There was a hard edge to the pub and its clientele. Court sensed it immediately. Malevolence filled the air.
This was no place for strangers.
Finally he glanced up into the mirror behind the bar. Every man in the pub, Dougal Slattery and the two young mates seated with him included, stared at him through the glass.
Tough crowd, Gentry thought.
A sign taped to the mirror caught his eye: No Singing Allowed.
Tough joint.
Shit.
The bartender eyed him for a long moment over his newspaper, finally laid it down, and raised his red eyebrows slightly.
“Pint of Guinness,” Court said.
Slattery sipped his beer, listened to the two young blokes in his snug complain about a bad call in the rugby match the previous evening between Clontarf and Thomond. Dougal was a Wanderers supporter himself, couldn’t give two shits about how bleedin’ Clontarf had been bleedin’ robbed by the bleedin’ referee, but he enjoyed the company of the two young regulars nonetheless. He looked up when he heard the door open; it was late for anyone to come in for a pint, but certainly not unheard of. He cocked his head to the side. His eyes tracked the stranger as he headed to the bar.
Dougal quickly tuned out his tablemates.
Inside Dougal Slattery’s large frame alarm bells clanged as loud as those in the belfry of the Christ Church Cathedral a mile to the west. A stranger in the Padraic Pearse was a queer enough sight, but this bloke had been in the crowd at the Oliver earlier in the evening. Moreover, he was young and fit, and just one shade too nonchalant for Slattery’s taste.
He wasn’t local. He dressed the part, true, but Slattery saw through it somehow. As the man sat himself on a bar-stool, the Irishman looked hard for evidence of a weapon in his clothing, either the printing of a handgun or that particular hitch a man with a sidearm must make to accommodate the iron on his hip as he sits. Dougal saw nothing, but the stranger’s right side was shielded from him.
He heard the man order. “Pint of Guinness”—nothing foreign or odd there. He even sounded a bit Irish, but his voice was low and soft.
Was he police? Interpol? Dougal knew that cops in a half dozen countries would like to put him in shackles and drag him off his blessed island. No. This man did not appear to be a cop; he seemed somehow too relaxed for that line of work.
He also knew how to order a Guinness, and that was something. Uninitiated foreigners tended to reach for the glass as soon as it’s placed on the bar, a cardinal mistake. The stout requires a two-part pour; the bartender allows the foam to settle for a couple of minutes, at which time the beer sits teasingly close to the patron, inviting him to show his ignorance by pulling the glass to himself.
But this stranger knew his manners.
Slattery caught a glance from the man through the mirror, just a quick, impassive, fleeting look. The other regulars in the bar were all staring at the stranger, as well. He looked them over before returning his attention to the bartender. George wasn’t any happier to see a stranger at his bar than was Slattery, but he served the pint and took the money and went back to his newspaper.
Dougal leaned forward to the men at his table. He spoke to them softly. There was an affectation of levity, but the words were said with no smile at all.
“Listen, laddies. How would you fancy a little action tonight before your ma’s tuck yas into your beds?”
Court had been made, and he knew it. He sat at the bar, stared into his beer, his body feigning relaxation but his mind tense, going over the protocol for dealing with a dozen men in a room not much larger than the interior of a school bus. There would be blades in this crowd, Gentry had no doubt. Brass knuckles, too, more than likely. Maybe even a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun behind the bar. Court wore a pistol in a holster in his waistband, but it wasn’t much of a defensive weapon. A Russian Makarov. With the silencer in his coat pocket, he could make it an effective assassin’s tool, but the .380-caliber bullet was too impotent to count on as an effective man stopper, the eight-round magazine capacity seemed woefully inadequate for the mass of beef around him in the room,