by Clive Barry
When Paul had finished talking, Sally removed the packages and money from the shoulder bag, placing them all on the kitchen table saying to her brothers.
‘Do yeh think maybe this has summit to do with it?’
‘What the fuck! where the hell did this lot come from?’
Mike had stood up and taken a quick step back away from the table as though the contents of Sally’s bag were about to explode at any time very soon.
Sally explained she’d gone through Charlies clothes with the intention of getting rid of some of them when she came upon this cache in the bottom of the bedroom cupboard.
Both lads just stared at the piles of money and drugs on the table, looking from Sally to each other.
‘Now what the fuck do we do?’ Mike asked to no one in particular, ‘this is really startin’ to get a bit fuckin’ daft man.’
‘Right let’s ‘ave a think,’ said Paul, ‘it’s pretty obvious that Charlie and Oggy had some sort of deal goin’ on, but we don’t know what that deal was. I think it’s fair to assume that Oggy is lookin’ for his stuff, but why Charlie would ‘ave it, I don’t fuckin’ know. As far as Oggy’s concerned, Charlie still has the goodies, but he don’t know where Charlie is at the moment does he? Maybe he thinks Charlie’s done a runner wi’ it all. At least that’s what I woulda bin thinkin’.’
While Paul was talking, Mike had opened one of the re-sealable plastic pouches, wet the tip of his little finger and dipped it into the white powder. He then rubbed the powder onto his top gum, with immediate results.
‘I think this is pretty pure coke,’ he said, ‘I feel like I’ve just had a shot of Novocain at the dentist, except I feel a lot happier about it.’
Mike’s brother and sister looked at him as much as to say, ‘are yeh daft, why would you do that?’
‘Oggy’s not gonna go away, is he?’ Said Sally, ‘he’s gonna keep comin’ back ‘ere lookin’ for Charlie ‘cos there’s nowhere else for him to look is there?’
Paul shrugged, that seemed like a fair assumption, so he said.
‘All you have to say is that Charlie hasn’t come home and you don’t know where he’s gone, or for how long. Sal you can even say you’re worried sick about him ‘cos he never stays away. No one can prove anything different. Maybe we need to get rid of some of his clothes and make it look as though he’s gone off somewhere.’
‘That’s what I was doing earlier when that Oggy knocked on me door,’ said Sally, ‘I still have Charlie’s mobile, there’s loads of messages and missed calls on it, I guess some of them must be from that Oggy. We should check the messages and voice mail though, shouldn’t we?’
So, for the next thirty minutes that’s what they did, they checked Charlie’s messages. There were a lot of missed calls, numerous voice mails and several texts, the three of them sat and went through them all one by one, omitting the inconsequential ones and recording the telephone numbers of the ones they believed may be of some importance.
All the important ones seemed to be from Oggy with voice mail messages ranging from.
‘Call me soon you can mate,’ to ‘where da fuck are yeh, yeh fat twat?’
It seemed that Oggy was quite desperate to get in touch with Charlie, for whatever the reason might have been.
It was starting to get late now and there was nothing more to be done this night. Both brothers had now been on the go for over forty hours, so they all decided that it might be safer if the lads took the money, drugs and some of the clothes that Charlie would wear on a day to day basis.
Sally put the money and cocaine back into the shoulder bag and together with some of Charlie’s clothes, put everything in a large Tesco shopping bag for Mike to carry. She gave the lads a kiss on the cheek, said, ‘night, night,’ and watched from the front door as they both got into the Mondeo and drove away.
Before they left, they’d made arrangements to be back the next morning bright and early to discuss plan ‘B’ whatever that was going to be.
Oggy was cold and hungry, he’d been stood outside Charlie’s house for the best part of the afternoon and evening and he’d seen from a distance the dark blue Mondeo pull up outside the house and two big lads get out.
Both of them were fair sized, the bigger one had a full beard and a short cropped head of dark hair. He also looked as though he worked out a lot based on the size of his chest and arms under the sweat shirt. The smaller one had no facial hair and the hair on the sides of his head was cut very short, the top slightly longer and combed back. He was also quite muscular, although he was a bit leaner and looked faster than the big lad, he also looked as though he worked out, or at least had a very physical job.
Who were they? Had Charlie already made a deal with them using his stash, or were they just visitors? Up until now there was still no sign of Charlie and it was getting late, he still hadn’t called him and Oggy didn’t dare go back to his own place for fear of unwanted visitors. He was also not answering some of his latest calls, he needed Charlie, like it was yesterday.
There was no alternative, he walked the short distance back to the front door and knocked, it was answered soon after by Charlies wife who only opened it by a small crack.
‘What do yeh want at this time of night?’ She asked, ‘if it’s Charlie you’re after, then he still hasn’t come home yet and I don’t know where he is, or when he’s gonna be back. I just told me brothers about yeh lookin’ for ‘im an’ they won’t be too pleased when I tell them yeh was round ‘ere so late knockin’ on me front door again.’
At least Oggy knew who the two lads were now, but that didn’t really help.
‘Misses, I really needs to find him, is all.’
