by Robert White
I will have asked you the hardest of questions, and you will have given me your answer.
You always were the strongest one.
I know how hard I fought to keep Hillside, but I cannot bear Gordon to have the house. No doubt, you will find out my reasons soon enough.
I could go on about mistakes made, but there is no time for regret now.
Do with the place what you will. If it holds too many painful memories, then sell it, take the money and run. It is your time now, Des.
You have weathered the storm all your life, my love, now it’s time for you to dance in the rain.
Anne.
I smiled at that one. The little saying at the end came from a small wooden plaque that used to dangle on our kitchen wall. Anne had bought it when we were on a rare holiday in Cornwall.
I read the letter again, folded it carefully and slipped it into my carry-on.
Leaving the legal stuff on the mat, I stepped out onto the landing.
Lauren North’s Story:
I had no idea why Rick was being so obtuse, but it wasn’t unusual. We would be briefed at the lock-up where he felt safe and all would be revealed.
I managed the short walk to my building without shaking legs. I liked to think that it was down to my returning mental strength, but it was equally probable that the good doctor’s ‘happy’ pills had worked some magic.
Either way, I’d binned the rest of the course. It was time to see if I could cope without them.
I showered and inspected the recent scars to my body.
Were they worth it?
I thought so.
Two hours wasn’t much time to get my bag together. I lived forty minutes away, for God’s sake. Having all my fighting kit stowed at the lock-up was one thing, but it was the personal stuff I lacked, and knowing Rick, I would need everything from jeans to that little black dress in my rucksack.
I dressed in the heavy stuff… jeans, hoodie, some nice boots I couldn’t resist, and used the sack for some skirts, posh tops, good shoes and the LBD.
I brushed my hair into a ponytail and applied some slap.
As I checked my face in the mirror, the tap on my front door made me drop my lippy.
Heart racing, I stepped silently toward the door. Nobody had ever knocked on my door before without buzzing up from the main entrance. Holding my breath, I managed to reach the spy hole.
It was Larry.
“You frightened the life out of me,” I barked at the closed door.
“And I see my welcome hasn’t improved,” he said with a laugh in his voice. “Any chance you can open the door?”
I didn’t feel like I had the choice, flicked the lock and took a step backwards.
“Ah,” he said. “That’s better.”
“Hello, Larry,” I managed. “This is a…”
“Surprise,” he added for me. “Yes, I know. I mean, I can guess…erm...” He noticed my bag on the floor behind me and pointed. “Going on a trip?”
Larry was dressed as he always was, in a suit. This time a pale grey three-piece. His tie was pulled away from the neck of his shirt, his hair tousled probably by his own hands during the course of his day. Handsome didn’t come into it.
I was briefly put at odds with myself and couldn’t think of an answer. Finally, I managed, “Oh me? Yes, I’m off to my mother’s.”
He furrowed his brow. “You’re visiting your mother dressed in jeans, a Helly Hansen hoodie, and taking the rest of your wardrobe in a rucksack?”
I nodded too many times.
He stepped inside without being asked, purposely brushing my shoulder, smelling even better than he looked. “Nice place you have here, Lauren. I never got to see the inside on my last visit.”
“No, erm…well…sorry about that, but, well, you know.”
He turned.
“But things are different now aren’t they, Lauren? I mean, you and your pals are working solely on your body-guarding business eh? No more gangsters, guns and bombs?”
More nods.
He pretended to be examining my bookcase but was expertly taking me apart.
“So, the fact that the guy whose address I gave you last night, is currently in the morgue with his forearms slit open has…”
I got myself together at that one. “…has nothing to do with me, yes…correct.”
Larry moved a box of wallpaper samples from my sofa and sat.
“I know,” he mused. “Doc says he’d been dead over twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours.”
There was no point in any further bullshit. “The blood spill looked fresher than that to me.”
Larry leaned forward. “So, you were inside then? Are you going to tell me why you wanted to talk to him?”
I shook my head.
“Official Secrets Act and all that eh? Still in the pockets of the spooks?”
I let him make his assumptions, shrugged and kept my poker face.
“Like the old Eagles song, Larry. ‘You can check out any time you want’…”
Larry stood and stopped inches from me. He took my arms gently and looked into my eyes.
“Yeah, I know the song, but you can leave, Lauren. You can get away, and I can help you …Want to help you.”
My head swam. “Look…Larry, I…”
He didn’t let me finish.
“I know what you are going to say, but just hear me out. What I did to you was inexcusable and I’m sorry, genuinely sorry. But I’m not here because I’m a cop or I want to know about the Firm, I’m not here for any of those reasons. I’m here because…because I think that me and you could… well you know?”
Larry leaned forward and kissed the corner of my mouth.
I pushed him away, avoiding his gaze, “You’d better go.”
He took a step back, but gently lifted my chin until our eyes met.
“The other night in the pub, I felt something I hadn’t done in a long, long, time, Lauren. I’m not being all soppy here. What I’m saying is I felt at ease, able to talk to someone who genuinely understands what it’s like to be in the job. What it’s like to be away from the nine to five routine…We could be good together, me and you.”
