Every Night I Dream of Hell (22 page)

Took him about three minutes. He straightened up, nodded to me, and walked out of the garden. It was his car we’d come in; he would drive home and I would be left to find my own way. He didn’t need to hang around. From what I understood of it, getting into the house involved breaking the lock to open the door, and then fixing it with the door open. Something like that anyway. It wasn’t a skill of mine. The door was ajar and had been for the last couple of minutes while Vernon worked at it.

I went inside and closed it. Walked through the downstairs of the house, took a quick look upstairs as well. Nobody there. Nothing of obvious interest, but I knew there wouldn’t be. A small terraced house, a man living on his own, careful about his work. He was hardly going to leave incriminating evidence lying on the bedside table, was he? I wasn’t wearing gloves or a balaclava. I was here for a conversation, nothing more. Just a conversation on my terms. It was nothing the police needed to worry about.

I went back downstairs and into the dark living room. Nothing much to do until he got back. Sat in the chair beside the table with the lamp on it, facing the doorless arch to the corridor. A good spot. Made sure the lamp was plugged in. Would make a neatly dramatic scene.

We knew he’d be out; Ronnie had been watching the house from across the street for a few hours. We didn’t know how long he’d be gone. I was sitting in that chair for forty fucking minutes, waiting for him. The phone in my pocket rumbled, then went still. Ronnie had seen him arrive back. I’d heard the car pull up in the street. Heard the car door closing. There was nothing out there for him to be suspicious of. He wouldn’t see Ronnie. He hadn’t been followed. His front door wasn’t tampered with, and his back door didn’t look like it had been. He came into the house, blissfully unaware.

It was silent, perfect. He walked a couple of steps from the front door until he was in view of the arch. That was when I clicked on the lamp. Russell Conrad. Gunman. Our gunman, now. The sudden burst of light from the living room caused him to spin and stare at me. Nearly caused me to spin in the chair. The man must have had a hundred-watt bulb in that fucking lamp. He looked frightened, which was a good thing.

‘Come in and sit down,’ I said to him. Said in a way that made it clear he didn’t get a second option to dither over.

He moved slowly, but he moved. He walked into the living room and took a seat on the couch, looking across at me with the kind of look his victims might have specialized in. Confused, horrified and very suddenly aware that something bad was nearby.

I let him get comfortable, took a few seconds before I spoke. ‘You killed Jawad Nasif.’

‘Nasty? Yeah, I killed him last night. That was the order. If you wanted to know about the job then you should have gone to Lafferty. You got no right coming to me the day after a job; you know how risky that is.’

It was convincingly said. Gave me pause, another little puzzle to twist around in my hands. That reaction, quick, honest and defiant, made it seem like Conrad didn’t know what he’d done wrong.

‘I think I’d rather talk to you about it. You don’t mind talking to me about it, do you?’

‘We’re on the same side of this, aren’t we?’

‘We might be,’ I said slowly. ‘That’s the very thing I’m trying to work out.’

He frowned and grimaced. He didn’t like the sound of anything I was saying. He was new to the organization, and that made him vulnerable. If he was on the wrong side of an argument that he didn’t even know was happening then he was in peril. He had reason to be concerned.

‘Well, you tell me what you want to know and I’ll tell you anything I’m able to. As far as I’m aware we’re on the same side here.’

‘How did Lafferty find out where Nasty was going to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. The casual shrug of a man who only needs to know where his victims are, not how they were found. ‘He called me up, told me he wanted it done, said that he thought Nasty was going to be at that location but that there was a tight window because he was only visiting the place, not staying there. He gave me the location, told me to get there early. I did. Went in through a downstairs toilet window that some idiot had left open. Went into the kitchen and waited because the kitchen was at the back of the house. The front looked out onto the street and there were no curtains in the place so I didn’t want the gun flashing there. I heard him come in; he was in the living room for a while. I don’t know why – I didn’t go through the house to check if there was anything there. Cleaning up, maybe. He came into the kitchen, went to the fridge, I shot him. That was it. I figure he was going to stay there the night or something, separate from the others. I don’t know.’

