The Searcher(25)

Cal has met this guy before, in various forms. He’s out in the boondocks not because he’s a dud or a troublemaker, or a wannabe detective chafing with frustrated ambition, but because he’s happy here. He likes his days unhurried and unsurprising, his faces familiar, and his mind unclouded when he goes home to his wife and kids. He’s the cop who Cal, in some or possibly most ways, wishes he had decided to be.

“Well, I don’t guess I have much right to complain,” Cal says. “When I was on the job, paperwork went straight to the bottom of the pile and stayed there. You’re not gonna mess around with some guy’s dog license when you’ve got actual police work to do.”

This has the uniform’s attention. “You were on the job?” he asks, making sure he has things straight. “On the force, like?”

“Twenty-five years. Chicago PD.” Cal grins and holds out his hand. “Cal Hooper. Pleased to meet you.”

“Garda Dennis O’Malley,” the uniform says, shaking his hand. Cal was betting on him not being the type who would see this as a dick-measuring contest, and he bet right: O’Malley looks genuinely delighted. “Chicago, hah? I’d say you saw some action there.”

“Some action and a lotta paperwork,” Cal says. “Same as everywhere. This seems like a good post.”

“I wouldn’t swap it,” O’Malley says. Cal can tell from his accent that he’s not from round here, but he’s from somewhere not too different: that rich, leisured rhythm didn’t come out of any city. “It wouldn’t suit everyone, now, but it suits me.”

“What kind of stuff do you get?”

“A lot of it’d be motor vehicles,” O’Malley explains. “They do be hoors for the speeding, round here. And for the drink-driving. Three young fellas went into a ditch coming home from the pub, Saturday night, up beyond Gorteen. None of them made it to hospital.”

“I heard about that,” Cal says. Noreen’s cousin’s friend’s husband was the poor bastard who came across the aftermath. “That’s a damn shame.”

“That’d be about the worst we get, now. There’s not much other crime. Oil does get robbed, now and again.” At Cal’s uncomprehending look: “Heating oil, out of the tanks. And farm equipment. And we’d get a bitta drugs—sure, they’re everywhere, nowadays. Nothing like what you got in Chicago, I’d say.” He gives Cal a shy grin.

“We got plenty of MVAs,” Cal says, “and drugs. Not a whole lot of farm-equipment theft, though.” And then, before he knows he’s going to say it: “Mostly I worked Missing Persons. I don’t guess you’ve got much call for that around here.”

O’Malley laughs. “Ah, Jaysus, no. I’m here twelve years, and we’ve had two people go missing. One fella came up in the river a few days later. The other was a young one that had a row with her mammy and flounced off to stay with her cousin in Dublin.”

“Well, I can see why you wouldn’t swap this place,” Cal says. “Thought I heard a guy did go missing on you this spring, though. Did I hear wrong?”

This startles O’Malley into sitting upright. “Who’s that, then?”

“Brendan something. Reddy?”

“Reddys from up by Ardnakelty?”

“Yeah.”

“Ach, them,” O’Malley says, relaxing back into his chair. “What one’s Brendan?”

“Nineteen.”

“Sure, no surprise there, then. And, being honest with you, no loss.”

“They trouble?”

“Ah, no. Wasters, just. A few domestics, but himself went off to England a coupla years back, and that put a stop to that. I know them because the childer won’t go to school. The teacher doesn’t want to be calling in child protection, so she rings me. I go out there and have a word with the mammy, put the fear of God into the childer about juvenile homes. They shape up for a month or two, and then we’re back where we began.”

“Know the type,” Cal says. He doesn’t need to ask why the teacher won’t call child protective services for anything short of broken bones, or why O’Malley doesn’t do it himself. Some things are the same out here as they were in his childhood backwoods. No one wants the government sending down city boys in suits to make things worse. Business gets handled as close to home as possible. “Their mama can’t make them go, or she won’t?”

O’Malley shrugs. “She’s a bit . . . you know. Not mental or anything, like. Just not up to much.”

“Huh,” Cal says. “So you reckon Brendan’s not missing?”

O’Malley snorts. “God, no. He’s a young fella. He’s got sick of living up the hills with his mammy, gone off to kip on some pal’s floor in Galway or Athlone, where he can go to the discos and meet the young ones. Natural enough, sure. Who said he was missing?”

“Well,” Cal says, scratching the back of his neck meditatively, “some guy in the pub was saying he was gone. I musta got the wrong end of the stick. Guess I spent too many years in Missing Persons, now I’m seeing ’em everywhere.”

“Not here,” O’Malley says cheerfully. “Brendan’ll be back when he gets tired of doing his own washing. Unless he finds himself a young one who’ll do it for him.”