Jim saw the apprehension on my face and was quick to reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, Kip. I’ll be in there with you and I won’t let you kill me. You’ll be fine like you always are.”
I was glad he was so sure because I wasn’t. After seeing him clip the maintenance guy in the arm, my faith in Jim’s guarantees had been shaken a bit. So I took our practice sessions in the woods a little more seriously. They became a lot more businesslike and a lot less fun. Still, the potential danger of it gave me some wicked rushes.
The most unnerving moment since coming back to Brixton came in the dark and quiet of my bedroom. It was Friday night. Renee and I had just finished fucking our brains out. We were just lying there in the dark, me staring up at the ceiling, Renee still shuddering slightly. Soon she’d get up, go into the shower, and I’d follow. But that Friday night, Renee didn’t immediately get up to shower and her shudders weren’t the quiet little aftershocks of orgasm. She rolled over to face me. She was crying, her tears pouring onto the bed. I reached out to hold her, but she slapped my arms away.
“What is it?”
She said, “I love you and I know you don’t love me.”
I wanted to lie to her. It would have been hard not to want to lie to her, even for the Kipster, but I couldn’t. “Being with you these last few months has been wonderful. Our time together has been the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had, but I don’t suppose that’s love. I understand that that’s not enough for you.”
“Kip, please go back to New York. Tonight. Right now! I’ll send your things after you. Just get in your car and go before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
I reached out for her again, but she was already rolling out of bed, heading for the shower. I stumbled after her, but she’d locked the bathroom door. Eventually, I went back to bed and passed out.
When I woke up early Saturday morning, she was gone. Renee hadn’t packed up her things or left a note. It wasn’t anything so dramatic as all that. By the next day, by the time I returned from my morning run with Jim, she was back. I tried asking her about what she’d said, about my leaving before it was too late, but she acted as if I were mad, that I must’ve dreamed it. I might have very well been mad. Still, I hadn’t dreamed it.
Twenty-Eight
More had changed than the shifts in the tide among Renee, Jim, and me. Gun Church had taken a dark turn. Whether it was playing Cutthroat, Fox Hunt, my trip to New York, or the need to self-destruct, I couldn’t say. Maybe the fear over having gotten the deal and the need to actually deliver a manuscript had pushed me over the line.
McGuinn’s notebook was filled with bomb diagrams, drawings of booby traps, plans for ambushes. There were names and places, body counts, reports of how specific operations had turned out: some bloody and successful, some bloody and disastrous. By the time I’d read halfway through his notes, I was numb to the havoc, the blood, the destruction, the baby’s arm lying in the road, hand still clutching a rattle. That was the horror I believe he was getting at: how even the slaughter of women, children, and friends had become as mundane as the image that looked back at him from the mirror every morning. But that was not the book I wanted to write nor the book I believe he’d wanted me to write. There was no deeper truth in the mundanity of violence. That truth sat on the surface and required no mining at all. That book had been written a thousand times over, and the truth of it had played out across the entire twentieth century and continued unabated into the next. There were other truths he wanted exposed, though he was vague about them.
The only deeper truth I’d ever exposed was that I was a fraud. My work, even my early good work, said almost nothing about the human condition. What it said a lot about was a particular time-the 1980s; a particular place-New York City; and a particular group of people-voracious yuppies who were nothing more than ridiculous children in adult bodies who had never grown out of their terrible twos. What is the deeper truth of a two-year-old? I want. I want. I want. My books were snapshots, cute snapshots, better than most of the period, perhaps, but not worth much more than an airing every twenty years so that people might say, “How nice. How quaint.”
What happened to the man I thought of as McGuinn was that he lost his soul, not by killing. It wasn’t about the killing itself. I don’t think that troubled him, really. Nor was his giving me his notebook an act of a man who had found God or cared to find him. Religion wasn’t the point. He had lost his soul and I think he wanted me to find out why and to retrieve it somehow, whether he was alive to see it or not.
McGuinn was numb with cold, exhausted, and bleeding from his shoulder wound, but he had found himself a place to hide that the others were unlikely to find.
He went back over it in his mind; how after the incident in the alley, a week had passed before they contacted him again-Zoe waiting for him outside the front door to his flat. How she had stayed that night and the next. How they had fucked until they were raw, only to do it again and again. How in spite of her orgasms, she seemed as far away as the streets of Belfast. Two days later, when she left him, Zoe gave him the ultimatum he was sure would come.
“If you ever want me again, you have to meet us tonight,” she said, handing McGuinn a slip of paper. “We’ll have company for you, an old friend of yours.”
McGuinn would have gone regardless of that last wee bit of enticement. He had to know what these people knew of him, about who he really was, and how they had targeted him. What good would it do him to run if he was easily found out?
When he showed at the address that night, they were waiting for him and this time there were more of them and better prepared. He was asked politely at the point of several guns to join them in the back of a van. Before he got in, they took his Sig and a black bag was thrown over his head. It was taped loosely around his neck. He’d done this routine before, from both sides. They weren’t going to kill him, at least not yet. It was very odd, for as they drove there was little or no chatter in the van, but McGuinn felt a familiar, almost comfortable presence that he could not make sense of. There was nothing and no one in this town he was familiar with.
As the van came to a halt, the doors opened and McGuinn was helped outside. He didn’t need to see to feel there was grass beneath his shoes or to know he was at a river side. Someone else was being taken from the van, but with fewer manners than had been shown to McGuinn. There was a bit of a tussle, a body hit the ground at McGuinn’s feet, and there was a distinct grunt. Again, McGuinn felt that familiar presence. The bag was removed from his head and when his eyes adjusted to the gloaming light, he understood. For there at his feet was Old Jack Byrnes.
The footballer from the slaughterhouse spoke first. “He came to kill you, Irish. That’s what he told us after we spoke to him.”
McGuinn looked down at his mentor, but Old Jack didn’t bother to shake his head in denial. Whatever was left of McGuinn’s heart sank. He’d known they would come for him eventually, but he never imagined it would be the man who was more father to him than his real da. Now it was Terry McGuinn shaking his head.
“He came snooping around work, asking about you about ten days ago. Your good luck we already had our eye on you for membership.”
“Membership! Membership in what?” McGuinn wanted to know.
The footballer spread out his arms and gestured at the woods, the waterfall, and the running river. “In this. In our church.”