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    Green Hell
    Green Hell
    Green Hell
    Ebook202 pages3 hours

    Green Hell

    By Ken Bruen

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel . . . writes in machine gun fashion . . . reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.” —The Irish Times
     
    In Green Hell, Bruen’s dark angel of a protagonist has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Guards, is ancient history. But Jack isn’t about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues a preppy American student on a Rhodes Scholarship from a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick, who abandons his thesis on Beckett to write a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.
     
    Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack’s vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals toward chaos. Enter Emerald, an edgy young Goth who could either be the answer to Jack’s problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing . . .
     
    “Taylor is a classic figure: an ex-cop turned seedy private eye . . . The book’s pleasure comes from listening to Taylor’s eloquent rants, studded with references to songs and books. His voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.” —The Seattle Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 7, 2015
    ISBN9780802191304
    Green Hell
    Author

    Ken Bruen

    Ken Bruen has been a finalist for the Edgar and Anthony Awards, and has won a Macavity Award, a Barry Award, and two Shamus Awards for the Jack Taylor series. He is also the author of the Inspector Brant series. Several of Bruen's novels have been adapted for the screen: The first six Jack Taylor novels were adapted into a television series starring Iain Glen; Blitz was adapted into a movie starring Jason Statham; and London Boulevard was adapted into a film starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley. Bruen lives in Galway, Ireland.

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    Reviews for Green Hell

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Boru Kennedy, an American student is in Galway doing research for a treatise on Samuel Becket, is set upon by a couple of thugs and while in the process of receiving a serious beating is rescued by Jack Taylor. Striking up an unlikely friendship and spending a bit of time together, Kennedy thinks he may have found someone more interesting to write about. So he learns of Jack’s intention to put a permanent end to a professor’s extra curricular activities of raping young women.. Also into Jack’s life comes a clever, young, mixed-up girl who has a thing for the vengeful act herself and she wants Jack to come out and play in her latest performance. Jack also acquires a puppy. Oh dear!A slightly different format than the previous entries in the series, this one is split into two parts. The first is from the young American’s point-of-view along with some notes he’s written for the intended biography. The second returns to the more usual Jack Taylor affair. It only remains to see who gets out of this one alive or with all their body parts intact.
    • 4/5
      First off I won this book on the early readers program. I didn't want to like this book. This is a book on cd. I started listening to the first cd and found it incredibly hard to follow, whether it was the writing or the reader or a combination of the two I don't know. It took me four or five times starting the first cd to finally pick out the lilt of the readers accent and get into the story. This story takes place in Ireland and the reader had a nice Irish accent. But, once I started to understand his accent I rally got into this story.It is brutal, noirish, violent and sad but at times it was hilariously funny even making me laugh out loud a couple of times.This is one of a series of novels about Jack Taylor a disgraced former cop, an alcoholic, drug using, soldier of fortune type. The language was a little rough but fit the character perfectly.He is on the track of a professor who rapes and tortures young students. I found the end a little anti climactic but interesting. And I found myself interested in reading more about Jack Taylor.
    • 4/5
      I have enjoyed reading Ken Bruen's books. This is the first time I have heard one on audiobook. While enjoying the plot and its development, I was somewhat confused by the reader's inconsistent use of American and Irish accents. Since the American was from Boston and visiting Ireland I expected more consistency. It may have been that the reader wanted to inject some variation to suggest that the character was confused about his own accent but it wasn't until that character was no longer in the book that the Irish accent was consistent and easy to follow. As it was, I sometimes had difficulty determining which character was speaking.
    • 3/5
      I wondered what Ken Bruen could do after he had pulled a biblical Job on Jack, killing his friends, his loved ones, destroying him over and over for so many books. You have to write something else after a while, right? Bruen lets up a little in this one: of course he kills off another close one, but he introduces a common device these days--the smart, young woman computer whiz. She advances the plot. She makes advances to everyone. She rates a cover.
      Bruen moves on to a new tactic in his writing, too. He still is sparse (poetic noir some critics call it), creates reading lists, and tries to do a George Herbert page layout at times, but now has another voice, that of a grad student American, who sounds much like the original Taylor storytelling voice, but this kid is trying to be the next Jack Taylor so his voice should, too, I suppose.

