Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

Jackie laughs.

“His name is Michael Forsythe, he told me, that’s his name,” Peter says.

Touched stops, turns to Peter.

“What did you say?” Touched asks.

“He told me his name. Michael Forsythe. See, I’m helping you. I’m on your side.”

“What else did he tell you?” Touched asks.

Whatever you do, don’t tell him about the boat, Peter, or he’ll kill us both right now and flee the goddamn house.

“He, he just told me his name. Michael Forsythe. That’s all,” Peter mutters.

Touched looks at me.

“Michael Forsythe? Where have I heard that name before? Let me think,” he wonders aloud.

“I’ll spare you the trouble. I was the man that killed Darkey White, ratted out his gang, and went into the Witness Protection Program,” I say.

Gerry nods his head.

“Yeah. That’s right. I remember you, I read about you.

Even in Boston that was a story. You killed some of his men, too. Isn’t there a price on your head?” he says.

“Aye, there is, bound to be close to a million bucks,” I mutter.

“Million bucks, dead or alive, actually,” Touched says.

“Nice wee bonus for us, Gerry, nice wee bonus.”

I shake my head.

“I don’t understand. Who is he?” Jackie asks.

“He was working for the feds, Jackie. Weren’t you, Michael? You’ve been federaled up the ass for at least, at least five years now, I suppose. But why us, pal? You’d think you’d want to keep a low profile after Darkey White.”

“I couldn’t resist your charming personality, Touched,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I heard you were a fucking cocky son of a bitch. Did you think you could take us down, like you took down Darkey? You were impressive then, but look at you now. Look at the state of you. This time you’re a bit out of your league.Don’t you think?” Touched says.

“Nobody said he’d only one fucking foot, though. That’s a distinguishing feature they forgot about. And his hair doesn’t look the same,” Gerry says.

I say nothing.

“I can’t believe this is what the feds make you do to pay the bills,” Gerry adds, drinking from a flask and slurring his words.

Fear and a thought. Have they all got drunk enough so they can get the moral courage to butcher me?

“Have to talk about this one, won’t we, Ger,” Touched says.

Gerry looks pained and confused, but finally he nods.

“One more for good measure,” Touched adds.

He kicks me in the stomach with his booted foot, a real good kick, nothing held back. I cough and spit blood and phlegm, wheezing and riding with the ripple of the blow. The pain almost knocking me out again.

“Come on,” Gerry says, “we’ll discuss this over a wee dram.”

“Nah, one more, Gerry, I’ll learn him for Darkey White, too,” Touched says and takes his little green toolbox from his back pocket. He removes a thin knife.

“Now you listen to me, you wee bastard. You’re going to tell us everything from the beginning or you’re gonna wish your ma had a miscarriage instead of you, I swear, boy,” he says.

With that he stabs me. The knife, small and cool, cutting into my flesh like a scalpel into tenderloin. The blade carving into my skin and the pain unbearable. Touched slicing up my skin, steady and relaxed, as if he’d done this hundreds of times before. Gliding it effortlessly under the soft membrane of my chest and digging through the tissue and blood vessels and hair with a harsh and unnecessary deepness. Touched coughs like an old man, leans forward with a bony hand and those yellow nails, and rips away a bloody square of skin and holds it up to me.

Someone’s screaming.

It’s me, the weak noise bounding back at me from the log wall. Screaming. Gasping at the air to breathe it in. I bite my tongue to stop it. I take a breath.

We face each other.

In the lines of dark with nothing between us.

Nothing.

It’s not loss or rage or resentment or revenge. Nothing.

Only the muddy light and an odd calm. One breath upon another.

Touched tosses away the patch of skin, irritated. He can read a situation like a master and he sees that he still has not yet mentally beaten me. He picks up the old wooden chair and smacks it into my legs, breaking it into pieces. I buck from the pain and fight another blackout.

“We have to go now, but we’ll be back,” he says.

He throws the remains of the chair onto the floor.

It clinks into the Coke bottle, knocking it against my foot.

“We’ll be back and we’ll bring Sonia and Kit, too, and we’ll all take our turns on you, and you’ll talk. You’ll tell me everything. It won’t be like that bitch, your boss, in Newburyport. Won’t be in a rush. I can take it nice and fucking slow with you, pal. Jack, Gerry, let’s go.”

He spits at me, misses, turns, exits, and slams the smokehouse door behind him.

He will be back. I shiver uncontrollably, horribly scared, for a minute or two. And then I breathe and count to ten, twenty, a hundred.

And remember that this is the night and I should not be afraid because fear is the enemy.

Pain is the friend.

Fear is the enemy.

And down there on the floor is the Coke bottle that no one notices.

They return my armor from the sea. They improvise a weapon. They give it to me. Go and pay them back in kind, they say. The water burns, the air curdles, Kit comes to me in the moonlit hut.

Geologists say that Ireland was once joined to the coast of North America.

“Is that so, Kit?”

Greenland was tucked into Labrador, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were squished together, and Ireland was soldered in there too. Galway hinged to the coast of Maine. There are rock formations that begin in the west of Ireland and end three thousand miles away in Maine and Massachusetts. So really I’m dying in a part of my homeland, separated by plate tectonics and several million years.

Is that comforting?

Is it fuck.

Kit. I smell sweet pea and look.

But she’s not there.

She’s not coming.

Shit.

I could never really have been asleep. More a hallucination. A waking dream.

And the dreams are done.

It’s business now.

Self-rescue, as the instructors used to say in the army survival course.

Imagine, if you can, the situation.

An epic journey of about one yard.

First step.

You’re holding the neck of a Coke bottle between your big toe and your next toe on your right foot. Your arms are spread-eagled, tied to crossbeams. The bottle has a ragged neck and if you can get it to your hands, you’ll be able to use the broken glass to saw through the rope. But how do you get it from foot to hand?

You’re going to have to swing your right leg up to shoulder height, hook it on top of your left arm, and then grab the bottle with your left hand. You’re probably going to get only one shot at this. Because the bottle could slip or fall out of your grip with the violent motion you’ll have to use to swing it. If it falls and rolls away, you’ll never get it back or another chance at this, and basically you’re done for.

Kit’s not coming.

But Touched is.

This is not the time for mister fuckup.

You rehearse it in your mind a couple of times.

It’s going to be tough.

And remember, also, they’ve taken away the prosthesis on your left foot, so for that second or two that your right leg is hooked over your left arm-if you can get it up there in the first place-you’ll be dangling off the floor, the ropes digging into you, pulling apart your wrists and popping your shoulder blades.

It’s going to take some time to saw through the ropes and they’re probably going to kill you first thing in the morning. You can’t be sure about the time right now but it’s certainly after midnight.