He turned to Marie. “How long was it?”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Two or three years, wasn’t it? But she got fed up waiting for him to leave his wife for her, so she finished it. And then she goes and takes up with a cop, just to rub it in. What do you think of that, Gerry?”
Fegan’s face gave nothing away, save for the faintest twitch in his right cheek. “She’s got nothing to do with this. Let her go.”
O’Kane straightened, wincing at the ache in his lower back. “Well, that depends on you, doesn’t it? Do as you’re told, don’t give us any trouble, and she can take her wee girl home. Fair enough?”
Fegan looked from Marie to O’Kane. He nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Right, then.” O’Kane looked at his watch. “I think it’s time we got things sorted.”
He went to the kitchen door and beckoned Coyle inside. He pointed to Campbell. “Take him out to the barn. Pádraig, you help him.”
He turned to Downey. “Bring Gerry out, too. If he tries anything, you know what to do.”
Downey aimed the shotgun at Fegan’s head. Fegan stood up. He was tall, but not as tall as O’Kane.
“Remember, Gerry. Do as you’re told and she can go home. Don’t, and . . . well . . . you know.”
Fegan nodded, walked to the doorway, and waited as Coyle and Pádraig wrestled Campbell’s limp body through it. He turned to Marie.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.”
Downey pressed the shotgun against Fegan’s back and followed him out of sight.
“Wait,” Marie called. She went to go after him, but Quigley gripped her elbow.
“There’s nothing you can do for him,” O’Kane said.
Her eyes welled. “Please don’t hurt him.”
“What do you care?” O’Kane crossed to her. “He’s a lunatic. He’s dangerous. He killed your uncle.”
Tears ran freely from her eyes as she clung to her daughter. “But he doesn’t deserve to die.”
O’Kane sighed. “Jesus, who does?”
He reached down and gripped Marie’s forearms. She was strong, but not strong enough. It was easy to take the child from her, even though she fought hard. He put the little girl in Quigley’s arms. She stared back at her mother, red-faced from the tears.
The ball of bloodstained cotton wool still lay on the floor next to the couch. O’Kane picked it up. He took the brown bottle from the windowsill, opened it, and poured the sweet-smelling liquid onto it.
Marie backed into the corner. “No.”
“Don’t worry, love.” O’Kane walked slowly towards her. “It won’t hurt.”
She only fought it for a few seconds, scratching at his face, kicking at his shins. By the time she thought to raise a knee to his groin she was too weak to put anything behind it. O’Kane lowered her to the floor as she went limp. He looked to the screaming child.
“She’s all right, sweetheart. Look, she’s only sleeping.”
The little girl’s cries continued to stab at him. He showed her the cotton wool. “Do you want to take a wee sleep, too? When you wake up you can go home.”
McGinty took the trembling child, quiet now, from Quigley. “No. That’s enough.”
O’Kane stood up so he could look down on McGinty. The politician stared back, defiant. O’Kane nodded. “All right. Take them back upstairs. You can keep an eye on them.”
He stroked the child’s blonde hair, soft against his rough skin. “You’ll be a good girl, won’t you? Uncle Paul’s going to look after you for a wee while.”
McGinty took a step back, bringing the girl with him. “What about Fegan?”
“Don’t worry about him. I’ll take care of it. Just you wait here. We need to have a talk when this is done.”
O’Kane turned his eyes to the kitchen door. “Kevin?”
Malloy entered the room, his pistol drawn.
“Make sure our guests don’t go anywhere.” O’Kane walked towards the kitchen. “I won’t be long.”
50
For just a moment, Campbell was dragged back to his body where the pain waited for him. He screamed inside his own mind, unable to draw the breath to make the sound real. And then he was free of it again. From above he could see the vague forms carrying his body out into the gloom and the rain. Even up here the stench of the place was inescapable.
The procession marched across a sea of grey to a burning sun. The barn, lit up for their arrival. Campbell knew that much. This was the place where the dogs fought for their lives.
The dogs.
In Campbell’s swirling consciousness, he imagined them, the dogs, slavering over his body. He was going to die soon, he knew, and the dogs would have him.
No. Not like this. Not here.
Wake up. No matter how much pain lies below, no matter how much it hurts, wake up.
51
Fegan saw the first hint of dawn beyond the stable roofs as he crossed the yard. Coyle and Pádraig heaved Campbell’s limp form into the mouth of the barn. The Scot gasped and moaned as they lowered him to the ground at the edge of the pit. Downey kept the shotgun’s muzzles at the small of Fegan’s back all the time.
Five shapes followed in the emerging light, shadows no longer.
O’Kane fetched a roll of plastic sheeting from a dark corner. He brought it with him to the pit and unrolled it on the blood- and feces-stained earth. Pádraig helped him. The smell rising up clung to the back of Fegan’s throat, and he forced himself not to gag. He didn’t want to die here.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the followers. The UFF boys looked up from Campbell’s unconscious body. The woman and the butcher stood by his side. “I couldn’t do it. I tried, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
O’Kane looked up from the pit. “Are you talking to your friends, Gerry? The ones in your head?”
