The Searcher(86)

Cal waits.

“Cleaning gear. Brendan coulda been meaning to do up the rest of the place. Rent it out, on the QT, like. To hikers, backpackers. Only the people who own the house found out, and they got pissed off. And that’s who Bren was going to meet. To sort it. Give them cash.”

“Could be,” Cal says, ducking under a branch. He can feel the kid watching him.

“And that’s who took him.”

“You know who owns the place? Who lived there last?”

Trey shakes his head. “But some of them up the mountains, they’re rough.”

“Well,” Cal says. “Looks like I might need to have a look at property registers.”

“You’re gonna find him,” Trey says. “Right?”

Cal says, “I’m aiming to.” He doesn’t want to find Brendan Reddy any more.

Trey starts to say something else, then checks himself and goes back to whacking tree trunks with his branch. They make their way through the spruces and back down the mountainside in silence.

When they get back onto the path, at the bend where they met up, Cal slows. “Where’s Donie McGrath live?” he asks.

Trey is kicking a rock down the path in front of him, but he looks up at that. “What for?”

“I want to talk to him. Where’s he live?”

“Just this side of the village. That gray house that’s in bits. With the dark blue door.”

Cal knows it. People in the village take pride in their homes, keeping their windows clean, their brasses polished and their trim painted. A run-down house means an empty house. Donie’s is the exception.

“By himself?”

“Himself and his mam. His dad died. His sisters married away, and I think his brother emigrated.” The rock has gone off the path. The kid nudges it out of a clump of heather with his toe. “Donie and his brother, they usedta pick on Bren, back in school. In the end they bet him up bad enough that my mam went in, and Donie’s mam hadta as well. She was like, ‘My boys would never, they’re lovely lads, we’re a decent family’—even though everyone knew the dad was a drunk and a waster. Thought she was great just ’cause she’s from town and her brother’s a priest. School didn’t give a shite either way, ’cause it was only us.” He glances up at Cal. “Now, but, Bren could beat the shite outa that little scut any day. Donie didn’t take him.”

“I never said he did,” Cal says. “I just want to talk to him.”

“How come?”

“Because. And I want you to stay away from him. Far away.”

“Donie’s only an arsewipe,” Trey says, with complete scorn.

“OK. Stay away from him anyway.”

Trey kicks his rock, hard, into the heather. He gets in front of Cal and stops, blocking the path. His feet are set apart and his chin is out.

“I’m not a fucking baby.”

“I know that.”

“‘Stay away from this, stay away from him, do nothing, you don’t need to know—’”

“You wanted me to do this ’cause I know how to do it right. If you can’t stay outa my way while I—”

“I wanta talk to Donie. He’ll say nothing to a blow-in.”

“And you think he’ll talk to some kid?”

“He will, yeah. Why not? He thinks the same as you: I’m a baby. He can say anything to me; there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Cal says, “What I’m telling you is, I find out you’ve been anywhere near Donie, I’m done here. No second chances. Clear?”

Trey stares at him. For a second Cal thinks the kid is going to flip his shit, the way he did when he smashed up the desk. He gets ready to dodge.

Instead, the kid’s face shuts like a door. “Yeah,” he says. “Clear.”

“Better be,” Cal says. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Come round the day after, I’ll update you.” He wants to tell the kid not to get seen on the way, but the sleazy ring of it stops him.

Trey doesn’t argue any more, or ask any more questions. He just nods and lopes off, into the heather and gone behind the shoulder of the mountain.

Cal understands that the kid knows. He knows something happened inside that house; something solidified and came into sharp focus, and the stakes shot up. He knows that was the moment when this situation went bad.

Cal wants to call the kid back and take him hunting again, or feed him dinner, or teach him how to build something. None of those will fix this. He turns and starts to walk home, by the same meandering route he took to get here. Below him the fields are yellowing with autumn. The shadow of the mountainside is spilling onto the path, with a chill inside when he crosses it. He wonders if, a week or two from now, the kid will hate his guts.

At least now he knows what farm equipment got stolen back in March. Brendan went out with a hose and a propane tank one night, or a couple of nights, and siphoned off a little bit of P.J.’s anhydrous ammonia. Only he got busted: maybe he got sloppy and left a piece of duct tape stuck to the tank where he’d attached his hosepipe, maybe P.J. spotted the brass fitting turning green. Either way, P.J. called the cops. Cal would love to know what Brendan said to him to make him call them off.

He could probably have those CSIs and that K-9, if he went to the police—not cheery Garda Dennis, but the big boys, the detectives up in Dublin. They would take him seriously, specially once they saw those photos. Brendan wasn’t setting up some pissant shake-n-bake op in that cottage. He was going for the real thing, the pure high-yield technique, and he had the chemistry knowledge to make it work. It seems like a fair assumption that he also had the connections in place to sell the meth once he made it. The detectives wouldn’t fuck around.