Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

Hard head-shake.

“Someone send you?”

Incredulous grimace, like Cal just said something bizarre. “Nah.”

“You do this as a regular thing? Watch people?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

After a moment the kid shrugs.

Cal waits, but no further information is forthcoming. “OK,” he says, in the end. “I don’t much care why you were doing it. But that shit stops now. From now on, you get the urge to watch me, you do it like this. Face-to-face. This is the only warning I’m gonna give you. We clear?”

The kid says, “Yeah.”

“Good,” Cal says. “You got a name?”

The kid has relaxed a notch or two, now that he knows he’s not going to need to run. “Trey.”

“Trey,” Cal says. “I’m Cal.” The kid nods, once, like this confirms what he already knew. “You always this chatty?”

The kid shrugs.

“I gotta get some coffee inside me,” Cal says. “And a cookie or something. You want a cookie?”

If the kid’s been trained in stranger danger, this is a bad move, but Cal doesn’t get the sense he’s been trained in much of anything. Sure enough, he nods.

“You’ve earned it,” Cal says. “Back in a minute. You sand this down meanwhile.” He tosses Trey the second runner and heads up the garden without looking back.

Inside, he makes himself a big mug of instant coffee and finds his pack of chocolate chip cookies. Maybe those will get Trey talking, although Cal doubts it. He can’t get a handle on this kid. He might have been lying, in one or more places, or he might not. All Cal gets off him is urgency, so concentrated that it shimmers the air around him like heat coming off a road.

When Cal goes back outside, Kojak is snuffling in the undergrowth at the base of the shed, and Mart is leaning on the fence with a packet of ham slices dangling from one hand. “Well, begod,” he says, inspecting the desk, “it’s still alive. I’ll have to wait for my firewood.”

The half-sanded runner and the sandpaper are lying on the grass. The kid called Trey is gone, like he was never there.

THREE

Over the next few days there’s no sign of Trey. Cal doesn’t take this to mean that the matter is concluded. The kid struck him as a wild creature, even more than most, and wild creatures often need some time to percolate an unexpected encounter before they decide on their next step.

It rains day and night, mildly but uncompromisingly, so Cal takes the desk inside and goes back to his wallpaper. He enjoys this rain. It has no aggression to it; its steady rhythm and the scents it brings in through the windows gentle the house’s shabbiness, giving it a homey feel. He’s learned to see the landscape changing under it, greens turning richer and wildflowers rising. It feels like an ally, rather than the annoyance it is in the city.

Cal is reasonably certain that the kid isn’t going to screw with his place while he’s out, certain enough that on Saturday night, when the rain finally clears, he heads down to the village pub. It’s a two-mile walk, enough to keep him at home in bad weather. Mart and the old guys in the pub find his insistence on walking hilarious, to the point of driving home alongside him calling out encouragement or making herding noises. Cal feels that his car, a loud, grumpy, geriatric red Mitsubishi Pajero, is noticeable enough to attract the attention of any bored officer who might be tooling around, and that it would be a bad idea to score himself a DUI while he’s still waiting for his firearm license, which can be denied if he’s known to be of intemperate habits.

“Sure, they oughtn’t to give you a gun anyway,” Barty the barman told him, when he pointed this out.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re American. Ye’re all mental with the guns, over there. Shooting them off at the drop of a hat. Blowing some fella away because he bought the last packet of Twinkies in the shop. The rest of us wouldn’t be safe.”

“What would you know about Twinkies?” Mart demanded, from the corner where he and his two buddies were ensconced with their pints. Mart feels a responsibility, as Cal’s neighbor, to defend him against a certain amount of the ribbing he gets. “It’s far from Twinkies you were reared.”

“Didn’t I spend two year on the cranes in New York? I’ve et Twinkies. Horrible fuckin’ yokes.”

“And did anyone shoot you?”

“They did not. They’d better sense.”

“Should’ve done,” one of Mart’s buddies said. “Then we might have a barman who could put a dacent head on a pint.”

“You’re barred,” Barty told him. “And I’d’ve liked to see them try.”

“There you are, then,” Mart said triumphantly. “And Noreen doesn’t stock Twinkies anyhow. So let this fella have his rifle, and give him his pint.”

The pub, identified as Seán Óg’s by lopsided Celtic letters above the door, is in the same down-at-heel cream-colored building as the shop. During the day people wander back and forth, buying cigarettes to take back to the pub or bringing their pints into the shop so they can lean on the counter and chat with Noreen, but at night the connecting door is locked, unless Barty needs bread and ham to make someone a sandwich. The pub is small and low-ceilinged; it has a red linoleum floor with the occasional fraying piece of carpet positioned apparently at random, an eclectic assortment of battered bar stools, splitting green PVC banquettes around rocky wooden tables, a wide variety of beer-themed bunting, a plaque mounted with a rubber fish that sings “I Will Survive,” and a cobwebby fishing net draped from the ceiling. Whoever put up the net distributed a few glass balls artistically inside it, as a finishing touch. Over the years patrons have added multiple coasters, a rubber boot and a Superman figure missing one arm.

Seán Óg’s is, by its own standards, buzzing tonight. Mart and a couple of his buddies are in their corner, playing cards with two unprepossessing young guys in tracksuits whom they’ve acquired somehow. The first time Cal saw Mart and his homies bring out the cards, he expected poker, but their game is something called Fifty-Five, which they play with a speed and ferocity out of all proportion to the small piles of coins accumulating on the table. Apparently the game flows best with four or five, and when no one else is available, they try to rope Cal in; Cal, knowing when he’s outclassed, stays clear. The young guys are going to lose their wages, if they have wages, which looks unlikely to Cal.

A parallel group of guys is sitting at the bar, arguing. A third group is in another corner, listening to one play the tin whistle, a fast spiraling tune that makes the others tap their hands on their knees. A woman called Deirdre is sitting on a banquette on her own, holding a small glass in both hands and staring into space. Cal is unsure what exactly Deirdre’s deal is, although he gets the general gist. She’s somewhere in her forties, a dumpy woman with depressing dresses and an unsettlingly vague stare in her large droopy eyes. Occasionally one or another of the old guys will buy her a double whiskey, they’ll sit side by side and drink without saying a word to each other, and then they’ll leave together, still in silence. Cal has no intention of inquiring about any of this.

He sits at the bar, orders a pint of Smithwick’s from Barty and listens to the music for a while. He doesn’t have the names in here straight yet, although he has most of the faces, and the gist of the personalities and relationships. This is excusable, given that Seán Óg’s clientele is a shifting bunch of clean-shaven white guys over forty, all wearing more or less the same hardy trousers and padded vests and ancient sweaters, and most of them looking like cousins; but the truth is that, after twenty-five years of maintaining an intricate mental database of everyone he met on the job, Cal enjoys the lackadaisical feeling of not bothering to remember whether Sonny is the one with the big laugh or the one with the cauliflower ear. He has a good handle on who he should avoid or seek out, depending on whether he’s in the mood for talk and what kind, and he figures that’s plenty to keep him going.