Bad Men (2003) by John Connolly

Author:John Connolly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: John Connolly
Published: 2003-06-26T23:00:00+00:00

Danny was kicking up a fuss, as he always did when his mother tried to leave him for an evening. It came from not having a father around, she believed. It had made him dependent, maybe even a little soft, and that worried her. She wanted him to be strong, because at some point he was going to have to learn about the world they had left behind, and the man who had contributed to his creation. But she also wanted him to be strong for her own selfish reasons. She was tired; tired of the constant fear, tired of looking over her shoulder, tired of having nobody on whom she could depend. She wanted Danny to grow up to be big and tough, to protect her as she had protected him. But that day, it seemed, was a long way off.

“Where are you going?” he asked again, in that whining voice he adopted when he felt that the world was being unfair to him.

“I told you already. I’m going out to dinner.”

“With Joe?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like Joe.”

“Don’t say that, Danny. You know it’s not true.”

“It is true. I hate him. He killed a bird.”

“We went through this before, Danny. He had to kill it. It was hurt. It was in so much pain that the kindest thing Joe could have done was to put it out of that pain.”

She had given him the gull carved for him by Dupree. He had looked at it for a moment, then had cast it aside. Later, when she went to retrieve it from the floor, it was gone, but she had glimpsed it on the shelf in Danny’s room before they left the house. Her son was a complex little boy.

The car jogged as it hit a dip in the road, the headlights skewing crazily across the trees for a moment. She wondered if she should bring up what had been troubling her since earlier in the evening, or if she should just let it rest until the morning.

She had gone outside to put some water in the car and her attention had been drawn to the little grave that Joe had created for the dead gull. The stone that marked the spot had been moved aside, and the earth was scattered around what was now a shallow hole. The bird was gone, but she had found blood and some feathers nearby. It could have been an animal that had dug up the bird, she supposed, except that Danny had dirt beneath his nails when he’d eaten earlier that evening, and when she’d questioned him about it, he’d simply clammed up. It was only later, when she examined the grave, that she had begun to suspect what had happened.

She decided to leave matters as they were. She hoped to enjoy the night and didn’t want to leave her son after an argument.

“Will Richie be at Bonnie’s?”

“I’m sure he will,” said Marianne. Richie’s mental age wasn’t much more than Danny’s, but he seemed to care a lot about Danny, and Danny liked the fact that Richie deferred to him.

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