Authors: Reed Farrel Coleman
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #General, #Mystery & Detective
“Get gone, motherfucka.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice and I got gone.
I’d been back from New York for about a week, and that week had been a tale of two lives: both mine. On the one hand, everything was exactly the same. On the other, everything was exactly different. It’s fucked up and a little hard to explain because if you were looking from the outside in, from the vantage point when crystal clarity just begins to soften at the edges, you wouldn’t have noticed the spectrum shift.
I got up early, wrote, crawled back into bed with Renee for a few minutes, went running with Jim, taught my classes, went shooting with Jim, came home and wrote, ate with Renee, wrote, fucked, and went to bed. That was pretty much my routine before I left for New York and it was my routine when I returned. The transition felt seamless, like the perfect pass of a baton during a relay race. I had handed off the baton on my way out of town and grabbed it back on my way in. I don’t think I could have adequately expressed to Renee how happy I was to be, for lack of a better word, home.
But something had changed and, at first, I could only describe the symptoms of the change, not what they meant or what had caused them. Renee seemed pleased enough at my return, but she wasn’t herself, or more accurately, she was like her old self. The fucking between us, which had undergone a steady transformation from ferocious and hungry to delicate and soulful, had turned back again. Since I’d gotten home, she had insisted on me taking her from behind and urged me to do it harder and harder still. When I’d crawl into bed with her in the morning, she wanted me in her mouth much more than she wanted my arms around her. She was back to making up and dressing like the St. Pauli Girl. Lots more makeup. Lots less clothing. It was almost as if she were trying to make me conscious again of just how young she really was and to make me wonder what it was we were doing together. If that was her intent, it was working.
Initially, I put it down to me. That I was sending out weird vibes because I regretted my decision not to take her with me to New York and worse, that I felt guilty for kissing Amy while I was there. Can you even believe it, Kip Weiler feeling guilty for kissing another woman? It was my ex-wife, for fuck’s sake, and it wasn’t like I initiated it. Compared to some of the Kipster’s past antics, kissing Amy was like an act of atonement. Still, it felt like a betrayal. I’d never understood what that word meant before now, but I knew it wasn’t the kiss that was the betrayal. It was the way I reacted to hearing Amy’s voice on the phone, the way I got hard at the brush of her hand against my cheek.
I came around to see that it wasn’t all me, that Renee had a little residual anger and resentment over my not taking her with me. Probably more than a little. But when I tried to discuss it with her, she either denied it or put the onus on me. “It’s in your head,” she’d say and give me a dismissive kiss. Whether it was her or me or both of us, at least I got to a point where it made some sense. None of that, though, could explain away Jim’s behavior.
Jim’s
I-know-all-about-you-Kip-Weiler
smile made an unwelcome comeback. I can’t say that I liked it either, not for a second. I wasn’t sure what had caused him to start flashing it again. I was pretty certain he hadn’t noticed me pilfer the Smith & Wesson before I left for New York, and I made quick work of slipping it back into the Colonel’s duffel bag the first chance I got. But even if he knew I’d nicked the .38, I couldn’t really see him getting too bent out of shape over it. In fact, given the basics of Brixton logic, he should have been proud of me. Of course, he might have been a little less proud had he an inkling of how close I’d come to getting into a gunfight with an off-duty cop. But it was more than just his smile that caught me off guard.
When we got up into the woods that Monday, he had some unexpected news for me that was more unwelcome than his smile.
“Time to move up to a real weapon,” he said, handing me the .45 Browning. “You’re good with the .38. Better than I thought you’d be. Let’s see what you can do with this.”
I wasn’t ready. I was barely used to the .38. I’d fired the Browning a few times over the last several months with very mixed results. It was a lot of gun for me. Even with sissy loads in the clip, it had wicked kickback. Jim was great with it, but he was great with anything he put in his hand. And if what Jim had said before I left was still the plan, I was about to step into the chapel wearing only a vest for protection, with an unfamiliar gun in my hand.
“But I haven’t really gotten good with the .38 yet.”
“Modesty doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth, Kip. You were good enough with it. Sometimes good enough is good enough. It’s time to move on.”
“Says who?”