I started to shake my head, but he was having none of it.
“Don’t say no now, Lauren…look, I can see you are going somewhere, and I know it will be with him, with Rick. All I ask is that when you get back, you call me…Okay? Promise me that.”
He kissed me again, this time full on the mouth, and I kissed him back.
I drew away, tasting him, smelling him, my head all over the place.
“No promises,” I said. “After all, Larry, I never know if I’ll make it back, do I?”
Rick Fuller’s Story:
I’d always demanded the highest standards from my teams and measured my own performance against the best of them. From the early days as a lanky kid walking the streets of Belfast, through to the jungles of South America and burning African villages, for me only the best and bravest had been good enough.
The men and women who failed to reach those standards were left behind at my request; some however, lay dead on the battlefield.
Although I knew my own talents were fading with each passing year, I found myself wandering around the lock-up, surrounded by memories of past adventures with a growing expectation.
Just as back in those days of combat and conflict, in the darkest moments just before the call finally came, the call to fall thousands of feet into the night, the call to detonate that charge on that door, I felt the same excitement rise in my belly.
Bring it on.
I had spread our largest table with every single weapon that remained at our disposal. Four Bergans sat against the wall, filled with clothing, rations and meds. The old wooden slab virtually groaned under the weight of weaponry, ammunition and auxiliary kit, yet none would be of any use until we could identify the whereabouts of our prey, Gjergj Dushku, Red George. Therefore, a second and equally crowded table top sat under
the television, packed full of binoculars, cameras and other electronic surveillance kit that I’d begged borrowed and stolen over the years.
Why had I demanded the team double their own anti-surveillance efforts?
That yellow post-it, that’s why.
JJ was the first back.
He slumped into a comfy chair and rolled his knife around his hands as was his wont. I’d almost gotten used to his ways, and I would never forget the bravery and toughness he showed when it really mattered. He’d saved my life not once, but twice.
He gestured toward the table full of cameras and lenses.
“This is not my thing, Richard. I have no patience for watching, unless with a rifle.”
“Me either, pal, I’ve never been one for sitting still for too long. But we won’t be using that gear just yet. Not on this first job anyway.”
The door was pushed open. Des strode in and dropped his day sack alongside his Bergan. He went straight to the weapon table, selected a Sig, checked the safety and removed the full clip. Then picking up two spare mags and a box of rounds, he sat and went about pushing 9mm into each.
As there was no greeting, no sarcastic comment and a definite lack of eye contact, I presumed there was an issue that he wasn’t going to share with the group, so I left him to it.
Seconds later Lauren appeared.
If Des had got a face on, she was a contender for the ‘lost a quid and found a penny’ contest.
I shot a glance at JJ. He just shrugged.
She too dropped her bag alongside her fighting kit, but chose to attack the fridge rather than the weapons. After selecting a chicken leg, she bit into it and found a chair.
There was no time for babysitting, so I cracked on.
“Okay…Lauren, Des, JJ…heads up.”
On the wall above the Bergans, I’d stuck a blow-up shot of a street on the Anson Estate, Longsight, Manchester. An area of town that you visited if you liked being shot at.
Longsight was bordered by Ardwick to the north, Rusholme to the west, Levenshulme to the south, and Gorton to the east.
If you were the social worker type, you may have said that Longsight was an ethnically diverse area, with high levels of poverty, deprivation and crime.
I’d just describe it as a shithole.
The area had been plagued by gang-related violence for years. Just like Moss Side, the viciousness came from tensions between just two rival gangs fighting over turf.
Last year, 2006, there were a hundred and twenty gang-related shootings between the two small districts. Even fucking Chicago couldn’t match that.
Egghead had identified Red George for us and was also able to give us his last known place of work.
The Albanian monster had been working for Jimmy and Kevin London, a pair of high end car thieves, who also transpired to be the heads of one of the aforementioned two gangs, that regularly caused so much chaos, smack bang in the middle of Longsight.
Fortunately, Egghead, in his previous life as a coke-head-cum-car-thief, had sold the odd knock-off motor to the London gang, and knew the lay of the land. That gave us a place to start, even if it was in the arsehole of the city.
I pointed to the picture.
“This is Jimmy and Kevin London’s house, or should I say houses. They reside in the two semis on the left, numbers 18 and 20…both council-owned three-beds. As Jimmy and Kevin are cash rich, you might think they would try and find a little more salubrious area in which to live. Not these two; apparently, they like it in Manchester’s answer to the OK Corral and religiously pay the twenty-nine quid a week rent for each of these proverbial palaces out of their benefits. Yes, unbelievably, they still sign on.
“Jimmy was born in 18. His uncle Trevor and cousin Kevin had number 20. In 2002, Uncle Trevor was shot in the face trying to steal a Range Rover from a farmer in Cheshire. Shortly after that the two cousins felt the need to be closer to each other, and knocked out the walls to make one large house. No one from the council dared complain about the building work.
Jimmy and Kevin are old school. They have never worked a day in their lives, have never been out of England, and still drink in the same pub they had their first pint in. That said, they are rich beyond most of Longsight’s residents’ dreams.
