There was a boy Nate had taken under his wing. A good kid, smart and tough, should have been perfect for the job. Nate had seen himself as the mentor, had seen Ronnie Malone as his not so enthusiastic apprentice. It didn’t last. Ronnie was killed. Murdered by someone who was supposed to be working with them. It was dirty and pushed Nate out to the edge of his personality, further into himself and away from the rest of the world. He didn’t want to work with anyone else, but what he wanted and what the organization needed could be at odds. Only one winner in that battle.
Nate, big, tough imposing Nate, was the security consultant, or some such bullshit title, for the Jamieson organization. It had been a one-man job, back when Peter Jamieson and his right-hand man John Young were on the outside and handled the day-to-day. Now, with them in prison, it was bigger than that, although he had tried to conquer it by himself after Ronnie. Didn’t want anyone else he liked suffering for the job, but he couldn’t do it alone. Too much work, too much risk. It was his responsibility to protect the organization from outside attacks, hold down anyone who might become a threat. One man can’t guard the multiple faces of such a big organization.
Took some time to work out how to play it next. He needed a second pair of hands, but he wasn’t going to take on another kid. No more master and apprentice shite, no more teaching on the job. Someone experienced, someone who already had the T-shirt. He thought about poaching Mikey or Conn away from their employer, Billy Patterson, given that he too worked for Jamieson. Didn’t seem fair, they were needed where they were. There was also a trust issue there, lies had been told to Nate around the time of Ronnie’s death and Conn was one of the liars. You have to work with liars in the business, you either accept them or find another job, but Nate was still angry. Hadn’t yet reconciled himself to what had happened, and couldn’t trust himself to act properly around the liars. In the end, he kept coming back to the same tough, trustworthy old hand. Gully.
‘You’re looking well,’ Nate said to him when Gully arrived at the office above the gadget shop. A little place in Govan that Marty Jones owned. Marty was one of the senior men running the organization in Jamieson’s temporary absence.
‘You old charmer,’ Gully smiled. ‘Lying bastard, but a charmer.’ He walked across to the desk where Nate was sitting and sat in the chair opposite, leaning casually back.
He was a little shorter than Nate, at around six foot. Almost as broad, although softer in the muscles and a little wider in the gut. His sandy hair was as ruffled as it always was, but he was clean shaven and neatly dressed, which he hadn’t always been. There was a time . . . Man, there was a time when Gully Fitzgerald was a wreck of a man. Back when Sally died, hit by a car. Eight years old. After everything Gully and Lisa had gone through to have a child, and they lost her like that. Total accident, she ran out onto the street, between two parked cars. Driver didn’t see her, didn’t have a chance. Driver was devastated, but it wasn’t his fault. There was nobody to blame, nobody to lash out at, which probably made it worse. He’d been working for old Danny Knight at the time, acting as muscle, bodyguard and general fixer. Gully stopped working, hit the bottle. Nearly lost his wife because of that. But Gully had been off the drink for a while, and still out of the business at Lisa’s insistence.
‘You’re looking about the same as you ever did,’ Gully said now, a sort of compliment that was undoubtedly true.
Nate, at thirty-eight, was ten years the junior of the two. Where Gully had gone from youthful, bright blonde with twinkling dark eyes to sandy, lined and sad, Nate had just stayed the same. His dark hair had gone a little grey at the sides, but that made little difference. Made him more distinguished, if it did anything at all. Maybe some of the lines that seemed to have always been there had deepened, but he had aged very little in the last decade.
‘As bad as ever,’ Nate said with a smile. ‘You, uh, earning these days?’ He always spoke in a deep rumble, something he couldn’t control. Even when he tried to sound a little softer, his words growled their way out of his mouth.
Gully shrugged. ‘I’m not sucking pennies out of charity boxes yet.’
‘But you’re not working?’
Gully smiled a little. Every smile just seemed sad from him these days. Too much misery in the eyes. Too experienced and world-weary to be surprised by any joke or outburst. The smile was designed to tell Nate all of that, and nudge him gently along.
‘All right, I’ll get to the point,’ Nate said. ‘You know I’m running security for Jamieson these days. Making sure we put up the barricades in the right places.’
‘I heard, yeah. You’ll be busy then.’
‘I am. And I could use a second pair of hands. Someone who knows the business. Someone who can do some of the dirty work when I’m not able or when I need a trustworthy second.’
There was a few seconds where Gully just looked down at the floor like he hadn’t quite heard Nate. He wasn’t trying to be dramatic; he had never been one for artificially creating silence. Gully had always been a good talker, comfortable with the sound of his own voice, but he was thinking about something.
‘You know, I’ve only been to one funeral since Sally’s. Couldn’t face them. I just knew that I would see her in the coffin every time I went to one of the bloody things, and seeing her once was enough. Anyway, when the person that matters most dies, what do the rest of them matter, eh? No offence, Nate, but the world is now populated entirely by less important people. Anyway, one funeral. You met Alan Bavidge? You must have.’
