Every Night I Dream of Hell (10 page)

Marty was pacing. Mikey and Conn looked relaxed enough. I got the impression that Patterson didn’t see this as being much of his business. But he ran debt collection for the organization, which made this very much his business. He was important, whether he liked it or not. Smart people often didn’t want to be important in this industry. Billy always looked like he wasn’t bothered about anything in this world. That was a lie. Billy Patterson was hellishly ambitious. He had run his own debt collecting organization before he hooked up with Marty and I was sure he wanted to run his own organization again in the future. Working with Marty was a convenient way of making sure the Jamieson organization didn’t wipe him out. Maybe he didn’t care much if Marty got hacked down by these events. Maybe he figured it would help him get back out there on his own, free from the deal he made with us in the first place. There were a lot of agendas, even in that little room.

‘Just waiting for Kevin to get here,’ Marty said to no one in particular. Might have been me.

We were in a small living room and the place was crowded. There were two couches in the room, Billy Patterson on one with Mikey on the arm of it. Conn was sitting on the window ledge, which meant the empty space on that couch was for Marty, if he ever decided to sit down. Didn’t seem likely to me. The other couch was empty, waiting for Kevin and Ben Carmichael, who was Kevin’s second in command. A smart guy, and Kevin trusted him, which was enough. Me and Ronnie just hung around silently by the door for five minutes until Kevin Currie and Ben Carmichael arrived.

They came into the flat; Conn went out into the corridor behind them to lock the front door now that everyone was here. Kevin and Carmichael were smiley and said hello to everyone before they sat on the couch. Kevin knew that he was entitled to the best seat in the house. He carried his authority lightly, but it was always in view. Had to be. As soon as his arse hit the leather, Marty started talking, and wouldn’t have stopped if Kevin hadn’t thought to interrupt him.

‘This is ridiculous. Way fucking beyond ridiculous. I mean, Jesus Christ. You see that dickhead, sitting there running off at the mouth like we were all kids and we had to sit there and listen to it. I mean, come on, what the fuck is this anyway? Is he in charge now, is that it? Are we all just going to trudge along and listen to whatever he’s got to say like he’s some sort of boss now? Sitting there talking like he was Peter Jamieson, as if Peter fucking Jamieson would have called everyone together like that in the first place. Has this prick never heard of a security risk?’

‘All right, Marty,’ Kevin said, running a hand over his mouth while he considered a response. ‘I talked to Lafferty beforehand. He had this all planned out well in advance.’

‘Too fucking right he did,’ Marty said, his voice a higher pitch than God intended for him. ‘He’s been waiting for a chance like this.’

‘Maybe, but he’s handled it well,’ Kevin said. ‘He had managed to get a call with Peter in prison before he arranged the meeting; got Peter’s permission to go down this road.’

Marty groaned and Billy looked mildly surprised; the rest of us looked like juniors who weren’t entitled to a big reaction to a boss’s decision.

‘He already knows the first move he’s going to make as well,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s found out who Barrett’s gunman is and he’s going after him as well as Barrett. He’s serious about getting revenge for this Christie person.’

‘No he fucking isn’t,’ Marty said with a hiss. ‘He’s serious about making himself look like he’s the big shot in town now, that’s what he’s serious about. And how the hell did he find out who the gunman is when we haven’t got anything to go on?’

‘Lafferty’s well connected down south. He managed to find out a bit about Barrett’s history. Found out that he’s a smart mover, used to have his own network down there, a small one but still something. He left the Midlands after trouble. Came up here with his crew, brought along his own gunman with him. Jawad Nasif, the gunman’s name is. They call him Nasty, apparently.’

‘Course they do,’ Mikey said with a smile.

‘So what now?’ Marty asked. ‘I mean, are we just going along with all this? If Peter says yes, then yes, I do it, but this is nuts. This is giving Lafferty the chance to run just about everything until Peter gets out.’

‘It does, yeah,’ Kevin said, ‘and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. Barrett needs to be dealt with and Lafferty’s taken the lead in that. What can we do? We have to help the man; it’s our own necks on the block if we don’t. We do it and we see what plays out.’

