Every Night I Dream of Hell (18 page)

Hotel was a rather lofty term for the place in Pollokshields we were heading for. It was getting dark, there was traffic crossing the river. Billy Patterson seemed less than thrilled to be in my company but that was just too bad. He was a tough nut, was Billy. A good man to have along on a job like this.

‘We sure they won’t be carrying?’ he asked me as we got close.

I shrugged. ‘Not important. We’re not looking for a fight; we’re just confirming they’re there. We do that, and we get a team together, properly armed, and we deal with it.’

‘Deal with it?’

I just glanced at him. Billy ran a debt collection business; Billy knew what deal with it meant. Billy had dealt with stuff like this before.

I found a place to park along the street. The entrance to the place was small; hard to spot that it was even a hotel. Five storeys, sandstone, on a fairly busy street. If we had to clean them out of there, it was going to be an issue. There were cars parked on either side of the road, a hairdresser’s, a cafe and a corner shop taking up the ground floors of neighbouring buildings. We weren’t getting in and out without being seen.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

In the front door and up the steps to reception. Reception constituted a desk in the hallway. This wasn’t a place that tried to trick you into thinking you were getting luxury; it wore its earthiness on its sleeve. As did the fat, bald guy behind the desk.

‘We’d like to see who’s staying here, please,’ I said to him. Kept it dry, not quite threatening but not far off.

He looked up at me and twisted his mouth. ‘You’re not cops.’

‘I know.’

‘So why am I showing you anything then?’

Billy chuckled. ‘You really want to say no to this guy?’ he asked, glancing up at me.

‘I don’t have any guests people like you would be looking for.’

I smiled. ‘You have no idea what we’re looking for. Let me see.’

The frown on his round face was as much opposition as he could raise. He nodded for me to come round the other side of the desk and he got his list of recent arrivals up on the screen of his computer for me.

‘That pair are about a hundred years old each,’ he told me, pointing to a couple who had checked in the day before. ‘Look like either one of them could drop any second. As long as they don’t do it here.’

There were two that might be interesting. One on the first floor, one on the fourth. Two young men had booked two single rooms on the first floor; a couple had a room on the fourth.

‘You check one eight and one nine; I’m going up to four eleven,’ I told Billy.

We left the fat guy behind the desk shaking his head. We took the stairs, Billy peeling off at the first floor. I bounded up as fast as I could, not wanting to waste any time. My phone was in my pocket, waiting for a call from Ronnie about the house Adam had mentioned. They should be there by now, checking the place out.

It was bloody boiling in that hotel. There were old, fat radiators in the corridors, belching out more heat than I needed after running up those stairs. I was in a long corridor, white walls and white doors on either side of me. A single door at the far end of the corridor. Room four eleven. I walked down towards it.

There were a few feet between me and the door when I started to slow. Listening for any sound coming from the room. Any clue. I heard someone talking, a loud female voice. Couldn’t hear what it was saying. Then a shout.

‘Nate. Help me, Nate. Nate.’

I recognized her. Years apart, but the sound of her voice was still so familiar. It was Zara shouting. I knew, deep in the back of my mind, that there was something strange about the way she was shouting. Something that wasn’t quite her. But I didn’t stop to think about that. Zara was shouting for my help and she was going to get it. Something deeper within me, something that I’d worked so hard for so long to crush, welled up again. When the shouts became muffled, I acted.

Shoulder to the door, firm but with a short shove. There was a crack, and I dipped back and hit it a second time, same as before. The door seemed to crumple inward, smashing round the lock and breaking on the hinges. It was open and I was in.

The room was dark, the thick curtains drawn. Too hot. Adrian Barrett sitting on the end of the bed, legs crossed, facing the door. There was a laptop beside him on the bed, giving out the only light. He had been watching something. Watching me, coming into the hotel and up to the room. A set-up. He was in T-shirt and jeans, a long, thin face and hair cut close at the sides. None of that was what stood out with him. What stood out was the small handgun resting on his lap, pointing listlessly towards Zara.

She was lying on the bed, sitting up against the headboard. Headboard was a filthy thing; you could see the round stains where other people’s dirty heads had rested against it too long. The pillow beside her, that she had been shouting into, was yellowed. Even in the light from the laptop and the little creeping in from the corridor I could see that. It was Zara, just not the one I’d known.

