“I know dad, I know, I fucked up. But look, he’s a wanker dad, he’s always dissin’ me in front of the guys. He was at it the minute I arrived, makin’ snidy comments about whit I was wearin ‘n that, and ye canny let them get away with shite like that…” he trailed off as he noticed his father’s face.
“Sometimes I worry about you, ye know that? Are ye tellin’ me now that you pulled a gun on him ‘cos he called ye names? Next you’ll be sayin’ that he stole yer lunch money or pulled yer pigtails. We’re talkin’ about a business deal here son, no’ a game of ma knob’s bigger than yours ‘cos ma dad’s the hardest man in the toon.”
The father kept his forceful gaze on his son until DJ lowered his eyes and looked at the table in front of him. Big Davie had heard enough anyway. The guard, as well as his superiors, had been well bribed but there was no point in taking any chances.
No matter how much he paid them he knew they wouldn’t keep their mouths shut, and the less folk knew about the details of why DJ was mixed up in all this the better. He particularly didn’t want Kats’ name slipping out in the conversation and giving the police a lead they could use.
Besides, he knew most of the back story by now and DJ had only coloured in some of the other bits for him. Squeak had called him from the service station so he’d had an early heads up that something was getting out of control. Squeak had bleated down the phone that he’d almost been run over by DJ and that Kats had done a runner with the stuff.
Big Davie immediately called DJ’s mobile and just got through when he heard the sounds of a crash, confusion and screams and then an ominous silence. Ice had gripped his heart. If DJ was dead or injured someone would pay and pay dearly… well, at least he didn’t need to waste time and energy thinking about that. The thing to do now was to minimise the damage.
Together with his lawyer they’d concocted a story that the lorry had almost run into the car in the service station car park and the driver when accosted about his poor driving skills had assaulted one of them, so they gave chase, a chase which got a little out of hand. One of the posse was already primed to take the fall for using the gun in return for being well looked after when he got out.
The key thing was that there was no provable link between them and the lorry driver as far as anyone was concerned, even though the police were pushing that angle. It was just an unfortunate sequence of events, your Honour, and would never have happened if the lorry driver hadn’t taken off at high speed after the assault in the car park.
That meant there was a better than even chance that if DJ kept his nose clean he would be charged on a minor offence and get a short sentence, perhaps even a non-custodial. It had cost him plenty, but DJ, for all his faults, was his only son.
Sometimes family is all you have.
“Okay. Sit tight. Keep yer nose clean in here and wait till the lawyer sorts this out. A couple of guys I know will look out for you but don’t forget there are plenty in here who’d like to do me harm and if they can, they’ll do it by harmin’ you. Keep yer heid doon and say nothin’ to nobody.”
With that he stood up, nodded to the screw and left the meeting room. Boots was waiting for him by the outer door.
“Fuckin’ eejit,” he fumed as they made their way to the main exit and out through security into the car park.
“Boss, ye should have waited and done it yerself or asked me tae do it. Kats was never gonnae take anything from DJ.”
Big Davie stopped dead in his tracks forcing Boots to stop also.
“Did I ask for your fuckin’ opinion Boots? Naw? Well shut the fuck up then.”
Boots made to say something else and thought better of it. They started walking again.
“Look Boots, you brought him intae the firm, you said that he knew folk out there, you said he was reliable. As far as I’m concerned this is your problem pal.”
“My problem? I know he came in under my recommendation and that but I canny see how this suddenly becomes my problem boss. I know Kats too well, you know that, there’s a way of talking tae him and a way of startin’ a fight with him. He will know folk out there awright, just like all of them know folk out there, but I told you as well that Kats never touched the stuff so he was never gonnae be interested in dealin’ it didn’t I? I know that DJ is yer boy and that boss, but he wasn’t the man for that job and ye know it.”
Big Davie knew it, but he still wasn’t about to let Boots off the hook.