My face was stone. There was nothing he could have said that would have elicited a reaction from me in that room. What he was saying tallied with what I knew about the killing, which wasn’t nearly enough.

‘Do you think Lafferty lured him there?’ I asked.

‘He might have, I suppose. Good for him if he did; we got rid of their gunman. Isn’t that a good thing? Am I missing something here, Nate?’

Russell Conrad was a long-term, high-calibre gunman. You don’t get to be that if you aren’t a reasonably smart person. You don’t reach thirty-six, which he was at the time, with a dozen years’ experience in the business, which he had, without above-average intelligence. He could have been acting. His surprise wasn’t enough to gain trust.

‘Was there any mention of Barrett in this job?’

‘No, just the gunman, nobody else. If they knew where Barrett was then they’d have gone after him, wouldn’t they?’

Without a pause I asked, ‘Did you kill Lee Christie?’

‘No, I did not,’ he said quickly and confidently. ‘Nasty killed Lee Christie, didn’t he? That’s my understanding of it anyway. Why would you think that I . . . Wait a second, Nate, what the hell are you getting at here? You’re pitching an idea I don’t much like the sound of. You’re saying that Nasty might not have killed Christie?’

‘I’m saying he probably did,’ I told him: emphasis on
probably
.

‘But you’re nodding and winking towards Lafferty right now, aren’t you? That’s what this is about. You’re saying he killed his own man, used Barrett and his crew as patsies. Now, what? You think he’s picking off Barrett’s crew so that they can’t drop him in it?’

I might have been surprised at him reaching that conclusion so speedily if I didn’t already know how smart he was.

‘What do you think?’ I asked him.

He sighed and looked me straight in the eye. ‘I think we got a big problem here, Nate. I don’t much appreciate you breaking into my house and scaring the shite out of me, but we’ll put that aside. I’ve done worse. I just had a conversation with Lafferty, not more than an hour ago, and you were mentioned in it. Look, I don’t want this turning into a war, but I think it’s going to. I want to be on the right side of this. I’m trying to make a living and nothing more. I just got in the door with this organization, and I had no idea the way things were shaping up when I did. I thought Lafferty hiring me had everyone’s support; otherwise I’d have walked away. But this, this thing, this job, it’s all going to hell. We’ve both been around a lot; we’ve both seen the crazy shite that people pull. I think that’s happening now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because in the meeting I had with Lafferty just now he was pointing the finger at Marty Jones and Kevin Currie. He said that they used Marty’s brother to get them a girl that would lure Christie to where they killed him. He thinks they’re using Barrett as a front to push him out and take control of the drug business for themselves. Once they have that they can take the whole organization before Jamieson gets out. He pointed the finger at you, Nate. He thinks you’re leading the charge – that’s why Currie hired you. Leading the battle at street level. You’re supposed to be my next target.’

I still didn’t change my deadpan expression, although it took a little more effort this time. ‘That right?’

‘He’s more afraid of you than he is of Barrett now. With Nasty out of the way he thinks he’s dealt with the worst of Barrett. But you? You he’s terrified of.’

‘Did you believe what he had to tell you?’

He shook his head a little, frowning. ‘I don’t know. He was talking about Currie and Marty and blaming them for everything under the sun. Sounded, I don’t know, a little much. But I don’t know either of them, and I don’t know you well. I haven’t been on the inside of this organization or this job. I only know you by reputation, and that doesn’t help you much in this case, no offence.’

I shrugged that off. My reputation was the uniform of my business. Sometimes it fell out of fashion. ‘Could Lafferty be faking all this? Could it be that he’s the one working with Barrett, trying to give himself an excuse to take over the organization? Doesn’t that seem plausible right now?’

‘None of it seems plausible to me right now,’ he said with a shake of the head. ‘I will say this: if this organization is in the process of eating itself alive then we both picked a hell of a time to join up.’

Almost smiled at that one. He wasn’t the only one who had signed up without bothering to check the small print. ‘True, but if we’re going to sort this out then there’s a chance that we both come out of it well, don’t you think? We just need to be on the right side of the argument.’

