‘How it works is easy,’ Findo said. ‘You go in the garden, walk round to the rear window and whistle. Like this.’ He demonstrated. ‘They drop the stash. You’re done.’
It was a neat system. You paid in advance, you went to the meeting spot, gave the signal. The product technically never changed hands. Anyone arrested you, you said you found it lying around. Didn’t belong to anyone. No, sir. No one.
It was a small time racket. But clever enough. Nairn was building his customer base. We were here to make a dent in it. We’d already hit a legitimate interest. Now we were showing him that nothing he had was safe.
So how did Burns plan to take Nairn off the street for good? Did we break his business? Or did we break him?
It was the kind of question I didn’t really want to answer.
Burns knew that there were rules to our new-found relationship. I didn’t deal. I didn’t kill. When I told him, he nodded like he understood. And maybe he did. If I’d been overly enthusiastic about the murkier areas of his business, he’d have known something was wrong. As things were, I was behaving exactly as expected.
‘But you’ll rough someone up?’
‘If they deserve it.’
‘Tell me what deserving is?’ As if he didn’t know. He’d seen the kind of men I was willing to drop in the deep end. He knew where my moral compass pointed.
That hadn’t been an act. Much as I might try to pretend it was.
Fin got out the car. I followed. Fin had the cricket bat he’d taken from the Crow. He was grinning like a maniac. Some guys get off on strip clubs. Some on adrenaline sports. Some on all kinds of weird sexual shite. But Fin liked violence. I remembered how he was in the warehouse. How, for him, it hadn’t been about the job or even, in the end, about the girls. It had been about hurting people. In an odd kind of way, there was something pure about his attitude. With Findo Gaske, at least you knew what you were getting. No wonder Burns trusted him so much. The lad was easy to read. And loyal, too. You’d rather have him with you than against you.
We walked round the side of the building. Fin sent me on ahead. The scouting party. The canary down the pit.
The building was condemned, now. Built in the sixties, it had served its purpose and then quickly become a blight on the cityscape. No one really wanted to live here, and no one wanted to buy it. So it was abandoned. Weeds cracked through the paving stones that ran the exterior, and forced their way into the brickwork of the building. Glass cracked beneath my boots. Dead soldiers. Abandoned works. I pushed long branches out of my way.
I reached the back of the building. Whistled. Would they realize I was little more than a distraction?
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
A plastic Tesco’s bag dropped by my feet. Plopped from one of the second floor windows. I picked it up, looked inside. ‘The fuck is this?’
No answer.
‘The fuck is this?’ Just in case they didn’t hear me the first time. ‘This is fucking short, man. Fucking! Short!’ Making for outrage. Not exactly Oscar material, but enough to get a response.
‘Get to shite, man! That’s the bag.’ The voice muffled from inside the allegedly abandoned building.
‘Like yer maw’s arse is this the bag. I want to talk to someone.’
‘No fucking deal, man. Get on your bike!’
‘Piss off! I talk to someone or …’
‘Or what?’
‘Or I’m fucking coming back with petrol and matches.’ For good measure: ‘I know my fucking rights!’
There was silence above. Maybe they were having a debate about whether I posed a serious threat. Whether I was even serious. I waited.
Then: ‘Back door.’
Maybe they planned to teach me a lesson. Maybe they really were going to work out a refund or exchange. It didn’t matter. I walked further round the building. Fin saw me, winked from where he was hiding behind the overgrown, sad bushes that lined the edges of the property. I didn’t do anything, just stood in front of the door. It looked heavy, paint faded, porthole glass at eye level shattered.
I waited.
The door opened. Two kids in shellsuits and peaked Burberry caps came out. Thought they were gangsters, had the cheap jewellery on their neck to prove it. They were pale, skin pitted with bad acne and eyes sunk into their heads. They blinked in the daylight. Skinny-malinky vampires robbed of their primal threat. One of them sneered at me and tipped his head. ‘The fuck’s your problem?’ Oh yeah, he thought his middle name was Danger.
I stepped back.
They stepped out. Into the open.
