Islandbridge (5 page)

“Da, this is useless,” the son called out.

Rynn spoke without taking his eyes off Kelly's. “You wait over there,” he said. “And don't interrupt me again.”

When the son didn't move this time, Rynn stood.

“Whatever I do, I do,” he said to him. “Now go to the car.”

Kelly did not try to turn to watch as the footfalls went away.

“How do you know me anyway?”

“It's just talk. Like, members talk.”

“‘Members'– oh, Guards, you mean. Only talk is it?”

“There's pictures. In the station.”

“Junior too?”

The son, he meant, Kelly realized, Jimmy Junior.

“I never saw his there, no.”

Rynn looked back into the deeper shadows that lay beyond the reach of the street lights.

“You keep tabs as to who goes in and out of that club, don't you?”

“Look,” said Kelly. “It was my last shift, I was sick of it–”

“Answer the question.”

“Only if I think there's something to it. If they look like they'd be trouble later.”

“Who do you give that info to?”

“I don't. It's just a mental note, for myself. Nothing else, honestly.”

“Why did you let those headers in, the ones with my daughter?” Kelly let a few seconds go by trying to think what Rynn was getting at.

“Come on now. You're well able to talk.”

“I thought the fella inside could handle that. On a weekday night, I mean.”

“Who? His name.”

“Mick. Weekends there's two on the door, there has to be.”

Rynn let out a long, smoky breath from his nose. Then he turned aside and rubbed slowly at his face.

“Look,” he said. “Don't try to cod me. You know what happened back there.”

At these words, and the quiet, almost regretful way that Rynn had said them Kelly's mind rebelled. This was all an act. They had decided.

He felt that he weighed nothing now, that he could almost rise, and drift up into the night sky. He wondered if he was here at all, if maybe his mind hadn't caught up to what had happened to the rest of him, and had escaped on its own, after refusing to let this go on.

For a moment he saw himself floating over the city, seeing everything and everyone in it. He kept his eye on the dark form he took to be the son, just beyond the car. If the son was to sneak around behind to use the gun, he wanted to hear him, to be able to yell, at least.

“Right?”

Kelly felt his jaw beginning to go, his throat close with the urge to cry.

“You did your hero bit worrying about the two women. Brilliant move.”

“Look, I can,” and Kelly's voice broke. The sobs wrenched his chest. The father waited. Kelly almost heard the seconds tick.

“You can . . . ? You can what? Are you making me an offer? What have you got?”

Kelly could stare back through the tears into the Dubliner's face now. He wiped his nose with his sleeve, and tried again to stop the shivers running through his body.

“I'll tell you something new, mister,” said Rynn. “If you live to see tomorrow's newspaper, you'd read this: two low-life drug pushers, dealers, whatever they call themselves, I don't know. Two low-lifes found de– what's the word? Deceased, yes, suddenly deceased. Can you hear it on the news? ‘Deceased.' So maybe your mates will hear it, you know, in the cop shop. Do they do a roll-call thing like on
Hill Street Blues
?”

Kelly nodded.

“Good. Well maybe there'll be a little cheer will go up, do you think? Maybe your pals won't hear it though, because they'll be complaining about pay or Dublin or something. They're worse than the bloody farmers, or the teachers.”

Kelly heard distant, slow thumps again, those same metallic clanks as before. There had to be a train station, or yards, near.

“They'll cheer because their job was done for them. I mean to say, would you want your kid to be a heroin addict? Would you?”

The startled, sneering expression on that girl's face flashed through Kelly's mind.

“So don't you be thinking you're the family men, and we're the bad guys on this.”

Kelly saw the dark form that was the son begin to move. Without taking his eyes from Kelly the father called out.

“Bring it over, Jimmy. It's time.”

Kelly had already begun to move without even knowing it, but the kick caught him just under the ribs. It shocked him because it had come from the father. He tried again and this time it caught him in the shoulder. Still he heard no metallic click.

“Don't,” he called out. “Don't! I never did anything, I couldn't!”

“Give it to me, Jimmy.”

