Free Evil for Evil by James R. Benn Page B

offense intended. It’s just a saying.”
    It takes a thief to catch a thief. I never believed that saying. In my book, it took a cop to catch a thief, and that’s what I was. A cop on loan, courtesy of my Uncle Ike, who even now might be writing love notes to the beautiful Kay Summersby. Another Irish thief, this one out to steal a general’s heart. Or was it an inside job?

CHAPTER • EIGHT
    I THOUGHT ABOUT asking Thornton why he hadn’t mentioned the request for Brennan’s files. If Brennan was a suspect in the eyes of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, I shouldn’t waste a minute before I talked to him. I could always find Thornton later, but if an Ulster cop was interested in a guy named Brennan, then I figured I had better get to him first.
    I drove the jeep out of the headquarters camp, splashing through water in muddy potholes as shafts of sunlight split the gray clouds drifting out over the Irish Sea. Thick, green grass grew along the sides of the boreen on the wooded hillside, which descended to the main road running along the coastline. The wet ground smelled fertile, the warmth drawing out odors of loam, pine, and sheep dung as a breeze from the sea salted the air. Gray stone cottages dotted emerald fields encompassed by stone walls, every rock the same uniform color and size, as if they came out of the ground ready-made for building fences and thick cottage walls. I squinted my eyes against the welcome sun as I caught the smell of smoke from a house close to the narrow road. It wasn’t wood smoke, I was sure. It was more of a musty, green leaf smell, and I realized it must be peat. There wasn’t a tree thicker than my arm in sight, and except for the small pine forest I’d left, there had hardly been any trees anywhere I’d passed. Another reminder that even though this country looked and felt familiar, far more familiar than North Africa or Sicily, it was still a foreign land, a land of strange habits and ancient hatreds, a place my ancestors had come from and of which I knew little but fables and stories.
    Brennan was an Irish name, a Catholic name. Not that there weren’t Irish Protestants, and a few who weren’t pro-British—the IRA even had some Protestant members—but historically, the Irish were Catholic, and religion had been a weapon used against them for hundreds of years. The only reason any Protestant was in Ireland now was because the English had sent them here generations ago, to rule the land by taking it away from the natives, who all happened to be Catholic. The British had called them papists, and passed laws eliminating all rights to land and life. Those laws were now gone but the memory of them hung in the air that every Protestant and Catholic on this island breathed, reminding them of the wars, wrongs, and oppressions their people had borne. So a Brennan suspected by a Carrick of any crime here could expect little sympathy and less justice. The RUC wouldn’t have jurisdiction on a U.S. Army base, but if Brennan was a suspect and went into town for a drink at the wrong local pub, he could disappear out the back door faster than you could say Red Hand.
    The road to Ballykinler took me back through the town of Newcastle, past the railroad station at the edge of town, as its brick clock tower chimed eleven. I turned inland, skirting the bay where I’d landed in the seaplane, then headed through the small village of Clough, where I saw the Lug o’ the Tub Pub, the joint where Grady O’Brick spent most evenings, and where I hoped to have a chat with the old man tonight. From Clough, the land rose up, a small plateau with views of the Mourne Mountains across the bay to the south and the Irish Sea to the east. The U.S. Army depot was at the highest point, a flat, windswept stretch of land enclosed in barbed wire. Thornton’s pass got me in without a question, and I followed signs for the Ordnance Depot, navigating through muddy lanes between rows of long barracks buildings. GIs were