“Listen, I don’t need any parenting lessons from you son. You’re forgettin’ whit’s at stake here Boots. Ye know fine that we’re getting’ shafted by the Geary’s. They control our whole supply and I want them out of ma face. The whole point of us gettin’ yer mate Kats in was tae get a direct supplier, tae cut thae grabbin’ bastards out, remember? Now he’s turned intae a fuckin’ liability. I want you out there lookin’ for him Boots. He’s over-stepped the mark by a long way. This is personal now. We’ve got four of our guys banged up over this and it’s gonnae cost me plenty tae fix it so someone has tae pay, unless of course you want tae pick up his tab yerself since yer so pally wi him?”
“Naw boss.”
“Right, so that’s that settled. It’s on your heid Boots. You brung him intae the business, he’s your pal, you go and find him now. But bring him tae me in one piece.”
“Right boss. He’s no’ gonnae want to come without a fight.”
“So whit? I’m no’ interested if he wins a beauty contest when ye bring him, just so long as he’s breathin’.”
“Quality boss. I’ve got Squeak and some of the others on it the now. We’ll get him nae bother.”
Big Davie wasn’t so sure it would be so easy though. Kats wasn’t the run of the mill ex-army knob-end that drifted in and out of his firm from time to time. Kats would take a bit of catching. And he also knew that even though Kats was a good earner, DJ was right about one thing: he needed putting in his place, just like everyone needed putting in their place from time to time.
With some guys, ‘putting them in their place’ involved a bit of direct violence, with others it involved a threat of violence to their family or whatever they loved in life; with guys like Kats it had to be more subtle. The harder guys like Kats were pushed, the more they pushed back until things got out of control and real blood was spilled.
He had seen gang bosses toppled in the past simply because they’d picked a fight with the wrong guy when it could all have been resolved with a bit of guile. After all, hadn’t that been how he’d gotten his position as top dog?
He remembered well the night he’d done for Tam Delaney. Tam had tried to put Davie in his place; he’d sent three of his guys to slap him about over a disagreement caused by a drug deal that hadn’t gone Tam’s way and Davie had taken a beating alright, but Davie wasn’t the kind of guy to just let it go at that so he had lain in wait for Tam as he came back from the pub a few nights later.
As Tam turned into his street half-pissed, Davie started up the stolen car and, right in front of Tam’s front door, Davie had smacked into him at a purposeful forty, mashing him against the garden wall. Tam hadn’t died, but he’d be shitting into a bag for the rest of his life and he was finished as a boss.
Davie had taken over the territory that very night. His first act was to personally give one of the neds that had beaten him up one almighty doing, using a blade on his face, both creatively and slowly. A teenage Boots, who saw it all, never forgot the smile on Davie’s face as he worked the other kid over, and as Davie knew he would, he told everyone the gruesome details.
Boots was a right violent bastard himself and Davie knew that if he was telling everyone who would listen that Davie was not a man to be fucked with then his coronation as a replacement for Tam was assured.
He never tracked down the other two who had knocked him about and heard later they’d been so frightened they’d stolen a car and headed down the M74 that night. He’d also added the prefix “Big” to his previously pedestrian Davie. He felt he’d ear
ned it with that night’s work.
Given his own very direct experience he wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Kats that Tam Delaney had made with him. Some ex-military guys were just plain nutters: brainless and stupid and only good for muscle. But not Kats. He was smart. Not what you would call academic, but he had a natural savvy and nous that Big Davie recognised. Yes, his type needed careful handling.
Hadn’t he read somewhere; keep your friends close and your enemies even closer? That had made a whole lot of sense to Big Davie. So Boots could go and pick him up when they found him, if they found him, but either way he knew Kats would resurface soon enough. His type never run from a fight.
“Ye got any ideas where he is?”
“No’ yet boss. We’ve turned his flat over but there wis nuthin’ in it. I paid a wee visit tae his sister and smacked that useless shite of a man of hers about but they didnae know anythin’. Whit about his auld granny?”
“Whit about her?”
“D’ye want me tae pay her a visit?”
“No’ yet, and no’ from you, you’re a wee bit too rough for pensioners Boots.” They both grinned at that. It was an in joke.
