Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  We were still at the point where Ronnie was doing the set-up and I was doing the dirty work. The process of educating him on how to get bloody was a slow one. He had to learn, because that was his job, but you don’t rush a kid into it if you don’t have to. I was taking my time, teaching him, because I enjoyed it that way.

  2

  I had a small terraced house in Balornock, on a long curving road in an area that wasn’t quite as rough as it looked at a glance. Used to have the Birnie Court flats looming at the end of the road, looking ready for a fight. They had picked one with a demolition team and were gone by the time this happened. My house was the sort of place you would accept a man on a low income lives in. I wasn’t on a low income, but I was happy for the world to make its usual assumptions and move quietly along. I needed just enough space for me and my few possessions and I wasn’t fussy about location, location, location.

  Don’t get me wrong, I would have liked to share my home with someone else. More than one, actually, but there was no way I was going to let that happen. I was bursting with faults, some of which I may find time to tell you about, but that kind of selfishness wasn’t one of them. I would have loved to have my daughter living with me, but I knew she was better off living with her mother’s parents. I wasn’t the man to bring up a young girl. And I would have liked to have a woman in my life, but that wasn’t happening either. I was short-tempered, generally surly and lugging around a reputation that made me good at my job and bad at everything else. People were scared of me, and that cut bad as well as good.

  There was someone sniffing around, a girl I liked, a girl I admired. Her name was Kelly Newbury, and because I liked her I was making a conscious effort to stay away from her. She wanted the security a relationship with me could give her. Have me be scary on her behalf. It was an invitation to trouble and other good things that I couldn’t afford to get tangled in. Not with all this going on.

  I took a sly look up and down the street as I made my way up to the front door because the habit of caution is a priceless gift. There was nothing out of place that I could spot, even if my eyesight isn’t as good as it once was. It’ll have to stay below its best because a guy like me doesn’t turn up to his work bespectacled.

  I pushed open the front door and stepped inside, already seeing something I didn’t like. There was a folded piece of notepaper lying on the mat just inside the door that someone had put through my letter box when I was away getting gainfully employed. In the few seconds it took me to pick up the piece of paper I wracked my brains trying to think of any good news I had received in this way. None, ever.

  Just needed a glance at the handwriting to know that this was more than bad news. This was a disaster waiting to happen. This was Zara Cope’s handwriting. Messy but confident, her name scrawled across the bottom of the paper, the Z much bigger than the rest of it, like a dyslexic Zorro.

  I sighed my disapproval loudly to the empty corridor and wandered through to the living room. Putting music on always made it less likely that I would lose my temper, so I sat with a guitar being gently strummed in the background and read the note.

  Nate,

  I was at your door but I guess you’re not home.

  I don’t have your number so I’m leaving this note instead.

  We need to meet. There are things we have to discuss, like the delivery I made for you some time ago.

  Remember that? There are other things to talk about as well.

  Zara

  There were little digs in there that were designed to annoy me. Let’s start with the ‘I guess you’re not home’ comment, as though I was hiding behind the fucking couch to avoid her. Even mentioning the delivery was uncharacteristically stupid. What if someone else had found the note before I got to it? And saying there were other things to talk about was just a cheap tease. There was a lot more to the letter than the words.

  She was desperate, was the first obvious thing. Mentioning what she had delivered to me before she was arrested was her charmless little shot at reminding me I owed her money. I didn’t need to be reminded; the money was sitting in an account waiting for her to adopt it. The sooner she got it out of that account and into one of her own the happier I would be. I didn’t want it anywhere near me. The money had started out its life attached to Lewis Winter, a walking catastrophe who had strolled to his early death when Zara was with him.

  I should maybe give you a little history lesson at this point. Zara was the mother of my nine-year-old daughter, Rebecca. Zara hung around the business, using her looks and her smarts to make herself a fine little living. Or a living, anyway. She was a cut above the usual hangers-on, sharp as anything that’s ever cut me. I fell for her hard; we moved in together; she had Becky. Didn’t last though, and it was mostly my fault. Zara was twenty-one, looking for a fast life, and I was an angry and dangerous twenty-eight-year-old who wouldn’t accept the world not constantly bending to my will. We were too young. She ran, and I let her. Becky went to live with Zara’s parents, and it’s been that way since.

  Zara shacked up with Lewis Winter, a mid-level dealer, and when he was knocked off she came to me with some of his dirty cash and the last of his supply. The drugs needed selling and the money needed hiding until the dear Scottish police service kindly stopped looking for it. I did what I could to help her, because that seemed like the right thing to do for the mother of my child, and because I still didn’t know how to say no to Zara Cope.

  She was a special woman, one who had a power over me no other person has ever had. That didn’t help her a damn when she got a three-month sentence for perverting the course of justice. Slap-on-the-wrist stuff for someone inside the industry, but she was no more than a hanger-on, and the sentence would have hit her hard. She got out and went off the radar for a while, didn’t even come looking for her money. I knew she’d been away from the city for a lot of that time because I kept an eye out for her. Now, evidently, she was back. And yes, I did recognize her handwriting after all those years. There was almost nothing of her I had forgotten.

