The Dead Yard (37 page)

Touched said something incoherent.

The chain saw got turned off.

"Fucking show you both a thing or two," Touched said.

Wiser heads had prevailed.

"My way," Gerry said.

Touched muttered something.

Gerry opened the door.

Touched behind him, Jackie too. They’d all been drinking.

"Go ahead," Gerry said. Touched and Jackie clenched their fists, rushed me.

And it all began again.

Tenses change. The room implodes. Touched kicks me in the stomach and punches my limp head. My
skull bangs against the log wall.

Punches and kicks. A yell and a swinging away of noise and light. Blood streaming onto my
chin, a terrible noise that turns out to be me screaming.

Touched, Jackie standing back, breathing hard from the effort.

"Well, that’s a sweet hello," I manage.

Jackie laughs.

"His name is Michael Forsythe, he told me, that’s his name," Peter says.

Touched stops, turns to Peter.

"What did you say?" Touched asks.

"He told me his name. Michael Forsythe. See, I’m helping you. I’m on your side."

"What else did he tell you?" Touched asks.

Whatever you do, don’t tell him about the boat, Peter, or he’ll kill us both right now and
flee the goddamn house.

"He, he just told me his name. Michael Forsythe. That’s all," Peter mutters.

Touched looks at me.

"Michael Forsythe? Where have I heard that name before? Let me think," he wonders aloud.

"I’ll spare you the trouble. I was the man that killed Darkey White, ratted out his gang, and
went into the Witness Protection Program," I say.

Gerry nods his head.

"Yeah. That’s right. I remember you, I read about you. Even in Boston that was a story. You
killed some of his men, too. Isn’t there a price on your head?" he says.

"Aye, there is, bound to be close to a million bucks," I mutter.

"Million bucks, dead or alive, actually," Touched says. "Nice wee bonus for us, Gerry, nice
wee bonus."

I shake my head.

"I don’t understand. Who is he?" Jackie asks.

"He was working for the feds, Jackie. Weren’t you, Michael? You’ve been federaled up the ass
for at least, at least five years now, I suppose. But why us, pal? You’d think you’d want to keep
a low profile after Darkey White."

"I couldn’t resist your charming personality, Touched," I tell him.

"Yeah, I heard you were a fucking cocky son of a bitch. Did you think you could take us down,
like you took down Darkey? You were impressive then, but look at you now. Look at the state of
you. This time you’re a bit out of your league. Don’t you think?" Touched says.

"Nobody said he’d only one fucking foot, though. That’s a distinguishing feature they forgot
about. And his hair doesn’t look the same," Gerry says.

I say nothing.

"I can’t believe this is what the feds make you do to pay the bills," Gerry adds, drinking
from a flask and slurring his words.

Fear and a thought. Have they all got drunk enough so they can get the moral courage to
butcher me?

"Have to talk about this one, won’t we, Ger," Touched says.

Gerry looks pained and confused, but finally he nods.

"One more for good measure," Touched adds.

He kicks me in the stomach with his booted foot, a real good kick, nothing held back. I cough
and spit blood and phlegm, wheezing and riding with the ripple of the blow. The pain almost
knocking me out again.

"Come on," Gerry says, "we’ll discuss this over a wee dram."

"Nah, one more, Gerry, I’ll learn him for Darkey White, too," Touched says and takes his
little green toolbox from his back pocket. He removes a thin knife.

"Now you listen to me, you wee bastard. You’re going to tell us everything from the beginning
or you’re gonna wish your ma had a miscarriage instead of you, I swear, boy," he says.

With that he stabs me. The knife, small and cool, cutting into my flesh like a scalpel into
tenderloin. The blade carving into my skin and the pain unbearable. Touched slicing up my skin,
steady and relaxed, as if he’d done this hundreds of times before. Gliding it effortlessly under
the soft membrane of my chest and digging through the tissue and blood vessels and hair with a
harsh and unnecessary deepness. Touched coughs like an old man, leans forward with a bony hand
and those yellow nails, and rips away a bloody square of skin and holds it up to me.

