“Dunno,” Trey says. Banter has never been Trey’s strong suit.

“They would, o’ course. Is that all you wanted? To get that off your chest?”

“Nah,” Trey says. She hasn’t looked at Cal once; her eyes are on Johnny. “I went out to where your man Rushborough said. Did a bitta digging around. Just to see, like.”

“Ah, now,” Johnny says reprovingly, waving a finger at her. “You know better than that, missus. I won’t give out to you this time, ’cause you came clean to me, but from now on, if you wanta—”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Found this.” She fishes in her jeans pocket and pulls out a small, squashed click-seal bag.

“What’s this, now? Didja dig up something pretty?” Johnny takes it from her with a half-puzzled, half-amused glance, and bends his head to peer at it. Under the men’s watching eyes, he turns it over and tilts it to the light.

Cal’s muscles almost launch him before he knows it. He wants to flip the table in Johnny’s face, get Trey by the shoulder, spin her around and march her straight out of all this. He holds himself still.

Johnny lifts his head to stare at Trey. “Where’d you get this?” he asks.

“Told you,” Trey says. “Where your man was saying. There at the foot of the mountain.”

Johnny looks around at the men’s faces. Then he tosses the bag into the center of the table, among the glasses and the beer mats.

“That’s gold,” he says.

Out in the main bar, the TV commentator’s voice gallops along with the horses. Someone swears, and someone else cheers.

Con, leaning in to gaze at the bag, starts to laugh first, then Dessie, then Sonny.

“What?” Trey demands, baffled and prickling up.

“Oh, Jesus,” Con gasps. Senan has started laughing too. “And us feckin’ about in that river at the crack of dawn, up to our oxters—”

Bobby is doubled up with giggles, beating his hands on the table. “State of us—”

“And hundreds outa our pockets,” Sonny manages, “and all the time, we coulda just sent out—” He points at Trey and dissolves into helpless wheezes.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Johnny says, chuckling, patting her arm. “No one’s laughing at you, sweetheart. We’re laughing at ourselves, only.”

Trey still looks unconvinced and prickly. Cal takes a look at Mart. He’s laughing along, but his eyes are sharp and steady, moving between Johnny and Trey.

“ ’Tis ’cause we thought we were awful cute,” P.J. explains to Trey, grinning. “Only we were thick.”

Trey shrugs. “ ’F you don’t want it,” she says, jerking her chin at the bag on the table, “I’ll have it back.”

“And why not,” Johnny says, catching up the bag and pressing it into her hand. “No one’ll grudge you that. You’ve earned it. Amn’t I right?”

“Go on,” Dessie says, still giggling, flapping a hand at her. “Plenty more where that came from.”

“Whatever,” Trey says, pocketing the bag. “Thought you might wanta see it, is all.”

“Ah, sweetheart,” Johnny says remorsefully, catching her arm. Cal is starting to wonder if the guy even remembers her name. “You done great. Daddy’s only delighted with you, and so are all these other nice lads. OK? You go along home now and tell your mammy to put that somewhere safe, and we’ll have it made into a lovely necklace for you to wear.”

Trey shrugs, detaches her arm from his hand, and leaves. Her eyes skid right over Cal.

“Well, God almighty, lads,” Johnny says, running his hands through his hair and gazing after her with a mixture of fondness and bemusement. “Doesn’t that beat Banagher? I didn’t know whether to give her a hug or a skelp. That child’ll be the death of me.”

“She’s got good timing, anyway,” Mart says amiably. “Isn’t that a great talent to have?”

“Where was it she went digging?” Senan asks.

“Fuck’s sake, man,” Johnny says, giving him a disbelieving stare. “Are you serious? I’m handing nothing over for free. And even if I did, ’twouldn’t do ye a blind bitta good: like I told you before, there’s no use in heading out digging with no license. No: we’ll do this right.”

“Foot of the mountain, she said,” Sonny says to Con. “That’ll be our land.”

“Hang on,” Johnny says, turning to Cal, holding up a hand to silence the rest. “Mr. Hooper had a question for me, before my Theresa came in and interrupted him. Mostly I’d apologize for her, only this time I reckon what she had to say was worth hearing, amn’t I right?”

“Jesus fuck,” Sonny says, from the heart, agreeing.

Johnny sits there smiling at Cal, waiting.

“Nope,” Cal says. “Nothing.”

“Ah, there was. Something awful serious, going by the face on you. You put the heart crossways in me there, man; I was afraid maybe I’d run over your dog and never noticed.”

