The Emerald Lie by Ken Bruen Read Free Book Online

and, voilà, she’s experiencing a mini resurgence.”
    Was there a moral, an inference? I couldn’t join the dots so went lame, said,
    “Guess it’s never too late to grab the brass ring.”
    Lame.
    He finished his beer, stood, said,
    “I’m glad you are home, Jack.”
    And it sounded as if he meant it. I had that awkward male moment of
    “So, okay, do we hug or what the fuck?”
    The pup came trailing the lead and saved us. I said,
    “Looks like I’m going for a walk.”
     

    “He could see her hands holding her bare skull and a teacher-voice in his mind saying this was woman, a hunter. The voice saying look at the fucking teeth on her, this was a man-eater.” (Elmore Leonard,
Freaky Deaky
)
     

    I got in touch with a semiretired villain I’d known back when my friend Stewart had been alive. The loss of Stewart weighed heavy, like all the others. Sweeny, the ex-crook, spent most of his time in Spain but had returned. He said,
    “Too many Irish drug dealers setting up shop there.”
    We met in Roldan’s, a quiet pub near what had once been thriving docks, now was just a wasteland like the country itself. Sweeny was brown as oak and had more lines than an Ordnance Survey map. His voice was raspy from too many cigarettes but it worked for him, gave him a gravitas that was an asset in his former line of work. He greeted me warmly, if raspily. He said,
    “Look like you’ve been in the wars, Jack.”
    “I was caught without a hurley.”
    He liked that. His weapon used to be a solid iron bar. He was drinking wine and had ordered a pint and chaser for me. Knew my form. He nodded at the wine, said,
    “Got a taste for it on the Costa.”
    Drank a sip, then,
    “Boring as fuck out there. Us Irish, we don’t do sun real well. I got me an iPad and, after a few glasses of this shit, I’d start buying stuff on Amazon. I wanted to see
The Bridge
and guess I was a bit befuddled as I ended up with
    … get this,
    The Bridge
, Danish original
    The Tunnel
… Australian
    The Bridge
, the Yanks setting it on the Rio Grande.
    So I’m watching all three on consecutive nights and I get to see the icy blond chick in three different nationalities.”
    I smiled, asked,
    “How’d that work out for you?”
    He sighed, said,
    “Fuck it. I gave up, went back to
Father Ted
, the devil you know, eh? But you didn’t ask to meet me to discuss the merits of European crime drama versus the Yanks.”
    “No, I wanted to get some armory.”
    We decided on something light, in terms not of stopping power but of weight. He took off for about half an hour and I listened to the jukebox.
    I kid thee not, an actual jukebox with no fucking Rihanna. Blessings. A tune playing:
    “If I Didn’t Have a Dime.”
    Oh, Lord.
    The days of the dance halls and show bands. When the only booze you brought into the hall was the booze in your belly and priests patrolled outside to ensure there was no impropriety as their colleagues abused the children of the country and destroyed most of a generation.
    Next tune up was one of the first pop songs that ever registered with me:
    “From the Underworld”
    By the Herd.
    Right, who the fuck is the Herd?
    The lead singer left the band. Peter Frampton, who became a global heartthrob. Cover of
Rolling Stone
and all points north. Where was he now?
    Hanging with David Cassidy?
    Sweeny was back, with the ubiquitous McDonald’s bag. In my time, weapons are always delivered thus. Some kind of postmodern statement? Or simply the nearest shit to hand? Sweeny grimaced, asked,
    “You wanted fries with that?”
    I asked the freight and rough it was. But these days of government levies on everything, from water to pretax scams, it was par for end-times. I asked,
    “Take a check?”
    Another bright scheme from our leaders.
    Yeah, abolish checks. Anything that would make life even more fucking miserable than it was. The juke played
    “Dust in the Storm”
    Marc Roberts.
    Sweeny said,
    “That McDonald’s? You want to tell