“There’s four buses a day,” Cal says. “Right up on the main road. Pick one.”

Johnny shakes his head. He says, “I owe money.”

“That’s your problem. Not the kid’s.”

“She wanted to help. I never twisted her arm.”

“You shoulda said no.”

Johnny looks up at Cal. “I owe your man Rushborough,” he says. His voice is so sodden with defeat and fear that it weighs down the night air. “And he’s not someone you wanta fuck around with.”

“Great. Him and me got something in common after all.”

Johnny shakes his head again. “Nah, man,” he says. “Talk tough all you want. I seen that fella hold a wee girl down and slice lines in her arm with a razor—a child, like, no bigger than my Alanna—till her daddy paid up.”

Cal says, no louder, “So you brought him here.”

Johnny gives a shrug, wry and appealingly rueful: Gee, man, what do you want from me, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. Cal, at long last, punches him right in the mouth.

Johnny never saw it coming and he goes down hard, hitting the verge with a thud and a crunch of undergrowth. But he recovers fast, and by the time Cal comes after him he’s got a foot up, aiming for Cal’s stomach. He misses and gets Cal in the thigh, and Cal falls on him, full weight, hearing the breath retch out of him. Things turn messy then, crowded with grunts and elbows. Johnny is a better fighter than Cal expected. He fights desperate and dirty, jabbing for the eyes and scrabbling for fishhooks. Cal welcomes it. He doesn’t want a clean fight, not with this guy.

Johnny is rolling them over and over among the rocks and brambles, trying not to let Cal get a solid purchase where his weight will tell, pressing close so Cal can’t get the reach for a decent punch. He smells of shitty fake-fancy aftershave. Cal sees flashes of his bared teeth, the heather, the stars. It streaks across his mind that if they roll too far and land in a bog, the mountain will take them and no one will ever know.

He gets Johnny by his pretty haircut and mashes his face into the dirt, but Johnny finds Cal’s ear, tries to rip it off, and twists away quick as a fox when Cal jerks backwards. Cal lunges after him, on hands and knees, blinded by the crisscross of moonlight and shadow, following Johnny’s scrabbles and the painful whine of his breath. He grabs a limb and drags Johnny back towards him, punching at anything he can reach, taking a vicious heel to the forehead. Neither of them yells out. Cal has never been in a fight this close to silent. If anyone or anything else is out on the mountain, neither of them wants to draw its notice.

He tries to get hold of Johnny’s arms, takes a thumb to the eyeball and sees a bright burst of stars, but the fresh shot of rage lets him force a knee up between their bodies and slam Johnny in the balls. While Johnny is curled up wheezing, Cal straddles him and lands one more punch to his nose, just to put a dent in his good looks, save a girl or two from falling for his wheedles. He forces himself to stop there. He wants to keep hammering the guy’s face till there’s nothing left of it, but he needs Johnny to hear what he has to say.

Johnny gets his breath back and tries to heave himself free, but Cal is a lot bigger than him. When Johnny goes for his eye, Cal catches his wrist and bends it backwards till Johnny yelps.

“If you’re still in town Monday morning,” he says, so close to Johnny’s face that he can smell the blood and booze, “I’m gonna shoot you and dump your carcass in a bog where it belongs. We clear?”

Johnny laughs, which makes him cough blood. Fine droplets of it hit Cal’s cheek. In the moonlight his face, stippled and smeared black and white, barely looks like a face at all; its edges blur into the black and white of the undergrowth, like he’s dissolving away.

“No you won’t, man. If you do that, Rushborough’ll think I took off, and he’ll come looking to get me back by going after my family. You think he’ll stop at Theresa?”

Cal gives his wrist an extra twist, and Johnny catches his breath with a hiss. “You don’t give two shits about your family, fuckhead. He could shove ’em all in a wood chipper, and you wouldn’t budge an inch outa cover. He knows that.”

“Then he’ll do it just to get his money’s worth. You don’t know the man.”

“I’ll worry about Rushborough. All you gotta worry about is packing your shit.”

“Are you planning on putting him in a bog as well? ’Cause I’ll tell you something for nothing, boy: you won’t catch him napping as easy as you caught me. Try anything on him, and you’ll be the one lands in the bog.”

Johnny’s voice is staticky, clogged with blood. “I’ll take my chances,” Cal says. “All you need to know is, your chances are a lot better out of this place than in it. You got the whole world to dodge Rushborough in. You’re not gonna dodge me. Are we clear?”

