Flesh Wounds (2 page)

Stevie thought Gerry was havering when he said it had been more than twenty years ago, but when he did the sums it was right enough. No’ real. It still felt like something that had happened recently: since the millennium, at least. Some folk cast a long shadow, and the period after they had departed always seemed shorter than the time you knew them, even if you had only known them for a fraction of the years they’d been gone. Glen Fallan: aye, there was a face Stevie missed, in spite of everything, though not from hanging round the Vaults. Not his style. Ever the lone gunman; often literally.

Stevie’s cousin Doke then told the story about the Egan brothers going on the lam because they knew the polis were after them, and hiding out at their mammy’s house two doors down. Aye, polis were never going to think of that. Fucking geniuses.

Doke was standing there in a two-grand suit, keys to an Aston Martin in one pocket, keys to a house in Thornton Bridge in the other, but like Gerry, like Haffa, like Stevie himself, it seemed all he wanted to talk about was old days, old faces, old streets.

Stevie had a Bentley Continental GT outside. He loved that machine like it was part of him: loved the growl of its engine, the gleam of its lines; loved what it said about him. It boasted more than six hundred brake horsepower, did nought to sixty in four seconds and its low-slung suspension was so smooth it handled like one of those lightcycles from
Tron
. But driving it had never given him a fraction of the excitement he had experienced behind the wheel of a stolen Escort XR3i when he was sixteen, his brother Nico riding shotgun, their cousins Doke and Jazz in the back, Stevie throwing the car around like it was the dodgems.

That thought was what finally gave him the nudge to get moving. It was one thing to miss your youth, but nostalgia could seduce you into thinking that the best of you lay in the past. To wallow in it was the same as staying here in this seat instead of going out to meet the day.

Fuck. That.

He climbed to his feet, giving Doke a phone gesture and receiving a subtle nod in response. He would be expecting him to call around teatime, and not to wish him happy birthday.

Stevie squinted against the late-morning sun as he opened the outside door. It was a cool and crisp November morning. Perfect for driving. He loved to see the metal glimmer of the Bentley’s flanks in the sunlight, the solidity of the alloys picked out in a sharp contrast to the black rubber of the tyres. This was nicer than summer: the windscreen would stay clear without a thousand beasties kamikaze-diving it between the car wash and the health club.

He put the Bentley into drive and glided out towards the main road.

Stevie was aware that the older he got, the more he was vulnerable to thinking he had peaked and plateaued; that it was too late in the game for anything much to change, least of all the way he played it. There was a seductive instinct to stick instead of twist, to protect what he already held, and implicit within that was an acceptance that this was as good as he could expect it to get, as high as he could reasonably aspire to climb.

It was the death of Flash Frankie Callahan that had most fuelled this insecurity. A powerful adversary suddenly taken out of the picture, a supply line cut off, a very big slice of the market up for grabs: it should have been the start of a new era. Instead, Stevie had been squeezed in the aftermath, losing market share and watching, helpless, as someone else took over Frankie’s operations.

The part of him that was still young and hungry was able to read a lesson in it, though. That it was Tony McGill who had been the phoenix from Frankie’s ashes should have been a lesson to everybody.

Tony had a criminal career going all the way back to the fifties, running rackets and smuggling operations before anybody in Glasgow had ever had their first jag of brown or their first sniff of cocaine. Tony had watched as the logistics, the economics, the very nature of the game altered. He was a T-Rex caught in the teeth of a snowstorm at the onset of the Ice Age, an apex predator rendered suddenly vulnerable by a changing world. Different breeds had evolved to overtake him: breeds such as Stevie, once upon a time, and inevitably the once-mighty T-Rex was felled.

Tony was past sixty when he got out of prison a few years back, and after serving as long as he did, he must have stepped through the gates into a world he barely recognised. Nonetheless, Tony hadn’t considered himself too long in the tooth to get back in the game, or thought that his most prosperous years were behind him. He had still run a decent-sized show from inside, despite the limitations of that chubby wee fanny Tony Junior.

