Chapter Twelve #3
She’s so triumphant and so furious that it takes a few tries before Cal gets her story straight.
“That’s why the fucker wants us out,” she finishes.
“For the land. And that’s why he kilt Rachel: ’cause she was gonna say it.
I knew she didn’t do it herself. Fuck him and Eugene and the whole lotta them. ”
“Hold on,” Cal says. He’s still standing at the kitchen table; Trey’s flood of info came at him too hard and fast to let him move. “Back up a minute. Where’d you get all this?”
“Lena. She got it offa Mrs. Duggan. And that’s why Tommy’s telling everyone she’s mental, so no one’ll believe her.”
“Lena,” Cal says. He starts moving in circles around the living room. As far as he knows, he has never once given Lena any reason not to trust him.
“Now we know what he’s playing at,” Trey says, “we can get him. Take him to fuckin’ pieces. Put him in jail for the resta his life.”
“No life sentences here,” Cal says automatically.
“So twenty years or whatever. Poncy twat like that, he’ll get the shite bet outa him. See does he still think he’s great when some skinhead’s knocked his teeth out.”
“All that stuff with the land, that’s all legal,” Cal says. He’s still moving, to help himself think this through. “Probably some bribes here and there, but we’re not gonna prove that.”
“What about Rachel? That’s not fuckin’ legal.”
“There’s no evidence he ever did anything to Rachel. What you and me think isn’t evidence.”
“Then get some.”
Trey is still standing in the middle of the floor, messy-haired from the wind, her triumph dimming fast with frustration and bafflement. She came in here all ready for Cal to catch fire with her excitement, and instead he’s wrecking it.
“Kid,” he says. He wants to head out the door right now, in his sock feet, come back to her laden with armfuls of evidence so they can mount Tommy Moynihan’s head over the fireplace.
“If I was a cop, then maybe. If I could pull location histories on Rachel and Tommy and Eugene, go through Tommy’s phone to see who he was in touch with around then, pull location histories on them.
Or if I could bring Eugene in, go at him hard enough. But I can’t.”
“You can still go at him hard,” Trey points out. “Harder. We’ll help, me and the lads. It’ll take about a minute.”
“Right. And then I’m in jail for assault, Eugene says he was just telling me whatever would make me back off, and we’ve got Tommy on our asses even worse.”
Trey says, with the weight and the force of a wrecking ball, “I’m not letting him away with what he said about you.”
“I’m not gonna let him get away with any of this shit,” Cal says.
Things rise up at him, Lena’s cold hand in his, Claire Holohan’s destroyed eyes, Senan’s shoulder taut under his grip; Rachel’s face, secretive in death, upturned to the sky.
He feels like he’s lifting off the floor with fury. “Not any of it.”
“So what do we do?”
Cal has been trying to find some way around this.
When it comes to shit as serious as this, his instinct is to turn to the law; it’s always seemed to him the best way to make sure things hold together, instead of disintegrating into an unholy mess.
That’s what he wants to be telling Trey right now: We’ll take this whole hell-brew to the police, they’ll set everything straight.
But if Garda Dennis and the home inspector are any indicators, the law around here has no intention of setting anything straight, even if they had the raw materials to do it.
All the borderlines have got mixed up; the patterns Cal understands have been shaken like a kaleidoscope and come down unrecognizable.
He’s thought about going higher up, talking to the brass, but the brass seem almost unimaginably remote; he can’t picture this story making any kind of sense to some suit in an office in Dublin.
If he knew Rachel’s father, he’d be bringing all this to him.
Probably that would be a terrible idea, but the man has a right to know what happened to his girl, and to decide what to do about it.
But Fintan Holohan doesn’t go to the pub—he has a name for being a quiet man, a homebody—he’s not a farmer, he works up in Kilcarrow; Cal has barely spoken to the guy.
If he showed up on the Holohans’ doorstep with this wild story, Fintan would more than likely kick his ass to the curb.
He says, “We’re gonna need to call in the cavalry.”
Trey gives him a blank look.
“I need to talk to Mart.”
Trey’s face shuts down. Trey doesn’t like Mart one bit, or this townland, or their methods of dealing with problems. She has every reason not to.
She says, “You and me can handle it ourselves.”
“Kid,” Cal says. “Tommy’s got his pockets full of Guards, inspectors, probably Child Services, who knows what-all. If you and me go up against him, he can take us down in a heartbeat.”
He doesn’t want to look at the blank disbelief on Trey’s face. The kid brought this to him taking for granted that he could fix it. It comes even harder than he expected, admitting to her that it’s beyond his power.
“What can Mart fuckin’ Lavin do that we can’t?” she demands.
“He’s got plenty of backup,” Cal says. “And he knows how this place works, better’n I do; better’n anyone. He’ll come up with something.”
Trey is still looking somewhere between outraged and crushed, but now that the decision is made, Cal finally has enough clear space in his mind to take in how much has transformed in the last ten minutes.
“Hey,” he says. “Kid. This is great. You did great. I’ve been sitting here going out of my mind, climbing the walls, ’cause I couldn’t do one single thing about any of this. Now we can.”
After a moment, Trey nods.
“We just need to make sure we do something that’s gonna work. Now that you’ve got us a shot, I’m not gonna waste it.”
Trey says, “You seriously reckon Mart can take Tommy down?”
“No,” Cal says. “Not Mart all by himself. Mart and you and me and your buddies and Mart’s buddies and whoever else he brings on board: yeah.”
He watches Trey turn inwards, sharp and alert, while she examines this and its implications.
Both by nature and from experience, she fights shy of community projects.
She’s come to a wary acceptance of her standoff with Ardnakelty, at a mutually agreed distance where she does her finest woodwork for them and charges full price, and they invite her to Halloween parties safe in the knowledge that she won’t come.
This will shift that balance beyond reversal.
“Guess themens have a right to be in on it,” she says, after a minute. “Since Tommy’s planning on fucking them over as well.”
“Well, he is that,” Cal says. He wishes he had some way of knowing whether what’s happening is a good thing for Trey or not. Lena would consider it a bad one, but Lena isn’t here.
Trey draws a fast breath. She says, “I’da rathered do it ourselves.”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “Me too. But this is what we’ve got.”
In the end Trey looks up at him and nods. “Yeah,” she says. “You gonna go talk to Mart now?”
“Wednesday evenings he mostly goes to the pub. First thing tomorrow, I’ll talk to him.
” Trey’s face has a look Cal hasn’t seen on it in a while, the stretched-thin look kids get when the day has held too much for them to take in.
“Meanwhile,” he says, “let’s you and me get some food inside us.
” He’s suddenly starving; it occurs to him that he hasn’t eaten all day. “We can throw on some hamburgers.”
Trey pulls off her jacket and hangs it up. She says, “Gonna text Lena to come?”
“Not tonight,” Cal says. He sweeps his wood shavings off the table into his hand and takes them over to the garbage.
Trey watches him. She says, “You and her breaking up?”
“Not that I know of,” Cal says. “Where’d that come from?”
“Then what’s wrong with her?”
Trey has never before appeared to pay the slightest bit of notice to anyone’s emotional state, including her own. Cal, while he’s delighted to see her maturing up, wishes she had picked another day or another way to do it. “Kid,” he says, “I have no idea.”
“So text her.”
“Nah,” Cal says. He goes to the sink to wash the sawdust off his hands. “This here that I’m working on, this is her Christmas present; she can’t see it. You want onions on your hamburger?” He doesn’t want to invite Lena. He doesn’t want to see the text marked as read, and the long blank after that.