They are very close together. Johnny’s eyes, made of fractured slashes of light and shadow, hold nothing but refusal, pure as an animal’s. For a moment Cal thinks he’s going to have to break Johnny’s wrist. Then he sees the vivid flash of fear as Johnny reads that thought and realizes that Cal means every word.

“Yeah!” Johnny yells, just in time. He jerks his head, trying to shake blood out of his eyes. “Jesus, man, I get it. Get the fuck off me.”

“Great,” Cal says. “About fucking time.” He picks himself up, starting to feel the throbbing in various parts of him, and hauls Johnny to his feet by his shirt collar.

“Bye, Johnny,” he says. “It’s been something.” The struggle carried them farther off the path than he realized; it takes him a minute to get his bearings, amid the maze of shadows, and aim Johnny in the right direction. He gives Johnny a good hard shove and Johnny stumbles off towards home, blotting his nose on his sleeve, with the autopilot obedience of a guy who’s lost enough fights to know the protocol. Cal resists the urge to speed him on his way with a kick in the pants.

He hasn’t worked out what, if anything, he’s going to do about Rushborough. His instinct is that Johnny was just blowing smoke, and that if Johnny goes, Rushborough will go after him. Cal has encountered plenty of men, and women too, who hurt people for pleasure, but he doesn’t get that scent off Rushborough. Rushborough smells like a different kind of predator, the ice-minded kind that locks on to his prey and doesn’t turn loose unless you shoot him off it. Regardless of what he said, Cal doesn’t rate Johnny’s chances of giving Rushborough the slip, here or anywhere.

He knows he has to factor in the possibility that Johnny was telling the truth for once, but this seems like a problem for after he’s washed off some of the blood. He also knows that Johnny may not be going anywhere. Johnny’s fears right now are an intricate spread, and Cal has no idea how the odds are weighted, or what bets his private, desperate algorithms might finally land on.

The sounds of Johnny blundering away are slowly fading into the distance. Cal makes his way to the edge of the path and listens till he’s sure the little shit is gone. He tests his injuries. There’s a goose egg above his eyebrow and a swelling bruise on his jaw, his thigh hurts where Johnny’s foot jabbed deep into the muscle, something has ripped through his shirt and dug a long gouge up his side, and about every part of him has small sharp grazes and bruises, but all of it seems minor enough to mend by itself. More importantly, he’s damn sure Johnny is a lot worse off.

He wonders where Johnny is heading, whether Trey is home, what Johnny will tell her, and what she’ll make of it. He wonders whether he just fucked up bad. He has no qualms about having given Johnny a beat-down—it needed doing, and if anything he feels like he did well to hold out so long—but he’s made uneasy by the fact that he did it because he lost his temper. It feels unmanaged, and this situation needs managing.

He starts homewards, listening for any movement in the shadows.

—

Trey knows she’s not the only one still awake. Everyone else has gone to bed, Liam is snoring softly and Maeve is sleep-muttering her annoyances, but Trey can hear her mother moving about the bedroom, and the occasional loud heave and sigh as Alanna turns among the sheets, hoping someone will come see what’s wrong. The house isn’t at rest.

Trey is sprawled on the sofa, automatically rubbing Banjo’s head propped on her knee. Banjo’s paw is better, but he’s still holding it up and looking pathetic when he wants treats and fusses. Trey is giving him plenty of both.

She’s listening for her father to come home. She reckons most likely he’ll be pleased with her, but with him you can never be sure. She’s left her bedroom window open, in case he’s raging and she needs to run.

She considered doing what he said, showing Noreen or Mrs. Cunniffe the piece of gold and letting them talk. It wouldn’t have worked. Trey, like anyone from Ardnakelty, has a gut-deep understanding of the ferocious power of talk, but it’s the wrong kind of power for this: fluid, slippery, switchbacking, forging twisting channels you can’t predict. She can see why her father went that way without a second thought. He’s all those things distilled; regardless of what either he or the townland might like to think, he’s Ardnakelty to the bone. Trey isn’t and doesn’t want to be, which means she sees angles that he misses. A solid thing appearing in front of the men’s faces, brazen and undeniable, has a different kind of power, to which they’re unaccustomed and against which they have few defenses. She let the gold do its own talking.

Banjo jerks in his sleep, eyebrows twitching and paws starting to work. “Shh,” Trey says, running his soft ear between her fingers, “it’s grand,” and he relaxes again.