‘I think so,’ Nate said. ‘Knew of him anyway.’ He of course knew of Bavidge, had seen him around and heard the stories even if he hadn’t worked with him. Heard the story of his brutal, messy death.
‘Aye. He was a good wee lad, was Alan. Not built naturally for it like you, but he had the talent to make up for it. Had the guts. Had the brain for it as well. That was the downfall, you see. The brains. Smart enough to understand how bad the things he was doing were. That’s where the darkness comes from. You’ve got it in you, the darkness, I’ve always seen it. It’s because you have to go home and look at your wee girl and know that the things you do would sicken her. I had it. Still do, I suppose. Alan had it in spades. I taught him to be as good at the job as possible, but it was never enough, not in this filthy business.’
He’d never spoken this way to Nate before, or anyone else in the industry. Never. He had been sad and reflective, but this was way beyond mere sadness. This was angry and righteous and tragic all rolled into one destructive package. This was hard to say, mostly because every word of it was true. When Gully mentioned Nate’s daughter, Rebecca, and what she would think of his work, it was an artful stab to the heart. Knowledge gained from bitter experience.
‘So when Alan died I figured I should go along to the funeral. I should see him dead as well, because I had helped put him there. If he had been worse at the job then he wouldn’t have lasted long enough in the industry to be killed by it. He’d have been knocked around and sent off to work somewhere decent instead. He was only important enough to be a target because he was good at it. He was my victim. I didn’t stab him, but whatever bastard did, only did it because of the things I taught Alan.’
‘Gully . . .’
‘Hear me out, Nate,’ he said, raising a hand. He hadn’t looked Nate in the eye once throughout this speech. ‘This business, it’s going to kill us. You know that, don’t you? Good men, they go off and play golf and get hit by lightning. Or they start travelling in their old age and have a heart attack in Thailand dodging ping-pong balls. That’s how the good and the nearly good go out. Us, the bad, we get involved in this business. We line ourselves up behind people like Peter Jamieson and wait for the consequences to come and rip us apart. You know it’ll kill you, don’t you?’
Nate nodded; a smart enough man to have worked this out already. The long, sleepless nights after Ronnie was murdered when all he did was think about the way this industry killed off its own. ‘Yeah, I figu
re it just might. Even if it doesn’t, it’ll ruin things just enough so that it might as well have.’
Gully nodded. That was as much as he needed to hear. He had to know that Nate understood, that he wasn’t kidding himself about the work they would do and the life they would have. It had been a while since they worked together, back when Nate had seemed to believe that he could survive this. The young ones always believe they’re strong enough to get through the industry unscathed. Gully would never work with a person like that again. No more naivety. No more kidding yourself. The only people capable of doing a good job in this shitty business are the ones who know a perfect job doesn’t exist.
‘I’ll work with you, Nate,’ Gully said, with a bit of a shrug that looked dismissive. ‘I could do with the money. But I won’t work much; just help you out when I can. No seven-day weeks. No all-nighters. Nothing I can’t explain away to Lisa.’
Nate looked up at that. He knew Lisa hated the business, knew she would hate Gully getting involved. She’d never liked what he did, but after Sally’s death it became something more ferocious. Nate hadn’t thought Gully would even tell her that he was working.
‘I’m going to tell her something,’ Gully said. ‘No more lying to her. Well, no more big lies, anyway. I’ll downplay what I’m doing, stop her getting afraid, but I’m telling her something.’
Nate nodded. ‘We’ll make it – I don’t know – part-time, I suppose. You can work when it suits, with the occasional call-out when I need proper backup.’
Gully nodded. That was what he was looking for, part-time work and part-time money. Been a long time since he dreamed of getting rich, or thought getting rich would make him happy. ‘The boy, the one who was killed. You want to tell me what happened there?’
Nate sighed heavily, looked around the empty office for words that would help a usually expressionless man explain how he felt about it. ‘He was already working for Kevin Currie, working out of the St John. Daft stuff, setting people up with rooms off the books, that sort of rubbish. He was smart and tough so I took him on. Pushed him into it. He was good, reluctant at first but becoming enthusiastic. We got crossed on a big job. Russell Conrad. You ever meet him?’
Gully shook his head uncertainly. ‘He’s a gunman?’
‘Was. Anyway, he killed Ronnie, the boy. That’s why I’ve been working alone, why I need someone to come in and help.’
Gully smiled a little. ‘Someone expendable. Someone else who can be a magnet for the bullets they’re firing at you. Aye, I get it, I get it.’
Nate smiled. ‘Aye, poor wee you. You’re so weak and vulnerable. So easily exploited.’
Everything seemed hollow now. Every day was an empty space from morning to night, the gaps in her life where Sally had been. Lisa tried, pushed hard to make it feel like a life worth living, but the gap would not be filled. So it became an act, the sad woman who was coping as well as could be expected. An act that convinced most people, but not her husband.
