Galway Girl

Stapes had the new target lined up.

Meaning, he paid a guy for the info, a guy Jericho had introduced him to.

The target was

A large home behind the golf club, nicely secluded,

Rumored to have a legendary painting by Jack B. Yeats,

The Galway Tinkers.

Denied to exist by all the experts.

But if it did...

Phew-oh.

Stapes’s new source said in a hushed tone,

“You get that, I’ll give you fifty large right then and there and a percentage of the final sale.”

Fuck.

Like, really?

This particular fence owed a debt to Jericho. This was his way out of the debt, convince Stapes to burgle the house. The fence didn’t ask why. He’d seen Jericho in action and it wasn’t pretty.

Stapes had done his recon.

The occupiers, a couple in their late sixties, played bridge on Wednesday evenings, from seven to nine, so he duly prepared.

Black tracksuit,

Watch cap that pulled down neatly over the face but frigging inclined to heat up,

Large non-logo rucksack,

Surgical gloves.

No weapons.

(Caught with a weapon, add a fast ten to the sentence but, hey, who was getting caught?)

No negative waves.

Dwell on speed.

As he did a last-minute check on his gear, he was assailed by the image of Jericho shooting the barman in the face.

Fuck.

Brutal and beyond belief.

He sat transfixed as she calmly turned to him and Scott, the gun still smoking, and he was sure she was on a spree.

But something flicked across her face and she snapped back to whatever passed for normal in her bizarre world.

There and then Stapes knew:

“She will kill us all, sooner or later.”

And he was done with those crazy fucks.

Focus.

On job in hand.

When he had his cash he’d be in the wind.

Jack Taylor? Jericho had him in her sights so he could simply let her deal with him. He did two fast lines of coke, got the ambience, then moved to boogie.

Getting into the house was so easy he was almost spooked. When it was this simple, he worried.

Moved along the ground floor to the main room and stood back, let out a

Whoosh.

The whole back wall was a mass of paintings, must be close to a hundred.

All framed but not, alas, labeled. He stood for a moment before what seemed a tornado of color, thought,

“Who the fuck is Yeats?”

Took a deep breath, muttered,

“Chill, chill, dude.”

And thanked God for iPhones.

Used the phone to view the picture his source had provided, the source insisting,

“This is from a facsimile as no one has ever seen the actual painting.”

Stapes had wondered,

“The fuck is a facsimile?”

Phone in one hand, he moved along the rows and lines of paintings, the colors starting to blend and whirl, giving him the beginnings of a hard-core headache. He paused.

“Step back, focus.”

And did a wee bit more coke.

The icy dribble down his throat, then he exclaimed,

“Hold the bloody phones.”

Bent down and, there in the left-hand corner, bingo.

His first thought was,

“Are they fucking kidding?”

To him it seemed like a kid’s first attempt at stick figures. He rechecked the phone image, shrugged, muttered,

“The fuck do I know?”

Ripped it from the wall, the coke adding a degree of ferocity that brought plaster and noise.

“Whoops,”

He cried,

Now beginning to have himself a time.

He shoved it into his ruck, then considered snatching half a dozen at random but the weight alone might make it just a tired exercise in futility.

His innate greed wanted to ransack the house but, if his source was right, he already had the prize.

He was well pleased as he headed for the back door, hummed a Pogues tune, no easy feat, and opened the door.

To a sea of blue.