Page 6 of The Circle

The door swings open and Alec pokes his head in. The sound of cutting tools, metal grinding against metal, fills the air. Alec looks back at me and holds up three fingers, waves them to the right—three guys that direction—then two fingers and waves left—which is the way I’m supposed to head. Good. I don’t wanna have to deal with more than two guys today. Honestly, I don’t wanna have to deal with any, really, but I can handle two no problem.

Alec slinks around the door frame, his long topcoat trailing behind him as he moves, almost like he’s on the runway at some kind of fashion show. The Assassin’s Spring Collection or some bullshit.

He can’t help it. It’s just who he is. He doesn’t even try. He simply possesses a kind of feline grace that I admire. I don’t envy it, exactly. I’m fine with my own thing, which is more of a “don’t poke that sleeping dog, he may not be friendly, oh, shit, here he comes!” kind of a vibe, but Alec’s way of approaching violence is… well, it’s sexy.

Not the moment to have that thought, I guess, but that’s the thought I have.

Anyway, he slides into the workshop, heading to the right, and I follow, moving to the left. The guys in Alec’s direction are the ones chopping up a car. A 1962 Bentley Continental, from the looks of it.

Why? Why are they chopping it up? To sell off the parts, obviously. Which, I mean, I understand the financial incentive. They’ll definitely make more from selling off the pieces one by one than they would by just selling the whole thing, but… it’s a fucking 1962 Bentley Continental. Just restore the thing, for Christ’s sake.

Man, fuck these guys.

The two red-headed beanpoles standing off in the direction I’m moving can’t be more than nineteen or twenty. Just a couple of ratty street kids with nowhere to go and nothing to do who got roped into the criminal life.

I don’t know them. But I know them.

Shit. I hope I don’t have to shoot them both in the face.

They’re vaping. Which is a very “now” thing for them to be doing, I suppose.

They don’t seem to notice me as I approach, sidling up from around the corner of a pile of metal that clearly used to be an MG. My hope is that I’ll be able to convince them to just fuck off out the door that Alec and I came in and maybe run home to their mom or whoever. Seeing these two kids—because that’s what they are—vaping and smiling, telling each other stupid jokes or whatever they’re doing, makes me want them to choose a different path. A different life.

I don’t know what’s going on with me right now. I think I’m getting soft in my old age. “Old age.” I’m not even thirty. But I’m starting to feel about a hundred and thirty.

I don’t want to go back to life without Christine and Alec. I absolutely don’t. Now that we’re together again and it almost, almost feels like a life together could be possible… I don’t want to go back to being alone.

But I just want for us to have some… I dunno. Peace? Yeah. I just want some fuckin’ peace, for fuck’s sake. Doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.

But first, we gotta get through this shit.

“Phhht,” I whistle in the direction of the two gingers. “Yo. Boyos.” They turn to look. See the shotgun. Whatever joke they were sharing doesn’t seem so funny anymore. “Declan,” I say. “Declan Lynch. Where is he? He here?”

The smiles have turned into scowls. And it’s weird. Suddenly they don’t look like a couple of Dennis the Menaces like they did seconds before. They look more like a couple of carrot-topped vampires who’re pissed that I opened their coffins.

“Feck are you then?” one of them asks with an Irish brogue so thick that it forces me to respond with…

“What?”

“Feck you want with Da, ye feckin’ cunt?” the other says. I think.

“Lads,” I respond with a tone of warning as I level the shotgun, “let’s not be all—”

But before I can finish, I hear a different shotgun going off somewhere to my right. And then I hear, “All right, you fokken naaiers! We’re looking for Declan and Brasil Lynch! Tell us where they are right now, or we’ll blow your fokken rooikops off!”

Okay. That’s another way to approach this. Glad we fuckin’ snuck in. Jesus.

The two boyos in front of me use this brief distraction as an opportunity to make for me and my semi-automatic boom stick, but I spin on them and rack it before they get to where I’m standing.

“Ah, ah, ah,” I say. “Lads. Don’t make me do something I don’t wanna do.” They stop their lurching and stand in place, chests heaving.

I want to turn around and see exactly what the hell is happening in the other corner of the garage, but the second I do, these two ragamuffins will try to take me down. They won’t succeed. Not in a million years. But that’s also part of my problem. I don’t want to have to be the one who stops them.

“Da’s gonna feck ye, boy,” one of them garbles.

“Oh, Da’s gonna feck ye hard,” says the other.

And before I can ask what they’re talking about, I hear…

“Jaysus! What the feck do you think you’re doin’, you cock-shiting bastards?”

The booming, almost God-like voice comes from the catwalk above that circumnavigates the whole of the garage. It’s the kind of voice that sounds like it started out having been scrubbed by sandpaper and has been further seasoned over the last four and a half decades by a steady flow of cigar smoke and Bushmills.

And looking up, I see him. All six feet six inches of him. Long, curly red hair pulled into a ponytail and streaked through with grey. Red and grey beard managed in exactly the same way. His sixty-year-old face as weathered as the Cliffs of Moher. He is the kind of person that, if you landed on Earth from outer space and had never seen a human, you would look at and still immediately go, “That must be their leader.”

Declan Lynch.

Standing twenty feet above us. Holding a Desert Eagle in each hand. One pointed at me and one pointed at Alec. From an elevated perch that puts him in total control.

Jesus. Good thing Eliza didn’t come with us. She might have “gotten too emotional.” Might have just “stomped in and started shooting people.” Might have “done something stupid that put us at a disadvantage.”

Goddamnit, Alec.

Seems like peace is gonna have to wait for just a little while longer.