Dublin Noir - Ken Bruen [25]
All. Of. It.
It took four days for Little Pink to return, four unbearable days, and he brought Fat Pink with him. They stood in the doorway on the business side of the moat, deadpan and composed.
The trader saw seraphs, and he tried to turn off the frenzy in his mind and under his skin.
The bouncer, dim bastard, held them back, being it was past midnight, and the trader had to scramble across the room to halt their dismissal, freezing the dope with an X-ray stare as he grabbed Little Pink by the forearm.
“Come,” he said, almost desperately, “come.”
They went to the little office he’d fashioned out of the storage room.
“Jaysus, where have you been?”
“It’ll cost you,” Fat Pink said, his voice a throaty growl.
“Huh?”
“What me brother is saying is that the ghost appears at no charge, but we have our expenses,” said Little Pink, collar up on the hound’s tooth.
He saw they had not a mind for charity.
“Sure,” said the trader. “Expenses.”
The Pinks kept still.
The trader took a breath. “Go on.”
“We all get what we pay for,” Little Pink said. “In the end, the accounts tally.”
And with that, the trader had found his hitching post. Negotiations had begun.
“But you’ve seen this place,” he said. “Be flattery to call it a dump.”
Big Pink looked askance at the beam an inch or so from his head. The cobwebs had cobwebs, and the wood wore moss.
“Suit yourself,” Little Pink said, with a faint shrug.
The visitors spun slowly toward the door.
“No, no. No,” said the trader, groping again for Little Pink and to hell with negotiating. “What I’m saying is I don’t know what I can raise.”
“Sure you do.” Fat Pink said it.
Little Pink dipped into his pocket: the machine, the button, and this time it was Rory on the twelve-string acoustic guitar, a slow, agonizing, gorgeous blues. No singing, not yet, but pain released from deep in the heart of Ireland filled the musty room. The sweet chirping of blackbirds too, and platinum rain, and yer ma’s tears.
“Oh,” the trader moaned. “Oh, sweet Jaysus.”
The music stopped when Little Pink popped open the device.
He held out the disk. A gift, and Fat Pink didn’t mind.
“Recorded not twenty-four hours ago,” said the little man.
The trader swallowed hard. “Name your price.”
They settled on 75,000 euros—Little Pink knowing the U.S. dollar was weak—and the Audi. In return, they’d record for as long as the ghost chose to play.
Driving in the rain through Ballsbridge toward Kill o’ the Grange, headlights sweeping across the diamonded windscreen, the trader had it figured. He’d report the Audi stolen before he left Stillorgan Road for the meeting, record Rory, glorious Rory, and then he’d double-back on foot to grab his money, putting the sight of the bouncer’s Ruger MK right between Fat Pink’s googly eyes.
He’d pick up a new set of wheels in Spain and be in Seville by tomorrow noon.
That was fair play to the boys in Coldbath Fields, and he wasn’t too far gone with the beatings and the crank to have forgotten what he’d learned in the yard. A real tutorial it was, day in and out.
The call made, he put the mobile back in his pocket, and rolled down the window, searching for a sniff of Dublin Bay. None, his nose as numb as stone.
“Eejits,” he said to the night air. “Eejits and wankers. Come to rip off Eamonn the barkeep, and look who’s here. The man who broke the Ravenscroft.”
He was still chattering when Fat Pink opened the door to the cottage on a grainy road two rights and a left off Kill Avenue, and there’s yer open field and the black tree branches groping for the indigo sky.
“You’re early,” Fat Pink said, filling the door frame, all but blocking out the light.
“I got the money.”
The rustle of wings, or his imagination, all too alive.
“Well?” said the trader, who’d left the Ruger in the glove box.
Fat Pink stepped aside.
The wobbly stairwell was his only