Every Night I Dream of Hell by Malcolm Mackay Read Free Book Online

didn’t have any product on him.’
    ‘So how did you guys find him?’
    ‘Had a meeting set up with him, went down to his place and he wasn’t there, but his wife tells us where he was going.’
    ‘His wife knew the address?’
    ‘Wife seems to know an awful lot; I think she did a lot of the work. Lot of the thinking, anyway. So she gave us this address, says he was going there and that was yesterday. We ask her what she’s been doing since yesterday; she says she’s been doing the same thing she always does when he disappears for days on end – praying his dick falls off inside whatever whore he’s with.’
    ‘Nice.’
    ‘Aye. So we go to the address, thinking it’s probably bullshit, but it’s not. It’s an ordinary wee flat with the front door ajar.’
    ‘It was open?’
    ‘Like they wanted it to be found,’ Conn said knowingly. ‘This was a professional hit, sending a message. Listen, Marty’s up to high dough. He’s got me and Mikey working on this and I want you and your boy to come give us a hand, maybe take the lead in some aspects. There’s more to this than me and Mikey can see for ourselves.’
    ‘Where do we meet?’
    ‘It’ll be one of Marty’s offices; I don’t know where’s available yet. I’ll call you in an hour. You and the boy come right round.’
    Coffee and toast for breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table thinking about this dead guy I’d never met, pushing thoughts of tomorrow’s meeting with Zara out of my head. I’d heard of Christie, because it’s my business to know who’s who. My first thought was Lafferty lashing out because the dealer was talking to Marty, but that was shit-for-brains thinking. There isn’t a man in the city works harder to keep out of trouble than Angus Lafferty, and knocking someone off for something minor like that couldn’t be further from his style. The corpse had been talking, but he’d been talking within the organization.
    So you think about the dead guy and who might have wanted him dead, who profits from it. Another dealer maybe. Yeah, sure, that’s the natural place to leap to, but what other dealer works a lure and nails the wee bastard with a professional hit? If Christie was sticking to his own patch and not playing suicide games then he was hit by someone looking to take his patch from him. Not much of a patch for a hit like that. Using a gunman, setting up a lure, those things cost time and money, and Christie wasn’t worth much of either.
    But my mind was clinging on to the same thing that had mattered to Conn: the open door. You lure a guy to a flat with the promise of a good score or a woman, you shoot him dead, and then you leave. So far so professional. Then you leave the front door open on your way out. Doesn’t matter if it’s wide open or ajar; open is open and open means a lot. Means you want someone to come along and find the body, sooner the better. You want to send a message and you want that message out on the streets within hours.
    If we’re accepting that Christie being killed was a message then you and me have got to sit down and work out what the message was. Not just what it was, but who it was aimed at. Let’s stick to the obvious until we have something more complicated to play with. The message was ‘we’re coming to take over your business and there’s fuck-all you can do about it’. The target was Angus Lafferty, or the wider Jamieson organization. If the obvious was correct then it wasn’t just a message; it was a bloody declaration of war.

6
     
    Took until half nine for Conn to send a message through with an address for me, an office in a small industrial site out near the airport. I went and picked up Ronnie and drove us out there.
    ‘This is all a bit over the top, isn’t it?’ Ronnie asked me.
    It was, a bit. We could have had this meeting somewhere more convenient and saved time, something we didn’t have to spare. But you can’t mock careful because careful is often the thing that