      The book almost works. Close enough.
    • 3/5
      Green Hell audio book is another story about a favorite detective of mine, that Jack Taylor fellow. Jack is a force of nature, He's the grim, hard sort of man that I would want trying to catch my killer if I was murdered. This story moves in fits and starts and I struggled to retain information about the characters as well as exactly what Jack's investigation was even about. I've listened to audio books that gripped me to the point where I had to stop driving, turn off the stove, let my coffee go cold. This is not one of those audio books. It is an unrelenting narrative into a group of people who drink so much its hard to even read about how often they are drinking. In the end I just gritted my teeth and got through it. Maybe that was the point, that the crime was so awful, the writer intended to convey the feeling of unmerciful pain that human beings are capable of visiting upon other human beings. If so, the book is a success.
    • 4/5
      I suspect this book would be better read than absorbed on audio discs. I had a difficult time paying attention to John Lee's voice or perhaps it was his style of delivery. It is noir all right. The grizzled crime solver has no trouble drinking with anyone at any time. The crime is heinous. It's a good story and a quick one. My thanks to the author and LibraryThing for a complimentary copy.
    • 4/5
      I found this title to be a little dry, but the plot was interesting and somewhat disturbing. It's a dark tale, but had great potential. I wish there had been a little more depth.
    • 3/5
      Disconcerting. Violent. Confusing. Downright thrilling.When I first started listening to this book, I was happy as hell that it was only 3 discs long. I had serious problems with the narrator, John Lee. He waxed nauseatingly poetic and was So. Damned. Dramatic. That. I. Had. Difficulty. Following. Him. I didn't have a clue what was going on. It was just a jumble of words. I sort of understood that a kid researching his thesis subject gets caught up in Jack Taylor's seriously messed up life and ends up dead. But I honestly had to re-listen to the first disc and a half because I truly did not understand what was happening. Then it all kind of clicked when a Lisbeth Salander lookalike shows up as a Goth Avenging Angel. It had one of the best endings I've seen in a book in a long time. I think I would like to go back and read some of the earlier Taylor books. I think that physically reading them will be more satisfying than listening to them, particularly if they are all written in the manner of Green Hell. I would recommend the story to anyone enjoying a hardboiled mystery... but in written form. Unless you have listened to other taylor books, this is not one I would recommend to a listener. However, if you are familiar with the character and the narrator and enjoy them together, then this might be right up your alley.
    • 3/5
      I love Ken Bruen, and have always enjoyed his Jack Taylor novels. I was particularly interested that this novel was told from the perspectives of two separate first-person narrators. It was a conceit that worked for me. My only real problem with the audio book was that it was much too short; it seemed that, contrary to the advertising on the box, it was an abridged version of the tale.
    • 4/5
      I've been a fan of Ken Bruen's wonderful noir Jack Taylor books since the very first, The Guards, and I doubt that I will ever forget my reaction to the gut-wrenching ending of The Dramatist. This is not a series to read when you're feeling low and needing a pick-me-up. Jack Taylor may have the soul of a poet, but he has enough flaws for two people, his addictions will always be with him, and he can turn extremely violent in the blink of an eye. But there's something about the way Bruen writes this man that makes me care deeply for him, regardless of how lost or hopeless he is. Jack is lost, Jack is hopeless, for the simple reason that he cares so much, and it's a difficult thing to watch someone whose heart and intentions are so good continue to do things that can be so bad.In Green Hell, once again Jack is dealing with someone who's seemingly above the law. As far as he's concerned, he has nothing to lose, so he welcomes the chance to mete out some long overdue justice. Since Jack no longer has friends, Bruen has paired him up with two opposites: a naive young American and a mysterious Goth girl. Having been saved from what could've been a deadly beating, Boru Kennedy is a young American who's completely under Jack's spell. To him Jack may as well be an Irish Don Quixote tilting at Galway's windmills of injustice. Kennedy's thesis on Becket used to take up his every waking thought, but now he can't get enough of Jack, and through his obsession, readers get to see Taylor through completely new eyes.Emerald the Goth girl refuses to be pinned down. Is she temptress, joker, damsel in distress, or the purest form of retribution? Jack seems a bit dazzled and unable to make up his mind just what she's up to-- or if she's up to anything at all.With its new sidekicks, Green Hell has a different feel-- an almost retrospective one-- to the other books in the series, and I enjoyed little touches like Ziggy and a postcard about The Poisoned Pen bookstore. But Jack is a bit too much out of control in this one, and as a result the book doesn't have the full power of several of the earlier books. But it's impossible for me to stop in Ireland without going to Galway to check on Jack Taylor. He's the kind of guy you never ever forget-- and one that you never stop hoping will have just a tiny smidgen of good luck. Just once.