“I'll do it, Da. Get out of me way.”

“No: you started, but I'm going to finish. I'll show you how things is done. Remember we're all in it now, up to our eyes. So give it to me.”

Kelly didn't know if he was actually shouting or if it was all his thoughts.

The son said something he didn't hear.

“Wedding bells you're supposed to be hearing, isn't it?”

Kelly's eyes opened. Surprise, he felt, near a shock, that the dread had lifted, that everything was clear now. He wouldn't be crying, he wouldn't be pleading. He stared up beyond the end of the pistol to the shadowed face of Jimmy Rynn. Was it drops of rain he felt? He wondered why those kicks hadn't hurt. How the mind works, he thought, how little we know, how everything had led to this moment, one minute a kid by the tractor at home, another in school playing hurling, and then the time he'd met Eimear first.

Kelly caught the movement of the finger before everything went away in the flash and noise. He fell back, his thoughts still running, but calm too, wondering and surprised that that's how it was.

There was light against his eyelids, and still the grit and pieces of rubble and broken granulated windscreen from where he had lain. He heard talk, a low grunting cry. Angels, he decided, and like humans too probably, so it was true all along what he had hoped, that you got to continue on your odd life now in the new place.

A voice came through the ringing still going through his head.

“That's called reality.”

Kelly opened his eyes. Rynn let out the cigarette smoke in a thin plume.

“But it's postponed, for now,” he added.

The son seemed to be kicking something.

“Do you hear me?”

The red glow of the cigarette glimmered and glowed bright, and Rynn's face appeared again in the red gloom behind.

“Did you hear me, Kelly? Mister Garda Declan Kelly. Did you?”

Kelly nodded.

“In an hour I'll know where your parents live. Where your fiancée lives. I'll know what time she leaves for work every day. I'll know if your ma has varicose veins. How much money you have in the bank.”

Rynn went down on one knee. The pistol wavered in his hand. A sharp, smoky smell different from Rynn's cigarette stung Kelly's nose now.

“Yes, I'm taking a chance. A big chance. That's because two percent of me believes what you said about my daughter. Two percent is all I need to go on for now. Are you hearing me?”

Kelly's nod this time was more of a shudder.

“Okay, you're not in a position to call me a liar. That's fair enough. But just so's you know we're serious. That was a real bullet that did your hair for you. Remember that. And remember those two scumbags back at that place were the bane of many a family. They took the lives of people. They've ruined families. I don't do that. Whatever else I do, I don't do that.”

He stood up slowly.

“Think about that,” he said. “Think about that, when your young one, let's say when you and your missus-to-be do the business in a few weeks – you know the next steps, right? So let's say you're scoring goals and not just dribbling, let's say you'll have a young one same age as my young one. What, in 2000? Isn't that seventeen years? Okay. See, I was thinking about things like that and us driving around here. Numbers. Sums. I was always good at them. So I see the year 2000, the start of the next I don't know what you call it, centuries or something. But it's important, for some reason. Maybe I'm gone mental, but I don't think so. Let's just say it'll be a fresh start. A turning point.”

He nodded and grimaced as he drew hard on the cigarette.

“Just don't get me wrong, Garda Kelly. I've done stuff, whatever needed to be done. I'm afraid of no-one. No-one.”

Kelly heard paper rustling. Rynn was rummaging in his pocket again. Rynn's arm shot out and Kelly flinched. Something landed softly near him.

“For your hardships tonight,” said Rynn and he waved the pistol once. “You get the good with the bad.”

“It'll pay for a taxi. It's better money than being a bouncer, I'm telling you.”

Rynn turned and he looked around the small mounds of rubble, into the dark empty places high up on the walls where the windows had been.

“Leg or no leg, you'll manage,” he said. “You're built to take a bit of a hiding.”

Kelly saw the glow of a cigarette near the car. The son seemed to have gone quiet now.

“One last thing. The most important thing. Are you listening to me?”

Kelly nodded.

