Chapter 26
Declan
The wind through the missing rear windscreen is relentless. It fills the car with noise and cold and the taste of salt from the Atlantic, and it makes conversation difficult, which suits me fine because I need to think.
Aidan is driving fifteen kilometres over the speed limit, which for him is practically cautious.
The road straightens as we leave the coastal stretch and push inland.
I watch the wing mirror. Empty. Either they didn’t follow or they can’t, and given that Aidan drove over one of them, I’m guessing the latter.
My gun sits heavy in my lap. I haven’t put it away. I won’t until we’re back behind locked doors with the deadbolt set and every window checked. My hands are steady because they always are when things go sideways, but my mind is moving too fast for the rest of me.
Someone was watching the place. Either for Dervla or just anyone who might turn up and find whatever they missed.
Which means one of two things. Either they came back to finish the search, and got unlucky with timing.
Or they knew we were coming.
Neither option does wonders for my mood.
In the back, Dervla has her eyes shut, one hand clamped around the ledger, the other over the sealed envelope and hard drive in her lap.
Cormac is angled toward the broken rear, watching behind us with his gun low and ready, his body still keyed up from the hit.
Aidan keeps both hands on the wheel and says nothing, which is never a good sign.
He gets quieter the more dangerous things get.
I turn in my seat enough to look at Dervla properly. “You okay?”
Her eyes open. Sharp despite the shock. “Yes.” She brushes at her jacket. Tiny shards glitter on the black fabric and catch in her hair before she presses her fingers to her neck. “I’m fine.”
Cormac reaches over, picking a sliver of glass out of her hair with absurd care for a man who just helped flatten someone with a car. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Doesn’t mean I want you bleeding in my car,” Aidan says.
“It’s not your car,” Dervla mutters.
“Semantics.”
I twist back properly and hold out my hand. “Let me see.”
She stares at me for half a second, then lifts her chin and moves her hand away from the side of her neck.
There’s a thin line of blood just under her hairline and another on her cheek where the glass caught her.
Nothing deep. It still sends a cold pulse through me that I ignore because now is not the time.
“It’s superficial,” I say.
“Obviously.”
Cormac is still watching the road behind us. “Could’ve been worse.”
“Thanks for that comforting insight,” she snaps.
Aidan finally takes a turn off the main road and pulls into a farm access lane screened by a stand of trees. He kills the engine but doesn’t relax. None of us do. The sudden quiet after the rush of speed and gunfire is wrong. The wind still tears through the back of the car.
“Two minutes,” he says. “Check the vehicle. Check the road. Then we move.”
I’m out first. Cold air hits hard. I scan the lane, the fields, the road we’ve just left. No sign of another vehicle.
Cormac joins me a second later, circling to the back of the Range Rover with his gun up. The rear is wrecked. Glass everywhere. One bullet has punched through the tailgate above the plate. Another has scraped along the left rear panel and taken paint with it.
Aidan gets out and comes around the front. “Tyres.”
“I’m on it,” I say.
Front left is fine. Front right, fine. Back left is holding. Back right looks low for one ugly second before I crouch and press my thumb into the rubber. Still solid enough. No fresh hiss. No hole I can see.
“Vehicle’s drivable,” I call.
Dervla gets out, keeping the ledger, envelope, and hard drive hugged to her chest under her jacket now, protecting them from the wind and from us in one movement.
“Road’s clear,” Cormac says.
“For now,” Aidan replies.
I step in front of Dervla before she can wander off to prove she’s fine.
“Hold still.” I pull the small first-aid pouch from the glove box, tear open an antiseptic wipe, and catch her chin gently with two fingers so I can see the cut on her cheek properly.
It’s shallow. The one under her hairline is bleeding more because scalp wounds always do, but it isn’t deep either.
She doesn’t pull away.
Her skin is cold from the wind.
“You’re doing that thing again,” she says.
“What thing?”
“Being caring.”
I smile, but say nothing.
Cormac scans the road again. “We need to move.”
“Yeah.” I step back and pocket the wipe. “Back in.”
Aidan is already running through options in his head. I can see it in his face even if I don’t know the exact route. “We don’t go straight back to campus,” he says. “Not in this. We swap vehicles first.”
“With what?” Dervla asks.
“We get creative.”
“Great,” she mutters. “Can we not just arrive back at St. Aug’s in a shot-out Range Rover?”
“No,” I say and help her in the backseat. Cormac folds himself back into the rear with Dervla. I take the front again, gun still in my lap, and Aidan gets us moving out of the lane with the engine barely above idle until we hit the road.
