Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“Thanks, Dinger,” I said and ran across the beach.

I digested the information. The kid might have made up the whole story and he was a bit of a looper, but Slider had been taking his kid brother somewhere this week. It could be that they were holding Siobhan in an abandoned Orange Lodge with an arched gateway not too far from the Knockagh Monument.

Slider tells Dinger to wait in the car while he delivers food or whatever to the rest of the kidnappers, and then immediately afterward he takes Dinger to the Knockagh, where they fly their kite.

Well, no good deed would go unpunished. Slider was only looking out for his retarded kid brother, but holy mother of God, I’d fucking kill him to get the girl.

And I really felt that I was close to her. This was a good lead. Slider was part of the gang. And if I were a betting man, I’d give you evens that Slider’s wee brother had just told me where they were holding the girl.

I might have to top you, Slider, but it’s your mistake, you’re not supposed to tell anybody. Nobody. Not your ma, not your da, not your bro. You certainly don’t bring him with you and tell him to wait in the car. Your mistake…

I ran off the beach and into the center of town. I saw a taxi. Flagged it down.

“I’m on a call, you can’t get in,” the driver said.

I opened the door and got in the passenger’s side. I gave him most of the money I had left in my wallet. Several hundred dollars and euros. I took the gun out of my pocket and held it in my hand. I didn’t point it at him. Carrot and stick.

“Listen, mate, I need your fucking cab. You’re going to tell the peelers that I hijacked ya, but you’re going to wait till after midnight. Ok? Do we have a deal?”

“You need my cab for a couple of hours and you want to pay me five hundred euros? Fucksake, mate, you didn’t need the gun.”

“So we have an agreement?” I asked.

“I won’t call the cops at all. But you’ve got to tell me, where are you gonna leave the car?”

“I don’t know. I have to go. Take the money, and if you’re calling the peelers, you better fucking wait till midnight. Ok? I won’t need it after that,” I said.

“No problem, squire, no skin off mine. Ratty old beast, just make sure you keep the clutch way down when you’re changing gears.”

The driver and I swapped positions.

I drove out of town.

The Knockagh was, of course, all the way on the other side of Belfast Lough. You had to go through the city to get there. I checked my watch. It was almost ten now. But that was time enough. More than time enough. No need to be reckless. I slowed from ninety to seventy-five.

“Hold on, Siobhan, hold on, ya wee skitter,” I said to myself. Words affectionate and reassuring. Affection for her and her wean. Darkey’s kid, yes, but half the genes belonged to her. And for Bridget’s girl I would move the Earth. I’d done a lot already. I’d do more.

And you behind the mask.

It’s already been decided.

Long before you or I was ever born.

Sit tight. In your bolt-hole a world away, a drive away, from here.

Do you feel that breeze on the back of your neck?

That’s me.

Aye.

Sleep soft, assassins. Embrace your loved ones. Kiss your wives. Drink your fill of the cool night air.

Your days on this world have been reduced by the thousand and the ten thousand.

For I am coming.

I am coming.

Silver light along the motorway. A darkening horizon. A gray road. The moon a yellow sickle above the sea.

Salt haze. Deserted shore.

Vehicles leaving the city. And farther, behind those hills, a gang of hoods and a sobbing, terrified kidnapped girl.

Something up there. Shapes just outside my field of vision. The songbirds are down. The seabirds, too. And, as per instructions, the helicopters are landing-abandoning the night to the insects and the doves navigating the magnetic field.

Something that’s bigger than dragonflies, pigeons.

A look of recognition.

Ahhh, I know what they are.

Imaginary things-specters, furies, impatient gods hovering above the car. Watching me, hurrying me.

“Faster, faster.”

They know it’s barely started. Pain behind. Pain ahead. They feed on it. It nourishes them. Go ahead, dip your talons, have a taste.

“We’ll assist you, death bringer.”

The taxi driver left a thermos. I open it and drink some lukewarm tea. Another morphine pill. No more of those. In the army they’d ink an M on your forehead by this stage. Ignore the creatures, smell the night, the lough. Relax.

My palms on the steering wheel. My fingers loose. My fingers. Look at them. Aye. Those hands were not made for reaping wheat or serving food or welding steel.

Death bringer is right.

I don’t know what I’ll do when I have to stop, but for now I’ll let them do what they do best. A trigger squeeze. A knife flash.

Yes…

Fifteen minutes along the motorway and I was approaching Belfast again. This morning I’d been excited about coming home. But not now. I’d been inoculated against nostalgia. An RPG attack and a good kicking will do that for you.

I wound down the window.

Rain and briny water and cold air.

But no magic. Belfast, a place like any other. A few landmarks. A few memories. The aircraft factory. The airport. A big poster advertising the book Evolution: The Fossils Say No! On my right the massive cranes of Harland and Wolff shipyard, where they built the illfated Titanic and her equally doomed sister ships, Britannic and Olympic. My father had worked in the shipyard. His father too, before going off to sea. Where was my da now? Did he still live here? My beloved nan was dead and she was the woman who had really raised me. No, my ma and da weren’t relevant anymore. I didn’t care. The psychic weight of the city wasn’t pulling me in. I was just passing through. My home wasn’t Peru, wasn’t America, but it certainly wasn’t here.

Still, Bridget had been correct to call me. Correct in her assumptions. Even after all this time it was as much my city as anyone’s and she was right to think that I was the man who could find her kid. Her goons couldn’t have gotten this close. Never. Throwing money is the Yank cure for everything. But in a society like Ulster or Afghanistan, money won’t do it. Not the peelers, either. In Belfast if you’ve a real problem, you don’t call the cops.

Aye, even now, I knew how the city ticked. I could feel my way through the streets. It wasn’t geography, it was just the way things worked. Same as New York, and Lima, too, come to that. Probably everywhere in the world. The same five hundred people at the top, the same five hundred people at the bottom. And everyone else in between. Little people. Extras. I could feel it out. I had felt it out. The trail was good. It was simple. There were three acts. She had given me a job to do and I was doing it. And the third act would work out too. Oh yeah. Deus ex machina. Me as both God and the instrument of destruction.

Over the motorway and through the city.

New roads that I didn’t know how to negotiate.

New buildings.

But eventually the signs took me out onto the M5, which led northeast along Belfast Lough. Traffic roaring by at eighty miles an hour.

The motorway had been built on reclaimed land. Four or five artificial lagoons created to prevent the road from being eroded by the lough water. Had this been here when I’d been here? I couldn’t remember. The lagoons were full of herons and oystercatchers stretching, squawking, settling down for the night.

Birds. Water. Clouds. Me.

The big sopping city retreating behind. Belfast receding in the mirrors for what could be the last time in my life.