Last year Boots had beaten a guy almost to death when he’d tried to intervene as Boots collected the monthly payment from his daughter. Turned out the guy was pushing sixty-five, but when the blood’s up, the blood’s up.
“I’ll get Coco to do it,” said Big Davie. “That’s if the wee shite ever shows up. Whit about yer auld mates then? Any of them know anythin’ about Kats?” Big Davie was referring to the street gang that Kats and Boots had been in, The Young Team, but Boots shook his head.
“Most of them are inside or have moved away. It’s only me and Kats that are still here.”
“He’ll be somewhere Boots, and you’d better find him.”
“Right boss,” said Boots dutifully.
He was suddenly tired of company. “I’ll get the driver tae take me back tae the house. You get off and keep on the Kats thing awrite?”
“Sure boss, if that’s whit ye want.”
Boots sloped off and Davie walked the rest of the way to the car alone. He knew he should have gone to do the deal with Kats himself of course, but he’d gotten that strange call from his money-man, Nick Crossan, who’d been almost frantic about something and demanded to meet him right away.
Crossan was clearly flaking out. That ex-wife of his was ripping the piss out of him with her lawyers all over his books, and that wee girl he’d been shagging was definitely costing him a fortune, adding to his financial problems.
The guy was turning into a nervous wreck and Big Davie was starting to be concerned that he may well unravel completely and start telling people things he really should be keeping to himself.
That would be too bad for Nick if he did of course, he’d make sure of that, but it would also be a huge inconvenience for him.
Crossan might be a flake, but someone had to operate the wheels of the increasingly complex finance and investment machinery where all of his money was squirrelled away, and for the moment Crossan was that man.
Maybe if he were to get him away from that wee bird he could manage him a bit better. It would be doing him a big favour really. She was obviously a gold-digger and he needed Nick to focus, especially when he nailed down the direct supplier from Afghanistan.
He’d already had Crossan set up a variety of offshore accounts in preparation, Crossan acting as the go-between so Big Davie’s name wasn’t on any of them. They were all in ghost company names with cross-holdings and connecting accounts. As well as that, he’d given Crossan a shed load of money to invest in his new insurance thing, he’d no clue what it was about but it was also offshore, the return was fantastic and there was no traceability or tax issues.
The central problem therefore was that Crossan was now part of the inner sanctum and so everything had to be all square with him. That level of responsibility, if not trust in non-family members, never sat well with Big Davie.
His driver was waiting for him and he slid into the back of the rented Jag he was using since the Beemer had been trashed.
Older guy on the rebound with a young blonde, so predictable, and so dangerous for everyone.
“That’s how real trouble starts…” he said aloud absently.
“What was that sir?” said the driver.
“None of your fuckin’ business.”
Chapter 10
“Mary! Where’s ma breakfast?”
“It’s comin’ it’s comin’ Davie, I’ve only got the one pair a hands.”
She bustled into the living room with a plate in her hands and placed it in front of him on the dining table where he liked to have his meals. The table was facing the window and it let him keep an eye on the street while he ate, just in case anyone should be lurking about.
“They didnae have any black pudding in the butcher’s so I fried a bit a dumplin’ for ye instead.”
He grunted as he tore a piece of buttered bread off the side-plate and dunked it into the yellow centre of his fried egg. “Nae tea?”
“Ah’ll just get it,” and she waddled back into the kitchen again.
“If that arse of yours gets any bigger hen we’ll be needin’ to buy yer clothes from Vango.”
“Shut yer hole and get away tae yer work ya crabbit auld bastard.” She slammed the cup down by his plate and turned on her heel.
Chuckling with pleasure, their morning ritual now complete, he aimed a playful swipe at her ample rear. They first met at a chapel dance in ‘78, during the hiatus between the Glam Rock era ending and the New Romantics starting.
Davie was older than her, he was the oldest in the disco truth be told, and he had been cruising for a young floosie to have a knee trembler with in a close on the way home. Catholic lassies were always up for it, and if he got really lucky he’d maybe pull a trainee nurse.
