Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“There’s not, like, a schedule, man. They ring me when they need me.”

“What’s Austin like?”

“You don’t wanta fuck with him,” Donie says. “I’m telling you now.”

“I don’t want to fuck with anyone, son,” Cal says, tossing the phone back onto the bedside table, where it lands in an ashtray with a dispirited puff of gray powder. “But sometimes life just turns out that way.” He gets up and dusts the residue of Donie’s chair off his pants. He feels like he needs a decontamination shower. “You can go back to sleep now.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Donie informs him.

The flat eyes say he’ll do it, if he doesn’t fuck it up. “No you’re not, you moron,” Cal says. “You do that, you’ll have a dozen detectives crawling all over this townland, interviewing the shit out of everyone about every piece of mopery that goes on in these parts. What do you think your Dublin buddies’ll do to you if you bring that shitstorm down on their heads?”

Donie may be dumb as a bag of hair in most ways, but he has an expert’s grasp of the intricate ways of trouble. He gives Cal a stare of pure vicious hatred, the kind that only comes from someone who’s no threat.

“See you round,” Cal says. He heads for the door, kicking a ketchup-crusted plate out of his way. “And clean this place up, for Christ’s sake. You make your mama live with this? Change your fucking sheets.”

On his way out Cal has himself a nice long wander around the lane behind Francie Gannon’s fields, taking a deep interest in the verges and checking to see if anyone is watching Donie’s place. He has a story about his lost sunglasses ready to go if anyone comes along asking, but the only person he sees is Francie Gannon, who waves cheerfully to him and calls something unintelligible, on his way somewhere with a bucket that looks heavy. Cal waves back and keeps looking, not urgently enough to make Francie come help him out.

When he reaches the conclusion that the place is clear, right now anyway, he walks home in a state of mounting irritation, more with himself than with anyone else. He reckoned all along, after all, that there was more going on underneath Mart’s quirky-yokel shtick; he just never put things together, which for someone in his line of work is an unpardonable level of dumb. Cal supposes he should be grateful for Mart’s protective herding, even if Mart was mainly motivated by the desire to prevent Cal from bringing down more trouble on the townland, but he’s not fond of being made to feel like a fool.

The morning has turned lavishly beautiful. The autumn sun gives the greens of the fields an impossible, mythic radiance and transforms the back roads into light-muddled paths where a goblin with a riddle, or a pretty maiden with a basket, could be waiting around every gorse-and-bramble bend. Cal is in no mood to appreciate any of it. He feels like this specific beauty is central to the illusion that lulled him into stupidity, turned him into the peasant gazing slack-jawed at his handful of gold coins till they melt into dead leaves in front of his eyes. If all this had happened in some depressing suburban clot of tract homes and ruler-measured lawns, he would have kept his wits about him.

He needs to talk to Austin. Austin sounds like a fun guy. If he’s the boss man, though, even just regionally, there’s better than a fifty-fifty shot that he’s the calculating subspecies of psycho, rather than the rabid kind. In this situation, unlike many, Cal considers that a plus. If he can convince Austin that Trey is no threat, then Austin is likely to abandon his silencing campaign as an unnecessary risk, rather than keeping it up just for entertainment. There’s even an outside chance Cal can persuade him to give Trey some level of answer in exchange for guaranteed peace and quiet. In order to gauge Austin well enough to wrangle him, though, Cal needs to do this face-to-face. He’s going to have to phone Austin and set up a meeting, pick his strategy on the fly depending on what he finds, and hope his meeting goes better than Brendan’s did.

The house and the garden look the same as they did when he left, and the rooks are happily doing their thing, making conversation and combing the grass for bugs, undisturbed. Cal unlocks the front door as quietly as he can, figuring the kid will likely be asleep again, and peeks into the bedroom. The bed is empty.

Cal spins round, his head blooming with fully fledged abduction scenarios. When he sees the bathroom door shut, he switches to picturing the kid collapsed on the floor, bleeding into her guts. He can’t believe he didn’t haul her to a hospital last night.

“Kid,” he says, outside the bathroom, as calmly as he can. “You OK?”

After a bad second, Trey pulls the door open. “You were fuckin’ ages,” she snaps.

She’s electric with nerves. So is Cal. “I was talking to Donie. Did you want me to do that or not?”

“What’d he say?”

The flare of terror in her eyes disintegrates Cal’s irritation. “OK,” he says. “Donie says your brother did get mixed up with the drug boys from Dublin. Not selling, you were right about that, but he was gonna be making meth for them. Only he fucked up, lost a bunch of their supplies. He was planning to meet up with them and make it right, and that’s the last Donie heard of him.”

He’s not sure if some or all of this is going to be more than Trey can take, but he’s done hiding stuff to protect her: look how well that worked out last time. The kid has a right, paid for and branded onto her, to true answers.

She absorbs it with an intentness that stills her jittering. “That what Donie actually said? No bullshit this time?”

“No bullshit. And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t bullshitting me, either. Not sure he told me every single thing, but I reckon what he did tell me was true.”

“Didja hurt him?”

“Yeah. Not too badly.”

“You shoulda battered the fucker,” Trey says. “Shoulda danced on his fucking head.”

“I know,” Cal says gently. “I would’ve loved to. But I’m after answers, not trouble.”

“You haveta talk to them, the lads from Dublin. Didja talk to them?”

“Kid,” Cal says. “Slow down. I’m gonna. But I need to work out the best way to go about it, so neither of us winds up with a bullet in our heads.”

Trey thinks that over, biting off skin from around her thumbnail, wincing when she catches her lip. In the end she says, “Didja see Mart Lavin?”

“No. Why?”

“He came looking for you.”

“Huh,” Cal says, mentally kicking himself. Of course Mart would have clocked Lena’s car and headed straight down here, truffle-hunting for gossip, the second he got a chance. “He see you?”

“Nah. I saw him coming, hid in the jacks. He went all round the house, when you didn’t answer the door. I heard him. Checking in the windows. Saw his shadow.”

The kid is starting to twitch with adrenaline again at the memory. “Well,” Cal says peacefully, “good thing my bathroom’s got that sheet over the window.” He takes off his coat and hangs it on its hook behind the door, moving nice and slowly. “You know why I put that up to begin with? ’Cause of you. Before we ever met. I knew someone was watching me, so I nailed that sheet up there to give me a little bit of privacy where it counts. And now it’s coming in useful to you. Funny how things turn out, huh?”

Trey gives a one-shouldered shrug, but her jittering has slowed down. “I know what Mart wanted, anyway,” Cal says, “and it’s got nothing to do with you. He saw Miss Lena’s car here, and he wants to know if me and her are hooking up.”

The look on Trey’s face makes him grin. “Are you?”

“Nope. There’s more’n enough going on without adding that in on top. You want anything? A snack, maybe?”