“Then you need Riley.” Reaching for the coffeepot, Sawyer missed the looks of annoyance from both Doyle and Riley. “She’s the one with the connections. I did inventory there,” he continued. “Got a list for you. I don’t know if your connections go this far, but I was thinking. The way this place is set up, we’ve got some excellent vantage points from inside. If we had a couple of long guns with scopes.”
“The towers.” Thinking it through, Riley nodded. A good long-range weapon, a good shooter—yeah, it could be an advantage. “You any good with a rifle, Dead-Eye?”
“I hold my own. You?”
“Yeah, I hold my own, too. I’ll make some calls.”
After breakfast, she flipped through a couple of the books Bran pulled for her. She decided she’d work through the ones written in English first, then tackle the one handwritten in Latin—could be fun. And finish with the two in Gaelic, as she wasn’t as fluent there.
She set up her laptop, her tablets, pulled out her phone. Started making calls.
Forty minutes in, Doyle surprised her. She’d figured he’d find almost anything to do but join her in the library venture. With the phone at her ear, she pulled one of the books out of her stack, shoved it across the table, circled her finger.
“No problem at all,” she said into the phone. “But I’d want to look them over, test them out.” She rose, wandered to the window and back as she listened. “Fair enough. I’ve got a list of ammo. If you can supply us there, it may be we can work out what you’d call a volume discount.” Now she laughed. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, Liam. Sure, hang on.”
She dug Sawyer’s list out of her pocket, began to read it off. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, picked up her water, drank. “Like I said, we’re a kind of club, having what you could call a tournament of sorts. Reach out to Sean. He’ll vouch for me. No question about that, but he’s no more full of shit than the next guy. Like I said, I worked with him in Meath on the Black Friary, and again about three years ago on Caherconnell in the Burren. Check with him and let me know. Yeah, this number. Later.”
She hung up, blew out a breath. “We’re going to score there, but it’s going to take another hour or two to confirm.”
“Another gunrunner connection?”
“Not exactly, but this Liam’s got connections to certain people who’d supply certain products.”
“But he doesn’t know you.”
“Not directly. He’s the cousin of the ex-girlfriend of an associate of mine. My associate, the ex, and the cousin remain friendly, seeing as my associate introduced the ex to her husband, with whom she has two kids, and the cousin is godfather to the oldest. My associate and the cousin hunt together once or twice a year. The cousin also runs a kind of side business, cash only, out of his barn,
which is, handily, only about twenty kilometers east of Ennis. This works out, we get pizza, guns, and ammo in one trip.”
Not on his bike, Doyle thought with disappointment. So it would mean taking Bran’s car. “I’m driving.”
“Why is that? I know the roads better.”
“And how is that?”
“Because I’ve been here in the past decade and, in fact, consulted for a time on the Craggaunowen Project, which we’ll pass on the way to this barn.”
“Then you can navigate, but I’m driving.”
“We’ll flip for the wheel.”
“No.”
“You prefer rock, paper, scissors?”
He didn’t dignify that with an answer, and just continued to read. “This accounting is worthless. It talks of four sisters—in Ireland—charged with guarding an infant queen. Three were pure, and one was lured by a dark faerie, who with promises of power and eternal beauty, turned her against the other three.”
“Not worthless,” Riley disagreed. “Just the Telephone Game of Time. The root’s there.”
“Well tangled. It says the three good sisters hid the infant in a castle of glass on an invisible island, and flew to the moon, becoming stars. And in her rage, the fourth sister struck them down from the heavens, blah, blah. One fell as lightning, striking the earth with fire, another into the sea in a swirling tempest, the last into the north where it covered the land with ice.”
“Not that far off.”
He spared her a single look that mixed equal parts annoyance and frustration. “Far enough when you’ve got the queen—apparently growing up fast—flying from the invisible island on a winged horse to do battle with the evil sister, vanquishing her and turning her to stone.”
“Shake out the probable hyperbole, and you find roots. Nerezza materialized out of a stone column in a cave on Corfu.”
Doyle put the book aside. “I’ve lived a long time without seeing a winged horse.”