Free The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

– it’s business, it isn’t—’
    ‘I don’t want details.’ Her eyes were big and round and he could stare into them for the rest of his life and it wouldn’t be long enough. ‘I just need to know if you’re going to suddenly disappear for ten years.’
    He grinned. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily.’
    Her face remained serious. She waited until a noisy Luas train thundered past, bell clanging. ‘It matters to me. For the first time in a long time, it matters.’
    ‘Anything I do,’ Vincent said, ‘if I take a risk it’s for a reason.’
    She had a way of leaning into him that made talking redundant, and she did it now. They embraced, Vincent closed his eyes. ‘I’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
    ‘Tonight,’ she said.
    He said, ‘Tonight.’

15
     
    James Snead shook Bob Tidey’s hand, and accepted the bottle of whiskey. ‘You’re welcome, you and Mr Jameson.’
    James had long insisted that he wasn’t an alcoholic. ‘Those poor sods,’ he once told Tidey, ‘it’s something in the body, they don’t have a choice. Me, I choose to drink too much. I know what it does to me and that’s OK.’
    He led the way into his fourth-floor apartment. Bob Tidey closed the front door and followed.
    James Snead was in his sixties, a former construction worker, tall and grey, muscular with a thickening middle. Face wrinkled around the eyes, thin red capillaries criss-crossing his nose. In another life he’d been a widower rearing a daughter alone, seldom going beyond his habit of two pints on a Friday evening. Then his daughter died with a needle in her arm. She left a baby son, and James reared him past his teens, until one day someone put two bullets in Oliver Snead’s chest and one in his head. Shortly after that, James Snead decided that he’d been sensible for long enough. ‘A world this ugly, I’d rather look away.’
    The best part of two decades back, Tidey was the young uniform who found the body of James’s daughter. The two kept in touch and when Oliver was murdered Tidey was part of the investigation. One night they shared a bottle and in a matter-of-fact tone James told him there wasn’t much left he wanted to do or see. ‘It’s all repetition, now. It’s hard to give a damn. Any day looks better when it’s topped off by a few drinks, and if that brings me closer to lights out – that’s a fair trade.’ Given the circumstances, Tidey couldn’t bring himself to argue the point.
    James twisted the cap on the bottle of Jameson. ‘Not often I manage to rise to a good whiskey these days, but after a couple of drinks it’s hard to tell the difference.’
    The flat smelled of Chinese takeaway.
    Tidey said, ‘You’re eating properly, of course?’
    ‘I’m a martyr to my five-a-day.’
    James brought two glasses and poured. The block of flats was noisy, people talking loudly, music from more than one direction. Tidey sipped at the whiskey, James offered a silent toast and drank.
    ‘I’ve a bit of news,’ Tidey said.
    James leaned back in his chair. ‘You and Charlie Bird.’
    ‘There was a murder – I’ve just been assigned. A man over on the Southside – two thugs came to his door with guns.’
    James’s interest seemed polite, less than wholehearted.
    ‘One of the guns they used, it turns out it’s the gun that killed Oliver.’
    James lifted the glass again to his lips. He said nothing.
    ‘What I’m hoping is, if we find whoever did this murder it might lead to whoever killed Oliver.’
    James looked at the whiskey lining the bottom of his glass. ‘That’s good, I suppose.’
    ‘I promised to keep you informed, for what it’s worth.’
    ‘If I had him within reach I’d have to be dug out of him. I imagined it many a time, but that’s not going to happen.’ He savoured some more Jameson. ‘And, knowing it was this little shit who pulled the trigger, as opposed to some other little shit – that doesn’t matter at all.’
    He sat a moment, as