She went to Cal’s in the morning, to warn him. She wasn’t clear on exactly how to do that, because she doesn’t want Cal knowing too much about what way she’s thinking; there’s a chance he might consider this to be a breach of her promise to do nothing about Brendan, and tell her to back off. It made no odds in the end, anyway, because Cal wasn’t home. Trey waited on his back porch for hours, her and Banjo eating the ham slices she’d brought to make sandwiches for lunch, but he didn’t come. He was out with the men, going about the business he doesn’t want her to know. In the end she left.

She doesn’t underestimate what she’s got into. The things she’s done before, robbing off Noreen and breaking into abandoned houses with her mates and drinking their parents’ booze, those were baby stuff. This is real. It feels good.

When she hears her dad at the door, she thinks at first, from the sounds of fumbling and staggering, that he’s drunk. Then he comes into the sitting room, and she sees his face. She stands up, spilling Banjo off her lap.

Johnny’s eyes go over Trey like she’s not there. “Sheila,” he says, and then, louder and more savagely, “Sheila!” Blood is all round his mouth and chin like a bright beard, and a flood of it is stiffening his shirtfront. When he puts his right foot down, he flinches like Banjo.

Sheila comes to the doorway and looks him over. The state of him doesn’t appear to cause her either surprise or upset. She seems like she’s been expecting this to happen ever since he came back.

“Your nose is broke,” she says.

“I fuckin’ know that,” Johnny snaps, with enough of a snarl in his voice that Trey goes up on her toes, but he’s too focused on himself to take time out for anyone else. He dabs his fingers gingerly at his nose and examines them. “Get me cleaned up.”

Sheila goes out. Johnny turns like he can’t stay still, and his eyes catch on Trey. Before she can move, he’s lunged across the room and grabbed her by the wrist. His eyes are dilated almost black, and there are bits of brush in his hair. He looks animal.

“You fuckin’ squelt to that Yank. What the fuck are you—”

“I did not—”

“You’ll get me kilt. Is that what you want? Is it?”

He jerks her wrist, hard, digging in to bruise her. “I said fuckin’ nothing,” Trey snaps, right in his face and not flinching. Banjo is whining.

“Then how the fuck does he know? No one knew, only you. What the fuck, what are you playing at—”

His hand on her wrist is shaking in sharp spasms. Trey wrenches herself free with such unexpected ease that she stumbles backwards. Johnny stares, and for a second she thinks he’s going to come after her. If he does, she’ll punch him bang in his broken nose. The only time she’ll bow to her dad’s will, from now on, is when it matches her own purposes.

Maybe Johnny sees that. Either way, he stays put. “Lena Dunne,” he says. The injuries have turned his voice clotted and ugly. “Didja talk to her? She’d squeal on me, no problem to her, uppity bitch—”

“I said nothing. To anyone.”

“How the fuck does Hooper know, so?”

“He coulda just guessed. He’s not thick. Just ’cause the rest fell for it—”

Johnny spins away from her, lurching around the room, hands in his hair. “This is what you get when you mess with fuckin’ cops. I knew it, the minute I got a smell of him, I knew he was trouble— What the fuck are you doing hanging around with a cop? Are you fuckin’ simple?”

“Don’t wake the children,” Sheila says, in the doorway. She’s holding a saucepan of water and an old red-checked dish towel. “Sit down.”

Johnny stares at her for a second, like he’s forgotten who she is. Then he drops onto the sofa.

“Get to bed,” Sheila tells Trey.

“You stay put,” Johnny says. “I’ve use for you.”

Trey moves closer to the door, just in case, but she stays. Sheila sits on the sofa beside Johnny, dips the towel in the water, and squeezes it out. When she dabs at his face, he hisses. Sheila ignores it and keeps working, in short systematic swipes like she’s getting a spill off the cooker.

“He’s got nothing,” Johnny says, wincing as Sheila catches a sore place. He sounds like he’s talking to himself. “He can say what he wants. No one’ll believe the likes of him.”

There’s silence in the room, only the drip as Sheila wrings out the cloth. Alanna has stopped tossing. The water in the pan is turning red.

“You tell me,” Johnny says, twisting to get one eye on Trey. “You know the man. Is Hooper going to run around this townland bleating it to everyone that there’s no gold?”

“Dunno,” Trey says. “He might not.” Cal’s relationship with Ardnakelty baffles her. He would have every right to a handful of well-honed grudges, but he’s easy and mannerly with everyone, to the point where she can’t even spot where the grudges might lie. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, though. Cal, even if he’s pissed off with Johnny for fooling him, might accept this chance to sit back and let the townland walk into Johnny’s trap. She knows, from stories he’s told her about his childhood, that his code allows for revenge, and that he knows how to take his time.