Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  ‘Get her out of my sight,’ Barrett said, turning to glance at Jess.

  Elliott led her through the kitchen and into the corridor.

  ‘I still need the toilet,’ she told him quietly.

  They went upstairs; he pushed open a couple of doors and found the bathroom. Pushed her in and stepped in after her. She stood and looked at him. He smiled.

  Henson and Aldridge put the bags in the corridor and started searching the house, happy to leave Zara and Barrett alone in the kitchen. Barrett stood by the sink, eyes shut, trying to process it all. Nasty was dead. They were under attack. Someone had known where Nasty was going to be and when. None of them were safe. Not in this city. They should get out. Just cut and run. They had gotten half the money up front. Take it and run, and if their employer sent people after them then so be it. Survive crossing this bridge before you worry about the next one. He felt Zara’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes, turned and looked at her. His girl.

  ‘Hey, listen, we’re nearly done,’ she said to him, looking up into his eyes. ‘I know this is hard. I know it. Losing Nasty like that. It’s hard, and it’s shocking and it makes you want to run from everything. Two days, and that’s it. Two days and we’re out of here, you and me. Back down south, and we can build something amazing together. Two more days.’

  She hugged him tight, and he felt better. Two days. They didn’t need Nasty for what was left. He could do this.

  21

  I got the call early from Kevin himself; they had been tipped off by one of their police contacts. Jawad ‘Nasty’ Nasif had been found dead in a house that was up for sale. Bullet to the back of the head was what they had been told; someone sneaking up on him in the kitchen of this house and leaving the body behind. I put the phone down and got out of bed, sat there thinking about what this was going to mean. I didn’t like it, which is strange given that it got rid of the gunman of our threat. But it didn’t add up to something I could be happy with, coming hours after I had encountered Adrian Barrett in that hotel room.

  That meeting was on my mind; what we had done after it was on my mind as well. We had gone back with a full crew, armed and ready to bring them down, but they were long gone, of course. We tried to find out where they had gone but the staff in the hotel knew nothing. Their ignorance was genuine, not bought and paid for. We had the message to pass on, but it wasn’t a message anyone was going to pay any attention to. It was passed to Lafferty given that it was his import business that was partly under threat, and I understood that, despite being a small man, he had hit the roof.

  ‘He was shouting about you, Nate,’ Kevin had told me. ‘He couldn’t accept that you had walked away from Barrett when you had him right in front of you.’

  ‘He had a fucking gun on his lap. What did he want me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing I suppose. He’ll calm down; he’s just bricking it right now. He thought this was going to be his chance to step up to the top and he isn’t dealing with it, not as easily as he thought he could.’

  Now that Nasty was dead it was inevitable that people were going to point the finger at us, particularly if they knew that Barrett had confronted us the previous night. Everyone would be thinking about that, expecting Barrett to retaliate. Maybe Barrett was already planning to retaliate. He probably thought it was us that had moved against his gunman because, let’s face it, that was the most logical conclusion to jump to.

  ‘We’re sure Lafferty didn’t make this move?’ I asked Currie when he called.

  ‘As sure as we can be,’ he said, and his tone didn’t aim for reassuring. ‘I might not place a high regard on his tactical prowess, but I don’t think he would try and pull this. Killing the gunman doesn’t wipe them out, he has to know that. Just pisses them off. The way Lafferty’s thinking, he would only make a move against Barrett or against all of them. He is getting nervous.’

  ‘But not nervous enough for this?’

  There was a pause while Currie considered it. ‘Christ, I don’t know. I don’t think so, that’s as much as I can say.’

  Which left a lot of questions that we needed to find the answer to just as much as Barrett did. Was this someone else muscling in on the act? Maybe another dealer or supplier that they’d threatened. Or was this their employer, let’s assume they had one, trying to get rid of them because he felt their work was done? Or, and this was the most likely one, was this a falling-out among the group that ended with them getting rid of their own gunman? All of those questions hinged on it not being Lafferty.

