Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman Page B

arched, body shuddered. She sighed and relaxed, falling fully against me.
    We stood there like that for a few minutes, the tension flowing out of her body. She felt small and vulnerable in my arms. It was dawning on me that I did in fact know far more about Jim than I did about the St. Pauli Girl. I really had cut myself off from women. I’d sleep with them, but I didn’t want to know them or anything about them.
    “I’m sorry about before,” I said, kissing her on top of her head. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”
    “Why not?”
    “Meg’s supposed to be calling soon about the book deal and the tension’s starting to get to me.”
    “Oh, the publishing stuff.”
    “Yeah, that.” I kissed her again, let her go, and retrieved the file from the desk. “You were asking about this.”
    “I found it in bed instead of you,” she said, wrapping herself up in an old quilt thrown over the back of my desk chair.
    I brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear, and kissed her on the mouth.
    “What about the file?” she asked, sitting down in my desk chair.
    I reached into the file. “You’ve seen me writing lately.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’m writing about what’s in here,” I said, handing her a tattered spiral notebook.
    “What is it?”
    “It’s the diary of a murderer.”
    She got a sick look on her face. “A murderer?”
    I told her about being sent to do a piece on the Troubles and detailed how I’d met the man who’d hunted me down in Deptford, how he’d given me that damned notebook.
    “But why you?” she asked.
    “He never said anything except he heard I was looking for a different kind of story. I don’t know. Maybe he could spot a fellow lost soul.”
    “Didn’t you ask?”
    I laughed. “He wasn’t the kind of man to ask.”
    “What makes his story so different?”
    “Because he was like the slave ship captain who comes to see the tragedy of what he has done. But unlike the slave ship captain who writes ‘Amazing Grace’ because he believes there is a God to redeem him, McGuinn knows there is no God. McGuinn is so much more a tragic figure because he knows there is no redemption or forgiveness. What is done is done.”
    But the book wasn’t done and when Jim called to say he’d be a half hour late, I went back to it.
    There he was, the jumpy bollix, ten paces over his left shoulder and about as inconspicuous as a cunt in a cock shop. He was looking everywhere but at McGuinn. Short of stature, he was a mean-faced fooker with opaque eyes. No more than thirty with the bloated muscles and acne of a juicer, he was a real trouble boy, that one. The type of lad that was always spoiling for violence. Maybe, McGuinn thought, he would oblige the lad, as he possessed a knack for violence his own self.
But he had to make a choice quickly. He supposed he could vanish into the crowd like so much smoke and keep going. It wasn’t as if this town held any particular fascination for him. To the contrary, he could recreate his lonely little hell in any of a thousand shite holes along the road. One factory or abattoir was much like another, one bloody and mindless job same as the next. Yet he found he was in no hurry to scurry. He’d been on the run his entire feckin’ life and he was spent. This corner of nowhere was as fine as any other in which to make a stand. Besides, he was curious.
This set up smelled neither of the Prods nor the Brits. Although it had the feel of amateur night at Ralph and Jim’s Bar and Grill, McGuinn couldn’t risk dismissing the possibility that there were forces at play here beyond his experience. Unlikely, for sure, but possible.
The man who believes he has seen it all is a blind fooker and more often than not, a dead one.
     

 
    Weiler’s writing was, for my money, always less than the sum of its parts. The novels were like long-form versions of Steely Dan songs: slick, well-produced, clever as hell, but rather soulless and