Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  ‘We’ll be out in thirty, forty seconds, tops.’

  ‘Doesn’t take that long to spot us.’

  ‘Nobody will be looking. There won’t be noise.’

  Jess was torn. She didn’t want Christie to turn up because she knew what was going to happen to him now. Didn’t matter how much of a creep he was, she didn’t want to see that. But if he didn’t turn up they might blame her. They would blame her. Nasty had a bad temper; she had seen him lose it. And Elliott, with his calm reassurance, always touching her. His punishment would be worse than Nasty’s anger.

  It was before six o’clock by the clock on the living-room wall when the doorbell rang. Everyone got up quickly. Elliott went into the bedroom and Nasty walked quickly down the corridor and into the bathroom. Jess waited until Nasty was out of view and answered the door.

  As soon as she opened the door Christie stepped inside and kissed her hard on the lips. Jess wasn’t expecting it; his mouth hit hers hard and hurt a little. He laughed and closed the front door behind him. Jess turned and started to walk down the corridor. She was walking with her back to him, didn’t hear the bathroom door opening as they moved along the corridor towards the living room. She was in the living-room doorway and looked back over her shoulder to make sure Lee was still behind her. That was when she saw Nasty coming out of the bathroom with the gun in his hand. He raised the gun quickly and shot Lee in the back of the head. The gun made a puff rather than a bang. There was a flash of blood and Lee fell forwards at Jess’s feet.

  She opened her mouth, wanting to scream or say something, but nothing came out. She stood in the living-room doorway, panting with shock. Someone touched her arm; she jumped. It was Elliott, already out of the bedroom and pushing her past the body and towards Nasty, who was at the front door.

  ‘Come on – let’s go.’

  They walked back down to the car, trying not to rush. If anyone spotted them, none of the three noticed. They drove straight back to the hotel, Nasty complaining that they were breaking too many rules of a good job. Elliott locked Jess in her room and disappeared downstairs. From her room she could hear them shouting, arguing about the gun Nasty had used. Nasty wanted to throw it away, try and get another one in the city. This one was used, compromised. Elliott was arguing loudly that getting another gun was madness when they couldn’t trust anyone here. They quietened down; Jess didn’t hear how it ended.

  Be a party girl, that’s what her friend had suggested. Knew a guy who ran a club in the city that held private parties. You dance with guys, get them their drinks, treat them like they’re something special. Maybe, if you want more money, you do more than that. Made it sound like it would always be her choice. Like she would have control. A few weeks later and she was locked in a hotel room. A man had died because she had lured him to a flat. Jess had never felt more alone.

  5

  His name was Lee Christie. He was thirty-six and had been a useful network guy for the organization, working a couple of street dealers and pushing some of the lower-risk stuff himself. He wasn’t vital, but he was useful. He made money. And then he was dead.

  There were three messages on my phone when I got out of the shower in the morning: one from Kevin Currie, one from Ronnie Malone and one from Conn Griffiths. Conn was what I always considered myself to be: smart muscle. There was a time, not that long ago, when most muscle could be dismissed as some halfwit, some thug working a short-term gig, throwing his weight around for cash. Times had changed, big organizations had gotten more sophisticated and the standard of muscle had gone up. There were still some halfwits around, but usually in the smaller organizations or working security or debt collection. There was still some use for the meatheads.

  Doing the sort of thing I’d done to Kirk Webster the day before, in fact. I’d done a thorough job, the sort of job that sent the right message, but the whole job was a piece of shit. If the organization even had basic muscle that it trusted, they would have done that job a long time ago. Right down to the bottom of the ladder, people were being treated differently. The old boss, and the old certainties, were gone. Now nobody knew who could be trusted, and everyone was trying to earn the leadership’s respect all over again. If they were lucky they would earn it before Jamieson got out and the leadership changed again.