Fegan nodded. “Yes.”
O’Kane beckoned. “Come on, son.”
Fegan stepped down into the pit. Downey followed, pressing him forward. “You’ll let Marie and Ellen go?” Fegan asked.
“I told you, didn’t I?” O’Kane said. “Jesus, whatever happened to you? The great Gerry Fegan. You remember the last time we met? How long did you say, twenty-five years ago?”
“Twenty-seven,” Fegan said. “I was eighteen.”
O’Kane addressed the others. “He was just a kid, but he had a reputation already. The only fella ever raised a hand to me and lived to tell the tale. That was the first time we met. The next time would’ve been, oh, 1980. Those were fierce times. We had a tout to deal with. This girl from Middletown was fucking a Brit. She’d tried to run, tried to get a boat from Belfast, but McGinty’s boys caught her at the docks. McGinty and Gerry here brought her down to me. Isn’t that right, Gerry?”
Fegan remembered. “That’s right.”
“McGinty puts the gun in his hand, says, ‘Here you go, Gerry. Now you can break your duck.” O’Kane pointed to Campbell. “Bring him down here.”
Pádraig walked over and helped Coyle to lower Campbell into the pit. The Scot’s face contorted as they laid him on the plastic and he cried out in his stupor. Coyle drew the pistol from his waistband and put it to Campbell’s head.
“What are you at?” O’Kane asked.
“I want to do him,” Coyle said.
“All right, but you’ll do it when I tell you, not before.”
Coyle gave an impatient sigh and tucked the gun back into his waistband. Pádraig went to his father’s side.
O’Kane continued. “Anyway, Gerry here takes the gun and just looks at us. McGinty asks him what’s wrong, and Gerry goes ‘No, I can’t, I can’t.”
“She was just a girl,” Fegan said, ‘no older than me. She was scared. And she was pregnant.”
O’Kane stepped closer. “Aye, she was pregnant. She had a Brit’s bastard inside her. So what? She was a tout. That’s all there was to it. And you didn’t have the guts. I had to do it for you.”
Fegan remembe
red her eyes, pleading, terrified. Tears burned his cheeks. “I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t stop it.”
“No, you didn’t even have the guts to watch. You ran away. You were weak. She was a tout, the lowest kind of shite that walks the earth. The kind that turn on their own people. Like you, Gerry. And touts get no mercy.”
He reached out and wiped the tears from Fegan’s cheeks. “No mercy, Gerry. Not then. Not now.”
The woman took Fegan’s hand, her fingers cool and soft. He turned to see her smile up at him, her eyes sad, the baby calm in the crook of her arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded.
O’Kane took a step back. “It’s time, Gerry.”
Fegan felt the twin muzzles at the back of his head.
He closed his eyes and the woman’s fingers slipped away from his.
52
Stay awake.
Every shred of Campbell’s will focused on this one thing, this one task. To grab the knife taped to his ankle, open the blade, and get to his feet. If he could do those simple things, he might live.
But there was the pain.
The last jolt had pulled him back to some form of consciousness when they lowered him to the plastic. Now his mind teetered on the cusp of aware and unaware, and only the pain kept him from slipping back into the fog. He knew the movement would waken the smoldering in his side and the pain would be unbearable. But he would have to bear it. If he screamed before the thing was done, he would not survive.
His brain thundered inside his skull as his eyes tried to make sense of the hazy shapes before him. How many were there? He couldn’t be sure. His vision didn’t stretch that far. The one in front of him, though, the one whose feet shuffled in front of his face: Coyle.
Campbell kept his head still but let his eyes work upwards, along the backs of Coyle’s calves, over his thighs, up to his waistband. A pistol, small, but it would do.
And what would he do with it?
Think.
Think.
Falling.
Who were these men standing over him, their fingers pointed to his head?
Falling into the dark again. No, come back.
He inhaled, letting the explosion of pain wipe away the mist, and held the air there. It had to be now. Fuck the pain. He ground his teeth together.
Now.
53
The desperate scream rose up to the barn’s rafters and Fegan felt the shotgun muzzles move away from the back of his head. He opened his eyes. Campbell had a knife to Coyle’s throat with one hand, and a small pistol in the other. Both men staggered in a lazy, lopsided dance as Campbell seemed to fight gravity. His eyes rolled, unfocused, like a drunk’s. Coyle’s mouth hung open. The scream hadn’t been his.
Campbell aimed the gun at random targets, sometimes air, sometimes shadow, sometimes flesh. “Stay back.”
Downey stepped around Fegan, the shotgun trained on the two shambling men.
O’Kane held his hands up. “Now don’t be silly, Davy.”
