Every Night I Dream of Hell (12 page)

‘Nice little diversion you’re throwing me,’ I said, ‘but don’t think my memory’s that bad; I remember what I said a few seconds ago. You and him are here to push your luck, and it’s going to end badly.’

She got up from the table, looking a little tearful and angry. ‘Why don’t you go to hell, Nate? It’s probably the only place you’ll ever feel at home.’ And she careered off through the restaurant, standing on the same black leather handbag I had stood on coming in.

Zara stormed out of the door and out of view. I never considered going after her. Nobody in my line of work was in the habit of chasing after people on busy streets; it would draw too much attention. I let her get suitably far ahead of me and left the place, thinking about what she’d said. She wanted me to go to hell, and I figured that would be a short journey.

I could put every other mistake I made that day down to Zara getting inside my head, but that would be cheap. The mistakes I made were mine; trying to put them on someone else is a damn good way of making sure you repeat them.

First job was to call up Kevin and tell him that I’d learned a little something about our friend Adrian Barrett.

‘So he basically knows a lot about the place then. I mean, she has connections here, right, so she could put him in touch with useful people?’ he asked me.

‘Hard to say what her connections are these days. Little above mid-level when Winter was alive, and she’s been away a while now.’

‘But still, it might explain his reason for coming here, might explain where he got the idea to try and muscle in on Glasgow business.’

That sounded to me like Kevin was trying to look on the bright side of this. If Zara coaxed Barrett north then there was a better chance that nobody else had, namely Don Park. If we could take Park out of the equation then the puzzle began to look a lot smaller.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t take it for granted though.’

I left him chewing on that new info, knowing that the first thing he would try to do was get a tail on Zara. Find her and there was a chance of finding Barrett and ending this thing quickly. Quickly made everyone look good. There was nothing reassuring about Zara being involved, not to me. She didn’t have direct connections to people like Park, that was true, but she didn’t need them. Zara was a woman capable of making connections wherever she pleased.

Next person on the call list was Ronnie. I wanted him to come along with me on the next job I had to do that day, a pointless little thing that he might as well watch and learn from.

‘Can’t, I’m heading out to some farmhouse with Mikey, Conn and some guy called Bee, or BB. They don’t think Barrett’s crew are there now, but they might have been. Sounds like a wild goose chase, but Marty Jones called me up himself and told me to go along.’

He sounded impressed by the fact that Marty had called him up. Tells you how far Marty had come that even smart people were impressed by a call from him these days. BB was Brian Bradley, young muscle that worked for Marty’s debt collection business, now run by Billy. Going in heavy with those four, heavier than he needed to for a possible past location. Sounded like a paranoia crew to me, two to do the work and two to check up on the two doing the work. Didn’t blame Marty for taking those kinds of precautions. It was going to be that way until we got all this sorted out.

Ronnie being in on that search meant I had to go visit Mark Garvey alone. I wasn’t in the mood for people I liked so I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for Mark Garvey. A middle-aged, smarmy gun dealer that we shouldn’t have been bringing into the organization in the first place. This would have gone much better if I’d had Ronnie with me, or if I’d managed to slip my brain out of neutral at any point.

He lived in a semi-detached house out towards Cider Hill, an area I only knew because I knew who was buried out there. I parked down the road from his boring little house on the kind of tight residential street that forces you to say hello to your neighbours, and went in through his front garden. Knocked on the door, ignoring the subtlety of the bell, and waited. The door was opened by a woman in her mid to late thirties, blonde hair scraped back and a scowl on her face. Wrapped in a bathrobe and looking like a visitor was the last thing she wanted. This, I knew, was Melanie Garvey, wife of Mark.

‘I’m looking for your husband.’

‘Are you now? Well, he’s not in.’

She didn’t know who I was. ‘My name’s Nate Colgan. I’m here to talk shop. You sure he’s not in?’

She got a little combative at the sound of my name. ‘He’s not, actually. He went out; I don’t know when he’ll be back. Shouldn’t be long. I think he was making a delivery. You can come in, wait if you want.’