He could see where this was going. ‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

‘What I’m saying is that right now you’re standing on the wrong side of the fence, and you need to hop across. We’ll make sure you don’t rip off a bollock on the barbed wire as you jump. If you get caught on the wrong side of the fence, you won’t work for this organization again. Might not work in this city again.’

‘I only ever said yes to working for Lafferty because he had Jamieson’s clearance. Way I saw it, I was working for Jamieson, and when he got out of the jail I would be answering to him. If keeping on working for Jamieson means working against Lafferty then I work against Lafferty. You have a plan, I take it?’

I nodded very slowly. ‘I’m getting towards that point, yeah.’

I stood up and he did the same. I was much taller than him, looked down on him. I wasn’t trying to intimidate him because there was no point. He was a gunman, he had done awful things that even I hadn’t done, but it was worth gazing down to see if he would wilt a little. There are plenty of men in this business, in this city, who are as big and tough as me and know how to throw a punch. There are plenty of brave men, plenty of psychos, plenty of men who can handle themselves in a fight. No gunman would be intimidated by any of them, because most of them didn’t have the balls to do the things that Conrad had already done in his life. But that reputation of mine, that made it worth looking down on a man you knew had worked in the darkness as well. That reputation had been hard earned by acts that created the indefinable little element of fear in others that separate the truly dangerous from the merely wild or nasty.

‘Whatever the plan is, there’s a high likelihood it’s going to require a gunman,’ I told the gunman in front of me. ‘I need to call some people together, get this sorted out. I’ll call you soon, let you know.’

He nodded, didn’t say anything. That was as much as either of us needed to say to the other. I left the house by the front door, out onto the street. The car was parked on the next street along, far enough out of sight to make sure he didn’t spot it. Ronnie had his orders. Wait for me to leave, then get back to the car without ever being visible to the front of Conrad’s house. The gunman could guess how we’d worked it, but there was no fun in making it easy for him. Took Ronnie a couple of minutes to get back to the car.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘So you know how we took the piss out of Lafferty for his get-together?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We need to arrange a get-together of our own.’

Barrett was still in a panic. Someone had shot his best mate and taken away the comfort blanket of having his own gunman. Zara sat next to him on the bed. They’d been in the emergency safe house for almost a day, and the nerves were only getting worse. He was shaking. It was hardly his first experience of death, but him and Elliott and Nasty had been together for so long, it was like losing a limb this time.

‘We should get out now,’ he said. ‘This place is gonna kill us if we don’t get out.’

‘Calm down,’ Zara told him, and put an arm around him. That was mostly to stop him going for the little stash he had in the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. She wanted him to keep a cool head for what she was going to suggest next. ‘Listen to me, Dyne, you can still finish this. We have half the money, but we can get the other half. We get back down south and we build something fantastic down there. Listen to me, babe; we’re this close, this close.’ She was holding his face in her hands at that point.

‘We’re also that far from being wiped the fuck out,’ he said quietly. There were times with Barrett when he was walking right on the very edge, ready to fall off into a depression that would have taken him out of Zara’s control.

Her control. She thought she had him under total control, but things were moving too fast for her to steer now. In that hotel room, acting as a lure for Nate. When Barrett had that gun in his hand, when he was making her inject so that he could present her to Nate . . . Zara didn’t even remember it, not really. There was a misty memory of shouting for Nate, but she didn’t remember Nate being there. What she knew about it was what Barrett told her afterwards. It had worked perfectly, apparently, right up until the moment Nasty took a bullet to the back of the head.

He deserved it. She had no sympathy for Nasty, no matter how much he meant to the others. There was something alarmingly cold about him. Nasty killed a bunch of people and he couldn’t have cared less about it. Zara used to hear him talking shop with Barrett and Elliott, and Nasty didn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. The guy was just empty. Perhaps not as bad as Elliott, in some ways. Elliott got off on making people uncomfortable and hurting people who couldn’t fight back. He was the sort of kid who would pull the legs off spiders, where Nasty would just stamp on them and go looking for more. Dyne was the most decent of the three of them, and he was a borderline junkie desperate to become a big-time gangster.