Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

She has no idea what he’s aiming at. Cal feels a flood of relief, chased by something thornier and harder to identify. The kid doesn’t need his rescuing; there’s no reason to change his plan. “Well then,” he says. “Quit looking at me like I’m gonna throw this toothbrush at you.”

“How’d you know? Did someone say it to you?”

Cal says, “What’s with the hair?”

Trey swipes a hand over her head and checks it, like she’s expecting a leaf or something. “Huh?”

“The buzz cut. Makes you look like a boy.”

“I had lice. My mam hadta shave it.”

“Great. You still got ’em?”

“Nah. Last year.”

“Then how come it’s still short?”

“Less hassle.”

Cal is still trying to overlay a girl on top of the boy he’s accustomed to. “What was it like before?”

Trey holds up a hand somewhere around her collarbone. Cal can’t picture it. “When I was in school, kids would’ve given a girl shit for having her hair like that. No one does?”

The kid does a combination shrug, mouth-twist and eye-roll, which Cal takes to mean that this is the least of her problems. “They mostly leave me alone. ’Cause I bet up Brian Carney.”

“How come?”

Trey shrugs again. This one means it’s not worth going into. After a moment she says, with a quick glance at Cal under her eyebrows, “Do you care?”

“That you beat up Brian Whatsisname? Depends on why. Sometimes you got no choice but to set someone straight.”

“That I’m a girl.”

“At your age a kid’s a kid,” Cal says. “Doesn’t make much difference what kind.” He would love this to be true.

Trey nods and goes back to her food. Cal can’t tell whether the subject is closed in her mind. After a little bit she says, “You got any kids?”

“One.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl. She’s grown.”

“Where’s her mam? Were you not married?”

“We were. Not any more.”

Trey absorbs this, chewing. “How come? You a hoormaster like your dad?”

“Nope.”

“Didja beat her?”

“No. Never laid a finger on her.”

“Then how come?”

“Kid,” Cal says, “I have no idea.”

Trey’s eyebrows twitch together skeptically, but she says nothing. She bites a chunk off the apple, puts it inside her last piece of sandwich and tries out the combination, with mixed results, going by the look on her face. It makes Cal’s bones feel weak, how little she sometimes is.

She says, “Does your girl know you’re here?”

“Sure. I talk to her every week.”

“Is the desk gonna be for her?”

“Nah,” Cal says. “She’s got her own place, her own furniture. That’s staying right here.”

Trey nods. She finishes the apple and tosses the core, with a hard whip of her wrist, down the garden towards the rooks. Then she wipes her hands on her jeans and goes back to sawing.

The sounds of their work fall into a balance that could sustain itself forever. The swifts streak and crisscross in the cool blue sky, and the weaning lambs call to each other in wavery trebles. Off on Dumbo Gannon’s land a red tractor lumbers patiently back and forth, small as a beetle with distance, leaving a broad band of dark upturned earth behind it.

Cal gives them as long as he can afford. Trey saws out the shelf, measures and checks, chisels and planes, squints and measures again. Cal scrubs cracks, wipes them down, scrapes a little with a blade when he needs to. Trey, finally satisfied, moves on to sanding.

The light is starting to condense, lying golden as honey across the fields. Cal needs to get this done.

“I talked to Donie,” he says, hearing the words start something splitting like wood.

Trey’s shoulders set. She puts down the shelf and the sandpaper, carefully, and turns to look at him. “Yeah,” she says.

Cal can see the white around her eyes, and the flare of her nostrils when she breathes. He knows her heart is going like a runaway horse.

“It’s not bad news, kid. OK?”

A hard breath comes out of her. She swipes the back of her wrist across her mouth. “OK,” she says.

She’s the same bad white as she was when she winged the rabbit. “You wanna sit down for this, get comfortable?” Cal asks. “It’s a long story.”

“Nah.”

“Suit yourself,” Cal says. He brushes paint dust off the desk and leans his forearms on the top of it, keeping his movements slow and easy, the way he would around a spooked animal; the way he did the first couple of times the kid came around, just a few weeks ago. “To start with: you wanted to know why I was aiming to talk to Donie. My thinking went like this. Brendan was planning to use that cottage to generate a good income. He had something shady in mind, or he’d’ve told you about it. Which means he would’ve needed to talk to people who have shady connections. The only people like that round here are the boys who come down from Dublin selling drugs. And I’d seen Donie hanging out with them in the pub.”

Trey nods, one tight jerk. She’s following him. She’s still white, but the wildness has gone out of her eyes.

“So I went to call on Donie. I knew, like you said, he wouldn’t be too eager to tell the story to a stranger—specially since, if you heard I was a cop, he had to have heard the same thing. But we came to an understanding in the end.”

“Didja beat him up?”

“Nah. No need. You only have to meet Donie once to know he’s not a big player. He’s just some two-bit hanger-on, kissing the real guys’ asses and scared shitless of them the whole time. So all I had to do was make it sound like I knew a lot more than I did, and then tell Donie if he didn’t fill in the gaps for me, I was gonna make sure his city friends heard he’d been talking to a cop.”

Trey clearly approves of this. “And he talked?”

“Sang like a little birdie,” Cal says. “Donie isn’t exactly a mastermind, so he mighta had some details wrong, but I think he got all the bones of the matter in place. Here’s what he says, anyway. You know all that crap up in Brendan’s hideout?”

Trey nods sharply.

“Sometimes people get hold of stuff they shouldn’t have. Then they sell it on.”

“Brendan’s not a thief.”

“Shut up and listen, kid. I’m not saying he is. What I’m saying is, sometimes it might take these people a while to find buyers. While they’re looking, they need somewhere to store the stuff. Somewhere secure and out of the way, so no one’s gonna stumble on it by mistake, and the cops won’t find it unless they know exactly where to look. If these guys find the right place, run by someone reliable who’s gonna keep their stuff safe, they’ll pay decent rent.”

“Like a warehouse.”

“Yeah. Exactly like. And a place like here, not too far from the border, this is prime territory. Brendan saw a gap in the market, and he realized his hideout was the perfect place to fill it. All he needed to do was fix it up some, and get in touch with people who’d use it.”

Trey evaluates this. Apparently she can fit this level of shadiness into her idea of Brendan. She nods.

“So Brendan started fixing the place up. Maybe he even got a couple of local guys using it, here and there, but they’d be too small-time to be much use to him. He needed to land some bigger fish.”

“The lads from Dublin,” Trey says.

“This part’s where Donie got a little hazy on the details,” Cal says. “No one’s gonna tell a dumbass like him more than they need to; he just got given the general gist of what went down. Best he can tell, Brendan waited till the Dublin boys were in town and asked them to put him in touch with people who might want his services. They were interested, but there was a little bit of disagreement among them about Brendan’s operation. Some of them thought he’d be an asset, but some of them thought he’d be more of a liability. From what I can gather, they’re planning on running something of their own up those mountains, and they didn’t want Brendan and his clients drawing police attention in that direction.”