Читать книгу Purgatory - Ken Bruen - Страница 15

8

You’d lose a farm in one bet, take you twenty years to drink it.

—Old Irish saying

Peg Ramsay thought no more of Jack Taylor, his bizarre account of some lunatic maybe posing a threat. She’d laughed.

Jesus wept. She had more enemies than the church had excuses.

She stood in the foyer of her new home. A magnificent seven-bedroom house, built in the boom by a property whiz who was now in jail. She’d bought it for a quarter of the asking price, the market being now more a turkey shoot than a business. Her minders/collectors, FX, Francis, Xavier, were four rooms away, chowing down in the vast kitchen. Rottweilers, she thought, loyal as long as she fed them.

She climbed the wide ornate stairway to the third floor, muttered,

“Third floor! Phew, count ’em and weep, yah bad bastards.”

Pride in her achievements was a rush, a sheer jolt of energy that propelled her up the stairs. Stopped, leaned on the balustrade, and wondered,

“Maybe some paintings along the walls?”

Buy a shitload of art. Like everything in the country, artists were on sale. She registered a sound a split second before the arm went around her throat, a knee in her back. Then a hand on her spine and she thought,

“Over the balustrade?”

A voice whispered,

My heart is as some famine-murdered land

Whence all good things have perished utterly

And well I know my soul in hell must lie.

One,

Her body halfway over the rail.

Two,

A deep effort of breath.

Push,

And fly,

The foyer rushing to smash her startled face.

A DIY petrol bomb landed on her back and with a whoosh illuminated the marble inlay.