Someone’s screaming.

It’s me, the weak noise bounding back at me from the log wall. Screaming. Gasping at the air
to breathe it in. I bite my tongue to stop it. I take a breath.

We face each other.

In the lines of dark with nothing between us.

Nothing.

It’s not loss or rage or resentment or revenge. Nothing. Only the muddy light and an odd calm.
One breath upon another.

Touched tosses away the patch of skin, irritated. He can read a situation like a master and he
sees that he still has not yet mentally beaten me. He picks up the old wooden chair and smacks it
into my legs, breaking it into pieces. I buck from the pain and fight another blackout.

"We have to go now, but we’ll be back," he says.

He throws the remains of the chair onto the floor.

It clinks into the Coke bottle, knocking it against my foot.

"We’ll be back and we’ll bring Sonia and Kit, too, and we’ll all take our turns on you, and
you’ll talk. You’ll tell me everything. It won’t be like that bitch, your boss, in Newburyport.
Won’t be in a rush. I can take it nice and fucking slow with you, pal. Jack, Gerry, let’s
go."

He spits at me, misses, turns, exits, and slams the smokehouse door behind him.

He will be back. I shiver uncontrollably, horribly scared, for a minute or two. And then I
breathe and count to ten, twenty, a hundred.

And remember that this is the night and I should not be afraid because fear is the enemy.

Pain is the friend.

Fear is the enemy.

And down there on the floor is the Coke bottle that no one notices.

They return my armor from the sea. They improvise a weapon. They give it to me. Go and pay
them back in kind, they say. The water burns, the air curdles, Kit comes to me in the moonlit
hut.

Geologists say that Ireland was once joined to the coast of North America.

"Is that so, Kit?"

Greenland was tucked into Labrador, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were squished together, and
Ireland was soldered in there too. Galway hinged to the coast of Maine. There are rock formations
that begin in the west of Ireland and end three thousand miles away in Maine and Massachusetts.
So really I’m dying in a part of my homeland, separated by plate tectonics and several million
years.

Is that comforting?

Is it fuck.

Kit. I smell sweet pea and look.

But she’s not there.

She’s not coming.

Shit.

I could never really have been asleep. More a hallucination. A waking dream.

And the dreams are done.

It’s business now.

Self-rescue, as the instructors used to say in the army survival course.

Imagine, if you can, the situation.

An epic journey of about one yard.

First step.

You’re holding the neck of a Coke bottle between your big toe and your next toe on your right
foot. Your arms are spread-eagled, tied to crossbeams. The bottle has a ragged neck and if you
can get it to your hands, you’ll be able to use the broken glass to saw through the rope. But how
do you get it from foot to hand?

You’re going to have to swing your right leg up to shoulder height, hook it on top of your
left arm, and then grab the bottle with your left hand. You’re probably going to get only one
shot at this. Because the bottle could slip or fall out of your grip with the violent motion
you’ll have to use to swing it. If it falls and rolls away, you’ll never get it back or another
chance at this, and basically you’re done for.

Kit’s not coming.

But Touched is.

This is not the time for mister fuckup.

You rehearse it in your mind a couple of times.

It’s going to be tough.

And remember, also, they’ve taken away the prosthesis on your left foot, so for that second or
two that your right leg is hooked over your left arm—if you can get it up there in the first
place—you’ll be dangling off the floor, the ropes digging into you, pulling apart your wrists and
popping your shoulder blades.

It’s going to take some time to saw through the ropes and they’re probably going to kill you
first thing in the morning. You can’t be sure about the time right now but it’s certainly after
midnight.

At the most you’ve got about five hours.

One shot to get the bottle up to your left hand and then about five hours to cut the
ropes.

And, to state the bloody obvious, the scales aren’t even.

On the minus side, there’s your ricochet wounds, you’ve a one-inch square carved out of your
chest, you’ve a couple of broken ribs, you’ve had the shit kicked out of you, and you haven’t had
any fluids or food in twenty-four hours.

On the plus side, if you don’t do it, you’re going to die.

