Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Read Online Free PDF

dazed onto the big wooden tables.
    “I think I broke his nose,” I said to a disgusted female noncombatant who’d come out for a quiet drink, not a John Ford movie.
    “What’s happening?” I shouted across to John.
    “Marty doesn’t want to give them the rollover money from last week’s quiz, because technically it was a tie,” John somehow managed to explain.
    Facey and Blaine suddenly went skewing across a table, turned over three more tables, and there was chaos now, people screaming, yelling, trying to save their pints; in the melee, somehow two other quite separate fights had broken out. Violence always bubbling beneath the surface here in the north Belfast suburbs.
    I turned to my left. John and Bannion were wrestling on the floor. I was going to go and kick Bannion but I happened to notice Spider sprawled in a mess on the ground. His back was to me, so I went and gave him five or six good kicks in the ribs. He was already half concussed from whatever had justly befallen him. I took a moment and rifled his pockets. No dough, but a nice little tinfoil turd of ketch that would last the likes of me a week or more. Make up for the one I left in the boat. Just hope he didn’t guess who took it. I kicked him once more for luck.
    Now John had pulled himself up, and that eejit Bannion was fighting with someone else completely. John and I rescued Facey and ran out of there before the Carrick peelers showed up and had the embarrassing task of arresting the lot of us.
    * * *
    Belfast Lough to our right, the town to our left, Carrickfergus Castle behind us, the stunted palm trees surviving in the Gulf Stream breeze. I knew it wasn’t the fight. John was quiet for some other reason. A deeper reason. He gave me a long look. He wanted to say something. It had been building all evening. It had been building for weeks. I knew what it was. He wanted to give me a lecture.
    The peelers had hired John because they thought he could be a big bruiser but in fact he was a lazy, pot-smoking, terrible cop. But he knew it had been my vocation. He was three years older than me, we’d grown up almost next door to each other and in lieu of a de jure older brother who lived in England, John considered himself the de facto one. Sometimes he felt he should tell me off. I looked at him. Quiet, reflective. He really was going to say it, he’d prepared a spiel. He took a breath. I had to stop him.
    “John, look, before you start. I don’t want to hear that shit you read in some pamphlet. About three hundred people die a year of straight ketch overdoses. More people die in lightning strikes. Tobacco kills ten thousand times as many. No bloody lectures.”
    He smiled and choked on his cig.
    “Alex, two things. First, I’m very impressed with your psychic abilities and second, who do you think you’re bloody kidding, you know it’s killing you.”
    “No, it’s not. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t understand. I’m not you. I am the driver, it’s the driven. I’m in control. You should understand that. I’m not even an addict.”
    “Do you not see? You’re the worst kind of addict, that thinks he’s not even an addict,” John said with a sad smile on his big face.
    “Bullshit, John, total bullshit,” I said with more than a little anger.
    “It’s not. And you have to deal with that scumbag Spider. Come on, Alex, you were a bloody detective, what’s happened to you? Look at you now, it’s humiliating.”
    “You know the rules, John, we don’t talk about this.”
    John stared at me and shook his head. But I’d taken the wind out of his sails and he didn’t want to go on.
    “Ah fuck it,” he said, angry at himself for blowing his chance. I was pissed off at him for trying to get heavy with me. We walked in silence past the Royal Oak.
    “Some peeler you are,” I said after a while.
    “Why?”
    “Bloke back there following us.”
    “One of the soldiers?”
    “No. Picked him up outside Dolan’s, in the phone box.