The Mexicans gathered the b.l.o.o.d.y heads in a pile perhaps the way their Aztec ancestors would have done half a millennium before.

They videoed the pyramid of heads and since Markov's work was done he went back up the ladder. He walked out into the guava plantation to get air.

The sun was setting and it was quiet. Someone in the house was playing on the piano. He stared at the blue flowers of the cacti and the dust whirls and the sky which had turned a deep desert magenta.

He breathed deep.

His arms felt weak and the new golf gloves were soaked with blood. He took them off and dropped them in the dirt.

The man with the rings patted him on the back.

He didn't like to be touched by men but he was too fatigued to object.

"You'll need to take a shower," the man said.

"Yes," he agreed.

"This way," they said and led him back to the house and showed him to a stand-pipe near a stable.

"Here?" he asked. "f.u.c.king forget it. I need a shower."

"You can't go in looking like that," they told him. And there were six of them and they were adamant.

He stripped and showered under the cold water and he heard the men muttering about his scars and tattoos. They gave him a change of shirt and jeans and finally he went inside to meet Don Ramon.

Ramon had a fully serviced bar set up in the dining room with a barkeep and a c.o.c.ktail waitress. He ordered a double vodka and a freshly squeezed orange juice and ice. He mixed them following a formula of his own devising and drank.

He waited and waited until the sky was the colour of a black bull and the old paranoia and suspicion had risen to the surface again.

He drummed his fingers on the bar and refused the offer of more liquor.

The barman looked uneasy.

This, Markov told himself, was what happened to you as an independent operator. Without a crew or a family to back you up there was no possibility of retaliation. No possibility of a war. Anyone at any time could decide that you were expendable.

Markov began thinking of ways he could get out of here. Surely he could lose them in the desert at night. The barkeep was a kid, about nineteen. He could kill him in a heartbeat and- The man with the rings came back and told him that with regret Don Ramon could not meet him personally but he had asked him to give him this.

Markov took the envelope and didn't count it.

They took him to the truck and he rode in the back where he hoped the stink would be less. He looked at the stars and smoked.

They left him at his own car and he had to drive for forty-five minutes before he stopped shaking.

It was nine by the time he arrived at the Nogales Days Inn.

He just made the last meal service. He got the enchiladas and a pitcher of beer and tequila. He asked around at the bar and he was able to score a gram of c.o.ke. He snorted it in his room and lit a cigarette and sat on the balcony chair. The view was over the parking lot and the highway and the smell was of kerosene cooking fires and cheap corn oil.

When the c.o.ke started wearing off the memories came and now he realised he didn't want them after all.

But it was too late. The smell of blood. The screaming...

He only ever flashbacked to three events in the whole Chechen War: the parachute drop, the OMON guy between the lines and this one: the two hours that followed the phosphorous sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.tting the munic.i.p.al hall.

He went to the minibar and got couple of Modelos and drank and remembered it all with crystal clarity. The flames burning bright yellow through the grey rubble, Dmitri, the platoon sniper shooting at anyone trying to get out. The victims trapped inside, yelling at them in Russian as the wooden ceiling caught and the roof beams burned. Finally, of course, the women who had taken to hurling babies and children out the windows. Not that that did them any good. Their orders were clear. No survivors. No witnesses. Perversely too, of course, it had all been so lovely: the bear mother in her sky, the phosphorous fire burning gold, red tracer from the AKs arcing like fireworks. When Captain Kutzo said it was sufficiently safe for their platoon to go in they went in. There were half a dozen still alive. They killed four and saved two women to rape. Two women who ultimately survived the entire war and ended up telling their story to a disbelieving foreign media. Yeltsin could get away with anything.

Markov clutched at the crucifix round his neck. A phantom crucifix that he had lost long before on his very first days in New York in Brighton Beach.

He was drooling. He had fallen asleep. The hotel phone was ringing.

He went back inside the hotel room, found his leather jacket and took out the red rubber ball he always kept there. He squeezed it and bounced it once off the carpet.

He picked up the phone.

"How was your day?" Bernie asked.

"Okay," he said.

"I won't ask you about money."

"I tell you, anyway," he said like some G.o.dd.a.m.n yuk just off the boat. He corrected himself. "I will tell you anyway. It was okay."

"You're wasted down there, brother. Marina called, I didn't know whether you wanted me to tell you the hotel number or not, so I didn't."

"I will talk to her later," Markov said.

"Anyway, bro, I got a real money job for you," Bernie said. "How much?"

"You heard of Michael Forsythe?" "Yes."

"He'll give you the rec. Fifty thousand. There's a catch, though." "What's the catch?"

"It's in Ireland. You ever been to Ireland?" "No."

"You object to the travel?" "For fifty thousand I'll go to f.u.c.king Mars." "That's my boy. When can you get back to Vegas?" Markov felt the car keys in his trouser pocket. He had a flight booked for tomorrow afternoon but if he drove the rental non-stop... "Let's talk at breakfast," he said.

CHAPTER 7.

THE TAIL.

When he arrived in Carrick he was so tired he had just one pint at the Jordy Arms and went home and slept for thirteen hours straight.

He didn't know what day it was when he woke up. It was raining and the halyards were clanging off the aluminium masts on every boat in the marina.

He lay in bed for a long time and thought about the forty thousand quid he had made in the New York trip. Rent on this place for two years or mortgage payment on the apartments for four months. Either way it was sweet.

And there was more money coming.

A fifty-thousand-pound retainer.

Four hundred and fifty for finding some wee la.s.sie on the mitch. A wee la.s.sie and bairns.

