“Shut the fuck up with them words! Now talk. How do you know all this shit about Tommy and him being at St Malachy’s and Dr Martin?”
I looked at him. “You know what the penalty is for killing a peeler? You get an automatic life sentence and they’ll give you a thirty-five-year tariff before they can even consider parole. You won’t be out of prison until 2023. How old will you be then? Sixty?”
Tommy looked at the others and shook his head. “He’s bluffing. He has no idea who we are and no one else has any idea either.”
“Your whole plan has been fucking compromised, if there even was a plan. I only arrived in Derry yesterday. Isn’t a honey trap usually planned well in advance? This was a last-minute operation. And since when did the IRA kill coppers and bury them in the woods? You disappear traitors. You bury informers in the woods but policemen you display, don’t you?”
“Yeah, what the fuck are we doing up here? Why didn’t we just shoot him and leave him in a sheugh outside of town?” the young man asked.
“They want me vanished forever. No murder inquiry, no body, they want me wiped from history. Why is that? Who are you really doing this bit of dirty work for?”
The young man let the .45 drop to his side and turned to face Tommy. “Aye. This whole thing’s a big bollocks, so it is. Answer us, Tommy. What are we doing up here in the mid—”
The edge of the flint thumped into his calf and he went down like a poleaxed gazelle. He fell sideways and I threw the big piece of flint at Tommy and hurled the spade after it. The kid was screaming so hard I must have severed a tendon. I jumped on top of him, rolled him, easily grabbed the .45 from his hand and kept rolling, expecting the .38 slugs to come roaring towards my head.
But Tommy was too slow. Glacial. Standing there flinching, trying to compute his comrade’s cry of pain, trying to understand the flint’s trajectory, trying desperately to grasp what had just happened.
The big piece of flint and the spade missed him by a mile and when he finally understood what was happening and his eyes cleared, he saw me on one knee pointing the black army-issue .45 at him. He raised the .38 and was surprised again when a hole appeared in his sport jacket under the pocket. A small hole in the front and a massive exit wound in the back through which came bits of ribs and lungs and heart.
A heart shot from a .45 at this range was almost instant death but I shot him again anyway in the head and his skull shattered like a coconut ventilated by a claw hammer.
The young man was clearly paralysed by the flint but to be on the safe side I shot off his right knee cap.
Only her left, but foolishly she started to run and I had no choice. The first shot missed but then I nailed her in the back and she went down like poor dead Mairéad Farrell falling forever in that car park back in Gib.
I got to my feet and walked towards her. The round had taken her in the left-hand side near the small of the back. I turned her over and I saw that she was bleeding out to the right of her belly button. There was no place to put a tourniquet. She looked at me desperately but I shook my head. Keeping an eye on her writhing, screaming friend, I knelt beside her and took her hand.
“You fucking fuck, Duffy,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You fucking bastard,” she said, sobbing.
“I’m sorry.”
“Like fuck you are,” she said squeezing the hand, hard.
“Do you want a benediction?”
“No … Yes.”
I took off the balaclava. She was a blonde with green eyes. About twenty-eight years old. She looked nice and intelligent too. Such a fucking waste.
“What’s your name?”
“Karen.”
I made the sign of the cross and said quickly: “Here lies Karen. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.”
I thought she would be dead by “mother of God” but amazingly she was hanging in there. I looked at the exit wound again.
What the hell? The blood was oozing out rather than haemorrhaging. The big .45 round had somehow missed all the major blood vessels. It had winged her, catching only fat and stomach. She must be under the fucking protection of St Jude. I ran back to Tommy, picked up the .38 and ripped the jacket off his back. I ran back to Karen. “I think you’re going to live,” I said and pushed the jacket down hard on the exit wound.
“I don’t believe you,” she groaned, her eyes wide, wanting to believe it.
I took her hand again and squeezed. “I think you’re going to make it. By all rights a big calibre round like that should have torn you up inside but somehow it missed all the major blood vessels.”
“I’m bleeding like fuck!”
“Of course you are but it’s not arterial bleeding. Hold that jacket over the wound and don’t try to move.”
I let go of her hand.
“Don’t leave me!”
“I have to go. Your mates will have been expecting one gun shot, perhaps two, but not four. The .45 made a racket that you could hear for miles.”
“Don’t leave me!”