  What I’ll try to do now is explain a little something about the food chain in our business. You look at the Jamieson organization, and you know that Peter Jamieson, in prison or not, is top dog because his name’s above the door. Below Jamieson are the people that run the different aspects of the organization work; and for loan sharking and prostitution, that was Marty Jones. So Marty has trusted people working below him, handling day-to-day stuff, and the man he trusts to handle much of the debt collecting is Billy Patterson. Keeping up? Billy has a long track record of hiring the smartest muscle he can get his hands on because he figures he needs to stay a step ahead of the other bitey little sharks in his area. He hired Alan Bavidge before he got knocked off. He hired Mikey Summers and he hired Conn Griffiths. There are a few levels below people like me and Conn, the front line if you like, but we’ll forget about them for now. If they were important, people would realize as soon as they went missing.

  ‘Apparently he’d been lying dead there since yesterday, maybe yesterday afternoon. Nobody found him,’ Conn said when I called him. Judging from the messages on my phone, Conn knew more about the dead man than Ronnie or Currie, and I was interested to know why. ‘It was me and Mikey went round and found the man, lying there. We left, waited a couple of hours, made an anonymous call about a smell. There was a fucking smell as well, Nate, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘What were you looking for him for?’

  ‘Ach, business, you know. Just business.’

  I stood in my kitchen, half dressed, wondering what to have for my breakfast, holding the phone and letting my silence speak for me.

  ‘Don’t fucking give me that,’ Conn said to the silence. ‘It was nothing major; we weren’t looking to do him any mischief, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’m just thinking, why was Billy Patterson sending his two senior men round to visit a mid-level dealer working for Angus Lafferty? Billy isn’t worming into dealing, is he?’

  I could hear Conn muttering under his breath. ‘Christ’s sake, you’re gonna make me say it, ain’t you?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  This problem was inevitable in any organization with a split leadership – the lack of trust. I hint that I think Billy is moving into dealing when he should be sticking to debt collecting and that gets Conn all hot and bothered because he knows if I said such a thing to Kevin Currie it could spark a falling-out. This is why any organization needs a strong head, a single person who has the power to make any decision he wishes. Means people further down the chain falling out don’t matter so much, because people down the chain will always fall out. Plus it gives those people someone to fear if their falling-out starts costing money.

  ‘It ain’t Billy, it’s Marty, and he ain’t trying to get involved in the drug business. We’re not daft, Nate – you know that by now. Marty doesn’t trust Angus Lafferty as far as he can throw him, so he’s got us hooking up with a couple of people close to Lafferty’s lot to find out what they’re up to. The dead guy, Christie, was trusted by Lafferty and we were talking to him, regular like, and friendly.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. And Lafferty is doing what he was always doing, not holding back on anything that we can see.’

  That was good to know, at least. ‘So what about Christie?’

  ‘Dead. Long dead and looking like it. I’ll tell you this and all, Nate – his way of dying is the sort that we all need to worry about.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Bullet to the back of the head, nice and clean, single shot. No fucking about with it. Couldn’t see any other marks on the man. It was quite dark so we could only get a wee look at him. Had to use Mikey’s phone as a fucking torch. An
yway, yeah, it was clean, professional, I’d say. Wasn’t in his own flat either. A place belonging to persons as yet unidentified.’

  ‘A lure?’

  ‘Probably, although he didn’t have any product on him.’

  ‘So how did you guys find him?’

  ‘Had a meeting set up with him, went down to his place and he wasn’t there, but his wife tells us where he was going.’

  ‘His wife knew the address?’

  ‘Wife seems to know an awful lot; I think she did a lot of the work. Lot of the thinking, anyway. So she gave us this address, says he was going there and that was yesterday. We ask her what she’s been doing since yesterday; she says she’s been doing the same thing she always does when he disappears for days on end – praying his dick falls off inside whatever whore he’s with.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Aye. So we go to the address, thinking it’s probably bullshit, but it’s not. It’s an ordinary wee flat with the front door ajar.’

