Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

Harry recovered, raised his Pecheneg. Bridget got to the top of the stairs and shot at him twice.

“Michael,” she screamed.

Harry turned to fire at her. I charged him, barreled him to the ground, knocked his rifle away, stabbed a finger in his eye, punched him in the throat, threw him over on his face, put my arm around his fat neck and my knee on his spine, and twisted his neck hard back-ward until it snapped and the life instantly went out of him.

Scotchy’s right hand was burned. But with his trembling left he found his gun, fired the rest of his clip at Bridget, every shot missing by miles. He slotted another clip, but I was on him. I head-butted him on the nose, breaking it. I grabbed his weapon hand and bit him on the thumb.

“Traitor, you traitor, Bruce,” he snarled, spitting the words out, kicking me.

“My name’s not Bruce,” I said and bit through his thumb, right to the bone. He screamed, dropped the weapon. I fell on him and we scrambled for the gun. I kicked it away from him and kneed him in the head. Somehow he rolled to one side and got to his feet. His skull cracked, his face covered with blood. He ran at me screaming with incandescent rage. I let him run, and I moved to the side like a fucking matador, grabbed him, threw him.

The poor bastard never had a chance.

His feet scrambled for purchase in the cold sea air and then he fell. Down, down, a hundred feet, into the sea, his body smashing to pieces on the razor-sharp rocks. There would be no resurrection this time, my old mate.

I sank to my knees.

I slumped forward, wavered for a moment, and cried…

A minute passed.

Bridget stroking my face.

Holding me.

Siobhan, dazed, looking at her ma. The spit of her mother. Right down to the crimson hair and the eyes like a forest glade. Still under, drugged, baffled, wondering what was going on. She wouldn’t remember a lot of this.

“It’s going to be ok, it’s going to be ok,” Bridget was saying.

“Mommy,” Siobhan said.

Bridget crawled next to me and all three of us held one another on the clifftop in the wind and rain.

“Michael, there’s something I have to tell you,” she said. “I lied about Siobhan. I didn’t tell you the whole story. I didn’t want it to be true. Oh God, I didn’t want it to be true. But it is.”

I nodded.

“Michael. It’s you. You’re her father,” Bridget said softly.

And as my fingertips reached for her fingertips and the blood dripped from my hand to her hand, I turned to her and said: “I know.”

The cliff path under the lighthouse. The sea had receded and the rain had ceased and turned to mist. The wind had slunk back to its box in Iceland. The scene was done and the sympathetic fallacy was back in force. Stars. I looked for the Southern Cross, but it wasn’t there. That was another hemisphere. Another time.

The girl was sleeping now. My daughter. Sleeping after all this. How could you not love her? I carried her wrapped in both our jackets. Behind us, shrouded in fog, the lighthouse keeping ghost time in broad beams across the sea.

We walked and Siobhan slept and we stopped at the first house we saw. A white timber frame with palm trees up the drive. Palm trees in Ireland. A thing that always made me smile. I carried Siobhan between the trees and up the gravel path. Bridget knocked on the door.

A kid answered. Big guy in jeans and Metallica T-shirt. He looked at me, Bridget, and then Siobhan.

“Has there been an accident?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You better come in. Do youse need an ambulance?” he asked calmly.

“We’re ok. The girl’s shaken up, she’s sleeping, but she’ll need a doctor,” I said.

“In to the left, have a seat, I’ll dial 999.”

We went in. The kid phoned for the authorities and a few minutes later brought towels and chocolate biscuits. He told us his name was Patrick. He was about nineteen, alone here tonight as his parents were at a Handel concert in Belfast.

I nodded, unable to speak. That adrenaline crash was coming. Exhausted, I could have slept right there on the couch.

Four of us sitting there.

“Do you want a blanket or anything for the girl?” he asked.

“Aye,” I said and gave him a wee look. The sort of look only a gunman can give. He took the hint.

“I’ll bring that tea, get you towels, youse just relax now, the ambulance might be a while getting down the path; but it’ll get here.”

He got up, gave me a nod to show that he understood my wish to be left alone.

“Cheers, thanks,” I said.

And when he had gone, Bridget sighed, leaned back on the sofa, began to cry. We sat in silence, listening to the waves retreating on the stony beach.

Siobhan woke, looked at her mother and father, whimpered for a moment, and with a single caress from Bridget fell back into a doze.

Bridget turned to me.

“A week ago I would have given anything to see you dead,” she said.

“Aye, and a week ago I would have given anything just to see you,” I said.

“So what happens next? After tomorrow we wake up like Cinderella and try to murder each other again? Or does this change everything?” she asked.

This changes everything, I thought.

I looked at her.

“You want to know what happens next?” I asked in a whisper.

“I do.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. The first thing we do is get out of Ireland. Your man Moran wants me dead, so you’ll either have to talk to him, or we’ll have to kill him. Or we’ll have to give him the slip.”

“We?”

“We.”

She stared at me and mused the word over in her mind. Her tired eyes processing the information.

“We,” she said, really considering the possibility for the first time.

“We,” I insisted. “And then you’ll retire and I’ll retire and we’ll move to Peru.”

“Peru, are you kidding?”

“It’s got a bad rap, but I really like it there. We’ll move there and we’ll have more kids and we’ll watch the sun set over the Pacific, and with your dough we can buy a big house with stables and trails up into the mountains and a Lima pied-à-terre in the Calle de las Siete Revueltas. And we’ll be done with the life. Done with it. And Siobhan will go to school and she’ll speak Spanish and English and be smart and beautiful and content; as will her brothers and sisters, and we’ll ride horses, and surf, and eat steak, and all live happily ever after.”

And Bridget thought about it.

She thought about me and retirement and what that would mean. And she thought about Siobhan. And she lived with the past too.

That Christmas night in 1992. Me cutting her fiancé’s throat.

She thought about that.

I could read her. I always could, or at least I imagined I could. Her emotions like ripples on the lough, or a sidewinder on the desert floor. What was owed and what was paid. And who deserved to die and who deserved to live. And how easy it would be to kill me tonight and be done with it all. Except that you’re never done. Never.

That was one universe of possibilities.

But there was another. An escape from the blood feud and the vendetta and the law of honor. The alternative, a new life in a new world. I knew she had picked up Scotchy’s gun and I knew she could use it. And if it was going to happen, it was going to happen now, before the cops showed, with the witness out of the room, with her girl back safe and sound. “After all this we had a terrible accident with the gun, officer.”

I waited, flinched. Dan’s troika arguing it out. The general, the killer, the mother. The strong, the vengeful, the weak.

Her hand reached inside her coat.