The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (33 page)

“From off her finger?”

“Of course from off her finger. From right where your grandda placed it.”

“That one's the fake.”

“What fake?”

“That's not the real one. That's the replica, crafted to look like the genuine article.”

“You never mentioned a fake.”

“The real one's tucked beneath her. Underneath her arse.”

Lafferty's mind stalled in the processing of the words, as he stared at the black of the dirt, the fake ring clutched in his fist.

“Just grab it, Mister. I'll explain it to you later.”

And so he did. He took a deep breath, diving in again. Never let the air out of him till he was standing once more. Dizzy, his mind still spinning. “Got it?” said she. He nods. “Hand it up then,” and so he did.

She tilted her head as she took it, sticking it straight in the pocket of her jeans. He drew in a great chestful of air, all the dread leaking out of him, and, reaching up to take her hand, doesn't he glimpse the oddest flash, too feeble for lightning, and doesn't he hear the faintest roar, too weak for thunder, a sight and a sound he could put together only after the fact as the back of the shovel coming barreling gangways toward his face at great velocity, behind which was Eena, the wee girl swinging the thing for all she was worth, like a champion hurler on the pitch.

 

Was he ever truly out? He was never truly certain, for it seemed as though no time had passed at all till he found himself slumped in the corner of the hole, on the lid of the box, white stars in his head drifting away, slowly letting blackness seep back in. And all the while the sight of Peggy in his mind, standing over him with her frying pan. He crawled up out of the hole, dirt crumbling back in with a rattle on the lid. Felt the lump on the side of his head, hair matted down in the dampness there. Down across the graveyard by the hedgerow, Peggy's car was gone. A light or two down across the village. No sounds at all now, the dog having gone to sleep, or having been murdered, just the whisper of a breeze restless through the trees. Lafferty picked up the shovel, wondered what the bloody thing was doing in his hand, and dropped it into the hole with a clatter.

He didn't head down toward the road. He went up higher instead among the gravestones, resting himself up a ways by a mossy Celtic cross, not far from the hunched-over trees.

There he waited. Not another five minutes gone by till he saw the headlamps. Sure enough, turning into the car park. Peggy's little Ford, the girl climbing out, Eena. Scrambling up toward the grave of her granny. If indeed it was her granny at all.

“Mister?” she cried. “Mister! Where are you? Jesus, I'm sorry!”

Down the hill, down his nose, Lafferty watched her panicky antics. Lighting the torch, she pointed it down in the hole, the beam bounding up again as if swatted away, and then all about the graveyard in a skelter of bedlam. Far too feeble to reach him. Lafferty watched, breathing in the cool night air.

“Where are you? Mister? Terrence? I don't know whatever come over me.”

He watched. Watched the spirit seeping out of her. Saw the torch beam droop and falter, then fail altogether. Watched the shadow of her trailing away back down across the graveyard to the car. He considered showing himself, confronting her, but in the end he couldn't do it. In the end he couldn't be certain the passenger seat of the car was empty.

So he watched. She climbed into the car and drove away, tail lamps disappearing down the road. When they were gone, when the sound of the engine had trailed off altogether in the still night air, not until then did he unclench his fist, no easy feat, so cramped was it from the work and the will. He held the thing up. Beheld it there. Even in the black of the night it gleamed against the sky, the genuine article, the real glimmering thing, the actual Ring of Kerry.

 

Mrs. Lafferty had not raised her son to work with his hands. He'd always found manual labor distasteful, and so it was with travel by foot. So it came to pass an hour or two later, maybe more, when the eastern sky was beginning to give in to gray and the car came up the motorway, that Lafferty changed his plan and stuck out his thumb.

For a long while the magic of the ring on his finger had sustained him, the heft and history and beauty and sheer gold lifting him above his weariness, and he'd vowed to trek on till morning, get as far away as he could on foot, then find shelter, rest, then plan out the rest of his life. He'd have put the ring in his pocket in the first place, only there were holes there, bloody holes his bloody wife could never be bloody bothered to sew, so he'd slipped it on his pinkie instead, where it fit snug as a rubber. But the weariness at last overcame him, that and the ache of his head, and after first determining that the car in question bore no resemblance to the little brown Ford of his erstwhile wife, Lafferty stuck out his thumb.