“I'm going to be phoning your place in the morning. No – not your cop shop. I'm not checking up on you. I don't need to do that. I mean your house or your flat or whatever you have. Be there when I phone. You know? I want to hear you say you understand.”

“I do. I understand.”

“And that you understand it's not just me, or him. If you get any more hero notions or run to your boss, even if I'm out of the picture, you're gone. You know that? Gone. No matter where you are. You, your missus, your parents. You hearing me?”

“Yes.”

“I do, say. Pretend you're doing the business. Pretend I'm the priest.”

“I do. Yes.”

Rynn nodded. He seemed to concentrate on where he had thrown the money. Then he turned and walked away.

Kelly watched him become a darker shadow, and then fade into the gloom by the wall. He listened for the footfalls on the rough ground. He began to elbow his way toward what looked like a bigger mound of clay and bricks. His rib hurt with each flexing of his arm. He didn't care if his hands were over glass. He heard the son's voice now, a single shout, and then something from Rynn. A car door opened. Rynn shouted something and he pulled it shut. Kelly got to one knee, listening for the second door.

He tried to stretch out his toes but the pain flared. The engine started, and screeched as the ignition was turned again. Kelly got up on one foot. There was nothing here to balance against. He drew in deep breaths as quietly as he could, and held his bad leg to hang in the air.

The tires bit into loose gravel and then found something more solid. Soon it crossed the sharp box of yellow cast by the lights on the street side the building. Kelly watched the car wallow and saw the jig of dull reflections dance over the car's roof. Then it was gone.

He began to hop. His head was suddenly full of the smell of his own body, and the rank smell of the rubbish from somewhere about him. He couldn't stop in time when some rubble by his shoe caught his foot. The other foot came down, and he gasped and cried out, and let himself fall to the side. Back on the ground again, he felt vulnerable, everything rushing back at him from the yellow haze of Dublin's lights over him. He reached down to feel the swelling, that warmth and numbness that would give way anytime to pain. He rubbed at the ankle, watched where the car had disappeared, listened. He couldn't take the chance of staying to rest, even a minute.

He realized that he had been talking out loud. Now it was his own hurried breaths he was hearing in the air around him. He got up again, and a new pain sliced into his side.

He found a half-mashed piece of PVC piping to his right, half-buried under clay and sharply broken cement. He pulled one loose, and it held as he tested his weight with it jammed into the ground beside him.

He stopped every few steps and used it to test the ground ahead of him. He worked around the mounds and away from the torn track the Rynns had driven out. In one of his stops, he heard a distant squeak and the dull thumps again. Trains for sure. This was somewhere in the centre of Dublin then. There had to be people, traffic, taxis.

He found a gap in the chain-link long ago widened and trampled down. The pipe caught in it but he held onto the lip of the fence and then a concrete pillar that was hanging by its rebar core. There were weeds growing by the fence, burst bags of rubbish and the leftovers of someone's old bathroom tiles.

Here was a street he didn't know, with just a high wall opposite, made of stone and topped by barbed wire. For a moment he thought he was near Kingsbridge, or beside that army barracks, what was the name of it.

Lights swept along the roadway then, from his right. He crouched and turned his face away. The car passed. He took down his arm, and looked down at the sleeve of this jacket he'd never wear again. He felt his mind began to slide, to capsize, the way it had when he'd fainted years ago with that flu. It felt he was fading into the street. He had to sit down, no matter how much it'd hurt him on the way down or back up again. Time passed, he didn't know how much. The sound of a car, and its lights, had him getting up again. He squinted into the headlights and tried to see a taxi sign on the roof.

The car swept by, leaving a fine spray from the road in its wake. He stared at the wet roadway but didn't see it for several moments. He hadn't said a prayer, not even when it looked like Rynn was going to kill him. But how could that be?

A sob escaped him. He felt numb now, and he wondered if he were about to pass out. A paralysis had come over him, one he couldn't break, and with it a terror that felt like it would only grow until it crushed him into the roadway here for ever. Maybe it had been too sudden, and he couldn't think? It was ridiculous to be thinking about this now, he knew, but still it pierced him. He understood that he was alone now.