Wonderland: An Inspector Matt Minogue Mystery (The Matt Minogue Series Book 7)

by John Brady

  “That bastard shot me,” he said. “He shot me, I can’t believe it.”

  “Yes, Wonderland,” Minogue said louder to the dispatcher. “The seafront, the arcades. And it’s a shooting, a Guard, yes.”

  Malone’s left trouser leg was saturated now, he saw. Minogue couldn’t see any entry. He looked around for Gannon. Maybe he’d done a bunk.

  A movement caught his eye, and he watched a dark line move slowly from under the chest of the fallen man along a fault in the cement.

  “I came out to stop him,” he heard Quinn say. “I swear to God.”

  “Shut up,” Malone shouted. He clenched his eyes tight and groaned again.

  Minogue looked up and down the lane. The shouting had stopped. Bray, teeming with people, was suddenly deserted? He didn’t know he had been shaking so much. The noise from the open door of the arcade seemed to be louder now. A movement there: Gannon’s face to the side of a console, some kids, open-mouthed.

  Malone lurched in on Minogue then, his fingers clawing tighter on his shoulder. His hand, still pointing the automatic at the fallen man was wavering.

  “What the hell is keeping them,” he heard Malone say. There was panic in the voice. He shouldered harder into Malone when he felt the slide.

  “Things are going spacey on me,” Malone muttered. “I’m going to sit down.”

  A million stars burst in the light around Minogue as he got Malone under the arm. He tried to brace himself better, but Malone was going slack on him, muttering, hissing. He fell the last bit to the pavement.

  “Ah, me arse,” he heard Malone whisper. Then his breath squealed and he clenched his eyes tight.

  Malone’s face was gone white now, and there was a sheen to it. He opened his eyes wide, stared at Minogue. He spoke in a clear voice.

  “Are they here now, boss? Are they?”

  Minogue kept pushing on where he thought the entry was. It wasn’t an artery, he thought. The colour, the flow.

  He saw that Malone’s arm was wavering.

  “Let me have that, Tommy.”

  Malone said nothing. His face was relaxed, a hint of a curiosity in his eyes.

  “Let go of it, Tommy. Or you’ll do me by mistake.”

  “The other fella,” Malone said.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Malone’s grip loosened a little. He looked down at where Minogue was pressing the jacket against his leg.

  “Am I okay?”

  The dreamy voice had Minogue sure Malone was going to faint.

  “You will be, yes.”

  Malone leaned to the side to look at the fallen man.

  “Is that him?”

  Minogue took the automatic, realized it had been four years since he’d done training. He let Malone’s hand down on his lap.

  “Don’t take your eye off him, okay?”

  It was the drowsy, fearful voice of a child waking, not waking fully, from a nightmare, that Minogue heard.

  “Yes, Tommy.”

  “Can you believe it?” Malone said, the whimsy breaking out in his voice. “He just did it, he pointed a gun at me and he shot me.”

  Minogue glanced at Malone’s face, saw the eyes widen.

  “Not long now, Tommy, I hear the cavalry.”

  More faces, teenagers, began to appear from inside the arcade. Minogue kept trying to wave them off.

  “Who’s that, boss?”

  “Just kids, Tommy, it’s okay.”

  “Someone’s shot,” he heard a girl say. “Look, a gun over there.”

  “Oh, where in the name of Jaysus are our lads,” Malone groaned.

  Minogue watched Quinn’s eyes. They moved from the cement by his cheek to the fallen man and back.

  Then a white car shot by the top end of the laneway. Minogue heard the tires bite, doors slamming. A Guard ran by the top of the laneway. Minogue saw the gun in his hand. They’ve missed us, he thought, the thicks.

  “What’s that,” Malone said. “Are they here yet?”

  The Guard came back, and looked down the lane. Minogue watched another Guard, then two detectives run along both sides of the laneway now. More people began inching out into the lane from the arcade now.

  He got up from his hunkers, waited for the spinny yaw in his head to stop.

  “The cops,” one of the teenagers shouted.

  Minogue had his photocard out. He held it up. The detectives had gone in to run to both sides of the laneway and taken up stances. He didn’t want to look their way, to see the guns aimed at him.