Findo came at them from the side. No sound. No battlecry. No warning.
The bat caught the first kid – the one with the sneer – under the chin, snapping his head back. He didn’t say anything. No noise. Just went down. The second kid did a skipping dance back into the hall. Didn’t even have time to try and close the door before Findo was in, swinging the bat up and between the poor bastard’s bandy wee legs.
I tried not to wince in sympathy.
We were in. Up the stairs. Behind us, the kids groaned and rolled and moaned. They weren’t getting up anytime soon. We climbed single file, the hall too small to allow us side by side. Not that it mattered. I was following in Findo’s wake. A small boat in the wake of a larger vessel. A pilot fish behind a whale.
Two more on the stairs. Findo smacked the first one over the balcony. Only one floor, but once we were done here, I was calling an ambulance. The second took a glancing blow and folded. Findo stepped over him. But the blow didn’t take the wee nyaff completely out of the game, and he tried to get back up. I stomped on his chest, leaned over, grabbed his fringe and smacked the back of his head against the stairs. He didn’t move after that.
Later, I’d be concerned for him. There and then, I just needed to keep things simple. The direct route.
We made it into the supply room. Two more in there. Dressed in darker colours. One with a cap, the other with greasy hair combed forward and flat against his skull. The one with the cap dived behind one of the tables where the stashes sat waiting and emerged with a gun. He was shaking, fumbling as he tried to hold it correctly.
Not like in the movies, then.
Findo said, ‘Fuck this,’ and chucked the bat like it was a spear. It hit the poor bastard square in the forehead, and he dropped the weapon. The gun went off, the explosion echoing round the small room. The sound had a physical presence. My ears popped with the noise, and I hunched in on myself. When the noise cleared, became little more than a background hum, I checked myself just in case. No sign the bullet had hit me. I’d seen men shot before. I’d shot a man before. Didn’t fancy the idea of a bullet ripping through my flesh.
I looked at the guy with the bad haircut. He was on the ground. Hand at his side, jaw dropped, catching flies. He coughed twice. Said, ‘… the fuck?’ and lifted the hand he had pressed against his side. Stained dark red with blood. He started to breathe fast, then flopped back. Passing out. Shock and blood loss.
Maybe he’d live. Hard to tell. But with prompt medical attention, I figured there was a good chance.
Findo was bending down. Came back up with the gun. No hesitation the way he held it. No doubt. The wee prick with the hat had been frightened of the gun. Probably never actually fired the thing before, just showed off to his mates, waved it around in folks’ faces and expected them to fear him.
Gun runs on the force had always been bad news. Like a nuclear bomb had been found in the city. The kind of call that made adrenaline spike. They were unexpected. Unknown. Dozens of officers at a gun scene. Specially trained firearms officers flanking normal uniforms, everyone keeping their distance, everyone terrified.
I’d been at the centre of a gun raid once, as a civilian. The officers who stormed the room had been wide-eyed with restrained fear. This was Scotland, not South Central LA. We have firearm issues, but rarely do they cause a real problem.
Findo said, ‘D’you feel lucky, punk?’ He hoisted the gun, pointed it at the guy with the cap.
‘Come on, man,’ I said. ‘This isn’t …’
‘Shut the fuck up!’ He turned his attention back to the punk with the hat. ‘Well? Do ya?’ Clint Eastwood with a Charleston twang.
The kid backed off. ‘Come on, man. This isn’t …’
‘You know the kind of cunt you work for?’
‘I don’t know, man. Just come here, do the work … like, better than on the dole, know what I’m—’
‘Do you know the kind of man you work for?’
‘I—’
Findo pulled the trigger. The kid’s head jerked back. His body twisted. Blood arced.
I watched. Like it was a movie. A computer game. A TV show. Something separated from the world that I knew and accepted as real.
I didn’t feel anything. Not at first.
Not for a few moments that were more like hours.
Findo turned away. Dropped the gun on to the hard wooden floor. And smiled.
I ran for him, head down. Roared so loud my throat scraped like a cheese-grater.