“Holy God,” Mart says disapprovingly, glancing over his shoulder, “you’ve an awful dark mind on you altogether. No one’s got any intention of killing anyone.”

“What about Brendan?”

“No one intended to kill him, either. Would you ever sit down there, Sunny Jim, you’re giving me the fidgets.”

Cal sits at the kitchen table. The house is chilly and smells of damp. The washing machine pulses in a slow, rhythmic trudge. Rain trickles steadily down the windowpane.

The kettle has boiled. Mart pours water into the Dalek and swirls the tea bags with a spoon. He brings over the mugs and the teapot, then the milk and sugar, and then lowers himself into a chair, joint by joint, and pours the tea.

“Brendan Reddy was headed that way anyway,” he says, “as fast as he could run. If it hadn’t been us that done it, it woulda been someone else.”

“P.J. noticed his anhydrous getting swiped,” Cal says. “Right?” The walk to Mart’s has raised a vicious throbbing in his knee. He feels a weight of dull anger that this should have landed at his feet today, of all days, when he’s in no condition to handle it with skill.

Mart shakes his head. He shifts one hip, painfully, and pulls his tobacco out of his pants pocket. “Ah, God, no. P.J.’s an innocent, sure. He’s not unfortunate or nothing, but he’s got no suspicion in him. That class of carry-on wouldn’t even occur to him. I’d say that’s why Brendan chose his farm to begin with.” He spreads out a cigarette paper on the table and starts carefully sprinkling tobacco along it. “No: P.J. was told.”

Cal says, “Donie.” Apparently he’s been everyone’s fool around here, even that fool Donie’s. He should have seen it straightaway, back in the fug of body smells and smoke in Donie’s room. He knows how the Dublin boys found out that Brendan had been snared, too. Donie understands the ways of trouble well enough to sow plenty of it himself, when he wants to.

“It was. Donie and Brendan never got on, even when they were little lads; I’d say he leaped at the chance to do Brendan a bad turn. Only the feckin’ eejit went and told P.J., instead of coming to me, the way he woulda done if he had the brains of an ass. And what did P.J. do only call in the Guards.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Cal asks, giving Mart something to argue with. “That’s what I’da done.”

“I’ve nothing against the Guards,” Mart says, “in their place, but I didn’t see what they’d contribute to this situation. We’d enough of a mess on our hands already, without them traipsing about the place asking questions and arresting all round them.” He rolls the paper into a stingy cigarette, squinting carefully to keep it even. “Lucky enough, they took their time arriving. Enough time that P.J. came up to tell me the news, and I was able to make him see sense. Myself and P.J. sent the Guards off about their business, and I rang another coupla lads—lads that live alone, that wouldn’t have to explain themselves to anyone—to get back P.J.’s anhydrous meanwhile.” He cocks an eyebrow at Cal over the rollie, as he licks the edge. “You know the place, sure.”

“Yep,” Cal says. He wonders who was watching him and Trey on that mountain path.

“They found a big loada Sudafed, as well, and a big loada batteries. No surprise there. They took all that away with them, too, for good measure. If you have a cold this winter, Sunny Jim, or if your alarm clock gives up on you, you just let me know and I’ll sort you out.”

Cal learned a long time back to know when there’s nothing he needs to say. He warms his hands on his mug, drinks his tea and listens.

“Mind you,” Mart says, pointing with his rollie, “I wasn’t taking Donie’s word for anything. For all we knew, he robbed that anhydrous himself, then his deal went arseways and he thought he’d take the opportunity to drop Brendan in a bitta shite. But I know a lad whose place looks out over the road to that aul’ cottage; he kept an eye out. And sure enough, not long after the Guards came calling, didn’t Brendan Reddy go rushing up that road in a terrible hurry altogether. So then we knew for certain.”

He clicks his lighter and takes a leisurely, pleasurable drag on the cigarette, turning his head to blow the smoke away from Cal. “Brendan laid low for a few days after that,” he says. “Considering his options, I’d say. But we had an eye on him. Sure, he couldn’t stay indoors forever; his pals from Dublin were bound to want a word with him. Myself and the lads had no problem with that, but we wanted to get our word in first, so young Brendan’d know where he stood. We were trying to do him a favor; we didn’t want him making any foolish commitments to the Dublin boyos. Next time he headed up to that cottage, we were there to meet him.”

Cal thinks of how Trey said Brendan went bouncing out the door, chirpy as a cricket, on his way to give Austin the cash to replace what Mart’s boys had annexed, get all his plans patched up and back on track. He says, “He wasn’t expecting that.”

“That he wasn’t,” Mart says, momentarily diverted from his story to consider this point. “The face on him: like he’d walked into a room fulla hippopotamuses. A lad as sharp as that, you’d think he woulda seen it coming, would you not? But then, you’d think he’d be a step ahead of a thick like Donie, too. If he’d been a little less sharp when it came to the aul’ chemistry and a little sharper when it came to human beings, he’d be alive today.”

Cal finds himself with no feelings and no thoughts. He’s moved into a place that he knows well from the job: a circle where even the air doesn’t move, nothing exists but the story he’s hearing and the person telling it, and he himself has dissolved away to nothing but watching and listening and readiness. Even his aches and pains seem like distant things.

“We were intending to explain the situation to him, was all,” Mart says. He nods at Cal’s beat-up face. “You know the way yourself, sure. Just a bitta clarification. Only this lad didn’t want anything clarified. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was a cheeky little fecker, d’you know that? Telling us we didn’t know what we were dealing with, if we had any brains we’d fuck off back to our farms and not be sticking our noses into things we didn’t understand. I know that fella was dragged up, not brought up, but my mammy would’ve wore out her wooden spoon on me if I ever talked that way to men old enough to be my grandfather.” He reaches for an old jam jar that’s become an ashtray and unscrews the lid to tap ash. “We went to put manners on him, but didn’t he get rambunctious and try to fight back, and matters got a wee bit outa hand. The blood was up all round, like. The lad landed a few punches, someone lost his temper and caught him a great clatter to the jaw, and he went flying over backwards and hit his head on the edge of one of his own propane tanks.”

Mart takes a long drag on his rollie and tilts his head back to blow the smoke at the ceiling. “I thought at first he was only knocked out,” he says. “When I looked closer, but, I knew he was bad. I don’t know what done it, was it the punch or the fall, but whatever way it happened, his head was twisted round and his eyes were rolling up. He made a bit of a snoring noise and he done a few twitches of his legs, and then he was gone. Quick as that.”