  “Drug Squad,” he called out. “There’s two of us, one hurt.”

  “Get down on the ground there,” one of the detectives shouted. “Get down, and put that gun flat out—use your fingers. Get down!”

  Minogue looked at the detective now. He studied the line between the eyebrows, the fear in his face. The vest had slid up under the detective’s chin. He could barely see the automatic pointing at him. The other detective was saying something. Quinn had bent his neck to watch them.

  “Get down, I said! You! Do it!”

  The second detective had his hand on the other’s shoulder now.

  “. . . know him . . .” Minogue heard.

  The siren he was beginning to hear had better be an ambulance. The second detective was calling out to him.

  “You’re what’s-his-name, are you? Kilmartin’s mob?”

  “That’s me,” said Minogue. “Get us an ambulance.”

  Malone’s voice was a reedy wheeze now.

  “Me too,” he said. “So easy does it there, cowboy.”

  Welcome to the Real World, Pal

  Kilmartin showed up on the ward pretending to be surprised to the Minogues sitting outside the door to Malone’s room. Minogue studied his friend’s stroll down from the lift. 50% new visitor to the planet, he decided, 50% gunslinger in a showdown. He leaned in to Kathleen while he watched Kilmartin beam a big, bogus smile around the nursing station.

  “Do they still make suits like that?”

  “Now now,” she said.

  Kilmartin leaned in over the counter to share some wit. Up came the right leg, Minogue noticed, kicked up like a horse. He had asked Kilmartin about the mannerism. He couldn’t remember the explanation.

  “Jim’s lost weight,” Kathleen whispered.

  Kilmartin pusged away from the counter with a debonair flourish and a crisp click from his new leather soles. Will he break into a tap-dance, Minogue wondered.

  “The bookworm himself,” Kilmartin called out. “Readng your breviary, I imagine – not.”

  He turned to Kathleen.

  “Ah, Kathleen Mavourneen. Why do we need the rain to remind us how lovely the flowers are?”

  “What are you on,” Minogue said to him.

  “Oh envy is a terrivle thing,” Kilmartin replied, genially closing one eye. “A terrible thing entirely.”

  “Don’t mind him, Jim,” Kathleen said.

  Kilmartin’s crowd-pleaser smile flashed.

  “Many’s the year since I did that, a stór.”

  He nodded at Minogue’s book.

  “Vienna? Is that a sign of something?”

  Minogue watched his friend tugging at his cuffs. Madly expensive shirts were Kilmartin’s weakness.

  “You should open a book yourself. You old tart, you.”

  “Oh, talk about contrary! You’re like an oul one there.”

  Kilmartin nodded at the door to Malone’s room.

  “Here, have you been in yet?”

  “We’re waiting our turn,” Kathleen said. “He has people in there now. We didn’t want to be crowding them.”

  “Good move. The Tallaght-fornia crowd? The howiya bags and the Babycham and all that? A wide berth.”

  “Tommy’s Crumlin,” Minogue said.

  He looked back down the page to try to remember what the Prater was again. “You big gom,” he added.

  Kilmartin still had the moves. He tipped the book closed with his right hand, and with hi
s left he pushed at Minogue’s arm.

  “Come up, let you,” he whispered. “Let me take the tough talk out of you, you buff, you. Come up, I say, and not be hiding behind some shagging book!”

  Minogue didn’t want to smile. It’d only keep him going.

  “Honestly,” Kathleen said. “Boys never grow up, do they.”

  Minogue rolled out of the chair and made a grab at Kilmartin’s arm.

  “Ho, you thick,” Kilmartin whispered. “You’ll have to get up a damn sight earlier to cod me with that stunt.”

  Minogue closed on him, but Kilmartin managed to bat him off with a shove.

  “None of the tricky stuff, you Mayo hoor, you. Don’t make me hurt you.”

  Kilmartin pretended to roll up his sleeves.

  “Well, by God now,” he said. “If Molly’s after getting himself shot in the arse out in Bray, you’re definitely in line to get kicked in the arse here in this place, what-do-you-call-it—”

  “Dublin, you iijit. You’ve only been here for thirty years now. Come on now, if you’re able.”

