Every Night I Dream of Hell (2 page)

‘I didn’t figure it would be,’ Currie said, nodding his head and letting his relief show. ‘We need good people around us right now, Nate, we really do. Feels like we’re taking shots from every side and I don’t know where the next one will come from.’

‘Anything new?’

He looked left and right, like someone might have snuck into that cramped little office. ‘There is something. I mean, Jesus, you know what people are like, always complaining about something or other, but this seems different. We’ve had a couple of guys complaining about being pushed off their patch. Couple of other guys seem to have crossed over.’

‘To?’

‘Don’t know. That’s the problem. Well, we sort of know. Outsiders. Can you believe it? Like there aren’t enough local sharks in the water. Some English guy seems to be trying to pick off business in the city.’

‘You have an ID?’ I asked. Knowing who the threats were was a big part of my job, and this was the first I had heard of this one. For the first time since I arrived in the office, Kevin had my interest.

‘Just a name, Adrian Barrett. You heard of him?’

I shook my head, which I didn’t like doing.

‘English guy, like I said. We’re trying to work out where he was before, who he might be working for, if anyone. Seems like he’s putting the word around that he’s in charge, but that could be a screen. The guy in charge doesn’t turn up to do the donkey work, does he?’

Asking me, because he didn’t know for himself. Kevin ran a counterfeit operation, a good and profitable one. The man knew how to run a business, let’s make that clear right now. But he hadn’t been involved in the dirtiest corners of the business until Jamieson’s arrest pushed him there. Now he was up to his armpits in the filth and didn’t know where to swim for safety.

‘Not usually,’ I said. ‘Depends how big he is to start with, I suppose.’

‘Aye, well, he’s becoming an issue. Everything’s becoming a fucking issue.’ He was shaking his head and looking tired. The small things were mounting up, because the organization wasn’t a well-oiled machine any more. It was causing the sort of frustration that coaxed a rare sweary word out of Kevin’s usually pristine mouth. ‘We have so many things we need to clean up,’ he went on. ‘There’s stuff that still hasn’t been done from months ago, stuff we should have gotten out of the way but we were too busy keeping our heads down. There’s new stuff coming along all the time. You’ll have to get on top of a lot of that.’

‘Sure. What’s my title?’

‘You’ll be security consultant, the job Frank MacLeod was doing before he disappeared,’ he said. ‘You remember old Frank?’

I smiled a little and nodded. If you’ve been in the business in Glasgow at any point in the last forty years, you know of Frank MacLeod. I’d been in it for nineteen years, since I was eighteen. Disappeared was business speak for killed off and buried without the body ever being found. We knew he had been murdered on Jamieson’s orders by a hitman called Calum MacLean, who then told his interesting little story to the police. But they couldn’t peg the killing on Jamieson in any way, so that was another crime for which he wasn’t convicted, despite the few for which he was.

‘You’ll be providing security advice for the club, some pubs, some bookies, some of the legit stuff that Jamieson has. You don’t have to do anything though; the security mostly takes care of itself. We have people for that. Just put in the occasional appearance; I think that was all Frank used to do. Make sure the legit employees know your official job title in case the police ask them.’

That all made sense, but I’ll admit I was a little uncomfortable having to step into Frank’s shoes. I wasn’t going to be doing his job, not his real job. He was a hitman, and that was a line I’d never crossed. But people would see me doing the ‘security consultant’ job he did and they would make the comparison. They would think I was now as important as Frank had been, and that would make me a target.

‘Listen,’ Kevin went on, ‘there’s a job I want you to start with, and I don’t want you to laugh.’

I raised my eyebrows. When you’re a freelancer, you can be choosy if you really want to be. Won’t do much for your reputation, and your reputation is what’s going to get you work, but it’s up to you what jobs you do. If you can afford to say no and you want to say no, then go ahead and say no. Not when you’re an organization man. When you’re on the payroll, you have to do the jobs you’re given.

