Every Night I Dream of Hell (26 page)

It wasn’t a perfect plan, and letting Barrett and his people keep on breathing afterwards was something that Jamieson apparently recoiled from, but it was shaping up to be the best plan available. If we’d hit Barrett and his people as well as Lafferty then it would have become impossible for us to cover the job up. Keep it small, keep it simple. Letting the police deal with Barrett gave them something to play with while we went after Lafferty.

I wasn’t in a great mood leaving his office. Kevin Currie wasn’t really cut out for leadership. He could lead his own part of the business, the counterfeiting operation. He knew it inside out, he was good at it and he’d worked out how to do it without getting himself caught or killed. What he was doing at that point, stepping up to help fill the gap that Jamieson’s imprisonment had created, put a pressure on him that he’d never experienced before. Something I wasn’t convinced Kevin Currie had been built to withstand. He didn’t have the stomach for it that Jamieson did. That man could make decisions that ended the life of another person without batting a stress-free eyelid. Jamieson was as good a leader as I had seen, and that was the standard Kevin was to be judged by.

It was obvious from the way he looked at me, talked to me, that he still wasn’t comfortable having me around. I was Jamieson’s hire, not his. Kevin had worked with dangerous people before, and he had ordered them to do dangerous things, but they were his dangerous people. When his only responsibility was the counterfeiting business, everyone he worked with was a person he had hired. He scouted them, made sure they were the right person for the job, someone that he could be comfortable working with. Now he was working with people that others had hired. People who did things he would never normally ask a person to do. People he could never feel comfortable with. People like me.

One of the people he’d scouted and hired was Kelly. She was there. Coming into the warehouse as I was walking to my car. I couldn’t ignore her, couldn’t be that much of a bastard. She smiled at me and came over.

‘Good to see you, Nate,’ she said. ‘How you been?’

It had only been a few days since she was at my house. ‘Good, yeah. Busy.’ Hardly the most polite way of talking to the girl.

‘Right, well, I won’t keep you,’ she said. Kelly did an excellent line in hurt feelings, looking away like she was trying to hide it. A pretty girl, pouting like that, I bet it had an effect.

Problem for Kelly was, every time I looked at her I saw two things. The first was the dead body of Tom Childs. He had been her man, and I had stuffed his corpse into a suitcase in a grotty room of the St John Hotel and taken it for disposal. The second thing I saw was Zara. The last woman I had pulled close to me. I was still trying to shake her off.

‘Maybe next week, when things have slowed down, I’ll give you a call,’ I said. Surprised myself, saying it. Hadn’t intended to. It wasn’t because she was pouting; I’m not that easily won over. It was the picture in my head of Nate Colgan, the fat old man decades hence, sitting on his own in that dingy house of mine. Alone. Always alone.

‘I’d like that,’ she said, and headed into the warehouse.

She’d like it. Someone happy at the prospect of me giving them a call. I heard that rarely enough that I was actually feeling positive when I went to the car. The next person I met could easily change all that.

I’d known where he lived for years. Not with any intention of doing something with the information, let me say. Knowing DI Michael Fisher’s address didn’t mean anything. It was a little piece of information that was interesting but unusable. There’s almost no circumstance in which you could use it. Almost none. You can’t go round and harm him. He’s a cop. Maybe, if a cop is dangerous enough to you and corrupt enough that he won’t report you, you can try a little intimidation. But that’s still a maybe. A last resort. A normal cop, in normal circumstances, is off the table.

It’s not a respect for the law, although you probably already guessed that. It’s a fear of what the law will do when they think you’re targeting them. You can commit crimes, and of course the police will come after you. That’s them doing their jobs. You target a cop and that’s personal. No organization wants to get into a personal fight with the police. Only the desperate, the stupid and the detached from reality ever do.

So I knew where he lived. Had never done anything with the information until now. I was sitting in my car, across the road from his house, watching. There were no lights on. I had no idea what hours he was working. It took a while of sitting there, I don’t know how long, before his red Renault pulled up in the little driveway in front of the house. He got out and went in without looking around. Interesting. Something I’d always wondered about cops. Did they take the same sort of precautions people like me did? I never once went into my house without first taking a look up and down the street. Always playing safe. Don’t need to play at it when you’re a cop.

