Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  He hated saying it. Hated it. Couldn’t believe that they’d reached the point where they were going to give themselves over to the cops. Since day one of their careers Elliott was the one who thought they would always get away with it. He thought they would have no problem staying one step ahead of every enemy in town. Their mix of skills, his strategic mind. It would always work for them. Now he had to admit that they were done.

  ‘Don’t . . . Just fucking don’t,’ Barrett said to the room in general. He was whispering, trying to keep his voice down and failing.

  Elliott didn’t say anything for a few seconds, but that was as long as he could leave it. The longer this went on, the worse the consequences would be for them. They were getting damn close to the time when the police could start to dress this up as some kind of dramatic stand-off and use that against them in court. If they walked out quickly they could make it look like a misunderstanding. Make it seem like they were just scared by the cops crashing in, didn’t realize who it was. Their mate had just been killed and they were scared witless, that sort of thing. Maybe not a great excuse, but better than the nothing Barrett was offering.

  ‘Come on, man, you know this ain’t happening. We’re in the corner, right, and the only way out is with our hands up. Live to fight another day, that sort of thing.’

  ‘We’ll get time, big time,’ Barrett said to him, the sort of whisper that made it clear he wanted to shout.

  ‘What for? Nasty killed that Christie guy, that was it. We haven’t done anything else, not really. We get done for possession of the gun, it’s a few years, I don’t know what they give you up here. Give it three years and we’ll be back down home, chanting ‘Shit on the Villa’ and pretending Birmingham and Wolves aren’t an embarrassment to us. There’s nothing else they can do us for. The girl that ran, she could be a problem, but maybe our employer keeps her quiet to help us out. Keeps her away from court,’ he said, more in hope than expectation. ‘Least he could do.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Cope said, the first thing she’d said. ‘There’s no way that girl is going to stand in a dock and point the finger at any of us; he won’t let that happen. There’s nothing major that they can pin on any of us. Maybe possession of a weapon, but they can’t prove who it belongs to. It’ll be a short term,’ she said.

  Elliott wanted to say, yeah, it’ll be a short term for you. They got nothing on you, sweetheart – you’ll be walking free in months. But he agreed with her, so he fought down the urge to provoke and kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Give it a few months and we’ll all be back down south,’ she said. It was hard to tell if Barrett believed her; maybe he was hyper enough to believe anything just then. He was walking in a small circle, blinking heavily. ‘We can be down south and forget about this,’ she went on in a calm voice. ‘We can start again. We still have half the money from this job. That’s something. We can start again, Dyne.’

  She was persuasive. In that little room, with decor that had fallen out of an eighties catalogue, the bed pushed against the door, the cops surrounding the building, you would have believed that everything was hunky-dory. Zara Cope could persuade you of just about anything you wanted to believe. It was easy to see and hear why Barrett had fallen under her spell. If she had been speaking to him like this all along, Jesus, it was no wonder. She might even have gotten inside Elliott’s head if she’d bothered to try.

  ‘I don’t want to have to start again. I don’t want to be always starting again,’ he said to her. His tone wasn’t rough though, not as rough as it had been with Elliott. He was relaxing. She was getting through to him.

  ‘It wouldn’t be starting again,’ she said to him, going across and intercepting him as he circled. She stopped him and put a hand on each arm, looked him in the eye. ‘It would be starting for the last time. This would be it. Get this out of the way, serve whatever time they give us, and when we get back together in Birmingham we have the chance to make proper plans. We’ll have enough money to plan what we want to do, not what other people want us to do for them. We won’t need other people’s help, other people’s jobs. This’ll be it. We just have to pay this price first.’

  He was looking into her eyes as she was talking. It was impossible to tell if he believed her or not. Barrett was always too smart to really believe that sort of thing. If they went down, they would go down for different terms. Him and Elliott, maybe months if they were lucky, years more likely. If Zara was lucky, she wouldn’t get anything at all. She could plead ignorance of everything and Barrett would back her up. She would be long gone before they got out. At least two of the people in the room knew that, maybe all three. But Barrett wanted to believe her. He wanted her to give him an excuse to end this thing because he was smart enough to know, once the panic and anger faded, that they were finished.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘we can build something.’

