Chapter Twenty #2
There’s a brief silence, and a scatter of nods around the table. Cal reaches for the bottle and tops up the glasses.
“I’ve zip ties,” Francie says.
“I’ve duct tape,” Senan says. “And I’ll find an aul’ feed sack.”
“We oughta leave it till late,” P.J. says. “I’d say everyone’ll be awful nervy tonight. They mightn’t go to bed on time.”
“Half-three,” Francie says. “Home before it starts getting bright, or before anyone’s out on the land.”
“Meet in the lane behind Moynihans’,” Senan says. “We’ll go in by the back, through that fuckin’ conservatory. Take him out the same way, have the car waiting.”
“I’ll drive,” Francie says. “That yoke of yours is on its last legs. The rest of ye walk there, and take the back roads. No torches.”
It rises up as powerful and vivid as a memory, spreading in the air between them.
The dark of the lane between the hedges, breath rising in the cold; tinkle of breaking glass, grunts of a struggle; and then the car bumping over potholes all the long twisting way up the mountain, the weight of a man lifted between them and the smell of his fear, and the high calls of night birds over the bog.
Cal lets it fill the air for a long moment, but he can’t give it more than that. Any time now, the Guards will come looking for accounts of what happened today, and there’s work to be done before he and the other men can be ready to provide those. He says, “What about Tommy’s security system?”
“Fuck the security system,” Senan says. “We’ll get out them balaclavas again, and say we were home the whole time. They can’t prove different.”
“He’s gonna have one of those alarms that call the Guards if there’s a breach.”
Everyone snorts. “By the time the Guards get up off their holes,” Francie says, “we’ll be home in our beds.”
Cal says, “Tommy’s got half the Guards in town living up his ass.
He’s got phone numbers. We take him, Clodagh makes a call, and we’re done: if they don’t pick us up on the way out, they’ll get us on the way back.
” He leaves a second for that to sink in.
“Or were you planning on taking Clodagh and Eugene, too?”
“Ah, no,” P.J. says firmly. “This was Tommy’s doing.”
“Then what are we gonna do with them?”
“We could leave them tied,” Francie says.
His voice lacks conviction, and no one nods agreement. No one likes the thought of binding and gagging a woman.
“We could,” Cal says. “But odds are they’re gonna be able to identify at least one of us, just by build.
” This is unarguable: he’s too big to be confused for anyone else, P.J.
is too lanky, Bobby is too little and round.
No one responds to this, either; no one is on board for making sure Clodagh and Eugene can’t identify them.
“And that’s before we even get started on camera footage. And tire tracks, and footprints, and—”
“Then we get Tommy on his own,” Bobby says. It’s the first time he’s spoken; his voice is thick and hoarse. Cal sees Senan’s glance flick to him. “He hasta go out sometime. We’ll get him then.”
“We gonna have eyes on him twenty-four seven?” Cal says.
Senan says, “We’ll take shifts.”
“Hanging around outside his house?” Cal asks. “Shadowing him every time he leaves? You think that won’t get noticed? This place, everyone sees everything.”
“They might see it,” Francie says. “They won’t say it.”
“Maybe they won’t, or maybe they will. Depends who it is.” Cal lets that land. Ardnakelty doesn’t talk to cops, but even that has shifted under Tommy’s hand.
“That gobshite Long John,” P.J. says, with disgust. “He’d rat. So would Mouth McHugh.”
“Even if no one does,” Cal says. “Say I spot Tommy going out by himself: I gotta get in touch and let the rest of you know. The Guards are gonna track where Tommy’s phone went, find out mine was near it, find that contact with you, track where your phones went—”
“So we’ll leave our phones behind,” Senan says, throwing himself back in his chair. He’s losing patience with Cal’s roadblocks.
“How? Think it through, man. How do I keep the rest of you guys updated on where Tommy’s heading, where to meet, if nobody’s got their phones?”
P.J. is starting to look baffled by all the permutations; Bobby has his mouth set mulishly, rejecting what he’s hearing. “Then whoever gets the chance does the job on his own,” Francie says. “Luck of the draw.”
“This isn’t a one-man job,” Cal says. “Tommy’s gonna be on his guard; he won’t go down easy.
And he’s too heavy for one guy to haul into a car, out of the car, into the bog; that’s gonna need two pairs of hands, maybe three.
And we need someone to take his phone in the wrong direction meanwhile, dump it in the river or—”
“Shoot the fucker and leave him in the road,” Francie says. His voice is gathering danger. “He’ll go down easy enough with a bullet in his head.” The table feels crowded with elbows planted wide, heads lowered for battle. The guys don’t like where this is going.