If he wasn’t going to be long then there was no reason not to go in and wait. She led me through to the kitchen, a spotless, white place that looked like nobody had ever stepped into it before. I wandered to the far end of the room where a dining table was pushed against the back wall and took a seat there. She filled the kettle, put it on, and walked out of the room.

The world would be a much better place if people had the good sense to leave me alone. Let me get on with my work; let me get on with my life. But they can’t do that, they just can’t. Everyone has to play their own little game and make me a part of it. On another day I would have had the good sense not to get involved.

She came back into the kitchen, still wrapped in the same bathrobe she had been wearing before. Her hair was loose now. Walked right up to me, stood with one of her bare toes pressed against the toe of my boot. She was short; didn’t have to look that far down at me sitting there. She pulled open the robe, reached out her hands to either side of my face. For reasons only she would ever understand, she gripped the sides of my head tightly, digging in with her nails, holding my head to look at her naked body. The reasonable sight of a woman in her late thirties who’d never had a kid and worked out a lot.

She reached down and picked my hands from my lap, slipping them round the back of the open robe onto her backside. Seemed like she wanted me to return her pinch, so being a gentleman I obliged. I grabbed, turned her around and shoved her away from me. Not much force, but she was small and her stumble across the kitchen floor wasn’t graceful. She stopped in the middle of the floor and looked at me, dressing gown gaping, mouth slightly open, trying to work out what my game was. Was I really not interested, playing hard to get or wanting something rough?

‘You go call your man and tell him I’m not looking for gifts or bribes. Tell him to get in here now.’

That ended any thought she had of going through with whatever little game her and Garvey had been playing. She should have been grateful. I wasn’t a man to dabble with, even when I was in a good mood. She shut her mouth, pulled her robe shut and walked out of the kitchen, indignant. Maybe she just wanted a fling, but I never thought of myself as handsome enough to invite that. This was her and Garvey trying to get me into their debt, the only thing they could use to hook me. If I owe him, then he doesn’t have to play by the rules I was about to lay down. I’d seen people like Garvey using tricks as dirty as that before; I figured it had to be what this was and it pissed me off.

I’d only given that a couple of minutes’ thought when the front door opened and I heard a man cheerily shouting hello. Mark Garvey, back just when it was slightly too late to catch anyone out. I’ve already said I don’t believe in coincidences, right? She leaves the room, has just enough time to text the husband and tell him he can come in now. Tell him the big lump that he’s scared of hasn’t bitten the hook and they’re going to have to play me straight.

Didn’t take a genius to work out that Lafferty had already told him he was getting the job before he suggested him at his meeting, and that Marty would have called him up the night of the meeting to hunt for info. Garvey was playing at being ignorant; all part of the game him and Melanie were enthusiastic amateurs at, with dreams of professionalism. If Garvey had the ‘security consultant’ in his back pocket then he had a chance to break the rules with impunity. Breaking the rules is a profitable business, and I mean double-or-treble-your-money profitable by selling to multiple buyers instead of just us.

He came into the kitchen, made a show of looking surprised to see me, and walked across the room with a smile on his face and his hand outstretched.

‘Nate, God, been a good long time since you and me had a chat, huh?’

‘I don’t remember us ever having a chat.’

‘Well, no, maybe not.’ He sat across the table, looking expectantly at me. He wasn’t bothered by my attitude.

‘The organization’s looking for a dealer that’ll supply us consistently and exclusively. Do you think you’re capable of living up to our standards?’ I posed the question as though I doubted his ability, but he ignored that. He was ready to ignore anything to get this deal done.

‘Sure I can, yeah. I have the stock and access to much more if needed. I’ll always make sure the organization is as well supplied as it can possibly be.’

I nodded and didn’t say anything else because there was nothing else I trusted myself to say. He was on board, which was what Lafferty wanted, but we both knew he had no place with us. It made no sense to have a gun dealer tied to us, or have our gunmen tied to a single gun dealer. This whole thing was a result of bad leadership. The sort of bad leadership that couldn’t last.