“Not that I know of,” Cal says. “Can’t’ve been that serious; it’s gone right outa my head. It’ll come back, though. I’ll be sure and let you know when it does.”

“You do that,” Johnny says, giving him an approving nod. “Meanwhile, lads, I think we all deserve another shot of the good stuff, amn’t I right? This one’s on me. We’ll have a toast to that mad young one of mine.”

“Count me out,” Cal says. “I’m gonna head home.”

“Ah, now,” Johnny says reproachfully. “You can’t stay for just the two; that’s not the way we do things around here. Sit where you are a while longer and then I’ll see you safe home, if you’re worried about overdoing it. I reckon we could do with a chat anyway.”

“Nah,” Cal says. He drains his pint and stands up. “I’ll see you round.” As he leaves, he hears Johnny say something that gets a big old laugh.

—

The moon is almost full. It turns the mountain road white and treacherously narrow, a trickle of safety wavering upwards between the thick dark scribbles of heathery bog and the formless looming of trees. A fidgety breeze roams among the high branches, but it takes none of the heat out of the air. Cal keeps climbing, sweating through his shirt, till the road splits and he strikes off down the fork that leads to the Reddy place. It leaves him a little closer to the Reddys’ than he’d like, but he doesn’t need someone irrelevant passing by at the wrong time. He finds a boulder in the shadow of a low, gnarled tree, with a clear view of the path below him, and sits down to wait.

He’s thinking of Trey, standing in the entrance of the alcove with her eyes on Johnny and her jaw set, close enough to touch and unreachable. He wonders where she is now, and what she’s thinking, and what happened to her mouth. It aches right through him that he failed her: he didn’t find a way to make her able to come to him with this.

He understands that it’s not surprising. When Johnny first came home, she had no use for him, but the more Cal sees of Johnny, the more he figures there are ways Trey’s brother Brendan took after his daddy. Trey idolized Brendan. If she saw in Johnny flashes of things she had thought were lost to her, she might find it hard to turn away.

Cal knows, not that it makes any difference, that Johnny isn’t deliberately trying to put the kid in harm’s way. He doubts that the extent of the possible harm has even crossed Captain Chucklefuck’s mind. Johnny has a plan, and everything is going to plan, so in his head, everything is hunky-dory. He has no conception of the dangers of being the one with a plan, when your targets have no such thing and are willing instead to do whatever the situation demands.

The undergrowth ticks and twitches as things follow their accustomed trails among it; a weasel or a stoat streaks neatly across the path, fine as a brushstroke, and vanishes into the other side. The moon moves, shifting the shadows. Cal wishes, with a surge of something that feels like vast dawning grief, that Johnny had waited even one more year, till Cal had had just a little more time to shore up the kid’s cracked places, before he came prancing into town breaking things.

He hears Johnny coming before he sees him. The dumb fuck is sauntering up the mountain singing to himself, softly and happily: “But I’m tired of all this pleasure, so I’m off to take my leisure, and the next thing that you’ll hear from me is a letter from New York…”

Cal stands up quietly, in the shadow of the tree. He lets Johnny get within ten feet before he steps out onto the path.

Johnny leaps and shies sideways like a spooked horse. Then he recognizes Cal and recovers himself. “Fuck, man, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he says, hand to his chest, managing to pull out a laugh. “You’d want to watch yourself, doing that. Another man woulda given you a clatter, if you took him by surprise like that. What are you doing out here, anyhow? I thought you were headed home to the bed.”

Cal says, “You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“Jesus, man, cool the jets. ’Tisn’t life-or-death. It can wait—I’ve been celebrating here, I’m in no state to be having delicate conversations. And neither are you, if you’re out here getting brambles stuck in your arse at this hour; you musta got a touch of the sun on that river. Go on home. I’ll buy you a straightener tomorrow, and we’ll have a nice civilized chat then.”

Cal says, “I been waiting here two hours to hear whatever you’ve got to say. Go ahead and say it.”

He watches Johnny eye him and the escape routes. Johnny isn’t drunk, but he’s considerably closer to it than Cal is, and the terrain has too many surprises to favor a quarry with no head start.

Johnny sighs, running a hand over his hair. “All right,” he says, marshaling his resources to humor the pushy Yank. “Here’s the story. No offense, now, and don’t be shooting the messenger, yeah?”

“Takes a lot to offend me,” Cal says.

