Purgatory. Ken Bruen

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      Told the truth.

      “I’m getting old and makes you look good with the church.”

      She smiled and I actually felt good.

      Forgetting smiles are prelude to nothing good.

      Ever.

      She said,

      “I’ve been watching the video of The Bodyguard all weekend.”

      Whitney Houston had been found dead in the Beverly Hills Hilton. I wondered if Ridge’s interest had been helped by the gay innuendo that had followed Houston. I was too cute to ask, cute in the Irish sense of sly hoor.

      I nodded sagely, as if I understood.

      I didn’t.

      How do you blow 100 million?

      Ben Gazzara died the same week and no fanfare. Ridge said,

      “That clip, she sings, I Will Always Love You, and pauses. You know, her lip quivers, she’s going for the high note and nails it.”

      I went,

      “Hmm.”

      But Ridge was going philosophical.

      “Whitney never hit that note again.”

      I said,

      “Apropos of nothing, some of us never hit that note.”

      Got,

      As she stood to leave,

      “Some of us just never got the right song.”

      I’d recently come across The Psychopath Test as compiled by the FBI. Jon Ronson had written a book of that title. I’d been compiling my own variation, the AT, as in

      The Asshole Test.

      I was pretty sure that anyone who used

      Apropos

      Made the list.

      Late that evening, before she clocked off work, Ridge decided to call at the garage, the one holding the statue. Knocking at the main house, she got no reply, then walked around to the garage. She was hit from behind with some form of iron bar, left in a heap on the ground. Either then or in the next few minutes, her Claddagh ring was torn from her finger. Her watch, twenty euros, and her warrant card were all taken.

      I didn’t hear until next morning, Stewart shouting into my mobile,

      “Why don’t you answer your fucking phone?”

      I said,

      “I had an early night.”

      He was fighting for air, control, spat,

      “Yeah? While you were sleeping, Ridge was being wheeled into the ICU.”

      Jesus.

      That was all the detail. I asked, Where?

      Heard, with a sinking heart, the address I’d given her. Stewart picked up on my tone, accused me,

      “You know something about this. Ah, no, you sent her on one of your fucking jobs.”

      My silence was assent.

      He said,

      “You bollix, you’re a . . . a . . . plague.”

      Rang off.

      I didn’t go on the piss.

      I went ballistic.

      7

      A Mind of Winter

      —Shira Nayman

      My hurley was almost bent from previous outings. Made by a man in Prospect Hill; he still used the ash: cut, honed, and polished the wood to a sheen and, if asked, would add the metal rings around the end of the stick, for traction.

      Kidding about the traction.

      Since the loss of the fingers on my right hand, I’d become adept at compensating, had wound a tight leather strap on the handle of the hurley. It had been a while since last I’d employed the stick. Ridge, then horrified at the use I’d put it to, had made me swear to never use it again.

      I swore.

      Swearing is easy.

      I placed it in a sports bag that proclaimed,

      Mervue United.

      Shucked into my all-weather Garda coat, item 1834, that the Department of Justice continued to try to repossess. From habit, I reached for the staples: the Xanax, a lethal shot of Jay, pack of cigs.

      Nope.

      Going to dance this reel with plain old-fashioned rage, bile, and bitterness.

      Fuel of a whole other hue.

      I checked my breathing: level, not what you’d expect for a guy with edged murder in his soul. I slung the bag over my shoulder, headed out. Ran into a man I used to know in my cop days. He’d been a player, became one of those predators they called speculators: had him, he told me once, a portfolio of quarter of a billion.

      On paper.

      And with Anglo-Irish.

      As wiped and gone now as the promise of poverty eradication.

      I thought then, what I thought now, on his losses.

      “Fuck ’em.”

      He stopped, peered at my sports bag, asked,

      “Going to the gym?”

      Of course gyms, saunas would have been part of his tycoon’s life, then. I said,

      “Well, a workout, sort of.”

      He said,

      “So sad about Eamonn Deacy.”

      Our most cherished local sporting hero; what Messi was to Barcelona, he was to Galway.

      Made me pause. When we didn’t have heroes anymore, just poisonous celebrities, Eamonn was that quiet unassuming figure that a hero was meant to be. The man before me shuffled, looked to his left, so a touch was imminent. He said,

      “Heard you were doing good.”

      Not health or emotional well-being, no.

      Cash.

      I said,

      “Getting СКАЧАТЬ