It was a big black car, posh and polished to a gleam, that came to a stop on the side of the road. Lafferty hustled up, climbing in. A man was behind the wheel, a man all dressed to the nines with his vest buttoned up, a man with a face full of smiling teeth, his hair pulled back in a ponytail and gleaming as bright as the car. “Lonely night for thumbing,” he said.

“It is,” said Lafferty.

“Where to?”

He was totally unprepared for the question. “Which way are you heading?”

The driver had to smile again, leaning up to the wheel. “West.”

“West it is, then,” Lafferty said, pointing like a cowpoke. “West across the island.”

There came a loud metallic click, the sound of the doors being locked, and Lafferty felt a jolt. The driver wasn't driving. He nodded toward Lafferty's lap, where his hand lay. “Lovely ring you're wearing.”

The first thing he was was surprised. The last thing he supposed was the thing could be seen in the dark. He was about to respond with the first inanity that popped into his head,
nothing special
, when he looked at the lap of the driver, where a gun was quietly glinting.

“You'd be Ray, then,” he said.

Ray smiled even broader. “And you'd be Mister Lafferty.” He nodded again toward the ring. “Hand it over.”

“I can't get it off.”

“What do you mean you can't get it off?”

“I mean it won't come off.”

The gun twitched up with impatience. “Give it a yank then.”

“I'm after giving it a yank. I'm after giving it a yank and a tug and a jerk and a pull. The bloody thing won't budge.”

“Try spitting on it.”

“I'm after spitting on it, too—do you think I'm a bloody eejit?”

“Try it again with the spit. Only wipe it off good before you hand it over.”

To no avail again. Lafferty nearly pulling off the skin.

“Stick it over here.” Lafferty did, and Ray grabbed and yanked, yanking the finger nearly out of the socket, the shoulder nearly out of its own. Nor did twisting, prying, cajoling, and cursing do any good at all. Ray sat back and slapped the wheel, twisting his head to glare out the window at the sky growing bright. “You're spoiling my morning, Mister Lafferty.”

“Get some butter,” Lafferty suggested. “Butter always works.”

“Mister Lafferty,” said Ray, leaning over calm and peaceful. “I have no butter. Do you see any butter? Do you think I'm carrying butter in my fucking pocket?” The volume gradually increasing, as was the redness of his face. “Do you think there's butter in the glovebox? There is no bloody butter! No butter on my person, in the car, lying out by the road, no butter within miles of this godforsaken shithole! There is no fucking butter!”

“I should have known butter,” said Lafferty. Why, he didn't know.

Nor did Ray. He glared a moment, then started the car with a roar, turned, heading back toward Ballybeg. He settled into silence for a while, though it was a fierce silence to be sure, the ferocity of which was exhibited by his reckless driving, the likes of which would have caused Lafferty to fear for his life, had that fear not already been in place.

Finally he slowed to a civil speed. “Mister Lafferty. Reach into the glovebox there. A celebration, a wee drop to the recovery of the ring.”

Lafferty, leery, did as he was told. It was a bottle of Powers, clear and gold.

“Well?” said your man, glancing askance at the faltering Lafferty. “Not thirsty?”

“Awfully early,” said Lafferty.

“Give it over,” Ray said. Lafferty handed him the bottle, and he took a gurgling draft, handing it back to Lafferty. “There. No poison. Now drink.”

Lafferty shrugged. “To the Ring of Kerry,” he said, tipping it up.

Ray looked at him, puzzled by the mention of the tourist trap. “Take another,” he said, and so Lafferty did. “There's a lad,” Ray said, smiling now. He'd the face of a child, Lafferty noticed, the face of a child of the streets. Dangerous to be sure, but innocent as well, with a certain capacity for compassion. They drove for a while in time to the gurgles and swallows, Ray seemingly pensive, peering out through the windscreen at the windy little road. Nearly back to Ballybeg, he spoke. “Do you like puzzles, Mister Lafferty?”

Lafferty, puzzled, neither nodded nor spoke.

“Have another,” Ray said, “and I'll tell you a puzzle. Eena—our mutual friend—calls me up in Dublin, what, not three hours ago, and isn't she crying, full of grief and misery to tell me what's happened, how Mister Lafferty has absconded with our ring. And what do you suppose is the story she tells me?” Looking Lafferty's way again, drawing a blank again. “No guess in you then at all? Not very keen at the puzzles, are you?

