I Hear the Sirens in the Street

right of Adrian McKinty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
    Copyright © 2013 Adrian McKinty
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
    First published in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
    3A Exmouth House
    Pine Street
    London EC1R 0JH
    website: www.serpentstail.com
    ISBN 978 1 84668 818 8
    eISBN 978 1 84765 929 3
    Designed and typeset by Crow Books
    Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

MARTY MCFLY : Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a time machine … out of a DeLorean?
    DR EMMETT BROWN : The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
    Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale, Back to the
Future (1985)
    Now I lay me down to sleep
    I hear the sirens in the street
    All my dreams are made of chrome
    I have no way to get back home
    Tom Waits, “A Sweet Little Bullet
    From A Pretty Blue Gun” (1978)

1: A TOWN CALLED MALICE
    The abandoned factory was a movie trailer from an entropic future when all the world would look like this. From a time without the means to repair corrugation or combustion engines or vacuum tubes. From a planet of rust and candle power. Guano coated the walls. Mildewed garbage lay in heaps. Strange machinery littered a floor which, with its layer of leaves, oil and broken glass was reminiscent of the dark understory of a rainforest. The melody in my head was a descending ten-on-one ostinato, a pastiche of the second of Chopin’s études; I couldn’t place it but I knew that it was famous and that once the shooting stopped it would come to me in an instant.
    The shotgun blast had sent the birds into a frenzy and as we ran for cover behind a half disassembled steam turbine we watched the rock doves careen off the ceiling, sending a fine shower of white asbestos particles down towards us like the snow of a nuclear winter.
    The shotgun reported again and a window smashed twenty feet to our left. The security guard’s aim was no better than his common sense.
    We made it to safety behind the turbine’s thick stainless steel fans and watched the pigeons loop in decreasing circles above our heads. A superstitious man would have divined ill-omened auguries in their melancholy flight but fortunately my partner, Detective Constable McCrabban, was made of sterner stuff.
    “Would you stop shooting, you bloody eejit! We are the police!” he yelled before I even had the chance to catch my breath.
    There was an impressive dissonance as the last of the shotgun’s echo died away, and then an even more impressive silence.
    Asbestos was coating my leather jacket and I pulled my black polo neck sweater over my mouth.
    The pigeons began to settle.
    Wind made the girders creek.
    A distant bell was ringing.
    It was like being in a symphony by Arvo Pärt. But he wasn’t the composer of the melody still playing between my ears. Who was that now? Somebody French.
    Another shotgun blast.
    The security guard had taken the time to reload and was determined to have more fun.
    “Stop shooting!” McCrabban demanded again.
    “Get out of here!” a voice replied. “I’ve had enough of you hoodlums!”
    It was a venerable voice, from another Ireland, from the ’30s or even earlier, but age gave it no weight or assurance – only a frail, impatient, dangerous doubt.
    This, every copper knew, was how it would end, not fighting the good fight but in a random bombing or a police chase gone wrong or shot by a half senile security guard in a derelict factory in north Belfast. It was April 1st. Not a good day to die.
    “We’re the police!” McCrabban insisted.
    “The what?”
    “The police!”
    “I’ll call the police!”
    “We are the police!”
    “You are?”
    I lit a cigarette, sat down and leaned against the outer shell of the big turbine.
    This room in fact was one enormous turbine hall. A huge space built for the generation of electricity because the engineers who’d constructed the textile factory had decided that autarchy was the best policy when dealing with Northern Ireland’s inadequate and dodgy power supplies. I would like to have to seen this place in its heyday, when light was