The Dead Yard (15 page)

Even so, I was a little nervous for Kit until Touched came out again. Without a piece I
couldn’t have done anything to stop a hit, but by God I would have tried.

When Touched did finally materialize, the protégé was cleaned up and appeared
half-respectable. Still, a look of disgust passed across Gerry’s face. Hmmm, maybe the time was
ripe to move someone else into the role of junior bodyguard.

"Bye," Kit yelled across the room.

"Bye," I said.

Jackie didn’t look at me but Kit did and with a final wave from her they left the bar. I
finished the rest of my pint, well pleased with a very successful night’s work on every
conceivable front.

Drizzle. Cold for summer. The amusements deserted. The sound of generators guttering off,
stalls being closed, people leaving.

Someone pulled the master switch and the colored lights swayed on the cables for a moment and
went out.

Her eyes were dark. Her skin alabaster.

She’d been waiting for me.

"Spare a couple of hundred?" a homeless man asked and I gave him a buck.

We crossed to the ocean side of the road. The town like a deserted film set. Oppressive reds
and a frail green light bobbling on the concrete.

"This is how every episode of
Scooby-Doo
starts," I said to lighten the mood. "An
abandoned fairground, a dark and stormy night."

She smiled and looked confused.

"A TV show," I explained.

The rain ceased.

A few insects, a few seabirds. Quiet.

Her tousled hair falling beneath her hood. She was wet, younger now. Her legs a wee bit
unsteady in heels and tight black jeans. I’d heard her murmur something to herself. She was a
little tipsy and it was almost as if I were the older one.

Novice and initiate.

The field agent and his control.

"You made a successful contact?" she asked finally.

"Yes."

"We’ll talk in my car."

"Are you sure you should be driving?"

"Don’t make me cross, darling. I had to have a couple of G&Ts to keep up the act of the
desperate woman on the prowl. But I’m fine."

The big plum-colored Mark 2.

"You met them," she said when we were inside.

"Yeah."

"Did you make a good impression?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you did," she said, grinning.

"Gerry offered me a job, I said I’d take it."

She nodded, drove south. She opened the sunroof and wound the windows down. Not for mood, but
to clear her head and help her drive. She was slightly more intoxicated than she was letting
on.

I knew enough not to ask why we weren’t going to my apartment in Salisbury. She drove over the
Merrimack bridge and into Newburyport.

She parked the car in the lot behind the All Things Brit store.

"What about Touched?" she asked as she turned off the ignition.

"What about him?"

"Did he frighten you?"

"No."

"That’s what I was afraid of, dear. Well, we’ll talk about that."

"I have to say, I’m not impressed. The Provos have put the fear of God into them. I met most
of the whole crew. Can’t be more than five or six of them."

"I saw that, too."

"Six people. Come on. All this for six people?"

"That’s the definition of a cell, darling. Now save your breath just for the moment while I
look for the keys to the…I suppose I should have put them on the same ring as the car key, I hope
I haven’t left them back in…no, there they are. Thank goodness. My ability to retain keys is not
my best virtue."

She walked me to her flat above the All Things Brit store.

She’d painted it Mediterranean blue and filled it with numbered Picasso prints and Andalusian
pottery. There was a Moroccan throw rug and of course that skylight that let in half the
galaxy.

The air-conditioning had cooled the apartment to fifty degrees.

She removed her coat. She’d been watching me all night. Watching me with Kit. I may not be an
expert at intelligence but I can read a situation.

Of course she was beautiful. Seductive. Almost the polar opposite of the way Kit was
beautiful. This was a woman, not a girl. A poppy bloom, not a daisy.

Her hair wild and wet. Soaked dark strands plastered inside her blouse between her
breasts.

She unbuttoned the blouse, removed her watch and a pearl necklace. She sighed as she kicked
off her shoes.

"What else do you want to know?" I asked.

She leaned over the bed.

"Help yourself to a drink, darling," she said, her breath carrying the scent of juniper.

"Uh, where is the booze again, over in the—"

"In the little study. The drinks are in the bloody globe, if you can believe it. I know it’s
terribly bourgeois but it came with the place. Have a drink, I need to freshen up."

