Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  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.

  27

  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.

  It wasn’t a perfect plan, and letting Barrett and his people keep on breathing afterwards was something that Jamieson apparently recoiled from, but it was shaping up to be the best plan available. If we’d hit Barrett and his people as well as Lafferty then it would have become impossible for us to cover the job up. Keep it small, keep it simple. Letting the police deal with Barrett gave them something to play with while we went after Lafferty.

  I wasn’t in a great mood leaving his office. Kevin Currie wasn’t really cut out for leadership. He could lead his own part of the business, the counterfeiting operation. He knew it inside out, he was good at it and he’d worked out how to do it without getting himself caught or killed. What he was doing at that point, stepping up to help fill the gap that Jamieson’s imprisonment had created, put a pressure on him that he’d never experienced before. Something I wasn’t convinced Kevin Currie had been built to withstand. He didn’t have the stomach for it that Jamieson did. That man could make decisions that ended the life of another person without batting a stress-free eyelid. Jamieson was as good a leader as I had seen, and that was the standard Kevin was to be judged by.

  It was obvious from the way he looked at me, talked to me, that he still wasn’t comfortable having me around. I was Jamieson’s hire, not his. Kevin had worked with dangerous people before, and he had ordered them to do dangerous things, but they were his dangerous people. When his only responsibility was the counterfeiting business, everyone he worked with was a person he had hired. He scouted them, made sure they were the right person for the job, someone that he could be comfortable working with. Now he was working with people that others had hired. People who did things he would never normally ask a person to do. People he could never feel comfortable with. People like me.

  One of the people he’d scouted and hired was Kelly. She was there. Coming into the warehouse as I was walking to my car. I couldn’t ignore her, couldn’t be that much of a bastard. She smiled at me and came over.

  ‘Good to see you, Nate,’ she said. ‘How you been?’

  It had only been a few days since she was at my house. ‘Good, yeah. Busy.’ Hardly the most polite way of talking to the girl.

  ‘Right, well, I won’t keep you,’ she said. Kelly did an excellent line in hurt feelings, looking away like she was trying to hide it. A pretty girl, pouting like that, I bet it had an effect.

  Problem for Kelly was, every time I looked at her I saw two things. The first was the dead body of Tom Childs. He had been her man, and I had stuffed his corpse into a suitcase in a grotty room of the St John Hotel and taken it for disposal. The second thing I saw was Zara. The last woman I had pulled close to me. I was still trying to shake her off.

  ‘Maybe next week, when things have slowed down, I’ll give you a call,’ I said. Surprised myself, saying it. Hadn’t intended to. It wasn’t because she was pouting; I’m not that easily won over. It was the picture in my head of Nate Colgan, the fat old man decades hence, sitting on his own in that dingy house of mine. Alone. Always alone.

  ‘I’d like that,’ she said, and headed into the warehouse.

  She’d like it. Someone happy at the prospect of me giving them a call. I heard that rarely enough that I was actually feeling positive when I went to the car. The next person I met could easily change all that.

  28

  I’d known where he lived for years. Not with any intention of doing something with the information, let me say. Knowing DI Michael Fisher’s address didn’t mean anything. It was a little piece of information that was interesting but unusable. There’s almost no circumstance in which you could use it. Almost none. You can’t go round and harm him. He’s a cop. Maybe, if a cop is dangerous enough to you and corrupt enough that he won’t report you, you can try a little intimidation. But that’s still a maybe. A last resort. A normal cop, in normal circumstances, is off the table.

  It’s not a respect for the law, although you probably already guessed that. It’s a fear of what the law will do when they think you’re targeting them. You can commit crimes, and of course the police will come after you. That’s them doing their jobs. You target a cop and that’s personal. No organization wants to get into a personal fight with the police. Only the desperate, the stupid and the detached from reality ever do.

  So I knew where he lived. Had never done anything with the information until now. I was sitting in my car, across the road from his house, watching. There were no lights on. I had no idea what hours he was working. It took a while of sitting there, I don’t know how long, before his red Renault pulled up in the little driveway in front of the house. He got out and went in without looking around. Interesting. Something I’d always wondered about cops. Did they take the same sort of precautions people like me did? I never once went into my house without first taking a look up and down the street. Always playing safe. Don’t need to play at it when you’re a cop.

  A light went on upstairs. He lived alone, Fisher. He had been married before, a long time ago I think, but it hadn’t produced any kids. I never heard any rumours about him having girlfriends. People in the industry know Fisher, watch him. Watch him like a fucking hawk since he put Jamieson and the rest away. A man once respected but underestimated, now feared.

  I don’t know why I sat there and watched. I could have gone up to the door and knocked, gotten the conversation out of the way. It wasn’t a fear of what I had to say, or a fear of him refusing the offer I was going to put on the table. There’s an instinct you get. Takes a lot of time, a lot of work, before you have it. Ronnie, at that point, wouldn’t have had it. I have no doubt he’d have marched straight up to the door and tried to finish this as fast as possible. My instinct was telling me to give him some time. Let him get settled in the house before you disturb him. Don’t let him know that you’ve been outside watching, which he will if you knock as soon as he goes in. That’ll unnerve him; make him wonder if he can trust you.

  My watch told me it was after midnight as I walked up the front path. That would spook him. I was guessing he didn’t get a whole lot of visitors, and none at all at this hour. There was a risk in me being here. Same risk that I criticized
him for taking when he turned up on my doorstep. Someone sees us and they make assumptions. They think that I’m giving the police information. I was, and I didn’t want the world jumping to that entirely accurate conclusion.

  I knocked on the door and waited. Took about thirty seconds for him to open up. Stood there looking at me, not saying anything. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with no shoes and his hair had the damp look of a man who’d just had a quick shower. He was dressed so casually and it didn’t suit Fisher at all. It’s hard to make a strong impression on someone when you’re barefoot and your sagging arms are showing. He always needed to dress the part, too worn down to intimidate otherwise.

  I looked at him for a few seconds, the two of us standing there silently. There was nothing we had to say to each other that was ever going to be said out on the doorstep. He nodded for me to come in, held the door open and let me pass. I could try and describe his house to you, but I can’t honestly say that I remember much about it. It seemed plain and functional, nothing that even approached a personal touch to it. It was a house with a bed and a shower and a kitchen and maybe that was all he needed it to be. My house would have been the same if it wasn’t for the effort I made to make it appealing to Becky. My abiding sense of Fisher’s house was that it was a lonely place.

  Once he was standing in the living room in front of me, I started to talk.

  ‘I’ve come to deliver on our deal,’ I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows, started to look like he was pleased with what he’d heard. Then the disgust ran right over the top of it. He was getting what he wanted but he was getting it from me. A deal with the devil, was how he saw it. His righteous horror was plastered across his face.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said.