  I got up, showered and called Ronnie, told him what had happened and that we should expect a response. I warned him to be on the lookout in case anyone tried to target him. He seemed a little shocked by that suggestion, maybe a little dismissive even. I warned him a second time, made sure he understood.

  ‘If Barrett thinks that we made a move against him then he will make a move against us. He has to. Doesn’t have to be against Lafferty or Currie or one of the top guys. As long as he can show people that he can still hit us without his gunman then he gets his message across. You and me, guys out on the street, we’re all at risk.’

  I hoped that got the point across to him and sat down to work out what I was going to do next. In a sense this didn’t change a lot. We still needed to know where Barrett was if we were going to deal with him quickly, and we needed to prepare for him and his little mob when they stepped out into the open. His mob being littler than expected didn’t matter. We also needed to know who, if anyone, was backing them. But still, our enemies had lost their gunman and we were no further forwards thanks to it. We didn’t know where they were and there didn’t seem to be any obvious way of finding out. That, right there, was why I was leaning towards Barrett being the killer of his own gunman. Couldn’t work out who else benefited much.

  The safe house was interesting. Needed to find out if it had been checked, but if it was for sale then it probably had. So maybe that wasn’t their safe house, just a place for, what, doing deals? Storage? Something like that. Didn’t change the fact that after an attack they were bound to have moved. Bound to have. That meant the squad of them all moving at the same time, because they couldn’t plan to go earlier if they didn’t know the attack was coming. Even if Barrett was behind it they couldn’t have moved earlier without alerting Nasty to the fact that something was going down.

  That was exactly as far as I had gotten when my doorbell rang. I didn’t like that, a Friday morning and someone ringing my doorbell without warning. If it was someone from work, Ronnie or Mikey or someone like that, they would have called first. There’s an etiquette that says you don’t turn up on someone’s doorstep without giving fair warning. If it’s an emergency, fine, but I didn’t want an emergency ringing my doorbell either. I opened the door to something worse than an emergency. I opened the door to DI Michael Fisher.

  I nodded for him to come in, seeing that he was angry and feeling my own anger beginning to boil. I wasn’t his contact and he wasn’t mine. I don’t know what our relationship was at that point. Didn’t matter – if you’re looking for info or influence you do not turn up on someone’s doorstep, not when you’re a cop and certainly not when you’re a high-profile cop. He was putting my life as well as my career in danger by being there. I ushered him through to the living room and we stood looking at each other, just a few feet apart, me looking down at him. Always impressed me, how little guys like him managed to look tough using only naked fury.

  ‘Was it your lot?’ he said. ‘It bloody was, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, it bloody was not,’ I said, growling because I was trying to stop myself from shouting. He had no business being here just because he was in a huff about the Nasty killing.

  ‘You know about it though.’

  ‘Course I do. I heard half an hour ago. But I’d be as interested as you are to find out who was behind it.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ he said, raising his voice and trying to sound sarcastic. He sounded a l
ittle frantic to me. ‘So I tell you who’s in his crew and a day later one of them is found dead.’

  ‘We already knew all about Nasif. I didn’t need that from you. We couldn’t find them and we still can’t. You were the one who knew where they were.’

  There was something in that glance he gave me that set alarm bells ringing. It was guilt, that’s what it was. There was a guilty look in his eyes.

  ‘You didn’t know where they were,’ I said.

  ‘I did,’ he said, snapping at me, ‘but I don’t now. I went round to the hotel they were at and they’d moved; I haven’t picked them up yet. The house we found Nasif in? I didn’t know they were using that place, if they even were. Seemed like that house had been used by someone, so, I don’t know, must have been them.’

  He fell silent and I let him. It was a good thing for him to calm down a little before I tried to prise any other info out of him. I felt a little sorry for him, which was ridiculous. He might just have been the last person in the whole damn city that I should have had any sympathy for. The guy was trying to stop bloodshed, and I could respect that. It mattered to him.