I saw something in his eyes and in the shape of his lips that looked more cruel than wounded, but he caught himself.
“You know how it is,” he said. “This isn’t a democracy. Things get decided for you when we shoot in the chapel. You just have to trust we know what we’re doing. We’ve been right so far, haven’t we? Someday you’ll be deciding things for yourself. Just not yet. I thought you understood that for us the chapel is life and we need the rules and rituals. It’s what separates us from each other and from the rest of the world. I get that it isn’t your whole world and that someday you might leave and not come back, but you can’t be treated specially or it takes the meaning away for the rest of us.”
He kept saying
we
and
us
, but it felt an awful lot like the decisions were his and his alone. I mean, fuck, I was already edgy enough about shooting with only a vest and this sudden shift in weapon gave me no comfort at all. Nor was I reassured by his vague promise of future choice. I’d have to live long enough to exercise that franchise.
Jim saw the apprehension on my face and was quick to reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, Kip. I’ll be in there with you and I won’t let you kill me. You’ll be fine like you always are.”
I was glad he was so sure because I wasn’t. After seeing him clip the maintenance guy in the arm, my faith in Jim’s guarantees had been shaken a bit. So I took our practice sessions in the woods a little more seriously. They became a lot more businesslike and a lot less fun. Still, the potential danger of it gave me some wicked rushes.
The most unnerving moment since coming back to Brixton came in the dark and quiet of my bedroom. It was Friday night. Renee and I had just finished fucking our brains out. We were just lying there in the dark, me staring up at the ceiling, Renee still shuddering slightly. Soon she’d get up, go into the shower, and I’d follow. But that Friday night, Renee didn’t immediately get up to shower and her shudders weren’t the quiet little aftershocks of orgasm. She rolled over to face me. She was crying, her tears pouring onto the bed. I reached out to hold her, but she slapped my arms away.
“What is it?”
She said, “I love you and I know you don’t love me.”
I wanted to lie to her. It would have been hard not to want to lie to her, even for the Kipster, but I couldn’t. “Being with you these last few months has been wonderful. Our time together has been the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had, but I don’t suppose that’s love. I understand that that’s not enough for you.”
“Kip, please go back to New York. Tonight. Right now! I’ll send your things after you. Just get in your car and go before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
I reached out for her again, but she was already rolling out of bed, heading for the shower. I stumbled after her, but she’d locked the bathroom door. Eventually, I went back to bed and passed out.
When I woke up early Saturday morning, she was gone. Renee hadn’t packed up her things or left a note. It wasn’t anything so dramatic as all that. By the next day, by the time I returned from my morning run with Jim, she was back. I tried asking her about what she’d said, about my leaving before it was too late, but she acted as if I were mad, that I must’ve dreamed it. I might have very well been mad. Still, I hadn’t dreamed it.
More had changed than the shifts in the tide among Renee, Jim, and me.
Gun Church
had taken a dark turn. Whether it was playing Cutthroat, Fox Hunt, my trip to New York, or the need to self-destruct, I couldn’t say. Maybe the fear over having gotten the deal and the need to actually deliver a manuscript had pushed me over the line.
McGuinn’s notebook was filled with bomb diagrams, drawings of booby traps, plans for ambushes. There were names and places, body counts, reports of how specific operations had turned out: some bloody and successful, some bloody and disastrous. By the time I’d read halfway through his notes, I was numb to the havoc, the blood, the destruction, the baby’s arm lying in the road, hand still clutching a rattle. That was the horror I believe he was getting at: how even the slaughter of women, children, and friends had become as mundane as the image that looked back at him from the mirror every morning. But that was not the book I wanted to write nor the book I believe he’d wanted me to write. There was no deeper truth in the mundanity of violence. That truth sat on the surface and required no mining at all. That book had been written a thousand times over, and the truth of it had played out across the entire twentieth century and continued unabated into the next. There were other truths he wanted exposed, though he was vague about them.
The only deeper truth I’d ever exposed was that I was a fraud. My work, even my early good work, said almost nothing about the human condition. What it said a lot about was a particular time—the 1980s; a particular place—New York City; and a particular group of people—voracious yuppies who were nothing more than ridiculous children in adult bodies who had never grown out of their terrible twos. What is the deeper truth of a two-year-old?
