Falling Glass (13 page)

Markov began thinking of ways he could get out of here. Surely he could lose them in the desert at night. The barkeep was a kid, about nineteen. He could kill him in a heartbeat and—

The man with the rings came back and told him that with regret Don Ramon could not meet him personally but he had asked him to give him this.

Markov took the envelope and didn’t count it.

They took him to the truck and he rode in the back where he hoped the stink would be less. He looked at the stars and smoked.

They left him at his own car and he had to drive for forty-five minutes before he stopped shaking.

It was nine by the time he arrived at the Nogales Days Inn.

He just made the last meal service. He got the enchiladas and a pitcher of beer and tequila. He asked around at the bar and he was able to score a gram of coke. He snorted it in his room and lit a cigarette and sat on the balcony chair. The view was over the parking lot and the highway and the smell was of kerosene cooking fires and cheap corn oil.

When the coke started wearing off the memories came and now he realised he didn’t want them after all.

But it was too late. The smell of blood. The screaming…

He only ever flashbacked to three events in the whole Chechen War: the parachute drop, the OMON guy between the lines and this one: the two hours that followed the phosphorous shells hitting the municipal hall.

He went to the minibar and got couple of Modelos and drank and remembered it all with crystal clarity. The flames burning bright yellow through the grey rubble, Dmitri, the platoon sniper shooting at anyone trying to get out. The victims trapped inside, yelling at them in Russian as the wooden ceiling caught and the roof beams burned. Finally, of course, the women who had taken to hurling babies and children out the windows. Not that that did them any good. Their orders were clear. No survivors. No witnesses. Perversely too, of course, it had all been so lovely: the bear mother in her sky, the phosphorous fire burning gold, red tracer from the AKs arcing like fireworks. When Captain Kutzo said it was sufficiently safe for their platoon to go in they went in. There were half a dozen still alive. They killed four and saved two women to rape. Two women who ultimately survived the entire war and ended up telling their story to a disbelieving foreign media. Yeltsin could get away with anything.

Markov clutched at the crucifix round his neck. A phantom crucifix that he had lost long before on his very first days in New York in Brighton Beach.

He was drooling. He had fallen asleep. The hotel phone was ringing.

He went back inside the hotel room, found his leather jacket and took out the red rubber ball he always kept there. He squeezed it and bounced it once off the carpet.

He picked up the phone.

“How was your day?” Bernie asked.

“Okay,” he said.

“I won’t ask you about money.”

“I tell you, anyway,” he said like some goddamn yuk just off the boat. He corrected himself. “I
will
tell you anyway. It was okay.”

“You’re wasted down there, brother. Marina called, I didn’t know whether you wanted me to tell you the hotel number or not, so I didn’t.”

“I will talk to her later,” Markov said.

“Anyway, bro, I got a real money job for you,” Bernie said.

“How much?”

“You heard of Michael Forsythe?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll give you the rec. Fifty thousand. There’s a catch, though.”

“What’s the catch?”

“It’s in Ireland. You ever been to Ireland?”

“No.”

“You object to the travel?”

“For fifty thousand I’ll go to fucking Mars.”

“That’s my boy. When can you get back to Vegas?”

Markov felt the car keys in his trouser pocket. He had a flight booked for tomorrow afternoon but if he drove the rental non-stop…

“Let’s talk at breakfast,” he said.

chapter 7
the tail

W
HEN HE ARRIVED IN
C
ARRICK HE WAS SO TIRED HE HAD
just one pint at the Jordy Arms and went home and slept for thirteen hours straight.

He didn’t know what day it was when he woke up. It was raining and the halyards were clanging off the aluminium masts on every boat in the marina.

He lay in bed for a long time and thought about the forty thousand quid he had made in the New York trip. Rent on this place for two years or mortgage payment on the apartments for four months. Either way it was sweet.

And there was more money coming.

A fifty-thousand-pound retainer.

Four hundred and fifty for finding some wee lassie on the mitch. A wee lassie and bairns.

He lay and the longer he lay there the more claustrophobic he felt.

