I Hear the Sirens in the Street

didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure if I’d found anything or not. Was there anything in there? Had they been thorough? If he let me go was he signing his own death warrant?
    “What’s that in your pocket?” he said looking at a finger of latex.
    “Nothing, piece of plastic, so I don’t get freezer burn handling the steaks.”
    “Can I see?”
    “You want to see a piece of plastic?”
    “Yes.”
    “I have to go, Harry. I’m late for dinner.”
    He raised the shotgun and I grabbed the .38 from my belt.
    Shotgun and .38.
    Cop and robber.
    Blue eyes/green eyes.
    All those dichotomies flitting by at once. Wonderfully.
    I smiled at him.
    “It’s a piece of skin, Harry. It’s the missing piece of Bill O’Rourke’s tattoo. A ‘t’ from the motto ‘No Sacrifice Too Great’. You didn’t even know it was there, did you?”
    He shook his head.
    “Why did you kill him, Harry?”
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    “Was he digging into your relationship with DeLorean? And for that matter, mate, what is your relationship with DeLorean?”
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    “Who did?”
    “Give me that piece of skin. Give it to me.”
    I laughed. “I don’t think so.”
    “I’ll fucking blow your legs off before you get near the trigger of that pop gun,” he said.
    “No, it won’t play like that. Look at my .38. It’s fully cocked. The slightest motion or noise will set it off and it’s pointing right at your heart, me old mucker. You’re not surviving that. Aye, you’re right, that shotgun will take my fucking head off. But for you … It’ll be a bad death. Your heart will be ripped out of your chest. Blood will pour into your chest cavity from your arteries. Your lungs will fill. You’ll drown in your own blood. Like your brother Martin. Can you imagine? There’ll be no white light for you, me old China plate. No friendly waving from the far shore. You’ll be fighting it to the last, desperately trying to breathe.”
    Now he looked even more yellow.
    “What happened to O’Rourke, Harry? Tell me,” I said softly.
    He smiled.
    “All right,” he said.

31: IN EXTREMIS
    Harry cleared his throat. “The whole thing started with one of Martin’s touts who spotted O’Rourke lurking around the DeLorean factory, taking photographs, asking questions. He stood out. He was an American.”
    “And your brother came to you?”
    “Yeah, Martin told me about it all. Martin knew that John DeLorean and me were pulling off a big score. He knew this guy was bad fucking news.”
    “What did you do with the information?”
    “I decided that we should bring O’Rourke in to answer a few questions.”
    “How did you do that?”
    “Got a few lads in balaclavas, stole a white Transit, grabbed him off the bloody street in front of some bed and breakfast in Dunmurry.”
    “So you don’t know Willy McFarlane?”
    “Who?”
    Sweat was running down my forearm onto the .38. It was hard standing in this position with me ribs aching and the painkillers wearing off. Harry, by contrast, looked pretty fucking relaxed with the Remington.
    “You brought O’Rourke here?”
    “Nah. Took him down the salt mine.”
    “And then what happened?”
    “Nobody was going to kill him. That was never the plan.”
    “What was the plan?”
    “We just wanted to know who he was working for, what he knew, that kind of thing. We chained him to the generator in the mine and put the fear of fucking God into him. Martin did. He was used to interrogating touts and informers.”
    “Did you torture him?”
    “No. It was all talk. Torture? Martin wouldn’t have it. He said we didn’t need to torture him anyway. He said O’Rourke would tell us everything he knew, given enough time.”
    He moved his shotgun a little and I straightened my arm to aim the .38 at his face.
    “And then what happened?”
    “Nothing. We lifted the informer who told us about O’Rourke, and gave him some money to disappear. He went over to England. So that took care of that, but O’Rourke was our main problem. Who was he? What did he want? Did he know about me and DeLorean and the deal? We needed answers.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “Martin said he could handle it all. I trusted him. I mean, O’Rourke was down the fucking mine. Have you been down there with the lights off? It’s like a pit of hell. Martin knew that that would work him and he told O’Rourke that if he didn’t tell us everything he’d fucking suffer the torments of the damned