Marty sighed and Billy folded his arms; nobody else seemed to feel like filling in the silence so I thought I’d take a stab at it and see what damage I could do.

‘So he got Jamieson’s agreement to hire Conrad?’ I asked. My voice rumbled round the room, deep and older-sounding than my years. Sometimes my voice intimidated people on my behalf.

‘Yeah,’ Kevin said.

‘And he found out about Barrett’s background within a few hours of looking around for it. Has he found out where Barrett or his crew are now?’

‘He says not yet,’ Kevin said, ‘but he’s looking around for them with everything he’s got.’

‘Kicking up a storm, in other words,’ Billy said. It was a small and ordinary voice, made to sound higher and lighter by the impression mine made. A fact I kind of liked.

‘There isn’t anyone in the business who isn’t going to see his boys stomping around the city,’ Conn said. ‘Gonna make sure every bastard knows that he’s the man now.’

‘Advertising it won’t get him far,’ Mikey said.

‘He find out anything else about Barrett?’ I asked.

‘All he told me was that his connections down there knew the name, respected it, didn’t know that he was up here.’

‘So Lafferty doesn’t know if Barrett’s working for anyone or just decided to come up here on a whim – fancied the weather or something?’ I asked.

‘You’re thinking about Don Park?’ Conn asked.

Damn right I was. Everyone was thinking of Don Park and someone needed to say it. Wouldn’t be the first time he tried to use a new name to attack us. He’d done it before: picked up a young guy that was looking for a way into the business and used him as a front, attacking us on our own patch to try and take business. Park was smart and a threat, and we needed to talk about that.

‘Could be Park,’ Marty said. ‘I already talked to a contact I have in MacArthur’s organization. Senior contact, mind, no bullshit. MacArthur isn’t involved, but that doesn’t mean fuck-all for Don Park. Park’s pulling jobs by himself these days, only reporting them to MacArthur when they’re done. MacArthur’s scared, close to the end of the rope.’

Alex MacArthur ran a major organization in the city, bigger than Jamieson’s but flabby. MacArthur was old, coughing up a lung every time he took a step, so the story went. Don Park was young and ambitious. He had been a rising star for MacArthur. Now he was morphing into a treacherous successor. The best ones always do.

‘We need to find out if Park’s involved then,’ Kevin said. ‘Doesn’t change anything if he is. Priority is finding Barrett and putting an end to him. In that regard we have to back Lafferty unless Peter says otherwise.’

We were all a toxic mix of misery, anger and impotence leaving that meeting. Everyone knew that this was Lafferty trying to put himself at the front and marginalize everyone else involved in the running of the organization; there was no secret to that. If you call everyone to a meeting in your office and make demands for their support then you’ve blown any secret out of the water. But Lafferty was smart enough to wait until he had a damn good reason to claim support, which was why it was important that we got to Barrett before he did. If he could clean up the mess then he would be untouchable, at least until Jamieson came out.

That was the real issue here. Lafferty was playing for leadership until Jamieson got out, but what happened then? Having split leadership was all part of Jamieson’s plan to make sure nobody got too big for their boots before he got out. If Lafferty changed the equation then his release became an unpredictable event. Nobody wanted unpredictable. Unpredictable was invariably trouble.

I walked down to my car with Ronnie and we stood on the street for a few minutes, talking. Conn was giving Mikey a lift home. Billy, Kevin and Carmichael had already gone and Marty was staying in the flat for the night. I think his plan was to get as drunk as possible in there and see if the morning would calm his fury.

‘I know it’s loose change,’ Ronnie said to me. ‘But about the stuff they were saying in the meeting about businesses doing their share . . .’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They’re talking about businesses like Owen’s shop, aren’t they? Small businesses, legit businesses.’

I nodded and said, ‘Yeah, they are. I wouldn’t worry too much about it though. There’s no way Jamieson’s going to let them start harassing small legit businesses into cleaning money through them. He’s far too smart for that. He needs some legit businesses to clean money through, but he needs some to just be legit businesses so he can explain income. That doesn’t change.’

‘But if Lafferty’s pulling the strings . . .’

