Free Green Hell by Ken Bruen Page A

asked,
    â€œYou want to tell me what’s going on?”
    â€œI’m Emerald, like the isle, I suppose, but mostly I prefer Em, less formal.”
    I said,
    â€œBefore I sling you out, you want to tell me why you’re here, stealing my booze?”
    She stood up, I tensed. A moment, then she said,
    â€œRelax, if I was going to hurt you, would I have sat waiting?”
    â€œBeen known to go down exactly like that.”
    For this I got a brilliant smile, sheer fucking radiance. It warmed something deep in my core that had been dead a long time. Whatever else, I felt she wasn’t a threat, leastways not a physical one. She was small but moved with that grace given only to dancers and felines. She said,
    â€œSee, you’re lightening up already. OK if I call you Jack?”
    Before I could answer, she continued,
    â€œNeed to alert you, hombre, that I have a form of accent Tourette’s. Means I flip from down-home through posh to ni-gg-ah . . .”
    She stretched out the final word provocatively. Almost but not quite wetting her lips. She was a piece of work. I tried again,
    â€œBefore I knock your multiethnic arse out, you want to give me a hint as to what this is?”
    She mimed a gunslinger stance, said,
    â€œIt’s all about the love, Pilgrim . . . well, no . . . revenge, actually, and that gig is cold, dude.”
    Jesus!
    I went and poured myself a drink, a large one, didn’t offer her. She had more than enough of whatever it was drove her batmobile. Was she finished?
    Was she fucked.
    More.
    â€œSo, Jacques, it’s all about the endgame and I’m your wingman.
    â€œYou wanna know who’re we’re taking D
    O
    W
    N?”
    She pronounced it thus, dropping in register to the last syllable.
    I said,
    â€œMaybe before the new year, you’ll actually tell me?”
    She threw open her arms in a grand salute, exclaimed,
    â€œEl Jefe, the professor, Señor de Burgo, his own badass self.”
    Got my attention.
    As she headed for the door, she stopped, listened, said,
    â€œThat wind they’ve been threatening is finally gathering force.”
    As to whether this was a metaphor or a weather forecast, who knew? She gave another blast of the wattage smile, said,
    â€œWe’ll go biblical on the prof’s ass, right?”
    She looked up at the sky, said,
    â€œGoth in the wind.”
    The death of Nelson Mandela met with a profound sadness not seen since the death of John F. Kennedy. Alas, the cash vultures were already swooping. Mandela’s famous handprint being sold for upwards of twenty thousand euros. It made you want to seriously vomit.
    The week before, the incredibly affable, apparently full-blessed Paul Walker, only forty, star of the hugely successful movie franchise Fast & Furious , was killed instantly when the Porsche he was a passenger in was wrapped around a tree.
    Some weeks it seemed only funerals marked the successive days.
    December 12: the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
    The Health Department, in one week, finally admitted liability in three separate cases of babies being neglected by the very medics charged with their care. All three of the little mites, as a result, had:
    Massive brain damage,
    Cerebral palsy,
    Total paralysis.
    And a very basic lack of oxygen for a few vital moments had occurred. The HSE took twelve years to admit liability in Case 1, and seven and five years in the other two cases.
    The families were utterly exhausted and destroyed but they fought all those years for the most basic human right.
    An apology.
    The minister for health, fat-jowled and combative, muttered platitudes like,
    Regret
    and
    Investigation.
    Dare one curse—
    Don’t hold your breath.
    All the major charities were exposed as paying their top executives “top-ups” in the hundreds of thousands and they even sneered,
    â€œIf you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
    And still they ran long, harrowing advertisements of