Every Night I Dream of Hell (11 page)

She was sitting at a little table towards the back of the busy little place when I went in. It was the kind of narrow restaurant designed to make tall and broad men like me look epically clumsy. The tables were all too close together, the chairs were all too big for the little square tables. It was all a good way of making a small place seem busy, but it guaranteed that I bumped into two chairs and stood on some poor woman’s handbag on my way to Zara. I already disliked the place by the time I sat down.

Zara was sitting there, looking like a thinner version of the girl I had known. Her cheekbones stood out more; her lips looked a little thinner and her eyes a little bigger. Her hair was the same as I remembered, dark and just past her shoulders. And she was still the same Zara, still beautiful and just a little too obviously dangerous for most.

She was one of the few people I had ever been close to. Properly close, in an emotional sense. I don’t have a lot of emotion to spread around, so very few people get a share. I make a point of keeping my distance. Create a sense that I exist a split second and a million miles away from everyone else, that nothing in the world the rest of you live in could intrude on the one I occupy and dominate. I want to be just out of reach, especially for people as dangerous as Zara. And then, for a little while, when she was pregnant with Rebecca, she crossed the gap into my world. That was when we connected, when we really had something special. It had to end though, when she had Rebecca. There’s only room for one other person in my world, and from that moment on it would always be our daughter. I pushed Zara back out, and I’d been pushing her further and further away ever since. I thought I’d done a good job of that, until I saw her sitting there waiting for me.

‘Nate,’ she said when I sat down. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

Not entirely true, but truth was a barrier Zara had long since hurdled over. I was a little greyer, maybe a little broader in the gut than I was last time we met. The lines on my face that had started digging in when I was still in my mid twenties were deeper than ever. But I had a look that aged well, so her lie was at least living on the same street as the truth.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, passing it across the table to her, beside the bowl of soup she’d ordered. ‘That’s all the details you’ll need to empty the account. Got as good a price as possible for what you gave me.’ I said it cold and businesslike, making sure she got the message early and clear.

She reached out and pulled the paper across the table, glanced at the bank name and the sequence of numbers on it, and put it into her bag. ‘Thanks. I do appreciate it, Nate. I know you didn’t need to help me.’

That, right there, was the moment that the last grain of trust between us put on its coat and left the building. Zara being nice and appreciative was not Zara. I looked at her with a stern expression, waiting for her to say something reassuringly sarcastic.

‘What?’ was all she could come up with.

‘Is that it then? Are we done?’

She looked disgusted, a look she wore with the kind of perfection only practice can bring. ‘You’re that desperate to get away from me, huh?’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Sure you are; you always were. Cleaning the blood out of the grooves in your boots, wiping other people’s skin off your knuckles. Always so busy. You can’t even manage one conversation?’

There she was, the good old Zara I had expected. ‘If you have nothing else to say then I don’t,’ I told her.

She smiled that wry little smile of hers. ‘Always the enigma, playing your cards close to your chest. I’d like to know how my daughter has been, seeing as my parents enjoy speaking to me about as much as you do.’

‘She’s fine,’ I said, then decided it was only decent to say a little more. ‘She’s into photography at the moment, however long that’ll last. Enjoying school, but she’s smart enough to enjoy it.’ That was as much as I would commit to saying; anything more and it might feel like an invitation for her to ask more.

In fact, it was about as much of a conversation as she and I needed to have, and I was ready to get up and leave. She could see me glancing at the door, trying to work out a way of saying goodbye that was polite but firm.

‘So who are you working for these days?’ she asked me, looking down at the table so that we couldn’t make eye contact.

That meant that my withering look in response was entirely wasted, which was a shame because it was a good one. The kind that makes tough men squeeze their lips together to prevent another stupid word squeaking out. I said nothing, kept looking at her until she had no choice but to look up to make sure I was still there. When she did I held her eye until she shrugged and looked back down at the table.

