The Going Rate Read Online Free

announced Kilmartin’s arrival. Minogue watched him in the mirror as he reversed a battered and sagging farm Jetta he had borrowed from his brother, to the curb behind. There was some difficulty to locking the door. Kilmartin put his overcoat on the back seat next to Minogue’s funeral gabardine and he sat in.

Chapter 3
    D ERMOT F ANNING ’ S BIKE had a puncture. It was the same wheel as last week’s. It might even be the same puncture. He leaned the bike back against the wall and he resolved to be calm about it. There were basically two possibilities: a) a fresh puncture, b) he hadn’t mended the last one right. It was likely b), he decided. It was all too easy to pinch the tube during a repair, enough to cause a slow puncture.
    But the truth was, there was a c). He could have bought a new tube and a new tire as well. This he had refused to do, citing to Bríd the outrageous prices of same. This wasn’t news, of course.
    Bríd, his wife, needed the car: a teacher couldn’t be late. Their daughter Aisling had still said that she liked going to the child-minder’s on Dadda’s bike anyway. That had changed lately, when she had become very clingy with Bríd in the mornings. Tears, haste, annoyance, guilt. Repeated several times daily. Were there Terrible Three And A Halve’s?
    Fanning didn’t like to think that Aisling had picked up on something between himself and Bríd. He felt sure that Bríd had been on the brink of asking him why exactly Aisling had to go to a child-minder’s all day. It was understood that he needed time to himself for his writing and the freedom to think – or not think.
    He checked the windows around the house again. Then he set the alarm, pulled the door behind him, and he locked it. It was only a quarter to ten, so he had plenty of time yet to get into town, and up to that restaurant in Smithfield. Even if he were a few minutes late, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to keep Breen, Colm Breen, Irish film’s mover and shaker, waiting for once. And whether Breen liked to be reminded or not, he and Dermot Fanning went back a long, long way. Breen had been the gawky newcomer in the Film Society then, and Fanning the third-year student running the meetings.
    Breen had become master of the schmooze, his country accent massaged to mid-Atlantic over the intervening years. To be fair, he had always made time for Fanning, and as much as it had angered Fanning over the years, Breen’s praise had also buoyed him.
    But it was no time to think of the past now. This was business, networking, something he had neglected for far too long, and realized its costs only lately.
    Some things were working his way, Fanning saw then, as the 62 bus appeared at the bend. He stayed downstairs after he got on, at the back of the bus, and took out his notebook. He thought about the points he wanted to leave Breen with, the three key things he’d remember. It took only a few moments of this for Fanning’s mind to turn to what was coming up later after the schmooze with Breen, however. The field trip – he had described it to Bríd. He had fudged it for her benefit though. A dog fight would horrify her, freak her out completely. Her husband attending one would be even worse.
    As the bus carved its way through the lighter post–rush-hour traffic, Fanning’s spirits lifted. He was raring to go on this script, and he was so close now. Nobody had yet treated Dublin crime the way it should be treated, as social commentary, as critique – as family drama. Breen would get it, probably. But if he didn’t, well there were others outside of Ireland. The Sopranos would look like summer school compared to what he would be coming up with. He’d have a draft by the summer for sure. Then it’d be summer holidays for Bríd, and they’d have the summer of their lives, the three of them.
    The bus shuddered to a sudden halt by a zebra