He sat up, walked to the window and swung it open. Gulped the sea air.

Sometimes the house felt a prison. Every house he had ever stayed in had, at times, felt like a prison.

But he couldn’t go back to a caravan, not now, not ever.

He stared through the open window at the rain and the boats in the
marina and Carrickfergus Castle which was a grey presence through the mist.

Nah, he couldn’t go back to tinker life and he was trying to leave The Life too.
Would
leave The Life after this.

The rain was pouring on his head. It was mixed with sea spray and snow.

He let it all hit him.

“I’m a tough guy, see?” he said and closed the window and went to the bathroom. He had to bend down to reach the mirror. He was tall and pale and with a four-day beard he looked like the survivor of a long-term kidnapping. Some people said that they could tell that he was a tinker, but others said there was no tinker look, except that tinkers seldom had grey hair: the oldest Pavee he’d ever known was Declan McQuarrie’s granny and she died at fifty-nine.

The cat came. How did it know that he was back? He’d have to write off a letter to the
Fortean Times
.

At least he knew how it got in now. Through the basement window and up the basement stairs and through the crack in the kitchen door.

He sat on the toilet, put the cat on his lap and continued to look at himself.

He looked harassed, stressed. He’d been keeking it for over a year now since Ireland’s economy had gone completely down the bog. In six months the unemployment rate had gone from five per cent to eleven and all over the island builders were dumping property. He was stuck with two luxury apartments overlooking the Lagan in Belfast. Half a million each was what he wanted, but the last offer he’d gotten was four hundred K for both, which would leave him at least three hundred thousand in debt.

Of course this money from bloody Dick Coulter would free him. He could sell the apartments, buy this house. Jesus. He could actually start living.

He didn’t like to think about it too much.

He feared the jinx.

“Let’s just see what happens, I mean you never know, eh, cat?”

The cat wasn’t used to long sentences. The old bird next door never talked to it and it stared at him oddly and cocked its head like a dog.

“You’re know where I’ve been? I’ve been all the way around the world, so I have, Kitty,” he said.

He called it Kitty, because when the old lady had told him its name a year ago, it had been something so dull he had forgotten it. Not that “Kitty” was a display of creative genius.

He got up and gave it some tuna from the fridge and ran the bath.

He read Rachel Coulter’s case notes and shaved. He dressed and went outside. He inspected the front of the house, a couple of times there’d been graffiti on the wall or the fence, once a wee mucker had even scrawled “Tinkers Out” but Killian had had a word with the local UVF commander and not only had the graffiti stopped but now someone came along and did his gardening when he was away.

The house looked fine. There was a letter in the hall. When he opened it he found a credit card statement that included a charge from the Fairmont Hotel for a missing hand towel.

He had breakfast at the Jordy: Guinness pie and a coffee instead of a pint.

He walked to the car rental place on Cornmarket Street.

He wasn’t sure how he’d ended up in this town. He’d never liked it. It was the young people. Even the nineteen-year-old douchebag giving him the rental car was way too cool for school. There was more attitude in Carrick than Belfast or Dublin. First the kid said the place didn’t open until half past seven and then the car itself turned out to be a white Ford Fiesta when he’d specifically ordered a Land Rover over the web. He kicked a pro forma stink and the douchebag pretended to look for another vehicle on his screen.

“Sorry, nothing else,” he said.

“Okay,” Killian muttered.

The Fiesta was parked at the far end of the lot, under a tree, covered in squirrel shit. Inside it smelled of aftershave.

“Thanks for nothing,” Killian mouthed as he drove out of the car park.

“Bye, and why don’t you go fuck yourself,” the douchebag mouthed from his booth.

Killian, who’d been taught to read lips by Kev McDonnell in the pit at the Trump Atlantic City gave him the finger; the kid responded in kind, and at exactly the same time both of them laughed.

“Carrickfergus,” Killian said, and suspected that he was only pretending not to like it.

He drove north up the coast.

The radio was no good. Politics, country, soft rock.

There were mountains, glens, trees, cute wee towns and across the North Channel a fair of chunk of Scotland spectacular in the morning light.

