Free The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty Page B

on me, needed to get some agua .
    In a minute. In a minute.
    I got back in the car, closed my eyes, and the blackness came and I was gone again.

4: CIRCE (DUBLIN—JUNE 16, 9:15 A.M.)
     
    A sliver of moon. A lemon sky. Morning drawing a breath across the window. Bridget’s hair spread out over the white sheets in a gossamer bloom of vermilion and gold.
    She’s asleep on the pillow next to me. Eyes closed, mouth open.
    The fan’s on, but I can still hear the phone ringing in the other room.
    It can only be Scotchy, so I’m letting it go.
    A smell of honeysuckle. The faint murmur of the city. Sunflowers poking up through the bottom of the fire escape.
    Her body is so still and white and beautiful it could be carved from Botticino marble.
    It can only be Scotchy telling me to meet him at the airport. We’re flying down to Florida for a funeral. Darkey’s there already, which is why we’ve got this night together. Our only night together.
    Her breathing becomes more shallow. Her eyelids flutter.
    “What’s that noise?” she mumbles.
    “Nothing, go back to sleep.”
    She yawns.
    “What are you doing?” she asks.
    “Watching you.”
    “Get the phone, Michael. It might be important.”
    “It’s never important.”
    “Get the phone,” she insists.
    “It’s Scotchy, it’s nothing,” I tell her.
    She shakes her head in disgust. Out of all the boys in Darkey’s crew, it’s Scotchy she hates the most. Something about that feral weasel-faced wee hood. He’s never made a pass at her, nothing like that, he wouldn’t dare cross Darkey, it’s more his unfathomable unpleasant mind and that sleekit, native cunning. You could tell that under all that bigmouthed bluster there was something darker going on. Put the wind up anybody.
    The phone gets louder.
    “Just get it. Could be Andy,” she says.
    “Ok,” I say. I take her hand, kiss it, then stand. I slide off the mattress, open the bedroom door.
    Suddenly she wakes fully, looks at me with those deep green eyes. I wait to see if she’s going to say anything but she doesn’t. I walk into the living room. The phone’s fallen under the sofa. I move a roach trap, grab it.
    “No. Wait. Don’t get it,” she says urgently, almost in panic. “Don’t get it. Don’t get it. You’re right, let it go. Come here instead.”
    But it’s too late. I’ve already picked up the handset and heard Scotchy’s nasal intake of breath before he speaks.
    “Hello.”
    “LaGuardia, one hour, Bruce,” Scotchy says. “Hurry up.”
    “My name’s not Bruce,” I tell him for the thousandth time.
    “One hour. Hurry up.”
    I put the phone down. Bridget sighs. Yes, it’s too late. . . .
    Lima.
    But there was no ocean. And the sky was the wrong color. Eggshell rather than deep blue.
    What was going on?
    Ask Hector, he’ll tell me.
    “Hector. Hector.”
    Uhhh.
    Where was my cell phone? I tried to sit, but an awful scrabbling pain took my breath away. I was in a car. A street sign said “Holles Street Maternity Next Left.”
    Holles Street, Dublin?
    It all came back. Hector was toast. I’d shot him in the head. I’d thrown an assassin out the window and I’d killed his partner with an upside-down .22 shot in his throat.
    A woman in a blue dress was staring at me.
    “Are you all right, love?” she asked.
    I got out of the car. Out, into the morning with no idea where I was going, or what in the name of God I was going to do next. Sunlight. Cirrus clouds. Nothing Irish about the day, but I knew it was definitely Dublin because the Liffey was a presence beyond the gray forms of the buildings. A smell off it that reminded me of gasoline. I couldn’t see it, but I could sense it was there, sluggish, like some dead thing on what was already a deadly morning. The lovely Liffey moving along effluent into the tidal basin, coating the pylons, bridges, and the wee blind alleys on the water’s edge. And there definitely was a stink from off it. If not petrol, diesel. Enough that I