“You’ll be OK. Keep the pressure on the wound, OK?”
“OK.”
“Now listen to me: when they come they’re probably going to want to move you. If they move you you’ll start to haemorrhage and you’ll bleed to death before they can get you to a hospital. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“What’s your blood type?”
“B positive.”
“OK, I’ll go and get help.”
“Duffy … Sean, what if … what if, they want to just finish me, so I don’t talk, so they can get out of here?”
“Are they the sort that would do that?”
“I don’t know.”
I thought about it for a second.
“All right. I’ll leave you the .38. If they try any funny business just fucking shoot them. And don’t fucking shoot me as I’m running off.”
“I won’t shoot you,” she said.
I put the .38 in her right hand and for a split second the barrel was pointing right at me but she didn’t pull the trigger.
“Hang tight. And tell your young friend there to hang tight. He’ll live too,” I said and ran off into the forest, circling round through the trees to the right, well off the trail.
Going downhill without a gun in your back made this little trek an entirely different experience.
My asthma didn’t play up in the slightest.
A lovely old wood – in spring it would be full of bluebells.
When I reached the fire-break at the bottom of the hill, I could see two men arguing with one another.
Both of them were carrying shotguns. Nope, correction, one of them was carrying an AK-47.
I decided not to try to intercept them or attack them or arrest them. If anything went wrong and that guy opened up with the AK I was toast. Burnt-soda-bread-full-of-holes toast lying in the bottom of a sheugh.
Arrest would be nice in theory. But they would never talk. No one ever talks. And I wasn’t going to push my luck.
I drifted deeper into the forest and kept going south until I reached the car park.
No one was here now, but there was the big stolen Volvo estate they’d brought me in. I looked through the window and didn’t find a key but the door was open and those big Volvos from the late 70s had an easy-to-smash plastic dash and steering column.
In a manner that would have impressed the best teenage car thief, I had smashed the plastic, sparked the car and got the steering lock off in under two minutes.
I took a sniff of the dangling Pine Barrens air freshener to get the smell of blood and death out of my nostrils.
I drove out of the car park and headed north until I saw a road sign for Derry. It was so early that traffic was non-existent and in fourth gear I managed to get the big old diesel Volvo up to 75 mph. I tried Radio 1 but it was all Whitesnake and Billy Ocean and George Michael and Cheap Trick.
I drove to Strand Road RUC like a banshee on her broom and was about to go into the station when I thought better of it, accelerated past the cop shop, drove up Asylum Street and towards the Bogside.
Squeal of breaks and a three-gear down shift and I stopped at a house in Heaney Street. I ran down the drive and rang the bell. I kept ringing it until Ken Kirkpatrick opened the door holding an ancient-looking pistol.
He recognised me immediately, even though it had been nearly fifteen years.
“Sean Duffy,” he began. “I never thought I’d see the likes of you again. Not after you’d taken the King’s shilling.”
Arses like Ken Kirkpatrick were always coming out with oldtimey phrases like “taken the King’s shilling”, but I had no time for his bullshit today. Ken Kirkpatrick was the Provisional IRA quartermaster general for Derry and as such was the number 3 or number 4 IRA man in the whole city.
“Kitchen, now,” I said and marched into the house.
“What do you want, Duffy?” Ken said following me into the back kitchen.
“Listen, Ken, I got lifted last night by an IRA active service unit, taken to a derelict house, interrogated and then they took me out to Glenblane Forest to shoot me this morning. They fucked it up. I killed one of your men and shot one of them in the knees and a wee lassie in the back. There’s two more of them up there. The woman is bleeding to death. She needs a couple of pints of B positive blood and she needs to go to a hospital. If you go now you can get a team there and save her.”
“What?”
I slapped my hand on the kitchen table. “Fucking wake up, Ken! Glenblane Forest. One of your ASUs tried to kill me. I turned the tables and there’s a girl called Karen bleeding to fucking death. B positive blood. Did you get all that in your skull?”
“Yes, I got it!”
“Make some fucking phone calls! I’ll leave the room. If you need more details I’ll be in the bloody lounge.”
I went into the living room and sat on a musty leather sofa.
Quiet in here. Ticking grandfather clock, old bookcase full of nineteenth-century hardbacks, family portraits …
Exhausted.
So very tired …
Don’t go to …
Don’t …
A hand on my shoulder.
Ken shaking me awake.
“Sean, here’s a mug of tea. Way you like it. Milk, two sugars, am I right?”