The Colour of Blood

by Declan Hughes

  Sadie had looked about fifty when she was thirty-five, with paint flecks in her hair and colourful “ethnic” skirts and an absentminded air that never quite concealed how sharp she was; now she was seventy, she still looked fifty, but the paint flecks were grey hairs now, and the skirts were just a little wider at the hips. She rolled her eyes behind the thick Nana Mouskouri glasses she had always worn, opened the living room door, whispered “Light Blue Touch Paper” and disappeared into the kitchen.

  It usually took a long time to talk Tommy out of a sulk, even when – especially when – the bad blood had been his fault. In that respect, it was like having a girlfriend, but without any of the advantages. But I didn’t have a long time. So I turned off whatever quiz show bollocks Tommy had been watching, sat down in front of him, put the sports bag I was carrying on the floor and said: “Tommy, I think the Reillys, working with Sean Moon or independent of him, have pressed ahead with an attempt to blackmail Shane Howard. They’ve set a pickup for six tonight, outside St. Anthony’s in Seafield. I want to follow them back to wherever they go once they’ve got the cash. Will you help me? And we’ll call it quits.”

  Tommy’s valiant efforts to keep his sulk in place dispersed on the word “pickup.” He was grinning in anticipation and nodded eagerly.

  “Sure, Ed, what do you want me to do?”

  I guess the fact he was here at all, and still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown, ruled him out of the latest ransom bid. Another last chance for Tommy Owens.

  “Two things, really. I need you to have a haircut and a shave, and then I need you to steal a car.”

  St. Anthony’s is an old Victorian church set in off the main road near a crossroads; there’s a big yard in front that is either open or closed to cars, depending on whether there’s a coffin being brought to the church or just a regular mass. Tonight, the mass was at six, and all the dead were saints in heaven, so the yard was sealed off to traffic. Shane Howard stood in the church porch, pacing back and forth, his suede car coat on and a racing trilby on his head. He looked like a caricature of a south county Dublin rugby buffer, and as such, blended straight into an area where the oval ball game was a religion. I had passed by earlier and was waiting near the crossroads in the ’98 Punto Tommy Owens had stolen about half a mile from his house. (“Easier to leave it back if you know who you’ve stolen it from,” he said – some eighteen-year-old girl who had been given it for getting good exam results, apparently.)

  When I’d called Howard on his mobile a few minutes earlier, he was still raging about the difficulties he had had getting out of his house.

  “Some Garda fuckers must have told the press, a whole pack of them had gathered. Garda car there too, I think. I had them out in fucking Bray, thought I’d have to head up the mountains, but I lost them up Enniskerry way, cut back down here with fucking minutes to spare.”

  “You’re all right now. Just hand them the bag, don’t worry about getting a look at them or anything: I have someone watching. I’m going to go now, I need to talk to him. Don’t lose the head Shane, all right?”

  “All right. Be sure and get these cunts now.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Tommy Owens, clean-shaven, with hair newly cropped by his mother and slicked back from his forehead (Sadie said, “He looks like his father did when he only drank at weekends,” which, given the way Tommy lived, I thought was good going) and totally unrecognizable in a duffel coat, clear-lensed glasses with thick rims and grey desert boots, stood outside St. Anthony’s handing out eccentric religious pamphlets that I’d robbed from the porch of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Woodpark about the spiritual benefits that would accrue from a special devotion to someone called Mother Meera, and also from the talismanic properties of Padre Pio’s Mitten. Tommy was anxious that he hadn’t had the time to establish who or what these were, but I said the only people who might want to know would be as evidently mad as he was claiming to be. Beneath the duffel coat, Tommy had the Sig Sauer the Reillys had used to scare me off, only this time it was loaded; I had Parabellum 9mm at home, and now they were chambered and ready to go. I wasn’t armed. I figured if by some chance the Reillys made Tommy, he had the right to defend himself; giving him the gun wasn’t easy, but the sober look in his eyes when he realized how much trust I was placing in him gave me hope he wouldn’t fuck up. Not much hope, but some. What I really needed was some higher-quality backup, or some less complicated cases.

  I called Tommy, and he answered while handing out his wares.

  “Mother Meera, God bless! Padre Pio, his dripping wounds, his blood-soaked mitten.”