  ‘We can build something amazing,’ she said to him.

  Elliott stayed silent, watching the witch pouring a little more poison into his best friend’s ear. He watched it and he didn’t say anything, because it suited him to say nothing. He needed to get out of there in one piece as well and that meant winning Barrett round. Meant Zara winning him round, because she was so much better at it. Meant her getting even more power. When Barrett looked at Elliott, Elliott nodded. Barrett nodded back and they began pulling the bed away from the door, leaving the gun where it was.

  ‘We’re coming out,’ Elliott shouted into the corridor. ‘We’re unarmed. We have our hands up.’ Everything he thought they wanted.

  There was only one cop in the corridor, Fisher. He was doing his best to look tough, not much of an expression on his face. He looked at Zara longer than he looked at either of the other two. That rather gave away the fact that he knew her. The look he gave her wasn’t friendly, and that was all the reassurance she needed. She was going to be fine. Nate was as good as his word. Fisher had her under arrest, and he was furious because he was going to let her go. Some uniformed cops came running up the stairs and cuffed the three prisoners. They swept into the bedroom to look for any more trouble.

  The three of them were taken away in separate cars. Fisher went in the car with Barrett, presuming that he would be the one with the most interesting things to say. Elliott watched them putting Zara Cope into the back of a car. She looked so relaxed, like she already knew the ending. She owned this whole thing. That woman was the most dangerous person he’d ever worked with.

  36

  It didn’t register. I knew what had happened, but I couldn’t allow myself to think about it. I had less than a second to react, and if I lost my focus I would be the next man dead. Everything shut out. All I could think about was the threat to me and how I could protect myself. I couldn’t think about Ronnie being killed. It makes me seem like a horrible person, I know that. The idea that I could ignore such a thing. But it was that or die. I didn’t choose to ignore it.

  Instinct. That’s the thing that experience brings you, that exhaustion overwhelms. I should have known. I should have seen the signs. That survival instinct is different from normal instinct, different from anything else. Doesn’t matter how tired you are, it can still kick you in the brain. It can wipe away every other thought, every other fear, and leave you with just one focus. Stay alive. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that it takes a certain kind of person to think that way. Maybe some would freeze, or react too slow, but many would react instantly. You don’t know.

  Conrad turned and raised the gun. He shot Ronnie in the forehead, dead centre. The shot so loud, so close. Ronnie was between me and Conrad, between the gunman and his next target. I was right behind Ronnie. His body fell backwards into my arms. I threw my left arm around the body. I’m calling it his body because it wasn’t Ronnie any more. He was dead and he was just a body to me now. I held the body in place with my left arm, using it as a shield, and raised my right hand round the side of it. Conrad still had his gun raised but he was trying to pick a shot, taking
time to avoid hitting Ronnie again. I raised the gun and fired.

  Nothing. Not a thing. The trigger moved under my finger, but there was no shot. Little resistance when I pulled it. Garvey had sold me a dud. Given me, I should say, not sold. Quite happily ran upstairs and picked two guns from his collection. One for Conrad, one for me. He picked them carefully. Made sure the gunman got a gun that worked. Made sure that what I got was as dangerous as a banana. Garvey and Conrad, both hired by Lafferty. I went to Conrad, and I thought that meant I could trust his conversion. Garvey was a gun dealer; he would sell to Conrad because I told him to. They were both playing me. Working with Lafferty all along. That was why the gun made no sound. It was designed to kill me from the start.

  The gun was always unfamiliar to me. Instinct told me to use it because it was in my hand, because it was the fastest way to remove the threat. Now my instinct was telling me to fall back on the thing that had always served me so well in dangerous situations. My brutality. I had to act in a heartbeat, knowing Conrad was about to fire. I shoved Ronnie forwards. His body crashed into Conrad as Conrad fired his second shot. It was meant for me; it hit Ronnie instead. Shooting a dead man. Conrad stumbled when Ronnie hit him, a dead weight, but he wasn’t going to stumble when I hit him. I lunged as soon as I pushed the body. Threw all my considerable bulk at Conrad and hit him hard as he took a backwards step and pushed Ronnie’s body aside.

