Authors: Gene Kerrigan
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Hard-Boiled, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary, #Crime Fiction
Little Criminals
After seven non-fiction books, veteran journalist Gene Kerrigan received critical acclaim in Ireland, the UK and the USA for his first two novels,
Little Criminals
and
The Midnight Choir
. His most recent novel is
Dark Times in the City
. He lives in Dublin.
This is a terrific novel, tense and exciting. I spun through it quicker than it takes to tell ... tremendous’
Independent on Sunday
‘He writes with a light touch that makes his darker final chapters all the more disturbing’
Daily Telegraph
Justin and Angela Kennedy have money, love, children and a limitless future. Jo-Jo Mackendrick is a pillar of Dublin gangland society; a man determined that nothing will endanger his hard-earned supremacy. Into their lives comes Frankie Crowe, an ambitious criminal tired of risking his life for small change. Kidnap could be the first step on his climb to a better life, and he knows just the kind of dangerous men to make it happen…
‘A great writer, a great story, relentless and brilliant’ Roddy Doyle
‘A savage X-ray picture of contemporary Ireland…beautifully etched characters’
Guardian
ALSO BY GENE KERRIGAN
Novels
The Midnight Choir
Dark Times in the City
Non-fiction
Round Up the Usual Suspects
(with Derek Dunne)
Nothing but the Truth
Goodbye to All That
(with Derek Speirs)
Hard Cases
Another Country
This Great Little Nation
(with Pat Brennan)
Never Make A Promise You Can’t Break
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409015772
Published by Vintage 2005
4 6 8 10 9 7 5
Copyright © Gene Kerrigan 2005
Gene Kerrigan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Vintage
Vintage
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London SW1V 2SA
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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099481492
This is for my daughter,
Cathleen Kerrigan
From where he lay, with only the light from the street lamp outside his flat, Stephen Beckett could see the gun on the bedside table. The Colt .45 pistol rested on the red and white hand towel, level with his gaze. Old and worn, big, grey and ugly.
A bit like me
.
It was some time after two o’clock. If he didn’t get some sleep, it wouldn’t matter what he decided in the morning. He wouldn’t have the strength to hold the gun, let alone use it.
He closed his eyes, but that didn’t help, his mind was still full of the gun and all it meant.
He opened his eyes and forced himself to turn over on to his back. The tiredness seemed to have hollowed out his bones. Some fool drove by too fast and the roar of the engine was accompanied by a pattern of light gliding across the ceiling.
It has to be done
.
After he’d come to bed and spent most of an hour thinking about what he had to do, he tried to push his mind on to something else, in the hope that he might drift off to sleep. No chance. There was no other thought strong enough to gain space in his head. This thing crowded out everything else in the world and he knew that was a mark of how messed up he was.
The little fucker
.
There were people who took short cuts through other people’s lives, didn’t give a damn what harm they did. Sometimes, what mattered wasn’t just the damage they left after them, it was the reckless contempt of it. It’s like some lives matter and other people exist just to populate the landscape.
It has to be done
.
Stephen Beckett had lived too long to mistake this urge for anything other than what it was – the need for revenge. At any other time of his life, he might have found a reason to step back. Now, the way things were, his sense of caution was feeble and there were more important things than right and wrong. Stuff like that belonged in another life, before the shooting began.
The shooting began in the small town of Harte’s Cross, a few minutes after ten o’clock one chilly summer morning. At first, only a few people knew there was anything wrong, and they were all in Sweeney’s Pub.
The pub owner was pleading for her life. She was a small-town throwback, aged about fifty, wearing heavy spectacles and settled into her plumpness, with the hair and the clothes of her mother’s generation. She hardly saw Frankie Crowe standing in front of her. Instead her gaze was fastened to the big black gun in his hand.
‘Please, mister,’ she said. Frankie Crowe was twenty-eight.
Frankie Crowe had a Homer Simpson baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead, a large pair of thick-rimmed glasses hiding the shape of his face. Under his bulky beige anorak, he might have been thin or fat or anything in between. The large automatic he was holding was pointed at no one in particular, but it was the centre of attention.