Campbell pointed the gun at the voice but his eyes seemed to focus on a place far beyond. “Stay back or I’ll cut his throat.”
Pádraig moved to flank Campbell, but the Scot turned to the side. “Get back.”
O’Kane took a step closer. “Come on, now, Davy. You’re in no fit state for this. It’ll only make things worse.”
Campbell moved his aim back and forth between O’Kane and his son. “I’ll fucking shoot you if you don’t get back.”
“No, you won’t, Davy. Jesus, you can barely stand.”
“Get back.”
Pádraig took one more step to Campbell’s left and the Scot pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. The first shot cut nothing but air, but the second punched Pádraig’s shoulder, and the third his throat. He stood there for a moment, mouth open in surprise, blood flowing down his barrel chest and pattering on the plastic.
“Da?” he said, his voice a throaty gargle. He took two steps backwards and sat down heavily on the edge of the pit.
Fegan looked to O’Kane. The old man’s face was a slab of stone, his eyes red. “The dogs will have you, Davy. I’ll watch them eat you alive.”
“Don’t move,” Campbell said.
Pádraig lay back on the dirt floor, his breath coming in shallow bubbling gasps. He tried to say something, but the words drowned in his throat.
“Give me the shotgun, Tommy,” O’Kane said, inching his way towards Downey. Downey passed it over. O’Kane raised it up to his shoulder and aimed at Campbell.
Coyle squirmed in Campbell’s grip. “Jesus, don’t shoot! Don’t!”
Campbell blinked hard and shook his head. He brought the pistol to Coyle’s temple. “I’ll kill him, I swear.”
O’Kane cocked the shotgun. “You think I give a shite?”
The boom filled the barn like a thunderclap, and time stood still for Fegan. He saw Coyle’s chest explode, throwing him and Campbell backwards against the low pit wall. The muzzle of Campbell’s pistol flashed as he and Coyle fell onto the lip of the pit, and something sliced the air beside Fegan.
He saw Downey reach inside his jacket. He heard Campbell’s pistol fire once more as Coyle’s body rolled away from him. O’Kane took a step back before letting the shotgun’s second barrel go with another booming discharge. Fegan flinched as a red sun burst from Campbell’s stomach. He dropped to the plastic-covered earth as Campbell writhed, pulling the trigger over and over.
Fegan covered his head with his hands and listened as the pistol’s angry barks turned to dry clicks. He felt two bodies hit the ground, one heavier than the other.
Breathing and crying. Then a tattered howl that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the earth. That howl was answered by the dogs across the yard. He heard their panicked yelps cut through the dawn, their frantic scratching at the stable doors. Fegan let his eyes rise up from the plastic, over its sleek surface, until they found Downey’s twitching body, a revolver by his quivering hand. A pool of deep red spread from beneath him.
Fegan turned his head to the right. O’Kane lay on his side, alive, breathing hard. His face was burning pink and shining with sweat. A bloody hole had been torn just above his kneecap, and another in his belly, above his groin. His eyes found Fegan.
“Jesus, Gerry, he got me.”
Fegan pushed up with his hands and got his shaking legs under him. He coughed as acrid smoke scratched at his throat, and went to Downey’s body. He took the revolver from his side.
O’Kane’s laugh had a shrill edge. “The fucker got me.”
Fegan looked to Campbell. The Scot’s chest hitched with tiny gasps. His belly had been torn open and Fegan tried not to see the mash of blood and flesh. The UFF boys lingered over him, savage grins on their faces.
“You got him too,” Fegan said.
He walked over to O’Kane. The old man craned his neck to meet Fegan’s eyes. His breath came in hissing stabs through gritted teeth. He looked at the gun in Fegan’s hand.
“I’ll give you anything you want,” O’Kane said. “Anything. Any price. Just tell me.”
“No,” Fegan said.
“Get me out of here. Get me to a hospital. A million. I’ll give you a million.” He reached out and gripped Fegan’s ankle. “You can take the woman and the child and go anywhere. Two million. I’ll give you two million. Think of it, Gerry. Two million pounds.”
“I don’t want your money,” Fegan said, pulling his leg away from O’Kane’s grasp. He aimed the revolver at O’Kane’s forehead.
Tears sprang from O’Kane’s eyes and dropped to the plastic. “Then what? Just tell me what you want. I’ll give it to you.”
Fegan hunkered down. He could smell O’Kane’s sweat. “I won’t kill you. If you can get out of here, I won’t come after you. But you have to promise me something.”
“Oh, Jesus, anything.”
“When it’s over, you won’t come after me. Or Marie. You leave us alone. I’m going t
o kill Campbell now, and when I’ve done that, I’m going to the house to kill McGinty. Then I’m gone and you won’t ever hear of me again. You won’t look for me; you won’t put a price on me. Promise me that, and you’ll live.”
The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve) jli-1 Page 30
