The Bloomsday Dead (19 page)

The shock wave rocks the boat and slides me across the deck right onto the port side.

The guy that fired the RPG on the embankment sees that he’s short and hurriedly begins to load another grenade. And now I notice him, when it’s too bloody late. And there’s a comrade next to him with some kind of heavy machine gun.

The grenade attached, the shooter gets down on one knee and aims at the boat, at me, not at the cops. So this isn’t an attack on the peelers by the IRA or a Republican faction, this a hit on yours truly.

A terrifying rip of noise and flame, the entire fiberglass rear of the boat exploding into pieces. This time I’m not quite so lucky. I’m thrown against the safety rail on the starboard side, the metal supports scouring into my back, the plastic rail gouging into my shoulder. I lie there stunned for a second and then I’m drenched in burning fiberglass.

I lose consciousness for a moment.

Blackness.

Pain.

Light.

Fingers. Arms. Pelvis. Stomach. Chest. Shoulder blades. Neck and head.

Motion? Yes.

A verb. Yes. A verb in my mouth.

Lips back. Tongue spit. Air migrating through my voice box. “Help.”

I try to sit up. I brush the burning embers off my body.

The peelers are hit too. Kevlar flak jackets kindling in the afternoon air. Hair and skin burning. Blood pouring out onto the swept street from unspecified multiple wounds. The blast echoing off the embankment like timpani fading diminuendo.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” I mutter in disbelief. “What the—”

A crater where the rear hull of the boat had been and a rain of fragments.

I’m alive. Singed, but in one piece. The boat is sinking. The RPG man is preparing his third grenade.

Get overboard, Michael.

I try to move. Stuck. Pinned. Huge chunks of what looks like the cabin roof lying on my legs. I start pushing them off.

Look up.

The RPG man: still trying to load the grenade. The coppers: the first hit got them bad. It seems to me, though, that no one is actually dead. At least not yet. One of the boys has lost his shoe and by the looks of it a couple of toes. White-hot pieces of shrapnel embedded in the others—wound marks on their arms and legs. All of them yelling. Shouting into their radios. The young policewoman screaming about her shoulder. Something red sticking out of her uniform. Their words melded together in a patter of confusion. Crackled voices speaking back, telling them help is on the way.

The woman cop’s hat floats down among the smoldering flakes of metal confetti and lands burning on the deck, where other fragments have been dumped by the explosion.

In the split second between grenade launches and while I’m attempting to get the cabin roof off my legs I’m oddly fascinated by her. With her hat gone she looks like a person now. Her bob of yellow hair lying in a divot of rainwater, a scarlet trail oozing into the blond from a laceration on her scalp. She’s dazed and flailing, but now she’s doing the only sensible thing of the five of us.

She’s going for her gun.

What a damn fine idea.

I stop kicking the cabin roof and pull out the .38. I level it with a steady hand and take a shot at the grenade launcher.

He’s fifty yards off and it looks like I’m not even going to be close, but at least I won’t be alone. Blondie, with blood in her eyes and a hurt hand, somehow gets to a kneeling position and starts shooting her Glock 9mm semiautomatic.

“Die, you fuckers, die,” she screams.

She fires nine shots, I fire six, all of them missing.

We start to reload.

“Get here, right now,” Blondie barks into her radio, while slotting another clip into the Glock. One of the front peelers, with gray hair and nearest the boat, has clearly been flash-blinded, standing up, staggering in front of me with his hands over his eyes. I nearly shoot him by accident, but neither Blondie nor I have hit anything and now RPG man has got the third grenade in the bloody launcher.

I put him between the sights.

One round, two rounds, three rounds, six rounds. Every one a miss.

Flip chamber, punch ejector, reload out of the bag in my pocket.

Blondie has her 9mm ready. She holds it in both hands, patiently squeezes the trigger, and hits the van next to RPG man just as he fires the weapon. It makes him jump, the grenade arcs high into the air and drops harmlessly into the Lagan without even exploding.

The boat is tilting backward now, beginning to founder. We’re inclined thirty degrees off the vertical and the roof fragments start sliding off my legs by themselves. Help them with a kick and a shove.

Obviously that’s it for the grenades because RPG man turns to his mate and starts taking ammo from a box. His buddy is a skinny figure, but he must be strong because I see that what he’s holding is an old army-issue general-purpose machine gun. A GPMG or Jimpy, as we used to call ’em back in the service—an ugly belt-fed weapon that makes up in punch for what it loses in accuracy. Two-man operation. One shoots, the other feeds the belt. 7.62-millimeter slugs that’ll come at you at 550 rounds a minute.

Shell casings pumping out of the gun and fast-moving rounds tearing up the tarmac.

“Shit.”

You’re supposed to fire it from a tripod but these guys have clearly seen too many ’Nam movies, where the old M60 got used in close-order action.

