The Cold, Cold Ground

Shore Road and up into Rathcoole.
    I screamed the Beemer through the estate and hand-brakedit to a halt in front of the Rathcoole Loyalists Pool, Snooker and Billiards Hall. I took the police revolver out of my jacket pocket, checked the cylinder, cocked it and stormed inside.
    A cocked .38 doesn’t feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.
    There were a dozen men playing snooker and pool. They looked at me and looked at the gun. Said nothing. Didn’t move.
    I marched to the cigarette room, kicked in the door.
    Shane and Billy were having Chinese for lunch. I swiped the food onto the floor and put the barrel of the .38 in Billy’s right eye.
    “I’m lifting you. I’m taking you in, fucker!”
    “I was expecting you,” Billy said, wincing away from the revolver in his face.
    “Like fuck you were. Get on your feet!”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Billy said.
    I shoved the revolver deeper against his eye.
    “You’re going down, Billy. You killed that boy to cover your tracks. Shane and Tommy were having an affair, weren’t they? Shane here can’t keep his dick in his fucking pants, can he?”
    “You have some imagination, copper,” Shane said.
    “I’m taking you down too. Separate cells, let’s see who cracks first.”
    “On what charge?” a voice purred behind me in an Anglo-Irish accent.
    I kept the gun in Billy’s eye but turned to see who was talking. A tall, thin, grey-haired man in a black suit.
    “Who the fuck are you?”
    “Anthony Blane, QC, Mr White’s barrister. On what charge are you arresting my client, Sergeant Duffy?”
    “Murder with malice aforethought.”
    “What evidence do you have linking my client with such a crime?”
    I wracked my brain for a second. “I have motive.”
    Blane crossed the little room. “Put the gun away, Sergeant, before someone gets hurt,” he said.
    I wanted to squeeze the trigger. I wanted to wipe the smile off Billy’s fat fucking face.
    I closed my eyes.
    I could see blood.
    Words.
    Letters.
    Typography.
    I lifted the revolver from Billy’s eye, disarmed it and put it in my pocket.
    “Please show me your warrant for entry into this private room and please tell me your grounds for suspecting my client of murder. When I talk to the Chief Constable this evening, I’ll want to have all the facts before me.”
    Shane was laughing now. Billy too. Pistol-whip the pair of them. Kill all three of them. Shane. Billy. Mr Tony Blane, QC, mob lawyer to the scum of the earth.
    I bit my lip. Shook my head.
    “Aye, I thought so,” Shane said.
    I slapped his face. Billy was on my back in a second. He rugby-tackled me to the ground and we tumbled out into the snooker hall.
    One of the goons raised a pool cue and smacked it down towards my head.
    I got my wrist up just in time and the cue smashed into two pieces.
    I scrambled to my feet. There were half a dozen guns pointing at my chest.
    Billy got up. Still grinning. Still laughing. It drove me mental.
    “Yak it up, Billy boy. I’ll find the proof. I’ll muddy the fucking waters. You and Tommy Little. You and Shane! A pair of benders? How will the higher-ups like that? I’ll fucking dig until Ifind something! And then you’ll be toast!”
    Billy looked around the room at his men. Some of them wanted to know what I was talking about.
    “Empty threats!” he said. “He’s spouting off. It’s all bollocks, so it is.”
    “We’ll see! We’ll fucking see!” I screamed and stormed out to the Beemer.
    I put it into gear. I drove. Someone threw a milk carton onto me from one of the tower blocks. It smashed over the windscreen scaring me shitless.
    “Shite!” I yelled. “Shite! Shite! Shite!”
    The Shore Road. Traffic. My wrist was banjaxed. Hurt like a bastard. And my beeper ringing so insistently that I finally had to turn it off. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to know.
    By the time I got to Carrick my wrist was agony. “Might as well go to the hospital,” I said.
    I got the end of Laura’s afternoon clinic. “Police business?” Hattie Jacques asked.
    “This time I’m a customer.”
    Laura saw me in her surgery. “What happened to you?”
    I told her the truth. She was appalled. She gave me an x-ray and it turned out that there was a micro-fracture in the ulna.
    “I’m afraid there’s very little we can do about that,” she said.
    “It hurts like hell,” I