There was just the one barman on duty, just as Leo had said there would be. And he was no problem. Hands flat on the counter, carefully avoiding eye contact with Frankie Crowe.
Of the three customers in the pub, two were sitting in a booth across from the bar, old men with faces the colour of stale porridge. One of the wrinklies, a pinch-mouthed little man with a stained and misshapen felt hat, had his arms held rigidly above his head, not that Crowe had given him any instructions. The old man knew, from the Bogart movies he’d seen more than half a century ago, that that’s what you do when someone pulls out a gun.
The other man was bigger and well built, with a slight stoop to his back that disguised his height. One hand cradled a teacup as he stared at the gunman without emotion.
The third customer was a young woman with very short black hair, a ring through her left eyebrow and a baby held in a sling on her chest. She was sitting at a table near the window, her own coffee and the baby’s half-empty bottle in front of her. When she saw Frankie Crowe come in with a gun in his hand she stood up and made for the door, but Frankie just shook his head and used his gun hand to wave her back to the table. The woman sat down, one arm supporting the baby’s sling.
She didn’t even see Martin Paxton, standing just inside the door, a dark baseball hat worn low on his forehead, a handgun held down by his leg, until Frankie said, ‘Keep an eye,’ and took the pub owner into the office behind the bar.
Nothing complicated, Frankie said. In and out and back home to Dublin with a rake of money, maybe fifteen grand, before anyone knows we’ve been there. Not the kind of take that would make a difference, but enough to keep things ticking over.
It was a Monday morning. ‘Saturday night, they make a bundle, Sunday too,’ Leo Titley said. Leo was the tip-off. ‘The icing on the cake is, Saturday night coming up they have a concert. Old man Sweeney, before he died, bought out the kip next door, broke through, fixed it up with a stage. They do a gig every month or so and it takes maybe five hundred punters.’
‘The bank has a night safe?’
‘None,’ Leo Titley said. ‘That’s the beauty of it. They lodge the takings next day. Mrs S does it herself, noon on the dot. Local cop walks her down the street. Guy I know used to work there a few years back, said there’s a safe in the back room. Two nights’ takings and the gig money, waiting to be banked Monday morning.’
And the great thing about the gig, Leo said, was it was nothing special. If it was a name act, there’d be advance booking. This was all money at the door. A couple of losers from a boy band that never happened. It broke up and three of them went back to scratching their arses, the other two were earning peanuts hawking their out-of-tune cover versions around the provincial pub circuit.
‘Money at the door. The pubs love it, taxman never sees a cent.’
And Monday morning, before they can get the cash into the bank, Frankie Crowe and Martin Paxton are sitting in the pub car park in a stolen Primera.
‘The pub opens at ten thirty,’ Leo said. ‘You go in, wave a gun and the safe opens.’
That was the plan.
The old bitch’s legs were trembling when she came out of the back room, so Frankie gave her a shove to hurry her up. The woman moved as fast as she could, putting the counter between herself and Frankie.
‘Time lock, she says,’ Frankie said.
Martin made a pissed-off noise and hit the door with the butt of his gun.
‘Says she can’t open it for another hour and a half. She’s bullshitting.’ He pointed his gun at the barman, his hands still flat on the counter. ‘You know the combination?’
The man swallowed, shook his head. He was wearing a short red waistcoat that showed his white shirt bunched up at the top of his trousers. His voice was thin, like he was squeezing the words out through his fear. ‘She’s telling the truth. She got the new safe last year, couple of young fellas broke in one night, nearly got the back off the old one.’ He looked at Frankie as if he was judging how his story was going over. ‘Can’t be opened until twelve o’clock. That’s when the garda comes, to keep an eye while she’s banking it.’
‘Bollocks.’
Frankie looked at Martin and said, ‘Old bitch is lying, this cunt too.’
‘Please, mister! For the love of God, this is all there is!’ The woman had the register open and was holding up a handful of notes.