  I turned the piece of paper over and saw that she’d scrawled a phone number on the back of it. A mobile number, underlined twice as though that would be the clincher if I was undecided. I was going to call her; she would gnaw at the back of my mind if I didn’t. She could also cause trouble for me, and I had enough of that to keep me company already. Zara was on first-name terms with some of the skeletons in my closet, so I had to keep her smart mouth shut. And she knew that I’d organized the sale of drugs on her behalf, and the cleaning of the money it raised.

  If you’re interested in how, I had taken that little stash of drugs and dirty money she turned up on my doorstep with to Ross Kennedy to handle. He worked most closely with Angus Lafferty, Peter Jamieson’s biggest drug importer, but his loyalties were made of smoke. He bought the drugs from me for less than their street value but as much as I could get in a hurry. He also cleaned the money for me, because making dirty things look respectable was always his greatest talent. Since then the money, about four and a half grand in all, had been gradually filtered into an account I’d opened to house it, waiting for Zara.

  I was looking at that number and looking at the phone, wanting to call and wanting to crumple up the paper and pretend she had never existed. But I was going to call, both because I had to and because I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to know that she was doing okay. Since she’d left the city she’d left my professional radar, so I had no idea what sort of state she was in.

  The phone rang for a while before she answered it and I heard her voice, cold and flawless.

  ‘This is Nate,’ I said to her hello.

  There was silence on the other end, the kind of heavy pause that insinuated horror. She wanted me to call so I was calling; it was up to her to say something next.

  ‘You got my note.’

  ‘It was inside my front door, so yeah.’ Talking to Zara always ripped me in half. Part of me wanted to be nice to her, let her kno
w that I still cared. The other part wanted to make sure that she kept her distance, stayed away from me and stayed away from Becky. That was the part that usually won, because protecting Becky from Zara’s influence was my priority.

  ‘Yeah. Well, we need to talk. I take it you still have the money you owe me?’

  Needling away, emphasizing the word owe as though she had done me a favour. She hadn’t; she had nearly led the police to me and had indirectly tied me to Lewis Winter through his product. It was a dangerous thing to be tied to a man whose murder was part of the MacLean confessions. It was hard to think of the last time Zara had done me a favour. Becky, I guess.

  ‘The money I raised, cleaned and hid for you is sitting in a bank account, waiting.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You want the bank details? We can make this nice and simple and you can take the money without any fuss.’

  This was me giving her the opportunity to keep her distance, something I didn’t really want but that I thought we were both smart enough to understand was the best option. But she didn’t keep her distance; she kept barrelling right on into my life.

  ‘I want to see you,’ she said, like it was a sudden revelation. ‘We should meet up. There’s stuff we need to talk about.’

  I sighed, but I kept it light enough to make sure she didn’t hear. I wasn’t looking to provoke. Maybe ten per cent of my worry was about my own feelings at seeing her again, another twenty was about whatever trouble she was going to try and drag me into, and the other seventy was the ever-present fear that she would want to talk about Becky. Whatever the split, it was still a hundred per cent of worry.

  ‘Where and when?’ I asked. I knew I was walking into trouble; this isn’t me looking back and thinking I could have done something different. I knew it then every bit as much as I know it now. I went along with it because that was all I could do. The alternative was no, and no meant conflict with a dangerous woman at a dangerous time.

  ‘Um, Wednesday, how about? I can come round to yours.’

  ‘No,’ I said, a little too quick and a little too hard. ‘Wednesday, fine, but we’ll meet somewhere.’

  ‘Neutral territory, huh? Fine, if that’s what you want. You know the Greek place right on George Square?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Midday?’

  ‘Fine.’

  She made a big effort to sigh down the phone at me. ‘It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Nate.’

  She sounded like she was about to say something else but she stopped herself and I heard a door closing in the background.

  ‘You have company,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe now I have a chance of a grown-up conversation. I’ll see you on Wednesday.’

  I hung up without saying goodbye because I was feeling petty. Resentful might be a better word for it, and disturbed by the fact that I was jealous of whoever was having the conversation with her right now. Some new man in her life, hopefully giving her a good sort of life. I looked at the letter and I thought about its desperate contents, and I knew that whatever he was giving her, it wasn’t a good life.

  3

  We were sitting in a car park outside a big plain white building. Big windows, could have been a building for just about anything, but the sign sprawled across the wall said it was for a telephone company.

  ‘Call centre,’ Ronnie told me, sitting in the passenger seat. ‘He’s something technical in there. I don’t know what. Supposed to be quite senior. I think that’s because most of the other people working there are students. Lot of short-term people. From what I can tell, he knocks off at five every day, goes straight home on the bus, doesn’t leave the flat when he gets there.’

  ‘That usual for him?’

  Ronnie shrugged. ‘No idea, but it’s what he’s doing now.’

  I nodded. We both guessed that wasn’t the life Kirk Webster had been living before he grassed up Peter Jamieson and John Young; just the life he was now stuck with. He was hoping that keeping his head down was going to help him stay out of trouble, like trouble ever walks past you because you don’t look it in the eye.

