Every Night I Dream of Hell (25 page)

‘Right,’ I said, trying to let her know I’d understood. ‘How about we meet the same place we did before?’ I would keep this as brief and quick as possible; give only the very basic details needed to get her there. If that bastard Barrett was listening then I wasn’t going to give him anything.

‘Sure,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘When?’

‘Soon as possible,’ I told her. ‘Can you get there in an hour?’

‘Yeah, I can be there in an hour.’

And now I was nervous. She was maybe the only person who could do that to me, and she had to be right at the fucking centre of this thing. It could only be her. Clearing her out of the city when this was over was the priority for me. I couldn’t have her tormenting me like this again.

I didn’t get parked anywhere near the square. Didn’t matter. I was deliberately early. I wasn’t going to go in there, trample on handbags and skulk up to a table at the back to wait for her. Sitting there at a wee table, looking like the incredible sulk. Waiting for her to turn up, Barrett and his crew at her back. There was a bench in the square where I could sit and watch the entrance. Wasn’t a good view, too far away, but I’d know her when I saw her, and I’d know if she was alone. I wanted to see if she was dropped off by Barrett or one of his crew, and where they went when she was in the restaurant. Paranoia, my old friend.

A taxi pulled up near the restaurant. Zara got out. She was alone. The taxi went off; no other car stopped nearby. I watched her go in, bang on time. I got up and wandered slowly across to the restaurant, crossing the street and looking carefully for anything that would give my suspicions justification. Nothing. No one, to be more exact. No Barrett, no muscle, no anyone lurking on the street, looking out for me. She’d done well to get this far alone.

She was sitting at the back of the restaurant. No makeup, hair scraped back. She was wearing a baggy jumper, shapeless thing. It wasn’t because she wasn’t making an effort that I felt sad. In the past, in our past, she didn’t need to make an effort. Zara was film-star gorgeous without even bothering. What made me sad was that she was thin. Aged far more than made sense for the time that had passed since she left the city. Seeing her here the first time had told me there was something wrong. Seeing her in the hotel had shown me what. This was where I started fixing things.

There were no handbags on the floor this time; they must have seen me coming. I walked slowly, trying to look inconspicuous. Hard thing to do when you’re six foot three, broad and cursed with a permanent scowl. We had reached that point with a job when you plan for every possible failure. If someone here sees me, tells a police contact about me meeting Zara. Tells Lafferty. Tells anyone. Start behaving like everyone’s your enemy.

‘You rang,’ Zara said with a little smile as I sat down opposite her.

I didn’t like sitting with my back to the door, but that was the price of arriving second. I looked at her, at the tightness in that smile. Whatever scam she was working, whatever she had gotten herself into, it was time to make for the exits.

‘This is nearly finished,’ I said to her. Keep it short. ‘I’m ending this, probably tomorrow. Tomorrow night, it’ll be, more likely than not. I want to know where Barrett and his crew will be tomorrow night.’

She didn’t even stop to think about it. It was, I knew, the reason she was here. If Zara was working an angle, then she was close to the endgame and needed out. I was prepared to hold the door open for her. If she was stuck in something bigger than she could handle then the same applied. Incidentally, I didn’t for one moment believe it was the latter of those two. Zara’s never been stuck.

‘I can give you the address of the house he’s using. I’ll make sure he’s still there, and you can go pick them off.’

I shook my head. Didn’t like the way she was leaping to the bloodiest outcome. ‘No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to get you all arrested instead.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I have a deal in place. You’ll be let go; the rest of them will get some solid time. Should do, anyway, if they don’t screw it up in court. But you’ll get off the hook. You’ll be swept up with the rest of them and then let go.’

Her mouth was a little open; she couldn’t find the words to throw out that would let her shut it. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘What are you talking about? What happened to you? Are you working for the cops now? What is this?’ She was stunned, hence the string of stupid questions.

‘I’m not working for the cops. Barrett isn’t the big score here, so I’m turning him over to PC Plod in exchange for you getting off the hook. There’s a bigger target that I’m going after. But that’s none of your business. You just need to make sure that Barrett is in the right place for the cops to get him and his lot with the minimum fuss. Will you give me the address of the safe house you’re in?’

