Islandbridge Read online

  “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 hear
d 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.

  The pain roaring up from his ankle brought him back. He realized he had sat back against the fence, his leg straight out ahead of him. He got up and used the broken pipe to get over the last of the chain-link. There was a doorway, a wide one, opposite, three-quarters of it in the gloom. A piece of the sign on the padlocked door met the light from the street lamp farther on. Eblana Electro something, he made out. Electroplating. Islandbridge.

  July 10, 1983

  Kelly’s eyes burned. All across his chest lay a weight, like a tightening belt. He had lain on the bed where he got in, in his clothes, and he remembered the huge jolt that had shaken him as he went into sleep. It was seven, now. That meant he’d gotten three hours of sleep, or less. The traffic had started already, its muted hush rubbing across the window.

  He managed to get through a small bit of breakfast, but he was bewildered by the terrible taste of everything. Now that he was home, he couldn’t decide if it was a lousy coincidence that he was starting his two days off, or a bit of luck. He remembered staring at the phone when he’d gotten home, and the awful, numb indecision.

  The taxi driver had taken him right up to the door of Casualty. He had spun him a story of being roughed up. When he got to the Casualty he changed it to falling. The doctor bandaging him had had a strong Indian accent. Kelly didn’t mind the open skepticism on his face. A twisted ankle was manageable.

  He took the leg down from the chair and reached down with his hand to the ankle. It wasn’t swollen at all. He sat up again, and looked around the flat. Everything here was the same but it wasn’t. Now he eyed the cardboard boxes he’d begun to stack near the door. They held the books and tapes he hardly listened to, as well as the trophies from the country championships, and the medals from Cluain Caomhin, his school, when they’d made it to the Munster Finals. Maybe that’s what had saved him then, the sports.

  He forced himself to think of Eimear. Mostly it worked, but she faded as did everything else, and without warning too, and for a moment he was back on the road with the slick, gritty cobblestones under his palms and the voice over him. But his mind was working, that he was certain. If that’s what the brain did, this shutting things out for a while, that’s what he would go with. He was fairly sure that it was shock, or plain and simple fear, but he needed time to figure this thing out.

  The main thing was that he was able to see things a bit clearer now. He knew that every minute he delayed telling what had happened last night made it worse. Several times already he had reached for the phone. In the end he had done nothing. He’d thought about an anonymous call, or telling someone who’d then tell for him – but no: he’d been through all the ways he could think of. Still he couldn’t make the move. He had to do something. Something ran cold in him at the thought, and then there was a kind of fury. No matter what he did, it’d turn out bad.

  He reached for a mug, and he had several moments to watch it wobble and hit the linoleum floor. He smacked the tabletop with his palms and he closed his eyes tight. He counted to five and opened them again. Everything was so strange in the room yet: the rings on the cooker, the angle of the taps over the sink; the half-empty wine bottle left from Sunday. He stared at the milk container near where his cup had been. Not phoning someone about this, not deciding even, they were decisions too. Time was running on: running out, really.

  He swiped the milk container hard enough for it to clear the floor before it crashed against the door. He felt some drops on his nose, one near his eye. He watched as the remains of it drained slower onto the floor. The quiet of the room after the whack got to him. He sensed a wave of panic closing on him and he got up. He wouldn’t be able to fight this off for much longer. Something had to be done: he had to talk to someone. He leaned against the cabinet and tried stretching out his toes. The splinter of pain shot up, seemed to hit him behind his eyes.

  Through the wall he heard a door being shoved closed and then a radio. There were squeaks as a drawer was pulled open. He listened for the water and sure enough it was turned on hard in the kitchen. Maybe it was early lectures for the three students, the slobs that he’d come to half like in the two years since they’d moved in. They could just get up and go to their lectures and do a bit of this and a bit of that and come home.

  There it was, that same goddamned tune they played toward the end at the club. “Every Breath You Take.”

  He pivoted to the sink and turned on the cold tap full. Drops reached his neck, and out over the lip of the sink onto his feet. He rested his hands flat on the bottom of the stainless steel sink and let his forehead rest on the cupboard door above. His eyes were sore even behind the closed lids. The tightness all over his body grabbed at his shoulders and his knees most.

  The water rose in the sink and tickled his wrist and forearms. There was four hundred and fifty-odd quid four inches from his forehead, in the souvenir mug from Crete. He’d never go back to that club on Capel Street again, never go down these streets and lanes around the Markets. He’d never stay in Dublin to get a Sergeant’s.

  The stream from the tap shot into the rising water, making a deeper sound. It was like a drill, he thought, or like a bullet. They must have been found by now, the two men. Maybe Rynn had taken them away, or sent someone to take them away somewhere. He saw himself then an hour from now hobbling into the station, soaking up some jibes about the leg and learning to dance and how was Eimear after it.

  It was to O’Keefe, his patrol partner, he should be talking to first. He would lay out what had happened last night, right from the word go. O’Keefe would know what to do. The law ran the place, not people like the Rynns, and the full powers of the Gardai would have each and every one of Rynn’s crowd swept off the streets. Then he remembered the father’s face, standing behind the pistol barrel. That drunken bitch of a daughter of his was behind all this, and then another kid of his, this lunatic of a son, was going nuts shooting people. And all Rynn’s remarks about family, and why it was okay to gun down two dealers, only made everything even worse.

  He imagined watching the judge pronouncing sentences on the Rynns. It’d be life for sure, and none other that Declan Kelly would be staring at them when it happened: ri
ght in the eye. Who would be the boss then?

  And then what?

  He’d be looking over his shoulder every day, is what. Moving, uprooting. What would Eimear do? Rynn could work from jail, put a number on him and Eimear. He’d be after revenge in the worst way, after letting Declan Kelly walk from this. There’d be his parents, Eimear’s family, anybody Rynn wanted.

  He left the tap running full. After a few moments he reached down and pulled out the stopper, and he watched the swirl begin. He shouldn’t have waited. He didn’t really have a choice now. He’d tell them it had been shock, or that he’d been paralyzed with fear, that he couldn’t think. It was true. First thing was make sure Eimear was safe, and he’d get them to let him go to somewhere. The States would be his first choice, or Canada maybe.

  The doorbell startled him. He turned the tap off and waited. The bell went again, the last note off, as it always had been, and probably always would be, in this flat. Hardly anyone used the doorbell.

  He headed for the hallway, using the chairs and then the wall to take the weight off the ankle. It was the postman’s bike against the railing outside.

  “Howiya boss?”

  Kelly took the chain off and opened the door. This cheerful, skinny Dub had been doing the road for twenty years.

  “I was asked to tell you something here, about your phone.”

  “What?”

  “Well, a fella says you’re related, or you will be. You’re tying the knot soon?”

  Kelly looked through the railings at the traffic.

  “Who told you that?”

  “A fella over there, sitting in a car. No, he’s around the corner there.”

  “Who is he? Is he there now?”

  A glaze came over the postman’s eyes.

  “You haven’t a clue, have you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “He’s your brother-in-law.”

  “My brother-in-law?”

  “To be, in anyways,” the postman replied. Then he cocked an eye at Kelly.

  “Tell us now,” he said. “Is there maybe a bit of a practical joke type of a thing going on here?”