An old pro. The dangerous type. Sipping the urine-colored Schlitz. Not nervous. Calm. Smoking Embassy No. 1 cigarettes, which I don’t think you can get in this country, so that solved the nationality question. He caught me with my eye on him and I looked past him to the barman who said:

“There in a minute, mate,” in the high-pitched tones of County Cork.

I gazed about to see if I could ID the feds but it was difficult to scrutinize faces. Too dark, too smoky, too many ill-lit spots. Loud, too, for such a small crowd. Keeping their voices up to talk over a jukebox playing Black 47, House of Pain, and U2.