I already knew that she wasn’t going to argue with me. Zara wasn’t in any position where she could argue with me about anything, so she was always going to play along. But she was simmering. Partly with me, but I think mostly with herself. She had thought this was going to be predictable, that it would pan out the way she planned. That was naive of her. Zara had forgotten that this business was capable of surprising you at every turn. No job ever went down the road someone mapped for it.

‘Yeah, I’ll write it down.’ She rooted in her bag for a pen and paper.

She wrote it out, telling me about the layout of the house, what it was like inside, what view there was from front and back. She warned me that you could see right down the adjacent street and right along the street the house was on, so they would have to move fast to catch Barrett’s boys by surprise.

‘You can’t do anything that might tip him off,’ I said. ‘You have to sit tight in there with him. Accept being arrested; trust me that you’ll get out.’

She nodded; Zara wasn’t stupid enough to do anything that rocked the sinking boat. The way this was shaping up, she was still going to get out of it with whatever score she had her eye on.

‘You be careful as well, whatever it is you’re doing,’ she told me. Sounded like she meant it. We were both getting treacherously wistful.

‘I will,’ I nodded, looking away from her. Careful was never part of my job description, and it was a million miles away from this gig. ‘Tell your man that he and I will have a meeting the day after tomorrow. Make sure he stays at the safe house until then. You’ll be raided tomorrow night.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ she said with a shrug. This wasn’t what she wanted, but I couldn’t let myself care. Nothing was going to deter me from finishing the job I’d started with Lafferty. The world would bend to my will.

I nodded and reached out a hand; put it on top of Zara’s. I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was going to say. I couldn’t leave without saying something. ‘Look after yourself,’ I said. Pathetic. ‘When this is done, go somewhere safe, get yourself clean, get yourself healthy.’ I got up and walked carefully out.

From anyone else it would have been an insignificant gesture, but she understood what it meant from me. Even when we were together, when she was pregnant with my child, gestures like that were rare. I can’t be a touchy-feely kind of guy, can’t express concern or pleasure or anything else I can avoid expressing. It’s not that I won’t, it’s that I can’t. I made no effort to be comforting or helpful, and when a little concern found its way out of me it meant something. Zara knew me well enough to know that it mattered.

I hope it reassured her. That was the most important thing about it. It showed Zara that I still cared about her enough to arrange a deal with the cops to make sure that she didn’t suffer for the arrest that she had coming. And boy, did she have it coming.

There was nobody outside that I needed to worry about. Time to concentrate on getting Zara out of my head. There was a dark little corner where she lurked, agitating me. Pulling at my memories of her, reminding me that I wouldn’t have Becky without her. She was the only person in the world to whom I owed anything. At least, the only person I felt any obligation to repay. Now I needed to get professional. Angus Lafferty. A target big enough and complicated enough for me to blank out the rest of humanity. I had never done a job like it, and I had enough scope to botch it without distractions. Zara was Fisher’s now.

They say you can live without water longer than you can without sleep. Water was easy to come by. I tried to work it out, came to the conclusion that I’d gotten about nine hours’ sleep in four days. It was enough to keep me alive, but not much more than that. Don’t go into the biggest job of your life tired. That’s my great advice. You’ll be more emotional, suffer poorer judgement. That assumes my judgement could get any worse.

There was a dream I had as a kid, a recurring nightmare I suppose. I would always picture it like I was looking at a screen. There was a square on the screen, and I knew I was looking at it from above. At the top of the square as I looked at it was me, a small boy, standing there. At the bottom of the square was a large man, moving slowly round the corner to the side of the square. He crept slowly along; I don’t remember ever seeing his legs move. I stood at the top of the square and I knew he was coming for me, I knew that he was going to do me serious harm, but I didn’t move. I stood there knowing I should run, and he moved up the side of the square towards the corner at the top. It always panicked me, and I always woke before he reached the corner, this terrifying man.