For a while it looked a little like there was a tail on him, a kid in a big SUV, but when he hit the Causeway Coast the tail was gone.

Coleraine was students, civil servants and more students.

Rachel Coulter’s last known address was a caravan park a little down the coast from the centre of town, not too far from the surfing and tourist spot of Portrush. Coulter’s boys had found her there but they had fucked up the get. Three of them on her and she’d got clean away and they didn’t even write down a licence plate. Well, as Sean would say, amateur hour was over.

He hit the caravan park, knocked at a few doors until he was pointed in the direction of Anna, the next-door neighbour. He could tell straight away that money wasn’t going to be an incentive for her. She was poor and a Jehovah’s Witness, with a glint of eternity in the white of her eyeballs.

There were a lot of kids running around; two of them were singing some kind of hymnal that would have sent Alan Lomax running for the tape recorder and the rest were playing a complex game that seemed to involve a lot of violent disputes about the rules. Consequently he had to give her the rap between screaming matches.

Ten questions in he saw that she didn’t know anything. Rachel hadn’t trusted her, which was pretty smart.

“You should ask Dave,” Anne said. “Him over there. She took his car.”

Dave was the other next-door neighbour, the man who’d owned the trailer she’d rented and, yes, whose car she’d borrowed and sold.

Coulter’s men had got nothing out of Dave which was only to be expected.

Dave was sitting in a lawn chair drinking a beer and watching him while pretending to read
Top Gear Magazine
.

“Mr Reynolds?” Killian asked.

“That’s me.”

“My name’s Killian,” Killian said.

Killian reached over and offered Dave his hand. Dave left the hand hanging there.

“What can I do for you?” Dave wondered. He was a tubby guy with a russet beard and an RN tattoo on an exposed forearm.

“Navy, eh?” Killian asked.

“What? Oh, aye, what of it?”

“I was up on
Caroline
once,” Killian said.

“Is that so?” Dave said, interested.

“Very nice ship,” Killian said.

Killian had indeed been on
HMS Caroline
once – the Royal Navy’s reserve headquarters in Belfast – when he was eighteen and him and a mate had paddled over there in a stolen rowboat, thrown a grappling rope over the side, climbed up, broken in and stolen five thousand quid’s worth of silver plate.

“Ach, she’s a great oul girl,” Dave said. “The last of her class, the last commissioned vessel from World War One.”

“Is that a fact? I did not know that,” Killian said with the appropriate amazement.

Dave grinned. “She was in the Battle of Jutland was
HMS Caroline
.”

More amazed nods. When Dave smiled he became a different guy,
good-looking, with a pleasant face under the beard and the easy confidence of an ex-serviceman.

He was drinking himself to death of course, but who wasn’t?

“Were you in the forces then?” Dave asked

“Nah, not me. Me ma’s da was a Yank soldier though. Passing through, you know? He was at The Bulge. Dentist, if you can believe it.”

Dave nodded. “I can believe it. The fucking Bulge. I’ve read about it. Yon was a bad one. He and your gran not hook up after?”

Killian laughed. “Are you joking? He had a whole other family Stateside. He sent me ma money, though, till she was eighteen, course by then she had two weans of her own, you know how it is.”

Dave nodded. He did indeed know how it was.

“So, what can I do for you Mr Killian?” Dave asked.

“I’m looking for Rachel Coulter,” Killian said.

Dave went all cold front and stroked his beard like he was trying to make a fucking genie come out of it.

“Aye, you and everybody else.”

“She sold the car you lent her in Derry,” Killian said.

“I gave her the car. She didn’t do anything wrong,” Dave said, his eyes narrowing as his right hand crumpled his magazine into a tube.

“Well, I think the cops have it now. You might even get it back,” Killian said.

“I don’t want it back, I gave it to her,” Dave muttered.

“Mind if I sit?” Killian asked.

“Free country.”

Killian unfolded a chair and positioned it next to Dave. He closed his eyes and breathed the air in through his nose. “Suppose you don’t know where she was going?” he asked after a minute.

Dave shook his head. “Don’t know. Don’t want to know.”