For Those Who Know the Ending (11 page)

Nate got onto his knees, touching the back of his head and feeling the sticky wetness in his hair. There wasn’t much blood there, but a head injury was always enough to make you nervous. Not as nervous as Gregor was making him, looking like a dead man on the floor. Nate, still on his knees, shuffled across to him. Gregor was breathing, his round mound of stomach slowly rising and falling. Nate leant down and gave him a gentle slap on the face. That got a groan in response, which was all that Nate needed to hear. The man wasn’t dead, wasn’t dying and this disaster hadn’t just turned into a complete catastrophe.

Nate had to put his hand back against the wall before he could stand up. Bloody hell, the back of his head hurt when he moved. Felt like the skin had been ripped, the sort of pain you get from a glancing blow, where someone hesitates just enough to not hit you cleanly. Could have been a hit with a sharp object, but there would have been a deeper cut and more blood if that was the case. Nate had experience of every kind of punch, kick and weapon attack that was ever likely to be dished out; he could tell in an instant what this was. It was a different wound from Gregor’s. Nate’s was no big deal, painful and annoying but once the shock wore off he would be fine. Couple of stitches might be needed, but nothing more gruesome. Gregor had been knocked out cold, Nate hadn’t. Gregor’s was a vicious blow to the back of the head, there could be something more serious and long-lasting there.

Never mind Gregor, he had to find Gully. There was no sign of him at all; he must have gone after the pair of little shites that were responsible for this. Could be dangerous, he might need some backup. Nate stumbled forward, stopped, shook his head and started again. He felt lightheaded, damaged. He wasn’t used to the feeling of vulnerability that came with it, or the feeling of defeat.

Gully stepped in through the back door just as Nate lurched round the corner. Glass crunched under his foot, he looked down and grimaced, then across to Nate.

‘You finished your siesta?’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ was all Nate could manage. ‘Bastard snuck up on me.’

‘You okay?’

Nate nodded. ‘Not sure about our friend back there though, he’s still half asleep. What did you see?’

‘Got the car number plate. The one who hit you was a Pakistani boy with a hammer. Face wasn’t covered, so I’m guessing he was supposed to be the driver for the other one. They got our guns.’

That didn’t matter; Nate didn’t like the bloody things anyway. The expense would be covered by the organization, and it would save him going to the effort of returning them. What mattered was that Gully had seen a face and had a car they could track down.

Gully led the way back round the corner to Gregor.

‘Try and wake him up,’ he said to Nate, ‘and I’ll find somewhere to write down that number before my ageing mind forgets it.’

Gully went into the office, found a pen and a sheet of paper and scribbled down the plate details, taking a glance at the open safe as he did. Smart little bastards, he thought to himself. Nate knelt back down beside Gregor. He was starting to get concerned; the guy had been properly unconscious for nearly a minute and he wasn’t waking fast. That was always bad news. He slapped him gently again, the extent of his medical expertise.

‘Come on, Donny, talk to me, you clown.’

There was a mumble, Donny trying to say something, slurring his words badly. Gully came back out and stood in the doorway, looking down at them both. Nate shook his head.

‘I think we’re going to have to get a doctor onto this one. He was out for a while. Concussion, or something like that. Could be serious. We can’t afford to have him dropping dead on us. This is a big enough fuck-up already without a body.’

‘We got a company doc or will I run him to the hospital?’

Nate had to think about it. They had a company doctor, a pill popper who technically wasn’t a doctor any more, but he seemed to know what he was doing and he could at least give them a better idea of whether they needed to get Gregor to a hospital.

‘Company doc first, see what he says. I’ll write you his address. Don’t know what state he’ll be in mind you, this late at night. Get this one round there, I’ll phone the doc up and warn him you’re coming.’

Nate went past Gully into the office, wrote the address down.

‘What about you?’ Gully asked him, taking the sheet of paper with the address and passing the one with the number plate to Nate.

‘I’ll stick around here. Tidy up this mess. Work out what the fuck we’re going to do next.’