  “I thought the miracle was, it wasn’t blood soaked,” I said.

  “Fuck do you know?” Tommy hissed. “God bless, terrible night, isn’t it?”

  He had a lisping, almost whistling voice he was using, one I hadn’t heard since it had nearly got him expelled at school, when he reduced a very timid student teacher to hysterics by convincing her that the voice, which he used only when her back was turned, was the ghostly emanation of a dead child.

  “Fuck Darren, they took the Merc” was the next thing Tommy said, very low, followed by “Mother Meera, Padre Pio, thanking you!” back up in the lisp again. I waited a few seconds, and then, “Darren Reilly picks up bag, Wayne in midnight blue Merc S-Series Padre Pio Mother Meera God Bless! ’O6 REG G67Y. Bag in car, Merc signalling to pull out. Mother Meera, Sacred Mitten! Merc barges into traffic, heading your way, Ed.”

  “Good work. Thanks Tommy. Keep your phone on, I’ll call you when I’m done.”

  The traffic was a slow rush-hour drift in both directions. I looked in the rearview, which had two mini-Bratz dolls hanging from it, waited until the Merc was passing, then signalled – and no one would let me out. A blue Mercedes could slide into any line of traffic, but a Fiat Punto? If a grown man was such a loser as to be driving a chick’s car (and a teenage chick’s at that)? Forget it, my friend! I tried to keep one eye on the Merc up ahead; the lights were still red, but I had lost sight of it. And then there was a loud crash on my roof: Tommy Owens, waving his pamphlets in the middle of the street, horns blaring at him, giving me enough room to pull out, and him enough time to hop in. The lights went green, and Tommy flashed two fingers at the boy racer behind us with his hand on his horn, and leaned out the window to keep tabs on the Reillys (“Left, Ed, left, the Woodpark Road”), and we were still in the game.

  I had long been used to Tommy saying the last thing you expected him to say, so it should have come as no surprise when he said, “I think we should call the Guards.” But it did.

  “We have them with the money, Shane Howard can give his side of it, yous have the ransom note, what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, we have a gun, we’ve set this up and we didn’t tell them… the problem is me, Tommy. Unfinished business. Anything less than the whole thing tied up with a ribbon, and they’ll do me for something, anything. And I am going all the way on this one.”

  “You always do, Ed. All right man. Just thought I’d say it. First time for everything.”

  There is indeed. Within the hour, I’d be wishing for the very first time that I’d taken Tommy Owens’s advice.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WE FOLLOWED THE BLUE MERC UP TOWARD WOODPARK, but then they swung right and drove toward the city for a while. I called Shane Howard and told him we were on their trail.

  “Fair enough. Little skanger in a hoodie it was.”

  “We know who it was. Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “You should go home.”

  “With all those jackals outside the house? No way.”

  “What if Emily wants to come home?”

  “Emily’s fine. She called me, said she’s with friends. Last thing she needs is to be splashed all over the newspapers.”

  “Don’t go missing now, Shane.”

  “I’ll tell you where I’m going. For the next half ho
ur. To mass.”

  He ended the call. The Reillys had changed direction again; they crossed the N11 and were heading south and west into the mountains. Tommy took the Sig and offered it to me.

  “Here. Make me nervous, fucking things.”

  I put the gun in my coat pocket.

  “Thanks. You did well tonight, Tommy.”

  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

  “I look like a fucking looper.”

  “That was what you were supposed to look like. So you got it right. You made up for fucking up. What more can anyone do?”

  I nodded at Tommy, and he nodded back, and that was almost that.

  We followed the Mercedes through industrial estates, then climbed through dense pine forests and along narrow roads thicketed with bramble and fern; finally, a road stretched out along foothills of granite and shallow bog, low clumps of heather and marsh grass. It ran about a mile at a slow incline; I thought about pulling in in case we were spotted, but I had no idea whether the Reillys were meeting someone at an outdoor rendezvous or calling at a house, or whether they’d just taken it into their heads to bowl out for an evening spin and count their money. I kept them in our sights, and then lost them as the Merc crested the incline; when we made it to the top, I saw the road drop and cut right against the side of the mountain; far below us the city lay, an irregular blur of lights in the mist and cloud. There was a lay-by halfway along, used as a viewing point; the Reillys, having slowed down near the lay-by, picked up speed again and then turned off to the right about half a mile further on. I kept the car moving slowly, wary of running into them if they were doubling back, wary of blundering about in the dark.