  ‘And there was nothing to ID the killer?’

  ‘No,’ he said with a shrug, ‘there was nothing there. There was no weapon found anywhere in the area, nothing that we can grab onto yet. Might be, still early, but I doubt it. I think the guy was a pro. I think he was the kind of pro that an organization like yours might employ.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t a pro,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe he was known to the victim. That would let him get close, make sure the job was as clean as possible.’

  He thought about it but I could see that he wasn’t buying it. ‘His own lot don’t benefit from it, not in any way I can see. Your lot, you’re the ones who benefit most from it; that’s why I suspect you.’

  I said nothing to that because I’d told him how wrong he was and he didn’t need to hear it again. ‘I want to stop this as much as you do,’ I told him, whether he believed me or not. ‘We’re all at risk here, and more people will be dead before this is all over. I don’t want that. I’m still trying to find Barrett, and if I do, I give you my word I will try to make sure that it ends peacefully. I’ll try to make sure that it ends with Barrett in your hands and not mine.’

  He looked at me like he believed me, perhaps because I was being honest. I could see his discomfort, partly because he was talking to me and I wasn’t the sort of person he wanted to talk to. But there was something else there. I think he was a little bit panicked by what was happening. He had made a huge score with Jamieson and Young, Shug Francis and all the other smaller fish he put away. He was the star pig in the pen, but now he was watching an incident coming down the tracks that he couldn’t stop. He needed my help.

  ‘You get me Barrett,’ he said, ‘and I’ll get you Zara Cope. She’s tied to Barrett, but I’ll make sure he doesn’t drag her down with him.’

  I nodded because there was nothing I wanted to say to him about Zara. My thoughts about her were my business and certainly not some cop’s, but I wanted her out of that mess and he was the man who could make that happen. The thought of her, lying on that bed, drugged to the eyeballs, laughing because she’d tricked me. It wasn’t her. Not the Zara that I had known back in the good old days. This one was a skinny, wasted, pathetic version of the sharp and determined woman I had known. It was the sharp and determined woman that I needed to rescue and then keep the hell away from me.

  22

  The morning had been an unscheduled meeting with Fisher. Around lunchtime I got a call from Ronnie. He was supposed to be working on finding out where Barrett and his people had gone. Same thing I should have been working on, but my mind was starting to drift off into other areas. We were beyond the point where Barrett working for himself was plausible. He was working for someone, and I needed to figure out who. The call from Ronnie told me he had a lead on who had employed them, that I needed to get round to his mate Owen Turner’s shop.

  I hadn’t been there before, but I knew where it was. I’d heard all about it from Ronnie. His mate had a store selling technology, mostly high-end stuff. It sounded like the sort of stuff nerds and show-offs would buy, but they had a good spot in the city centre. Had its problems though. Bad economy made selling high-end stuff hard, and their shop wasn’t the swankiest place. A cramped little space with narrow aisles and poor lighting, but they were planning to change all that. Going to renovate the place with the money they got from Kevin Currie for a cut of the business. That was their hope, anyway. A young couple, living on hope. Owen and Trisha Turner. Tish, Ronnie had called her. I remembered that. Remember names; remember why the people behind them matter.

  Didn’t manage to get parked anywhere near the place, so it was a short walk up to the shop on the corner. It didn’t look like a young person’s shop from the outside, that was the problem. Needed paintwork and a sign, needed a better window display. Can’t remember what that shop was before they had it.

  Inside wasn’t a lot better. Too much stuff in too small an area. No room for people to wander round, browsing. That’s what I figured a place like that needed. Get people in to look and maybe they buy something. Or maybe they see something they want to save up for. Or maybe they see something they tell a friend about and the friend comes in to buy. Walking up the narrow aisle to the counter, tall and broad, I felt closed in. It needed change.

