Free Hurt Machine by Reed Farrel Coleman Page A

away at whatever trust there is left that binds us together. Without trust, we have nothing, and I just wasn’t in the mood to add to the weakening of those bonds, not today.
    …
     
    McPhee’s wasn’t exactly hopping in mid-afternoon. I don’t know. I guess I went looking for trouble, half-hoping that asshole Hickey would be there and I could embarrass him in front of his friends or better yet, a woman. I also wanted to see Flannery again. I liked the guy for having the
cojones
to be honest with me when it would have been easier to just let it be. There was something else about him too. He had the sadness in him, the demons. Fuck if I knew that was why he drank. There are a thousand reasons for a man to drink and only some of them have to do with tamping down the demons. I was curious about why he didn’t want to talk about his heroics and why he was so eager to drink to guilt. Guilt, now there was a subject I knew a little something about. Maybe I was looking for answers in him for the questions in me. Short of running into my attacker or seeing Flannery, I hoped the same barman was on duty. He seemed a chatty sort and I was in the mood to chat.
    I didn’t see either Flannery or the shithead who’d cold-cocked me, but the bartender was on. The crowd was sparse: no women, not even very many fireman that I could spot. Who would be in a bar at three in the afternoon, anyway? Finbarr McPhee’s, for all of its firehouse cachet, was no different than any other bar at that time of day. It catered to the lonely and the losers, people lost in their drinks or the newspaper or their own thoughts.
    I found the same seat I’d sat in the other night. The barman nodded hello, a smile on his face, but it was a salesman’s smile, not one meant especially for me.
    “What’ll you have?”
    “Same as the other night,” I said to test him.
    It took a second, but he remembered. The smile ran away from his face. “You, huh? Guinness, right?”
    “Right, but I’ve changed my mind. Make it a Dewars rocks.”
    “Not gonna start a fight today, are you?” he asked, scooping ice into a rocks glass and reaching for the Dewars bottle.
    “Not on the agenda, no. And for the record, I didn’t start one the other night either. I was just talking to Flannery. What time does he usually come in?”
    He put my drink up. “Not till about seven. He works his way down Fourth Avenue. He needs to drink a little before he drinks in here.”
    I took a sip. “Why’s that?”
    “Ask him.”
    “Don’t go all quiet on me now,” I said. “You were quick to volunteer that story about him being a hero the other night, but that wasn’t the whole story, was it?”
    “Nope. What’s it to you, anyways?”
    “I like the guy. He stuck his neck out for me. I’m curious about someone who would do that for a stranger.”
    The barman nodded his head at the Wall of Honor.
    “Okay, you got my attention,” I said. “What about it?”
    “Walk over and take a look. See if you can find Brandon Fitzgerald Flannery Jr. I’ll make sure no one steals your seat or your scotch.”
    I walked over to the wall and found the name listed amongst the three hundred and forty-three members of the FDNY lost on 9/11.
    “Flannery’s son?” I asked, retaking my seat.
    “His youngest. His only son.”
    “I’d drink too if I lost my kid that way.”
    “That’s not why he drinks. He drinks because he blames himself. The kid didn’t want to follow in his old man’s footsteps, but Flannery pushed him. And you can tell by how he handled things the other night that when Flannery pushes, he pushes hard. The Flannerys have been fighting fires in this city since they stepped off the boat. They go back to before 1898, to before the job was the job and before the city was the city. No son of Flannery’s was going to turn his back on family tradition.”
    “That guilt’s a lot to carry,” I said.
    “More than he can bear and that man can bear a lot.”
    “Thanks. I