‘You don’t need the doc?’ Gully looked a little concerned; he’d witnessed, suffered and inflicted enough head injuries in his time to know you didn’t take them lightly.

Nate shook his head. ‘I’m fine. Will be, anyway. You need a hand getting him out to the car?’

Gully smiled. ‘Nah, I got him. All this loose muscle is still technically muscle. Plus I’m the only one here who had the good sense not to get my skull caved in.’

‘Aye, that was clever thinking.’

It took some effort to get him off the floor, but Gregor was able to move slowly with plenty of sturdy support from Gully. They went out the front door, taking the shortest possible route to the car, and drove away.

Once they were gone, Nate went out and locked up, pulled down the shutter and made his way round the back, going in through the still open back door. He was inside the bookies, on his own. He wanted to punch a wall, but all that would achieve was the unwanted attention of people in neighbouring buildings and some cracked knuckles. So far this had been an almost silent night, the only noise coming from the cars coming and going. He went back through to Gregor’s office and knelt down in front of the safe. He had a horrible feeling about what he was going to see when he pulled the already ajar door open. No surprise, the two packages of cash were gone, the bookie’s own money still there.

He sat in the chair at the desk and tried to get his sore head working. Think, you dumb fucker, how do you catch the people responsible? Is it possible to cover this? It was mere damage-limitation, he knew that much already. The job of defending the money from a known attack had failed. They could get the money back and punish the people who had stolen it, but they had still failed to protect it in the first place and it was that failure everyone would point to. That’s what would become public knowledge, unless the punishment they brought about was so severe that it overwhelmed people’s memory of the original crime.

Shit, he wasn’t thinking straight, working out punishments for people they hadn’t even identified yet. They had to
find
the pricks before they could make them suffer. They would. They could trace just about any car, work out who was using it, then go after them. There was a chance here, a slim one, that word wouldn’t get out. Gregor would keep his mouth shut and only an act of crass stupidity would open it. He hadn’t lost any of his own money, no reason for him to mention tonight if they could keep him out of the hospital.

Shit, phone call. He got out his mobile and scrolled down to the doctor’s number. Nick Hall. Once Dr Nick, but not any more. He had been off on medical grounds for ages and eventually his colleagues managed to persuade him that there was no job for an addict like him to go back to. Not that it changed his life much; he had been working as a doctor for the Jamieson organization since before he went off work sick.

‘Nick, it’s Nate Colgan. What state are you in?’

‘What state am I in? I’m fine. Why?’

He sounded fine, but that didn’t mean anything. Nate had met the doctor a few times, sometimes when he was popping and sometimes when he wasn’t and there was little noticeable difference. The guy was a pro at covering his addiction, a hardcore user who had learned how to always appear normal. Then again, Nate figured, if anyone should be able to cover a habit, a doctor should be. Or maybe the pills he was guzzling just didn’t have a dramatic effect; Nate had heard conflicting stories about what the guy was into.

‘Someone’s coming round to yours with a patient right now. Can you see them?’

‘Yeah, sure, I’m alone.’

‘Gully is bringing him,’ he said, then realized that Dr Nick probably didn’t know who Gully was. ‘It’s a head injury, so we’re not sure how serious it is. He was out cold for over a minute, groggy when he left here to go round to you. Have a look, see what you can do, and if they guy needs to go to the hospital then so be it.’

He hung up and looked back down at the safe, reached out a foot and kicked the door shut. Stupid bloody thing. He’d have to spend some time scouting somewhere better to store money from now on. He had mentioned already that they might need better stores, but there was always too much else to worry about, too much else that had to be organized. This wasn’t a criminal organization any more; it was a tower-defence strategy. Trying to build ever more effective defences before the enemy strikes, always worried that there might already be an enemy inside.

All this because the boss was in jail. Everyone afraid of making big moves without his permission, the natural order of the business thrown into chaos until he got out. And Nate, catapulted into the position of security consultant. The man people within the organization looked to for protection, the man who was supposed to keep the likes of Donny Gregor safe from harm. Protect the money he earned and hid in his safe, more to the point. The money was always considered more important than the person who earned it.

