At least now he knows what farm equipment got stolen back in March. Brendan went out with a hose and a propane tank one night, or a couple of nights, and siphoned off a little bit of P.J.’s anhydrous ammonia. Only he got busted: maybe he got sloppy and left a piece of duct tape stuck to the tank where he’d attached his hosepipe, maybe P.J. spotted the brass fitting turning green. Either way, P.J. called the cops. Cal would love to know what Brendan said to him to make him call them off.
He could probably have those CSIs and that K-9, if he went to the police—not cheery Garda Dennis, but the big boys, the detectives up in Dublin. They would take him seriously, specially once they saw those photos. Brendan wasn’t setting up some pissant shake-n-bake op in that cottage. He was going for the real thing, the pure high-yield technique, and he had the chemistry knowledge to make it work. It seems like a fair assumption that he also had the connections in place to sell the meth once he made it. The detectives wouldn’t fuck around.
Cal would be lighting the fuse on something whose blast would reverberate through Ardnakelty in ways he can’t predict.
No matter what he does or doesn’t do, he can’t see a way that this might turn out well. That’s what that shift in the air meant, the one he and Trey both felt as they squatted by the sideboard, the cold implacable shift that’s familiar to him from a hundred cases: this isn’t going to have a happy ending.
FIFTEEN
The loss of one of their number hasn’t scared the rabbits off. In the morning an easy dozen of them are bounding around Cal’s back field like they own it, breakfasting off his dew-wet clover. He watches them from his bedroom window, feeling the cold creep in at him through the glass. Whatever people do, right up to killing, nature absorbs it, closes over the fissure and goes on about its own doings. He can’t tell whether this is a comforting thing or a melancholy one. The rooks’ oak tree is every shade of gold, leaves twisting down to add to a pool lying like a reflection beneath it.
It’s a Wednesday, but Cal feels safe in assuming Donie McGrath won’t be spending his day in gainful employment. He also assumes Donie isn’t an early riser, so he takes his time over his morning. He fixes himself a big breakfast, bacon, sausages, eggs and black pudding—he hasn’t worked out whether he likes black pudding, exactly, but he feels he should occasionally eat it out of respect for local custom. This could take a while, so he might as well be prepared for a long wait and no lunch.
A little after eleven he heads down to the village. Donie’s house is on the fringe of the main street, maybe a hundred yards from the shop and the pub. It’s a narrow, ungainly two-story house, its windows crowded, at the end of a mismatched row facing right onto the sidewalk. The gray pebbledash is flaking off in patches and there’s a sturdy crop of weeds growing out of the chimney.
Opposite Donie’s place is a pink house with boarded-up windows and a low stone wall outside. Cal settles his ass on the wall, turns up the collar of his fleece against the lush wet wind, and waits.
For a while nothing happens. The sagging lace curtains in Donie’s front window don’t move. There are little china ornaments on the windowsill.
A skinny old guy Cal has seen in the pub a few times shuffles past, giving him a nod and a sharp look. Cal nods back, and the guy heads on to the shop. Two minutes after he leaves, Noreen pops out with a watering can and tiptoes to aim it at her hanging basket of petunias. When she cranes her head over her shoulder to peer at Cal, he gives her a wave and a great big grin.
By evening, all of Ardnakelty will know he was looking for Donie. Cal has had enough of being discreet. He figures it’s time to kick a few bushes and see what scuttles out.
He waits some more. Various old people go past, and a couple of mothers with babies and little kids, and a fat ginger cat that gives Cal an insolent stare before sitting down on the sidewalk and washing its nether parts to show him what it thinks of him. Something moves behind Donie’s mama’s lace curtains, and the folds waver, but they don’t move aside and the door doesn’t open.
A beat-up yellow Fiat 600 bumps down the street and pulls up in front of Noreen’s, and a woman who has to be Belinda gets out. She has a lot of dyed-red hair going in a lot of directions, and a purple cape which she swirls around herself before she goes into the shop. When she comes back out, she slows down as she drives past Cal, flutters her fingers and gives him a huge glowing smile. He nods briefly and pulls out his phone like it’s ringing, before she can decide to stop and introduce herself. It looks like Noreen has changed her mind about setting him up with Lena.
The movement behind the lace curtains becomes more frequent and more agitated. Not long after two o’clock, Donie cracks. He throws open his front door and heads across the street towards Cal.
Donie is wearing the same shiny white tracksuit that he wore to Seán Óg’s. He’s aiming for a threatening swagger, but this is hampered by the fact that he’s limping a little bit. He also has a swollen black-and-blue lump, with a gash down the middle, over one eyebrow.
Cal has no doubt that Donie McGrath could have earned himself a few whacks in plenty of ways, but he didn’t. Mart, the big expert on Ardnakelty and everyone in it, got this one wrong. Cal wishes he could see Mart’s face when he finds out, on the slim chance that he hasn’t already.
“What the fuck do you want, man?” Donie demands, stopping in the middle of the road, a safe distance from Cal.
“What you got?” Cal asks.
Donie evaluates him. “Fuck off,” he says.
“Now, Donie,” Cal says. “That’s impolite. I’m not bothering anybody. I’m just sitting here enjoying the view.”
“You’re bothering my mam. She’s afraid to go to the shops. You fuckin’ sitting there staring out of you, like a pervert.”
“I promise you, Donie,” Cal says, “I got no interest in your mama. I’m sure she’s a lovely lady, but you’re the one I’ve been waiting for. You sit down here and have a little talk with me, and then I’ll be on my way.”
Donie looks at Cal. He has a fat flat face and small pale eyes that don’t show expressions well. “Got nothing to say to you.”
“Well, I can sit here till kingdom come,” Cal says amiably. “I got nowhere else to be. How ’bout you? Day off work?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah? What do you do for a living?”
“Bit of this, bit of that.”
“That doesn’t sound like enough to keep a man occupied,” Cal says. “You ever consider going into farming? Plenty of that to go round hereabouts.”
Donie snorts.
“What, you don’t like sheep?”
Donie shrugs.
“Seems to me you got some kinda grudge against them,” Cal says. “One of ’em turn you down?”
Donie eyes him, but Cal is a lot bigger than he is. He spits on the street.
“How’d you get that?” Cal nods at Donie’s eyebrow.
“Fight.”
“But I oughta see the other guy, right?”
“Yeah. Right.”
“I gotta tell you, Donie,” Cal says, “he looked OK to me. In fact, he looked happy as a clam. That’s pretty sad, considering he’s half your weight and twice your age.”
Donie stares at Cal. Then he grins. His teeth are too small. “I could take you.”
“Well, I bet you fight dirty,” Cal says. “But then, so do I. Lucky for both of us, I’m in a talking mood, not a fighting mood.”
He can see Donie’s mind operating on two tracks at once. A small, slow surface part of it is taking in the conversation, more or less. The majority of it, running underneath and a lot more expertly, is assessing what he can get out of this situation and what, if anything, might be a threat. Although it’s muted now that he’s sober, he still has that bad, unpredictable hum that first made Cal pick him out: the look like there are none of the usual processes between his ideas and his actions, and the ideas aren’t ones that would occur to most people’s minds. Cal is willing to bet that, while the general concept of the sheep may not have been Donie’s idea, the specifics were.