    • 4/5
      3.5 Jack Taylor is a wreck of a man, a heavy drinker, blunt to the extent of rudeness, with very few he can call friend, addicted to violence but if there is a miscarriage of justice to right he is the one you want on your side. He reads like there is no tomorrow and has his own moral compass.The novel is written to reflect the personality of Jack, blunt and to the point. There are no wasted words here and the humor is the sarcastic type or dark irony. A very different type of main character, yet something in this series speaks to me. Maybe it shows that there is some good in even the flawed and that there is someone there to right a wrong. In this one he meets his match in a young woman he comes in contact with, a young woman who changes her personalities like a chameleon. There is one part of this one I had a hard time with and if you are a animal lover you will too. A different type of series, one more bold and in your face but I love it. Many quotes from authors in this one which made it even more interesting.ARC from NetGalley.
    • 3/5
      Lots of brutality. Interesting use of two different first person narrators. Jack Taylor comes off as a bit much.
    • 4/5
      I have not previously read this author so it took a bit of getting used to. At the beginning, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy this audiobook but resigned myself to listening to it as I received it on condition that I give it a fair review.Boy was I mistaken.This particular volume starts out somewhat like the 100th epidode of a television series with American Boru Kennedy forgoing his dissertation on Samuel Beckett to research the life and career of the well lubricated ex-Garda officer Jack Taylor. Many are the scenes where Kennedy listens to Jack Taylor anecdotes from a variety of interviewees. These interviews are interspersed with scenes where Jack himself is on the trail of a serial rapist that the church authorities are protecting.The story changes perspective radically when Boru is arrested for the assaults that Jack is investigation. From there, the reader sees the story from Jack’s point of view.Taylor himself reminds me somewhat of an Irish version of Matthew Scudder in When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes (a book in which Scudder is unburdened by the burden of sobriety). He seems to have burned more bridges than most people cross in a lifetime.Ken Bruen writes with a snappy, machine-gun bullet style that one would expect more from a San Francisco beat poet than an Irish mystery writer. “I told him I was an atheist and he laughed, loud and warm. He had one of those truly epic laughs. It was so rare but when he let go, it was all-embracing. His eyes and his wounded spirit on song.Said,‘See how that flies when a fucker shoves a gun in your mouth at three-thirty in the morning.’Riddle me that.The books he was reading in those last days. As if he knew something.Satan, your Kingdom mustCome down….(Massive Attack)Playing while I perused the book titles. “Perused”A fifty-euro sound bite, Jack said. Adding,“That track used in two TV series:HannibalAnd Lector.”Unfortunately, this style of writing does not lend itself well to audio recordings. The spaces in the written copy that provide invaluable assistance in understanding the pace of the story are absent in the audio recording requiring a great deal of effort from the listener to follow along. In addition, British reader John Lee, while generally an able narrator, does an unconvincing job of sounding like the Boston-born graduate student that or the burned out Irish tough the narrator is supposed to be. In his defense, Lee’s sing-song voice began to grow on me and eventually melded with the story like bongo drums at the Gaslight Club.Bottom line: Ken Bruen has written a story as gritty and hardboiled as it gets. Add to it the aforementioned poetic style, a shot of Jameson’s and a good splash of Irish profanity and you have a good story that could be read in an evening. I encourage you to give it a shot.*Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review book was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:•5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.•4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.•3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered good or memorable.•2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending. •1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.
    • 1/5