If word got out about this job, Nate would look like a failure. If word got out that he was there when it happened and botched the whole fucking thing . . . Fuck’s sake, his reputation would be circling the drain. Didn’t matter how powerful your reputation was now, it only ever took one screw-up for it to collapse to rubble. Nobody would call him a failure to his face, nobody in this city would fucking dare, but they’d think it. He would lose respect. But word of the job getting out was still an if.

If this had been carried out by someone working for another organization then word would undoubtedly spread fast. They would want the world to know the joyous news that they’d hit a Jamieson business and got away with it, adding bad PR to the pile of money already gone. But if it wasn’t someone from another organization, that was different. If this was just a random opportunist then it made sense that the attackers would be desperate to keep it to themselves. Only if they were tremendously stupid would they even think of spreading the word, inviting hell to fall down on top of them. So the two guys work on their own, they hit the place and then they lie low, they tell no one. They don’t risk Nate discovering identities and chasing them down. Well, he was going to chase them down anyway, but he’d appreciate them keeping their mouths shut in the meantime.

9

It was very late when Martin made it back home. Usman had dropped him down the street and let him walk the rest of the way, accepting that it didn’t make sense for the car to be seen stopping outside Martin’s house in the dead of night. A glance at his watch, five past two, he was going to have to explain his late arrival. Part of him wanted to explain it in honest detail; he wanted Joanne to at least ask where the hell he had been.

He was still clutching the bag with sixteen thousand pounds in it that was going to have to be hidden somewhere in the house. He would have to tell her about it, if she asked. He was afraid too that she wouldn’t ask. It was stupid, but as he put the key in the front door and went inside, he was afraid that she wouldn’t care enough to ask.

The house was silent and dark. He went through to the kitchen, thought about putting the bag with the cash into the large cupboard there. No, too public. Needed to be somewhere that no visitor to the house would enter. Only he and Joanne ever used their bedroom, which was why he had to put it somewhere there. So he went quietly upstairs.

She wasn’t asleep, she was just pretending to be. Joanne rolled over and stretched, making it seem as though he’d woken her when he entered the room.

‘You’re back.’

‘I am.’

She put on the bedside lamp and sat up, watching him. He already had the wardrobe door open and was down on his knees. He opened the now empty shoebox the gun had been in and forced the bag of cash inside. It burst one of the sides of the box, but it went in. He placed the lid loose on top of it, it wouldn’t fit with the side burst, and put the now empty carrier bag on top of the box.

Joanne was watching him when he closed the wardrobe door and turned around. He stared at her, waiting for her to say something more. If she cared she would say something, he had convinced himself of that.

‘Didn’t think you were going to be this late,’ she said, looking at him with an impenetrable expression. He’d never been this late before, but she knew he’d never worked on something intense like he had that night.

‘I didn’t think I would be. I would have said. I didn’t mean to keep you awake.’

She smiled a sort of dismissive smile, her way of saying that if she wanted to sleep she would sleep and him not being there wouldn’t change it. That self-confidence felt a little bit false and they both knew it. Martin went over and sat on his side of the bed, not making a move to undress. He looked at Joanne, almost forcing her to say something.

‘You were working?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I was working. I was. It was a big job. I made some money.’ He almost added the words ‘for us’ to the end of that sentence, but that would have been unfair. He had chosen to do the work, trying to imply that she was part of the reason for it was just delusional.

Silence. He had set the question up for her, but she wasn’t responding. Joanne knew she just had to ask him what it was exactly he had been doing and he would spill his guts all over the bedroom. If she told him to stop working, he would stop. If she said she was disgusted with him and wanted him out of the house he would fight for the relationship. It was entirely up to her what happened next.

‘Martin?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s in the box?’

Finally. Now she was asking something that forced them down the dark road towards an honest conversation.