Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [86]
25
It was almost four when I crawled off the main road, taking the back lane. I cut the headlights halfway down the hill, parked up. Slipped and slid through the pitch black on foot.
The house was dark, no light showing from the road, no tyre-tracks in the driveway, which meant nothing. The snow had obliterated everything that wasn’t moving. I jumped the wall, made my way up the garden behind the rhododendron bushes, so I wouldn’t trip the spotlights, emerging behind the woodshed.
The kitchen was dark. The snow between the shed and kitchen door was unmarked, the white van’s bonnet cold, which meant its driver had been inside long enough to get warm and maybe a little too comfortable. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but it was something.
I slipped the safety off the Ice Queen’s gun, trying not to breathe, my breath pluming, a dead give-away if anybody was lurking in the shadows. Crossed the open yard, every pore attuned for the slightest hint of impending oblivion, knowing full well I wouldn’t even hear it coming.
The back door was unlocked. I eased it open, crept through the kitchen on tiptoe, opened the kitchen door a crack. The hall ran the full length of the house, all the rooms opening off it, and once I started walking I was a sitting duck. A murmur came from the living room at the end of the hall, voices confident enough not to be whispering. Voices that belonged to people not disposed to jumping out of doorways and blasting everything in sight. When I finally convinced myself of this fact, I slipped through the door and began inching down the hall. It took me a good ten minutes to traverse the sixty feet or so to the living room. Threw back my shoulders, pushed the door in.
The conversation stopped. By the looks of things, it had been a little one-sided anyway. Denise, sitting forward on the end of the couch, looked even less enchanted by small talk than usual. Hugging herself like she was trying to stay warm, dressed in a pair of her father’s outrageous tartan pyjamas, feet bare, face haggard. She looked up quickly when I walked in; from the expression in her eyes, a quick blaze of hope, gratitude and irrational expectation, I could have been Saint Nick himself.
Galway wasn’t a believer. He snorted, derisive, casual on the other end of the couch. What looked like a Smith and Wesson 9MM, standard Branch issue, appeared in his hand. Ben, lying in front of the couch, playing trucks, swung around. His face lit up and he struggled into a sitting position.
“Dad!” he shouted, pointing at the bike in the corner of the room beside the Christmas tree. “Santa brought a bicycle. Look!”
“It’s lovely, Ben.”
“And a dumper truck, Dad!” He trotted across the room to show me the truck, a red-and-yellow plastic tractor with a shovel on the front that tipped up and down. I ruffled his hair. Chocolate had dried on his cheeks.
“That’s lovely too.” I swallowed hard but the lump in my throat stuck to its guns. “Now go sit with your mum.”
He pouted.
“But Dad –”
“Ben!”
Denise’s voice was harsh enough to make him jump; he mooched back to the couch. Denise took the truck from him, folded him in her arms.
“Take him to the bedroom,” I said. She started to get up, struggling to lift Ben from a sitting position, but she didn’t even make it off the couch.
“Nice try, Harry,” Gonzo said, laconic. His sleepy eyes looked me up and down, lazy. He was sprawled out on the armchair opposite the TV, in good shape for a corpse, relaxed, a can of beer at his elbow. All he needed was a pipe and a pair of slippers. “Sit down, Dee,” he said. “It’s too late to start listening to Harry now.”
“Whatever it is, Gonz, it’s between you and me. She has nothing to do with it.”
He laughed, crooked a lazy finger.
“Come on in. Sit down. Have a beer. And put that down before you do yourself a damage.”
I put the Ice Queen’s gun on the coffee table, sat in the armchair beside the TV, facing Gonzo. Galway didn’t take his eyes off me. I stuffed my hands deep into the pockets