It was a battle to rationalize what had happened to their daughter. Years of trying, then years of joy after they’d had her. Now the rest of their lives to suffer the loss. There had to be a reason, an explanation. Lisa wouldn’t come right out and say it, but she considered the industry to be responsible for every bad thing that had happened to them. Like losing Sally was some punishment from God for what Gully had done with his life. Gully didn’t believe it. If anyone was going to be punished for what he had done it would be himself. He believed Sally had died because the world was a naturally cruel and unpleasant place. That’s what he told Lisa, and what she struggled to accept.
They didn’t talk as much as they had. Existed in the same house, two people tied together by their shared horror. When Gully made the effort to talk, it usually led to an argument. He came in that day and sat down across the table from her. Looked at her with a slightly sheepish expression that usually meant he’d done something stupid. She’d seen that look a few times during the drunken years.
‘I met Nate Colgan today,’ he said to her. ‘You remember Nate? Big lad, used to do some jobs with me when I was working for Danny.’
‘I remember the name.’
‘Aye, well, Nate’s flown up to new heights in the world these days, senior man for Peter Jamieson. He’s looking for reliable help for low-level work, part-time. I said I would think about it, talk to you about it.’
Lisa sat stiffly, trying not to show her sense of disgust. ‘What’s there to talk about? Do you want to do it?’
Gully shrugged. It was obvious that he didn’t know how to speak to her any more, scared that anything he said would upset her. He seemed like a man terrified that he was one poorly chosen sentence away from pushing her over the edge.
‘We could do with the money,’ he said. ‘It would only be easy work, a few hours a week.’
‘You want to do it. You may as well.’ She could see that he was going to do the work anyway. He might not have any enthusiasm for it, but it was a choice between work and spending more time at home. She didn’t blame him for choosing work.
It was something else to put between them. Another screen that she could hide any hope of a return to normality behind. Normality would have been an insult to what they had lost. Him working in that industry again was another thing to hate. Another step towards the end.
Nate had what he wanted, but when was that ever enough? He had a man he respected and trusted to work alongside in Gully, but they would be working a job Nate didn’t much like. Working for people he struggled to trust, the lingering hatred from Ronnie’s death refusing to clear. It was never going to be any different. The industry was run by people only a fool would trust. Nate was no fool. Hate them, never trust them. Do their dirty work and take their money but never get attached. Always there, nagging at the back of his mind, the memory of Ronnie Malone. A good kid, killed because of the job Nate forced him into. Now he was working with a friend, another person he cared about. Putting that friend in danger. So no, he wasn’t happy.
There was an empty house waiting for him, something even Gully could better. Nate had a daughter, Rebecca, but she lived with her mother’s parents, an arrangement that generally kept her away from the violence of Nate’s life. He had her most weekends, and that brought him some joy and plenty of extra worry. There was a woman he was in danger of getting close to, despite himself. Her name was Kelly Newbury, and no matter how hard he tried to keep his distance from her, he couldn’t quite get her out of his mind. He wanted someone else around, despite the risks.
He wanted something physical, but he needed something more, too. A beautiful younger woman, smart and aware of his work, Kelly worked in the business too. She knew what Nate did, knew the life he lived because of that work. She was, in many ways, the perfect woman for him. He wouldn’t have to hide his true self. Still couldn’t bring himself to call her. He felt too old and too dangerous. He was a man in a bubble; the only person he allowed close enough to share it was Rebecca. Doing work he didn’t like for people he didn’t trust. Keeping the woman he liked at arm’s length because of it. He cursed his stupidity.
4
He didn’t tell Joanne anything. She didn’t ask, to be fair, so it’s not like he lied to her. A lie of omission, if you insist on calling it a lie at all. If she had asked what he was working on, Martin would have told her, would have explained it to her in as much detail as she wanted. Part of him wanted her to ask, he wanted it to be that sort of relationship. Perhaps if they’d already established it as that sort of relationship, she would have asked, but it felt too early for total honesty. Lying about work was also an instinct he had never learned to crush.
See, for many years, back home, he worked just as hard keeping the job a secret as he did doing the work itself. He tried to hide it from family, but that became too hard so he lost touch with family. He tried to keep it from friends, but when that got too complicated he changed his friends. Only hung around with other people in the business, the kind of people
who wouldn’t care and wouldn’t talk. They weren’t always the kind of people he wanted as friends. Flashy and aggressive, industry people who defined themselves by the damage they did. And girlfriends. There were a few. Started out being girls he liked from outside the business, ended up being girls he didn’t from inside. The business sent you on a downward spiral, even in your private life.
Now he had Joanne. A smart woman, outside the industry, and he wasn’t going to lie to her. If she put her size-four down and said no way Josef, he would have backed out. Would have walked away from the life at her instruction. He had told himself again and again, he would back out, all she had to do was tell him. But she didn’t.
She could see the expectation on his face. He had told her he was going to be working that day, and hadn’t added anything else.
‘Oh, right,’ was all Joanne had said.
She knew it disappointed him, her not asking for more. He wanted to have to explain. Wanted her to want to know. Joanne understood the nature of Martin’s work and she didn’t feel like she had to know more than that. She was happy in ignorance, and she hadn’t been happy for a long time. She had earned the right to decide how honest they were.
For Those Who Know the Ending Page 4