‘One thing,’ I said as I got to my feet. ‘You will be dealing exclusively with us. You will not sell a single piece to a single other person at any point in time. If I find out that you have, I will deal with you the way I deal with anyone who betrays this organization. No warnings, no second chances. It’s us and it’s no one else. There is nothing you or your wife can possibly do that’s going to get me under your thumb, you understand?’

His mouth was a little open, his face a little red. He stood up to try and match me and realized he would have been better sitting down. He looked up at me, working up the best pious impression he could manage.

‘You certainly don’t have to worry about that sort of thing with me, Nate. I can tell you now, I’m delighted to be working with the organization and I won’t sell a single thing to anyone else. Not a thing. You have my word.’

I’ve blown things out my nose that meant more to me than his word, but I nodded anyway. At the very least I’d denied him the opportunity to pretend that he hadn’t been warned. He might have been welcomed into the organization by Lafferty and Marty, but he was still on probation with me and there he would stay until I could find an excuse to get rid of him.

There’s a sense of relief when you leave a place you wish you’d never gone to, and leaving that house gave me a rush of it. That was a sad little marriage standing on the brink of collapse and I didn’t want to get the dirt of it on my clothes. Instead I went home and killed a little time before I called Ronnie.

Couple of hours had ticked away since I’d last called him, so I tried again.

‘You back from your farmhouse?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’ I knew he’d have called if they’d found anything.

‘And it was a farmhouse with no one in it. Didn’t look like anyone had been living there for a while.’

‘What’s the story of it?’

‘Old house, couple of barns, nothing alive in any of them. House was recently renovated; one of the barns was new. Farmer overspent, went tits up, owned by the bank or someone now. We went round it carefully; place had no signs of being used. None at all.’

I trusted Conn and Mikey to make that judgement. An empty place, not scrubbed so clean it becomes suspicious. They would know what signs to look for.

‘How did you get on with Garvey?’ he asked me.

‘Waste of time,’ I said. ‘The guy already knew he was going to be working for us; I was just there to make it look official.’

‘So what now?’

‘We keep looking, is what now. Come round and pick me up. We’ll go out and look at a few places. You talk to Thorne like I asked?’

‘Yeah, he gave me a few addresses, but, I don’t know, he didn’t seem confident. He reckons there are better ways of putting people up than that.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, caravans and empty buildings that never come on the market. All the places he had for me were places he knew were available recently, but he reckons they’ll be somewhere that was never available in the first place. Places we have are too obvious.’

I sighed. ‘I know it’s obvious, but we still have to check them. If we don’t and it turns out they’re there we look ridiculous. This is donkey work. It has to be done and we’re not above it. Come round and get me; we’ll have a look at some of those addresses he gave you.’

I didn’t want to be short with the boy, but he was making this harder than it needed to be. Kids like Ronnie always wanted to go looking for the glamorous long shot and ignore the simple, obvious stuff, and I could understand that. It seemed implausible that Barrett would have his crew hidden away in an easy-to-find place, a hotel or a large house available for rent, but that missed another obvious point. Barrett and his crew couldn’t stay hidden forever; they needed to come out into the world and be seen on the streets if they wanted to maintain the credibility they’d built so far. There was no need for a clever hiding place when you had no intention of staying hidden.

It was after ten o’clock at night. We’d had no joy finding even a hint of Barrett and his crew, so my mood hadn’t improved any. The clock was ticking down to the moment when that bunch of English bastards stepped out of the darkness and into the spotlight. That moment was going to be failure for me. The security consultant. Men like Lafferty would accuse me of letting this happen. Goes without saying that the moment they stepped out was the best chance we would get to take a shot at them. A chance to wipe them out. But that didn’t matter: it was about perception. The perception would be that I’d failed. That the organization was weak and hadn’t dealt with them.