Page 6 of Hang on St. Christopher

So I decided I wasn’t going to flash my police IDorleave. No, the barman and his cronies had just become a special project of mine.

I slid the fiver closer and bent over the bar toward him.

“You seem to have mistaken me for someone else, pal.”

“This is my estab?—”

“I want you to do me a favor and look into my eyes and tell me what you see there,” I said slowly and clearly.

“What?”

“Look in my eyes. Take a really good look and tell me what you see there.”

“Are you some sort of fruit?”

“Look at me.”

Reluctantly his eyes flicked up and met mine. He also had greeny-blue irises with a hint of dark in them. But his dark couldn’t match my dark. I was not a man who habitually got dicked around with, and I had already been dicked around quite enough today.

I let him get a glimpse of all the men I’d killed and all the men I’d hunted and all the men I’d put away.

You didn’t get to be a barman—even in a place like this—without learning a little something about human nature.

He saw.

He knew. I might be north of forty, I might be only a part-time cop, I might be getting soft in the middle, and I might not have worked a case in a year, but I was the scariest bastard he was going to encounter in a long time.

I smiled at him and relaxed.

The movie of my life cut from close-up to the two-shot. He took a step back, removed a clean glass from the rack, and poured the half a pint.

“On the house,” he said.

“Thanks very much,” I said, and drank it in one.

All this aggression and sectarian strife—can’t he see, can’twesee, that they love us at one another’s throats? I went outside to the Beemer, looked underneath it for bombs, and got in.

I turned on Radio 1. “Coming up Michael Bolton, Kylie, and Simply Red.”

Yeah, so much for the musical revolution. I killed the radio and gunned the Beemer along the A2 to Carrickfergus Police Station, where, incredibly, there was a murder case waiting for me if I wanted it.

CHAPTER2

A SORT OF HOMECOMING

I left the Beemer in the car park and went upstairs to turn in my time sheet. As a part-time reservist, I no longer had an office. Just a desk in the CID incident room that I shared with Sergeant McCrabban, another part-timer. Crabbie was a low-maintenance deskmate, and it was no problem to share a space with him if you didn’t mind his pipe smoke, which I didn’t.

I turned the sheet in to Mabel in admin.

“Oh, Inspector Duffy, everyone’s been looking for you,” she said.

“Have they?”

“Oh, yes, Chief Inspector McArthur was on the phone. Very particular, so he was. ‘Where’s Inspector Duffy, then?’ he says.”

“Me? He was looking for me?”

“Yes.”