The Dead Yard (29 page)

But it didn’t happen.

"All right, job well done," Gerry said.

We walked back to the van.

Gerry drove. He dropped Touched and me back at the house on PI and gave Jackie a lift back
into town for his long hours ahead. Jackie would have to scour the place of blood and any clues
that she’d met a violent end. Definitely an all-nighter. But at least he wouldn’t find a fax from
the FBI or MI6 confirming Samantha’s request for a million dollars and a pardon from Spain and
Mexico. She either hadn’t gotten round to asking for that yet, or, like the professional agent
she was, she’d destroyed the note as soon as she’d gotten it.

"This way," Touched said, leading me not to the guesthouse but instead to a basement room in
the main house.

I was relieved. If I didn’t sufficiently convince Touched and this was to be my prison cell it
would be ok. Eventually the FBI backups were bound to notice that Samantha was missing and they’d
come looking for me; and if I was still alive they’d find me down here. Hopefully, before Touched
had a chance to work his magic.

The dead channel of the TV casting a dismal glow out into the thick air of the musky room. The
blinds drawn but sunlight filtering through the gaps, illuminating the dust spirals rising from
the heat of the floor. Outside crickets and grasshoppers beginning their summer song and
greenheads and biting flies waking from their nighttime slumber, ready for another day of greedy
torment on the human population of the island.

Morning.

I was knackered, but Touched was exhausted too. He wasn’t up for this. Asking questions
without torture, where was the fun in that? Harder than it looked.

He had sat me in a comfortable old leather reclining chair, but five hours with my right hand
cuffed to the radiator and the worry that one slip would mean certain death was still a dark
night of the bloody soul.

Touched yawned.

"Let’s go through this one more time," he said, rubbing at the blear in his eyes.

He’d asked about random times in my life, what school I’d gone to, my teachers, where I’d
shopped in Belfast, the names of various pubs. And of course he realized that if I was an
Englishman or an American pretending to be an Irishman I was impossibly good. Still, that didn’t
prove I wasn’t working for the FBI. He’d asked about every year of Sean’s life, asked names,
contacts, addresses. But I’d broken the back of him in the wee smalls and after that his heart
wasn’t in it.

Or at least so it appeared.

One thing you couldn’t do with Touched was underestimate him.

That was ok too. I was patient and I’d wait him out. I wanted to wait him out. I was in a
dangerous place, but the moment I’d seen Samantha I’d made a decision. The mission had changed.
It was no longer about money or the Sons of Cuchulainn. Touched had taken it into the realm of
the personal, and I’d decided that whatever else happened I wasn’t running now. I was in it for
the long haul. Now it was between him and me. Let the Sons of Cuchulainn carry out their little
fantasies, let them have their delusions of grandeur. Let them do what they wanted. But give me
time alone with him. Before I escaped to the feds, before I got away from these people, I’d make
bloody sure that he got what was coming to him. No trial for you, Touched. Gerry and the rest,
yes, but I’m taking care of you myself.

Touched yawned loudly and I could see he was hamming it.

He was about to roll his final play.

"So between March 1992 and November 1992 you don’t remember where you were working at all?" he
asked quietly.

I shook my head.

"It was either in London or it was Spain, I don’t fucking remember, Touched, I really don’t.
I’m beat," I said.

He stood up and got himself a drink of water from a tap in the corner. He hit the TV set to
switch it off.

He turned and looked at me.

Carefully, he took his little green toolbox from an inside jacket pocket. He opened it and
removed a blood-encrusted scalpel.

His eyes narrowed.

"You think you’re so fucking smart. Well, you’re not. You’re as smart as her and that’s not
smart enough," he said coldly.

He walked over, threw his arm round my neck, pulled my head back, and brought the bloody
scalpel up to my eyeball.

"Tell me the fucking truth," he said. "Tell me the truth or I’ll fucking cut you right
now."

The bloody blade touched my eyelid. It made me wince. Fear rushed through me.

But I wasn’t going to lose it now.

"I don’t fucking remember, Touched," I insisted.

He pushed on the blade for a horrible ten seconds but then he let go the grip around my neck,
removed the scalpel, and shook his head.

He yawned.

