For Those Who Know the Ending

by Mackay, Malcolm

  Nate got back into the car, drove them into the garage. It was dark in there; even in the daytime it was a grimy little hole of a building that could crush the spirit of any occupant. Usman didn’t wait for instruction, knowing how this would play out. He got out and stood in the garage, waiting for the other two to tell him where to go. Nate led the way through to the workshop in the back, Gully taking up the rear to cover the only exit. There was a small chair with its back missing sitting in the middle of the room, like it was waiting for Usman to come and fill it.

  ‘Sit,’ Nate said to him.

  Usman did as he was told. Sat down, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He looked up at Nate and Gully. ‘Can I explain?’

  Gully hung back at the door and watched. It wasn’t up to him to get involved in a conversation. Nate was every inch the man in charge. If Nate needed help, Gully was there to provide it.

  ‘What is there to explain?’ Nate asked him.

  You had to know Nate well to hear the annoyance in his voice. It was always that low grumble, and because of that it rarely gave anything away, which might have been the point. It was the speed he spoke at that Gully noticed. Nate was talking faster than usual, wanting to dish out a slice of revenge to one of the few people that had ever gotten the better of him. Holding back, because holding back was the professional thing to do. For now, anyway.

  ‘I did that job at the bookies in Coatbridge,’ Usman said. There was confidence in his voice, defiance. He was scared, just not scared stiff. ‘I didn’t want anyone to get hurt on that job, right? It was supposed to be clean and easy but then you two turned up. Not that I’m blaming you for turning up, that’s your job, I know. It just, you know, shat all over my plan. Anyway, I did it, and I’m sorry about the way it went down. Didn’t ever mean for you or the bookie to get hurt, that was a shame. But that was a one-off. I ain’t targeting you, or Peter Jamieson. I just target easy money, that’s it. You got to understand, this wasn’t part of anything bigger.’

  Nate shrugged. ‘I never thought it was.’

  ‘And I’m working a new job right now. Me and my partner, right? We got something lined up. It ain’t against Jamieson. In fact, you ask me, you should want me and my mate to make this job happen. It could do your boss a pretty big favour, if you let it happen. We do the work, take the risk, and you beneft.’

  Nate didn’t say anything at first. Gully smiled a little, making sure nobody was watching him when he did. This kid was just smart enough to live another day.

  ‘So what do you think is going to happen here?’ Nate asked him. ‘You think I’m going to let you go back out there and work more jobs, just because you tell me my boss might benefit from one of them? You give me your word and that’s supposed to be enough? You really think that’s how it works?’

  ‘I think,’ Usman said, ‘that I got a job lined up that would stick a spoke in a deal that’s going to make Don Park a lot more powerful. I don’t think you want that. I don’t think your boss wants that. And, yeah, I think you should let me out of here. Let me go do this job. We do it, and Park gets held back. We don’t do it, he makes a shitload of cash, and he becomes more powerful, maybe big enough to go to war with your organization before your boss gets out of jail.’

  Gully straightened. These were awfully dangerous words for a kid to throw around. Talking about a war between Park and Jamieson, that was sticking your finger into a wound the rest of the industry was trying to ignore. Gully might not have paid an awful lot of attention to the industry in the last couple of years, but he knew enough to know that the Jamieson organization was desperately trying to avoid war until the boss got back on the street. You go to war without a chief and you’ve got a lot of Indians running wild. Park was the guy they feared most, too. If he took control of Alex MacArthur’s organization, which he would as soon as the old man wheezed his last, then he would need to prove himself. Pick a target and destroy it, just to show that he could. Jamieson would be top of that particular list.

  Nate, still standing in the middle of the room, looked down at Usman. The kid met his gaze. He was scared but strong, sure of his footing. Nate glanced across at Gully. Gully shrugged just a little.

  ‘Right,’ Nate said, ‘tell us about this job.’