He lay and the longer he lay there the more claustrophobic he felt.

He sat up, walked to the window and swung it open. Gulped the sea air.

Sometimes the house felt a prison. Every house he had ever stayed in had, at times, felt like a prison.

But he couldn't go back to a caravan, not now, not ever.

He stared through the open window at the rain and the boats in the marina and Carrickfergus Castle which was a grey presence through the mist.

Nah, he couldn't go back to tinker life and he was trying to leave The Life too. Would leave The Life after this.

The rain was pouring on his head. It was mixed with sea spray and snow.

He let it all hit him.

"I'm a tough guy, see?" he said and closed the window and went to the bathroom. He had to bend down to reach the mirror. He was tall and pale and with a four-day beard he looked like the survivor of a long-term kidnapping. Some people said that they could tell that he was a tinker, but others said there was no tinker look, except that tinkers seldom had grey hair: the oldest Pavee he'd ever known was Declan McQuarrie's granny and she died at fifty-nine.

The cat came. How did it know that he was back? He'd have to write off a letter to the Fortean Times.

At least he knew how it got in now. Through the bas.e.m.e.nt window and up the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs and through the crack in the kitchen door.

He sat on the toilet, put the cat on his lap and continued to look at himself.

He looked hara.s.sed, stressed. He'd been keeking it for over a year now since Ireland's economy had gone completely down the bog. In six months the unemployment rate had gone from five per cent to eleven and all over the island builders were dumping property. He was stuck with two luxury apartments overlooking the Lagan in Belfast. Half a million each was what he wanted, but the last offer he'd gotten was four hundred K for both, which would leave him at least three hundred thousand in debt.

Of course this money from b.l.o.o.d.y d.i.c.k Coulter would free him. He could sell the apartments, buy this house. Jesus. He could actually start living.

He didn't like to think about it too much.

He feared the jinx.

"Let's just see what happens, I mean you never know, eh, cat?"

The cat wasn't used to long sentences. The old bird next door never talked to it and it stared at him oddly and c.o.c.ked its head like a dog.

"You're know where I've been? I've been all the way around the world, so I have, Kitty," he said.

He called it Kitty, because when the old lady had told him its name a year ago, it had been something so dull he had forgotten it. Not that "Kitty" was a display of creative genius.

He got up and gave it some tuna from the fridge and ran the bath.

He read Rachel Coulter's case notes and shaved. He dressed and went outside. He inspected the front of the house, a couple of times there'd been graffiti on the wall or the fence, once a wee mucker had even scrawled "Tinkers Out" but Killian had had a word with the local UVF commander and not only had the graffiti stopped but now someone came along and did his gardening when he was away.

The house looked fine. There was a letter in the hall. When he opened it he found a credit card statement that included a charge from the Fairmont Hotel for a missing hand towel.

He had breakfast at the Jordy: Guinness pie and a coffee instead of a pint.

He walked to the car rental place on Cornmarket Street.

He wasn't sure how he'd ended up in this town. He'd never liked it. It was the young people. Even the nineteen-year-old douchebag giving him the rental car was way too cool for school. There was more att.i.tude in Carrick than Belfast or Dublin. First the kid said the place didn't open until half past seven and then the car itself turned out to be a white Ford Fiesta when he'd specifically ordered a Land Rover over the web. He kicked a pro forma stink and the douchebag pretended to look for another vehicle on his screen.

"Sorry, nothing else," he said.

"Okay," Killian muttered.

The Fiesta was parked at the far end of the lot, under a tree, covered in squirrel s.h.i.t. Inside it smelled of aftershave.

"Thanks for nothing," Killian mouthed as he drove out of the car park.

"Bye, and why don't you go f.u.c.k yourself," the douchebag mouthed from his booth.

Killian, who'd been taught to read lips by Kev McDonnell in the pit at the Trump Atlantic City gave him the finger; the kid responded in kind, and at exactly the same time both of them laughed.

"Carrickfergus," Killian said, and suspected that he was only pretending not to like it.

He drove north up the coast.

The radio was no good. Politics, country, soft rock.

There were mountains, glens, trees, cute wee towns and across the North Channel a fair of chunk of Scotland spectacular in the morning light.

For a while it looked a little like there was a tail on him, a kid in a big SUV, but when he hit the Causeway Coast the tail was gone.

Coleraine was students, civil servants and more students.

Rachel Coulter's last known address was a caravan park a little down the coast from the centre of town, not too far from the surfing and tourist spot of Portrush. Coulter's boys had found her there but they had f.u.c.ked up the get. Three of them on her and she'd got clean away and they didn't even write down a licence plate. Well, as Sean would say, amateur hour was over.

He hit the caravan park, knocked at a few doors until he was pointed in the direction of Anna, the next-door neighbour. He could tell straight away that money wasn't going to be an incentive for her. She was poor and a Jehovah's Witness, with a glint of eternity in the white of her eyeb.a.l.l.s.

There were a lot of kids running around; two of them were singing some kind of hymnal that would have sent Alan Lomax running for the tape recorder and the rest were playing a complex game that seemed to involve a lot of violent disputes about the rules. Consequently he had to give her the rap between screaming matches.

Ten questions in he saw that she didn't know anything. Rachel hadn't trusted her, which was pretty smart.

"You should ask Dave," Anne said. "Him over there. She took his car."

Dave was the other next-door neighbour, the man who'd owned the trailer she'd rented and, yes, whose car she'd borrowed and sold.

Coulter's men had got nothing out of Dave which was only to be expected.