“The information we have is that our main target, Red George, the man seen in Spiro Makris’ house just before his murder, and the man we believe Miss Morrison saw at Colin Reed’s house around the day of his demise, has been working for Jimmy and Kevin as recently as last month. I’m guessing that the Albanian has been acting as some kind of go-between, helping move stolen motors out of the country.
“The London’s empire is built on stolen cars. They make Nicolas Cage look like Miss Daisy when it comes to knocking off motors. Their people only steal high end vehicles and most of these will be rung, and end up in Eastern Europe.
Now, don’t let the car thief tag faze you. Jimmy and his cousin Kevin are a couple of Manchester’s most violent criminals. Both were sentenced to a nine stretch for kicking a student to death outside a Manchester nightclub. All the kid had done was puke on Jimmy’s car. Apparently, they took it in turns to kick the boy in the head, fracturing his skull in eleven places.
The murder charge was dropped to manslaughter at Crown Court, on the proviso of a guilty plea. Both served only three years of the nine, all of it in Strangeways, from where they not only ran a landing, but their stolen car business too.
Since then Kevin has been arrested four times, twice for wounding with intent, and twice for rape, one on a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. In all those cases, the witnesses have failed to attend court to give evidence and he’s walked.
Jimmy seems to be able to keep his dick in his trousers, but was pulled for possession of a firearm in 2004. He served three months.
“These two choirboys are the only connection to Red George we have, and we need George to get to Stephan Goldsmith.”
Lauren dropped her chicken leg into the pedal bin and returned to the fridge for further supplies. She seemed to have recovered some of her composure.
“Where’s the intel come from? How good is it?”
“Egghead…Simon that is, the guy who hacked into Spiros’s CCTV unit. He finds out current intelligence quicker than the boffins at the Firm. The detail is superb. Also, he was a car thief long before his interest in computers saved him from a lengthy prison term. He worked for Jimmy and Kevin London back in the day so the intel is good and reliable.”
She nodded and crunched a celery stick.
Des had finished loading mags. He still had the look of a man with something on his mind and I finally realised I’d seen that very look before. Whatever his problem was, I reckoned it had something to do with his ex-wife, no danger.
“So, we’re going to pay these wee bastards Jimmy and Kevin a visit then?” he asked.
“We are,” I said.
He pointed his finger and gave me a look that told me I was crazy. “At their house? That one there in the picture?”
I shook my head. “No, not the house…for two reasons.
One, the ongoing gang war between the London crew and their rivals has meant a massive increase in their security. Simon describes the house as Fort Knox, all internal gates and reinforced doors. Also, Jimmy and company, have joined the rest of Manchester’s gangsters and recruited the usual group of teens to ride around the surrounding streets on BMX’s, clocking strange cars or faces and reporting to their main security.
These guys form their real security cordon, older faces, more experienced, often armed, working foot patrols in four-hour shifts around the house. According to Egghead, most of their muscle live on a diet of Clenbuterol and Charlie. The last thing we need is a gun battle with a group of muscle-bound blokes who think they are ten men, especially on their turf.”
“And the second reason?” asked Lauren.
I began pinning up pictures of The Anson pub.
“Because we know exactly where our targe
t will be and when.
The intel is, that it’s Jimmy who does the hiring and firing, and he will be the one with the knowledge on Red George. So… it’s Jimmy we want, forget Kevin, we take Jimmy, alive, on the street…here…outside his local.”
Des Cogan’s Story:
The Anson reminded me of a few pubs I’d visited over the years. You found them in inner city shitholes wherever you lived. They tended to be big red brick-built, corner plots with lots of rooms and massive car parks, which nobody with a brain cell ever left their car in.
The Anson was one such venue. At some point in its life, some entrepreneurial soul had taken over part of the main building and turned it into a take-away. I suppose it gave the clientele a change of scenery in which to stab each other without the need for public transport.
Rick had used Google Maps to show all the possible routes from Jimmy’s house to the pub.
I could see the job was a non-starter straight away.
“There are too many ways he could go, mate. I mean, there’s only us four eh? And he could take five, maybe six ways there. He could go on foot or drive, and anyway, the moment our crew set foot on the estate, the jungle drums would be banging, nae bother.”
“I realise the issues,” said Rick, pointing at the pile of binos and kit on the table under the TV. “That’s why we are not going to use the usual surveillance methods.”
I didn’t like the sound of this little soiree, and I was right not to.
“Aye…go on then, pal.”
“I want you and Lauren to sit inside the pub, clock Jimmy as he arrives, and take him on the carpark. Me and JJ will be sat just off the manor, and as soon as you give us the nod, we’ll come and complete the lift.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
“You want us… me and Lauren… to sit inside that shithole and wait for this bad boy to turn up?
No chance, pal. Me and Lauren will stand out like spare pricks at a wedding in that boozer. Everybody in the place will be either related by birth or have lived on the Anson for donkey’s years. The only thing you’d be lifting from the car park would be our battered bodies.”