His reputation had preceded him however and if he got within thirty feet of a likely looking bird she’d lift her handbag from where she and her pal were dancing round it and head for the bogs.
Mary was different. She was the only lassie in there who looked fearlessly back at him. His bad reputation hadn’t bothered Mary one bit. She was a good looking girl too back then, and when she proved to be less interested in the details of Davie’s activities than she was on spending the proceeds of them, their relationship had stepped up another notch.
They’d been going out, off and on, for about eight years, and they’d been careful, or rather she was supposed to have been careful as Davie wasn’t exactly interested in contraceptives, but she’d finally got pregnant with DJ.
Davie harboured a suspicion she had done it deliberately to force him to marry her, but actually she had always been so terrified he would just walk away from her that it had never crossed her mind. DJ was simply an accident.
To her surprise, Davie’s father – still a formidable man even though he had been in his mid-sixties - had prevailed upon Davie to “do the decent thing and marry the lassie” although Davie never told her the argument that his dad had used.
He’d sat him down and said, “Look son, you’re on yer way up. If yer on yer way up ye’ll need someone at yer back. Ye canny trust yer mates, it needs to be family and I’m too auld. Ye need a wife. From what I’ve seen of her, that wee lassie keeps her eyes and ears open and her mouth shut. That’s good. That’s why I married yer maw and I never regretted it. She knows ye have other women on the go and she says nothin’, am I right?”
Davie agreed. He hadn’t exactly been secretive about his affairs but he’d never waved them in Mary’s face either. Still, she kept quiet about it and they rubbed along as though she was the only one in his life. Just as long as he came home to her at night, he could do as he pleased more or less. Davie, like his father, was a man who valued discretion in those he was close to.
She also learned how to patch up him and anyone else in the gang when they were injured so they didn’t have to go to the
casualty and therefore be questioned by the police. She was a handy girl to have around was Mary, and Big Davie knew he could have done a whole lot worse. So he’d gone ahead with the marriage, and all things being equal, he hadn’t regretted the decision.
A muffled peep told him the car was outside. He slurped some more tea, stuck a sliced sausage on some bread and got up to go.
“Am away hen, I’ll call ye later if I’m comin’ home for ma dinner awrite? Whit are ye makin’ anyway?”
“Ach a thought I’d do roast saddle of venison with a blueberry and Buckfast jus.”
“Whit?”
“Yer getting’ stovies ya dick, now away tae work and let me get on,” she kissed him goodbye and he chuckled to himself again as he got into the waiting car and told the driver where to go.
They arrived in Dundonald Street and he told his driver to come back for him in four hours as he got out of the car. He unlocked the gate in the close and went through and down the steps to the basement office that served as his main place of business.
“We got him boss,” said Boots excitedly as he entered the drab and dimly lit room.
“Whit? Ye got Kats?” said Big Davie, his mood lifting suddenly.
He looked around the office and saw a lanky unshaven drip sat in the chair by the solitary radiator. It wasn’t Kats. Squeak, back at work after his escape from the M8 fiasco was standing guard on the captive.
“Whit are you so pleased about Squeak?”
“Nothin’ boss,” his smile slipping from his face. “Ah just thought that ye’d be pleased tae see this bag a shite here that’s aw.”
When he wasn't baby-sitting DJ on errands, Squeak’s main purpose in the set-up was to intimidate shopkeepers, publicans, pushers, hookers, pimps and the like; the ordinary men and women of the area that his boss somewhat benevolently thought of as his “clients”.
Kats was right in his assessment: Big Davie saw himself as an entrepreneur, a businessman in fact. He arrived at this aspirational conclusion after reading a piece in The Herald newspaper by a well-respected business editor; “People in deprived areas where there are no jobs, no prospects and no other options will always strive to create wealth for themselves; be it through drugs, loan-sharking, prostitution or housebreaking…they are the natural entrepreneurs of their social class”. Big Davie had bought into that idea totally. As far as he was concerned his was a business, pure and simple as that.
Waging War To Shake The Cold Page 6