  ‘It was open?’

  ‘Like they wanted it to be found,’ Conn said knowingly. ‘This was a professional hit, sending a message. Listen, Marty’s up to high dough. He’s got me and Mikey working on this and I want you and your boy to come give us a hand, maybe take the lead in some aspects. There’s more to this than me and Mikey can see for ourselves.’

  ‘Where do we meet?’

  ‘It’ll be one of Marty’s offices; I don’t know where’s available yet. I’ll call you in an hour. You and the boy come right round.’

  Coffee and toast for breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table thinking about this dead guy I’d never met, pushing thoughts of tomorrow’s meeting with Zara out of my head. I’d heard of Christie, because it’s my business to know who’s who. My first thought was Lafferty lashing out because the dealer was talking to Marty, but that was shit-for-brains thinking. There isn’t a man in the city works harder to keep out of trouble than Angus Lafferty, and knocking someone off for something minor like that couldn’t be further from his style. The corpse had been talking, but he’d been talking within the organization.

  So you think about the dead guy and who might have wanted him dead, who profits from it. Another dealer maybe. Yeah, sure, that’s the natural place to leap to, but what other dealer works a lure and nails the wee bastard with a professional hit? If Christie was sticking to his own patch and not playing suicide games then he was hit by someone looking to take his patch from him. Not much of a patch for a hit like that. Using a gunman, setting up a lure, those things cost time and money, and Christie wasn’t worth much of either.

  But my mind was clinging on to the same thing that had mattered to Conn: the open door. You lure a guy to a flat with the promise of a good score or a woman, you shoot him dead, and then you leave. So far so professional. Then you leave the front door open on your way out. Doesn’t matter if it’s wide open or ajar; open is open and open means a lot. Means you want someone to come along and find the body, sooner the better. You want to send a message and you want that message out on the streets within hours.

  If we’re accepting that Christie being killed was a message then you and me have got to sit down and work out what the message was. Not just what it was, but who it was aimed at. Let’s stick to the obvious until we have something more complicated to play with. The message was ‘we’re coming to take over your business and there’s fuck-all you can do about it’. The target was Angus Lafferty, or the wider Jamieson organization. If the obvious was correct then it wasn’t just a message; it was a bloody declaration of war.

  6

  Took until half nine for Conn to send a message through with an address for me, an office in a small industrial site out near the airport. I went and picked up Ronnie and drove us out there.

  ‘This is all a bit over the top, isn’t it?’ Ronnie asked me.

  It was, a bit. We could have had this meeting somewhere more convenient and saved time, something we didn’t have to spare. But you can’t mock careful because careful is often the thing that keeps you breathing in this business. I could understand why Conn wanted this out of the way. It was his meeting, so he got to choose the venue.

  ‘If we’re going to be poking around in the business of a dead man then we need to poke carefully,’ I told him. ‘Better if people don’t know we’re doing it at all. Also helps if we only meet Conn and Mikey off the radar. Make it seem like we’re not working together. Trick people into thinking that only those two are looking into it – leaves us free. At least make people think we’re working separately from each other.’

  ‘Muddy the waters so we can move in them unseen,’ he said casually, like he’d heard it often enough to know. Apparently I’d tried to teach that lesson before.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. He was learning.

  The place was smaller than I had expected – a little office building in a wide open space that was presumably meant for unfulfilled industrial purposes. The building wasn’t a lot to look at: not twenty years old and looked forty. Two-storey, bare blocks, glass door, sat at the end of a street that just stopped there with little room to turn and go back. There was an empty patch of land next to the building that used to have a shitload of vans for hire. The building was worth buttons but the land was worth a fucking fortune and Marty was sitting on it. Picked it up from some halfwit who hit the bottle as soon as his business started to look shaky, got himself into debt with Marty and gave him the place to settle it.