  “—Whitehall or whatever it is.”

  Minogue made a feint and came around on Kilmartin’s left. He caught him wrong-footed from the decoy and he shoved him to the wall.

  “Mind the suit, you gobshite,” Kilmartin said. “Sorry about that there, Kathleen. It slipped out.”

  Minogue poked him in the ribs.

  “You hoor’s get, you - excuse me, Kathleen, but the dirty moves here—”

  Minogue let go when he saw the door to Malone’s room swing open. Mrs. Malone was indeed not much taller than five foot, just as Malone had told him. The woman with her looked nothing like her. Kilmartin had been right about the trademark howiya bags of the Dublin-born matrons.

  Sheila Malone, she introduced herself as: her sister-in-law Theresa. Tree-sah. Malone’s aunt had more of his set-in eyes, a Dubliner’s now-hold-on-there-just-a-minute air about her. She might even be angrier than Malone’s mother.

  “How are you managing?” Minogue asked Sheila Malone.

  “Well, I wasn’t one bit well yesterday, I can tell you.”

  She glanced over at Kilmartin, her eyes narrowing. Was it him she had decided was responsible for sending her son on this assignment?

  “Me head is still spinning so it is,” she said next. “But in the heel of the reel, I’m going to have to believe what I was told in there, I suppose.”

  “We had no idea,” Minogue said. “When it happened I mean, out of the blue. No idea.”

  Sheila. Malone sighed and shook her head once. She tilted her head then, and squinted at him.

  “But you,” she said “are you okay? Yourself like?”

  “Allow me, Missus,” Kilmartin said. “This character you’re talking to, he was never all right. No difference.”

  She managed a wan smile.

  “Well,” she said then as though she had put down a heavy load. “‘Stumbled into it’ says smart boy inside. As if that’s going to help me get a wink of sleep. Am I right, Theresa?”

  “You’re always right, Sheila.”

  “That’s the style,” Minogue said.

  Words seemed hard to find then. An orderly walked by, shoes squeaking. Sheila. Malone moved her handbag up further on her arm, looked down at her shoes and then straight at Minogue.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said. “But I couldn’t phone you. I wouldn’t a been able to, you know? Thanks, is all I had to say to you. Thanks.”

  She dabbed her eyes.

  “I did nothing,” he said. “Except hit the floor and roll up in a ball - and pray.”

  “Ah now,” she said. “Go on with you. He says you stayed with him all the way into the operating room. They had to kick you out, he told me.”

  “He owes me a tenner,” he tried. “I didn’t want him out of my sight. The Dublin crowd, you know?”

  “Ah go away out of that. My own Ma was country.”

  She made another effort to smile. Drawing in a deep breath she let it out slowly as she looked down the hall.

  “A cup of tea would do it,” Minogue said. “Or maybe a little go of the you-know-what. Unofficially now, I have some in the car, for medicinal purposes. So would you..?”

  “Save him the bother of drinking it,” said Kilmartin.

  “Go on,” she said. It was the real deal, her smile, Minogue thought: mischief and relief in one. “A right pair, you two. Oh youse’re just like he says, only worse.”

  It was her way of ending the conversation. Minogue and Kilmartin watched them head down the hall.

  “Tough birds,” Kilmartin murmured.

  “Sure they’d have to be,” Kathleen said. “What else could they do?”

  “Here what’s this ‘pray’ thing,” Kilmartin said then, rounding on him. “That was some whopper, I tell you.”

  He reached out and tapped his knuckles on the door, and pushed.

  “Get dressed, you gurrier,” he called out, and tapped again. “Cavalry’s here. Book him, Danna. Cover your ar—”

  Minogue tried to take a step back, but he had been too close. Backing out hastily, Kilmartin stepped on him.

  Sonia Chang’s mother had steel grey hair. There were freckles or something high on her cheeks, sunspots maybe. Her eyes flicked around the hall before going to her daughter. Not totally comfortable with English, Minogue remembered.

  “We’re just going,” Sonia Chang said.