I want. I want. I want
. My books were snapshots, cute snapshots, better than most of the period, perhaps, but not worth much more than an airing every twenty years so that people might say, “How nice. How quaint.”
What happened to the man I thought of as McGuinn was that he lost his soul, not by killing. It wasn’t about the killing itself. I don’t think that troubled him, really. Nor was his giving me his notebook an act of a man who had found God or cared to find him. Religion wasn’t the point. He had lost his soul and I think he wanted me to find out why and to retrieve it somehow, whether he was alive to see it or not.
McGuinn was numb with cold, exhausted, and bleeding from his shoulder wound, but he had found himself a place to hide that the others were unlikely to find.
He went back over it in his mind; how after the incident in the alley, a week had passed before they contacted him again—Zoe waiting for him outside the front door to his flat. How she had stayed that night and the next. How they had fucked until they were raw, only to do it again and again. How in spite of her orgasms, she seemed as far away as the streets of Belfast. Two days later, when she left him, Zoe gave him the ultimatum he was sure would come.
“If you ever want me again, you have to meet us tonight,” she said, handing McGuinn a slip of paper. “We’ll have company for you, an old friend of yours.”
McGuinn would have gone regardless of that last wee bit of enticement. He had to know what these people knew of him, about who he really was, and how they had targeted him. What good would it do him to run if he was easily found out?
When he showed at the address that night, they were waiting for him and this time there were more of them and better prepared. He was asked politely at the point of several guns to join them in the back of a van. Before he got in, they took his Sig and a black bag was thrown over his head. It was taped loosely around his neck. He’d done this routine before, from both sides. They weren’t going to kill him, at least not yet. It was very odd, for as they drove there was little or no chatter in the van, but McGuinn felt a familiar, almost comfortable presence that he could not make sense of. There was nothing and no one in this town he was familiar with.
As the van came to a halt, the doors opened and McGuinn was helped outside. He didn’t need to see to feel there was grass beneath his shoes or to know he was at a river side. Someone else was being taken from the van, but with fewer manners than had been shown to McGuinn. There was a bit of a tussle, a body hit the ground at McGuinn’s feet, and there was a distinct grunt. Again, McGuinn felt that familiar presence. The bag was removed from his head and when his eyes adjusted to the gloaming light, he understood. For there at his feet was Old Jack Byrnes.
The footballer from the slaughterhouse spoke first. “He came to kill you, Irish. That’s what he told us after we spoke to him.”
McGuinn looked down at his mentor, but Old Jack didn’t bother to shake his head in denial. Whatever was left of McGuinn’s heart sank. He’d known they would come for him eventually, but he never imagined it would be the man who was more father to him than his real da. Now it was Terry McGuinn shaking his head.
“He came snooping around work, asking about you about ten days ago. Your good luck we already had our eye on you for membership.”
“Membership! Membership in what?” McGuinn wanted to know.
The footballer spread out his arms and gestured at the woods, the waterfall, and the running river. “In this. In our church.”
“Church? And what church would that be, boyo?”
“Gun Church.”
“Gun Church,” McGuinn repeated. “One church has already failed me, son, and I’ve no heart for another.”
“But we won’t fail you, Irish, ever.”
Terry McGuinn smirked. “And what proof would you give of that, son?”
“Fair question,” the footballer admitted. Then he turned to the juicer and motioned for him to cut Old Jack’s hands and feet free. He left the gag in.
Old Jack tried rubbing some feeling into his wrists and ankles, but couldn’t bring himself to look at McGuinn.
After a few minutes, the footballer knelt down by Old Jack and whispered in his ear. With that, Old Jack Byrnes took off, running towards the woods. The footballer reached into his jacket pocket and came out with McGuinn’s Sig in his hand. He gave it to McGuinn, handle first.
“He’s all yours, Irish.”
“What if I don’t want him?”
“Well, Irish, someone’s going to get hunted down tonight. If it’s not him, then … ”
“So that’s how it is?” McGuinn asked.
“Consider it a tithe. Don’t worry, though. When you’re done with him, we’ll clean up after you. Like I said, Irish, we won’t fail you.”