The Whore-Mother by Shaun Herron Page B

and just follow him,” Powers said.
    McManus tucked it behind the delivery van. It led them down the Springfield Road, around a bend that hid them from the factory, then turned left off the road and headed through the housing estates back the way it had come. It picked up speed, left the outskirts of the city, and took a lane towards, then a bumpy track across the lower slopes of the Black Mountain. They stopped in a dip that hid them from the houses in the lower distance and the road far to their right.
    The driver of the van got out and came grinning back to the car. His puck-face was creased by the lines of the irrepressible witling. He leaned on the door and spoke as a familiar to Powers. It was easy for him to lean on the door. His head at full stretch didn’t reach the top of the window frame. He was indeed, Wee Jimmy.
    â€œPat,” he said. His grin was engagingly harmless.
    â€œJimmy,” Powers said. It might have been a casual meeting on a highway.
    â€œWho’s yer man?” Jimmy said, and nodded at McManus.
    â€œMcManus.”
    â€œYou drivin?”
    McManus said, “Yes.”
    â€œTake her to the third door on the loadin ramp. The man ye want is Tommy Davison. All ye do is tell him I’m sick. They’ll give youse a trolley and ye take the case to the kitchen. Then ye come out and drive away. That’s all.” He grinned encouragement. “Tie me up, boys. An make me comfortable, for Jasus sake. I’m gonta be here for bloody hours.” He handed over his delivery book. The possibility of major hardship occurred to him. He glanced up at scattered white clouds moving sedately across the sky. “If it rains, I’ll get my deatha cold.” He winked at McManus. He was a witling all right. This was a great lark. He was here, remote on the Black Mountain. The half-shift at the chemical plant, down in the canteen for the tea break, was far away on the edge of the Lough. Out of sight. Out of mind. No connection between Loughside and Black Mountain. Not in Wee Jimmy’s mind. He could deliver at the Chemicals tomorrow, survey the ruin and the bloodstains and say to the survivors, “Holy Jasus. That’s fuckin awful.”
    â€œIreland One Fuckin Nation,” Wee Jimmy said with glee before Powers put the tape over his mouth and propped him up behind a drystone wall.
    â€œSee you the morrow, Jimmy,” Powers said, and patted his head. Jimmy nodded vigorously, his eyes glittering with amusement. “Away on,” Powers said, and shoved McManus towards the van.
    Wee Jimmy sat behind the wheel of his van on two thick hard cushions. McManus shoved them away to prevent his head pushing through the roof.
    â€œJoy Street,” Powers said, “like shit.”
    When they came out of Joy Street again the packing case, all properly marked like a case of Marsh’s products, was behind them in the van. It was a quarter to ten. Callaghan picked them up in the doctor’s car when they came through Divis Street and McManus watched him follow and watched him peel off for the Shore Road when he took the van into Duncrue Street and onto the Loughside Motorway.
    It was the widest—ten lane—and the shortest—two miles—high-speed motorway in Europe, built on stilts to serve a growing complex of industrial plants located close to the docks. The chemical plant was less than a mile down the motorway, on the left. McManus put his foot down. The skin of his neck was beginning to tingle. It was a quarter past ten when he turned down the ramp into the plant yard and pulled up the van at the loading platform. Then he saw a strange thing in the side mirror: Callaghan, in the doctor’s car, pulling up beyond the yard entrance. Callaghan was supposed to wait a mile beyond this point, on the Shore Road just off the Greencastle Interchange, where the van would be abandoned and the switch made. It was ten-twenty. He swung the van rear-on to the