  Goh-ing, Minogue heard. He wondered if he’d ever be able to say to her that he liked how she spoke—how she said Ih-land—without offending her, or somebody.

  “God, no,” Kilmartin said and backed off further. “Honestly. Don’t mind us at all, at all. Honestly. Take your time. Really.”

  He held the smile, nodding all the while, and pulled the door behind them. He looked at Minogue.

  “The people in there,” he said.

  “People, I know. They’re all over the place.”

  “The two Chinese-looking people in there I’m talking about. The two women. Have they started bringing in nurses from over there now?”

  “Sonia’s his girlfriend.”

  “You never told me anything about this.”

  “What’s there to tell? That’s her mother as well.”

  Kilmartin looked to Kathleen and back.

  “The mother’s a bit old style,” Minogue said. “She chaperones the daughter.”

  “A chaperone?”

  “The whole Caucasian thing. It’s still bit of a wobbler for the family.”

  “Caucasian,” Kilmartin said.

  “Tommy’s a Caucasian.”

  “That doesn’t count. A Dublin man, is what he is.”

  “You’re one too,” Minogue said. “So am I. Caucasians.”

  Kilmartin dipped his head, gave his friend a hard look.

  “I have never in all my frigging long and happy life—excuse me, Kathleen, I can’t help it—been called that. A … Caucasian.”

  Minogue strolled back to the two chairs he had lifted from the waiting area. He found the page on where Freud’s office was now a museum. It looked like everything was walkable in Vienna.

  “A takeaway is what I thought right away,” he heard Kilmartin trying to reason with Kathleen. “Your man in there likes his grub, that I know for a fact, yes.”

  “Maybe I got it all wrong,” Minogue said. “Maybe they’re in to get the laundry.”

  Kathleen looked at her watch and she began a slow walk down the hall. Kilmartin flopped down in the chair beside him.

  “God almighty,” he whispered. “Every day in this town. What next.”

  He poked Minogue.

  “Well. This Quinn character still singing, is he?”

  “I believe he is.”

  Kilmartin stroked his neck slowly and then sighed.

  “Jesus. A right wake-up he got. Out of his depth by a long shot.”

  Minogue nodded. He thought of Sonia Chang’s mother again. The things she had seen in her
lifetime.

  “And his mate shot to bits in the jacks there,” Kilmartin said. “Canning, that his name? Well, it’s time to reconsider then, isn’t it?”

  “It’s got a lot of things happening in Serious Crimes, I hear.”

  “Did I hear the RUC had a file on your man as long as a Mass in Lent? What’s his face, the fella came down to do them?”

  “Roe,” Minogue said.

  “Yep. A real case. Pure mental, right?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “A butcher, for the love of God. But the feckers above in the RUC didn’t see fit to warn us about him. Bastards.”

  “They couldn’t pin him, I heard.”

  “Me bollocks. He’d no politics either, is what someone told me. But he was more than just a do-for too. The disguise wasn’t just the tools of the trade.”

  Kilmartin looked down the hall to see if Kathleen was out of earshot. He dropped his voice to a whisper.

  “Went around the twist in prison, right?”

  “That’s what I’ve been hearing,” Minogue replied.

  The ring of streets around Vienna would have him dizzy walking maybe. Kilmartin leaned in.

  “Tell you something else I heard. He liked to dress up in a certain way. If you take my meaning.”

  Minogue watched Kilmartin adjusting his tie. Then he turned to wondering how many calls Kilmartin had made. He’d never allow that he was out of any loop.

  “Good will come of it,” Kilmartin said. “It’s out in the open that the IRA is into drug rackets worse than any of them. Let’s see how they wear that one, by God.”

  Kilmartin stopped when a sedated patient was wheeled down the hall. Minogue stole a glance at Kilmartin’s covert study of the sunken face as the attendant pushed the trolley by.

  “As if we didn’t have enough trouble,” Kilmartin resumed, his eyes still on the trolley. “Russians and Albanians and Bulgarians, and your men the Turks even—and all the other fecking I-don’t-know-whats—running their efforts into the country. Baloobas. Christ, Matt, they must think this is heaven here. We’re gobshites here, ready and willing to be taken down the garden path.”