Johnny grins automatically. “That’s a great thing, man. Listen: I hate to say it, but my friend Mr. Rushborough, he’s after taking against you. No reason that he’s given me; he just doesn’t like the cut of you. You make him nervous, he says. I’d say ’tis just that you don’t fit the idea of the place that he’s got into his head, d’you know what I mean? Them hairy aul’ farm fellas that smell of sheep shite and tin whistles and forty shades of green, they’re what he came looking for. A street-smart Chicago cop like yourself…” He turns up his palms. “That doesn’t fit the image at all, at all. ’Tisn’t your fault, but you’re upsetting the dream. And men get awful edgy if you upset their dreams.”

“Huh,” Cal says. “You know what, I had a feeling it was gonna be something along those lines. Maybe I’m psychic.”

“Sure, you’re a man of experience,” Johnny explains. “A man that’s seen as much of the world as you have, he can spot when another man’s taken against him. It happens sometimes, no rhyme nor reason to it. But you see where that leaves us, don’t you? If you were to stay on board with this, Rushborough’d only keep getting edgier, till in the end he’d decide, Ah, here, I’m not enjoying myself any more. And off he’d go, back to London. So…” He gives Cal a regretful look. “I’ll need you to step back outa this, Mr. Hooper. You won’t be leaving empty-handed, now, don’t be worrying about that; myself and the lads, we’ll make up your share outa what we get. ’Tis fierce unfair, I know that, but we’ve a delicate situation on our hands, and ’tis this or lose the man altogether.”

“Yeah,” Cal says. “Like I said, no surprises there. Now it’s my turn. Run whatever con you want, I don’t give a shit. Like you said, I’m not from around here. But you don’t get to bring Trey into it. She has to live here, once you and Whatshisname are done and gone.”

He watches Johnny think about going into outraged-daddy mode, and then think better of it. He goes for baffled innocent instead. “Man,” he says, spreading his hands, injured, “I didn’t bring her into anything. Maybe I shoulda checked that she wasn’t listening in, but how was I supposed to know she’d go digging? And where’s the harm in it, anyhow? There’s plenty there for everyone, no need to grudge the child her bitta fun—”

“Johnny,” Cal says, “I’m not in the mood. You gave the kid that piece of gold. There’s nothing to find.”

“Ah, God,” Johnny says, rolling his eyes in exasperation, “there’s always one. The feckin’ pessimist. Debbie Downer, isn’t that what you Yanks call it? Here, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: I’ll give you back your few quid, so you won’t need to be worrying about what’s out there, and you can jog on. That way we’re all happy.”

“Nope,” Cal says. “You’re done here. Pack your stuff, pack your Brit, and get out.”

Johnny rears back in the moonlight, eyebrows going up. “Ah, here. Are you joking me? You’re trying to order me outa my own home place? You’ve got some brass neck on you, Hooper.”

“I’ll give you two days,” Cal says. “That oughta be long enough for you to come up with a story that’ll keep the kid clear.”

Johnny laughs at him. “Jesus, man, who d’you think you are? Vito Corleone? You’re not in the States now; that’s not how we do things round here. Relax on the fuckin’ jacks. Get yourself some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show. It’ll all be grand. Rushborough’ll go away happy, whatever we find or don’t find—”

“Johnny,” Cal says. “I’m trying real hard to be patient here, but you need to cut the bullshit. You’re not running a con on Rushborough; you and him are running it on the guys. The more cash you scam out of them, the more flak the kid’ll take when the shit hits the fan. You’re done.”

Johnny looks at him with no expression at all. Then he lets out a short, meaningless laugh. He sticks his hands in his pockets and turns to scan the long slow curves of the mountains against the stars, giving himself time to pick his new tack. When he turns back to Cal, his tone has lost its lilting charm, turned crisp and businesslike.

“Or what, man? Quit throwing shapes and look at it straight for a minute. Or what? You’ll go to the Guards and tell them you and the lads are trying to run a scam on some poor tourist, only it’s not working out for ye? Or you’ll go to the lads and tell them they’re the ones getting conned? Here’s you making out you care so much about Theresa: how d’you reckon that’ll pan out for her?”

“There’s no ‘or,’ ” Cal says. He wants his gun. He wants to shoot the balls right off this little shitweasel for fathering the kid, when she deserves so much better. “You got till Sunday night.”

Johnny looks at him for a minute and sighs. “Man,” he says, in a new, simpler voice, “if I could, I would. Believe me. D’you think I wanta be here? I’d be gone in a second, if I’d the choice.”

For the first time in their acquaintance, he doesn’t sound like he’s trying to bullshit Cal. He sounds tired and powerless. When he brushes his hair out of his eye, screwing up his face and catching a sudden breath like a kid, he looks like he wants to lie down right there on the path and sleep.