I stop reloading and lie down flat on the deck.

Only way out, over the side.

I crawl backward for the safety rail and know that I’m not going to make it.

But I don’t need to. Blondie has her wits about her. She’s not fazed. One knee, balanced, two hands, aiming very carefully at the shooter. She fires off four shots, all four hitting the machine gunner in the chest, killing him instantly.

His partner yells something, picks up the Jimpy, and tries to fire it single-handed. No chance. He burns himself on the stock and in the afternoon murk I watch the tracer sailing harmlessly overhead like fireflies on the river.

A one-sided gun battle ensues.

The hood can’t work the machine gun and I’m shooting at him, Blondie’s shooting at him, and finally beside her Zapata pulls out an enormous Model 500 Smith & Wesson .50-caliber handgun. His bullets cross the dead ground toward the machine gunner in huge resounding whomps that would put the fear of God into anyone who wasn’t shooting back from an Apache helicopter.

A third cop joins the fray lying on his back firing with his left hand, his shots wild, but it’s all more than enough to draw the machine gunner’s attention away from me for good.

“Fucking pigs,” he screams and tries to lower the Jimpy sufficiently to get an angle on the peelers.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and even if he did, he can’t handle a gun like that by himself. In desperation he crouches low, balancing the gun on his knee, but the inevitable overheating happens, the weapon seizes and instantly bucks away from him.

He pulls out a revolver, shoots off a couple of slugs, drops the gun, runs for the van.

“Come back, you son of a bitch,” the policewoman yells, fires the last round in her clip and it bloody hits him, knocking him to the ground.

Good on ya, love.

“Cease fire,” Zapata yells.

And the silence is worse than the noise.

A dozen car alarms, ducks clacking, coppers moaning. Above us an army observation helicopter that has seen the whole thing. It’s unarmed, so it’s not as if they could have helped but even so, bastards.

I take it all in in a split second: The flash-blinded peeler sitting down, Blondie and Zapata looking for a tourniquet for their other colleague, way down the river a police Land Rover tearing along the Lagan path, and up on the embankment RPG man getting awkwardly to his feet and making a shambling run for it.

Time for me to go.

I pulled myself up onto the Lagan path, walked over to the coppers.

“Everybody ok?”

Zapata was sitting up. The woman standing. The others in agony, shrapnel making them feel like they were pincushions. I didn’t see anyone dying, though. I bent down to adjust the straps on my prosthesis.

“Who the fuck are you?” Zapata asked.

“I’m from America. FBI. Going after that guy,” I said.

“What guy?”

“The guy who fired the RPG is hit but he’s running,” I had to explain so they didn’t bloody shoot at me when I legged it.

That was all I had to say. Zapata nodded, bought it.

“Just for the record, I think they were trying to kill me, not you. You were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said and ran up the embankment after Mr. RPG.

I stopped for a quarter of a second at the place where they’d done the hit. The Jimpy was seething, the van was peppered with bullet holes and had two flat tires. A blood trail led down the alley. I was right, Blondie had hit him. A goddamn markswoman, that lass. She had killed the Jimpy guy and plugged this character, too.

In other circumstances, I would have gone back and proposed.

I followed the trail behind the first of the condo buildings, lost it on the pavement, and found it at a rusting yellow trash compactor where he’d paused for a second, leaning on it, getting a breather and revealing his position with his bloody paws.

He’d turned left and continued running along this street, which was parallel to the Lagan.

Worried me. If he kept going straight, eventually this road led out of these bankside condo developments and into a feeder road for the city. Once he was on that he could lose himself in the crowds.

He had a big lead, but he was hit bad and I was angry.

The blood drops closer now.

He was moving slower.

Two feet between drops.

Then one foot.

Then six inches.

I was near. I turned a corner. The trail led between two large apartment buildings and abruptly stopped.

Had he climbed into a getaway car? No way. They had come in that damn van and the van was still parked along the embankment.

I scanned the alley.

Concrete walls. No doors leading into the apartment buildings and no obvious hiding places like trash bins or a skip. I ran to the end of the street.

A field, a piece of waste ground, and one of the main roads.

Shit. I’d bloody lost him? It didn’t make sense. Who brings two getaway cars to a hit?

I searched the alley again.

The condo complexes on either side of the alley were identical three-story-high apartment buildings with balconies. No doors on the ground-floor flats, and the windows that I could see were closed.

People don’t just vanish.

Maybe he’d taken a moment, patched himself up, and run to the waste ground. I sprinted to the bottom of the alley again, but there appeared to be no one in that featureless cinder track. He could be hiding under a bunch of newspapers or garbage, but I didn’t think so. He was back here somewhere.

I examined the ground-floor apartment windows and saw that not only were they not open, but they didn’t open.