  Kirk had helped the organization by placing fake calls in the records to implicate some people, removing real calls from the records to protect others. A simple precaution, but it was illegal and it was all about hiding much more serious crimes. The police knew it, because Calum MacLean told them, but it’s never enough to know something. They needed more proof than they had, and they managed to get Kirk’s name. They questioned him; he cracked like a dry biscuit and told them everything he knew. That added to Jamieson’s sentence and played a big part in John Young’s sentence. Young was Jamieson’s right-hand man, and the most senior organization man Kirk had met. Now Kirk had to be punished.

  ‘That’s what he looks like,’ Ronnie told me, holding his phone across to me. ‘You’ll not have trouble picking him out.’

  Wasn’t a brilliant picture, but it showed me a thirty-year-old guy in a tracksuit, dark hair with a mini Mohawk. He looked ridiculous, easy to pick out. A man not smart enough to understand that the concept of keeping your head down included keeping your head restrained.

  ‘Right, you can leave it with me,’ I told Ronnie.

  I got out of the car and walked halfway across the car park to where mine was parked. A couple of minutes later Ronnie pulled away and went off to do whatever things he killed time with. He had a girlfriend, Esther, who he lived with, and it seemed like he had a good little circle of friends. I wondered how long all of that would last. As secrets grow, friendships shrink.

  The boring part of the job, sitting there and waiting for someone else to stick to their schedule. Which he did, emerging from the building at about ten minutes past five, walking quickly, looking around without ever knowing what he was looking for. He was scared of everything, and that was why he couldn’t see the danger. You get so wrapped up in believing that every shadow is about to jump at you that you can’t pick out the real threat.

  I let him get well ahead, then drove to his flat. He lived in Greenfield, a line of old council flats running down a side road with a bashed and bedraggled bus shelter at the corner. There weren’t many cars on the street so parking was easy. I stopped at the top of the street, with a view of the bus stop down at the bottom. I could have made more effort to hide away, but your effort matches your need. I didn’t need to die of effort outwitting Kirk Webster.

  Took another ten or fifteen minutes of waiting for the bus to stop and Kirk to get off. He walked quickly up to one of the four-storey buildings, dipped in brown roughcast and left to degrade, and went inside. I watched and I waited and wished I was somewhere else. This was cheap, and the world would know it.

  No point sitting there wishing your superiors had better judgement. You go and you do the job, so I went and I did the job. Up to the front door, in and up the stairs to the second floor. Three doors on each floor, and I found the one I was apparently looking for, number 8. I knocked and stood a step sideways so that he’d still be able to see me when he opened the door but he wouldn’t be able to see much of me. I doubted he would recognize me, but I’m a big unit and wherever I am, I look like I’m there with bad intentions.

  The door opened a couple of inches, me leaning sideways against the doorframe, watching for any sign of security. There was no chain on the door, no sign that the clown had gone to any real effort to protect himself. You’re living in fear of the Jamieson organization and you don’t even get a chain for your door?

  ‘Yeah?’ he said out into the corridor, still only holding the door an inch open.

  ‘Delivery,’ I said with a bored tone.

  And he paused just long enough to let me take complete control of the situation. People always pause. Even when they’re not expecting a delivery they’re still willing to believe it might be for them. People want to believe that there’s something wonderful arriving. I spun a half-step and shouldered the door, shoving it open and Kirk backwards.

 
; As soon as I stepped inside I closed the door behind me, keeping as much of the noise inside as possible. Kirk was back against the wall in the narrow corridor, looking at me and shaking his head.

  ‘No, oh no, please, no,’ was about as much as he had time to say.

  I didn’t want him to start cranking up the volume, so I threw a fast punch, straight-armed, aiming for the middle of his face. It wasn’t a hard shot, but it was a silencer. Caught him on the tip of the nose and knocked his head backwards, making it bounce off the wall behind him. The shock shut him up, made him drop to his knees. This wasn’t a man practised in the art of fighting. No man who voluntarily drops off his feet when he doesn’t have to is a competent fighter.

  While he put his hands up to his face, I reached out and grabbed him by his stupid hair, dragging him in through the door to his cramped little kitchen. He was whining and spluttering, blood coming out of his nose.

  The kitchen was already a mess by the time I got there. Food packaging, crumbs and general assorted dirt were scattered over every surface. There was a stack of magazines on the small kitchen table that looked like they’d been there a good while. Some were tech mags, others weren’t. There was a laptop on the table too, probably used to view the same content as the magazines. Looked reasonably new, maybe bought with the money the organization paid him. The kitchen had old cream units, a cooker that didn’t look old and didn’t look used; this was a young guy not living much of a life as far as I could tell.

  It was my turn to make that sad little life a little sadder. I threw him at the table. He hit it side-on and smacked into the magazines, sending them skidding off the table. He reached out and held on to the table because he thought that would help him. His legs had gotten drunk without him; he was wobbling. It was exactly what I wanted him to do, hold a position while I picked up a chair and smashed it against him. It was a dramatic move, smashing a chair against a guy, watching the legs fly off, but it didn’t do a whole lot of damage. An effective scare tactic. It also had the benefit of not having to throw a punch. No need to cut my own knuckles to make him hurt.