Read Dead Irish for Free Online Page B

airport.
    There were some glasses and bottles out front, left from the hurried exit of the night before. Some of the tables hadn’t been wiped down.
    The cash register. It hadn’t been rung out. He refilled his pint glass to the halfway point again.
    Somebody knocked while he was counting the money. Through the door he saw that it was a retired schoolteacher, a regular named Tommy, who ought to know better.
    “Two o’clock,” Hardy yelled, holding up two fingers. Tommy nodded and shuffled on by, past the front window.
    Hardy went back to ringing out. He looked at his watch. Twelve-twenty.
    “Slow down,” he told himself.
    But he didn’t. In five more minutes he was ready to open.
    He sat at the stool behind the bar, time weighing a ton and not getting lighter. He didn’t want to have that time to think. About the unaccustomed restlessness inside him. About ambition, where love had gone. Especially, he didn’t want to think about the ridiculous idealist Eddie Cochran and his wife, Frannie. He didn’t want to think that it might be important to help her in some way—maybe keep her from losing what he’d lost.
    The inside pocket of his peacoat, hanging on its peg at the end of the rail, held his darts. The leather case, velvet-lined, worked on him like worry beads as he rubbed it gently, passed it from hand to hand. Finally he opened it on the bar.
    The three 20-gram tungsten beauties sat in their slots, awaiting their flights, the pale blue, dart-embossed bits of plastic that Hardy had made himself, and that in turn made those hunks of metal fly true. Carefully, he emptied the case and fitted the flights to the darts.
    Over at the board, he threw some rounds, not really aiming. Not really shooting. Just throwing. Three darts. Walk to the board and remove them. Walk back to the chalk line. Do it again. Sometimes stop for a sip of Guinness. It didn’t matter where they hit, although, even without trying, Hardy put all the darts in the pie bounded by 1 and 5, with 20 in the middle.
    Hardy, in the bar by himself, throwing darts.
     
    Hardy, behind the bar, looked at the lined face of his friend, the oft-broken nose, the mountain man’s beard. McGuire’s eyes were shot with red. Moses had gotten his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley when his deferment had run out. He hadn’t viewed being drafted as the tragedy many others had—he was a philosopher and believed that one of life’s seminal experiences was war. As it turned out, the war tempered both his philosophical bent and his intellectual appreciation of men killing each other and anything else that moved.
    He was two years older than Hardy and, back then, only two steps slower, which, Hardy had told him six hundred times, explained his getting hit in both legs at Chi Leng while Hardy made it to cover, only to turn around and carry Moses back out, picking up some lead in his own shoulder in the process.
    So, tritely, Moses felt he owed Hardy his life. When Hardy had changed careers, Moses had been there with the Shamrock and, owing him his life, had made a place for Hardy in the rotation, something he would have done for no one else with the possible exception of his sister Frannie.
    “So?” Hardy asked finally.
    McGuire looked into his glass, found it empty, twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. The bar still hadn’t opened.
    Hardy reached to the top shelf behind him and brought down a bottle of The Macallan, the best scotch in the house, if not the world. He refilled Moses’s glass.
    “This afternoon I gotta go see about getting the body taken care of. Frannie’s in no shape to do it. Especially after all the cops. They were all over the place, wouldn’t leave her alone. Why so many cops, you think?”
    Hardy the ex-cop said, “Reports, bureaucracy, bullshit.”
    Someone came and pounded at the door to the bar, still locked. “Let’s go where they can’t see us,” Hardy suggested.
    They went back to the storeroom. Cases of bottled beer