The Dead Yard (12 page)

Salisbury was the very last town in Massachusetts and the End of the State Bar was actually
just over the state line in New Hampshire. Massachusetts had strict gun controls, bans on
fireworks, high taxes on cigarettes, blue laws, and other regulations. The "Live Free or Die"
state had none of these things. Booze was cheaper, you could drink all night if you wanted, the
blood alcohol limit was higher, and if you were driving home drunk, smoking your cheap
cigarettes, and letting off fireworks, you weren’t even required to have car insurance.

The pub was packed full of youngsters with fake IDs, as well as fishermen, illegal immigrants,
frat boys, tourists, and the regular town drunks. The lighting was poor, the ventilation
nonexistent, and the jukebox would have you believe that the greatest epoch in popular music was
the era of hair bands and Englishmen playing synthesizers.

I spotted Simon at the bar, talking to some girl, and I saw Gerry McCaghan up in a corner
booth that had walls on two sides and afforded a view of the whole establishment. He was with
Sonia McCaghan, Touched McGuigan, and Jackie O’Neill.

People Kit thought I had never seen or heard of before, but already I was pulling up the
briefing notes on all of them.

Kit let go of my hand and waved at Jackie.

"When you meet everyone don’t, like, go mental if Dad winds you up a bit, and whatever you do,
don’t fuck with Touched. You’ll like him but seriously don’t mess with him," she said, concern
dripping into her voice and those cornflower blue eyes taking on an anxious iodine tint.

"Understood," I said.

The Sons of Cuchulainn had never been a big group. About nine or ten "volunteers" at its
greatest extent. Samantha said that following the hit on Gerry there had been several defections
and that now she thought it was down to a rump of about six or seven. Kit, Gerry, Sonia, Touched
McGuigan, Jackie, Seamus (one of the two bodyguards I’d seen that night in Revere), and possibly
one or two others. But Touched and Gerry were the only two I was concerned about.

Gerry, fifty-five, an old-school hard-nosed Provisional IRA man from Derry. Violent, clever,
charming, unpredictable. In the 70s, responsible for more than a score of bombings and attempted
bombings. British Intelligence couldn’t be precise about these things but they reckoned he’d
killed and maimed at least three dozen people in his career.

Gerry wouldn’t hesitate to cut out the cancer or risk civilian casualties, and you couldn’t be
fooled by his girth—you didn’t need to be a lithe man to pull a trigger or push the button on a
radio-controlled bomb.

But as much as Gerry put the fear of God in me, it was Touched who worried me most. Davy
"Touched" McGuigan, forty-nine, Gerry’s second-in-command, was a gunman from Belfast exiled from
Ireland by an IRA tribunal. Quick tempered, violent, and even more unpredictable than Gerry
(hence the nickname Touched, i.e., crazy). He looked and dressed like an aging rock star. Black
jeans, white embroidered shirt. He was tall, well built, square-jawed, and quite the handsome
devil if you didn’t mind the ear that had been partially burned off in a premature explosion, an
ear that Touched covered with a long mane of partly graying hair.

Touched had committed at least six murders that we knew about. Two cops, a guy he thought was
having an affair with his fiancée, a man he stabbed in a bar fight, an eighteen-year-old who had
stolen Touched’s car (Touched finding him three days later, beating him, tying him into the car,
dousing car and kid with petrol, and torching the pair of them), and an IRA informer that Touched
grabbed from a Glasgow Celtic social club in broad daylight, bundled into a van, drove to a
safehouse, tortured for two days, and finally shot, after he had revealed everything that he
knew.

Touched had known Gerry since the old days and had been living with him at the house on Plum
Island for the last year, ever since he’d screwed the wife of a comrade who was doing fifteen to
life in Belfast’s Long Kesh prison. Touched would have been given the death sentence if they’d
had anyone with the bottle to kill him. Exile for life was the safer alternative for all
concerned.

So both Gerry and Touched had been expelled from Ireland and both had an axe to grind. The
other two people at the table were nothing to worry about. Sonia was around forty years old, from
Portland, Maine, and for the last year, Gerry’s wife. She was a history professor at UNH, a
Marxist, anticolonialist Edward Said type who almost certainly knew about Gerry’s activities but
probably saw him as a romantic hero. Sonia was pretty in a skinny, blond, washed-out kind of way.
Harmless, I suppose, but you never knew, sometimes the quiet ones were the ones who’d fucking cut
your throat in your sleep. The FBI didn’t have much on Sonia, she was too young to have been a
sixties radical, she hadn’t been to Ireland with Gerry on his trips, and since the SOC had more
or less been a sleeper cell for the last five years, it was unlikely that she had done any
mischief.