She went to the bathroom. I opened the globe. A twenty-five-year-old Glenfiddich, a
thirty-year-old-Bowmore, and a venerable bottle of brandy that looked as if it had been laid down
to celebrate one of Napoleon’s more famous victories. I helped myself to a full glass of the
brandy but before I could sip it she came out of the bathroom in only the high heels. She marched
across the room, took the glass out of my hand, knocked it back, and lay down on the bed.

"Fuck me," she said in an imperative tense that was impossible to refuse.

I took off my T-shirt and jeans, dimmed the light.

Her body was ruddy and pale and her breasts were huge and perfect. I climbed on top of her.
Her lips like a dollop of strawberry jam on a cream scone. I kissed her. She was hot, aching with
desire, her body bending up to meet mine.

"Don’t think I’m always this unprofessional," she said.

"Of course not," I assured her.

"I don’t screw all my agents. Not even all the good-looking ones."

"No."

"Clouds the judgment."

"Yes."

And I laid her down, and eased my body on top of hers.

I was an amputee but it meant nothing. Not to her, not to me, and I could do wet work just as
well with a prosthesis as your average bloke.

Her hands stroked my back and pulled me close. I kissed her breasts and her neck but she was
impatient for sex. She pushed me off her and kissed my belly and stroked my penis and sucked it
till it was hard.

She smelled good.

And we kissed and I thrust my way inside her and we made love, our bodies moving together like
singers in a duet, a new song, but one, somehow, that we knew by heart.

And I forgot Kit.

And I thought only about her.

Her snowy English arms and thighs, hungry lips, and assassin’s eyes that were warmer now,
burning and alive. The only sound, the harbor boats; the only light, the rotating galaxies and
nebulae and stars. We made love until Orion set and the big bear rose. The heavens peaceful,
silent, and fair; and, for once, here on Earth, we were in perfect symmetry with the world
above.

Four days of this. Seagulls. Heat. Midges. Greenhead flies. Blackhead flies. Mosquitoes. The
stink of marsh gas and a broken sewage pipe. Sand fleas, no fresh water, hundred percent
humidity, a dozen men grumbling in Portuguese.

It was noon. Ninety-two degrees and the flies liked the taste of a Belfast boy.

The cool blue waters of the Atlantic a few feet away. Instead this.

"So it’s bloody mutiny, is it?" I asked the leader of the Portuguese insurrection, who wagged
his finger in my face and accused me of being the offspring of Satan and either a kind of donkey
or, more likely, a prostitute. At least that’s what I gathered from my shaky command of the
Romance languages.

"You listen to me, you fool, I am at my wits’ end, you either start digging or it’s back to
the Azores," I told him in broken Spanish. The Portuguese looked at me with disgust.

Seamus lay snoozing in the hammock. Seamus was supposed to be the foreman but when he had
shown up for work, all he’d done was sleep off his hangover and tell me to get the "dagos" back
to work.

It all began so promisingly. The day after I met the crew, Seamus and Touched came to see me
in Salisbury. They formally offered me a job in Gerry’s construction firm. I packed my bags and
drove with them down to Plum Island. They introduced me to a bunch of Portuguese guys and said
I’d be living with them in a house Gerry was renovating. The house was the first bad sign. A
timber-frame sweatbox with mattresses on the floor, no ventilation, poor plumbing, and also
apparently the major breeding ground for every type of blood-sucking insect in New England. The
job itself was a piece of piss. Twelve bucks an hour and uncomplicated and anyway I figured it
wouldn’t be long until Touched checked out my rap sheet with the Boston PD.

But then nothing after that.

No contact, no pledge of loyalty to old Hibernia, no secret torchlight induction ceremony à la
Riefenstahl. No news of any kind. Just getting up and working all day in the hot sun, liquid
lunch with Seamus, more work, a quick dye job on my hair, and going to bed in the fly-ridden hell
house full of drunk Portuguese men all of whom, it transpired, hated me.