She was naked, sitting up, the blanket covering her bottom half. Made to look vulnerable. The man with the gun, showing me what control he had over the mother of my child. Using her like that. Her eyes were half closed, her mouth was half open. She had a small smile on her face. Laughing and stretching out so that her ribs showed. She was never that thin before. Never. Laughing hard and then falling silent, like she was asleep. Looking away from me, which I was glad of.

I looked away from Zara, looked back at Barrett. He had his hand on the gun but he wasn’t gripping it. He was making it look casual. I had about two seconds to work out what this was. Not an attempt to kill me. You don’t drug your lure if you need to make a quick exit. He might well have other people nearby, in the next room. I could be in for a beating. They might use a knife. It’s how I’d have done it, if I was going to kill someone in that hotel room, but the broken door complicated things. So this was a warning. Or a dickish attempt at delivering a message. It took a lot of effort to make sure that I had no expression on my face.

‘You knew I was coming,’ I said. Kept my voice low.

Barrett didn’t respond to that. If he admitted this was a set-up then he’d be inviting me to punish those involved. Starting with Adam Jones, the man who had given me this address. So he wouldn’t confirm it, but he didn’t need to.

‘I want you to deliver a message,’ he said to me.

I raised my eyebrows just a little, whether he could see it or not. ‘Do you now?’ I said.

He started talking more quickly, obviously trying to hurry this up. He knew Billy was downstairs; he was concerned about the change in tone if I had backup. ‘Tell your bosses that they need to hand over their suppliers and distributors to me. If they don’t, I’ll pick them all off like I did with Christie. They don’t have long.’

I said nothing for a few seconds, still standing in the doorway. The light was behind me and I knew it made me look huge.

‘That all you want?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Tell them,’ he said. ‘Tell them or people die.’ Barrett raised the gun slightly and pointed it at Zara properly. Letting me know that I wasn’t the one whose life was running out of road. Not even other Jamieson employees. The first person to go would be Zara. Fisher had asked me how I would explain that to Becky. How the hell would I deal with it myself?

It was a stupid demand. Moronic message. Tell them to hand over everything they have to some nobody who just turned up. They would laugh at the message, but he knew that. The real message wasn’t in what he said. It was the way he was doing it. Showing me that they had Zara and could frighten me with that. Showing the city that they could go toe to toe with Nate Colgan.

‘I’ll tell them,’ I said quietly.

Zara moved, rolled onto her side, facing me. Her eyes were shut, but she mumbled something. I don’t know what. I stood there looking at her. The blanket was down to her knees now. I’ve always considered myself a smart man. Always thought that I could handle any situation, no matter how tough. I’ve done grim things, pushed myself beyond the boundaries I thought I had. Here was this smart, tough guy, standing there watching her sleep. Watching her naked body. Knowing that the business didn’t matter, doing the right thing for Jamieson didn’t matter. I was going to do the right thing for her.

‘Go on then,’ he said, hurrying me up.

His tactic was obvious. Get me out of the building and then get himself and Zara out before I had the chance to come back with a crew. This wasn’t where they were staying. Whether they’d fed the information to Adam Jones without him realizing or not, this was all fake. They set up cameras here; waited for someone from the organization to turn up. They knew I was working this, but they got lucky that it was me who went to their room. Whoever it was, they had a girl to point a gun at. A girl everyone knew mattered to me. If it had been Ronnie or Billy or Conn, didn’t matter. They’d all have known not to push it with Zara there, in that state.

I turned and walked out of the room, walked quickly down the corridor. Didn’t run. Nobody’s ever going to see me run away from them, not in this fucking life. I strode, purposeful. When I reached the stairs I started moving quickly. There was a half-chance, and we had to be seen to make a stab at it. Get Billy, get a crew together, get them round to the hotel.

Billy was back at reception. He nodded to me. ‘Anything? Because I got nothing.’

‘Come on,’ I said, walking past him and out of the front door.