  We parked next to Conn’s car and went inside. A little reception area with glass doors on either side. There was a shout of ‘through here’ from the right so we went into a large empty room to find Conn and Mikey. Two big men in their thirties, Mikey younger, darker and a little softer round the gut. There was a pasty halfway into his mouth, so he could only nod a hello to us both.

  It had been a workroom; Conn and Mikey were sitting on units at the side of the room. It had a bare floor and tiled ceiling and not much else to look at. It was clean; place hadn’t been used or broken into since the previous owner went tits up. There was a large window that looked out the front to where we’d parked.

  ‘You must be Ronnie,’ Conn said, reaching out a hand.

  Mikey had met Ronnie before; helped him out of a little jam when we were chasing down a dealer working on Jamieson’s patch. Conn hadn’t, and was polite enough to say hello first. Politeness is often the first casualty of professionalism, so Ronnie appreciated the gesture.

  Conn went back and sat beside Mikey; me and Ronnie loitered around in front of them, close enough to whisper. It was cramped; we were huddled together like we were hiding the conversation from non-existent passers-by. It felt right though, the way men like us ought to talk when we’re discussing the dirty end of the business.

  ‘What’s the latest?’ I asked, in a tone that said I wanted to take charge of the conversation. I knew what I needed to hear, and I didn’t want to hear anything else.

  ‘Latest is what it was,’ Conn said. ‘The police are on it. I heard DI Fisher’s name being mentioned. Don’t know what conclusions they’re jumping to, but we’ll need to keep our heads down. They see us sniffing around, they’re going to think we’re involved.’

  We were involved, of course, just not the way Fisher would want us to be. ‘How clean did you leave it?’ I asked.

  ‘Clean enough, I think,’ Conn said as I watched flakes flutter from Mikey’s mouth. ‘We weren’t gloved; didn’t think we’d need to be. Touched the door and nothing else though. Took our time leaving, wiping anything we might have touched on the way in. Can’t guarantee we weren’t seen, but we didn’t see anyone. Not a great area for going unseen, mind you.’

  I trusted them both; they were about as good at this as anyone in the city and they made a hell of a team. I nodded, accepting that there was no need to say any more on the subject of their professionalism.

  ‘We went and saw the wife again,’ Mikey said, swallowing down the last of his brunch. ‘That was Marty’s idea; he wants th
is figured out as fast as possible. We went round and had a word with her when we were sure the cops had gone.’

  ‘How sure?’

  ‘We called her first, checked; she said they were,’ Conn said. ‘We went round, checked the area first. Seemed clear. We didn’t have long with her though; the cops aren’t going to leave the grieving wee woman alone yet.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she had fuck-all to add to what we already know. She was holding it together, best she could. Said nobody had been in touch with Christie that he hadn’t been expecting until this new chance came along. Said he got a call asking him to come to a meeting inside, like, an hour, or some fucking rubbish like that. Should have smelled a rat at that.’

  ‘She says this was some new person that Christie had no connection with, but, I don’t know,’ Mikey said. ‘He wasn’t daft. Got led around by the cock sometimes, but that was a problem for him and the wife to sort out. I figured with his experience he wouldn’t go running off to a meeting with someone he’d never even heard of.’

  That made sense; even someone with little experience shouldn’t run into a potential danger zone like that. A man who’d been around the business a while, he would know that.

  ‘So what are we thinking?’ I asked.

  ‘First thing, he knew the person who called up and invited him to the meeting. Maybe someone he’d done business with before, or a woman he’d been involved with,’ Conn said. ‘The lure worked, and they had a pro there to hit him. It was someone that was good enough to get in and out without being seen, far as we know, and make a clean shot on Christie. I think we can assume a pro.’

  ‘Which leaves the why part,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, that bit’s what’s got Marty farting fury,’ Mikey said with a casual smile. ‘He’s worried that we might be under attack, that this might be the start of something big instead of all the pishy wee shite we’ve had to put up with so far.’