      Green Hell by Ken Bruen; Audio Book read by John LeeI was given a free copy of this audio book in exchange for an HONEST review. Please keep in mind that my review is my OPINION. Yours may differ but this is MINE.First let me start by saying that I believe this audio book must have been “abridged” even though the back of the case says “unabridged” since it was only 3.5 hours long and the book (according to Amazon) is around 300 pages. I will break this down into two sections: the Reader/Audiobook and then the Author/Story.(I am using the word “reader” rather than narrator because the story is in first person and I will use narrator for the person in the story)Reader/AudiobookI have heard many times that the reader can make or break an audiobook. In this case, I believe that to VERY MUCH a relevant statement. John Lee—a nice guy socially, I’m sure—needs to find a new profession. While his voice is strong and has a decent tone to it, his reading and the way he “stylizes” is absolutely HORRIBLE. Imagine if Captain Kirk (the William Shatner version) was a game show host or old time radio show host. He pauses A LOT and uses LONG pauses between words for effect (fail), between items in a list (aggrrhhh) and even in between syllables of words (-_-).SAMPLE: There’s…some…thing on the wing. I…can’t…tell what it is.Additionally, Lee’s use of accents was utterly confusing and didn’t fit. The book switched first person narrators but the first of the two narrators was supposed to be an American university student and the story is set in Ireland. This American student sounded only slightly less-Irish than the rest of the characters and sometimes the accent even switch back and forth between the “pseudo American” and the Irish one while the student was talking. Now imagine this American student speaking in this “fluctuating” accent and sounding like the Kirk/Shatner game/radio show host I mentioned earlier. Mr. Lee…not every character in the book should sound like a hard-boiled Private Eye from the ’40s.It was so annoying to listen to that I had to stop on disc two and wait 3 days before continuing. I was extremely glad that the audiobook was only 3 discs long or I may not have finished it. I will never listen to another book read by John Lee.Author/StoryFirst let me say here that this is my first experience with Ken Bruen and from the good reviews of this book I see on amazon, I am sure that the horrible audio performance may be the reason why I really didn’t enjoy it…but, there are some things I would like to point out that bothered me.The story is about a university student going to Ireland on a prestigious scholarship to write his dissertation but after a mugging decides to throw away his entire reason for being there so he can idolize the man (Jack Taylor) that saved him from the muggers and write a book on Jack’s life. Not all together believable…Aside from the weak story premise, the book really had no twists, turns, suspense or thrills. It was a linear story that made me think, “That’s too bad but oh well, I don’t like any of these characters anyways…is this audiobook over yet?” At no time did I worry for the characters, feel compassion…nothing. It evoked zero emotion in me…well, other than my rage at the reader, John Lee. And it seemed to just end with the ending being spoon feed to me which breaks what I have always been told about writing…SHOW don’t TELL please.The author also uses lists quite often and I found it to be distracting. He would say something like, “He had seen evil before; muggings, rape, murder, battery, etc, etc.” I think I counted about 15+ lists in a 3 hour audiobook. Add the annoying Mr. Lee’s pauses between words in a list and I am surprised the book finished in less than 12 hours.Additionally, the author would repeat himself—I guess he is trying to sound “clever” or something. He tells us what the story narrator is thinking and then he tells us what the story narrator said…and they are the exact same thing. Here is an example: “She asked me if I knew him. I didn’t know him, I told her I didn’t know him.” I don’t recall exactly how many times this occurs but it was enough for me to notice.I never tell people not to read/listen to a book. I leave that up to each individual, I only tell my OPINION of it.
    • 1/5
      Looking for a crime novel with riveting suspense, charming characters and plenty of local Irish color? Pass on by, nothing here for you. Looking for graphic brutality, incest, animal cruelty, rape and alcoholic rant? This is for you, then. I received this 3-CD audio book in exchange for an honest review, and if that wasn’t an implied contract I would have chucked it after playing the first CD. I’m pretty much inured to most of the brutality and language in Green Hell but there are a host of other issues I’d take with it. The narrator, for whom each comma is a full stop and each period a coffee break, sounds like the voice-over on a 50’s film noir mystery. Incessant, irrelevant pop culture references and commentary on national and international affairs must make up a quarter of the text if not more. Ken Bruen has not so artfully packaged a short story into a stand-alone book, and it just isn’t a very good short story. Rubbish.

