Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  ‘You think we’ll start making moves tonight?’ he asked me. There was enthusiasm in the question, like he wanted to get out there and do some work. Also sounded a little like a wee boy wanting to know if he was going to get to stay up past his bedtime. Reminded me how inexperienced he was.

  ‘Not tonight,’ I told him. ‘Next forty-eight hours, but not tonight. Tonight is about making sure we have the right people on board to make moves.’ I’d have made moves if I thought I could get permission, mind you. Lafferty was pointing guns in my direction; I wanted this done as soon as possible. Wouldn’t get clearance for it though, not yet.

  That enthusiasm Ronnie had, I didn’t like it. Maybe it was because I was used to working with experienced guys. I had been lucky when I first came into the business, working with people like Gully Fitzgerald. Old hands who taught you well. On the few occasions when I did work with someone, it was usually someone experienced. Now I had someone to mould, to make into the kind of sidekick I wanted. I didn’t want an enthusiastic sidekick. I wanted someone who was as cynical as me. Cynical of the business and all the people in it, me included.

  We drove round and picked up Russell Conrad. If this went according to the plan I had, he was going to play a big part in what happened next. He had a right to be there, hear about it.

  ‘The others know I’m going to be there?’ Conrad asked, sitting in the back of my nondescript car.

  ‘Some do,’ I told him. ‘The rest will be fine about it as long as you don’t give them a reason not to be.’

  He didn’t say anything. He was a brave man, Russell Conrad. Getting into the back of my car with me and Ronnie for company. Going to a meeting that would be populated by Kevin Currie’s people. It was a risk, not to be taken lightly. The sort of risk that occasionally ended with someone being killed. Conrad wanted to be on the right side of events. Wanted to see the bullet going away from him at the end, not towards him.

  Marty had gotten there first; made sure the place was unlocked. Conn’s car was there as well, which meant him and Mikey had beaten us to the meeting. I didn’t see Kevin’s. We went inside; they were in the office to the left of the foyer this time.

  We said polite hellos, hands were shaken. Conrad immediately dropped back into a corner. He was the odd man out and he was busy showing it. He should have made more of an effort, gotten involved in conversations, tried to be casual. Wasn’t his fault. There weren’t many gunmen who were talkers. A solitary, weird bunch, on the whole.

  ‘No sign of Kevin yet,’ Conn said, trying to make sure the atmosphere didn’t get too chilly.

  Conn made small talk with Ronnie, asking him about himself. Marty butted in because there’s never been a conversation Marty Jones didn’t think he could improve. Talked to Ronnie, talked to Conn, made a few jokes with Mikey and me. The pretence was those three getting to know Ronnie a wee bit better, making sure he knew them properly. The truth was that they were desperately trying to stop Conrad turning the rest of us to ice. He was still over in the corner by the door, silent.

  It was a blessing when Kevin Currie and Ben Carmichael turned up, fifteen minutes late and not needing to apologize for it because Kevin was the boss. You could, technically, make an argument to say Marty was his equal these days, but Kevin had taken charge of this.

  The office on this side was pretty much the same as the office on the other side, cupboards and units against the side walls and not much else. Marty had found a few chairs from somewhere though, and some of the group were taking the weight off. Bright lights from strips on the ceiling, big windows with no blinds so all the light could be seen outside. Wasn’t as subtle as I would have wanted it to be, but it wasn’t me who got to decide these things.

  Some guys were sitting on the units, some were standing up. I always stood up if I could because that was always the way you wanted to be if things got violent. Trust me, if you’re somewhere that things might kick off, you want to be on your feet from the start. The guy on his arse when it starts is going to be the guy on his arse when it finishes. Currie and Marty were sitting down, so was Carmichael. On this occasion, so was I. It went against my instinct, but I was a man with something to say and if you’re going to open your mouth, you look better doing it sitting down. People don’t like having to look up to you when you talk. Ronnie, Conn and Mikey kept standing. So did Conrad.

