The Quattro raced along the north bank of the Liffey, screeching past the Customs House, its heavy roar echoing off the stonework and drifting across the river.
“Are the bastards still behind us?” Devlin asked.
A gunshot blasted the mirror clean off the driver’s door.
“Guess so,” Kyle drawled.
“They shot Ciara!” Mikey exclaimed. “They bloody shot Ciara!”
In the back of the Quattro, out of Mikey’s vision, Kyle face-palmed and lowered his voice. “Oh God…”
“What was that, Kyle?” Mikey said, trying to see him in the mirror.
“Nothing.”
“I said they bloody shot Ciara!”
“Is she bleeding?” Kyle said.
Mikey narrowed his eyes. “You’ll be bloody bleeding in a minute!”
Mikey swerved around a dawdling bus and accelerated along Eden Quay.
“Bloody hell, Mikey!” Lea shouted. “You’re going against the traffic!”
“Thanks Miss Donovan — I hadn’t noticed that.”
Mikey changed down and powered the Audi the wrong way along a bus lane before swinging the wheel hard to the left and crossing the Liffey on O’Connell Bridge. The little skull-shaped air-freshener swung back and forth from the rear-view mirror as the big Irishman slammed on the brakes to avoid an old lady crossing the road. She looked up at the Quattro, startled.
“I won’t have the elderly treated with disrespect,” Mikey said, and waved at her cheerily. “You cross safely, my love.” He turned to Lea, his voice lowering to a tone of confidential respect. “We all get vulnerable when we’re old.”
The lady stopped pulling her little tartan trolley bag and raised her finger at the car. “You shouldn’t be on the road driving like dat, ya fuckin’ eejit!”
Mikey changed into first and drove carefully around her. “She was just a little shocked, that’s all.”
As they crawled past her Mikey waved apologetically, but she was in full-flow now, and not to be pacified.
She waved her rubber-tipped walking stick in the air. “Ya tink Dublin’s a fuckin’ rally track now, do ya, ya stupid gombeen?”
“Sorry, Granny!” he said, and moved the car forward into D’Olier Street.
“Bloody Northsider…” Kyle mumbled.
“Now then, Kyle — don’t be like that,” Mikey said. “She’s alright really, and… hang on a minute, I’m from Northside!”
“Who’d ya think I was talking about, you fool? Not that sweet little old lady you nearly drove over the top of, surely?”
Mikey laughed. “I was nowhere near driving over the top of her.”
“Just as bloody well,” Kyle said. “If you had you’d have made a right bloody mess.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Mikey said, giving an evaluating shake of the head. “Maybe the front spoiler might have got smashed a bit though.”
Kyle winked at Lea. “I was talking about the old lady, Mikey.”
Seeing Mikey O’Sullivan’s hard-exterior crumbled down by a little old lady made Lea smile briefly, but it was wiped from her face a second later when she instinctively glanced in her side mirror. “Bastards still behind us, Mikey.”
Devlin twisted in the cramped rear seat and confirmed it. “They sure are — just hitting the bridge now.”
Mikey didn’t wait for a second, slamming down on the throttle and sending the Quattro lurching forward in a whine of squealing tires and blue rubber smoke. He weaved in and out of the light traffic along the north side of Trinity College and headed south through the city. “We’ll lose the bastards down here and then get out of town.”
They took the corner fast, and Lea caught a sign outside a tourist shop. It was offering tours of the Cliffs of Moher. For a second she was back on the cliffs with her father, but the sound of bullets hitting the back of the Audi dragged her back from her past.
“They’re still shooting at Ciara, Mikey!” Kyle shouted. “If you don’t do something about it pretty soon, she’ll think you love another.”
Mikey said nothing, but focussed on dodging pedestrians crossing Grafton Street.
“Like maybe a Passat or something.”
Mikey ignored Kyle once again, reserving his attention for more pedestrians, this time walking in and out of St. Stephen’s Green. He turned the Audi toward the large monument on the northwest corner of the green and changed down.
“Oh, no!” Lea shouted. “You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Mikey never kids,” she heard Kyle say from the back.
Devlin pulled his seatbelt forward so he could lean closer to the front seats. “What’s the problem?”
“Sit back in your seat, Danny,” Mikey said. “Ciara won’t have been driven like this since Monte Carlo.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to drive them into the back-arse of nowhere and lose the bastards!”
Mikey blew the horn and sent a few pub-goers running out of the archway.
Lea shielded her eyes as Mikey powered the Quattro through Fusilier’s Arch. On the other side of the archway, two metal bollards scraped either side of the car and tore off the remaining wing mirror on Lea’s side.
“Bastards ain’t getting a Range Rover through there, are they now?” Mikey said, swinging the wheel to the right and skidding onto the public walkway that stretched deep into the large park. He struck a trash can with the front left wing and sent it flying into the air behind them. It landed with a metallic smack in their wake as they powered forward into the park.
The Range Rover skidded violently to the right at the last minute to avoid the arch and roared south along St. Stephen’s Green.
Lea checked her mirror and saw the gunmen swerve dangerously around a few drunken students meandering along the street. “That was close!” she said. “They don’t care who they kill, it seems.”
“I’ll say,” Mikey said with conviction. “They showed that when they shot at my Ciara.”
A moment later they had no choice but to leave the park and rejoin the street.
Lea wound down the window and pulled a Glock from her holster. She clicked the seat-belt release and twisted around in her seat, a look of focussed determination on her face.
“What the hell are you doing, woman?” Mikey said, eyeing the Glock.
“Gonna take out those dirty little poxes, if that’s okay with you.”
“But we’re in the middle of Dublin! Not even I would start a shooting war here. There’s a Starbucks right there for God’s sake!”
“So?”
Mikey shook his head and sighed. “It just doesn’t feel right, that’s all.”
“Too bad — they have a bloody machine gun!”
She leaned out of the window and fired at the pursuing Range Rover, striking the front left headlight and smashing the glass out of the housing. It swerved in response but powered up, not down. Drawing closer, the man in the passenger seat stood up until his upper body was outside the sunroof.
“Uh-oh,” Lea said.
Devlin turned in his seat. “What does uh-oh mean?”
“Maybe we should get a move on, Mikey?” she said.
“What’s up?”
“I think he’s going to have another go with the MAT!”
Mikey sighed. “You hang out with some pretty crazy people, Danny — you know that?”
“Hey!” Lea said. “I am not crazy!”
“Tell that to the guys with the bloody machine gun aimed at my Ciara!”
Before she could respond, the man opened fire and peppered the back of the Quattro with the submachine gun. A line of bullets punctured the top of the boot and one hit the release mechanism, sending the boot-hatch into the air and blocking Mikey’s rear-view. “That’s just bloody fantastic — now I’ve not got any bloody mirrors to see what they’re up to!”
Another burst of submachine gunfire tore through the open car and blasted the windshield into a thousand pieces. Lea screamed and covered her face to protect herself from the flying glass.