Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“Left with her.”

“Fuck,” I said, biting down an urge to yell the word. “Ok, ok, when did they go?”

“Twenty five minutes ago,” he said.

“Twenty-five minutes ago. Jesus. Not in a goddamn Jeep?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

I cursed inwardly.

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I said where did they fucking go?” I demanded, pushing the revolver between folds of fat in his neck.

“I don’t know, Slider knows, he talked to the boss, he suggested the handover place, I don’t know where it’s going to be, I’m not supposed to know. I promise, I don’t fucking know.”

“Slider’s still in there?”

“Yes.”

“And the boss?”

“He left with the others and the girl.”

“You have no idea where they went? You better not be lying.”

“I don’t, I really don’t know,” he said.

“How’s your shotgun? Do you keep it clean?”

“It’s clean, but I only have the left barrel loaded.”

“Ok.”

I didn’t have time to tie him up. If I knocked him out he could come to at any time. Really, there was only one course of action. And he had fondled her breasts while she was unconscious. That was enough for me. I unfolded the penknife. I put the gun in my jacket pocket. I quickly threw my hand over his mouth and locked his head between my shoulder and arm. I shoved the blade into his throat, missing the carotid artery by an inch. It was ok, I dragged the blade through his flesh, found the artery, lifted it out, and cut through it. Blood spraying everywhere.

That would kill him in two minutes, but I didn’t have two minutes. I took the penknife and stabbed him in the voice box. Couldn’t risk a scream while he bled to death. I kicked him to the ground and let him gurgle there. I was drenched in arterial blood but time was pressing. I picked up the shotgun in my left hand, held the revolver in my right. I walked to the building and slowly began turning the door handle. No profit in kicking it in. That would just alert them. This way they’d think it was their mate coming back from his piss-give me a second to analyze the situation.

I inched opened the door, raised the shotgun.

A single room, twenty feet by fifteen feet. A fire burning in a grate. A camp bed. Recliner chairs and deck furniture. A table with a gas stove and an oil lamp. Three men. One sitting in the old leather recliner reading tonight’s Belfast Telegraph. The second cooking a plate of sausages over the gas stove. The third lying on the bed looking at a chess problem.

“Which one of you is Slider?” I asked.

None of the men answered, but the one looking at the chess set nearly leaped out of his fucking skin. I shot the one cooking the sausages with the twelve-gauge, the impact blowing his shoulder and the side of his head clean off. I dropped the weapon and with the.38 shot his mate reading the paper, the bullet sailing through the color picture of the half-sunk Ginger Bap on the front page and catching him in the stomach. I shot him twice more in the chest. Slider, mean-while, had produced a gun of his own, a semiautomatic, which he was trying to load with a clip. He got the clip nine-tenths in and attempted to pull the trigger, but the gun wouldn’t fire like that and the lead shell jammed half in and half out of the chamber.

A cool-headed man would have cleared the mechanism, slammed home the clip, and shot me. Slider wasn’t cool or fast enough. I strode across the room and knocked the gun out of his hand. I pistol-whipped him back onto the bed.

He resembled his mother more than any of his brothers. Dead crab eyes, one brown, the other blue, graying unkempt hair, lank smell, a broken nose. He was thin, but the skin was hanging off him. With a haircut he could have passed for Iggy Pop on a bad day but that wouldn’t get him on my good side.

He put his hands up, and keeping the gun on him, I patted down his dirty jeans and a suede sweathshirt that was covered with food stains.

“Are you going to turn me in?” he asked.

“I’m going to fucking kill you if you don’t tell me everything you know,” I said.

“About what?”

I shot him in the left kneecap, the noise sounding dissonant and terrible in the wee room. He screamed and tumbled off the bed. The kneecap is a nasty place to take a bullet because of the conjunction of bone, muscle, and nerve endings. Especially at close range with a.38.

“You fucker, you shot me, I’m dying, I’m fucking dying,” he gurgled, writhing in agony.

I knelt beside him.

“No one ever died because of a bullet in the kneecap. One time, many years ago, I shot a man in the kneecaps, the ankles, and the elbows. Christ, you should have seen the state of him. Well, that’s what I’ll do for you. To begin with.”

“Why, why, you bastard?” he said.

“Now listen to me, Slider. I’m not fucking around here. I’ll torture you and I’ll kill you unless you tell me where she is.”

A sudden burst of pain rode through him.

Tears were running down his face.

“What do you want to know?” he managed.

“Do you know what’s going to happen tonight at the exchange?”

“I know a bit.”

“Well, talk then.”

“Bridget Callaghan’s getting a phone call at the Albert Clock in Belfast,” he said, every word an effort.

“I know that. What happens after that?”

He groaned and shat himself. He was in agony. Goddammit. I looked around the room and saw that there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker next to the dead man who’d been reading the Belfast Telegraph. I went across the floor, grabbed the bottle, poured a full measure into a coffee mug, handed it to him.

“Drink the whisky,” I said.

He sipped and then gulped it. I let it bubble through him for a minute. He started doing a wee bit better.

I spoke softer.

“Ok, Slider, what happens tonight? Tell me everything.”

“They’re supposed to make her drive to a couple of different call boxes over the city,” he muttered.

“Go on.”

“And then there’s the swap. We’re supposed to wait here. We couldn’t all go, but we’re rendezvousing back here with the money, after Bridget and the girl are dead.”

“What are you talking about? After you swap the girl for the money, you mean?”

“Nah, I don’t think the boss wants to do it that way. I think he wants to kill the pair of them or something. Maybe for security reasons. But we get the money anyway.” Slider groaned again and I forced him to drink another mug of whisky. He sobbed a little.

“Get that down your neck, mate, go on,” I said.

He drank gratefully, looking at me as if I were an old friend.

“Tell me about this boss. Who is he?” I asked.

“I don’t know, he’s from Dagoland, probably the Mafia or some-thing, for all I know. Dead good English, though.”

“Ok, Slider, you’re doing great, now where’s the girl?” I asked.

But the whisky was working too well. Slider recovered some of his bravado. He looked at me suspiciously.

“Who are you?” he asked, his eyes still filled with tears.

“I’m asking the questions. Where the’s girl?”

“She’s gone, she’s not here,” he said.

“So I see. Listen, mate, my finger’s getting awful itchy, so you better keep talking.”

“I don’t know anything more,” he said.

“Slider, I want to know where the exchange is going to be.”

“We’re not in on that. The boss comes back here. He didn’t want to tell us the place. You know how it is, some things you have to keep secret. It was on a need-to-know basis,” he said, thinking he was pretty smart wasting time like this.

“Slider, listen. Your mate outside already told me that you know where they’re doing the fucking swap. If you don’t tell me, I’ll fucking kill you,” I said.