Page 15 of The Unlikely Spare

Cavendish materializes from behind a copse of trees, his expression thunderous. His hand remains on his weapon, eyes scanning the surrounding area before settling on me with barely concealed irritation. Officer Blake jogs toward us from the opposite direction. She speaks rapidly into her wrist mic.

“Status report,” Cavendish demands in a clipped voice.

“False alarm,” I admit, feeling heat crawl up my neck. “Just a startled bird.”

Fuck. I don’t need a shrink’s perspective to know exactly where my “shield first, ask questions later” impulse comes from. It comes from being sixteen and having to dig through the rubble of what had been our home to find my brother. I’ll never forget those frantic moments when I’d clawed at crumbling concrete and twisted metal, Malachy’s freckled face ashen and still beneath the dust.

I just never thought about how that experience would affect me doing this particular undercover assignment.

Officer Davis appears on the scene, looking simultaneously relieved and disappointed that there’s no actual threat to neutralize.

Officer Singh catches my eye from his position near the hunting party, giving me a subtle head shake that clearly communicates: overreaction, mate.

It appears the entire security team is a witness to my second embarrassing disproportionate response in as many days.

Grand.

I go off duty at eight p.m., which is a relief. I’m still smarting from what happened at the hunt.

I’m used to being good at my job, not fumbling around like some rookie fresh out of training who can’t distinguish poultry from peril.

To settle myself down, I FaceTime my brother.

Malachy answers on the second ring. The familiar cluttered walls of his flat provide a backdrop that instantly transports me home.

“If it isn’t my prodigal brother,” he says, grinning wide. “Still alive then?”

“Barely,” I grunt, lounging back on the pillows of my bed. “Long day.”

“Poor lamb,” Malachy mocks, wheeling himself toward his kitchen counter. “Try spending all day sorting packages that people can’t wait five bloody minutes for. Had a woman ring the warehouse today asking if I could personally fish her lipstick order out of the sorting pile because she needed it for a date tonight. Like I’m some kind of postal magician.”

“Maybe she should have ordered her lipstick earlier,” I say. “Though I imagine your customer service skills involve telling people exactly where they can shove their priority packages.”

“No one actually dares complain to me in person. I think they’d know I’d run over their toes.” He flashes that familiar wolfish grin, the one that hasn’t changed since we were boys pelting each other with mud balls in the back alley of our tenement.

I chuckle, leaning back against the headboard. “The O’Connell charm at work.”

“Says the guy who told Mrs. Flannery her Christmas pudding tasted like it had been soaking since the Great Famine.”

“That pudding could’ve been classified as a biological weapon. I was performing a public service.”

The familiar back-and-forth with my brother calms me.

Malachy’s the reason I joined the police force in the first place.

I’d been breaking my back on construction sites for a year after finishing school, coming home covered in cement dust to find my brother struggling with a wheelchair held together by duct tape and prayers.

Then I saw that Police Services Northern Ireland poster at the job center:

Paid training, competitive salary, make a difference in your community.

The paid training bit caught my eye first. Making more than twenty grand while learning definitely beats earning minimum wage hauling bricks.

Of course joining the police service as a Catholic in Northern Ireland wasn’t the done thing. After the Good Friday Agreement, they changed the name of the police services to make us Catholics feel welcome. But it was hard to erase the decades of being treated like the enemy.

Many in the Protestant community saw Catholic recruits as infiltrators, while fellow Catholics saw us as traitors.

I didn’t care. Principles were a luxury when you had a brother who needed specialized physical therapy three times a week and a wheelchair that cost more than most people’s cars.