Bulls Island Read Online Free PDF

up on life the day my childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth McGee, walked out. Very few people did. So Mother picked Valerie for me to marry instead. I married Valerie. Big Jim wanted me to run the business, so I ran the business the way he wanted, doing whatever it took to get what we wanted. My life was prescribed like an antibiotic a doctor gives a patient, swearing it will cure what ails him. So far, it had not worked for me, and that was probably never going to change. I barely cared.
    The moon shone over the Wappoo, throwing everything into a kind of half-light, and in those dream shadows sometimes I wondered whatever had become of Betts. She had never married, so far as I knew. I knew she worked for some kind of huge company in New York because I had Googled her, and that she had done very well. She lived on Park Avenue, I’d heard. She was still beautiful according to the picture on the company’s website. It was best not to think about her too much and I had disciplined myself to do that, but still I couldn’t help thinking I might drop by her friend Sela’s restaurant and try to weasel some news about her. Sela was pretty tight-lipped about anything that had to do with Betts—which told me she knew everything. I needed a Betts fix.
    Six o’clock the next evening and I was walking through the door of Sela’s restaurant, named O’Farrell’s for her husband’s family from Dublin. I was to meet Valerie there after her appointment with the head of neurology at the Medical University. Valerie hadn’t been happy when I told her we were going to O’Farrell’s for dinner.
    “It’s so casual!” she complained.
    “It’s delicious,” I said.
    “It’s so noisy!”
    “Because it’s popular,” I said.
    I loved O’Farrell’s, with its decrepit brick walls, sawdust floors, and endless Irish memorabilia hung from every inch of wall space. Big wooden bowls of pretzels were scattered the length of the bar and the menu was written on a blackboard and rarely changed. Shepherd’s Pie. Bangers and Mash. Fish and Chips. The Dublin Burger. When they were in season the menu offered fried shrimp and oysters, and when the weather was cold there were endless stews with dumplings and chicken potpie. It didn’t matter to me; all the dishes were pretty mouthwatering. No frigging sprouts, no freaking tofu, no girlie smoothies. Sela was a great regulation cook, and when she’d grown tired of cooking, she trained four people to do her job, which should tell you something else about her.
    Anyway, I arrived early and there was Ed O’Farrell, Sela’s husband, who also happened to be the chief of police for the city of Charleston. Ed was out of uniform and working behind the bar. The regular guy must’ve been out or late. He saw me in the enormous mirror behind the rows of bottles of liquor and turned around to greet me.
    “Well, well! J. D. Langley in the flesh! As I live and breathe! How are you, my man?”
    “Good, Ed. Good. You?”
    “Right as rain! What can I get you?”
    “Harps? On tap?”
    “God love ya, man. Harps is mother’s milk!”
    He filled the mug and put it before me.
    “Thanks! So what’s all the news in Charleston?”
    “Not much new—same old drug business, crack houses, meth labs, the occasional murder…you know how it is.”
    I chuckled, thinking about this fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, how unthreatening he seemed as a barkeep and how he had this whole other life as a Jedi keeping Charleston out of the hands of Darth Vader.
    “Right. Sela around?”
    He winked at me, knowing exactly what I wanted, and said, “I’ll tell her you’re here. She went to the beauty parlor when she saw your reservation.”
    “Women,” I said.
    “You’re telling me? Watch the till for me, will ya?”
    “You know it.”
    Ed disappeared behind the door to the office and he and Sela came out at the same time as Valerie came in the front door. Valerie despised Sela and any other detail of life remotely connected to