The Quiet Man (McGarry Stateside Book 3) Read online

  The Quiet Man

  Caimh McDonnell

  Copyright © 2020 by McFori Ink

  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 author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Caimh McDonnell

  Visit my website at www.WhiteHairedIrishman.com

  First edition: October 2020

  ISBN: 978-1-912897-12-4

  Contents

  Author’s note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue One

  Epilogue Two

  Epilogue Three

  Also by Caimh McDonnell

  The Stranger Times – C.K. McDonnell

  Eagle-Eyed Legends

  Author’s note

  The following book contains scenes that some readers may find offensive.

  These scenes contain violence, bad language, good language, the occasional bit of sign language, and references to the inappropriate use of a mechanical rodeo bull. The action itself is not actually offensive but if you’re North American then it is the spelling that’ll really boil your grits – along with that reference right there which clearly shows I don’t really understand what grits are.

  The reason for the spelling is that the author and the main character are Irish and so everything is spelled as it would be there. The author has previously blamed this on his mother, but she has firmly told him to stop. He would now like to blame this on his dog, who, inexplicably, has strong opinions on this matter that agree one hundred per cent with his granny.

  The dog’s granny would further like to clarify that she is not granny to a bloody dog.

  Chapter One

  Jack Trainer polished a bar top that didn’t need it and sighed. Times like this, when it was quiet, a man could get to thinking unhelpful thoughts about where his life had gone wrong.

  Back in the late eighties, when Tom Cruise had made being a cocktail bartender cool, Jack had been at the top of his game. He’d been in his early twenties, a college dropout and a mixology master, working the big bars in Manhattan and getting paid handsomely to do so. He’d been sharp. The perfect combo of science meeting art.

  His nickname was the Iceman. You needed an angle, and ice had been his signature. He’d come up with new frozen cocktails and crazy ways of mixing them – tossing around frosted glasses, messing around with dry ice. He’d been a success on his own terms, no question – and then he had met her. Margareta, the ice-sculpting queen of New York.

  The shows they put together were legendary. At the peak of their fame, you had to drop sixty large to have them at your event. She’d unveil a breathtakingly complex sculpture and then he’d stand atop it and work his magic, sending rivers of booze down the various flumes and tunnels before perfectly mixed cocktails arrived at the bottom.

  Kobe and Shaq, Fred and Ginger, Woodward and Bernstein, Margareta and the Iceman. They had been one of the all-time great duos – the rock stars of the beverage prep and delivery business. Negotiations to open their own chain of bars had been at an advanced stage.

  The affair had been as fiery as it had been misjudged. The passion between them had burned like a supernova and left a trail of destruction in its wake. They’d often stayed up all night, working and screwing, screwing and working. You’ve not lived until you’ve made love in the bowl of a perfect ice-rendering of Shea Stadium while gin rains from a specially constructed sky.

  Ironically, it was weather that would be their downfall. Margareta had seen him talking – just talking – to the weather girl from Channel Nine News, and she’d come after him with an ice-pick. They’d made up, but then, at their next performance, he’d been standing beside a twelve-foot-tall Empire State Building, dressed as King Kong and dishing out funky-monkey cocktails, when the ice-rendering of a helicopter detached and smashed into his head.

  To the world it had appeared to be an accident, but he’d known different. Margareta did not make mistakes. Under her control, ice did not melt unexpectedly. She was the Ice Queen for a good reason. Also, amidst the blood, ice and panicking New York Jets cheerleaders, as they put him on the gurney he’d noticed that the helicopter bore the insignia of the Channel Nine News.

  After the break-up, Jack had tried to carry on, but it hadn’t been the same. He’d started taking his work home with him, drinking more and more. He’d also become obsessed with trying to create the great new cocktail. Like there was something he could do that would be so awe-inspiring that it would bring her back to him.

  He had sunk further and further. During a demonstration on morning TV, he’d lost control of a bottle of vermouth while executing a backside throw. It smashed a beloved sofa-sitting TV icon in the head, and that had been that. He’d got the shakes, and all the money he spent on doctors and psychologists couldn’t get him back to where he had been.

