“Well, I don’t guess I have much right to complain,” Cal says. “When I was on the job, paperwork went straight to the bottom of the pile and stayed there. You’re not gonna mess around with some guy’s dog license when you’ve got actual police work to do.”
This has the uniform’s attention. “You were on the job?” he asks, making sure he has things straight. “On the force, like?”
“Twenty-five years. Chicago PD.” Cal grins and holds out his hand. “Cal Hooper. Pleased to meet you.”
“Garda Dennis O’Malley,” the uniform says, shaking his hand. Cal was betting on him not being the type who would see this as a dick-measuring contest, and he bet right: O’Malley looks genuinely delighted. “Chicago, hah? I’d say you saw some action there.”
“Some action and a lotta paperwork,” Cal says. “Same as everywhere. This seems like a good post.”
“I wouldn’t swap it,” O’Malley says. Cal can tell from his accent that he’s not from round here, but he’s from somewhere not too different: that rich, leisured rhythm didn’t come out of any city. “It wouldn’t suit everyone, now, but it suits me.”
“What kind of stuff do you get?”
“A lot of it’d be motor vehicles,” O’Malley explains. “They do be hoors for the speeding, round here. And for the drink-driving. Three young fellas went into a ditch coming home from the pub, Saturday night, up beyond Gorteen. None of them made it to hospital.”
“I heard about that,” Cal says. Noreen’s cousin’s friend’s husband was the poor bastard who came across the aftermath. “That’s a damn shame.”
“That’d be about the worst we get, now. There’s not much other crime. Oil does get robbed, now and again.” At Cal’s uncomprehending look: “Heating oil, out of the tanks. And farm equipment. And we’d get a bitta drugs—sure, they’re everywhere, nowadays. Nothing like what you got in Chicago, I’d say.” He gives Cal a shy grin.
“We got plenty of MVAs,” Cal says, “and drugs. Not a whole lot of farm-equipment theft, though.” And then, before he knows he’s going to say it: “Mostly I worked Missing Persons. I don’t guess you’ve got much call for that around here.”
O’Malley laughs. “Ah, Jaysus, no. I’m here twelve years, and we’ve had two people go missing. One fella came up in the river a few days later. The other was a young one that had a row with her mammy and flounced off to stay with her cousin in Dublin.”
“Well, I can see why you wouldn’t swap this place,” Cal says. “Thought I heard a guy did go missing on you this spring, though. Did I hear wrong?”
This startles O’Malley into sitting upright. “Who’s that, then?”
“Brendan something. Reddy?”
“Reddys from up by Ardnakelty?”
“Yeah.”
“Ach, them,” O’Malley says, relaxing back into his chair. “What one’s Brendan?”
“Nineteen.”
“Sure, no surprise there, then. And, being honest with you, no loss.”
“They trouble?”
“Ah, no. Wasters, just. A few domestics, but himself went off to England a coupla years back, and that put a stop to that. I know them because the childer won’t go to school. The teacher doesn’t want to be calling in child protection, so she rings me. I go out there and have a word with the mammy, put the fear of God into the childer about juvenile homes. They shape up for a month or two, and then we’re back where we began.”
“Know the type,” Cal says. He doesn’t need to ask why the teacher won’t call child protective services for anything short of broken bones, or why O’Malley doesn’t do it himself. Some things are the same out here as they were in his childhood backwoods. No one wants the government sending down city boys in suits to make things worse. Business gets handled as close to home as possible. “Their mama can’t make them go, or she won’t?”
O’Malley shrugs. “She’s a bit . . . you know. Not mental or anything, like. Just not up to much.”
“Huh,” Cal says. “So you reckon Brendan’s not missing?”
O’Malley snorts. “God, no. He’s a young fella. He’s got sick of living up the hills with his mammy, gone off to kip on some pal’s floor in Galway or Athlone, where he can go to the discos and meet the young ones. Natural enough, sure. Who said he was missing?”
“Well,” Cal says, scratching the back of his neck meditatively, “some guy in the pub was saying he was gone. I musta got the wrong end of the stick. Guess I spent too many years in Missing Persons, now I’m seeing ’em everywhere.”
“Not here,” O’Malley says cheerfully. “Brendan’ll be back when he gets tired of doing his own washing. Unless he finds himself a young one who’ll do it for him.”
“We could all do with one of those,” Cal says, grinning. “Well, I wasn’t aiming to use that rifle for self-defense anyway, but it’s nice to know there won’t be any need around here.”
“Ah, God, no. Hang on a minute there,” O’Malley says, extracting himself bit by bit from his chair, “and I’ll have a look on the system for that license. What gun are you getting?”
“Got a deposit down on a nice Henry twenty-two. I like ’em old-fashioned.”
“That’s a beauty,” O’Malley says. “I’ve a Winchester myself. I’m not great with it, now, but I took down an aul’ rat in my garden the other week. Big fella, looking at me bold as brass. Felt like Rambo, so I did. You wait there, now.”
He ambles off into the back room. Cal looks around the warm little foyer, reads the raggedy posters on the walls—SEAT BELTS SAVE LIVES, WALK FOR SUICIDE PREVENTION, TEN FARM SAFETY TIPS—and listens to O’Malley singing along to a bread-ad jingle on the radio. The place smells of tea and potato chips.
“Now,” O’Malley says triumphantly, coming back out front. “That’s marked in the system as approved—and sure, why wouldn’t it be. You should have your letter any day now. You can take it into the post office and pay the fee there.”
“Much appreciated,” Cal says. “And nice to meet you.”
“Likewise. Call in another day when we’re closing up, sure; we’ll bring you for a pint, welcome you to the Wild West.”
“I’d be honored,” Cal says. The rain is still coming down hard. He pulls up his hood and heads out into it, before O’Malley thinks of inviting him to stick around for a cup of tea.
While he waits for his laundry, Cal finds a pub and gets himself a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich and a pint of Smithwick’s. This pub is an entirely different species from Seán Óg’s: big and bright, smelling of hot savory food, with a shine on the wooden furniture and a wide selection of taps at the bar. A bunch of women in their thirties are having lunch and a laugh in one corner.
The sandwich is good and so is the beer, but Cal doesn’t enjoy them the way he ought to. His chat with O’Malley, which should have settled his mind, has only stirred it up worse. Not that he believes for a minute that Brendan Reddy has been kidnapped by persons unknown. If anything, O’Malley confirmed what Cal thought from the start: Brendan had every reason to take off, and not many reasons to stick around.
What’s bothering him is the fact that Trey was right about one thing: the Guards are, for his purposes anyway, fucking useless. Once O’Malley heard the name Reddy, he was done. So is everyone else. Cal thinks of those rain-blurred hills, and a mother who’s not up to much. A kid that age shouldn’t be left with nowhere to turn.
The restlessness is still biting. Cal finishes his pint faster than he meant to, and heads back out into the rain.