off after a couple of weeks, but he couldn’t afford rent yet, so he figured he’d live with her till he found a decent score.
He told Angela a lot of lies, afraid if she knew the truth she’d throw him out. He told her he was a scout for the RA, thinking sussing out schemes for the boyos was a patriotic ideal she’d understand. The truth was he was what is known in Ireland as a Prov-een. When the Irish want to diminish something, somebody, they add een, making it diminutive. You call a man a man-een, you’re calling him a schmuck, a wanna-be. The Ra had many guys who hung on the fringes, did off jobs for The Boyos but were never seriously considered part of The Movement. They were mainly cannon fodder, used and discarded and if they managed a big score, no problem. Dillon had actually made some hits for the Boyos, but it didn’t get him inside, not in the inner circles where it mattered. He knew where they hung out in New York but he didn’t know what the level of operations was. They kept him on a strictly need-to-know basis and a loose demented cannon like Dillon, he needed to know precious little.
There were two other other things he lied to Angela about – one was big, the other small. The small thing was herpes. He said he’d caught it off her, but the truth was he’d caught that shite a long time ago, back in the eighties. The big lie was that he’d only killed a few people before. Actually, he’d killed at least seventeen people – some memorable, some not. Like all his race, Dillon was deeply superstitious. All that rain, it warped the mind, added a mountain of church guilt. What you got was seriously fucked up head cases or as they called them in Dublin, “head-a-balls,” which doesn’t translate in any language yet discovered.
The one that gave Dillon pause was a tinker he’d killed, not that the guy didn’t need killing; he did, but you didn’t want to mess with a clan who knew a thing or two about curses. It was in Galway, a city of serious rain, it poured down with intent and it was personal. That town had swans and tinkers, and culling both seemed like a civic duty. There’d been a case in the place, swans and tinkers being killed, and the citizens were outraged about, yep, the swans. Dillon had been drenched, lashed with wet, the week of the Galway Races. Fookit, he’d lost a packet on a sure-fire favorite and then in Garavans the tinker had snuck up on him, doing the con, going, “How are ye, are ye winning, isn’t it fierce weather?” Like that. The whole blarneyed nine and then lifted Dillon’s wallet, headed out of the pub. Dillon caught him at the canal, rummaging through the wallet, so intent on his fecking larceny, he never heard Dillon coming. A quick look around, no one about, then Dillon gave him the bar treatment, a Galway specialty. You zing the guy’s head off the metal bars lining the canal for as long as it takes to say a decade of the rosary, keeping the deal religious. Thing is, you murder a tinker, you’re cursed – they have a way of finding out who did the deed and then damn you and all that belongs to you. Still gave Dillon a tremor when he thought about it.
Todd, that was the tinker’s name. Dillon would like to have lots of things in his past changed, and knowing the tinker’s name topped the list. Knowing the name made it, like, personal and shite. You didn’t ever want murder to be personal, you might start to take it serious, think it meant something. He felt the karma would come down the pike and hit him when he least expected it. He never shared this hibby jibby with anyone, but Todd was engraved in whatever passed for his heart forever. Wasn’t that curse enough?
Oh, yeah, and he’d committed one murder in New York. He cracked some guy’s head open against a brick wall because the guy had that plummy Brit accent.
Dillon had only gotten busted for one of his murders – a guy he’d cut for looking at his woman – and did five hard years in Portlaoise, where they kept the Republican prisoners. His first day, he’d found the Zen book on his bunk, left by the previous inmate. He’d picked it up from boredom and got gradually hooked. Hooked up quickly too with the Provo guys and got his arse covered though again, he wasn’t privy to any of their councils. They’d look out for him but didn’t feel any great need to stretch it.