  So when Jack had got out of rehab – well, he was actually kicked out when the money ran out – he’d moved to the desert. He wondered if a part of him had picked the location because it was the farthest you could be from ice without boarding a rocket to the sun. His mixing days were over. He never so much as spun a bottle these days. The bars he worked served nothing more complicated than rum and Cokes, and he drifted from bar job to bar job, feeling like a ghost in his own life.

  Stanton was a ghost town, as in an actual ghost town, built especially for tourists who were on day trips out of Vegas. Technically, it had existed for centuries, but there had only really been a well and an inn, which, rumour had it, had been a whorehouse that catered to the long-distance traveller on a budget. Do any two words in the English language form a worse combo than “budget whorehouse”? They’d
knocked it all down and replaced it with brand-new, rustic and family-friendly history, complete with ghost stories and specially shipped-in tumbleweeds. Apparently, real tumbleweeds don’t look enough like tumbleweeds.

  The venture had been a success and attracted tourists in big numbers on their day trips. While the Rusty Spur was a long way down from his Manhattan days, Jack hadn’t minded it. It was the only bar job he’d ever had where you could close up at 7pm and go home. No tour out of Vegas was going to keep people away past peak slots-feeding and show time.

  Then, another company had created a new ghost town closer to Vegas. Stanton was still trying to compete, but Mardenville had holograms and all kinds of nonsense like that. It made their creaky doors and funhouse mirrors look outdated. And so Stanton the fake ghost town was soon well on its way to becoming a real one. The novelty hat shop had closed last week, and Mildred, who ran the tours, was letting staff go.

  The Rusty Spur was hanging in there only because it offered truckers an all-you-could-eat buffet of heart-stopping grease, which had probably helped kill more people than gunfights or disease ever did. By rights, the place should be haunted by fat dudes expiring on toilets. Still, between that, the sheriff’s department up the road and the occasional tour, the place kept ticking along. Just.

  Jack found himself staring into the ice-bucket. Damn. Life was too long for purpose. He looked up at the sight of a large man riding into town on horseback.

  Riding was too kind a word for it. The guy was hanging on to the horse’s neck inelegantly as it trotted down Main Street. Jack didn’t recognise him, but he recognised the horse.

  “Shittin’ Nora!” hollered the man as the horse deposited him in front of the Rusty Spur.

  Jack sighed.

  Too damn long for purpose.

  Bunny lay on the ground. Everything hurt too much for him to consider moving. Luckily, the place didn’t seem that busy, so the chances of him getting run over appeared to be minimal. At least, not unless his own horse turned around and came back to trample him. Bunny wouldn’t put it past the foul-tempered beast. They had not got on well at all.

  He stayed there, feeling thoroughly sorry for himself, until he heard a throat being cleared.

  “Afternoon, sir,” a voice said.

  Bunny looked up to see a man of about fifty, wearing a rather hangdog expression, looking down at him.

  “Howerya. I’m having a hell of a day. My car blew out all four of its tyres up the road there.”

  “Did it?” said the man. “Fancy that. I’m Jack. Welcome to the Rusty Spur.”

  “’Twasn’t good. Middle of the desert and no bloody phone signal either. I mean, how can there be no feckin’ mobile phone signal?”

  “Yeah. The cell tower keeps getting blown up,” said the man.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “By who?”

  “Best guess – the same little old lady who found you and was nice enough to sell you her spare horse.”

  Bunny looked long and hard at the man. “You have got to be shitting me – she must’ve been eighty if she was a day!”

  “She’s been pulling this scam since she was fifty. Why stop when it works so well?”

  “But … Well, that is truly diabolical.”

  “Yeah,” said the man. “Her grandsons will have stripped down your car for parts by now.”

  “I can’t believe I fell for that.”

  “Hey, if it didn’t work, she wouldn’t have been doing it since the last century.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Bunny, “she’s not getting her horse back.”

  “What horse would that be?”

  Bunny looked down the street, which was a remarkably equine-free zone. “A man could really take against this place.”

  “There’ll be some cops in here later on. You can report this heinous crime to them.”

  “And they’ll get my car back?”

  “Almost certainly not, but they enjoy hearing about old Marge’s shenanigans. If you’d like to come in, your first beer is on the house.”

  Bunny stood up slowly, cataloguing his various aches and pains as he did so. “That’s very decent of you.”