  15

  He hadn’t had the chance to go out to Argyle’s big house yet, that was for senior guys only. One day. One day soon, Aiden figured. He had this invite along to the office to meet him, which was more than most people got. An ordinary red-brick building that could have been flats or offices or anything else inside. Argyle had offices in there, took up a chunk of the first floor. A proper place, legit, on the books, the sort of place a big operation has so that it can clean all its money and pay all its taxes. Might have been a small office, but it was big-time.

  Aiden was excited about going there and he was struggling to hide it, he knew how much this meant for his future. This was Argyle pulling him a little closer. This was Argyle telling him to come in and see what real power looked like, bask in it. It showed the progress he was making, how important this deal with the Allens was.

  Aiden was about twenty minutes early, so he hung around out on the street. Smoked a cigarette, then worried about going into the meeting smelling like an ashtray. He chewed gum to get it off his breath, and spat the gum onto the pavement. Then he started worrying that Argyle had seen him from a window, spitting gum onto the street. Bad enough that he would see him hanging around, like he had nowhere else to go. He decided to go inside, it was nearly time.

  Up the carpeted stairs and along to the first door on his right, knocking and going in. It was a reception area, he felt stupid for knocking. They should have had the fucking door open then, so that people could see that it was a reception area instead of knocking like it was a fucking office. He felt his face burning red as the receptionist watched him come in and close the door behind him. He walked across to her desk, trying to act a little cocky.

  ‘I got a meeting with Mr Argyle,’ he told her. He went for confident and came across stupid, and he knew it.

  The woman, she must have been about thirty, was dressed primly with hair and make-up like she was in the 1950s. She gave him a smile that said she was smarter than him.

  ‘Just one moment,’ she said, and picked up a phone. She didn’t say anything into the handset, not at first. Then: ‘Yes, I’ll tell him,’ and she hung up. Made him feel more powerful to know that she only had to pick up the phone and they knew who she was calling about. It felt good to be expected. ‘If you’d like to wait just a moment, someone will be out,’ she said, nodding across to a row of three chairs against the side wall.

  Aiden stood there for a couple of seconds, looking down at her. Sit and wait. He looked round at the chairs, back at the receptionist. She had that smile again, the one that said she had just enough patience to deal with the stupid person in front of her. He walked across and sat down on the middle chair. Didn’t know what to do with himself now. Thought about taking his phone out, make it look like he was an important person with loads of messages to handle in these spare minutes, but then thought that might look disrespectful. If Argyle came out to greet him and he was sitting there dicking around with his phone it might look bad. So he sat and stared straight ahead.

  It took a couple of minutes of awkward stillness and silence in the reception room before a door to the side opened and a young man came out. It wasn’t Argyle; it was one of his men. Aiden had seen this guy around before, knew he was someone quite important called Liam Duffy. Younger than Aiden, yet more senior and more confident. He walked straight across to Aiden.

  ‘Good to see you, come through.’

  Maybe this was a good thing, Argyle sending his lackey out to lead Aiden through to the big office. Made it clear that Aiden was now more senior than Liam Duffy when Duffy did the fetching. There was a little swagger coming back into his step as he walked down a narrow corridor. Duffy ducked sideways into a small office, held the door open fo
r Aiden to follow him in.

  It was a narrow room, cramped, a large table filling the middle, chairs round it. Duffy sat at the head of the table, invited Aiden to sit with him. There was no sign of Argyle, or anyone else for that matter.

  ‘We have the stuff,’ Duffy told him casually. ‘All of it. You need to get in touch with Allen’s person and set up a meeting place. We want this done as soon as possible.’

  Aiden nodded, looked back over his shoulder at the door, and nodded again. ‘Sure, yeah, no problem. I’ll call her. No problem, yeah. Plenty of places we can do it.’

  ‘You need to pick somewhere appropriate,’ Duffy told him, cutting across him and talking loud. There was no hint of respect in his voice. ‘If you need us to come up with a few ideas for you, we can. We have a couple of places you can use, but you’d need to get their person to agree to it.’