“Why, she'd wanted to surprise me. To fetch the ring back to me all on her own, to atone for all the harm she done me back then.” Glancing again at Lafferty. “You'd be unaware of the harm, then? How she cost me four bloody years of my life?” And so Ray told him. How Eena, five years before, had brung the ring to his attention in the first place. How Eena, who'd been a domestic for the wealthy Mrs. Moore, owner of said ring, had botched the simple snatch-and-switch late at night when the old lady was laid out at home for the wake. How just as Ray was about to do the switch, Eena knocked over a tray full of dirty saucers and such, alerting the family, who apprehended your man beating feet down the lane with the replica, which of course they mistook for the real thing. And Eena meanwhile fleeing under cover of the ruckus, having stashed the real McCoy under the old lady's dead arse. And how her clumsiness cost him four years in Portlaoise—from which he'd been sprung but a few days before.

“So here's the puzzle then. Am I to believe she was going to fetch the ring back to me? Or was she planning to make off with the bloody thing all along, go off on her own, and myself left in the proverbial lurch? What am I to believe, Mister Lafferty? Do you yourself believe little Eena Brown to be capable of treachery and betrayal? For I understand you've got to know her well since the day you left her the stinking little two-punt tip.”

Lafferty was stung, though he kept it to himself.

“But the thing of it is, Mister Lafferty,” said he, “the thing of it is, she could well be telling me the truth. That's the nature of her. That's Eena. She might well have been planning to bring me a get-out-of-jail present. Or she might have been planning to fuck me. With Eena, you just never know.”

Lafferty didn't know, couldn't even think about sorting the thing out in his mind. Ray nodded. “Take another drink,” he said, and Lafferty did, thankful for small blessings.

At Rattigan's everything was gray, everything from the sky right down to the pavement beneath his feet when he stepped from the car. Something moved in the window—Eena peeping through the ratty green curtain. Peggy's car nowhere to be seen, and only one other car in the car park, several doors down, Lafferty concluding that the owner of a rusty yellow Fiat with a dent in the fender would not possess the formidability needed to come to his aid at all.

Eena rushing to Ray where she buried her face in his shoulder left Lafferty more stricken than ever. Wounded and hollow, and lightheaded from the whiskey, not to mention the thump on the noggin. Shot through with fear and sorrow. Though how much of the burying of her face was out of love for your man, how much out of not wanting to look Lafferty in the eye? Ray gently stroked the nape of her neck under the rowdy red hair.

“Mister Lafferty,” said Ray, pointing the gun toward the bed. “Sit.”

Lafferty did. Ray handed the gun to Eena, who held it in both of her hands like a foreign object, like a spade or a tray full of dishes. Ray took off his jacket, hanging it neatly on the rack. He unbuttoned his vest, removing it as well, hanging it beside the jacket. From the pocket of his trousers, he withdrew an object that Lafferty at first couldn't identify. When he placed it by the car keys on the rickety table, he saw it was a knife. A long knife. A long, shiny knife, and this before the blade was ever out of it. Ray removed his trousers, lined up the creases, hung them neatly over a hanger. Unbuttoned his shirt, hung it by the rest of his clothes, then stood there in his boxers and undershirt, Lafferty noticing the round pucker of a scar above his knee.

Eena looked at him as well, puzzled as well.

“The ring won't come free of his finger, love,” said Ray. “I have to perform surgery, and I don't fancy ruining a good suit of clothes with the blood.”

“Butter,” Lafferty said.

“Butter works,” said Eena.

Ray stamped his foot on the threadbare rug. “There is no butter!”

“There's always butter somewhere,” said Lafferty, his mouth dry as a cobweb.

Ray took the gun. “Into the bathroom,” he said, taking Lafferty by the collar. “Eena, love, bring the knife. Gather up the towels.”

Lafferty naturally resisted. Ray naturally pressed the gun to his cheek. “Mister Lafferty. I'm not a heartless man. I'm after allowing you your anesthesia—here, have another.” He handed Lafferty the bottle of Powers from the nightstand. “Now I intend to cut the pinkie from your hand to take possession of the ring that's rightfully mine. I paid four years of my life for it. I intend to cut it off you and leave you alive, without a pinkie, which, in your line of work as I understand it, will not be much of a hindrance. However, if I must, I will cut the finger from a dead man. It would, in fact, be a far easier trick.”