  ‘Okay, Nate, this was your call. Give it to us,’ Currie said, looking at me.

  The best way to approach anything like this was to be a straightforward bastard. Hit them with everything I had. ‘I’ve come to a conclusion about what’s really going on here. I think Lafferty hired Barrett and his crew to come up and put pressure on the organization so that he can take control. The hit on Christie gave him the excuse to take control in the short term. I think he’s going to point the finger at the two of you.’ I was saying this to Currie and Marty. My impression was that it didn’t shock Kevin so much, just saddened him. Confirmed something he had already suspected.

  ‘Us? What do you mean, us?’ Marty said with his voice going squeaky. Reaching for the high notes the way it did when he was all nervous and worked up.

  ‘He’s going to accuse you of trying to wipe out his business so you can take control of the organization. That gives him the excuse to wipe out you two and take control for himself. He’ll say he was pre-empting you, defending himself, protecting Peter Jamieson’s share of the business from you. By the time Jamieson gets out, this’ll be Lafferty’s organization.’

  I could see that Marty was going to start bouncing off the fucking walls. That was the kind of guy he was, his basic nature that he couldn’t quite suppress. Sure enough he had matured, but he still threw some massive wobblies when he wasn’t getting his own way; he was just smart enough not to throw them in front of senior men. Conn had told me about one or two of them, Marty letting off steam on things that didn’t matter, holding it together for things that did. I thought he was about to lose it in front of us all, but Kevin spoke before he got the chance.

  ‘How sure are you, Nate? Not that I don’t have faith in your work, you know I do, but, Jesus, we have to be a hundred per cent before we do anything about an accusation like that.’

  This wasn’t Kevin questioning my judgement, I knew that. I had seen the look on his face when I pitched the theory. He had to be certain, and he had to be seen to be certain. Make sure everyone here saw him question me, saw him leave no stone unturned before he went after Lafferty. That had to be a last resort. I nodded and then looked round at Conrad, who was lurking behind me. Telling him this was his moment to shine. Conrad started talking.

  ‘Lafferty’s been talking about how it was you two who organized the whole thing. Said that you wanted control of the organization, and that you had to be stopped. He said it to me; I wouldn’t be surprised if he said it to other people as well. He wants that story to get out. He, uh . . . He told me that he wanted me to line up Nate as my next target, because Nate’s running things on the ground for you two.’

  Marty was muttering under his breath now. Kevin was just shaking his head. None of them had trusted Lafferty. He had been the hardest one to keep on a leash when Jamieson went down. The one who doubted the organization’s ability to survive. I had helped to persuade him at the time. Regretted that now. If he’d walked, he wouldn’t have been trying to push the rest of us over the edge. Neither Kevin nor Marty liked him anyway, that was obvious. They didn’t like the way he’d tried to take control of events just because Christie had been his man. I hadn’t said it, but it was obvious the reason he’d chosen Christie instead of someone else to spark this was because Christie was feeding info to Conn and Mikey. Killing two birds with one stone.

  The place fell silent after Conrad spoke. He had brought the idea of me being killed into the conversation. Had con-firmed the suspicion that Angus Lafferty had us all in his sights. It was Currie that spoke first.

  ‘We have to move quickly, put a stop to this. You have a plan,’ he s
aid to me. He was saying it rather than asking. He already knew. We wouldn’t all be sitting there if I didn’t have something more concrete to offer than this. I could have taken this to Kevin alone if what had been said so far was all that needed to be said.

  ‘I think we need to focus on Lafferty and forget about Barrett,’ I said. ‘Barrett’s just an employee; he’s only here as long as Lafferty’s paying him to be here. I have an idea that puts Barrett in the police’s hands: let them deal with him. They have enough on him to lock him away for a good spell. He’s not the priority here; him and his crew are nothing to us. They killed one of Lafferty’s men and then Lafferty had one of their lot killed. He wants them wiped out so that he has a guarantee of silence. Probably save himself some money into the bargain. We need to deal with Lafferty and it needs to be in the next couple of days. I think we have to remove Lafferty completely; anything less than that and we’ve got a long-running headache.’

