The Hunter

Cal puts Nealon in Lena’s porch rocker and goes inside for a couple of glasses and two cans of Bud. He knows damn well Nealon isn’t taking time off from this kind of investigation just to chug a cold one and shoot the shit on his porch, and Nealon has to know he knows. The guy wants something.

“Cheers,” Nealon says, clinking his glass against Cal’s. He raises it to the view, swallows curvetting back and forth between golden cut fields and a blazing blue sky. “God, this is great, all the same. I know you’re used to it, but I feel like I’m on me holidays.”

“It’s a pretty place,” Cal says.

Nealon wipes foam off his lip and relaxes back into the rocking chair. He’s grown a touch of salt-and-pepper stubble since Cal saw him last, just enough to look rumpled and nonthreatening. “Jaysus, this yoke’s comfortable. I’ll be going asleep if I don’t watch out.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Cal says. “Made it myself.”

Nealon raises his eyebrows. “That’s right, you said something about the carpentry. Fair play to you.” He gives the arm of the chair an indulgent pat that dismisses it as cute but unimportant. “Listen, I’m not being as lazy as I make out. I’m here on business. I reckoned you wouldn’t say no to an update on the case. And I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t mind a second opinion from someone who’s got the inside scoop. Local consultant, like.”

“Happy to help,” Cal says. He rubs Rip’s head, nudging him to settle down, but Rip is still bouncy from the thrill of a visitor; he takes off, down the yard and through the gate into the back field, to hassle the swallows. “Not sure how much use I’ll be, though.”

Nealon flaps a hand like Cal’s being self-deprecating, and takes another swig of his beer. “Your man’s name wasn’t Rushborough,” he says. “Didja guess that already?”

“I had my doubts,” Cal says.

Nealon grins at him. “I know you did. You caught the smell off him, yeah?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Cal says. “Who was he?”

“Fella called Terence Blake. Not a nice fella. He was from London, like he said; the Met have had their eye on him for a while now. He had a bit of a line in money laundering, bit of a line in drugs, bit of a line in brassers—he liked to keep his portfolio diversified, Terry did. He was no Mr. Big, but he’d built up a solid little organization for himself.”

“Huh,” Cal says. He’s getting warier by the minute. Nealon shouldn’t be telling him this. “Was Johnny Reddy one of his boys?”

Nealon shrugs. “He’s not on the Met’s radar, but that doesn’t say; if he was only hanging round the edges, they could’ve missed him. Johnny says he hadn’t a clue about any of it. As far as he knew, a lovely fella called Cillian Rushborough got talking to him in the pub, Johnny mentioned he was heading home to Ardnakelty soon, and Rushborough was only dying to see the place. Johnny’s shocked, so he is, to find out that wasn’t the truth. Shocked.”

Cal doesn’t ask whether Nealon believes any or all of it. He understands the parameters of this conversation. He has license to ask about facts, although he may not get answers, or true ones. Inquiring about Nealon’s thoughts would be overstepping.

“Blake have any connections here?” he asks.

“Great minds,” Nealon says approvingly. “I asked myself the same thing. Not a one, as far as we’ve found. All that about his granny being from round here, that was bollox: he was English straight through. Never set foot in the country before, that we know of.”

Nealon’s rhythms, in their familiarity, are distracting Cal so that he has to snap himself back to listen to the words. If he had thought about it, he would have expected an Irish detective to sound different from the ones he used to know. The accent is different, the slang and the sentence shapes, but under all that, the blunt, driving rhythms are the same.

“That could’ve been what brought him here,” Nealon says, tilting his head to consider his beer glass. “These small-time setups, they’ve always got some kinda beef going on. They use amateurs, stupid young fellas, and those lads fuck up or start in throwing shapes at each other: next thing you know, you’ve got a feud on your hands. Blake could’ve needed to get outa town for a while. He ran into Johnny, just like Johnny says, and reckoned Ardnakelty was as good as anywhere. From what I’ve been told, it’d be his style. He was unpredictable, did things on a whim. Not a bad way to live, if you’re in his line of business. If there’s no logic to what you do, no one can be one step ahead of you.”

Cal says, “So someone could’ve followed him over here.” If Nealon is working along those lines, it means he’s not hanging his hat on Trey’s story. Cal would love to hear that he’s found a reason to dismiss it as irrelevant, but he can’t afford to let Nealon know he has any feelings on the subject. As far as Nealon is concerned, Trey’s story needs to stay a straightforward thing.