Stevie had often heard boys described as ‘working for Tony McGill’ when they had never come within fifty miles of where the man was securely locked up, and none of them meant that they were working for Teej, as his arsehole son was known.

They said beware the vengeance of a patient man. They also said the best revenge was living well. Tony could thus consider himself thoroughly avenged. After Flash Frankie went up in flames, it was Tony who took possession of a massive misplaced shipment of brown, before stepping in to replace Frankie and his crew as the Scottish outlet for a seriously major supply line. Not bad for a guy who used to bask in the acclaim of being ‘the man who kept the drugs out of Gallowhaugh’.

It was an astonishing turnaround in fortunes, only a few years after his release from jail. Stevie wasn’t sure how becoming Glasgow’s primary heroin conduit sat with his parole conditions, but didn’t imagine Tony lost any sleep over it.

Tony had learned from past mistakes. He had adapted, proven an old dog could learn some new tricks. Nonetheless, when you analysed his success, you could see he was like one of those veteran football managers who replicated their success at each club by signing the same type of player and playing the same system. There were adaptations, sure, but at a fundamental level they always went with what they knew.

In Tony’s case, the linchpins of his strategy were bent polis. They had made him bombproof once upon a time, and they had played their part in putting him back on the map in jig time once his stretch was done.

However, those veteran managers could eventually get found out. They became too reliant on the tried-and-tested formula, and their recipe for success became their weakness. Something that predictable would eventually expose a vulnerability if you watched and waited long enough, though only if you had the means to exploit it.

Stevie hadn’t, until now.

He might have turned forty-nine today, but his birthday present had come early. Out of nowhere he’d been offered precisely what he needed to change the game in this city. And like all the best deals, the vendor didn’t have a clue as to the true value of what he was selling.

Unlike the others, Stevie wasn’t going to let his zest for the present become sapped by the soporific temptations of nostalgia. The future was opening up before him, and it was going to make his past look like a pre-match warm-up.

He drove the Bentley into the car wash, waved to a space between islands that once housed petrol pumps by a teenager in grey overalls and a Metallica T-shirt. He didn’t know the kid’s name but the kid knew his. He signalled to his mate and they jumped to it, leaving the woman in the Ford Focus at the next wash station wondering what was the script.

Funny he should be thinking about Tony as he drove to use this place: in a way it was the first sign, way back when, that Stevie was outgrowing him, and that the rules were changing in ways Tony couldn’t grasp. The older man didn’t understand why Stevie was putting money into running a car wash, even after he had explained that it wasn’t just cars that were going in dirty and coming out clean.

There was some heavy metal rubbish playing from a pair of puny speakers perched on the water heater that fed the cleaning lances. Stevie cranked up the Bentley’s stereo and let the sub-woofer take care of the noise pollution. Bit of Simple Minds:
Sparkle in the Rain
. That didn’t count as nostalgia; just a basic matter of it being better than any of the shite that was out nowadays.

The kid in the Metallica T-shirt knelt down and began squirting some stuff on his alloys, while a biker-looking bloke in what most closely resembled fishing waders hefted the lance. He gave the car a once-over with some hot water to start with, then began coating it in foam.

The windscreen got it first, then the entire vehicle was insulated in a layer of white bubbles. As always, this part made Stevie feel a little uncomfortable, blind and isolated in what suddenly seemed a cramped wee capsule. There was only a thin film between him and the outside world, but he felt suddenly very detached. It was easy to imagine what it would be like to be inside a car buried in an avalanche. He recalled a dream he’d had, two or three times in fact, about being engulfed in a different kind of snow. It piled up around him, higher and higher until he couldn’t escape. That was before he quit sampling his own merchandise.

This bit never lasted long, however. They’d start with the brushes any second, though they seemed to be taking their time this morning. He considered rolling down the window a little to ask what was keeping them, but thought better of it, as chances were a brush would come right along it at just that second.

Instead he relaxed, deciding to enjoy the isolation, alone with his thoughts and his music.

