Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [66]
Dutchie’s stereo was tuned to a tired Classic Hits FM station, the presenter an All-American constipated duck. I flipped through the channels, hit something that sounded like it might have a real news bulletin. The news came and went, the lead story now the tragic tale of the multiple pile-up in Cork, the pathos intensifying as Christmas Day got closer. Then some poor bastard from Portadown, who’d had his knees blown out in the early hours of the morning. Then the foiled bank robbery in Ardee, which hadn’t been foiled at all, meaning the raiders had got away with nearly quarter of a million. The tax amnesty scandal didn’t even make the charts.
The weather forecast was for heavy snow, high winds. The winds hadn’t kicked in yet but the snow was already coming down, thick and fast. I switched the radio off, slipped a tape into the stereo and decided that it was apt that Gonzo’s overdose hadn’t made the airwaves. He had contributed nothing to society in his time, so there was no reason society should mark his passing. I wondered whether that might have bothered Gonzo, acknowledged that I didn’t know him well enough to tell.
The next question was whether or not I cared. I took the Fifth and checked the rear-view. The Mondeo was still there, still about a quarter mile back. I pushed the needle up past seventy. The Mondeo picked up speed. I dropped down again, took my eye off the rear-view.
There were drifts in the high mountain pass, starting to freeze over, but even so I made it just after one. Went all the way around the second roundabout and turned off into the shopping centre car park, watching for the Mondeo. It didn’t show. I hauled Ben’s bike out of the boot, carried it into the shopping centre. The air inside was humid, heat rising off the damp coats of the shoppers.
I bought an extra-large zip-up fleece with deep pockets, a Red Sox baseball cap, putting them on in the public toilets. The fleece was a tight fit but I could just about swing my arms, which would come in handy if the trapeze artists ever went out on strike.
I went from the toilet to the hardware shop, then out back of the shopping centre, where I locked Ben’s bike to a disused skip. I dialled one of the numbers pasted to the public phone, arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the bus station, across the car park from the Bravo. When the taxi pulled up I tugged the baseball cap low over my face and loped across the car park. I was in the back of the taxi when the driver emerged from the bus station’s waiting room. He manoeuvred his huge bulk into the driver’s seat and looked at me expectantly in the rear-view mirror. He had a wide face, apple-red cheeks and a flat beret of snow-white hair that had been cut with a secaturs.
“Harrison?”
“That’s me.”
“Where to?”
That stumped me. We had always driven to the holiday home and I didn’t know the actual address.
“Go to the bottom of the main street and turn right. Go right again up the hill. After that, I’ll keep you posted.”
He dropped me about five hundred yards past the house. When he turned the car I strolled up the lane and started rolling a smoke, taking my time. Twenty minutes later I flipped the butt into the ditch. Not a single car had passed in either direction. I walked back down the hill to the house, turned into the gravelled driveway.
It was as safe a hideaway as any. I’d been turning my car up that driveway for nearly five years now and the curtains across the road still twitched. The house was set well back from the road, obscured by a row of Sycamores that ran the length of the low redbrick wall marking the boundary of the huge garden. I walked around the back, noting the tiny boot-prints in the snow. I jumped when Ben gave me his fright, threw some snowballs and let him shove snow inside my collar. When I finally shook him off I took Denise into the kitchen. She poured coffee, cocked an eye at my swollen face and waited for me to start. I let the warm kitchen soak away the