  I glanced around at all of them, looking for instant reactions before they had time to think about it. Kevin didn’t look surprised and Marty looked pleased. Ronnie and Mikey were expressionless, assuming that this had little to do with them. Conn was concerned, but he often was. Conrad was the one that mattered most. I could see that he didn’t look happy because he was the one that was going to have to go kill Lafferty. That was a monster fucking job, and Conrad knew it. You kill a guy like Lafferty and it follows you around for a long, long time. He looked worried about it, but what could he do? Lafferty had employed him but he was working for Jamieson and this was the right thing to do for Jamieson. Kevin kept up his newfound habit of breaking silences.

  ‘I know this needs to be done quickly,’ he said, ‘but before we make a move that serious against a man like Lafferty I think we need to clear it with Jamieson. Set things up, fine, because I think Jamieson will give the all-clear, given the situation. Set it up, but we don’t make a move until I have clearance.’

  Nobody was gonna argue with that; it was common sense. Nobody would ever sit there and say no, don’t bother asking Peter Jamieson, the boss of the whole damn thing. It was the reason I had told Ronnie we wouldn’t be moving that night. So everyone nodded along and Currie looked back at me.

  ‘Go ahead and set up what needs to be set up, use who you need to use. I’ll trust your judgement to run this,’ he said, nodding firmly. That was as much to assert my authority to everyone else in the room as it was to reassure me. ‘As soon as I have the all-clear, I’ll let you know and we can solve this. It’ll be a relief to put it behind us.’

  He stood up and nodded goodbyes to everyone else. Kevin and Carmichael left first and the rest of us had to stand around to give him a head start. Marty making small talk because he was always the king of that. I hated it; I wasn’t in the mood for talking.

  Me, Ronnie and Conrad went next. Marty would have to stay until last, the man with the keys. We had given Kevin a near ten-minute head start, which was enough to be polite. The car was silent on the drive back to Conrad’s house. As soon as we had dropped him off and driven away, Ronnie started talking nervously.

  ‘This is pretty huge, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  It was the biggest thing I’d ever been a part of by a good long way. It was big enough to intimidate me, but I wasn’t going to terrify him with that.

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ was all I said. Sometimes saying little can be even worse.

  26

  Zara Cope. The first step in the most daunting job of my life was calling her up. Nothing was going to be easy about this. If I’d been home that first time she came round to visit then she would never have written her number down for me. I might still have had it on my phone, but it would have been hard to resist the temptation to delete it. A person I didn’t want to speak to again. Get rid of it to remove the temptation. Crush sentiment before it crushes you. But I had it on the piece of paper she’d put through my letter box. Still sitting in the drawer of the little table beside my chair in the living room. A reminder of her handwriting. Sentimental.

  I put it off until the afternoon. Made a phone call in the early morning to ask Becky’s grandparents if they could keep her this weekend. Her grandmother understood when I said I had to work. Understood enough not to ask any questions. I didn’t mention that one of the jobs was meeting her daughter. She didn’t put Becky on the phone, which I appreciated. I didn’t want to have to hear disappointment in her voice. The one person whose disappointment mattered. Then I went back to finding reasons not to call Zara.

  Found a million little excuses that together didn’t add up to much. I just didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t want to be in her company. Didn’t want her being the centre of this job. This was just the set-up; I could afford to waste time on it. The following morning and I still hadn’t had clearance from Kevin. That would come when he got a talk with Jamieson, and that would happen only when Jamieson’s schedule allowed.

  Took me until after midday to dial the number.

  ‘Hi, Nate,’ she said, before I’d even opened my mouth. She sounded pleased that I had called.

  ‘We need to meet,’ I told her, in that dead tone I use when I want to make sure that you can’t possibly work out what I’m thinking. It’s a tone I use a lot, and used a lot around Zara back in the day. She would have recognized it, and, sharp as she was, would have known what it meant. It meant I had something to hide.