A light went on upstairs. He lived alone, Fisher. He had been married before, a long time ago I think, but it hadn’t produced any kids. I never heard any rumours about him having girlfriends. People in the industry know Fisher, watch him. Watch him like a fucking hawk since he put Jamieson and the rest away. A man once respected but underestimated, now feared.

I don’t know why I sat there and watched. I could have gone up to the door and knocked, gotten the conversation out of the way. It wasn’t a fear of what I had to say, or a fear of him refusing the offer I was going to put on the table. There’s an instinct you get. Takes a lot of time, a lot of work, before you have it. Ronnie, at that point, wouldn’t have had it. I have no doubt he’d have marched straight up to the door and tried to finish this as fast as possible. My instinct was telling me to give him some time. Let him get settled in the house before you disturb him. Don’t let him know that you’ve been outside watching, which he will if you knock as soon as he goes in. That’ll unnerve him; make him wonder if he can trust you.

My watch told me it was after midnight as I walked up the front path. That would spook him. I was guessing he didn’t get a whole lot of visitors, and none at all at this hour. There was a risk in me being here. Same risk that I criticized him for taking when he turned up on my doorstep. Someone sees us and they make assumptions. They think that I’m giving the police information. I was, and I didn’t want the world jumping to that entirely accurate conclusion.

I knocked on the door and waited. Took about thirty seconds for him to open up. Stood there looking at me, not saying anything. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with no shoes and his hair had the damp look of a man who’d just had a quick shower. He was dressed so casually and it didn’t suit Fisher at all. It’s hard to make a strong impression on someone when you’re barefoot and your sagging arms are showing. He always needed to dress the part, too worn down to intimidate otherwise.

I looked at him for a few seconds, the two of us standing there silently. There was nothing we had to say to each other that was ever going to be said out on the doorstep. He nodded for me to come in, held the door open and let me pass. I could try and describe his house to you, but I can’t honestly say that I remember much about it. It seemed plain and functional, nothing that even approached a personal touch to it. It was a house with a bed and a shower and a kitchen and maybe that was all he needed it to be. My house would have been the same if it wasn’t for the effort I made to make it appealing to Becky. My abiding sense of Fisher’s house was that it was a lonely place.

Once he was standing in the living room in front of me, I started to talk.

‘I’ve come to deliver on our deal,’ I told him.

He raised his eyebrows, started to look like he was pleased with what he’d heard. Then the disgust ran right over the top of it. He was getting what he wanted but he was getting it from me. A deal with the devil, was how he saw it. His righteous horror was plastered across his face.

‘Go on then,’ he said.

‘I know where he’s going to be. Tomorrow night.’

The tomorrow night thing caught his ear right away. It was going to make him suspicious, of course. I had to tell him now because the following day was going to be very busy for me. I’d have the chance to phone him and tell him, but I didn’t want my phone giving away my location. Not when I was planning to do things I didn’t want the police tracking.

‘Tell me then,’ he said.

I took a piece of paper from my pocket, passed it across to him. The address in Shettleston that Zara had written out for me. A man of Fisher’s experience would know where it was. He could get a team of people, surround the place. Might have trouble getting round the back unseen, but that was his problem. If some of Barrett’s people made a break and Fisher had to give chase then that was just something else to distract him from me.

‘Not a great spot. From the front they can see along their own street and down an adjacent one, so it’ll be tough to get close unseen.’

‘Tomorrow night, huh?’

‘Tomorrow night,’ I said.

‘So if I went round there now with a squad I wouldn’t find Barrett and his people there?’

I gave him the look. The expression doesn’t change, not in any way that I can sit here and describe to you, but there was something in the eyes that told him he was playing with fire. A man with stony face and stony fists, giving you a blank look that would scare the waves from the sea. That was the plan, anyway.

‘We had a deal,’ I said. I was talking low, and my grumbly voice was turning into a growl.

