“Huh,” Cal says. He wasn’t expecting a full menu, although maybe he should have been. Lord knows back home the smallest towns, where the kids had nothing else to keep them occupied, were the ones where you could get your hands on any drug you’d heard of and a few you hadn’t. “Crack?”
“Nah. Not that I ever heard.”
“Meth?”
“Not a lot. Few times I heard someone had some.”
“Heroin?”
“Nah. Anyone who gets on that, they leave. Go to Galway, or Athlone. Round here, you wouldn’t know what’d be around when. Junkies haveta know they can get it anytime.”
“The dealers around here,” Cal says. “You know where they get their stuff? Is there some local guy in charge of distribution?”
“Nah. Buncha lads bring it down from Dublin.”
“Did Brendan know these guys? The ones from Dublin?”
“Bren isn’t a dealer,” Trey says, instantly and hard.
“I never said he was,” Cal says. “But you think bad people took him. I need to know what kind of bad people he could’ve run into around here.”
Trey examines the desk, running a fingernail along cracks. “Them Dublin fellas are bad news, all right,” he says in the end. “You’d hear them, sometimes: they come down in them big Hummers, race them across the fields at night, when there’s a moon. Or in the daytime, even. They know the Guards won’t come in time to catch ’em.”
“I’ve heard ’em,” Cal says. He’s thinking about that huddle of guys in the back of the pub, every now and then, guys too young and dressed wrong for Seán Óg’s and eyefucking him for just a second too long.
“Kilt a coupla sheep that way, one time. And they bet up a fella from up near Boyle because he didn’t pay them. Bet him up bad, like. He lost an eye.”
“I know the kind,” Cal says. “They start out dangerous, and they get a whole lot worse if someone pisses them off.”
Trey looks up at that. “Bren couldn’t have pissed them off. He doesn’t even know them.”
“You sure about that, kid? Certain sure?”
“They wouldn’t sell direct to the likes of him, that only does the odd bit here and there. Bren just bought from the local lads, when he wanted something. He wouldn’t be around them fellas.”
Cal asks, “Then who took him? These are the only bad guys anyone’s mentioned around here. You tell me, kid: if not them, then who?”
“They could’ve got it wrong. Got him mixed up with someone else.” Trey scrapes at paint residue with a thumbnail and watches Cal to check what he thinks of this theory.
“Maybe,” Cal says. He can’t imagine any likely way this could have played out, but if Trey needs it, he can keep it, at least for now. “That type mostly aren’t geniuses, I’ll give you that. If Brendan didn’t hang with these guys, who does? Any of his buddies?”
Trey blows out a dismissive puff of air. “Nah. You saw Fergal, and Eugene. You think they’re on the gear?”
“Nah,” Cal says. “Never mind.” He’s thought of one person who knows plenty about the Dublin guys. Donie McGrath has been at the edge of that huddle in the pub, most times.
Trey glances sideways at him, with a glimmer of that grin creeping back. “You ever do any drugs? Before you were a cop, like?”
For a second Cal isn’t sure what to say to this. When Alyssa asked him this same question, the thought of her on drugs kicked him in the stomach so hard that all he could do was tell her stories of things he’d seen and beg her never to go near anything stronger than weed. She hasn’t, as far as he knows, but then she probably wouldn’t have anyway. Here, the right answer could matter.
In the end he goes with the truth. “I tried a few things, back in my wild days. Didn’t like any of ’em one little bit, so I quit trying.”
“What’d you try?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cal says. “I wouldn’t’ve liked anything else any better.” The fact is, everything he tried repelled him with an intensity that startled him and that he was unwilling to admit even to Donna, who back in those days accepted the odd drag or snort with cheerful ease. He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you. One of the happy side effects of having Alyssa and leaving his wild days behind was not having to hang out with people who were on drugs.
He asks casually, his eyes on the desk, “How ’bout you? You ever try any of that stuff?”
“Nah,” Trey says flatly.
“You sure?”
“No way. Makes you stupid. Anyone could get you.”
“True enough,” Cal says. He’s thrown by the strength of the relief. “I guess if you’re not the trusting type, drugs probably aren’t for you.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, I picked up on that. Me neither.”
Trey looks at him. He seems thinner in the face this week, and paler, like this is taking something out of him. He says, “Now what’re you gonna do?”
Cal is still turning that over in his mind; not what to do, exactly, so much as how to go about it. What he does know right now is that the kid needs something good to happen today. He says, “I’m gonna teach you how to use that rifle.”
The kid’s mouth opens and he lights up like Cal just handed him that birthday bike. “Easy, tiger,” Cal says. “You’re not gonna just pick it up and be a sharpshooter. Mostly what you’re gonna do today is learn how not to shoot your foot off, and miss a few beer cans. If we have time, maybe you can miss a few rabbits.”
Trey tries to give him an eye-roll, but he can’t wipe the grin off his face. Cal can’t help grinning back.
“But,” Trey says, his face suddenly falling. “That’s not finished.” He indicates the desk.
“So it’ll get finished some other day,” Cal says, straightening up off the counter. “Come on.”
The gun safe looks out of place on Cal’s bare bedroom floorboards. The only other things in the room are the mattress and sleeping bag, the suitcase where Cal keeps clean clothes and the garbage bag where he keeps dirty ones, and the four damp-mottled indigo walls; amid those, the tall dark metal box has an air of sleek, alien menace. “This is a gun safe,” Cal says, giving the side of it a slap. “My gun stays in here until I’m planning on shooting it, because it’s not a toy and this isn’t a game; this thing was built for killing, and if I ever catch you disregarding that, you’ll never lay a finger on it again. We clear?”
Trey nods, like he’s scared to talk in case Cal changes his mind.
“This,” Cal says, lifting it out, “is a Henry twenty-two lever-action rifle. One of the finest guns ever made.”
“Ah, man,” Trey says, on a reverent rush of breath. “My dad’s gun wasn’t like that.”
“Probably not,” Cal says. Next to the Henry, he finds most other guns seem either runty or bad-tempered. “They used this rifle in the Wild West, on the frontier. If you ever watch old cowboy movies, this is the gun those boys use.”
Trey inhales the scent of gun oil and runs a finger down the rich walnut of the stock. “Beauty,” he says.
“First thing, before you do anything else with it,” Cal says, “you gotta check that it’s unloaded. Magazine comes out like this, lever goes down like this, make sure there’s no round in the chamber.” He slides the magazine tube back into place and holds out the gun to Trey. “Now let’s see you do it.”
The kid’s face when he takes the gun in his hands makes Cal glad he decided to do this. His private opinion about a lot of the baby thugs and delinquents he encountered on the job was that what they really yearned after, whether they knew it or not, was a rifle and a horse and a herd of cattle to drive through dangerous terrain. Given those, plenty of them—not all, but plenty—would have turned out fine. Failing that, they got as close as they could, with results ranging from bad to disastrous.