  I caught him mostly with my shoulder in his chest, the top of my head striking the underside of his jaw as I stooped. He tumbled backwards. I don’t think I stayed still in any part of this. As soon as he was falling I lunged forwards again, down on top of him. He landed hard and before he could react, I hit him. I still had the dud gun in my hand and it was time for it to earn its keep. My arm was out behind me as I went down, using my momentum and the power of the swing to hit the gunman with my gun. I hammered it into the top of Conrad’s head. Once, twice, and hammered him again. I felt a crack, and then with another blow I felt his skull crumple. I kept hitting him. I don’t know why.

  I had never killed a man before that moment. For all my reputation, and as close as I’d come, I had never killed a man before I killed Russell Conrad. I’d beaten people. Beaten them hard. But killing a man, that’s something different. I killed him; I didn’t murder him. To my mind there’s a distinction. I killed Conrad because he was going to kill me. I defended myself. It wasn’t self-defence that had me hitting him with all of my force, though, mouth tight shut as the sweat broke out across me. I was expelling energy, telling myself that I was making sure, telling myself that he deserved this for what he had done to Ronnie, admitting to myself that my fury was selfish.

  That was enough. The top of his skull was crushed in. One eye was wide open, the other forced shut by the collapsed skull. His mouth was open, his balaclava twisted up to show it, but he hadn’t made a sound throughout. I leaned back, still on my knees, Conrad underneath me. This was my fault. I could have stopped this. I should have seen it. That’s where the anger came from. Smashing the butt of the gun into the top of Conrad’s skull was no kind of catharsis. I was just following my instinct. Violence was the only language in which I was ever truly fluent. I was a master of it, every syllable, every pronunciation. Every noun and verb was under my command, and I was singing it all in perfect clarity in Lafferty’s office. It made no difference. Nothing would make me feel better. This was one of those failures that would settle down to become a lifetime regret.

  Lafferty was still standing there. Standing still at the side of his desk, watching me kill his man. His eyes were a little wider, but that was his only reaction. His plan had failed. Get me there with Conrad, have Conrad kill me. It was a smart little plan. Having Ronnie there was the only thing that saved me, the only thing that stopped Lafferty getting exactly what he wanted. Would have been a great plan. Big horrible Nate Colgan, working for Kevin Currie, tried to kill him, which proves that little Kevin Currie is a traitor.

  He didn’t try to run. Despite all that had happened, despite the time it had taken me to kill Conrad, Lafferty hadn’t made any attempt to get out. I was blocking the only exit and Lafferty had no hope of fighting his way past me. He didn’t have a gun of his own, probably didn’t want one. He had a gunman, which he had thought was better. He knew what had to happen next, and somewhere in his conniving mind he had accepted it and didn’t fear it any more. The fear had been in the approach, not the destination. When he finally realized that the business he’d chosen was about to kill him, the fear walked away and left Lafferty to face the moment with a sliver of dignity.

  The only sound in the room was my heavy breathing. Down on my knees, looking across at Lafferty. Watching him and thinking that he should have made a dive for Conrad’s gun. That’s what I would have done, because I might have had a chance of succeeding. Not Lafferty. Too old and podgy and used to sitting behind a desk. Diving for the working gun would just have been a quicker way to die, and he wasn’t in any hurry. A dying man always wants to take a few more breaths. Lafferty wanted to look around his office at the pictures of his wife and children, to see that he had created something good among all the bad. Those last few seconds mattered to him and he wasn’t going to throw them away in some pathetic attempt at proving his courage and manhood by challenging me.

  Conrad’s gun was out of his hand, lying on the floor beside the two of us. I could reach out and pick it up. And I was alert; you must understand that. I wasn’t swinging my arm wildly throughout, wasn’t screaming and shouting as I killed Conrad. I was hammering the gun into the top of Russell’s head, killing him, giving his dead body more punishment than the body cared about, but I wasn’t completely out of control. As I leaned back, blood dripping off the handle of the gun in my hand, I watched Lafferty through the eyeholes of my balaclava. Watched him watching me. Watched him wait for me to kill him.