"Ugh, it doesn’t matter, Sean, I don’t remember anything of the 80s and not much of the early
90s either," he said with a half-laugh.

I nodded.

"So you finally believe me?"

"Aye, I think you’re ok. I have a sixth sense for these things. You’re one of us. I’ve thought
so all along…. There’s just that one wee thing."

"What one wee thing."

"Well, ach, it’s nothing, it’s just that you’re a bit too good to be true, you know? You’re
cool and you’re clever and you’re young. And you fell in our lap at just the right time. Do you
see what I mean?"

"Not really."

"No. Well, it doesn’t matter. The thing is, I want to believe you and it’s easy to believe
you."

"You should believe me ’cos I’m telling the truth."

"Aye, so you say. You probably are. It’s nothing to do with you and I’m going to tell Gerry
that. It’s my fault, I’m just a suspicious old dog," he said with a mechanical wink.

He gave me a cup full of water. I drank it and leaned back in the reclining chair. Touched
rubbed his face.

"It’s morning," I said, looking out the basement window.

"Aye, we’ve been at this all night, and I still have to go and check up on Jackie and ring my
wee pal in Portsmouth Harbor. Fuck it. Ok. Ok. I think we’ll call it right here," Touched said
with weary eyes.

"Fine by me," I said. "You wanna undo the cuff?"

With him tired and the cuff off and the gun in the other corner of the room I could fucking
kill him right now. But Touched was an old pro.

He backed away, got his gun, and took another drink of water.

He shook his head.

"Like I say, I’m a sussy oul dog. But still, we’re on the job today and I’m going to have to
keep you under close observation until then. Do you mind?" he said, sounding a bit ashamed of
himself.

"You got to do what you think is right," I said like a good little disciple.

Touched stood, threw me another set of cuffs, and motioned me to fasten my wrists together.
Only then would he undo the chain to the radiator.

"Ok, what time is it? Let me see, six, ok, I can hear them moving around upstairs. Well, what
I suggest is this. You and me go upstairs and get some breakfast and I’ll buzz Jackie and we both
have a big bloody sleep for four or five hours. Let them do all the packing and hard work. We’ll
kip, have some lunch. Go to Portsmouth, get our man, and head to the cabin. What do you say?"

"Sounds good to me," I muttered.

"It wasn’t too bad, was it?"

"I’m wrecked, Touched, totally wrecked. I hope you did all this with Jackie and Seamus, too,
and all the others," I said.

He put his arm round my shoulder.

"Come up for breakfast. Got to keep those cuffs on ya until after the op or at least until I’m
sure. Do you think you can sleep with them on?"

"I doubt it," I said.

"Cuff your good ankle to the bed. What about that?" Touched said in an attempt to be
tender.

It made me hate him all the more.

"Whatever you say, mate," I told him.

He led me upstairs. He threw me the key so I could eat breakfast, but he was sitting at the
other end of the table and he had the gun in his pocket now.

After I’d forced myself to swallow some toast and eggs, he made me cuff myself again, took me
to my old room upstairs, and handcuffed my ankle to the iron bedstead, only then undoing the
wrists. Suspicious old dog was right. And from his extreme caution, it was not impossible that
he’d seen through my act and actually he was the one fooling me, not vice versa. Not impossible,
but not likely.

Touched waved goodbye, shut the door, and I lay back on the bed.

I closed my eyes. But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t come down from the high plateau of
concentration. One wee slipup and I’d be joining Samantha in a hole in the salt pan.

Samantha.

Oh my God, Samantha.

What a hero she’d been. Saying nothing, when it would have been so easy to give me up to end
her pain. If I got out of this alive I’d make sure the Brits knew about her courage.

I stared at the cloud patterns through the window and watched the tide come in, and then,
despite everything, I did manage to doze for a while….

Two, three hours later?

The door opened.

Gerry was standing there.

He walked to the bed and undid the handcuff at my foot.

"We won’t be needing that anymore," he said.

I was free.

I sat up, rubbing my ankle to get the circulation back.

Gerry was easy, even if he was armed. A dropkick to the sternum. Get him on the floor, rip
that revolver from him, grab a pillow to act as silencer, shoot the fucker twice, one in the gut,
one in the head, run down through the house looking for Touched. But where was Touched and the
rest of them?