‘I want you to go round and kick seven bells out of Kirk Webster. I know that’s a pathetic place to start, but it still hasn’t been done and it needs to be.’

‘Is that all that needs to be done?’

‘Well,’ Kevin shrugged, ‘for now it is.’

I stood up and I shook his hand, like a new employee delighted to get through the job interview. There was something about that little office that made me want to play at being legit. That feeling had passed by the time I was out on the street, getting into Ronnie’s car.

He had his little Astra parked in the single line of parking spaces in front of Currie’s place. The car was too clean, I thought, maybe too new as well. It was a work car that nobody should ever spot. We were in Hillington, not far south of the river in an industrial area full of engineering firms and warehouses. Currie’s was a single-storey white building, brick front and corrugated roof, the office at the back of a large warehouse, surrounded by respectability on a street lined with trees. Nothing to suggest that the warehouse was crammed with tremendously illegal goods.

‘So?’ Ronnie asked me.

‘I’m on the payroll.’

‘And me?’

‘My first job will be to hire you in a security role. Congratulations.’

He started the car and we pulled away, me telling him about Kirk as we went. I’ll tell you about Kirk in a minute, but first I want to tell you about Ronnie Malone. I’d met him a good time ago, when he was working in a grubby little hotel near Central Station. He was there for Currie, helping his men get rooms for whatever little business they wanted to hide from others. He was wasted there.

Ronnie was smart, and smart shouldn’t be left booking rooms in a half-empty hotel for barely important counterfeiters and suppliers. I persuaded Currie to move him into my employ, let me work him into something more usable.

‘You come and work with me, and we’ll make good money together,’ I had told him. ‘You’ll have cash, you’ll have interesting work, you’ll have the chance to move up fast.’

He’d looked at me like he was trying to find the world’s politest way to say no. I wasn’t there to hear no, however polite, so I leaned a little more heavily.

‘All you’re getting now is beer money, but you still go down if someone points the finger at you. You’ve helped dangerous people do terrible things. The dough you’re making isn’t worth that. Let me help you make more, help make the risk worthwhile.’

He still looked reluctant, but he was a good boy, smart enough to realize that yes was the correct answer. So he came to work for me, and he was doing a decent job of it. Had a few little missteps, but every kid does when they’re starting out. Kid: Ronnie had just turned twenty-six a few weeks before Currie put us on the payroll.

He drove me back to my house. ‘You go look up Kirk Webster, find out what rock he’s living under. Come pick me up when you’ve found him. I’ll handle him. It won’t be a two-man job.’

We were still at the point where Ronnie was doing the set-up and I was doing the dirty work. The process of educating him on how to get bloody was a slow one. He had to learn, because that was his job, but you don’t rush a kid into it if you don’t have to. I was taking my time, teaching him, because I enjoyed it that way.

I had a small terraced house in Balornock, on a long curving road in an area that wasn’t quite as rough as it looked at a glance. Used to have the Birnie Court flats looming at the end of the road, looking ready for a fight. They had picked one with a demolition team and were gone by the time this happened. My house was the sort of place you would accept a man on a low income lives in. I wasn’t on a low income, but I was happy for the world to make its usual assumptions and move quietly along. I needed just enough space for me and my few possessions and I wasn’t fussy about location, location, location.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have liked to share my home with someone else. More than one, actually, but there was no way I was going to let that happen. I was bursting with faults, some of which I may find time to tell you about, but that kind of selfishness wasn’t one of them. I would have loved to have my daughter living with me, but I knew she was better off living with her mother’s parents. I wasn’t the man to bring up a young girl. And I would have liked to have a woman in my life, but that wasn’t happening either. I was short-tempered, generally surly and lugging around a reputation that made me good at my job and bad at everything else. People were scared of me, and that cut bad as well as good.

