Priest by Ken Bruen

then,
    â€˜The stench of him.’
    Â 
    Outside, as the Americans say, my ride had gone. I walked down the drive, my head in turmoil, going,
    â€˜Oh God, if God there be, let it not be Jeff.’
    Spent the rest of the morning trying to find where the body was. Tedious, frustrating, but primarily terrorizing. At four thirty I was in the city morgue, finally allowed to view the corpse. I stood before a metal table, a sheet covering the body, enclosed by the institution-green colour on the walls, dizzy from smells, real and imagined. The attendant, impatient, asked,
    â€˜You ready yet?’
    A whine in there, but I couldn’t really start beating onhim, tempting though it was. I nodded and, like some second-grade magician, with a flourish he whipped off the sheet – this was his party piece.
    Closed my eyes real tight and begged, did the old Catholic barter, whispered,
    â€˜God, if You let this not be Jeff, I won’t smoke again. I give You my word.’
    What else did I have? And that item was shaky, suspect, at the best of times. As a child, you wanted something – something impossible, like civility from your mother – you went to the Abbey, lit a candle and did the trade-off. Telling the Sacred Heart, ‘If Mum is nice to me, I won’t hate people.’
    Shit like that.
    Never worked. She was hostile till she drew her last bitter breath, which is some achievement. I thought of Jeff, his love of that child, the way his eyes lit up when she smiled. Thought too of his face when he realized the broken tiny body on the footpath was his daughter. And she was lying there, her head twisted to the side, a small pool of blood under her ear, because his best friend, me, wasn’t paying attention.
    The very first time I met him, the signs in his pub read, NO BUD LIGHT. He was my age, and always wore a waist-coat, black 501s like Springsteen and his long grey hair was tied in a ponytail. I’d been a Guard – it was my training to kick the crap out of men with ponytails. It said so in the manual, under
Section
#
791: beat on hippies, students, leftwingers.
    He had effortless cool, the real kind, none of that poised shite. I introduced him to Cathy Bellingham, an ex-punkfrom London who’d washed up in Galway while kicking a heroin habit. Such was the nature of our cosmopolitan city these days. Who could have foreseen it. She married him, like some Jane Austen novel written by Hunter S. Thompson.
    Against all the odds, it worked, and they had the little girl. I loved them and deeply envied them. They had what I could only ever dimly imagine, and I was the one who smashed it to smithereens. Jeff wasn’t just my best mate, he was probably my only one.
    My hands were clenched tight. I broke the skin on my palm with my nails, and welcomed the tiny throb of pain. The attendant was out of patience, snapped,
    â€˜Know him?’
    He was chewing a Juicy Fruit, the aroma sickening in its strength. I looked down, took an unsteady breath, must have been silent for nearly five minutes as my mind whirled, then,
    I said,
    â€˜No. No, I don’t.’
    He wrapped the gum around his front teeth, said,
    â€˜No one ever knows the winos, they’re truly the cast away.’
    â€˜What happens to him?’
    Snapped the gum with a long tongue, said,
    â€˜We burn ‘em.’
    Jesus.
    â€˜It used to be a pauper’s grave, but the city is running out of land.’
    I was seriously angry, said,
    â€˜People are so inconsiderate.’
    He looked at me with vague interest, asked,
    â€˜How’s that?’
    â€˜Dying . . . using up valuable land.’
    He gave a throaty swallow, went,
    â€˜That’s sarcasm, right?’
    â€˜Or something close.’
    â€˜No biggie, I get it a lot, it’s an outlet for rage.’
    I turned to stare at him, asked,
    â€˜What, you took psychology?’
    He gave a superior grin, said,
    â€˜I know people.’
    â€˜Well,