“Creative how?” Dervla asks from behind me.
Aidan glances in the mirror. “There’s a storage unit outside Ballinasloe.”
I rest my elbow against the door and keep watching the road ahead. “What’s in it?”
“Cars.”
“Plural?” Dervla says, flat with disbelief.
“Plural,” Aidan confirms.
The road opens up ahead, wet and empty, and Aidan keeps us at a speed that won’t draw attention but still gets us moving.
I check my phone. No signal for a stretch, then one bar, then none again.
We leave the main road outside Ballinasloe and head into an industrial estate that looks half dead even in daylight.
Shuttered units. Faded signs. Patches of rough tarmac with weeds forcing their way through.
The place is quiet enough that the broken rear window sounds even louder, wind cutting through the car in hard bursts.
Aidan turns into a fenced yard and pulls up in front of a corrugated unit with a rolling shutter halfway open. A man in his fifties stands there, smoking and looking thoroughly unimpressed with all of us.
His eyes go to the back of the Range Rover. Then to the bullet hole in the tailgate, and then to Aidan.
“You’ve made a show of it,” he says.
“Helpful as ever, Mick,” Aidan replies, getting out.
Mick flicks ash onto the ground and looks at the rest of us climbing from the car. His gaze pauses on Dervla for half a second, not in a creepy way, more in a calculating one, then shifts back to the vehicle.
“Need rid of that now, do you?”
“Need a swap. Same standard.”
Mick takes one last drag and drops the cigarette, grinding it under his boot. “You bring chaos to my yard before noon. That’s disrespectful.”
Cormac shuts the rear door with more force than necessary. “Can we do this part where you complain after?”
Mick looks at him. “Can you shut the fuck up before I decide not to?”
Cormac smiles. Not nicely. “Try it.”
I step between the start of that and the likely end of it. “Mick, is it? Please, can we swap?”
He snorts and reaches into his jacket. “A polite one. Just for you.” He tosses a set of keys to me. Black fob. No tag. I catch them one-handed.
“What are we taking?”
“The Audi inside.”
I look past him into the unit.
The Audi is black, low, fast, and clean. Beside it sit two other cars under dust sheets and a motorbike with no plates. Of course Aidan has a man with a warehouse full of untraceable vehicles.
“That one?” I ask.
“That one,” Mick says. “Full tank. Try not to bring it back ventilated.”
“No promises,” Cormac mutters.
Mick’s eyes flick to the bundle under Dervla’s jacket. He doesn’t ask. Good instinct.
Aidan walks straight past him into the unit. “I want this one stripped by tonight.”
Mick turns and stares at the Range Rover. “Bit late for subtle, isn’t it?”
“Can you do it?”
“I wouldn’t be standing here if I couldn’t.”
Aidan is already doing a quick check of the Audi, opening the driver’s door, glove compartment, centre console, boot. Cormac yanks the rear passenger door open and folds himself in.
Mick looks at the Range Rover again. “You hit something with it.”
“Someone,” Cormac calls from inside the Audi.
Mick looks at me.
I hold his stare for a beat. “Allegedly.”
He snorts. “Get the fuck out of my yard.”
Aidan shuts the boot. “Phone?”
Mick pulls a burner from his pocket and tosses it. Aidan catches it. “One use. After that, bin it.”
“Noted.”
I open the front passenger door for Dervla. “Get in. I’ll take the back.”
Her eyes flick to me, then to Aidan, measuring the lesser evil.
I slide into the back beside Cormac. The car smells clean and expensive and faintly chemical, like it hasn’t had a real life yet. Aidan starts it, and the engine is quiet in a way that makes the Range Rover feel even more battered in retrospect.
We pull out of the yard and back onto the road.
For ten minutes, nobody says a word. I watch the side mirror and the road behind us out of habit.
Cormac watches too. Dervla stares ahead, jaw still tight, one hand on the envelope in her lap, the other resting over the leather ledger.
The hard drive is tucked under her thigh now. Sensible. Harder to snatch that way.
“Which order are you going to look at those in?” I ask when the silence becomes almost painful.
Dervla looks at me over her shoulder. “Haven’t decided.”
“Book, envelope, hard drive,” I state.
“Why that order?” she asks.
I shrug. “The book is already open, the envelope is less open but still accessible, and the hard drive requires a laptop.”
“Good point,” she murmurs and turns back around to stare out of the window, not moving a muscle for the rest of the journey.