  “I know where they are,” said Tommy. “Pull into the lay-by.”

  I did as he said. There was a grass verge with picnic tables and purple Hebe and St.John’s wort and a framed guide to the flora and fauna and a wooden gate across a rutted lane that led up into a forest of pines. Tommy hopped out and opened the gate, and we ran the car up and off the side of the lane.

  “Used to bring a girl up here. There’s a quarry about half a mile along. That’s where they turned in.”

  “Wait here,” I said.

  Tommy shook his head.

  “No way man. I may have made it up to you for getting involved with these cunts. But I haven’t made it up to me yet. Anyway, I know the way.”

  Before I had a chance to argue, he set off up the lane, dragging his ruined foot as if it was weightless; I followed. We climbed a couple of hundred feet and then bore left through the trees, picking our way over uneven ground. I kept my balance by hand, steering my way along the densely packed pines; resin clung to my fingers and the pungent smell burned clean in my lungs.

  At the sight of light ahead, Tommy began to sidle gradually down the hill; when we began to hear the rumble of voices, we made our movements slower and more deliberate; finally, we reached the edge of the pines, dropped to our knees and moved carefully between clumps of gorse and tangled bramble and fern for about twenty feet, until we were almost at the edge of a quarry. The sheer face, silver grey and orange slashed with purple and white, was to our right; opposite and beneath us, a sloping of mud and heaped stone fell to a dust floor of shale and rubble. There was an orange digger at rest, and an unlit grey and green Portakabin with Norton Excavation written on it; the lights came from the Reilly brothers’ Mercedes and a navy blue Bentley. The Reillys were standing by the Merc, the silver and blue drug company bag full of money between them. A man sat in the front seat of the Bentley, smoking, but I couldn’t make out who it was. Standing near the Bentley was Sean Moon, or someone who looked like Sean Moon might have if he’d had a shower and put on a suit and a dark coat; he was still pretty fat, but he didn’t look like a down-and-out. They were talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying; Tommy turned to me and put a finger to his ear to say he couldn’t hear them either.

  Darren held up the bag, but when Sean Moon stepped forward to take it, Wayne moved between them. There was another set of exchanges, then Sean Moon called “Maria!” to someone in the Bentley, and a very nervous-looking woman with snow blond hair got out. At first I thought it was Anita, then I realized it wasn’t, but that I had seen her before and she had reminded me of Anita then too. It was the woman who had been in both porn films, the woman Moon had called Wendy, and was now calling Maria.

  Maria was shaking, and didn’t want to go to the Reillys, but Sean Moon was insisting, dragging her across the gravel; she stumbled, and broke a heel, and he held on to her and swore and she stood straight, crying now, and he laughed and made an expansive gesture, and said “Women! Jaysus!” and the Reillys laughed too, and Wayne took hold of Maria’s other arm and dragged her across toward the Merc, and Darren handed the bag to Sean Moon, who quickly turned and tossed it in the front seat of the Bentley beside the smoking man, and as quickly shouted “Maria” again, very loudly, and she hit the dirt as quickly and when Sean Moon turned he had a compact submachine gun, the kind you can fire in one hand, and two or three bursts of automatic fire sang out and echoed around the hills, and when it was over, the Reillys lay dead, and all you could hear was the sound of a woman crying.

  The man in the car got out. He had a large head of hair in a bouffant style and a moustache and wore a long pale-coloured wool coat; he knelt down to comfort the weeping Maria; after a minute she rose to her feet, seemingly unharmed, and he walked her back to the car. Tommy turned to say something to me, but I didn’t hear what it was because in the act of turning he dislodged a clump of earth or a pile of stones, and whatever it was skittered down in a trail, right down to where Sean Moon stood. He trained the SMG in our direction, and before I could do a thing, Tommy said quietly to me, “One man, in the back lane,” and was on his feet, shouting “It’s okay, Tommy Owens, it’s all right.” He began to walk unsteadily down the slope, hands up, repeating the same words over and over, like a prayer.

