Free The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley by Jeremy Massey

ward.
    â€œI nearly brought my dinner up there,” said Christy, pressing the elevator button. “As if the smell of piss and Pine-Sol isn’t bad enough.”
    We stood the stretcher up in the elevator and sank to the ground.

NINE
    3:00 a.m.
    W ith Harry Roche’s remains locked safely in the embalming room behind me, I turned my thoughts again to slumber and a soft pillow. I was about to head home when Eamonn slowed his Mercedes down as he was leaving, lowering his window.
    â€œBack left tire, Pat,” he said with a downturned smile, and drove out the gate. I looked at the tire on my Camry. It was completely flat. And then, as if on cue, the rain came down, prompting Christy to rush to my boot and open it.
    â€œCome on, Buckley, you unlucky fuck,” he said, pulling the spare out. “Let’s get it changed.” If it had been hailing golf balls, Christy wouldn’t have hesitated to help me, such was the quality of his friendship. We battled away at the wheel with the rain bouncing heavily off the ground beside us, the pair of us saturated by the time we’d finished changing it.
    â€œGo home,” I told him. “I’ll get the gate.”
    Christy didn’t have to be told twice. He ran to his car and drove off.
    Alone again, I settled into my car and relaxed, closing my eyes to listen to the rain on the roof. Memories of laughter came in and out of my mind. Lucy laughing her beautiful laugh while holding my hankie, and me laughing with her; Brigid stifling her laughter while we whispered together; Eamonn and I silently laughing in Lia Fáil; and Eva laughing the sexiest laugh I’ve ever heard, her hoarse and croaky voice crowning it. I imagined being away in another land with Brigid Wright, remembering the laughter from there, but I was only tormenting myself with pleasant notions that could never be.
    After locking the gates and getting back in my car, I moved off down the street and failed to do something so routine, so reflexive, that I unintentionally transformed my car from an everyday object of convenience into a giant bullet. I’d forgotten to turn my lights on.
    I drove down James’s Street, headed for Kilmainham, my attention more absorbed in tuning the radio away from a late-night chat show than focusing on the road in front of me. Just as I tuned into some music, something ahead of me grabbed my attention. In the fraction of a second that I got to see him, I saw the trotting figure of a man holding a newspaper over his head to shield himself from the rain while he was crossing the road. But he was moving so ridiculously fast towards me that I only had time to raise my foot from the accelerator. His body was hit by the car with such a deafening wallop that he must have been thrown a good fifteen feet up in the air. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on the rainy street twenty yards up the road.
    It was only as the car finally stopped moving that I realized my lights weren’t on. I looked in the rearview mirror and in the dark could just make out a body lying motionless in the middle of the street. I looked at the shattered windscreen and the crumpled bonnet, and then I turned around and looked out the back window, my heart marking each moment like a pounding drum.
    I got out of the car and walked shakily towards the crumpled prostrate figure. I knelt down beside it and saw a tall, well-built man, not yet middle-aged, dressed in a suit and overcoat not dissimilar to my own. The man’s eyes were open and there was a little stream of blood that had trickled out of his mouth down the left side of his face. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I felt for a pulse and, for the second time that day, found none. The man was dead.
    Sticking out of his inside coat pocket were a bulging zip case and a leather-bound rectangular wallet. I took out the zip case and looked inside. It was jammed tight with fifty-euro notes, totaling what looked to