I was on my way, more out of anger than curiosity. I asked,
“I know your wife, she works for the Post Office, but you, your own self, what do you do?”
“I’m between jobs just now.”
I pushed,
“Before, before the between?”
His face took on that angry riled how dare you expression of the fundamentally righteous. He said,
“I don’t have to answer that.”
I gave him my knife smile, said,
“You just did.”
Leaving him, I went to feed the swans.
Sat on the bench across from the long walk where a young man had lain dead for eight months in his apartment in the city that cared.
We had a new cinema that cost eight million. We needed a new cinema? When two hundred people lay on trolleys in the hospital for days due to a bed shortage?
Our gay Indian government leader launched the Yes campaign, the referendum to legalize abortion.
I thought about Amy Fadden.
She’d hired me to find out who killed her daughter, and then planned to frame me for the ensuing murder of her daughter’s killer.
What should I do? Which door to choose?
Revenge
Acceptance
Confrontation
Tell the Guards?
Or do what I did best:
Fuck all.
I could simply let it go.
M
A
Y
B
E.
16
York knows the truth
Doesn’t matter in here.
Inside, the lies you tell
Become
The person you become.
On the outside, sun and reality shrink
People back to their actual size.
In here,
People grow into their
Shadows.
Jericho
Selected O’Connell’s bar on Eyre Square for the first meeting of the trinity,
When she’d introduce Stapes to Scott.
Neither Scott nor Stapes knew Jericho had a lover stashed. When she’d finished with the dim duo, she’d give full attention to the one who mattered, whose heart was as black as Jericho’s own.
She entered O’Connell’s.
Why there of all the pubs in the city?
You’d think with her chaos fixation, her general anarchy, she’d go for a dive, some shady gig near the docks or, at the very least, some yuppie shit hole as an ironic gesture.
No.
O’Connell’s over the past few years had become the in place for
Real estate wankers,
Budding entrepreneurs,
Billionaires on paper and by rumor (usually spread by themselves).
O’Connell’s had once been an old-fashioned, very Galway pub.
Mrs. O’Connell died and financial insanity began.
Valued at eleven million in the heady, utterly mad days of the Tiger.
Get this:
She had left it to
St. Vincent de Paul.
To charity.
Many felt a cats’ shelter would have made some kind of misguided sense.
But a charity?
Uh-oh.
And this was before the charities became as crooked publicly as the banks.
So many,
Many
Legal battles.
Jericho had no doubt that Scott, the cop killer, and Stapes, the burglar, would jell.
Why?
Because she would make it so.
She arrived first, dressed in semi-Goth, death white makeup, the kohl, biker jacket, torn jeans, and Docs.
She brought with it an air of cool that said,
“Hey, I’m out there but, like, you know, hot.”
It worked.
The bar guy wasn’t drooling but close and dared in this Me Too era to risk,
“Get cha, babe?”
Jericho gave him a smile and it was a winner, psycho or no. She’d that kind of smile that told you,
“You, you’re a winner.”
She ordered vodka rocks, slimline tonic.
They both enjoyed the slimline touch.
Scott entered next looking morose and as if he’d strayed into the wrong bar. Every bar was really the wrong one. He was just a miserable git.
Dressed in grunge but not as any statement unless
“I don’t give a fuck”
Says anything at all.
He ordered a pint.
No smiles on either side of the divide.
Jericho gave him a brief nod, the one that implies,
“You have not brightened my day.”
Then
Came
Mr. Bon Jovi, his own shining self.
He had his hair gelled, not overly so but sufficient that gel-less guys thought,
“Mm, maybe?”
He had a long soft leather jacket that he’d stolen and it looked either that or very expensive or, indeed, both.
He was the kind of guy who always knew the barman’s name.
How?
Fuck knows.
Black jeans that clung to his body like a brief love and those trainers never seen much anymore.
Made by Camper.
They had a brief day in the shoe sun when Snow Patrol were hot and got free shoes from said company.
Those were the days of early stardom, when even Ireland was on uppers.
But then the Taylor Swift virus hit.
One of the guys got engaged to one of the Friends stars.
One of the women, I think.
And the lead singer did duets with everybody going the road but especially Ms. Swift. She then moved on from him to destroy all cred that Tom Hiddleston was
Enjoying after The Night Manager.
I am of course ashamed to be a mini version of the National Inquirer with all this utterly useless data but time in the dentist’s office has that effect.
Scott instantly hated Stapes and it got a shade worse when Stapes greeted, effusively,
“Hiya, Sean,”
To Pavlov, the bar guy,
Who was glad of any courtesy from the Irish.
Jericho leaped to hug Stapes, and Scott thought,
“I really
Really
Hate this
Bollix.”
As Jericho continued to engulf Stapes in a hug that verged on the dreaded twerk in reverse, if such a thing is even feasible,
Scott fumed, muttered,
“Get a friggin’ room.”
Jericho disengaged slowly, went,
“Phew-oh, that was intense.”
Stapes put out his hand, greeted,
“You must be the infamous Scott.”
Scott tried to rein in his bile but he was fucked if he’d shake hands. He said,
“You’re the incompetent burglar.”
Lame, right?
Sean/Pavlov, acting on a false sense of civility, brought a creamy pint, put it in Stapes’s hand, said,
“On the house.”
You see how insincerity gets a bad press when it can do all kinds of significant shite. Just ask the pope.
“My man,”
Said Stapes.
Jericho suggested they all sit and get the party cooking.
She began,
“Now we all know each other, let’s plan our first event.”
Scott, still sulking, sneered,
“Why are we trusting this loser, this failed housebreaker? We know nothing about him.”
Jericho leaned over, right in Scott’s face, almost like a caress, sensually whispered,