    Book preview

    Green Hell - Ken Bruen

    GreenHellHcfront.jpg

    GREEN HELL

    Also by Ken Bruen

    Once Were Cops

    Sanctuary

    Cross

    Priest

    The Dramatist

    The Magdalen Martyrs

    The Killing of the Tinkers

    Funeral: Tales of Irish Morbidities

    Shades of Grace

    Martyrs

    Sherry and Other Stories

    Time of Serena-May/Upon the Third Class

    Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice

    Rilke on Black

    The Hackman Blues

    A White Arrest

    Taming the Alien

    The Guards

    London Boulevard

    Blitz

    The McDead

    Vixen

    Dispatching Baudelaire

    The Dead Room

    American Skin

    Bust (with Jason Starr)

    Calibre

    A Fifth of Bruen

    Slide (with Jason Starr)

    Ammunition

    The Max (with Jason Starr)

    All the Old Songs and Nothing to Lose

    Headstone

    Purgatory

    GREEN HELL

    A Jack Taylor Novel

    Ken Bruen

    Including a Biography of Jack Taylor, by Boru Kennedy

    The Mysterious Press

    an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

    New York

    Copyright © 2015 by Ken Bruen

    Jacket design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

    Author photograph © Rob W. Hart

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

    Published simultaneously in Canada

    Printed in the United States of America

    ISBN 978-0-8021-2356-5

    eISBN 978-0-8021-9130-4

    The Mysterious Press

    an imprint of Grove Atlantic

    154 West 14th Street

    New York, NY 10011

    Distributed by Publishers Group West

    groveatlantic.com

    For

    my friends

    JOHN CASSERLEY and OWEN DAGLISH

    and Damanja and Prodrag Finei (The Lights of Bosnia)

    Part I

    Forgiveness

    Might Be Feeding the

    Hand that

    Bites You

    The day began . . . badly.

    For Jack, this was like breathing. Natural.

    It was never a plan to write about Jack Taylor. I’d come to Dublin as part of a Rhodes scholarship to conclude a treatise on Beckett. To end up living in Galway, drinking as if I meant it,

    . . . how’d that happen?

    As Jack would say,

    Fuck knows.

    This is not . . .

    A Boswell to Dr. Johnson

    Or even . . .

    A Watson to Holmes gig.

    But rather a haphazard series of events leading me to abandon Beckett in pursuit of the Taylor enigma. Little did I know it would be an ironic reflection of one of Jack’s favorite novels:

    The Wrong Case.

    As Jim Crumley had once said of a book,

    This is not a crime novel, it’s a story with some crimes in it.

    Quite.

    I met Jack Taylor at a time of odd disturbance.

    James Gandolfini,

    Cory Monteith,

    Alan Whicker

    Had all recently died. Jack mourned all three. He had heard of only the first. The second was the star of Glee and the third had presented a show called

    Whicker’s World.

    Jack said those last two represented (a) the youth he never had and (b) how old he was not to recall Whicker.

    Both ends of his booze-soaked candle. James G of course was in The Sopranos, demonstrating, Jack said,

    How depression and brutality are uneven dance partners.

    This, like many things he said, made sense only to him.

    I hadn’t, he claimed,

    Drunk enough.

    To truly grasp absurdity. Accounts in part for my name. My mother is Irish and steeped in the iconography of a blood saturated in epic/tragic history and so, after

    Brian Boru

    My first name.

    My father hails from Boston though, alas, is not of the infamous immediate family. Though they do say all Kennedys are related.

    Yeah, right!

    That dog doesn’t hunt. I haven’t come within a spit of the Hyannis Port compound. I will admit to a certain strain of impetuousness. Spring break in Cancún the year of my graduation, I came to from a tequila slammer ruin with a tattoo on my arm, reading

    P.T. 108.

    When I’d jokingly suggested to Taylor I write of his life, he’d gone deep.

    Then,

    Do a Tom Waits.

    Huh?

    He sighed, said,

    Shall I tell you the truth or just string you along?

    The heft of the man. Jack was, he claimed, exactly six feet tall, adding,

    Like the Pale Nazarene.

