Dublin Noir - Ken Bruen [27]
Little Pink stepped back and he smiled, and when he smiled, Fat Pink smiled too.
It was Fat Pink—Larry Chick being his real name—who came across Trudi in Bristol, and it was Bernie Chick—him the one the trader dubbed Pug—who heard about the guitar player over in the States in Red Bank, New Jersey, who could play it like Rory done. Little Pink, who was Paul but went by the name Des to honor his father, put it together. The club off the Royal Canal was a gift, it was. The crystal meth situation too, meaning the trader didn’t think to see if Bernie was behind him when he finally stumbled back to his ratty flat.
“We’re going to take your teeth too,” Des Chick said.
“And the nose,” Larry nodded.
“And the nose,” Des agreed, “if Bernie comes back empty-handed.”
The trader could not believe he had been duped. Better than them all, and smarter, and yet he’d been duped.
Des said, “And then we’ll talk about regret.”
The trader looked at his thumb on the table, and he heard the one he called Pug trudging up the creaking stairs.
LOST IN DUBLIN
BY JASON STARR
Kathy had come to Dublin to forget about her fiancé, Jim, or to at least reassess the relationship, but so far she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. She’d called him twice—once, minutes after her flight landed, under the pretense of wanting to find out how Sammy, their year-old Labrador, was doing, but it was really to hear his voice; and again when she arrived at the hotel to admit that she missed him. He said he missed her too and told her that this was crazy, to get on the next plane back to New York, but she told him no, she had to stay, to try to “work this thing out once and for all.”
Now, as she lay in bed in the curtain-darkened hotel room, trying to sleep off her jet lag, she wondered what the hell she was doing with her life. For years, all her friends had been trying to convince her to dump Jim, and part of her wanted to do it. She knew she’d never be able to trust him again—for all she knew, he was back in bed with that bitch right now—so what was the point in even thinking about staying with him? But it had never been easy for her to let go of things and she’d been with Jim for six years, and although things had been stormy, to say the least, she felt she had to at least give it a chance—see if there was still something there.
She stirred for a couple of hours and then got up, not sure if she had slept or not. She still had a bad headache and felt out of it, and a shower and a whole small bottle of Killarney sparkling from the minibar didn’t help. But she was excited to go out exploring and she figured a good cup of coffee would perk her up.
She picked up a tourist map and went down Chatham Street to a pleasant-looking café and sat at one of the tables outside. A waitress came out and asked her what she was having.
“Just a coffee,” Kathy said.
The waitress left and Kathy opened the map and was very confused. Dublin was a maze of streets with Irish names and she had no idea where she was. It didn’t help that she had a lousy sense of direction. Normally when she traveled she relied on Jim to take her from place to place. Jim was one of those guys who seemed to have a compass implanted in his brain and always got a handle on a city instantly, even if he’d never been there before. The last trip they’d taken together was to Paris, two years ago, and she never looked at a map the entire ten days. Jim whisked her around the city, from arrondissement to arrondissement—walking to some places, taking the Metro to others—and she never had to worry about anything.
The waitress brought the coffee. Kathy had a sip, then noticed a guy at the table next to hers smiling at her. She hadn’t noticed him before and she figured he must’ve sat down while she was looking at the map. He was working on a laptop and was kind of cute.
She smiled back at him and then he said, “You’re American, are you?”
Kathy felt a wave of guilt she experienced whenever she was traveling and was outed for being American,