Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

Have to deal with those bastards and that will eat up a lot of precious time. That eejit called the peelers even after I told him.

“Shit,” I muttered and ducked back inside the boat. Maybe there was a way of avoiding them. Could I make it off the vessel without being seen? The peelers arrived at Donald’s boat. The dog began barking. Donald pointed at the Ginger Bap.

“Damn.”

No, there was no way out.

Not unless I jumped into the Lagan and swam for it and then they’d think I was involved and probably plug me.

Reluctantly, I climbed back out onto the deck and I waved at the cops to pedal their slow arses over here and get things bloody moving.

Four cops, one a woman. The lead with a big graying Zapata mustache. All of them in shirtsleeves, but only the lass wearing her bullet-proof vest. Nice-looking bit of stuff too, from this distance. Pert nose, cute figure, and blond hair almost hidden under her hat.

“Who are you?” the lead copper yells at me as if I’m a football hooligan messing about on the terraces.

I pick up a forget-me-not that has floated onto the deck. I sniff it.

“Get off that boat,” he shouts.

I do not reply. I don’t respond well to hectoring. Especially not from a bloody cop. Let the bastard come over and talk to me like a civilized person.

“Hey, did you fucking hear me there, pal?” Zapata tries again.

I hope he sees my ironic grin. I mean, I know two people have been murdered and it’s a pretty serious situation. But even so there’s no need for coarseness or incivility.

In my day the police had been called the Royal Ulster Constabulary and were a largely white male Protestant force. After the Patten Report their name had been changed first to the Northern Ireland Police Service, which had an unfortunate acronym, and then to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Supposedly, now they are less white, less male, less Prod, and more responsive to the public.

Old habits, however, clearly die hard.

I sit down on the deck and dangle my legs over the side.

I’d be smoking if I had a cigarette.

The lead cop decides to pretend I’m not there. That’s how his authority will survive my disobedience of his direct order. I see it as a small victory for the general public. Bloody cops. I lean my head back against the cabin behind me.

Blink.

And then there’s something I miss.

The stiffening of the air. A sudden tension. Violent thoughts leaking into the atmosphere.

For the last ten years I’ve been a wanted man. Hyperaware. Able to take in everything within my field of vision. Able to siphon out the chatter from the real data. Able to see what is relevant and what is not. Whether people are potential threats or harmless individuals going about their lives. Unlike Bridget, I haven’t had bodyguards, armored cars, lackeys. It has kept me cautious, suspicious, paranoid. It has kept me alive. I’m always looking for the assassin carrying the handgun under the bunch of flowers.

Bridget, however, has changed things.

She has given me an escape from that kind of thinking. Away from that life: if you find Siobhan the slate is wiped. You’re clean. Safe.

The killers will be withdrawn. You don’t have to sit next to the wall at the back of the bar. You don’t have to count the exits and memorize them. You don’t have to move house every single year. You can live like a normal man again.

An attractive proposition.

It would be nice to sit outside in a café, it would be nice to day-dream, to let people come and go.

And with these thoughts ebbing into my consciousness, it could be that my guard has fallen a little. The promise of that. That little chink of hope.

And perhaps that’s why I don’t see the van drive up an alley between the apartment complexes. Maybe that’s why I don’t notice the two men in ski masks getting slowly out.

The chugging of a river barge, birds, clouds, footsteps. Feedback through the police radios.

A midge lands on me and begins sucking my blood.

My mind preparing the talking points. I’m a private investigator working for Bridget Callaghan. I got a tip-off about a man called Barry who lived on a boat called the Ginger Bap. I came here to check him out, the lock on the cabin was already broken, so I went down and I found these bodies. I told Donnie over there to call you guys. Don’t worry, I’m a professional, I didn’t touch a thing.

Aye, that’ll do.

As they come closer, the air is so inert I can hear their entire tedious cop conversation. Zapata is talking about the decline of modern music.

“All just a beat and a backing track. No bloody talent needed for that. I remember when you could actually hear tunes and there were decent lyrics.”

“What are you going on about, there are A1 bands about these days, so there are. Fact is, you never listen to anything but the bloody Beatles. Love me bloody do, for Chrissake,” one of the other cops replies.

“Load of shite; tell ya, boy, I know more about it than you and your Downtown Radio country special. Garth Brooks and all that oul shite.”

The midge continues sucking my arm. Only the female of the biting species of midge eat blood. They need fats and protein to make eggs. Sperm is cheap. I let her get on with it. The cops are nearly over.

I stand.

“You were talking about rap a minute ago. Now what are you whittering on about? You should listen to modern stuff sometime, PJ Harvey or the White Stripes.”

“Same oul balls.”

“Gentlemen, please,” the woman says, mocking them.

“I used to be in a band, drummer in a three-piece,” the peeler who hasn’t spoken yet begins, but before anyone can say anything more, the rocket-propelled grenade aimed at me explodes ten feet short of the boat, right in front of the four cops.

Disastrous noise.

A clenched light-cone warning a second before the hail.

I literally hit the deck.

Talk, invective, all sucked away and burned in the air, like a record scraping off.

A civilian would perhaps have been killed by the explosion. The cops, even lulled as they are, still have a fast reaction-response time. The white flash of the blast gives them an instant to get down. An instant, it is hardly quantifiable. The time it takes for me in free fall to clatter to the wood. Three of the cops even get hands up to their faces before the shock wave rains debris and fire over their bodies and blows out four pairs of eardrums. The monstrous sound is metal twisting and advanced chemical morphology. An ammonia flare of Soviet-made fire, a smell like chaff igniting.

The shock wave rocks the boat and slides me across the deck right onto the port side.

The guy that fired the RPG on the embankment sees that he’s short and hurriedly begins to load another grenade. And now I notice him, when it’s too bloody late. And there’s a comrade next to him with some kind of heavy machine gun.

The grenade attached, the shooter gets down on one knee and aims at the boat, at me, not at the cops. So this isn’t an attack on the peelers by the IRA or a Republican faction, this a hit on yours truly.

The grenade launches, flies through the air in an instant, and hits the stern of the Ginger Bap.

A terrifying rip of noise and flame, the entire fiberglass rear of the boat exploding into pieces. This time I’m not quite so lucky. I’m thrown against the safety rail on the starboard side, the metal supports scouring into my back, the plastic rail gouging into my shoulder. I lie there stunned for a second and then I’m drenched in burning fiberglass.

I lose consciousness for a moment.

Blackness.

Pain.

Light.

Fingers. Arms. Pelvis. Stomach. Chest. Shoulder blades. Neck and head.

Motion? Yes.