more with himself than with anyone else. He reckoned all along, after all, that there was more going on underneath Mart’s quirky-yokel shtick; he just never put things together, which for someone in his line of work is an unpardonable level of dumb. Cal supposes he should be grateful for Mart’s protective herding, even if Mart was mainly motivated by the desire to prevent Cal from bringing down more trouble on the townland, but he’s not fond of being made to feel like a fool.
The morning has turned lavishly beautiful. The autumn sun gives the greens of the fields an impossible, mythic radiance and transforms the back roads into light-muddled paths where a goblin with a riddle, or a pretty maiden with a basket, could be waiting around every gorse-and-bramble bend. Cal is in no mood to appreciate any of it. He feels like this specific beauty is central to the illusion that lulled him into stupidity, turned him into the peasant gazing slack-jawed at his handful of gold coins till they melt into dead leaves in front of his eyes. If all this had happened in some depressing suburban clot of tract homes and ruler-measured lawns, he would have kept his wits about him.
He needs to talk to Austin. Austin sounds like a fun guy. If he’s the boss man, though, even just regionally, there’s better than a fifty-fifty shot that he’s the calculating subspecies of psycho, rather than the rabid kind. In this situation, unlike many, Cal considers that a plus. If he can convince Austin that Trey is no threat, then Austin is likely to abandon his silencing campaign as an unnecessary risk, rather than keeping it up just for entertainment. There’s even an outside chance Cal can persuade him to give Trey some level of answer in exchange for guaranteed peace and quiet. In order to gauge Austin well enough to wrangle him, though, Cal needs to do this face-to-face. He’s going to have to phone Austin and set up a meeting, pick his strategy on the fly depending on what he finds, and hope his meeting goes better than Brendan’s did.
The house and the garden look the same as they did when he left, and the rooks are happily doing their thing, making conversation and combing the grass for bugs, undisturbed. Cal unlocks the front door as quietly as he can, figuring the kid will likely be asleep again, and peeks into the bedroom. The bed is empty.
Cal spins round, his head blooming with fully fledged abduction scenarios. When he sees the bathroom door shut, he switches to picturing the kid collapsed on the floor, bleeding into her guts. He can’t believe he didn’t haul her to a hospital last night.
“Kid,” he says, outside the bathroom, as calmly as he can. “You OK?”
After a bad second, Trey pulls the door open. “You were fuckin’ ages,” she snaps.
She’s electric with nerves. So is Cal. “I was talking to Donie. Did you want me to do that or not?”
“What’d he say?”
The flare of terror in her eyes disintegrates Cal’s irritation. “OK,” he says. “Donie says your brother did get mixed up with the drug boys from Dublin. Not selling, you were right about that, but he was gonna be making meth for them. Only he fucked up, lost a bunch of their supplies. He was planning to meet up with them and make it right, and that’s the last Donie heard of him.”
He’s not sure if some or all of this is going to be more than Trey can take, but he’s done hiding stuff to protect her: look how well that worked out last time. The kid has a right, paid for and branded onto her, to true answers.
She absorbs it with an intentness that stills her jittering. “That what Donie actually said? No bullshit this time?”
“No bullshit. And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t bullshitting me, either. Not sure he told me every single thing, but I reckon what he did tell me was true.”
“Didja hurt him?”
“Yeah. Not too badly.”
“You shoulda battered the fucker,” Trey says. “Shoulda danced on his fucking head.”
“I know,” Cal says gently. “I would’ve loved to. But I’m after answers, not trouble.”
“You haveta talk to them, the lads from Dublin. Didja talk to them?”
“Kid,” Cal says. “Slow down. I’m gonna. But I need to work out the best way to go about it, so neither of us winds up with a bullet in our heads.”