Funnily enough, he was starting to believe the very pretty young woman that was stood in the doorway. Even his instincts were telling him she could be telling the truth and that was even more worrying than when he thought Charlie might be hiding upstairs under the bed, trying to avoid him.
Then a thought struck him, what if the Albanians already had Charlie and that’s why they were trying to call him. Maybe this was why Charlie seemed to have disappeared and nobody had any idea as to his whereabouts. But how would they even know about Charlie for that matter. Ya but, the Albanians were always one step ahead of everyone else, that’s why they ran everything.
‘Okay missus, you gets Charlie he must calls me, okay?’
With that Oggy turned and this time he headed into the town, where he kept a small one bedroom flat at the back of the railway station.
CHAPTER NINE
Donika Demaci was Albanian. He was a wiry, lean man of around five foot ten inches tall, with short black hair and a very neatly trimmed goatee beard. Not a huge man physically, but immense as far as his power and control were concerned.
He was the boss of the criminal underworld based around the Seaborough city limits. Demaci was a ruthless street lord and ruled by simple violence and terror, there was not one kind bone in his body.
There was however, little that perturbed Demaci and that included being on the wrong side of the law. He had no scruples and would have sold his mother, granny, sister or any other female member of his family to a Bedouin goat herder if he believed the price was right. In fact, he would sell all of them together, if he thought he could get a decent payback on a package deal.
He had no respect for women, he didn’t hate or dislike them, on the contrary there was one or two that he was quite fond of, but they were there to be used and for a profit. Not by him of course, perish the thought, Donika Demaci loved boy’s and the younger and prettier they were, the better.
The police, both locally and at a national level had tried unsuccessfully to apprehend Mr Demaci on various occasions in the past, but he was far too cunning to allow that to happen.
His underlings might be apprehended in the course of their everyday activities and some of those that had, ended up serving time in Her Majesties prisons as a result, but it was never going to be Demaci, he’d neve
r been found anywhere near the scene of a crime yet.
Today Donika Demaci was slightly perturbed however. He generally knew what was going on, but today he didn’t seem to understand where Oggy was. It wasn’t like young pretty Oggy to ignore his mobile phone when summoned.
After waiting through the morning, a couple of the lads had been sent to Oggy’s flat, but apparently after they’d knocked and got no reply, they knocked very hard and the door became open and so they walked on in as if invited. They couldn’t find Oggy anywhere, nor any of the merchandise that was owed to Mr Demaci.
Even after they turned the chairs and television upside down in the living room, the bed in the single bedroom was also turned over to look underneath and the kitchen cupboard doors seemed to have fallen off when they swung on them, with all the crockery tumbling out onto the floor.
They didn’t find any of the things that they’d come for and so they left, thinking that Oggy was one seriously untidy housekeeping Turkish individual.
This was all reported back to Mr Demaci who was starting to think that maybe he was being double crossed somewhere or even heaven forbid, disrespected. It wasn’t so much the value of the items, although that was a fair amount, maybe a pittance to the likes of Demaci. It was more the principal.
He could ill afford to let anyone be seen to get the better of him, this would be an effrontery and a mark against his good name, it needed to be rectified immediately. They must find Oggy and quickly. There were other bigger fish waiting for his total concentration and this hiccough with Oggy was just something that was getting in the way.
Donika Demaci had just received the telephone call he’d been waiting for from the ships agent in the harbour area, notifying him that the vessel Rangoon Princess had finally arrived at the anchorage area and tendered her Notice of Readiness. The vessel had then been instructed to proceed directly to the first of the marker buoys at the entry channel, where the duty Pilot would board by launch on the port side and under pilotage, would manoeuvre the vessel to the Seaborough City Container Terminal, berth number two for the unloading and then backloading of three thousand containers of varying sizes and differing cargoes.
The vessel Rangoon Princess was a Panamax, fifth generation container vessel. Built at the Hankim Heavy Industries shipyard in Busan, South Korea in 2002 and had a maximum capacity to carry a total of 8,000 units.
The heroin being smuggled in, was coming from the port of Karachi and had been loaded on board the vessel at the Pakistan International Container Terminal.
The heroin had been packed inside a total of twenty bags of Portland cement which would be part of a larger consignment of one hundred tons of cheap dry cement powder being delivered by five, twenty foot containers to local construction sites within this part of the UK. Demaci had made contact via a network of international criminal type investors and brokers, devising what he considered to be a foolproof plan.
CHAPTER TEN
Oggy was knackered, he hadn’t slept for days with worry, he hadn’t eaten for hours, he’d been walking and waiting for what seemed like an eternity and he was no closer to finding Charlie than he had been the day before.
Charlie was definitely not at home, he felt sure of that now, so where had the fat bastard gone? And what for?
Oggy got his keys out of his pocket as he was approaching his front door on the ground level. The actual flat being up a narrow flight of stairs on the first floor. However, as he neared the door, he could see it was not closed properly and this concerned him.
He stepped closer and listened, there wasn’t a sound coming from the inside. He looked around and couldn’t notice anything untoward. Slowly he pushed the door open and stepped inside. Nothing, so he ventured up the stairs as cautiously and quietly as he possibly could.
