Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

Where were we?

Safe.

An alley behind the Peace Line between two rows of new houses. The Peace Line, a twenty-foot-high wall that separated the Protestant housing development from the Catholic one.

No one around here, but they were close and they were coming.

Cops starting to mill about the crime scene. A helicopter flying above us. I had about five minutes to question the old man. We were three hundred yards away on the other side of a playground from where the police Land Rover had rammed the van. Already there were two other cop Land Rovers there with a forensic team.

We’d gotten away so fast the peelers hadn’t seen us. But it was standard cop procedure to fan out from the scene of a violent incident. Soon there would be dozens of constables walking three-sixty in every direction, looking for witnesses. We’d have to move on if we didn’t want to get arrested. Like I say, five, ten minutes tops.

But that was ok.

All I needed was a quick debrief with O’Neill and then I’d pop the old git and make a run for it.

And if I survived this day, I’d make sure I bought a bloody copy of Star Wars III from that bootleg video man. His phone call to the peelers had undoubtedly saved my life. I’d thank the coppers, too, if I hadn’t made it a rule never to thank the peels for anything.

O’Neill was slumped against a wall. Breathing hard, dabbing at his scalp. Let him bleed, let him fucking hemorrhage. But be damn quick about it. The helicopter might spot us and sooner or later the police would realize that someone had run. I needn’t worry about eyewit-nesses, at least, there’d been no one about. (Even if there had, nobody would have seen a thing.)

O’Neill coughed and spat blood.

Didn’t look like an internal wound, just a gash in the mouth.

I was still holding the Uzi but I felt uncomfortable with that bulky weapon, so I searched O’Neill, removed my.38, the bag of shells, the money he’d taken from me, and all his dough too. I wiped the Uzi clean of prints and threw it over the Peace Line.

“Open your eyes,” I said.

O’Neill looked at me.

“If you’re going to kill me, just fucking kill me,” he said.

“Patience, Body, patience; we don’t have a lot of time, those pigs are going to be over in a minute and we want to be gone.”

“You’re not going to top me?”

“I haven’t decided. O’Neill, listen, I want you to answer some questions for me, I don’t want you to piss me about,” I said.

O’Neill sat up.

“There’s some pills in my trouser pocket, can I get them? For my angina.”

“Get your pills, but hurry up.”

O’Neill reached into his pocket, pulled out a bottle of morphine pills, and chucked a couple into his mouth.

“I’ll take a few of them too,” I said, and pocketed a couple. I was in a hell of a lot of pain myself. O’Neill breathed deep and seemed a little better now.

“Ok, what do you want to know?”

“I want to know why you’ve been trying to kill me since I landed in Dublin,” I said.

He looked puzzled.

“I haven’t been trying to kill you since you landed in Dublin.”

“You bloody have. Your wee pal Jimmy told me you authorized the RPG attack on me. You said so yourself in the van.”

“I did. But I didn’t try to get you in Dublin,” O’Neill said.

“Why did you try to kill me at the boat?”

“You fucked with one of my boys. Seamus Deasey. You embarrassed him in front of his men, you hit him, you came into his place of business and you shot Eliot Mulroony, who was his right-hand man. I couldn’t let you get away with that. Seamus was furious. He told me where you were going to be and I told him I’d take care of it.”

“You’re lying to me. You sent that guy to the airport and the other guy in the brothel. You tried to get me twice in Dublin.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did. I talked to Moran and he told me that it wasn’t him. I looked him right in the eye and he said it wasn’t him.”

“Listen, Michael, can I call you Michael? The first time I heard you were in the bloody country was this afternoon when that eejit Deasey calls me gurning that you’ve humiliated him and he wants you dead.”

I sat on my hunkers in an uncomfortable squat.

“You’re saying you haven’t been trying to kill me since this morning?” I said.

He shook his head.

“Believe me, Michael, I just did what I had to do to keep my boys in line. It was nothing personal, it was nothing to do with you being a rat, er, I mean…”

“It’s all right… So it wasn’t you.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“So who was it?”

“Maybe you have old Belfast enemies.”

“I don’t. I was small-time. Nobody that would want to kill me that bad.”

“Maybe somebody who knew that there was a bounty on your head.”

I sat on the pavement beside O’Neill. The cops were starting that line thing they do, where they pace very close to one another, looking for evidence. Be over here sharpish.

“You’re telling me that it wasn’t you?” I muttered to myself. It was a rhetorical question, but O’Neill wanted to reassure me.

“It wasn’t me, Michael. I authorized just the one attack on you. That’s all. I don’t know about these others you’re talking about. Just the one attack.”

“The RPG hit at the boat,” I said.

“Aye, the apparently fucked-up RPG attack on the boat.”

I looked into his tired eyes. I believed him; there was no reason for him to lie. It was just that one op. Which unfortunately reopened the question, what the hell was going on? Two attacks in Dublin, not by Bridget, not by the IRA. Someone as yet unknown. I put the.38 back in my pocket. I offered him my bloody palm.

“Listen, Body, I want to talk truce.”

He shook my hand.

“Talk away.”

“Ok. I messed with your boy Seamus and you’re pissed off about that. But I have other things on my plate. Bridget Callaghan’s right-hand man, David Moran, wants to see me dead. He’s vowed to kill me when they get Siobhan back at midnight. If they don’t get her back, he’s going to kill me anyway. Now, as I see it, it would be bloody redundant of you to waste your time trying to kill me. You’ve more than paid me off for Seamus, ok?”

He nodded.

“So what do you want?” he asked.

“I want you to leave me alone. You don’t want me around. Ok. Give me twenty-four hours to leave Ulster. One way or another, I’ll either be out of here or I’ll be dead. Keep off the goddamn hounds until then.”

He straightened himself, thought about it.

“Michael, if you’re sparing me right now, and it sounds like you are, you’re a bigger man than I thought. I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill you; if the peelers hadn’t rammed the van, you’d be dead. It’s rare to see that these days. I know what they say about you, you’re a rascal and all that. But I give you my word that no one from the IRA or any other group that I have influence over will bother you in the time you’re in Belfast.”

“Including Seamus?” I asked.

“Including Seamus,” he confirmed.

“Do you have the clout to do it?”

He seemed offended.

“I do.”

“You’ll keep Seamus Deasey off my back?”

He nodded.

“And there’s something else. I need Seamus to do me a favor,” I said with a little smile.

“From Seamus? Of all people in the world, you need a favor from Seamus? That’s not happening, mate,” O’Neill said doubtfully.

“Bridget Callaghan hired me to find her daughter. The person who lifted her was on that boat, the Ginger Bap. Kid called Barry. He’d been murdered, execution style. Seamus knew he was already dead. Don’t ask me how he knew, because I’m damned if I know.”