‘If Lafferty’s pulling the strings then you and me will end up being hung from them anyway,’ I said. I wasn’t looking to depress the boy, but he had to know where this was going. ‘If Lafferty gets any amount of real control then it’s going to be Lafferty’s boys that get to do all the meaningful work. You and me might find work as low-level muscle, debt collection and bullshit like that, but the whole security-consultant cover will go to someone else, someone close to Lafferty. We’ll be pushed down the chain or pushed off it altogether.’

He sighed loudly, making a show of what a bad thing that might be, but it was as skilled a performance as Lafferty’s. I could see that he quite liked the idea of being pushed out of the business, of having to go legit. It would be an escape route back to a safe life.

‘How much do the Turners owe Kevin?’ I asked, just to drag him back to horrible reality.

‘He bought a twenty-grand stake in the shop. He owns it; they’re not paying him back. It’s just a minority stake though; I mean, they still run the business.’

I looked at him and raised my eyebrows, thinking that I must have taught him a lesson about ownership in the industry by now. Apparently not. ‘The second they let someone from an organization take a share in their business, they stopped running it. Not like they can do anything to stop Kevin doing whatever he wants with it.’

‘But Kevin doesn’t want to put pressure on them though, does he?’ There was naive hope in his voice.

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know how much that’s going to matter. Not if Lafferty gets his way.’

It was a suitably horrible way to end the day, so I drove back home. It was late when I got in, pushing past midnight. I checked for messages and breathed out when there were none. There would be plenty coming, I was pretty damn sure. People were starting to make moves that were all about sending messages.

Lafferty had men out there looking for Barrett and this Nasty gunman of his, and that was going to mean blood. You hold yourself up in front of the organization as a man who defends his people and you bloody well better come up with a result. This was a dangerous game for Lafferty too, and that was where I dared to get a little bit hopeful. You take any gamble as big as this and you can lose. We could still knock Lafferty down on his arse. Not to harm him; he was still profitable to the organization. There was a route out of this that kept the status quo. We find Barrett and deal with him and his crew before Lafferty can get Conrad on the job. We make it clear that we handled it for Lafferty and now that he has what he wanted, it’s time to play nice. If he gets what he wants from us rather than getting it for himself then it holds him firmly in place. Holds him where Jamieson should want him.

I went to bed with all that shit running through my head, so that’s my excuse for not sleeping that night. Three, three and a half hours altogether, perhaps. Yet another night of not sleeping well. Not because of the things I’d seen or done in my life. They ran through my mind when I was awake, not when I was sleeping. I was always waking up growling at the darkness, scared of the things I was yet to do.

Being awake early let me get to work early, which just ensured I had even more time to get slowly pissed off with the world. Nobody seemed to know anything at all about Adrian Barrett or Jawad Nasif or any other member of the crew Barrett had brought up with him. They were invisible men, drifting silently through this city.

Nobody would tell me a thing about them, and that got me worried. People tell me things, because they know the cost of silence if I find out that they’ve been holding back. If they were more scared of Barrett than they were of me then Barrett was a man to worry about. It had to be fear. There were people in this city who knew something about him.

Me and Ronnie stumbled through the morning, powered by bacon rolls and watery tea, clearing as much of our list as we could. Properties where a crew coming in from outside might hide. We were at the point where we had ruled out the idea of the Barrett crew staying in any hotel or B & B that we could think of. Everywhere was too public, too easy for them to be spotted. That meant they had a place or places of their own in the city. Made more sense if you were willing to buy into the idea that they were here for the long haul, and that they had people from the city helping them.

‘What now?’ Ronnie asked me.

‘Now you go pay a visit to Brendan Thorne and have a conversation about housing stock, who has what, that sort of thing.’

‘And you?’

‘And I have a meeting of my own I have to go to.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, giving him a look that told him the questions ended round about here. He needed to understand that not every meeting I had needed his permission, or even his awareness.

I headed over to the place on George Square Zara had said to meet her. I was nervous about it – no shame in admitting that. I hadn’t seen her in so long, didn’t want her back in my life, knew she was poison to me, but couldn’t stop myself being excited. Being a man of reasonable good sense I then couldn’t stop myself from being angry with that excitement.