THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 65
it’s very presentable from a distance. It’s
only up close it lets you down.”
Noonan managed a smile.
“The family will need to be told,”
Crean said. “Can you handle that?”
Noonan nodded.
Crean studied her for a moment,
rooted out a pack of disposable tissues,
and offered them to her.
“Your forehead,” he said. “You can’t
be showing up to the family’s door
with that poor fucker’s blood all over
your face.”
T
he forensics team arrived, as did
Inspectors Burke and McElroy over
from Castlebar. Crean and the inspec-
tors escorted the Creedon men to Bal-
lina station. Noonan and Swift detoured
back to the station so that Noonan could
clean up, change shirts, and double-
check the address they had on file. The
house in the Glen Gardens estate was
under the name Amy Mullally. Noonan
rang the listed number but got no an-
swer and decided against leaving a mes-
sage. She rang home, told Trevor she
would be late.
“How are you now?” Noonan asked
Swift as they idled in traffic in the town
center.
“I’m O.K.,” he said. “I mean, you
know.”
He did not complete the thought,
smiling dumbly and gazing out at the
streets of Ballina as if he weren’t quite
sure they were there. It was darker now,
the street lights throwing down their
harsh yellow dazzle.
“That the first death you seen on
the job?” Noonan asked him.
“It’s not been called yet.”
“No. But was it?”
“There was that lad topped himself
in the shed in Easky last Christmas.”
“I mean a death where someone else
has done the killing.”
“There was a couple of gangland
shootings up in Dublin, after I’d just
come out of Templemore. Only saw the
aftermaths, though. Never saw a fella
dying in front of me like that. You?”
Noonan shook her head.
They were waiting on a light at the
entrance to the Tesco car park. A pack
of teen-age boys was crossing the road.
There were five of them, moving in ad-
dled formation. They were dressed in-
terchangeably in branded hoodies, some
in tracksuit bottoms, some in jeans.
They were clean-faced and dark-haired.
They so resembled one another, at least
at a passing glance, that they might all
have been brothers. As they moved from
street light to street light, Noonan
watched their bobbing, intent, vocifer-
ating heads and smiled, because the
thing about boys was that they only
had the one haircut. That haircut
changed every couple of years, but what-
ever it was they all had it. Noonan re-
membered that for a while—ten, twelve,
fifteen years ago?—it had been the per-
oxide-blond highlights; every strutting
little gangster coming up had the per-
oxide-blond highlights. The style now
in vogue was tight at the sides, with
just enough hair on top to brush for-
ward or to the side. Her own sons wore
that style, and each of these boys did,
too. For an idle moment, Noonan’s at-
tention dwelled on the lad trailing the
group, the tallest and palest, not speak-
ing but sunk in his thoughts and seem-
ingly indifferent to the animated cross-
talk of the four in front. He looked up
and caught Noonan’s eye. Without
thinking, Noonan raised two fingers
from the steering wheel in that imme-
morial gesture of laconic country sa-
lute. The boy’s face, benignly blank,compressed into a sudden snarl as he
hocked a thick pearl of phlegm into
the gutter by the squad car and kept
on walking.
“Did you see that?” Noonan said to
Swift, watching the boys recede in the
rearview mirror.
“See what?” Swift mumbled.
Noonan swerved the squad car onto
the curb, unclipped her seat belt, and
jumped out onto the pavement. She
came right up behind the boy, grabbed
a fistful of his collar, and shoved him
against the parking-lot wall so force-
fully that her own hat went twirling to
the ground.
“What was that, now? Have you
something you want to say?” Noonan
roared into the boy’s face.
The boy looked at her, startled, a
muscle jumping in his clenched jaw.
“Hey, he didn’t do nothing,” one of
the boy’s friends blurted.
“Shut up,” Swift said to the friend
as he arrived on the scene.
“Well?” Noonan asked the boy.
“Tell me what I did,” the boy said.
“You know what you did!”
The boy said nothing. The muscle
in his jaw stopped jumping.
“Pick that cap up,” Noonan said.
The boy looked at the Garda cap“I had that nightmare again where everyone found out I’m in my
late thirties and still have no idea how the stock market works.”