‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ Arm threw in, anyway.
‘Nah,’ Paudi said mildly. He went quiet for a moment, then, addressing Arm: ‘You killed that Fannigan fella, just like that, hah? What do you think you are?’
‘I’m not anything,’ Arm assured him.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve shown your hand,’ Paudi said.
‘It was you boys wanted Fannigan dealt with. It was the other fat cunt showed up yesterday saying how Dympna’s old man wouldn’t want to let this lie,’ Arm said.
‘Invoking the dead,’ Paudi tittered. ‘That’d be Heck alright.’
‘Fuck all that!’ Dympna shouted, ‘What about this? You thought, what? We came here to do you over and fucking what? Rob you?’
Paudi did not respond.
Arm was standing with his hands up and out either side of his head. Dympna had his fingers interlinked, palms on his crown, rocking his elbows demonstrably in the air as he spoke.
‘So what’s going to happen, Unk?’ Dympna said.
Paudi spat.
Arm looked above the porch, past the roof. Back of them, he estimated, there were thirty or more feet of open ground to cover to get to the shitbox. Arm could smell the heather and could see, beyond the house, the upper part of the hill, the graded billows of green and brown and purple fronds turning languidly in the wind, then turning back again. Beyond the hill’s crest a tiny plane slipped frictionlessly across the sky, shedding a wake of thin white exhaust that feathered apart as it hung there, in the grey.
Thirty feet. Give or take. It was too far, Arm knew. If this man was actually going to use the gun he’d get every chance no matter how lightning they ran.
And so the three stayed put, just silent and waiting. The uncle regarded the two. Arm heard Dympna let out a deep breath.
‘Ah now, Unk,’ Dympna said, ‘fuck all this for a game of soldiers.’
Dympna dropped his arms and started forwards, stepping right up to Paudi and closing the substantial meat of his palm over the barrel, nudging the muzzle downwards.
The noise was there and gone, a slap to the air that left it hot and thrumming. Arm was jarred, punch-drunk, blood droning thickly in his ears. The Alsatians were off, barking dementedly out back, one or both, maybe. The bridge of Arm’s nose throbbed. He blinked to water away the sudden flecks of grit inundating his eyes. His face was very hot. There was a smell. Dympna was genuflecting on one knee in the grass. His sleeve was mostly gone and a gouge of black and red smoked along the underside of his arm, wrist to elbow. Dympna’s sleeve was in tatters. He was still holding the double barrel. The smell was the smell of combusted flesh. Dympna’s arm was bad but there was also his leg. Paudi stepped back and the gun barrel slid from Dympna’s grip. Dympna made a fist with his other hand, his left, and bowled a hopeless swing in the direction of his uncle. The momentum brought Dympna keeling forward. The shot leg seemed to stay upright a moment longer, then it too capsized, dragged by the portion of it that was still connected to Dympna’s thigh.
Arm turned and ran, lunging so quickly from a standing position he felt his right hamstring tear within a couple of strides, but he kept going. He fell against the driver door. The keys were in the ignition. The engine whinnied like a piteous bitch. Arm was stepping on the clutch like it was Paudi’s windpipe. He put the shitbox in gear and commenced turning. Dympna was down so low on the ground Arm could not see him over the bonnet. But Paudi was moving, circling in behind the shitbox as Arm trundled for the gap to the track out of there. Paudi loped, the rakey fucker, right into Arm’s blind spot. The door window on Arm’s side caved in. Arm punched the shitbox through the gap and hit the lane. The ruts attacked the suspension with such violence his jaw slammed shut on his tongue. Brambles from the ditch threshed in through the window. Shards of glass bounced like loose change all over his legs.
Arm careened out onto the road, slew a vicious right angle towards town and ground into third. Away, away, he was away. Arm could not tell if he was going fast or slow.
He thought: Dympna.
He thought: I have got away.
He thought: Bullshit.
Keeping the lurching, shifting shitbox on the road was his immediate concern. The wind whistled in through the shattered window. He moved his right arm and a scalding pain lanced up through his torso. The pain stuck. Arm felt impaled, run through.
This was a thing to worry about. But not yet.
He drove, trying to keep his right side still. His hamstring burned. Arm had to take periodic gulps of the blood leaking from his tongue. The gorse bushes in the bog fields juddered in the wind. Arm joggled switches until the head-lights snapped bright, and kept his eyes locked on the immediate section of macadam refreshing itself in the windshield.
No other cars appeared. Arm assured himself that Paudi was not in pursuit. How could he be? The uncles had only the one road vehicle, a Hiace van, and it was in Ballintober where Hector was dallying with his widow.
Arm tried to assess the situation, but what was there to assess? Things had got fucked, precipitously and in multiple ways, and for little reason. Arm had come to this place with Dympna. Arm and Dympna had entered Paudi’s house. Arm had informed Paudi he had done away with someone Paudi and his brother had asserted they wanted done away with, and Paudi had interpreted this as what? A dry-run for what he thought Arm and Dympna were about to do to him? The paranoid fucks. It was always going to come asunder like this.
The homely glimmer of the town lights appeared ahead. Arm eased in along the main