‘The deal was that you let me have Barrett and I let you have Cope. That deal stands. You have my word that if we sweep up Cope in these arrests I will make sure that she doesn’t get time. I’ll make sure she’s out on the streets within hours, in fact. But the deal said nothing about timing.’

He wasn’t being smug, which was big of him. He was just saying that he needed to be able to carry out a big move like this on his time, not on mine. I took a deep breath before I spoke.

‘I’m giving you the chance to stop a war here. You go and arrest Barrett and his men tomorrow night, sometime after nine o’clock, and you’ll have that bastard off the streets. You’ll also have helped avoid something much bigger, much worse. You go in early, and taking Barrett off the streets won’t mean a damn thing. You have my word on that.’

I didn’t want him knowing that there was something much bigger going on, but there wasn’t an alternative. Now he knew that my priorities had shifted away from Adrian Barrett. Had to assume that he was smart enough not to ask, not to push me. Assume that he was smart enough to guess that whatever I was glaring at now was something he couldn’t touch.

An intelligent man like Fisher would know that my demand for the timing meant the Barrett job was a distraction. The plod focus their attention on Barrett while big, awful Nate Colgan and his band of merry thugs do something unspeakable to someone else. He wouldn’t guess who the real target was. Fisher would guess at Don Park, most probably. No doubt that sent his mighty little brain off wondering what an attack on Don Park might do for the city. Hurting Park would keep MacArthur in place; keep a lid on the tensions that were rising within that organization. And, let’s face it, if Park took control the first thing he would have to do was establish himself as successful by picking a fight with someone he could beat. Me taking out Park might actually calm things down; bring a little peace to the world. What was Fisher doing if not trying to encourage people to calm the fuck down?

‘I’ll be all over this address at nine o’clock tomorrow night,’ he told me. ‘If anything happens in the meantime that makes me think I should go sooner then I will go sooner.’

I nodded just a little, accepting and respecting that he had come to a difficult decision. ‘And Zara?’

‘The deal stands,’ he said.

I had what I wanted, so I turned and walked out of his house. Breathed a sigh of relief when I got out of there, and I’ll bet Fisher did too. Relieved that I was gone from his view. We were two men who could do each other a world of damage. Not just if we were caught fraternizing. It was a mental thing, after years of being on the opposite side of a bloody big fence. Years of conditioning. It damaged me in my own mind, associating myself with someone like Michael Fisher. God knows what it did to the mind of an honest cop like him to be working with me.

A hypocrite. That would be the right word for it. Each of us as bad as the other. You can’t trust a hypocrite. If a man works his whole life to do one thing, then flips and stands against it in an instant, how do you trust him? Fisher shouldn’t have been working with me. I shouldn’t have been cutting deals with cops. And not just any fucking cop either. The one that put Jamieson where he was. It was rotten. It was also very late, so I drove back home. I would get in touch with everyone I needed to the following morning, early. One of the benefits of not sleeping at all. I would be up early, ready to organize a long day for everyone else.

It was Sunday afternoon and I should have been with Becky. The job was a means to support her, to provide me with a life where I could spend my weekends with her. That was what I told myself. Convinced myself. That was what good people did. They worked jobs they didn’t like because it supported the people they loved. Here I was putting the job first. Fine, I could argue that it was an emergency, but there would always be an excuse if I allowed it. Maybe the job wasn’t just a route to providing for her. Hadn’t started out that way.

The day was going to come when I had to talk to her about what I did for a living. She was going to hear rumours, or I was going to get arrested or hurt, and I was going to have to try and explain some things to her. Scared the crap out of me, to be honest. The thought of her hating me for what I’d done. I didn’t hate what I had done; I had always been able to justify and accept what I did and why I did it. What I hated, what I feared, were the things I knew I was still going to do. There were worse things out there than the things I’d done, and I knew it was a matter of time before I did them. The path I was on, with the Jamieson organization, made it unavoidable. That was why I didn’t sleep well. Lying there, knowing that I was going to do terrible things. Knowing that the day would come when I had to explain those things to someone I actually cared about.