"Where is Touched? I should really tell him that there’s no hard feelings."

"Oh, he’s gone already, and listen, I want to talk to you about that, better that he’s not
here."

"Go ahead."

His big frame lumbered up beside me and his sad eyes blinked slowly.

"Sean, I just want to let you know that I’m very sorry about all of this. This is not how I
customarily treat my guests," he said.

I don’t know what was worse, Touched’s suspicions or Gerry’s constant fucking apologies.

"It doesn’t matter," I said.

"I had no idea he had shackled you and it will not happen again…. I want to let you know that
I for one never doubted you."

"It’s ok," I said, standing up and balancing myself.

"No, it’s not ok. Goddamnit, you saved my daughter’s life. And I was moved by that more than
you can ever know, Sean," Gerry said, his eyes getting all watery. "Touched doesn’t want me to
tell you this, but I feel so terrible about the way he’s been abusing you in the hospitality of
my house. And he even wants to…" Gerry’s voice trailed off.

He’d certainly piqued my bloody interest, though, and I couldn’t let it stop there.

"What?"

Gerry sighed. "Oh, I suppose it’s nothing really. But I wanted to let you know that he’s asked
our friends in Belfast to check you out too. We should have word back in a couple of days and
then the cloud will be gone permanently. We’ll do a proper induction ceremony into the Sons of
Cuchulainn and after that, my boy, you’ll start to see how we really work. What the FBI don’t
realize is that we’re not lunatics or chaos merchants, we’re smart, and we’re long-term thinkers,
and we’ll get it right, you’ll see."

I hoped I wasn’t showing any emotion. There were two ways they could check me out back home.
They could look into the police computer files, school records, that kind of thing and Sean
McKenna would be fine. Six had sorted all that out for him. But the other way might be more
tricky. If these "friends" actually went to the trouble of asking questions in the alleged
neighborhoods where I used to live, went to the schools I used to attend, talked to the men I
supposedly knew, well, then things could be quite a bit hairier.

I shrugged and smiled.

It didn’t matter to me anyway. I had already made up my mind. I was staying in until I
butchered him and if it meant I had only a couple of days of safety, well, then that
rapist-murderer had only a couple of days too.

We stood in the driveway while Gerry lowered the flags. The van was loaded up, and the two
vehicles were ready. Kit was wearing a black trench coat that didn’t suit her, a wool sweater,
and a Boston Red Sox wool hat.

"How far up is this cabin? You look as if we’re going to the North Pole," I asked her.

Kit looked at me and smiled. She was goofy but she could get me killed, that girl. One blab to
Touched about the army and I’d be dead meat.

"You’d be surprised how cold it can get. You ever look at the weather reports in the papers?
On days when it’s ninety degrees in Boston, a hundred degrees in New York, check out Mount
Washington and it’s like forty."

Sonia laughed.

"She’s exaggerating, Sean. It won’t be that cold. And the cabin isn’t even in the mountains.
We won’t be anywhere near Mount Washington," she said.

Kit’s nose wrinkled up in a way that would have made the Ottoman eunuchs weep into their
sherbet.

And because she looked so beautiful I had to insult her.

"That coat doesn’t really work on you, it’s trailing along the ground," I said.

"That’s what I told her," Jackie said.

"You two know nothing. It’s called a trail-duster frock coat. They’re, like, making this film
next summer called
The Matrix,
Keanu is in it and that’s the whole look," she said.

"Again with Keanu," Jackie groaned.

I turned my attention to Sonia, who also looked radiant in a summer dress that shimmered
brilliantly with the light behind her.

"It’s in the woods though, right?" I asked.

"It is in the woods, a very beautiful part of the state, I think you’re going to like it very
much. We’ll have so much fun," Sonia said happily.

Sonia, it seemed, was unaware of the "surprise" that was going to happen to us when we got up
there. The mysterious plan B.

"Gerry said something about the fall colors."

"Oh, we’re far too early for that, but you never know. Anyway, since I’m the pathfinder I’d
better go," she said. She kissed Gerry and Kit, waved, and drove off in the Mercedes.