In fact, none of them had carried out any recent terrorist activity and it was only the IRA’s
tip-off that the SOC was reactivating its operational command that alerted MI6 in the first
place. Still, Gerry was not a stupid man and he was bound to know that the FBI was probably
watching him. Maybe the hit, the FBI interest, and his advancing years would be enough of a
deterrent, and the SOC really was going to disarm despite Gerry’s defiant communications to the
IRA’s Army Council. My job was to find out. ’Course, it was much harder to prove a negative, but
it was still my job.

The final person at the table was Jackie O’Neill. The file on Jackie was only a couple of
paragraphs long. Born in County Sligo, he had run away from home, lived in Manchester, England,
for a while, and had moved to America when he was just fifteen. He’d spent the last five and a
half years Stateside cutting his teeth terrorizing black and Latino kids out of his old
neighborhood in Roxbury. He had a few convictions for vandalism and theft but nothing to write
home about. He’d met Touched at a Troops Out rally and Touched had offered him a job working for
Gerry. He’d been in the construction company for about a year. Hard to say how long he’d been in
Sons of Cuchulainn but probably the same amount of time.

Jackie was clearly going for the bad-boy look. Leather jacket, white T-shirt, hair gelled back
like Brando in
The Wild One
. Long-nosed, sallow-featured, slightly pigeon-chested—the
T-shirt sagged and the jacket was too big.

Still, this was the boyfriend Kit had been talking about. And I liked Kit and I felt she had
good judgment about people, so there must have been something about Jackie, some redeeming
attribute. Maybe he had a great fucking personality.

The rest of the group wasn’t there. But Touched and Gerry were the players. Get something good
on them, send those boys to the chokey, and the whole organization would fall to pieces.

Kit prodded me in the back. We walked across the bar and stopped in front of the booth.

"Hello, my dear," Gerry said, and I was struck immediately by his ease of bearing and his
ursine confidence.

"Hi, Dad," Kit said.

They were all drinking from a pitcher of Budweiser, except for Sonia, who had a glass of
sparkling water. Touched and Gerry looked relaxed. Jackie was pissed off.

"Dad, I’m really sorry I’m a bit late," Kit said.

"It’s ok, but punctuality is a sign of respect, Kit, honey," Gerry said. He had lost some of
his Irish country accent and now had a slightly pompous NPR-ish voice. It was interesting. I
wondered if it was a cultural cringe—a reaction to his humble beginnings and newfound wealth. Or
perhaps it was his wife’s recent influence. Sonia was old money and old New England.

"Sorry again," Kit said, looking at me.

"Where have you been, Kit?" Gerry asked.

"Aye, where the fuck have you been?" Jackie asked in a distinct South Boston drone. It threw
me a bit and Kit had already answered before I had understood Jackie’s question.

"Nowhere. Anyway, I want you all to meet someone," Kit said.

"You must have been somewhere?" Jackie asked, reddening with anger.

"Nope," Kit said.

I shuddered involuntarily. Yup, this fine specimen was definitely the boyfriend.

"Who’s this?" he asked Kit while looking furiously at me.

"This is Sean," Kit said.

I put my hand out.

"Nice to meet ya," I said.

Jackie had no real option but to shake my hand. His touch was cold, clammy, sweaty. As he
leaned across the table and into the light, I saw that he was a thin but sinewy wee shite, with a
weak attempt at a mustache on his upper lip. Bit of a pong off him too. Nice.

"I’ll introduce everybody," Kit said, not in the least nonplussed by Jackie’s rudeness.

"My dad," Kit said, beaming.

"Nice to meet you," I said.

"The same, I’m sure," Gerry replied with some diffidence and gave me his left hand. For his
visit to the End of the State Bar, Gerry was wearing a green polo shirt and enormous white
shorts. He seemed mellow, at ease, happy. Christ, if the Provisional IRA had me on its death
list, or at least had attempted to kill me, I’d be squatting in a cave in Patagonia, not having a
few beers down the local pub. It impressed me, and I shook his proffered hand with something
approaching genuine admiration.

