In the Galway Silence_Jack Taylor by Ken Bruen

Author:Ken Bruen [Bruen, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802128829
Amazon: 0802128823
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Published: 2018-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Silence

is

the

last

dance

of

the

Disenchanted.

22

Michael Ian Allen.

They called him the Silence.

Meaning, he was usually the last thing you ever heard.

He was the only child of an Irish mother, American father, grew up in Watertown, Boston.

Quiet

Studious

Religious.

A Catholicism verging on fundamentalism instilled in him a fierce passion. He seemed destined for the priesthood but that other organization the Marines claimed him first.

He was a fine soldier, if not outstanding.

Until

Two patrols in Fallujah.

Both patrols were wiped out. He was the sole survivor—if just still breathing counted as life.

His initials had been almost a foreboding.

Some essential part of him had been MIA.

Chess and a warped sense of assisting those who were unable to help themselves lodged in what had been his soul. On leave, he had

2

4

J

Tattooed on his arm.

He wasn’t entirely sure what his mission was until by chance he read an article about a man who tormented his family, received a slap on the wrist from the court.

“Pawns.”

He thought.

Victims who had no recourse to justice.

He’d be their advocate. His sense of definition varied from going after a man who beat his son in a supermarket to a bully who taunted a fat girl on the street. A crash of sounds roared in his head, the explosion of the Humvee.

With that first doomed patrol to the shrieks of the second as a mortar fired on them. Such times he physically shook his head to plead for ease.

A brief visit to the West of Ireland, land of his mother’s people, led to a chance encounter with Pierre Renaud, who had come across Allen curled in a terrorized ball on the shores of Lough Corrib. Renaud had sat with him and gently soothed him down to a quiet green platform and whispered to him,

“Le silence est magnifique.”

A rare confluence of events:

Kindness

The soft words in a soft French

Compassion

Created

A jellying of benevolent quiet in the mind of Michael Allen.

Renaud had gone further... provided a small cottage in the wild of Connemara.

Many weekends the duo spent fishing, hunting, and just finding a solace in each other’s company. One late Sunday evening, the men, tired from a day of hiking along the mountain trails, sat outdoors, sipping pure poteen, a turf fire fresh from the very bog they had traversed, when Allen said,

“You seem troubled, my friend.”

Renaud, prodding the fire into a blaze, said,

“My sons plan to kill me.”

He explained years of rebellion, bad behavior, insufferable attitudes, resulting in the twins’ becoming obsessed with the Menendez brothers. Renaud thought they were just adding another layer of abuse to irk their father.

They had the books, documentaries on the trial and eventual jailing of the two young killers. Mocking their father with comments like

“The difference is we won’t get caught.”

Their mother, a drunk, refused to see or heed anything that was less than one hundred percent proof. He had managed to find a way to live that had him work every hour he could until...

Until.

He was searching the garage for old tax returns when he came across two brand-new shotguns.

Allen had listened with no interruptions.

When Renaud finally wound down, he was weeping softly.

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