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 pajamas 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
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 signaling 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 signaled-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.
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 hour. 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