‘You still want to keep everything to yourself then,’ she said. ‘Good to know you haven’t changed; still hiding yourself from the world.’

‘Still hiding myself from you.’

She looked up at me and smiled. Sneered, actually, might be the better word for it. Trying to make it seem like she could never respect a supposed tough guy who hid himself from little old her, but that was bull. Whatever else she thought of me, she thought I was respectably tough. I started to get up, pretty sure that we’d reached the inevitable dead end that any conversation between us always arrived at.

‘No interest in me then,’ she said, raising her voice and sticking a little quiver into the middle of it.

I was on my feet now, looking down at her, looking around at the busy little place and the busy little conversations happening at the other tables. You can always sense with Zara when she’s planning to make a little scene, and I could feel it at that point. I’m allergic to scenes, so I sat back down and put an enjoyably sarcastic look on my face.

‘Go on then. Tell me all about yourself.’

She looked me right in the eye, and then started talking about herself. At last she had a subject she liked. ‘I was going to come for this money much sooner but when I got out I was paranoid that Michael Fisher was on my tail. I think he was, you know. Following me around, having me watched, making sure that I didn’t go and pick up any money. So I couldn’t come and get it.’

I frowned, trying to work out if Fisher was enough of a dick to waste his time trailing around after Zara. Probably was, but he was supposed to be a good cop and God knows he was busy at the time she got out. He did well to find the time to stalk anyone.

‘Good of you to show patience,’ I said, only semi-sarcastically. If she’d come running to me for the money as soon as she got out she could have brought a determined cop straight to my door, so there was that much to appreciate.

‘I went down south,’ she carried on, ignoring me.

Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have had alarms going off at this point if it wasn’t Zara Cope sitting opposite me, and if I hadn’t sat through a similarly rehearsed conversation the night before. This sounded like something she’d decided she wanted to say before I even turned up.

‘Kicked around down there for a while, trying to make a living, doing regular jobs. Wasn’t a lot of fun, wasn’t much of a life. So I decided to come back, try and start again up here.’

‘Turning over a new leaf, huh?’

‘If you want to look at it that way. Maybe just make the most of my old leaf.’

I was sitting there doing my basic maths and I was convinced that the answer was four. It could easily have been a coincidence: man comes north with a crew of his own to try and muscle in on our market, no previous experience of the city, at the same time Zara comes back. A man who looks like he’s being guided by someone who knows the scene. Could so easily have been a coincidence. I didn’t believe in coincidence.

‘Where were you down there?’ I asked her. Kept my tone mildly disinterested so that she might just believe that I already knew the answer.

‘Birmingham, for a while.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you could have gone anywhere else.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe I always figured I’d be coming back here. I kicked around there for a few months, got bored, came back. Now I need to try and find some work, get a life set up that I can live. I’m not asking for help,’ she said, the opening shot in her asking for help. She said it with such a determined tone, like the truth could hide behind that.

But I knew that her asking for help was false as well, because everything that was coming out of her mouth was wrapped neatly in a lie. She was the link between Barrett and Glasgow. She had to be; it made such obvious sense. She talks to him about the city, about the organizations up here and how one of them is unstable. She points out that he’s a man who ran a drug network already, so he could do it again up here, make some real money. I could already picture her, whispering in his ear, telling him everything he needed to do to impress her, excite her. I remembered those whispers.

‘So you’re back up on your own?’

‘Of course,’ she said, a little too quick and defensive. ‘This is all the money I have now, so I’ll need to find something.’

She could have been fishing for a job, or she could have been fishing for information about the state of the organization, whether it was hiring or not.

‘There’s work around if you’re willing to do it,’ I said. ‘Same as it ever was.’

Which wasn’t entirely true: there were fewer jobs around for a couple of reasons. One was the mess of Jamieson’s arrest; that had thrown everything into the air. Every organization shied away from new employees in a time of uncertainty, especially one with Zara’s backstory. The other was the fact that there was less money in the world right now. A poor economy serves some parts of the industry well, others badly, so it sort of balances out. In the end you’re usually left with fewer new jobs being created. She nodded and looked suitably unconvinced, waiting for me to offer to help find her something.

