Falling Glass (38 page)
Authors: Adrian McKinty
“Michael, Tom already told you all this – you don’t need the proof, you know it’s true. If you’re looking for an additional reason to top me, be my guest – add the fact that I’m a liar if you want, but I’m not lying and you know it.”
“The Dick Coulter I knew—” Michael began but Killian interrupted him.
“Aye, the Dick Coulter you knew was as pure as the driven snow, it was all a terrible misunderstanding. Rachel and me got the wrong end of the bloody stick…”
Michael coughed. “All right. Let’s say I believe you. It doesn’t really change anything does it?”
Killian smiled. “How many years since you’ve been on a job, Mike? Since you’ve been in a position like this?”
Michael leaned back in the sofa. “Must be seven years now since I even picked up a gun. I wouldn’t have done it this time either, but for the fact that it was all so bloody personal.”
“Okay if I smoke?” Killian asked.
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t. Can you hold off? Are you desperate?” Michael asked.
“I can hold off,” Killian said.
“Where was I?” Michael asked.
“It was all so personal…”
“Yes, I mean, I liked you, Killian. You had a rep. You were a quality closer. A first-class pressure man who could do the job without breaking a little finger. You were a bit of a wee local star and the fact that you were so conflicted about it made you even better. You were a class act. I heard about your Uruguay story. Genius.”
Killian smiled. “You liked that?”
Michael laughed. “I did, aye. And in many ways I’m sympathetic to your point of view. Avoiding the rough stuff. Using the old noggin…I dig it. But you’ve crossed a line here. What you’ve done cannot be allowed to stand.”
Killian looked Michael in those blue-grey eyes, now a little greyer than blue.
“No one cares, Michael. Coulter’s dead and buried and on his way to being forgotten. Everybody’s rich. Nobody gives a shit,” Killian said.
“Not no one.
I
know and
I
care,” Michael said, his voice rising, becoming a little shrill. Killian’s eyebrows shot up. The Northern Irish house style was understatement. You didn’t get all shouty at the drop of a hat. Michael had been in New York too long.
“Why don’t you have that cigarette now,” Michael said. “Maybe I’ll riff on the smoke.”
Killian was wearing a light jacket over his blue post-office shirt. He reached in the outside pocket for his Marlboros and his lighter. He’d been easing off. He was down to five a day, not that that would matter much now.
“Are you okay for one?” Killian asked.
“I gave up,” Michael said.
“I’m in the process, or was.”
Michael sighed again. “Ach, I mean, what kind of a life is this anyway, eh? Always looking over your shoulder, stuck here in a dull wee corner of England?”
Killian took a drag on the cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“It’s not dull. Nowhere’s dull if you look hard enough. Take a gander at yon book at the end of the shelf there. Take a wee look, you might get a kick out of it. I know I did.”
Michael picked up a book with the title
Where Troy Once Stood
by a Dutchman called Iman Wilkens. He flipped the cover, read the back, was completely uninterested, put the book down.
“It’s this guy’s thesis that all the events of the
Iliad
took place in East
Anglia. The whole of the Trojan War took place in Britain during the Bronze Age. It was so famous that the story got spread across Europe and adopted by the Greeks and so became part of their mythology.”
“It sounds nuts.”
“Oh, it is. Completely. Wilkens got the idea because it rains so much in the
Iliad
but not very much in Greece or Anatolia. So where does it rain a lot? England, of course. It’s so loony it’s kind of brilliant in a way. Anyway, you see that hill behind you through the window?”
Michael smiled. “You think I’m gonna fall for that?”
Killian chuckled. “Okay don’t look, but anyway that hill behind you is called the Gog Magog, we’re on Gog Magog Street and according to Wilkens’s theory that hill, that very hill is the hill of Troy.”
“That’s why you moved here?” Michael asked.
“No. We moved here because of the common land, but I found that book in the Oxfam Shop and started reading it and thought it was great,” Killian said and then in the voice of the preview guy at the movies: “Here we are in the shadow of ancient Ilium.”
“Or not,” Michael said, laughing.
Because of who he was and what he’d done Michael didn’t have many friends. He liked Killian. Killian could have been a pal, once. But, of course, not now.
The laughter died on Michael’s lips. “Look, Killian, I don’t want to give you false hope. I don’t want you to be labouring under any illusions. You realise that, right? This isn’t a debriefing. I haven’t come here to get your side of events, I’ve come to end this sorry episode.”
“I thought there might be a reason for the fancy-looking piece of equipment in your right hand.”
“I mean, you see where I’m going with this? It’s for honour and, if you will, professional reasons.”
“What if I put up a fight?” Killian asked
“Do whatever you have to do, but only one of us is going to walk out of this…” Michael’s voice tailed off.
“
Caravan
– you’re allowed to say the word, you won’t turn into a tinker just by saying it,” Killian said.
“I wasn’t shitting on your accommodation, I was just trying to think of the British term. We call them trailer homes in America,” Michael said.
“Aye, I know, trailer trash and all that malarkey.”
“No, you don’t know. That’s got nothing to do with it. I’m not prejudiced. I’ve been through the mill myself a few times as well, mate.”
Killian put his hand on his thighs and smiled. “By ‘put up a fight’ I didn’t mean fisticuffs. I meant me using my skills, what I’ve got, to make you change your mind,” he said carefully.
Michael nodded.
There was not a soul in the pasture behind him and it was beautiful out there: a golden sea of rapeflowers, an azure horizon, carnation-shaped clouds. The light was bending through the perspex making a halo in the dust thermals above Michael’s head.
Killian liked that. An angel, even an angel of death needed a halo.
“As I was trying to say, only one of us is going to leave this caravan alive. I know you’re good, mate, but you’re not talking your way out of this one,” Michael said.
“You’re not going to fault me for trying though, are you?”
“No.”
Killian’s smile broadened. What more could you ask than to be given a chance to do what you did best.
“Well then,” Killian said and out poured the words, which, of course, are deadlier by far than bullets in the hands of an expert practitioner.
Killian was a little rusty, but eventually he warmed to his theme and Michael listened, and the goat outside listened, and even the Trojan shades in Hades listened. He talked and talked, and shadows fell on the tinker camp and on the rapeseed fields and on the Gog Magog; and Venus rose in the vermillion sky, and the moon lowered her pointed keel, and in the background, in the broad limb of an oak tree, a wheatear was singing.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 4 an oyster in the mirror sea
Chapter 5 lawyers, guns and money
Chapter 8 an island in the stream
Chapter 9 twenty miles to slemish
Chapter 13 the lady in the lake
Chapter 17 the killing of the tinkers