  There was eye contact. Just a split second where Lafferty met my steady gaze and we both knew where the next step took us. Lafferty would have known that I’d never killed before – everyone knew that. It was one part of my reputation I was happy for the world to know. But Lafferty wasn’t daft and he’d have heard all the stories about the times I beat people bad enough to make them wish I’d just killed them instead. I was a man of violence. A man who not only practised brutality, but controlled it and was in turn controlled by it. That was the reputation. Also, I had a gun and he didn’t. Lafferty wasn’t some fearless giant, some warrior who’d been through every terror the world had to offer and would stand up to a gun. He’d spent most of his adult life behind a desk, filling in paperwork and giving orders for dirty work to be done by others when dirty work was required. Put a gun in the hands of an already frightening man and he was paralysed by it.

  I was finished with Conrad. I dropped my gun, more useful than Garvey had ever intended, onto the floor, reached across to pick up Conrad’s and got slowly to my feet. My legs were stiff, my back as well. I could feel a throb developing in my right shoulder. That wasn’t age, that was the intensity of the event. Every muscle had tightened; my head was starting to throb. I stood up straight, maybe stretched a little. I wasn’t going to rush. There was a chance that there were other people in the house, hiding somewhere, ready to run in at the sound of a gun. That’s how I would have worked it. Have them waiting to remove the body as soon as the body hits the ground. That’s how a pro does it. Not how Lafferty had plotted this out. I stood near the doorway of that silent room and I didn’t hear anyone coming. Lafferty wasn’t a pro, whatever he had told himself. He hadn’t organized this properly. He was going to wait until I was dead and then call someone in. Or him and Conrad were going to do the removal themselves. Bad strategy.

  So I had time. The only part of me that he could see would be my eyes and I wasn’t letting him avoid them. I stared straight at him. There was hatred in my eyes, I’m sure. Angus Lafferty was stupidly rich. He had more money than he or his kids were ever likely to spend, a big house, a happy family. If
he didn’t like what the organization was doing then he could have found some path that would lead him away from us. You can always find a way out. Might have been complicated, he might have had to leave the city to feel safe, but he could have done it. Instead he went the other way. His greed and his stupidity led him to try and take the organization for himself. That made more sense to this rich man than walking away. That greed was why all this had happened.

  I was breathing heavily, holding the gun down by my side as I walked across the room towards Lafferty. I wanted him right in front of me, to get a good clean shot. Lafferty didn’t react. I wanted to look him in the eyes, wanted him to be afraid and to see that he understood this was his fault. I wanted to see some sort of guilt. Fear was easy. I didn’t need to stare him down and wave a gun in his face to achieve that. I could coax fear to the surface of any man with very little effort. But that bastard wasn’t going to give me any satisfaction; he could see the end coming and he was determined to be defiant. We both stood still and looked each other in the eye like we didn’t know what to do next. He seemed to be looking for some sort of emotion in mine that he wasn’t going to find. Professionalism, I’ve heard a lot of them call it, when you go into the emotional dead zone and care nothing for anyone else. That’s not what I would call it; it’s closer to some sort of psychological disorder if you ask me, but there were some who were capable of it. Gunmen, mostly, but not exclusively. I had found that place and I had put myself there.

  Lafferty opened his mouth slightly, trying to come up with some last words. He wasn’t trying to save himself, but everyone wants to have some smart last words. Nobody had said a word since we were outside the house. There had been a blast of noise from Conrad’s gun and my reaction, and then silence for the last minute or two. The last words that come out of anyone’s mouth should be taken with a massive pinch of salt; I had heard some ridiculous begging from people who thought they were going to die. People would say anything they thought would make you pause, any desperate lie that might buy them several more seconds or an end to their pain. I wouldn’t listen to a word that came out of the mouth of a man looking down the barrel of a gun, but I was letting him live just long enough to say it.