  ‘I suppose we could meet,’ she said to me in that stupid way people talk when they want a nearby third person to know what’s being said. It was done for my benefit; there was no need for her to exaggerate like that just for Barrett or whoever else was nearby. It was her way of letting me know that someone was nearby and listening to what we were saying. Her way of telling me this might not be a secure line.

  ‘Right,’ I said, trying to let her know I’d understood. ‘How about we meet the same place we did before?’ I would keep this as brief and quick as possible; give only the very basic details needed to get her there. If that bastard Barrett was listening then I wasn’t going to give him anything.

  ‘Sure,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘When?’

  ‘Soon as possible,’ I told her. ‘Can you get there in an hour?’

  ‘Yeah, I can be there in an hour.’

  And now I was nervous. She was maybe the only person who could do that to me, and she had to be right at the fucking centre of this thing. It could only be her. Clearing her out of the city when this was over was the priority for me. I couldn’t have her tormenting me like this again.

  I didn’t get parked anywhere near the square. Didn’t matter. I was deliberately early. I wasn’t going to go in there, trample on handbags and skulk up to a table at the back to wait for her. Sitting there at a wee table, looking like the incredible sulk. Waiting for her to turn up, Barrett and his crew at her back. There was a bench in the square where I could sit and watch the entrance. Wasn’t a good view, too far away, but I’d know her when I saw her, and I’d know if she was alone. I wanted to see if she was dropped off by Barrett or one of his crew, and where they went when she was in the restaurant. Paranoia, my old friend.

  A taxi pulled up near the restaurant. Zara got out. She was alone. The taxi went off; no other car stopped nearby. I watched her go in, bang on time. I got up and wandered slowly across to the restaurant, crossing the street and looking carefully for anything that would give my suspicions justification. Nothing. No one, to be more exact. No Barrett, no muscle, no anyone lurking on the street, looking out for me. She’d done well to get this far alone.

  She was sitting at the back of the restaurant. No makeup, hair scraped back. She was wearing a baggy jumper, shapeless thing. It wasn’t because she wasn’t making an effort that I felt sad. In the past, in our past, she didn’t need to make an effort. Zara was film-star gorgeous without even bothering. What made me sad was that she was thin. Aged far more than made sense for the time that had passed since she left the city. Seeing her here the first time had told me there was som
ething wrong. Seeing her in the hotel had shown me what. This was where I started fixing things.

  There were no handbags on the floor this time; they must have seen me coming. I walked slowly, trying to look inconspicuous. Hard thing to do when you’re six foot three, broad and cursed with a permanent scowl. We had reached that point with a job when you plan for every possible failure. If someone here sees me, tells a police contact about me meeting Zara. Tells Lafferty. Tells anyone. Start behaving like everyone’s your enemy.

  ‘You rang,’ Zara said with a little smile as I sat down opposite her.

  I didn’t like sitting with my back to the door, but that was the price of arriving second. I looked at her, at the tightness in that smile. Whatever scam she was working, whatever she had gotten herself into, it was time to make for the exits.

  ‘This is nearly finished,’ I said to her. Keep it short. ‘I’m ending this, probably tomorrow. Tomorrow night, it’ll be, more likely than not. I want to know where Barrett and his crew will be tomorrow night.’

  She didn’t even stop to think about it. It was, I knew, the reason she was here. If Zara was working an angle, then she was close to the endgame and needed out. I was prepared to hold the door open for her. If she was stuck in something bigger than she could handle then the same applied. Incidentally, I didn’t for one moment believe it was the latter of those two. Zara’s never been stuck.

  ‘I can give you the address of the house he’s using. I’ll make sure he’s still there, and you can go pick them off.’

  I shook my head. Didn’t like the way she was leaping to the bloodiest outcome. ‘No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to get you all arrested instead.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I have a deal in place. You’ll be let go; the rest of them will get some solid time. Should do, anyway, if they don’t screw it up in court. But you’ll get off the hook. You’ll be swept up with the rest of them and then let go.’