There was someone sniffing around, a girl I liked, a girl I admired. Her name was Kelly Newbury, and because I liked her I was making a conscious effort to stay away from her. She wanted the security a relationship with me could give her. Have me be scary on her behalf. It was an invitation to trouble and other good things that I couldn’t afford to get tangled in. Not with all this going on.

I took a sly look up and down the street as I made my way up to the front door because the habit of caution is a priceless gift. There was nothing out of place that I could spot, even if my eyesight isn’t as good as it once was. It’ll have to stay below its best because a guy like me doesn’t turn up to his work bespectacled.

I pushed open the front door and stepped inside, already seeing something I didn’t like. There was a folded piece of notepaper lying on the mat just inside the door that someone had put through my letter box when I was away getting gainfully employed. In the few seconds it took me to pick up the piece of paper I wracked my brains trying to think of any good news I had received in this way. None, ever.

Just needed a glance at the handwriting to know that this was more than bad news. This was a disaster waiting to happen. This was Zara Cope’s handwriting. Messy but confident, her name scrawled across the bottom of the paper, the
Z
much bigger than the rest of it, like a dyslexic Zorro.

I sighed my disapproval loudly to the empty corridor and wandered through to the living room. Putting music on always made it less likely that I would lose my temper, so I sat with a guitar being gently strummed in the background and read the note.

There were little digs in there that were designed to annoy me. Let’s start with the ‘I guess you’re not home’ comment, as though I was hiding behind the fucking couch to avoid her. Even mentioning the delivery was uncharacteristically stupid. What if someone else had found the note before I got to it? And saying there were other things to talk about was just a cheap tease. There was a lot more to the letter than the words.

She was desperate, was the first obvious thing. Mentioning what she had delivered to me before she was arrested was her charmless little shot at reminding me I owed her money. I didn’t need to be reminded; the money was sitting in an account waiting for her to adopt it. The sooner she got it out of that account and into one of her own the happier I would be. I didn’t want it anywhere near me. The money had started out its life attached to Lewis Winter, a walking catastrophe who had strolled to his early death when Zara was with him.

I should maybe give you a little history lesson at this point. Zara was the mother of my nine-year-old daughter, Rebecca. Zara hung around the business, using her looks and her smarts to make herself a fine little living. Or a living, anyway. She was a cut above the usual hangers-on, sharp as anything that’s ever cut me. I fell for her hard; we moved in together; she had Becky. Didn’t last though, and it was mostly my fault. Zara was twenty-one, looking for a fast life, and I was an angry and dangerous twenty-eight-year-old who wouldn’t accept the world not constantly bending to my will. We were too young. She ran, and I let her. Becky went to live with Zara’s parents, and it’s been that way since.

Zara shacked up with Lewis Winter, a mid-level dealer, and when he was knocked off she came to me with some of his dirty cash and the last of his supply. The drugs needed selling and the money needed hiding until the dear Scottish police service kindly stopped looking for it. I did what I could to help her, because that seemed like the right thing to do for the mother of my child, and because I still didn’t know how to say no to Zara Cope.

She was a special woman, one who had a power over me no other person has ever had. That didn’t help her a damn when she got a three-month sentence for perverting the course of justice. Slap-on-the-wrist stuff for someone inside the industry, but she was no more than a hanger-on, and the sentence would have hit her hard. She got out and went off the radar for a while, didn’t even come looking for her money. I knew she’d been away from the city for a lot of that time because I kept an eye out for her. Now, evidently, she was back. And yes, I did recognize her handwriting after all those years. There was almost nothing of her I had forgotten.

I turned the piece of paper over and saw that she’d scrawled a phone number on the back of it. A mobile number, underlined twice as though that would be the clincher if I was undecided. I was going to call her; she would gnaw at the back of my mind if I didn’t. She could also cause trouble for me, and I had enough of that to keep me company already. Zara was on first-name terms with some of the skeletons in my closet, so I had to keep her smart mouth shut. And she knew that I’d organized the sale of drugs on her behalf, and the cleaning of the money it raised.