He continued to ransack the downstairs of the townhouse. It was fun turning things over, destroying shite. A rush like when he was in his teens and the Brits came at them with rubber bullets, those suckers bounced off you, you hurt like a pagan for a week. The first time they got an armored car on fire and got the soldiers to crawl out, crying for their mammies, with a sniper picking the fookers off, one by British one. Fook, it got him hard just remembering. Those Brit accents, sounding polite even as they roared. Dillon was convinced then that he was one of the real Boyos. In fact, there was hardly a kid in the city who hadn’t been bounced by a rubber bullet – it came with the territory.
When everything on the ground floor looked good and wrecked, he went upstairs. He found the bedroom Max had told him about, which was filled with more ugly old shite that looked like rubbish his grandmother would buy. Everything was made of wood and they had some fierce gold-colored bed. Dillon imagined what the room was going to look like when he put mirrors on the ceiling, put down some reed mats, like home, get one of them waterbeds, and put a jacuzzi in the bathroom. He broke all the glass stuff from on top of the dresser and night table and dumped all the clothes out of the drawers. Then he found the old lady’s jewelry box and stuck all the diamond- and gold-looking stuff into a plastic bag he found.
On the wall, there were some pictures of a fat old lady – he guessed this was Mrs. Fisher. There was also a picture of Max Fisher standing on a beach somewhere. He looked the same as he did at the pizzeria and in Modell’s, except he had a bit more hair. Dillon couldn’t wait till he got to do Max too. He knew the plan was to wait for him to die but, fook, Dillon wanted to get on with his life. He hated that old bollix, the way he was sitting there in his posh suit. He reminded Dillon of Fr. Malachy, his principal in school. Dillon never understood what the priest was saying but nothing about school made much sense to Dillon. The only reason he went was to keep the Social Services away. But Fr. Malachy was always calling him down to his office for whatever, or suspending him. Malachy thought he was God almighty because he was the principal and could do whatever he wanted. Now Max Fisher was trying to pull that same deal, trying to call all the shots, but this time Dillon named the jig – now he was the man in charge and Max Fisher was the little Irish schoolkid sitting on the other side of the desk. When Dillon had heard that Malachy died in real agony from cancer Dillon had muttered, hope he died roaring.
Dillon heard voices and a noise – a key turning in a lock. He took out the. 38 he’d gotten from the Boyos’ place down off the Bowery. When he’d showed up there, they’d rolled their eyes, like, here’s this mad annoying fook again. But he had money to pay for the piece and, what the hell, he’d brought some decent bottle of Jameson. They treated him like a younger brother who’s always hanging on but is never, like ever, going to be in the gang.
Heading downstairs, he remembered what the Yanks said and used it now like a prayer, albeit a dark one, Lock n load.
Nine
Straight to Hell
As Max was feeling for the light switch, he slipped and fell. The way he landed and the way the pain was shooting down his side, he thought he’d broken his hip. When he started to get up he realized he was okay, but wondered what the cold wet stuff on his hands was.
For some reason, this whole time he’d been planning the murder, Max hadn’t thought about what the body would look like. He thought Deirdre would die like people in old westerns died. In those movies you never saw any blood – the cowboys and Indians just fell off their horses and lay there nice and still. In modern movies, they always showed the blood squirting out of people’s heads, gushing from their mouths. Max always thought it was just Hollywood exaggerating things, but now he realized that those movies didn’t show half of the real horror.
If it weren’t for her short, blond hair, Max might not have recognized Deirdre at all. Blood had leaked from her head into a twoor three-foot-wide puddle around her body. Although she lay on her back, Max could barely make out the features of her face. He thought, This can’t be fuckin’ happening. It was part of a dream – soon the alarm clock would ring and he’d wake up. When a ringing actually started, Max thought he really had been sleeping. But then he realized that the noise wasn’t an alarm clock, it was the burglar alarm. Shit, it nearly gave him a coronary and his heart was in bad enough shape.
After he shut off the alarm, he glanced back at the scene, shocked again by all the blood. When he realized that the wormy stuff on the wall was part of Deirdre’s brain he started to throw up. No one told him it was going to be so… gross.