A hole suddenly appeared in both the foam and indeed the windscreen itself, a spiderweb of crazing extending like ripples from its centre. The bullet that shattered the glass carried on through Stevie’s chest, bouncing off a rib and spinning end on end through his heart. It was liquidised midway through its final beat, but his brain had still enough oxygen for him to look through the dissolving suds and glimpse a tall figure levelling a silenced handgun and pulling its trigger three more times.

He had a skull for a face: death incarnate.

It was the last thing Stevie saw.

Jasmine slipped her phone back into her pocket and climbed out of the Civic. People had been streaming out of the car park as she drove in, making her worry whether she would find a space so close to the theatre, but there were plenty in sight once she crested the hill.

She had just read a text from her friend Monica, apologising that she wasn’t going to make it. The message had arrived while Jasmine was driving along the M8 half an hour back, but she hadn’t heard the alert over the sound of the Honda’s stereo, nor felt a vibration as her leather jacket had been draped over the passenger seat. Monica’s own car had broken down somewhere around Cramond, and with the AA bloke telling her the alternator was gone, it wasn’t going to be a quick fix.

This meant Jasmine was going to be on her own, which made her stop for a moment and consider her options. She felt perfectly comfortable going to the cinema by herself, or even, at a push, seeing a play, but this was a gig. Nobody went to a gig alone, did they? This was daft, though. There was no explicit social convention that she was about to violate; just the threat of her own self-consciousness, which in this case would be a mixture of insecurity and delusion. Why should she be conspicuous? Nobody was going there to look at her.

Besides, she had paid for the tickets and been looking forward to it: posted as much on Twitter and Facebook like an excitable wee lassie and had luxuriated in the prospect of
being
an excitable wee lassie for a couple of hours. So despite the doubting voice that was whispering how sad she would look to be sitting there like Nelly No-Mates at a rock concert, she decided it was profoundly sadder still to even contemplate driving home again.

I’m not sad, she thought to herself.
I’m okay.

She walked down the slope towards the Alhambra, the road in front of which was teeming with excited people. That was when she deduced that she shouldn’t have been surprised to find a parking space, due to the demographic. Only a very small proportion of this crowd would have turned up in a car as they were predominantly too young to be in the position to own one, or even to learn to drive. The fact that it struck her as unusual to be surrounded by so many people her own age or younger – and a clear majority of them girls – warned her she was becoming too accustomed to spending her time around middle-aged men.

She needed to get out more, even if it was on her own.

The support act was already on stage when she made her way into the stalls. She guessed they were local, or had a lot of pals who had made the trip, as they were being cheered with conspicuous enthusiasm by a portion of the crowd close to the front. The band were lively and enthusiastic, loving their time on a stage that was itself probably bigger than any of the dives they had played before.

Jasmine glanced around the place, taking in the venue. She had never been inside the Dunfermline Alhambra, and had assumed it would be a nightclub. Instead it turned out to be a grand old 1920s theatre-cum-cinema, a doughty survivor of the great bingo-hall attrition.

Whilst taking in her surroundings, her professional abilities also noted that somebody nearby was taking an interest in
her
, and thus she was reminded of another reason why she had her reservations about going to a gig alone. There was a guy leaning against a pillar about ten feet away, and she clocked him staring at her on two separate passes. Suffice to say, she was the better skilled at keeping her scrutiny undetected.

He looked like he might more usually be occupied outside the venue at this point, breaking into vehicles in the car park, but even if he’d looked like Sam McTrusty, she wasn’t interested tonight. Okay, maybe if he actually
was
Sam McTrusty, but this chancer looked more like Ned Untrusty. It provided the impetus to swap the standing-only stalls for a seat upstairs, and the chance to enjoy her favoured perspective of any proscenium-arch space.

Her ticket was for down below, she and Monica having been planning to get sweaty in the mosh-pit, but the bouncers weren’t fussed. The circle wasn’t full, and venues were always more wary of letting you into the standing area if you were supposed to be upstairs.