“Your gun registered?” Cal asks. “ ’Cause mine is. It’ll take the Guards about a day to match the bullet. It’s not gonna work.”
Senan’s eyes are steady and bleak on his. “Man,” he says, “you don’t get it. My granddad usedta tell me stories about the shenanigans himself and Mart’s granddad got up to.”
“One time,” Bobby says, and clears the roughness out of his throat, “one time a heifer pinned my daddy against the wall of the crush. He woulda been kilt, except Mart’s daddy got her away. That’s back in the sixties, like. I wouldn’ta been born only for him.”
“Mart’s granny got TB,” Francie says. “She hadta go into a sanatorium. My family took in the kids, till she was better.”
Cal understands what they’re telling him. These aren’t just bittersweet anecdotes. These men’s lives have been knotted together with Mart’s since centuries before they began. They can’t be disentangled at will.
“Mart’s brothers is all gone,” P.J. explains. “He’s got cousins over to Gorteen, but they’re not close, like. There’s no one to get the job done, only us.”
“If what I said won’t work,” Senan says, “you find something that will. You’re the cop.”
“I was the cop,” Cal says, “so that’s how I know there isn’t any safe way. Too many things come down to luck. All it takes is one of ’em going wrong, and we’re screwed.” Senan starts to say something, but Cal keeps going. “If we take Tommy out, we’ll end up in prison.”
“Don’t be telling me Tommy Moynihan can get away with murder and we can’t,” Senan says.
His voice is rising; he’s hunched like he might overturn his chair any minute.
“That prick’s sitting in his conservatory right now, with a big smirk on him, thinking he’s warned us all off and he can do what he likes.
We’ve been letting him away with shite all our lives. I’m not letting him away with this.”
Cal looks at the faces turned towards him.
Out of nowhere he recalls the sudden fall of silence in incident rooms when he stood up to brief a team on the next phase of some investigation, or outline the operation that lay ahead of them.
Those seem like places in another universe, like he could never have been real in those rooms and exist in this one too.
These men, windburned and interwoven, in their battered work pants stained with grease and sheep shit, live by different rhythms and are made of different materials from the easy, smart-talking, forthright mix in his incident rooms. Even the light at the window seems to come from a different sun.
He has no right to lead these men anywhere, and no urge to do it. But it needs doing. All his life Cal has aimed to do the things that need doing, and now he’s here.
“He’s not getting away with it,” he says. “I’ve got witnesses who saw Tommy heading for the old bridge, right around when Rachel went off it.”
No one moves.
“Jesus fuck,” Senan says, after a moment.
“I never knew,” Bobby says, stunned. “If I’da known—”
“None of us knew, you gobshite,” Francie says, “but we still didn’t have our heads up Moynihan’s hole.”
“All this time,” P.J. says, with a kind of wonder. “Everyone going mental trying to work out what happened, saying this, that, and t’other. And all the time, there was people that saw him.”
“So you were right about getting loud,” Senan says. He’s looking at Cal with a new alertness, now that Cal’s way has turned out to get results. It didn’t work exactly like that, but Cal doesn’t correct him.
“Who was it?” Francie wants to know. “And how come they said nothing before?”
“Teenagers out drinking,” Cal says. “They didn’t think much of it; they figured he had a side piece somewhere, went back to what they were doing.”
“He’ll say they got it wrong, in the dark. Or they’re talking shite.”
“Right,” Cal says. “If that was all we had, Tommy could talk his way out, easy. But I’ve got witnesses for last night, too. Trey and her buddy saw Tommy heading for Mart’s land, after two in the morning, carrying a spade.”
There’s a surge of breath, close to a growl, around the table.
“What were they doing out?” Francie wants to know. “Kids don’t go drinking on a Monday.”
He means is this bullshit, and if so, will Trey and Kate be able to stand by it. “They were there,” Cal says. “I set them to watch the Moynihan place. I had a feeling.”
He doesn’t go into the Eugene side of things.
Eugene is the wild card who could win him the hand or come to nothing, and today the guys need solid things to grip; Eugene’s precarious possibilities, rather than heartening them, would only wind them tighter.
Cal feels, suddenly and sharply, the weight of being the one who has to make that call.
“He done it himself,” Senan says, low and dangerous. “The fucker.”
“And I got photos of that hole in the ground,” Cal says. “You could still see the spade cuts, in places. I got photos of the dirt that came out of the hole, too; he collected it in a garbage bag or something, and dumped it over by the wall. Tommy fucked up this time.”