When he reached the top and saw the immediate obliteration of his small flat, his first reaction was burglars. But he knew that all the bad lads in the area knew who he was and what his relationship was with Mr Demaci and based on that alone, he believed they wouldn’t dare. Therefore he had to assume that it must be the second and much worse option, Mr Demaci was looking for him. Oh shit!
Oggy’s choices of what he could do were starting to look abysmal. He could call Mr Demaci and explain why he didn’t have the goods, which would probably result in some form of punishment, with hospitalization at the very least. He could run, but he didn’t know where to run to, or he could find Charlie which he’d been trying to do and it was becoming more difficult by the hour.
All he wanted to do was sleep, wake up the next morning to find a happy smiling Charlie standing there in front of him with the shoulder bag, having cleaned and tidied his flat, made him a nice Turk kahvesi and a full menemen breakfast. Not too much to ask, is it? Not a cat in hells chance mate.
It had all started the night of the big football game, when all the lads had gone to the Ship and Anchor. Oggy wasn’t too bothered about watching the game, he had a meeting with some out of town dealer who’d got in touch through Mr Demaci.
Oggy believed that this little venture might turn out to be quite lucrative, however he was very wrong and when the dealer walked into the pub with a couple of extremely large and very heavy associates that Oggy immediately recognised as being a particular dealer who had travelled up from London, and was wanting to step outside around the back to discuss business, then Oggy got what might be considered a senses overload. This just might turn out to be a rather huge mistake.
Especially considering what Oggy had already taken off him when he’d left London and further, considering what and who’s goods Oggy had in the shoulder bag.
The match had long ago finished and Charlie was heading out to buy a six pack, then going home to sort his missus out, when Oggy turned to him and whispered urgently.
‘Charlie, I needs favour now.’
Charlie thought he’d finally made it into the big boy’s camp and was only too keen to help.
‘Course Oggy, owt for a fuckin’ mate, watcha fuckin’ need?’
‘Takes this to your home. Keeps it safe and brings it back ‘ere tomorrow night, I see you is alright after, okay?’
Oggy handed Charlie the small canvas bag with the shoulder strap, which Charlie promptly placed over his head, putting his left arm through, then gave Oggy a very limp salute.
‘No fuckin’ probs mate, see yeh tomorra.’ He then staggered to the door and left.
Oggy on the other hand, made his way through the melee of football supporters into the back room and legged it out the back door into the yard and over the wall.
Oggy desperately wanted to sleep, but did he dare put his head down in his own flat or should he go off somewhere else out of the area. All his known associates were also known to Mr Demaci, so it would only take a phone call from any one of them to gain favour and for Mr Demaci to be advised of Oggy’s whereabouts, in which case he was well screwed.
He may as well turn his bed the right way up and sleep on it and if the worst scenario took place then that’s where he’d shuffle off this mortal coil, he could always beg. Begging sometimes worked.
Mr Demaci was not happy and if he was not happy he was going to make very certain that others were not happy. He was speaking to Bashkim Hamiti, his right hand man.
‘So, you searched the flat and found nothing, right?’
‘Yes Mr. Demaci, we searched it, but no, we found nothing. There was no sign of Oggy or any of the goods that you sent us to look for.’
Bashkim was also Albanian, a very precise and intelligent man. He’d once been a Kapter, or Staff Sergeant in the Albanian infantry, but the rank was well below that of his capabilities and intelligence and after leaving, he’d found there was only a limited calling for the skills with which he had been accredited to in the military.
That was until Mr Demaci took him under his wing and made him his own private lieutenant.
Bashkim was the most average looking man you would ever imagine and because of that, most people
underestimated his skills and his gentle powers of persuasion. He was in fact deadly and as such, ideally suited to Mr Donika Demaci’s special requirements.
He’d been married at one time, however whilst he was still serving, his now ex wife had taken their only daughter and fled back to her parent’s home crying that Bashkim was mentally cruel, totally unfeeling and insensitive towards her and the child. Bashkim shrugged his shoulders, told her she was probably right, then wishing her good luck, he turned and walked out.
It was late evening and they were talking in the small study office of Donika Demaci’ apartment in the Tower Flats, overlooking the busy river Tonnet in the centre of the city. Demaci was wearing his black, Japanese silk Kimono.
‘Okay, before we are finished tonight, I want you to go back and see if he has returned. If he has, then take him to the lock up under the bridge and make sure he is made as uncomfortable for the night as you can and we will talk with him in the morning. If he is not there, then go home to bed and we will discuss what we will do in the morning, okay? All is understood?’
Demaci was still calm. Until now he hadn’t lost his temper, but he was starting to. He had the strongest feeling that someone somewhere was disrespecting him. Bashkim Hamiti nodded agreement as Demaci walked him to the front door, quietly locking it behind him.
Demaci then turned to face Simon. The young male model who was lounging on the black leather corner suite with a glass of chilled Moet and Chandon in his very soft looking, expensively manicured hands. The escort agency had sent him for Mr Demaci to assess and approve, it would therefore be Demaci’s decision as to whether or not this tall, slim, dark haired and very pretty young man would be working full time for the agency or should we say, it really depended on Simon’s powers of persuasion as to whether or not he got the job.