The Searcher, стр. 48
“I haven’t got a clue,” Eugene says. He drapes his cloth neatly over his bumper, picks up a can of lube and starts carefully spraying his cables. “I doubt it was anything serious. I saw them leaving like twenty minutes later. But knowing Brendan, if the Guards weren’t after him that time, that would just make him figure everything was grand and go right back to his big plan, instead of doing the smart thing and dropping it before they actually did come after him. That’s what I mean about Brendan not being as smart as he thinks. He’s intelligent enough, but he doesn’t think things through. If he’d used his brain in school instead of mitching off to get stoned, he could have got into college. And if he’d used it to think through his brilliant idea, he wouldn’t have ended up so terrified of the Guards that he’s probably sleeping in a doorway somewhere.”
Cal says, “He wouldn’t get in touch with you, if it came down to that? Borrow a few bucks, sooner than sleep rough?”
“Oh,” Eugene says, considering that for the first time. “I mean, obviously I’d, if he really needed . . . But he wouldn’t. Brendan’s ridiculous about money. Like, you can’t even offer to buy him a pint, or he gets the hump about charity and storms off home. It’s like, fuck’s sake, we’re all just trying to have a good night out together here, what’s your problem? You know?”
Cal figures Eugene’s manner of offering might be the kind that would have sent him storming off home, too, at nineteen. He wholeheartedly agrees with Brendan’s decision to go to Fergal, rather than Eugene, for extra cash. For him to do even that, the need must have been urgent. “Well, some folks are touchy that way,” he says. “He didn’t say nothing to you that day, about where he was headed?”
“What day?”
“The day he left. He was meeting you, wasn’t he?”
Eugene stares at Cal like he shouldn’t be allowed out alone. “Um, no? What with me being in Prague with the lads from college? It was Easter hols?”
“Right,” Cal says. “Easter hols. Sounds like I can’t count on Brendan coming home any time soon, huh?”
Eugene shrugs. “Who knows, with him. He could take a notion and be home tomorrow, or he might never come back at all.”
“Huh,” Cal says. “There anyone else that might be able to help me out?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Eugene says. He dabs away a trickle of excess lube and leans back to examine the bike. “Think I’ll take this for a spin, get it properly dried out.”
“Good idea,” Cal says, straightening up off the gatepost. “If you hear from Brendan, tell him there’s work waiting for him.”
“No problem,” Eugene says, picking up his helmet from the drive and flicking a speck of something off it. “Don’t hold your breath.”
“I’m an optimistic kind of guy,” Cal says. “Nice talking to you.”
He watches Eugene roar off up the road, weaving the Yamaha neatly around potholes. Only a little bit of the motorbike made it into Brendan’s Facebook shot, but he’s pretty sure it was this one. Eugene was at least generous enough to give his buddy a ride on his bike. Either he doesn’t share his helmet, or Brendan was too much of a dumbass to wear it.
Cal heads back through the village, which has its Saturday up and running now. The aging blond woman who owns the boutique is decking out her window mannequin in an outfit running riot with ferocious tropical flowers, Noreen is polishing the brasswork on her door, and Barty the barman is giving the windows of Seán Óg’s a wipe with newspaper. Cal nods to them all, and picks up his pace when he sees Noreen whip round with her polishing cloth raised and a gleam in her eye.
He walks the lanes for a while before he heads for home. In his mind, he’s spreading out and arranging what he’s got so far. If Eugene is right and Brendan is on the run from the police, then at the top of the list of potential reasons has to be drugs. Brendan had contacts, even if they were just low-level ones, and he wanted cash. Maybe he wanted to start selling, or actually had started selling, but he didn’t have the constitution for it. The first time the police came sniffing around—or maybe the first time his suppliers got a little bit scary, and Cal knows suppliers can get plenty scary—he panicked and ran.
Officer O’Malley up in town didn’t mention anything about a drugs op focused on the village, or about Brendan Reddy being in anyone’s sights. But then, Officer O’Malley might not know.
Or Brendan’s business plan might not have involved drugs at all. There are plenty of ways for a kid to pick up some cash on the wrong side of the law around here: running stolen cars across the border, helping out the guys who launder agricultural diesel. And those are only the ones that run close enough to the surface that even a stranger can see them. A kid like Brendan, with ideas and an entrepreneurial streak, could have come up with a lot more.
Another possibility, one that Eugene the boy genius hasn’t thought of, is that Brendan’s moneymaking scheme and his fear of the police were two separate things. Maybe he was planning on taking his odd-jobs business legit, or getting famous on YouTube. And meanwhile, unrelated, he was doing something bad.
And then there’s the possibility that neither the moneymaking scheme nor the bad thing was ever real. Brendan’s mind could have been misfiring. Everything Cal has heard puts him on the unsteady side: one minute on top of the world and spinning