harnessed to a shiny black buggy driven by a man in a stovepipe hat.
Bruised and shaken as he was, Liam was no more able to leave a horse in difficulties than swim home to Eire. No sooner did he see the shoat run between the bay’s feet and the bay shy and startle and kick its traces, than he ran to its head and grabbed its harness.
The bay tossed him to and fro like a terrier with a rat, but Liam hung on, murmuring soothing inanities in Irish and English, until the gelding’s terror calmed and it stood silent and shivering.
Liam stroked the bay’s nose and looked around him.
The street was a shambles, with the corpses of his late assailants bleeding into the mud. A crowd of day laborers stood all around, goggling with their mouths at half cock. Off to one side, Madra the hound was licking the blood from a gash on his flank.
The gelding’s driver climbed down from the buggy, his cheeks as white as his snowy shirtfront.
“Thank you.” His voice, though flatly American, was kind. “That was bravely done. I take it you know something about horses?”
Liam touched his forehead with his knuckle. “I do so, sir.”
“Ostler?” the gentleman asked.
“Back in my own country, I was a trainer. Racehorses.”
The gentleman looked startled. “A horse trainer? I’ll be blowed! Do you mind if I ask your name?”
“It’s Liam O’Casey, if it please your honor.”
The gentleman laughed, showing strong teeth. “Honor me no honors, Mr. O’Casey. I’m plain William Graves, and I breed horses.” Mr. Graves produced a pasteboard card. “Here’s my card. I’ve a little farm up past the orphan asylum—Eighty-fifth Street, more or less. If you care to come there tomorrow, it may be that we’ll find something to talk about.”
Mr. Graves shook Liam’s nerveless hand, climbed back up into his buggy, collected the reins, and drove off.
“Well, that was a piece of luck and no mistake.”
It was Madra’s voice, but when Liam turned, he saw no dog beside him but a tall man in a black-skirted coat as filthy as it was out of fashion. His skin was pale, his crow-black hair was tied with a strip of leather, and his narrow eyes were set on an upward tilt, with his black brows flying above them like wings.
“You can be shutting your jaw now, Liam O’Casey,” the Pooka said. “I’m not such a sore sight as that, surely.”
“Madra?”
“For shame, and me standing before you on my two legs as fine a figure of a man as you are yourself.” The Pooka linked his arm through Liam’s and propelled him down the street. “Come away to Maeve McDonough’s and stand yourself a whiskey for a good day’s work well done. You may stand me to one as well.”
Looking back over his shoulder, Liam saw a pair of cart horses in thick collars pulling a piano in a wagon over the broken bodies of the swine. “My knapsack,” he said sadly. “My tin whistle.”
“The works of the late lamented J. J. Callanan were beyond saving,” the Pooka said. “The tin whistle, on the other hand…” He held it out to Liam, dented, but whole. “I saved your purse, too.”
“And my life.” Liam stopped in the street and offered the Pooka his hand. “I’m forever in your debt.”
The Pooka looked alarmed. “What are you after saying, Liam O’Casey? There’s no question of debt between us. Favor for favor. Life for life. We’re quits now.”
“Will you be leaving me, then?” asked Liam, and the Pooka could not for the life of him tell whether it was with hope or dread he asked it.
“Not before I’ve had my drink,” he said, and was ridiculously pleased to feel the arm in his relax its tension. “I’ll see you safe up to Mr. Graves’s farm first.”
“Do you think he’s prepared to employ me?”
“Of a certainty. And give you his daughter’s hand in marriage, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Liam laughed aloud. “He’s not much older than I, Madra. His daughter would be an infant, presuming he had one at all. This is the real world we’re in, after all, not a fairy tale.”
“Are we not?” They’d reached Maeve McDonough’s by now and descended into the hot and noisy saloon. “And here am I, thinking there’s room enough for both in a city the size of this. New York’s got life in it, my friend. I’m minded to stay awhile. As long as you come down from the country from time to time and give us a tune. There’s no joy in a city where you cannot hear ‘Whiskey Before Breakfast.’”
On the Slide
BY RICHARD BOWES
Richard Bowes has published five novels, two collections of short fiction, and fifty stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and the Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers Awards. Recent and forthcoming stories appear in
The author’s home page is www.rickbowes.com.
Sean Quinlan caught the 6:30 wake-up call almost before his cell phone began its first ring. He murmured, “Thanks,” glanced at Adrianne La Farice, who wore only a soft, lovely smile and barely stirred in her sleep, thrust the phone aside, slipped from the bed in the pearly morning light, and padded quietly out of the room.
He wasn’t awake so much as in a place where the line between work and dreams had been erased. In the ample living room he flicked on the DVD player, keeping the sound way down. In the kitchen he started the coffee. Back in the living room he sat in his shorts on the arm of the couch and watched the opening scene in an episode of the old
Grainy black-and-white detectives in suits and hats chased a gunman over the roofs of early 1960s New York. Sun through the apartment windows made the gray figures look like ghosts, and Quinlan liked that effect.
The gunman turned to fire, and the detectives ducked behind a chimney. An actor playing a uniformed cop fell, shot. The fugitive fled down a fire escape with the two detectives firing after him.
Quinlan turned up the sound half a notch to catch the voice of the old character actor who played the hard- bitten police lieutenant in the series. “Wounded in the hunt, with the law on his trail, the fugitive returns to his final lair, his first home, the old neighborhood.” The trumpets played the city-at-dawn theme music, which mixed nicely with early rush-hour street noise from downtown Manhattan fifty years later.
The episode was set in a neighborhood of five-story tenements that Quinlan didn’t quite recognize. It had probably been torn down and turned into high-rises. When coffee smells spread, he stood and discovered Adrianne in a floor-length robe, with her eyes barely open, leaning in the doorway and watching him. Her smile was gone.
“More detectives,” she mumbled. “You never stop working, do you, Sean?”
“My granddad and his friends used to make fun of what they called ‘twenty-four-hour-a-day cops’—guys who were always on duty,” he said. “Now it’s like I’ve become one. Can I offer you some of your own coffee?”
“Yes, please.” She made her way to the bathroom saying, “When we were kids, I remember guys backing off from confronting you because they just
Adrianne La Farice had been Adie Jacobson when they were in their early twenties and she waited tables while he took care of the door at Club Red Light over in the Meatpacking District back in the now-legendary early nineties.
She returned saying, “I don’t need to be up this early. I don’t need to be up at all. With business the way it is, I could spend the day in bed, and I think I will.” She uttered some variation on that every morning and never followed through.