Kit leaned over and whispered something in his ear. A big un-Belfast smile broadened across
Gerry’s face. Un-Belfast because the teeth were white, capped, straight, and symmetrical. Gerry
transferred his cigar from his right to his left hand and offered the right to me. This time his
grip was powerful and enthusiastic.

"You’re the hero that saved my daughter’s life," he said, laughing.

"Hardly that," I said.

"He was totally heroic, he jumped on top of me," Kit said with a grin.

"Oh aye?" Jackie said, his face contorting as if he were in a high school production of
Othello
.

"Steady on there, big fella," Touched said. Jackie looked at him for a second, nodded, and
forced a grin.

"Allow me to present Sonia, my better half," Gerry said.

"Nice to meet you, Sonia," I said.

She smiled demurely.

"And over here we have David McGuigan and Jackie O’Neill, my associates, confederates, and
all-round comrades-in-arms," Gerry said again in this florid style that he definitely must have
picked up in America. No one ever spoke like that in Belfast, where Laconian immigrants would be
known as chatterboxes.

I sat down next to Kit.

"Nice to meet you all," I said.

"Charmed," Sonia said.

Touched and Jackie kept their own counsel. Touched merely nodding, Jackie pretending not to
see me.

"Can I offer you a drink?" Gerry asked.

"Whatever you’re having," I said.

Gerry poured me some Budweiser.

"Kit told us about you," Touched said. "You helped her out in a big way."

"Aye."

"And what exactly were you doing in the bar that night?" Touched asked, raising his eyebrows
slightly.

Gerry looked at Touched as if he had committed a social faux pas by being so impertinent, but
he let the question stand, so I had to answer it.

"Well, I was itching to be in a gun battle and that looked like just the right place," I
said.

Touched grinned and his penetrating eyes bored into me for a moment.

"And the real answer?"

"Looking for a job, really," I said.

"A job. I see. And where are you from again?" Touched asked.

"Belfast. Ma was from Carrickfergus."

"Thought that was a Proddy town."

"Everybody thinks that. Not all of it," I said.

"There’s a song about it, isn’t there?" Gerry asked with a smile.

"Aye, there certainly is. Dreary, bloody awful song it is, too," I said.

"Family still over there?" Touched asked.

"Cousins in Cork but my ma and da are both pushing up the daisies," I said.

"Sorry to hear that," Touched said with no sorrow at all in his sleekit, suspicious face.

"How long you been on the fair shores of the New World?" Gerry asked.

I looked at Touched. How could he stand to listen to Gerry talk like this? Kit and Sonia would
be indifferent but Touched was an old guerrilla buddy.

"I’ve been on the fair shores about a month," I said with slight sarcasm and a straight
face.

"Doing what precisely?" Touched asked.

"Anything. Christ, you should see what I’m doing now. Kit’ll tell you, bloody embarrassing," I
explained, trying to get Kit back into what was becoming a difficult one-sided conversation.

"Oh, Daddy, he’s a gladiator on the beach, fighting the Christians or something, isn’t that
right, Sean?" Kit said.

"Sort of."

"I’ve heard about that, it’s the Greek festival, isn’t it?" Sonia asked, suddenly
brightening.

"Yes, we’re dressed up as Hector and Achilles," I said.

"Aye, I seen that too, pair of you dressed up like a couple of fruits, skirts and everything,"
Jackie said.

Well, Achilles was passionately in love with Patroclus, I nearly said to tweak Jackie, but I
remembered that Sean McKenna would probably never have heard of Patroclus, so, alas, Jackie’s
remark went untweaked.

"I think it’s a very good idea to boost our cultural heritage like that," Sonia said.

I smiled at her. Not a bad-looking lass really. If she gained a few pounds, saw a bit of
sunlight now and again, and renounced the dark side, she might just be an acceptable piece of
ass.

"And are you happy in your job?" Touched asked.

"It’s ok," I said.

"You like the fucking skirts?" Jackie mocked, laughing as heartily as if he had just cracked a
devastating Wildean bon mot.

"They are popular among the warrior peoples of the Celts. But I can tell you don’t know much
about warriors, Jackie," I said with a twinkle in my eye.