  Snotty little bastard, talking to him like he couldn’t handle a handover. Fuck’s sake, how many had he done in his career already? Okay, fine, maybe none this big, but the idea was the same. You give them the gear, they give you the cash, you both walk away. This prick hadn’t done half the handovers Aiden had. He knew places he could use; he didn’t need some silly wee bastard drawing up a fucking list for him.

  ‘I got places,’ he said. ‘I don’t need any help with it. Don’t you worry, I can handle all of that. Anyway, they ain’t going to come along to some place they know you use. Got to be neutral territory, that’s how it works.’

  Duffy gave him a dirty look. To Liam Duffy, Aiden was some halfwit who got lucky, a street dealer who happened to be able to get in touch with the Allens. That made him briefly useful. Once this was over there wasn’t going to be any room for a guy like Aiden Comrie in Argyle’s set-up. Duffy, he’d worked for his position, taken risks and done things a man like Aiden would never be capable of. Made mistakes as well, because that’s how the business goes, but he was still a mile ahead of Aiden at a younger age because he was a much smarter man.

  ‘Fine, you find somewhere, but make sure it’s somewhere proper. Make it somewhere with more than one exit, we don’t want people coming and going by the same doors. And make sure it’s somewhere you can hang around awhile without getting noticed. We’ll be nearby, of course. Me and a couple of the boys. We’ll collect you and the money at the end of it, get you clear and safe. You call them, you tell them it’s time to organize this. You let us know exactly where and exactly when it is going to happen so we can get the goods to you. Hey, you listening to me?’

  Aiden had turned to look at the door again. Thought he’d heard someone coming down the corridor, hoped it was Argyle coming to meet him.

  ‘I hear you,’ Aiden said with a shrug. ‘Set it up, let you know, I get it, fine. It ain’t brain surgery, is it? I done this before, loads of times.’ He paused. ‘What about the boss? Doesn’t he need to know about this?’

  Duffy leaned back in his chair, a smug look. ‘The boss knows. I already talked to him about it, and I’ll talk to him about it again in a wee while. Don’t you worry about him, you worry about yourself. Worry about getting this right. Maybe worry about me as well, because I’m your boss on this, okay?’

  Aiden shrugged, looked at the table, tried to summon up a tough look to shoot back at Duffy and failed. So he shrugged again, which was less of a response than he had hoped to conjure. They were back to treating him like a street dealer. He had met Argyle himself to set this up, but now that it was in motion it was being handed across to some guy who hadn’t even been in the business as long as Aiden, hadn’t worked nearly as many jobs.

  Duffy could see the disappointment in Comrie. He had been honest, but he didn’t want to lose this guy. Comrie was an idiot, but he was still the best chance they had of clinching a deal with the Allens and taking another big step forward in the industry. So he had to reassure him, lie to him a little, pat him on the head.

  ‘Look, Aiden, Chris is a very busy guy. He’s in meetings all day today. In meetings most days. That’s the way it is now, with all the work we’ve got to cover. There’s so much happening, and so much we got to do to cover it all. He can’t be hands on with everything the business does; he’d need to be in ten different places at once. So sometimes guys like me have to do some of the organizing. Chris is still involved, still in touch with all of it, and you’ll have another meeting with him straight after the handover. That’s when he’ll really want to talk to you.’

  That was enough to persuade the easily persuaded. Aiden looked happy, impressed by the suggestion of legitimate scale that Duffy had thrown at him, looking forward to the prospect of meeting Argyle again after the handover had been a success.

  ‘Sure, yeah,’ he said with a nod. Thinking that in a year’s time it would be him sitting at the head of the table, him in the position of power.

  Duffy didn’t bother with a friendly goodbye, just took him to reception and let the dumbass leave. He walked back down the corridor, past the office they’d used and into the one at the bottom. This one was about the same size, but there was only a single desk in it, a chair in front and shelves behind and to the side. Sitting behind the desk was Chris Argyle, a man in his early fifties, looking younger. An energetic man, an inspirer.