  “Not really. Marge has a tab for this very purpose. She’s good like that.”

  Bunny shook his head. “Unbelievable. And I’ll tell you what, my arse is red-raw. I’ve never ridden a horse before.”

  “Really?” said Jack. “I would never have guessed.”

  Bunny dusted off the backside of his jeans. “Now’s a splendid time to wound my pride – I won’t feel it over the pain in my bollocks. Why would anyone get on a horse more than once?”

  Jack shrugged. “Occasionally they make an ill-fated attempt to go back and find Marge, but I don’t recommend it.”

  “I meant in general. It looks so much easier when jockeys do it. They must store their nuts behind their ears.”

  “Interesting theory,” said Jack. “So, Cork?”

  Bunny looked at him in surprise. “That’s right. How’d you get that?”

  Jack shrugged. “I was a bartender in New York. You don’t do that gig for long without getting to know your Irish accents. Don’t suppose you know a man called Tommy Byrne?”

  “’Tis a big country. We don’t all know each other, despite what you … Wait, does he have one leg?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I do. Not seen him for thirty years.”

  “You’re not likely to either. He died in a bar I was working in.”

  Bunny stopped and looked at the man. “Well, you’re just full of good news today, aren’t you?”

  Ten minutes later, Bunny was sitting at the bar, on a large cushion, halfway down his second beer and feeling slightly better about life. It had been made clear to him that only the first one was free. As it happened, he had very little attachment to the car. Still, he was embarrassed to have been taken in so completely by an octogenarian con artist. He was losing his touch.

  “I’m starving,” he said.

  “Well, riding the range is hungry work,” said Jack.

  “Too right. Not had a good meal for two days.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Not that you had a choice. We don’t do cordon bleu but people love what we do.”

  “Good to know. Could eat a horse’s arse.”

  “And while that’d be appropriate retribution, we ain’t got that.”

  “Never mind,” Bunny said, scanning the menu. He pointed at the bottom. “What’s this thing?”

  “You don’t want that,” said Jack.

  “You’ve not told me what it is yet.”

  “It’ll be the worst decision you’ll make today, and that’s really saying something.”

  “Jack, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re quite the ray of sunshine.”

  “OK,” Jack said, folding his rag neatly. “If you must know, the apocalypse platter is everything on the menu, and I mean everything. And if you finish it in under two hours, you eat for free. You don’t, and it’s one hundred bucks, no matter how far you got.”

  Bunny pointed at the small print. “What’s this bit?”

  “Oh no.”

  “C’mon, out with it.”

  “I’m just saying, as someone who works here, I would rather not watch somebody attempt this. Order anything else and I’ll throw in free fries.”

  “It says,” said Bunny, running his finger under the type, “that if you finish the apocalypse platter, not only is it free, but you can drink as much beer as you like. On the house.”

  He smiled at Jack – a wonky-eyed smile that many men had seen over the years, normally right before their lives took a decided turn for the worse.

  Jack sighed, then shouted over his shoulder into the kitchen. “Miguel, we got somebody for the platter.”

  Bunny rubbed his hands together gleefully.

  Jack hit a couple of buttons on the register and extended a hand. “That’ll be a hundred bucks.”
>
  “But—”

  “You’ve got to pay up front. If you make it, you’ll get it back. I started doing it this way because, with God as my witness, I am not going through another dead, fat guy’s pockets looking for money.”

  Chapter Two

  John Manzano – Mad Dog to his friends – looked at the line of four men standing in front of him. Up until an hour ago they would’ve considered themselves to be his friends, but assuming they were still able to read facial expressions, they wouldn’t be so confident now. They were pledges in the Razorbacks, the biker gang of which Mad Dog was the leader, and they’d embarrassed him. For a man in his position, being made to look a fool was not good.

  Mad Dog didn’t wish to be called by that name any more. It felt unprofessional. He’d been reading a book by this Fortune 500 guy, Johnny Shure, and he was surprised how much of it rang true for his situation. There was a long and glorious history of people who had made their fortunes on the darker side of the street before going legit. It was the American Dream. John Manzano could do that, Mad Dog could not. If Joe Kennedy had been called Mad Dog, he’d never have made it over that particular fence.