Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Read Online Free PDF Page A

score ketch without him? You either dealt with the paramilitaries or didn’t deal. Spider was the local UDA rep. You didn’t need years of policing experience to know that Northern Ireland was divided into Catholic paramilitary (IRA) and Protestant paramilitary (UDA) districts. Try to be an independent pusher and you would end up naked in a bog with a hole in your head.
    “History: In what country is Waterloo—”
    Facey and I pressed the buzzer and said simultaneously: “Belgium.”
    “Van Morrison was formerly part of which band?”
    “Them,” Facey said.
    “The High Kings of Ireland were crowned where?”
    “Tara,” one of the Brats said, getting in before me.
    “Science: Boyle’s law…”
    The questions went on and at the end we were tied. Marty needed time to prepare a tiebreaker. I went to the loo again. Just as I had relaxed my bladder in came Mr. McCarthy, one of Da’s friends from the old cricket club. Dolan’s was that kind of bar. People from the cricket club, aldermen, drug dealers. Carrickfergus had many bars, some paramilitary hangouts, some for locals only, but Dolan’s was for everyone.
    “Sandy,” he said.
    “Mr. McCarthy,” I said.
    “Sandy, I respect your dad very much but he can’t win the election, you know.”
    I nearly gave Mr. McCarthy my spiel about how the decline of the west begins at the urinal, but he was a friend of my father’s, so I had to humor him.
    “I know, Mr. McCarthy, he lost his deposit last time and in a ward of a thousand people, which means that fewer than fifty voted for him. Told him not to run. But he says it’s the principle of the thing.”
    “He’s a good man, your dad, a good man. If he was in my ward I’d vote for him. Well, anyway… Oh, terrible about Victoria Patawasti, wasn’t it?” Mr. McCarthy said.
    “What?”
    “It was terrible about Victoria Patawasti,” he said again.
    “What was?”
    “Didn’t you hear?”
    “No.”
    “Maybe I’m mistaken, but I heard this morning that she’d been in an awful accident or something in America.”
    “I don’t think so,” I said, “I saw her dad just yesterday.”
    “Oh well, maybe I’m wrong,” he said.
    I went back to the quiz, unsettled. Victoria Patawasti? What was he talking about? He must be mistaken.
    “Jesus Christ,” Facey said, “we’re about to have the tiebreaker.”
    I sat down.
    “Who was the Roman Emperor who conquered Britain?” Marty asked.
    I buzzed. I hadn’t even heard the question. I was thinking about Victoria.
    “Julius Caesar, no, Claudius,” I said.
    Facey groaned.
    “I must accept your first answer,” Marty said.
    “It must be bloody Claudius then,” one of the Brats said.
    Facey didn’t even speak. I felt sick. I went outside. I waited for John. What an idiot. How would I pay Spider now? A minute passed.
    There was some kind of commotion.
    I looked in through the windows. A depressingly familiar scene. John and Facey right in the thick of an argument, yelling at Davy Bannion—the Brats’ captain, a tough-bastard sergeant in the military police. Shite, I supposed I had to go help. I went back inside. I caught John’s eye and shook my head ironically at him, trying to convey the impression that this sorry state of affairs had begun with his speech in the toilet. But before John could respond, Davy swung a punch. It hammered John backward into the picture over the fireplace.
    “Oh, shit,” I moaned.
    Facey immediately piled into a skinny corporal called Blaine and I jumped the third member of the Brats, a stuck-up officer called McGuigan, from behind. I enjoyed smacking him a good right hook on the side of the head. A fight between cops and the army, so you knew no one in the bar was going to break it up.
    McGuigan turned around and tried to head-butt me, but I used his forward momentum to grab him by the hair and hurl him into one of the ceiling-support columns. He crunched into it with a sickening crash. Blood squirted everywhere and he fell