At first she had been certain that they would be caught. Koenig had never come so close before, and only the dead sheep on the road had saved them. Koenig had had to brake hard, his attention fastened on stopping the huge car safely, and before he could settle himself and send bullets their way they were off, the motorcycle leaping beneath them, plunging headlong down the road.
She was wrapped in wind and rain and noise, the constant roar of the cycle, the whining of the wind in her ear. There were things she wanted to say to David, questions she had to ask him, but conversation was presently impossible. Once, she tried to shout to him, but he failed to hear her over the combined roar of motorcycle and wind. She gave up the attempt and held on to him for dear life.
She could barely believe what had happened, and her own feelings were hopelessly confused. On the one hand she was overcome with admiration for David. He had acted so quickly, so precisely, sending her for her purse, taking it from her, then using the gun to force the policeman to surrender his motorcycle. Another moment’s delay and they would have been finished, and the shepherd and policeman killed in the bargain. But now, at least for the time being, they were free.
And at the same time she was afraid, terribly afraid, of what they had done. They had stolen an Irish policeman’s motorcycle. Their earlier plan, one of seeking refuge with the police at Tipperary, was no longer workable. A single act had transformed the police from friends to enemies, at least until they could straighten things out. They had to run, not only from Koenig and Farrell and their gang, but from the police as well. Before, they had been fugitives from evil; now they were fugitives from the law, too.
She pressed her face into the comforting warmth of David’s sweater. Her eyes glanced down at the road surface below as it flew by beneath the wheels of the motorcycle. She had never been on a motorcycle before, had always been scared to take a ride. It did not frighten her now — as though there were no room within her for additional fear, as though she already had as much fear in her as she could manage at one time.
Koenig and Farrell could be behind them right now, she thought. They could have caught up, they could be bearing down on the motorcycle at any moment and she would never know it. She could not turn around to look behind her. Surely the carnage in the roadway would have delayed them for a while, but not for very long. And it was impossible for her to estimate how fast the motorcycle was going. She couldn’t see the speedometer from where she sat, and although it felt to her as though they were exceeding the speed of sound, she knew they were probably making less speed than a fast car was capable of.
Without warning, tears welled up behind her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. She was not sobbing; the tears simply flowed of their own accord, fighting her attempts to blink them back. She tightened her grip around David’s body, clinging to him, her eyes tightly shut, her teeth clenched hard together.
She wished, not for the first time, that she could pray....
When finally he braked the motorcycle to a gradual stop she loosened her grip around his waist and dismounted. He lowered the kickstand and stepped away from the motorcycle. There were no cars approaching from either direction. She found her cigarettes in her purse. She gave one to him and kept one for herself, and he lit them both, cupping the match in his hand to shield the flame from wind and rain.
She said, “Where are we?”
“Two miles outside of Mitchelstown, according to the sign.
“In Tipperary?”
“In Cork, but close to the county line. I don’t dare drive into Mitchelstown. That garda must have got to a phone by now, and they’ll be waiting for us. And we can’t stay on the road any longer because they’ll come looking for us.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.” He took his cigarette from his lips and looked at it. The rain had put it out. He shook his head and threw the cigarette off to the side of the road. “We made very good time. The motorcycle was flying.”
“It felt that way.”
“So we should have a good jump on Farrell and Koenig. But where do we go from here?”
“Do you think we might have lost them?”
“We could have, on any other road in the world. But this damned thing didn’t have a single side road branching off ever since we got on the motorcycle. They could follow us with their eyes closed. There was just the one road, and we stayed with it, and so will they.” He sighed. “Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t have taken the motorcycle, maybe we should have stayed there.”
“We’d have been killed.”
“That’s what I figured. You know, if he tried to stop them, they might have shot him. But I don’t think he would. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“He may have asked them to give him a ride after us. And they may have refused, or else they may have taken the easiest way of refusal. By putting a bullet in him.” He shook his head. “Poor man. He was very decent with us, made it very easy for us to pay for the sheep and cut through all sorts of red tape. And the price for the sheep certainly seemed reasonable enough. Though I don’t honestly have any idea what a sheep’s worth. Still, it seemed reasonable, didn’t it?”
She nodded. She could still hear the horrible sounds of the dying sheep and the sounds Mr. Mahoney had made as he ended their suffering.
“They’d never have been so easy with us if the same thing happened in the States. So we return the favor by taking his motorcycle away from him. I wonder who’s going to catch us first, the law or Farrell.”
“Isn’t there anywhere we can go?”
“There must be, but I can’t think of it. Maybe we can hide the motorcycle and work our way into Mitchelstown on foot. Find someone there to hide us from Farrell and the police. But how do you walk up to someone out of the blue and tell him you’ve got a gang of spies after you, and the police as well? A man would have to be mad to take us in. More likely he’d hold a gun on us and call the gardai.”
But she was only half-listening to him. There was something she remembered, something that had struck a responsive chord somewhere inside her. Something, a place to hide....
“They’re used to hiding men on the run. On the run from the British or from the Irish forces during the Civil War. But would they hide strangers? And strangers from overseas? Somebody might, but we don’t know anyone. You didn’t happen to pass through this part of the country on your way to Tralee?”
“No, I went south of here. I was in Cork City, so I took the southern route over. David...”
“If we only knew someone.”
“David — Mitchelstown Caves!”
He looked blank.
“In the song,” she said. “One of the verses to “The Croppy Boy.” It’s not in the standard versions, they all take place in Wexford, but there’s one that I heard this trip where one of the croppy boys is a Tipperary boy who hides in the Mitchelstown caves. Oh, how does it go?”
She sang,
“An old woman taught me the song,” she said. “The caves are in Tipperary, a few miles northeast from Mitchelstown.”