Free The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley by Jeremy Massey Page A

be more than seventeen or eighteen grand. I put it back in the man’s pocket and took out the wallet. I opened it up to see a large collection of credit cards. I searched for the name and saw it in raised print: DONAL CULLEN . My eyes widened with increasing horror as I looked to the face of the dead man, and then I recognized him: from the papers, outside the courts with his brother, Vincent, Dublin’s number one thug.
    â€œOh, no.” I barely whispered the words. I dropped the wallet to the ground as fear swept through me like a ghost, and I stumbled backwards to my feet. The hum of the engine running behind me never sounded so inviting. I scanned both sides of the street, both ends, to see if anyone could see me or had witnessed the accident, and I saw no one. I backed away from the body slowly. Once I got a few yards away, I turned and walked purposefully to the car. I snapped the number plate off the back of the car, quickly did the same around the front, and then got back in and shut the door. A little voice in my head made a suggestion.
Leave the lights off,
it said. I put her into gear and drove off slowly with my hands trembling. Just before I turned the corner, I noticed in the rearview mirror somebody running from a building to the body in the middle of the road. I punched the accelerator, kept my head looking forward, and a moment later I was around the corner and gone.
    The voice continued.
You killed him. Not like Lucy, who happened to die while you were fucking her, this man died because you killed him with your car. You killed him by not looking. By being tired. By tuning the radio. By driving with no lights on and not braking. You took his life.
    I shook my head and gripped my face.
    â€œJesus Christ,” I said out loud. “Oh, Jesus.”
    Any worries I had about Lucy Wright’s autopsy disappeared the moment I’d read Donal Cullen’s name. In the blink of an eye, my concerns switched from being caught out for riding a bereaved widow, a client, and sending her to the grave in the process, to being butchered alive for the unceremonious killing of the brother of the most dangerous gangster in Ireland.
    By the time I’d pulled up outside my house on Mourne Road, I was numb, still not breathing normally, and living in a full-scale nightmare. I’d fled the scene, acted like a coward. Countless times had I sat with families who’d had a son or daughter killed by a hit-and-run driver, and I’d silently condemned the driver along with them. I knew well the added injustice a family felt at not having someone put their hand up and say, “Yeah, it was me, I’m so very sorry.” On James’s Street, I’d been fully intent on doing just that until I saw who it was. I knew it was the right thing to do. And then the fear took me. It had me by the balls and the hair and the neck, and wasn’t letting go.
    Eva’s car, a silver ten-year-old Renault Clio, had been parked in my garage since she’d died, and I still carried the key. I opened up the garage, moved past the dusty clutter, and climbed into the little French car, praying the battery wouldn’t be flat. It had been four months since I’d turned her over. I pumped the pedal, turned the key, and listened to the engine roar to life. I closed my eyes to appreciate this small triumph. I moved it out onto the street and parked it, then I drove my Camry into the same spot in the garage. I locked the garage doors and checked the damage to the car. It looked like it had killed someone.
    I went into the house as quietly as I could and didn’t turn on any lights. I crept upstairs to my bedroom. I left the light off while I got undressed, the room being sufficiently lit by the streetlight outside. I took off my coat and threw it to the floor and noticed a bulge in the inside breast pocket, the same one as Donal Cullen had his money in. I knelt down and put my hand in and pulled out a damp