I’d been to see Samantha once at her lair in the All Things Brit store, ostensibly going in to
buy English candy; but she had been aloof and very unhelpful. "Just keep at the job and sooner or
later they’ll swing by and recruit you. They’re desperate for manpower, bound to be what with the
defections they’ve had."

"What if, Samantha," I said bitterly, "the Ra has scared the shit out of them and they have
decided to pack in the life and disband their organization? How long am I going to have to do
this sweaty, annoying job before you tell me that I’ve finished my bloody assignment and can go
home?"

"Oh, we’re not close to that time yet," she said. "Now if you don’t mind I have to get back to
the shop. I’m quite enjoying working here. I might take early retirement and open a place like
this for myself," she said, arranging a box of tea towels.

No erotic fumbling, no swooning looks. All bloody business.

No joy from Samantha, and I hadn’t even seen Kit at all in the last four days. Four days,
seemed like forty.

August had ended and it was now September. Princess Diana had died in Paris, not that the
Portuguese or Seamus gave a shit, but Samantha had put black drapes in the windows of All Things
Brit and, in a canny business move, doubled the price of the Princess of Wales mugs and
commemorative wedding plates.

I’ve described Seamus once before, but I’ll recap. He was the one that did the shooting in the
Rebel Heart back in Revere. His pal, Mike, as Touched had explained, had the bejesus scared out
of him and left Gerry’s employ, but Seamus was seeing it all through at least until his trial,
when he’d be convicted of assault or attempted murder, probably the former, and get a couple of
years inside. Serve him right.

Seamus was a disillusioned beat cop, about fifty-five. An old-school racist, with gray skin,
salt-and-pepper hair, and a body wrecked by his sixty-a-day habit, which he’d been maintaining
through thick and thin since he was fifteen years old. In a series of depressing lunchtime
conversations, I quickly ascertained that the highlights of Seamus’s life had been the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the abandonment of court-ordered busing in the 1980s,
the blowing up of Mrs. Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference, and the glorious run of the
Celtics under Larry Bird. The low light: game six of the 1986 World Series. I suppose his loyalty
to Gerry was less ideological and more an attempt to give his pathetic and useless existence some
meaning.

I’m being hard on Seamus, partly as a defense mechanism, because a week after I met him for
the first time, in circumstances that were less than pleasant, I had to shoot him in the head
from three feet away with a whopping Colt .45 hand cannon, the round at that range blowing his
skull apart and sending his brains, blood, and bone all over me and a hapless squaddie standing
nearby.

But we’ll get to that.

Seamus lying there in the hammock, snoozing while greenheads and horseflies sucked the blood
out of his pasty legs.

But for the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s bird sanctuary (and that do-gooder DFW alum
Rachel Carson), they would have nuked this whole island with DDT years ago and made it bearable
for thin-skinned Paddies like Seamus and me.

"Seamus, are you awake?" I shouted.

He didn’t budge.

"Seamus, the Ports are saying they’re on strike," I tried again, but Seamus was in a deep
drunk sleep.

"Get your bloody backs into it," I said to the Portuguese men, but none of them moved a
muscle. I didn’t blame them, really. Our job itself was a KKK dream or a good Catholic’s
nightmare. Demolishing Plum Island’s small Roman Catholic church to make way for housing. The
church had suffered declining attendances for years and the land was worth a couple of million,
so the diocese must have thought, what the hell, it’s coming down.

McCaghan’s firm had been contracted to do the demolition and the Church had already sold the
lots for three five-bedroom houses to be built on the former hallowed ground, the prospective
buyers obviously having learned nothing from countless Stephen King films. Not so the Portuguese
navvies, who were all superstitious illegals from the Azores. To say they didn’t like demolishing
a Catholic church would be understatement, and for days they’d been working slow and acting
stupid.

They were supposed to be shoveling a straight path through the sand, the loam soil, and the
concrete foundations to let the bulldozer in to demolish the church. A nasty job but one that
could be done in a day if everyone’s heart was in it.

The Portuguese rebel stood on his pickaxe and mumbled a remark about my mother, which, if he
had but known, was remarkably accurate.

I walked over to Seamus, who was still snoring in the hammock slung between a generator and a
portable toilet.