    For such a ferocious derider of the Church, he was sodden with its

    ritual, innuendo,

    propaganda.

    I’d told him I was an atheist and he laughed, loud and warm. He had one of those truly epic laughs. It was so rare but when he let go, it was all-embracing. His eyes and his wounded spirit on song.

    Said,

    See how that flies when a fucker shoves a gun in your mouth at three-thirty in the morning.

    Riddle me that.

    The books he was reading in those last days. As if he knew something.

    Satan, your Kingdom must

    Come down. . . .

    (Massive Attack)

    Playing as I perused the book titles.

    Perused.

    A fifty-euro sound bite, Jack said. Adding,

    "That track used in two TV series:

    Hannibal

    and

    Lecter.

    The connection?

    Jack’s coked taste.

    Those books:

    Reconstructing Amelia

    Where’d You Go, Bernadette

    Lottie Moggach, Kiss Me First

    Sara Gran, The Bohemian Highway

    Lynn S. Hightower, Flashpoint

    The Universe Versus Alex Woods

    Malcolm Mackay, The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

    And of course, the boxed DVDs:

    House of Cards

    Breaking Bad

    Les Revenants

    Borgen

    The Americans

    And I wondered how a perpetual drunk, pill-popping, on/off nicotine freak could focus long enough for any of the above. I asked.

    He said,

    Practice.

    July 2013: The Galway Races on the shimmering horizon. I’d known Jack for three months. In truth, with him,

    The rush.

    The intensity.

    The sheer hard core.

    It felt like three years.

    How we met? Not as you’d hazard: in a pub.

    I was on the ground, my top teeth crushed by a steel-toed Dr. Martens. Two thugs, trainees almost, no more than sixteen . . . collectively had waylaid me as I came out of McDonagh’s Fish ’n’ Chips. Bottom of Quay Street but a bad poem away from the Spanish Arch. I was balancing my smartphone and the food, authentically wrapped in the weekly Galway Advertiser, the first one asked,

    Gis a chip, cunt.

    The richness of Irish youth vocabulary. The second one, I’d carelessly allowed behind me.

    Come on.

    I’m an academic, not a kung fu fighter.

    He hit me hard in my lower back with a baseball bat. The shame, not to be even mugged with authenticity, like, say, with a hurly.

    Oh, America, we export too well.

    Shock and pain swamped me as the first took my top teeth out with his boot. Shame too, mortification, I was taken down by . . . fuck’s sake . . .

    Kids!

    Seriously?

    Amid blood and dizziness, I gasped as both kids stood, ready to, as they chanted,

    Let’s kick the fuckin be-Jaysus out of this bollix.

    A figure loomed behind, then I heard,

    What’s the craic?

    And he literally cracked their small, malicious skulls together. They reeled apart, moaning, and he dropped the first with a kick to the groin. He reached a hand to me, said,

    Take it slow, Pilgrim.

    As . . . was I hallucinating? . . . John Wayne.

    With his help, I was able to stand, even spit out some teeth. I mumbled,

    Thanks, I guess.

    He smiled, said,

    A Yank.

    I asked, as I tried to fight off nausea and tremors,

    Is that like . . . bad?

    He was staring at the second kid, who, though on his feet, was dazed. He answered,

    Long as you got the bucks, we love you.

    Then checking my ruined mouth, said,

    Better get you to A & E.

    Used his cell, called a cab, urging them,

    Get here like yesterday.

    Again a faux American intonation, as if he was subtly mocking me. Sure enough, a cab screeched to a halt in, as I’d come to know Jack’s term,

    Jig time.

    Helped me to the cab, then turned, moved back to the seriously fucked kids, and, get this, frisked them.

    The kid still standing, utterly dazed.

    Jack slid into the seat beside me, holding the kid’s money wedge, said,

    Cab fare.

    Contempt

    Prior

    to

    Investigation

    From Boru Kennedy’s Notes/Journals

    He sees the little girl, Serena May, delighted with the new trick he showed her. How to make a silver coin disappear. He’d thought, ruefully,

    A trick the banks had perfected to an inordinate degree.

    The sun had been uncharacteristically hot. He’d opened the window on the first story and watched as the little girl gurgled happily on the floor.

    Then

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