Funny, I hadn’t remembered the dream for years until that evening. Trying to get a little sleep and failing. I was relieved when my phone went and Kevin told me to come round to his office for a chat. Being sluggish on a job was better, by a slim margin, than being sluggish at home. At least I’d be doing something.

It was night-time at the warehouse in Hillington. The place seemed almost empty; there was little to no chance of bumping into Kelly. One blessing. I wasn’t up to the task of dealing with any more complications. I feel like I’ve used that word a lot telling this story. It was a world made up of one complication after another at the time. I went through to the office at the back. There was a light on, Kevin waiting for me.

‘I managed to speak to Peter about an hour ago,’ he told me as I sat down across the desk from him. ‘We discussed your plan and he eventually came round to the idea. Dealing with Lafferty he agrees with, of course. That needs to be dealt with and he likes your idea. It’s the bit about leaving Barrett for the police he’s not too thrilled about. He thinks Barrett has damaged us, and been seen to damage us, more importantly, and he reckons we need to be seen hitting back. But in the end he agreed to go along with your plan. If it had been anyone else I don’t think he’d have gone for it, but he seems to put a lot of trust in you, Nate.’

I nodded at that, taking it like it was no big deal to me. It wasn’t, really; you have to accept other people’s reactions with ease. You can’t stop the opinions of others; just try to shape them to your desires. That’s not going to be done by leaping out of your chair the first time they say something. Most people would be impressed by the idea of Peter Jamieson putting that much trust in them. There’s a caveat, as there so often is, which is that if Jamieson really objected to the plan he would put his foot down and leave us all in no doubt. The fact that he was letting other people make the call told me that he wasn’t enormously concerned about Barrett any more, that Lafferty was the one that really mattered to him. I understood that.

‘I’m going to set up Barrett and his crew tonight, try and make sure that it’s carried out tomorrow night when I’m working the Lafferty job.’

‘And the Lafferty job?’

‘I know how I want to do it. I know how it needs to be done. It could get messy, I suppose.’

I said it matter-of-fact. Maybe made it sound like I didn’t much care about the violence I was about to be a part of. That wasn’t the case. There were others who didn’t seem terribly concerned by the jobs they were given, no matter how difficult or violent. Mikey Summers was a notable nonchalant; he never seemed concerned. With men like Mikey it was because they were conditioned to the violence, or perhaps because they simply didn’t understand the scale of what they were up against. I understood it perfectly well. There was a part of me missing, I think. The part that tells the rest of you to pull back from something that’s too much to handle. I had no such reflex, no little voice telling me this was something I ought to be afraid of.

I mention that only because it must have been my tone that prompted Kevin to ask what he asked next. A question he shouldn’t have asked.

‘Are you nervous, at all?’

I looked at him like he’d asked a question that was a long way beneath him. He should have known better. ‘No,’ was all I said, but not in a dismissive way. I said it with a forceful certainty that he might just have found convincing.

‘You have everything you need?’

‘I think so,’ I said, a little less sure about that. ‘If there’s anything or anyone else I need then I’ll be in touch about it, but I doubt it. I’ll be off the grid for a lot of tomorrow, me and Ronnie both. Emergency contact only.’

‘Sure,’ he said as I got up.

I had decided to end this meeting. Time was running out on me; I had another meeting I had to make happen that night. I’m not sure how impressed Kevin was with me standing up. I was the junior man; it wasn’t up to me to decide when the meeting ended. He had called me here, wanting to tell me face to face I had the go-ahead from Jamieson. He wanted to see my reaction. I’d take a guess that he wanted to convince himself I was up to the job. Little bit insulting, but I was muscle, and muscle didn’t usually handle something this big. This would be led by the gunman, or by someone senior like Kevin himself. Would have been Jamieson, if he wasn’t in Barlinnie. It was rare for a man of my position to lead this sort of job, so I was asserting my own authority. Kevin didn’t seem to care.

‘Good luck,’ was all he said to me as I pulled open the door to go out. I glanced back and nodded.