Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“Everybody ok?”

Zapata was sitting up. The woman standing. The others in agony, shrapnel making them feel like they were pincushions. I didn’t see anyone dying, though. I bent down to adjust the straps on my prosthesis.

“Who the fuck are you?” Zapata asked.

“I’m from America. FBI. Going after that guy,” I said.

“What guy?”

“The guy who fired the RPG is hit but he’s running,” I had to explain so they didn’t bloody shoot at me when I legged it.

That was all I had to say. Zapata nodded, bought it.

“Just for the record, I think they were trying to kill me, not you. You were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said and ran up the embankment after Mr. RPG.

I stopped for a quarter of a second at the place where they’d done the hit. The Jimpy was seething, the van was peppered with bullet holes and had two flat tires. A blood trail led down the alley. I was right, Blondie had hit him. A goddamn markswoman, that lass. She had killed the Jimpy guy and plugged this character, too.

In other circumstances, I would have gone back and proposed.

I followed the trail behind the first of the condo buildings, lost it on the pavement, and found it at a rusting yellow trash compactor where he’d paused for a second, leaning on it, getting a breather and revealing his position with his bloody paws.

He’d turned left and continued running along this street, which was parallel to the Lagan.

Worried me. If he kept going straight, eventually this road led out of these bankside condo developments and into a feeder road for the city. Once he was on that he could lose himself in the crowds.

He had a big lead, but he was hit bad and I was angry.

The blood drops closer now.

He was moving slower.

Two feet between drops.

Then one foot.

Then six inches.

I was near. I turned a corner. The trail led between two large apartment buildings and abruptly stopped.

Had he climbed into a getaway car? No way. They had come in that damn van and the van was still parked along the embankment.

I scanned the alley.

Concrete walls. No doors leading into the apartment buildings and no obvious hiding places like trash bins or a skip. I ran to the end of the street.

A field, a piece of waste ground, and one of the main roads.

Shit. I’d bloody lost him? It didn’t make sense. Who brings two getaway cars to a hit?

I searched the alley again.

The condo complexes on either side of the alley were identical three-story-high apartment buildings with balconies. No doors on the ground-floor flats, and the windows that I could see were closed.

People don’t just vanish.

Maybe he’d taken a moment, patched himself up, and run to the waste ground. I sprinted to the bottom of the alley again, but there appeared to be no one in that featureless cinder track. He could be hiding under a bunch of newspapers or garbage, but I didn’t think so. He was back here somewhere.

I examined the ground-floor apartment windows and saw that not only were they not open, but they didn’t open.

The only other possibility was that he might just have had the strength to climb up onto one of the second-floor balconies. I went to the nearest one and examined it closely. Nothing. The next one.

And what was that? A speck of red on the balcony rail. I smiled. Blood. Fresh blood.

With a heroic effort of will he had somehow climbed up there. Bullet wound or no bullet wound. I stepped back and surveyed the balcony. The door to the apartment was shut. I couldn’t tell if it was locked but I guessed it was. The lights were off and no one was home, and if you lived on the second floor it would probably be sensible to lock the balcony door.

My hunch was that he was still crouching up there, lying behind the concrete balcony walls, breathing hard, listening to me, hoping that eventually I would give it up as a bad job and piss off home.

“I’ll give you five seconds to stand up and then I’m throwing the hand grenade onto that balcony. Five, four, three, two-”

He stood.

He’d lost the ski mask. Bald guy, forties, gray face, gut. One of the old-timers. Reliable, he was rusty with the RPG, but it hadn’t been the first time he’d fired the weapon. I’m sure he’d knocked over quite a few Land Rovers in his time. His hair was singed from the back flare on the weapon and his denim jacket at the shoulder was ripped open. I faked holding the grenade in my hand.

“Get those hands up,” I said.

He put his hands over his head.

“Get down from there,” I ordered.

“I can’t get down, I’m hurt,” he whined.

“All right, I’ve had enough of you, try to kill me, would ya. I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“Wait, wait, wait.”

Gingerly, he tested his weight on the balcony rail. He leaned his stomach on the edge, toppled over, and dropped to the ground. I saw now that the woman peeler had hit him on the buttocks or lower back. It was, in fact, only a glancing wound, but still, he’d been a moving target, a good hundred feet away, got to give her credit.

And yeah, he’d really messed up his shoulder from firing the rocket-propelled grenade. Torn jacket, lot of blood.

He tried to stand, so I belted him on the side of the face. He skidded into a wall and fell down sideways into a gutter. An empty revolver tumbled out of his inside jacket pocket. As luck would have it, a.38. See, that’s why you get a PC over a Mac. They’re shitty, but the bastards are everywhere.

I picked up the revolver, checked the chamber-seemed clean enough. I pulled six rounds out of my pocket and loaded the gun. I waggled it at him.

“Ok, now we talk,” I said.

Two stories up a man opened a window in one of the yuppie flats and looked out.

“What the bloody hell is going on down there?” he shouted in a Scottish accent.

“He’s trying to kill me,” the RPG man said.

“You say another word and you’re a dead man,” I muttered sotto voce and then to the yuppie: “Michael Forsythe, CID, this man has just attacked four police officers, I’m arresting him.”

“Perhaps I could see your identification?” the canny Scot demanded.

I pointed the gun at him.

“Get the fuck back in your fucking flat before I arrest you for obstruction of justice. If you’re nervous, mate, call the bloody cops,” I shouted back. He ducked his head inside and closed the window.

I turned the gun on RPG again.

“Ok, you, on your knees, hands behind your head. One move and it’s tea and crumpets with Beelzebub.”

He knelt. I did a quick pat down. I took the wallet from his back pocket. Five hundred quid and a driving license that said he was called Jimmy Walker. I kept the money and put the wallet back in his pocket.

I squatted down next to Jimmy, smiled at him, and smacked him in the ear with the butt of my revolver. He hit the ground.

“God,” he screamed.

“Who do you work for?” I demanded.

He kept his trap shut. I kicked him in the wound on his arse.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.

“Who do you work for?” I asked again.

“I work for Body O’Neill.”

“Who’s that?”

“Bloody hell, where are you from?”

“Who is it?”

“Commander Belfast Brigade IRA,” Jimmy said.

“You weren’t going for the cops, were you? It was me, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was you,” he said.

“Why me? Why the hit? What did I ever do to Body O’Neill?”

“I don’t know. I do what I’m told.”

“What did O’Neill say I’d done?”

“I don’t fucking know. We were told to hit you, that’s all.”

“Why an RPG, bit excessive, no?”

“O’Neill said you were hard to fucking kill, he said you were slippery. He told us that we had to use overwhelming force. Sammy said you were the guy who had killed Darkey White years ago and had survived a couple of hits. He said we should fire a bloody antitank rocket at ya. See you survive that. Then we got the idea of the RPG.”