The Searcher(44)
“I want to know what done this,” Mart says. “Your bitta woods there, that’s thick enough to keep me hid. I’m asking you to let me spend the nights in there for a while.”
“You think it’ll come back?”
“Not to my sheep. But that bitta woods has a great view of P.J. Fallon’s land, and he’s got a fine flock. If this creature goes after them, it’ll find me waiting.”
“Well, be my guest,” Cal says. He’s not crazy about the idea of Mart out there on his own. Mart is a scrawny little old guy with rickety joints, and Cal knows, in a way that Mart might not, that a shotgun isn’t a magic wand. “I might join you. Keep all the angles covered.”
Mart shakes his head. “I’ll do better on my own. One man can stay hid better than two.”
“I’ve done my share of hunting. I know how to keep still.”
“Ah, no.” Mart’s face crunches into a grin. “The size of you; sure, whatever’s out there, it’d see you from space. You stay indoors and don’t be freezing your bollocks off for something that’s likely long gone anyway.”
“Well,” Cal says. “If you’re sure about that.” He needs to warn Trey not to make any more nighttime visits, or he’s liable to end up with an ass full of shotgun pellets. “You let me know if you change your mind.”
The flies have resettled into tight, roiling clumps. Mart pokes the ewe with the toe of his boot and they rise again, briefly, before getting back to work. “I never heard a sound,” he says. He kicks the ewe one more time, harder. Then he turns and stumps off, hands deep in his jacket pockets, towards his house.
The mailman has been by: Cal’s firearm license is waiting for him on the floor by the door. When he applied for that license, he did it with a hankering for homemade rabbit stew rather than with any sense of real need. One of the things that had caught his attention, when he first started looking into Ireland, was the lack of dangers: no handguns, no snakes, no bears or coyotes, no black widows, not even a mosquito. Cal feels like he’s spent most of his life dealing with feral creatures, one way or another, and he liked the thought of passing his retirement without having to take any of them into account. It seemed to him that Irish people were likely to be at ease with the world in ways they didn’t even notice. Now that rifle feels like something it would be good to have in the house, the sooner the better.
He makes himself a ham sandwich for lunch. While he eats it, he manages to get the internet to show him bus timetables. On Tuesday evenings, a bus headed for Sligo goes by on the main road sometime around five, and one headed for Dublin goes past a little after seven. Both of these are possible, although neither one leaps out at Cal as the obvious answer. The main road is about a three-mile walk from the Reddy place, and Trey says Brendan left the house around five, just as Sheila was serving tea, which around here means dinner. Trey’s sense of time has a haphazard quality that means his guess might well be off, and Cal doubts that Sheila serves meals on a strict schedule, but even four-fifteen would be cutting it close for the Sligo bus. On the other hand, five or even five-thirty would be too early to leave for the Dublin bus, specially if it meant skipping dinner unnecessarily. Overall, if Brendan was going any distance, Cal inclines towards him getting a ride from someone.
He calls Brendan’s number, just for the hell of it. Like Trey said, it goes straight to voicemail: Hi, this is Brendan, leave a message. His voice is young, rough-edged, quick and casual, like he dashed this off in between two more important things. Cal takes a few shots at the voicemail password, in case Brendan left it on the default, but none of them get him anywhere.
He finishes his sandwich, washes up and heads for Daniel Boone’s Guns & Ammunition. Daniel Boone’s is concealed down multiple back roads, and Kevin—Daniel’s real name—is a loose-limbed, scraggly-haired guy who looks like he would be more at home running a mildewy basement record store, but he knows his wares inside out and he has Cal’s Henry .22 oiled, ready and waiting.
It’s been a long time since Cal held one of these, and he’d forgotten the pure physical satisfaction of it. The warm solidity of the walnut stock is a sheer pleasure to his palm; the action is so smooth he could rack the lever back and forth all day. “Well,” he says. “This was worth waiting for.”
“Don’t get a lot of demand for those,” Kevin says, leaning his hip against the counter and eyeing the rifle sourly. “Or I wouldn’t’ve had to order it in.” Kevin took that personally. He clearly felt he had let himself down, and possibly let down his country while he was at it, by allowing some Yank to find him unprepared.
“My granddaddy had one,” Cal says. “When I was a kid. Don’t know what happened to it.” He lifts the rifle to his shoulder and sights, enjoying the elegantly balanced weight of it. Cal could never muster up much fondness for his duty Glock, with its thuggish lines, the insolent swagger with which it wore the fact that it existed to be pointed at human beings. It carried nothing but aggression; it had no dignity. The Henry is, to him, what a gun should be.
“They haven’t changed much,” Kevin says. “You’ll have your eye back in before you know it. Down to the range now, is it?”
“Nah,” Cal says. He’s a little nettled by the idea that he looks like someone who needs a range to shoot. “Gonna go get myself some dinner.”