  “Who else is with you?” Sean Moon said when Tommy was about halfway down. I had the Sig in my hand and the slide pulled back, but unless I wanted to take Moon out now, it was useless, and even if I did, he’d still most likely be able to rake us both with a single burst.

  “Nobody,” said Tommy. “I’m on my own. After those fucking Reillys.”

  He stumbled down to the bottom and walked toward Moon, who gestured first at his clothes. Tommy pointed at the Reillys and then at himself; I guessed he was saying that part of the ransom belonged to him. The bouffant-haired man appeared above the low roof of the Bentley, and Sean Moon went around and explained the situation to him. He nodded Tommy into the back of the car, then pointed up in my direction and whispered an instruction. I eased back on my hands and knees as quietly as I could before Sean Moon pointed the SMG up where I had been and sprayed a few more bursts of automatic fire around.

  I jammed myself low behind a charred gorse bush; my irrational prayer was that the more the needles hurt my head and face and ears and neck, the less likely I was to catch a stray slug. The musk of the gorse flowers had long gone; in its place was the smell of charcoal and ashes. The gunfire stopped. In the silence following, I heard the liquid purr of the Bentley and the crunch of gravel as it pulled away. I shinned down the slope and watched it slide majestically down the narrow road like a great sleigh on ice. I flashed on Denis Finnegan: the same luxury class, the same ooze through life. The Punto was well hidden above the lay-by; I decided to take the Merc; it would be better suited to what I had in mind. Even if the Guards found the Punto, chances were the owner had reported it stolen by now. I was halted momentarily by the Reillys’ massacred bodies, bleeding on the shale. Their deaths probably wouldn’t make the front page, or cause the people of Dublin more than a moment’s pause: just another gangland killing, another pair of dead hoods.

  I got behind the wheel of the Merc and lorried it down on the Bentley’s trail; I almost drove off the narrow roads a few times until I adjusted to the increased power of the engine.
A waft of cheap aftershave and hash smoke and body odour clung to the interior: human traces that now evoked the sickly sweet smell of death. I became aware that I was shaking, and sweat was prickling at my scalp; I found the switch that rolled all the windows down and let the cold damp air into the car. I didn’t catch sight of the Bentley for a while, but I didn’t need to; I was pretty sure I knew where it was headed; I finally caught sight of it ahead of me on Templeogue Road; when I saw it was going on down through Rathmines, I cut right through Ranelagh, running a couple of red lights and piling along Leeson Street, then down Fitzwilliam Place and left along the lane to the rear of the south side of the square, where residents could park their cars if they hadn’t built mews houses in their backyards. Brock Taylor hadn’t. I parked right up against his barred electric gates and cut the engine and got out the passenger side and crouched below it and let the slide back on the Sig. “Brock Taylor” was what Tommy must have said to me, what I hadn’t heard above the sound of the rubble he kicked down. And then, “One man in the back lane.” I thought of the boy who cried wolf. Tommy had invoked Brock Taylor so often, and it had almost all been fantasy. I hoped, for his sake as much as anyone’s, he had it right this time. The gates swung open, and a large uniformed guard appeared and rapped on the driver’s window of the Merc. I stood up and let him see the gun, and said “Hands” and walked around and frisked him. His big pink face was round-eyed with surprise. He didn’t have a weapon, which made sense; this wasn’t some gangster’s ranch in the mountains, this was Fitzwilliam Square, where the big rich kept town houses and solicitors had their offices. No one got shot around here. I took his phone and walked him through the gates and into a little booth on the left of the yard with a heavy metal door and a console and a CCTV screen and an armchair, and I gave him a tap or two on the back of the head with the Sig and pushed him into the armchair. There were no lights on in the house. I went out and reversed the Merc into the yard and around the corner so it wasn’t visible from the street, then I went into the little booth and consulted the console and flicked the switch that shut the gates. I waited for long enough to worry that the Bentley was going to dispose of its extra cargo first. Then lights appeared in the lane, and the gates swung back to admit the great car. Brock Taylor was driving, with Maria in the passenger seat; Sean Moon was behind Taylor, Tommy beside him. Moon pushed Tommy out and walked him toward the house; the machine pistol was loose in one hand, the money in the other. I stepped out between Tommy and Moon and had the Sig in Moon’s neck before he saw what was happening.