There was a young man standing at the bottom of the steps. He watched me walk down, smiled at me. Actually had the nerve to smile at me. He was Barrett’s man, watching to make sure we left. Shit. That blew part of the plan away. Meant we had to actually leave, to put some distance between us and the hotel while we called round the rest of them. They would be gone by the time we got back. Of course they would.

‘The fuck’s going on?’ Billy demanded as we got into the car. He knew better than to ask in the street.

‘Barrett was there. Had Zara and a gun. A message, demanding we hand over the drug business to him. Whole thing was a fucking set-up.’

‘Fucking Adam Jones,’ he said with a hiss. Then, ‘What are we going to do about it?’

‘Let everyone know, get a team here, see if we can catch them, spot them going. Something.’ Truth was there was little we could do that didn’t put Zara at more risk than I was willing to accept.

Adrian Barrett knew he had about five minutes before Colgan came back with a crew, armed to the teeth. He ran out of the open door, knocked on the room next door on the right side of the corridor and went back in to Zara. He slapped her a couple of times, made her put on a T-shirt and jeans and shoes. He had to do most of the work; her responses were slow and unhelpful.

Elliott Parker, Jawad ‘Nasty’ Nasif and Gary Aldridge were next door, awaiting further instructions. They moved as soon as they heard the knock, knowing they were up against the clock. Elliott went first to get his cameras back. One at the other end of the corridor, another downstairs near reception. Nasty went ahead with Parker; Aldridge helped Barrett lead Zara unsteadily downstairs.

Once they were out on the street they saw Keith Henson. Sitting in the driver’s seat of the van, window down, the same smile he’d offered Nate still on his face.

‘They went off, didn’t leave anyone behind.’ Said loudly and into the street. That got a frown from the more experienced men. They all piled quickly into the van and headed back to the hotel in Mount Florida. There was a lot of work still to do.

Back at the hotel and packing up everything they had. Leaving nothing behind, no trace. The owner knew the cost of admitting they’d been there. The van was filled, everybody in, even the terrified girl that they should have gotten rid of. Another complication. Elliott getting attached to a girl that shouldn’t now be anywhere near them.

One last safe house, that was what Barrett kept telling himself. One more move, a couple more days and they could all get in the van and go back home. That was all he was thinking about. Sitting in the front of the van, dreaming of getting his old life back down south. Take some good money home with him. Start again. The last time he’d had a network of his own it had fallen apart. Left Ricky Saunders, the other member of their quartet, in jail. Left him, Elliott and Nasty with nothing. Barrett started using more than he had before. Then he met Zara. The first bit of good luck. Now they were this close to being able to start again. This close.

‘Drop me at the other safe house,’ Nasty said. ‘I’m meeting a gun dealer, getting rid of that gun and getting a clean one. Come back and pick me up.’

‘Make it quick. They’ll be looking for us now,’ Barrett told him. ‘Crawling all over the city.’

‘I know.’

They dropped Nasty off, Henson telling him he’d be straight back after dropping the rest at the new safe house. Nasty watched the van pulling away, watched its lights disappear round the corner so that only the street lamps were left to brighten the darkness. All he could hear were his own footsteps. The residential street reminded him of the one he’d grown up on.

He knew as soon as he opened the front door, shoving the key back into his pocket, that the gun dealer was there ahead of him. That instinct, when you know someone’s nearby just before you see or hear them. The house was dark, but the dealer was hardly going to light it up. There was still some warmth from the last time some of the group had been there, a newspaper on the stand at the bottom of the stairs. They’d used this place and the hotel for the first stage of the job. The stage that lasted from arrival until first direct contact with the Jamieson organization. The second stage, the final stage, would see them holed up in a small safe house in the north of the city that wasn’t anywhere near large enough for a group their size.

‘I’m in here,’ a male voice called out from the living room.

He had seen Nasty coming up the front path. The gunman went into the living room, unwilling to switch on the light given that the room looked out onto the road. There had been nobody out there when he was coming in, but that didn’t give him an excuse to get sloppy. He could see the middle-aged man standing by the fireplace, on his own, which was a basic part of the relationship between any gun dealer and any gun buyer. Both parties should always be alone when a deal is being done. Common sense to ensure that both sides are kept as calm as possible when guns are around.