Simple as that.

You’ll die and you’ll rob the Fates.

Oh yes, Michael. If you die now you’ll never see what Bridget Callaghan’s got in store for
you—what she’s been hiding away all these years.

Other things.

You’ll never see the consequences of asking for that pardon from the Mexican government.

You’ll never go to Los Angeles or Peru and you won’t go back to Belfast on a wet June day
seven years from now.

You won’t do any of that fun stuff, Michael, if you can’t get the bottle up there.

One chance.

You’ll need to be a goddamn gymnast. One of those guys with the giant arms and the talc on
their hands and their coach praying in Romanian as they swing their legs up above that bloody
horse.

One chance.

Give you a minute to compose yourself.

Cut to the establishing shot. Midnight in the primeval forest. In Maine. A sepia film in a
remote country of the dead. The uneasiness is everywhere. You can feel it. The hunters, the
hunted.

But if you can get that bottle up there.

Well, I wouldn’t like to be in that big cabin when I get free.

A deep meditation.

A silent countdown.

Here goes.

A final look out the tiny window to check for a light on at the cabin. I listen for anyone
coming down the path. Nah. Just me and the woods and the boy, and the snow falling, steaming in
the log fire. It’s after midnight and they’re done for the night. Those brave inheritors of
Cuchulainn. With their tattoos of a maniacal fighting man tied to a stone. You should be
concerned about another man, tied to the beams of a smokehouse wall.

Enough procrastination.

Slowly and deliberately, I jam the broken bottle into my big toe to give me a better grip. I
hold it as tight as I can.

The night holds its breath.

If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.

Ten, nine, eight.

"Here goes."

I swing my leg up, feel the bottle slip, but grasp it tight as a motherfucking vise, jamming
the glass deeper into my skin.

I arch my side and my broken ribs, and in some kind of miracle hook my right leg over my left
arm.

With the fingers of my left hand I take the bottle from between the toes.

I make sure I’ve got it.

Have I got it?

A desperate tenth of a second.

This is my poleaxe, my claymore, my fucking deliverer.

Have I got it?

Aye.

I hold it tight in my palm and fingers, I unhook my leg, drop it back to the ground, take a
huge gasp of air, spit, and begin rubbing the ragged bottle neck over the ropes.

The morning—dour and constant in a speckled half-light. A snowy mist and an eerie quiet, as if
the plague had come or we were waiting for old eponymous in the moorland of the Baskervilles.

The boy raised his head as the door opened.

A key jangled in her hand.

She was holding a tray with a plate of toast and a cup of coffee. I could smell the melting
butter and the stench of Sanka.

She looked at me.

"You’re free," she said, surprised.

I know.

"How? When?"

Only just now.

Her mouth opened.

This was the moment.

Slow-down time.

I swung the Coke bottle and smashed it against the side of Sonia’s face. It caught her on the
cheek and made a clubbing noise on contact with the heavy bones in her skull. I’d swung
powerfully from the shoulder, and the crushing force of the blow hammered through the bronze dust
of hair on her jaw and twisted her jawbone with a dry snap that shoved it almost forty-five
degrees from the horizontal.

Before she could react, I hit her again from the other side. This second blow an uppercut. It
knocked out teeth and splintered pieces of bone and cartilage through the roof of her mouth.
Fragments slicing through the front of her gums and spurting thick blood down onto her chin. She
swayed and staggered to the side. The tray dropped in a clatter on the floor.

"Ssssss," she groaned.

The two hits were enough to send her into a mild standing concussion, but I needed her to stay
down. I held on tight to the wall and kicked her in the stomach with the heel of my right foot. I
knocked the wind out of her and she fell backwards, bumping her head into the edge of a pine log
and slumping to the floor.

For a second I thought she was unconscious and I hunted for a gag but then she began
struggling up on one arm. Conscious, but still too stunned to react. She put her hand to her
mouth and looked at the red blood on her fingertips.

Kneeling there before her executioner like Mary Queen of fucking Scots.

Our eyes met.

I lifted the bottle above my head.