The Searcher(56)

Trey holds that straight stare for another moment, checking for cracks; then he nods, accepting that, and lets his breath out. He heads over to the desk and starts poking at it, seeing what’s left to do.

Cal leans back against the kitchen counter and watches him. “What kinda drugs do you get round here?” he asks.

Trey flashes him a fast, unexpected grin, over his shoulder. “You looking?”

“Funny guy,” Cal says. “I’ll pass, thanks. But say I was. What’s on offer?”

“Lotta hash, lotta benzos,” Trey says promptly. “E, off and on, like. Special K. Coke, sometimes. Acid, sometimes. Shrooms.”

“Huh,” Cal says. He wasn’t expecting a full menu, although maybe he should have been. Lord knows back home the smallest towns, where the kids had nothing else to keep them occupied, were the ones where you could get your hands on any drug you’d heard of and a few you hadn’t. “Crack?”

“Nah. Not that I ever heard.”

“Meth?”

“Not a lot. Few times I heard someone had some.”

“Heroin?”

“Nah. Anyone who gets on that, they leave. Go to Galway, or Athlone. Round here, you wouldn’t know what’d be around when. Junkies haveta know they can get it anytime.”

“The dealers around here,” Cal says. “You know where they get their stuff? Is there some local guy in charge of distribution?”

“Nah. Buncha lads bring it down from Dublin.”

“Did Brendan know these guys? The ones from Dublin?”

“Bren isn’t a dealer,” Trey says, instantly and hard.

“I never said he was,” Cal says. “But you think bad people took him. I need to know what kind of bad people he could’ve run into around here.”

Trey examines the desk, running a fingernail along cracks. “Them Dublin fellas are bad news, all right,” he says in the end. “You’d hear them, sometimes: they come down in them big Hummers, race them across the fields at night, when there’s a moon. Or in the daytime, even. They know the Guards won’t come in time to catch ’em.”

“I’ve heard ’em,” Cal says. He’s thinking about that huddle of guys in the back of the pub, every now and then, guys too young and dressed wrong for Seán óg’s and eyefucking him for just a second too long.

“Kilt a coupla sheep that way, one time. And they bet up a fella from up near Boyle because he didn’t pay them. Bet him up bad, like. He lost an eye.”

“I know the kind,” Cal says. “They start out dangerous, and they get a whole lot worse if someone pisses them off.”

Trey looks up at that. “Bren couldn’t have pissed them off. He doesn’t even know them.”

“You sure about that, kid? Certain sure?”

“They wouldn’t sell direct to the likes of him, that only does the odd bit here and there. Bren just bought from the local lads, when he wanted something. He wouldn’t be around them fellas.”

Cal asks, “Then who took him? These are the only bad guys anyone’s mentioned around here. You tell me, kid: if not them, then who?”

“They could’ve got it wrong. Got him mixed up with someone else.” Trey scrapes at paint residue with a thumbnail and watches Cal to check what he thinks of this theory.

“Maybe,” Cal says. He can’t imagine any likely way this could have played out, but if Trey needs it, he can keep it, at least for now. “That type mostly aren’t geniuses, I’ll give you that. If Brendan didn’t hang with these guys, who does? Any of his buddies?”

Trey blows out a dismissive puff of air. “Nah. You saw Fergal, and Eugene. You think they’re on the gear?”

“Nah,” Cal says. “Never mind.” He’s thought of one person who knows plenty about the Dublin guys. Donie McGrath has been at the edge of that huddle in the pub, most times.

Trey glances sideways at him, with a glimmer of that grin creeping back. “You ever do any drugs? Before you were a cop, like?”

For a second Cal isn’t sure what to say to this. When Alyssa asked him this same question, the thought of her on drugs kicked him in the stomach so hard that all he could do was tell her stories of things he’d seen and beg her never to go near anything stronger than weed. She hasn’t, as far as he knows, but then she probably wouldn’t have anyway. Here, the right answer could matter.

In the end he goes with the truth. “I tried a few things, back in my wild days. Didn’t like any of ’em one little bit, so I quit trying.”

“What’d you try?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cal says. “I wouldn’t’ve liked anything else any better.” The fact is, everything he tried repelled him with an intensity that startled him and that he was unwilling to admit even to Donna, who back in those days accepted the odd drag or snort with cheerful ease. He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you. One of the happy side effects of having Alyssa and leaving his wild days behind was not having to hang out with people who were on drugs.