  There was a young woman standing behind the counter. Late twenties, dark curly hair, pretty enough. Had a hint of the hippy about her with a nose ring. Anyway, I assumed she was Tish.

  ‘I’m looking for Ronnie. He about?’

  She looked at me. She must have been a good judge of character because she didn’t like the look of me.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said with a wary nod and disappeared into a back room.

  She emerged after twenty seconds, Ronnie sticking his head out of the door after her.

  ‘Come through,’ he said. She said nothing, watching me walk round the back of the counter and through the door to the storeroom.

  This place was cramped as well. Boxes of everything stacked against three walls, including against the fire door. The only wall that wasn’t covered with boxes had a small sink and worktop with a microwave and a kettle on it. There was a table in the middle of the room, Ronnie taking his seat at it. Owen was already there, dark hair down to his shoulders, a beard that belonged to an older man.

  ‘Take a seat. Owen has something to show you,’ Ronnie said.

  I sat in between the two of them and looked at Owen. He had his mobile phone in his hand, twisting it back forth nervously. He looked at me like he wasn’t sure he was supposed to speak, then leapt into a sentence.

  ‘I got a video of them on my phone. Not much, cos you can’t see the ones that came in,’ he started, and I stopped him.

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ I told him. ‘Tell me everything. I want details.’

  The problem with people is that they always want to tell you what they think is interesting. They skip straight to the punchline, and you don’t get the detail. That’s where the Devil is, and we were looking for him.

  ‘Right, well, it happened this morning. I was in the shop, everything normal, quiet. Sold a tablet in the morning, so that was something. And then these two guys came in. They came up to the counter.’

  ‘Describe them.’

  ‘Right, yeah. They were both twenties, I guess late twenties. Casual, but well dressed. One of them, the one who did the talking, he was the smaller of the two. I figure he was, I guess, the more senior. Sometimes you can just tell, you know?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, nodding my head. He was nervous; he didn’t like the way his day was panning out.

  ‘So they both came up to the counter, and the smaller one . . . Well, he was smaller than the other guy, but the other guy wasn’t that big. I mean, not as big as you, for example. He asked if I was Owen Turner. Seemed casual, nice enough. I didn’t really think about how he knew my name. O
nly afterwards I realized that should have got me, you know, suspicious. When I asked him what I could do for him, he said that I could recognize that Kevin Currie no longer owns his share of the business. I played dumb, you know,’ he said, looking to me for a nod.

  ‘No one was supposed to know about Kevin owning a share,’ I said, nudging him along.

  ‘Exactly. He said I had to recognize that Adrian Barrett now owns that share of the shop. I had no idea; I never even heard of this Barrett guy before. Said that if I acknowledged that now things could work out very well for me. I just told him that Kevin Currie owned a share of the business, that it was a legit business and that he needed to speak to Kevin Currie about it. He laughed at me, told me that the Jamieson organization was dying and Adrian Barrett was the guy who was going to kill it. Said that Barrett was the coming power and I needed to think carefully about whose side I was on. I told him to leave.’

  I nodded. The guy didn’t like talking this much, not to me. I was familiar with that. People are waiting for me to lose my temper, for me to do something terribly scary. The more they say, the more chance of saying something that upsets me.

  ‘Did they have an accent?’

  ‘Local,’ he said quickly. ‘Definitely local.’

  ‘Tell him what happened next, Owen,’ Ronnie said quietly, doing his bit to push his friend over the finish line.

  ‘Yeah, right. Well, they went out, and for the first few seconds I was just glad to see them gone, you know. Then I thought, well, fuck them, who are they coming into my shop and saying all that. So I went out, stood in the doorway. I could see the car they were getting into; they had parked down the street. There was other people in the car too. It came up to the corner, and, you know how there’s traffic lights there? They had to stop for a few seconds, then pulled away. As they were coming up to the lights I got my phone out, videoed them.’