‘You think Fisher’s still sniffing around you?’ I asked.

She looked at me a little shocked, like this was something she hadn’t thought she’d need to worry about now. ‘I don’t think so. Do you think he might be?’

‘I didn’t think he would have followed you around before, so what do I know?’

There was silence for a few seconds that I should have filled with a second attempt at leaving.

‘You heard anything else about Lewis?’ she asked.

‘Winter? Still dead as far as I know.’

She frowned at me and for a second there I thought she was actually hurt. Zara was always a complicated little bundle of lies and emotions; she might have actually cared about that pathetic man of hers.

‘Sorry,’ I said, quietly enough to be able to deny I’d ever said such a word. She knew as much about Winter’s killing as I did. Killed by Calum MacLean on the orders of Peter Jamieson; everyone knew that now. MacLean was long gone, and there wasn’t going to be any new information leaking out.

‘How’s business in the city?’ she asked, using my newfound discomfort to roll in the riskiest question she had to ask.

If she was connected to Barrett then she would want to know what I knew about the organization, about the city as a whole. I knew a hell of a lot more than her or Barrett or most other people. Anything she could get from me would be gold. Just a hint, something in my tone that said things were good, bad or indifferent. Something that would give them hope for their little plan.

‘Business is business,’ was all I said. She looked at me like she was about to say something clever, but I’d heard enough clever things in my life already so I cut her off. I leaned forwards, getting closer to her than I had in years, a few inches from her face. Close enough to notice that she didn’t smell of anything sweet, which was unlike her. ‘And you’re telling me that you came back up the road on your lonesome.’

‘I did,’ she said, frowning at my knowing smile, which didn’t know as much as it was pretending it did.

‘That right? And you’re staying on your own now, huh?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ she said, because she was smart enough to remember that I’d heard someone in the background of one of her phone calls. A hard woman to trip up.

‘You come waltzing back into town with your wee man and his pals in tow and you think I’m not going to even notice that,’ I said to her, watching her eyes for a reaction.

It was there, I saw a flash of it, but she killed it quickly because there’s nothing she wouldn’t kill quickly to profit herself. A little bit of shock, a little bit of fear and a little bit of anger. Most people wouldn’t have spotted it, but it was a look she’d worn often in our relationship and it was the familiarity that hit me hard.

Nearly hit me too hard. Knocked me backwards into the past, remembering being on the couch next to her and looking into her eyes. Remembering being in bed with her when she was pregnant. The feelings I’d had back then that I didn’t recognize and still can’t readily identify, but might have been fear. I was scared of being a father, being committed to Zara. And I looked at her now and saw the bags under her eyes and the too heavy make-up, neither of which had been there before, and I realized that for once her fear and anger might not be directed at me.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said with a scoff that was too late and feeble an arrival to make an impact on this conversation.

‘Him and his crew are heading for a spot in a forest somewhere, or up a chimney stack,’ I told her. ‘I won’t give you a second warning.’

‘Warning? What warning? I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must be paranoid about something, or punch-drunk at last. Probably paranoid. You were always paranoid. You remember how bad you used to get? Standing at the bedroom window, naked as the day you were born, looking out into the night for some bogeyman you thought was after you. I was eight months pregnant at the time and all you cared about were your little power fantasies, the chance to beat someone up. You haven’t changed.’

She was red in the face by now, but it all sounded like aimless lashing out, trying to pull the conversation away from the subject she feared. She was scared that I knew what little game she was playing. There was some truth in what she said about me being paranoid. That little story about her and me when she was heavily pregnant was partly true, only I wasn’t paranoid; we were both in real danger. I had pissed off a man I shouldn’t have, but I dealt with it without her understanding how bad things were. If she knew she would have been upset and she was emotional enough already. I was trying to protect her from me.