  ‘How did that go?’ he asked Duffy.

  ‘About as well as expected. He’s going to set up the meeting himself, didn’t much like being offered help. I don’t know, I suppose he might have enough experience to avoid screwing up the location, but I won’t bet on it. I’ll get a couple of the boys on it; make sure we have the building well covered. If anyone can find a way to fuck this up it’s Aiden Comrie. The guy doesn’t have a clue.’

  Argyle gave him a measured look. ‘We wouldn’t have a deal without him. If he hadn’t worked for the Allens before, we would have no connection with them. He’s useful and we need to get the maximum profit from that. But you’re right, of course, he is just a street dealer and he doesn’t have the smarts to handle all of this. That’s why I’ve got you looking over the deal. You keep this under control and we’ll have nothing to worry about. He doesn’t understand all the things that could go wrong but you do. You need to have it covered.’

  Duffy nodded, left his boss to it. This was a big moment for them, a chance to clinch a key deal. Argyle’s set-up was already big, already lucrative, and this was a chance to lock them into the kind of long-term stability that the organization craved. It was true that they needed Aiden Comrie for the set-up, but it seemed daft to leave him in charge of the handover. He was a liability.

  Aiden was out on the street, taking a walk back towards the city centre and dwelling on that meeting. He would soon be as important as that arrogant shite Duffy. Would only be months before he was strutting around that office building, acting like the big cheese. Time would come when he might be able to push Duffy aside, make him pay for his attitude. Yeah, that would be pretty sweet, Aiden at the head of the table lecturing Duffy on how to do his job. Right now he needed to get back to his car, get somewhere quiet and private and make the phone call to Sarah McFall. He was looking forward to that. Get that pretty blonde on the phone; get her running around to meet him. He would insist on it being his location, wouldn’t let her make the decision, no matter how much she argued. Aiden was going to be commanding. That would show Duffy who was really in charge around here.

  Aiden was thinking too much about how he was going to handle the future, not focusing enough on the present. He didn’t notice the guy on the other side of the street, walking slowly and checking his phone. He was a short guy, shaven-headed, didn’t stand out at all. Looked casual, like he didn’t have a care in the world, but if you were observant and a little paranoid you might think it was funny that he was keeping exact pace with Aiden. But Martin was good at that. Didn’t matter where he was, he could blend into the scenery, make himself seem like just another guy on the street. It was easy for him to tail Aiden, and text Usman the details as he went.

  16

  It had b
een a day since they sat him down in that garage and he talked his way out of a grave. Maybe they wouldn’t have killed Usman, maybe they’d just have battered him badly enough to make him a walking advertisement for their revenge. Whatever, he had got out of it in one glorious piece, which was a significantly lower number of pieces than he had feared when they’d bundled him into their car. But it had changed everything.

  The first thing he had to do was make sure that Martin didn’t find out. That was key, and he had made it clear to Nate Colgan as well. Wasn’t easy telling Nate Colgan anything, insinuating that you knew better than him, but he had. If Martin found out, he was likely to run for the hills, or wherever Czech people run for. Colgan agreed with a half-shrug. So they were keeping Martin in the dark, and that was why Martin was out tracking Comrie, happily oblivious to the new people looking over both their shoulders.

  It was never going to be the same. Not now that he had someone the size of Nate Colgan on his back. There was a reason every single person in the city was intimidated by that man. A good reason, a bloody one. Usman had heard enough skin-crawling stories to know he wasn’t going to defy Colgan. What the big man said went, which meant Usman had to tailor every job from now on to make sure it suited him, or at least didn’t offend his sensitivities. Usman wasn’t naive enough to think it would just be this job and then he’d be free to do as he pleased. Once Colgan had him under the thumb, he was never letting him out.