Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

If I could take him out, and get a gun into the bargain, that would certainly level the goddamn odds.

Gerry couldn’t follow me up the hill, so we’d be talking one against one.

Nice.

Jackie was walking away from me, up towards a rocky outcrop from where he could survey the terrain. I crouched on all fours and made my way behind him. Six feet away, five feet, four feet.

I’d jump him. I’d land on his back, left arm round his throat, pull hard. Snap his neck, soundlessly, take his walkie-talkie, his jacket, his gun, shoot the cuffs, run for the far side of the pond.

I loosened my fingers.

Tensed.

Stood.

A huge crashing noise.

A sharp hammer blow in the back of my shoulder. I was spinning through the air. I thumped into a tree and came down heavily on a rocky outcrop, cracking half a dozen ribs.

Jackie turned. He was right above me. I’d landed at his feet. I reached out to grab his shoe and pull him off balance but I was moving in slow motion and he easily stepped away.

Lightning triage. Ribs, broken nose. I’d been shot in the shoulder and the bullet had ricocheted off my head. Flesh wounds, but it wouldn’t matter now.

“Don’t move,” Jackie said, nervously pointing a.22 pistol at me.

“I got him,” Touched shouted. “I fucking nailed him.”

“Get over here,” Jackie called out.

Touched ran over, breathless, his.38 smoking, his grin as wide as ever.

“Is he dead?” Jackie wondered.

“No way, he’s not dead. Don’t think he’ll die from that. Will you, Sean? Or whatever your name is. Just winged him, Jack.”

“Hell of a shot.”

“Aye, glad I didn’t top him. For him it has to be slow. He’s going to think that the unluckiest thing that ever happened to him in his miserable life was my bullet missing his traitor brain.”

“Fucking liar, too,” Jackie snarled.

“We may as well get started,” Touched said, and I made an effort to turn my head and stare at him. Delight on his upcurved mouth and a frenzied look in his eyes.

You may as well, I tried to say, but there was blood on my tongue. Blood everywhere: in my nose, mouth, and ears and running underneath my T-shirt.

My limbs were heavy. My eyelids drooped. Closed.

Heartbeats. Voices.

Gerry: “You got him, Touched?”

“Aye, I got him.”

“Dead?”

“No, Gerry, not dead. Not by a long way.”

“What now? Dig a hole?”

“Aye. But we’ll have to interrogate him first. We’ll take him to the smokehouse with the general’s son.”

“We could use him as a bargaining chip too.”

“Nah, we won’t be doing that, Jack. We’ll use him as a lesson. When they find him the feds will know they made a mistake. They’ll know how serious we are.”

Just leave me here, Touched, for old time’s sake, I’ll die

soon enough, I promise. Leave me.

“You want me to drag him?”

“Aye, have you got that rope?”

The birds, spooked by the gunshot, began chirping again. A rope uncoiled on my thigh. Water on my face. It was that rain at last. Icy cold rain from Quebec or the Hudson Bay or Newfoundland.

“No, Jack, a slipknot is what you need. Let me have a go.”

“I’ve got the rope, I’ll tie it round him. Lift up his legs.”

“Tie it round his fucking throat, not his legs.”

“Do what he says. Round his throat.”

No, no rope. Just leave me, Touched. Out here in the woods. Leave me. I’ll die and the rain will turn to snow and cover me up and no one will find my body until the spring, when they’ll see me thawed-a vernal votive offering. Maybe they wouldn’t find me for years, just a pair of boots, a skeleton, and the well-preserved carbon fibers of an artificial foot.

“Look, he’s moving, he’s crawling, he’s trying to get away.”

“Get that fucking rope.”

Crawling. Who knew where? It didn’t matter. North. Under cover of the front. Over the Saint Lawrence and the Ottawa and the Kapiskau rivers.

“Here you go, Touched.”

A rope around my neck.

Crawling, perhaps I’d go on forever until I was in the kingdom of the bears. There was nothing between here and the pole and I could slip through unseen because I was invisible now.

Rope tightening. My breathing stopped.

“Drag him now?”

“No, Jack, we have to soften him up first.”

And the kicks came.

From three pairs of booted feet. Angry, furious, violated, betrayed. In my side, in my legs, in my back, in my testicles, in my head. I tolerated them for a minute and then I took myself to another place.

The bottle is the most important thing in the world. The dirty Coke bottle on the floor. That no one notices.

Fear is my enemy.

Pain is my friend.

An image. The remains of a man, naked, his skin bruised black and verdant green and lying facedown dead in a sheugh on a one-lane road in the bog country. The rain falling and there’s a breath of wind from out of the Sperrins, a hackle of dogs howling, and the warped glass of a camera lens taking pictures. The body is not the body of a man. His genitals have been torn off, his eyes gouged out with a screwdriver, and his fingernails burned off one by one with arc-welding gear. His kneecaps have been smashed in with a sledgehammer and the synovial fluid lies caked on his shins like dry white spittle. He has been scalped and his feet wrapped in barbed wire. Electrodes have been attached under his arms, where they have burned him and cauterized him hairless. A helicopter is hovering grimly above him with the swamp grass rising to meet it as if it were some monstrous god-the hushed void of peat, vaporous and awed in its considerable presence.

I have seen this picture.

An informer shot in the temple. I have seen this picture more than once. From Samantha’s files. Touched’s handiwork in the flesh. In the washed-out black-and-white tones of the bogland.

With Samantha he exercised what, for him, was a chivalrous restraint.

I know what he is capable of doing.

Someone is shaking me.

Fear is my enemy.

Pain is my friend.

The Coke bottle. Focus on that.

A shake.

“Are you with us, brother Sean?”

A cough. I squint into the dark. I’m tied, naked against a wall. My arms stretched out and my wrists bound about the wooden support beams of the smokehouse. The cuffs wouldn’t stretch round the big beam, but this is better in any case. Tying me out like this is a stress position that’s like a slow form of crucifixion. My lungs are filling with fluid. I’m gradually drowning.

A man has a chair turned round and is sitting in front of me.

“I can see that your eyes are open and I would assume, having some considerable experience in this field, that you are unconcussed.”

“I’m suffocating.”

“So I see.”

“You’re killing me.”

“That’s the idea, my boy.”

“Go to hell.”

“Ha, ha. I admire your pluck, but that is hardly the tone to take with me, considering your position and my position.”

“Fuck off.”

I open my eyes to look at him. It’s Gerry, of course, saying this. He’s wearing a wool cap and sipping from a big plastic drinking cup.

He’s pulled a light on above his head and I notice Peter in the far corner. Also tied to a crossbeam, but his hands are behind his back. He won’t suffocate, he’ll live until the final bullet. They’ve kept him blindfolded, Touched sustaining the pretense of being able to let him go someday.

“I see you have no trouble speaking,” Gerry says.

“Not yet.”

“That’s good, we want you to talk. Come on. Look, let’s make it easy on ourselves, shall we? Just tell me your name,” Gerry says cajolingly.