For Those Who Know the Ending (17 page)

13

There was a definite hint of smugness in his voice, a little relief as well. Usman was doing his best to hide that, but he wasn’t an actor, or not a good one anyway. He knew he was radiating relief, even on a slightly iffy phone line.

‘I want to hear every detail about this job first though,’ Martin told him. ‘Every single thing.’

‘Of course you do, sure, and I want to tell you every wee detail. I wanted to tell you a couple of days ago but you buggered off back to miserable-land. You want to come round the flat and talk about it?’

‘The same flat?’

‘Yeah, the same flat.’

‘Is it safe to always be using the same place?’

Usman, walking along the street outside his brother’s house as he talked, sighed right into the phone. He hadn’t actually thought about that, but it wasn’t a bad point. He didn’t use the flat often, but when he did it was either to meet Martin or set up some other kind of criminal work. A pattern was developing and patterns were treacherous, they gave the game away.

‘Yeah, you might be right, I suppose. We can use it again in the future, but maybe not this time, eh? What about your place?’ Usman knew Martin was living with a woman, he knew they had a place of their own. It made sense.

‘No,’ Martin said. A little word with a lot of force behind it.

‘All right, okay, never mind then. We can meet up at my own flat then. Breaks the routine, and we can talk properly, in peace.’

So Martin was going round to Usman’s flat. They sure as hell weren’t going to use Joanne’s house, it was bad enough to have his criminality in her life without bringing it all the way into her living room. And it was still her house, not theirs. He hadn’t earned the right to call it his yet, although his sense of home was growing within it. But they couldn’t use it for a meeting when Joanne might come back and catch them. Worse still, Skye might be lounging around the place now. Then the explanations would really have to begin.

But he didn’t want to meet Usman at Usman’s own flat either, that felt like it was escalating the relationship. The place in Mosspark had been a good meeting place. A flat that didn’t belong to either of them, where they could meet without being seen and without seeing much of each other. It was business, and nothing else, there was no danger of getting any little glimpses of personal life. Martin didn’t want any personal element to worm its way into this. He didn’t want a friendship. This was business.

Usman’s flat was up in Maryhill. That meant a drive with the satnav on, taking instructions from a detached voice with a lot more confidence and a little more knowledge than he had. With a couple of wrong turnings it took a lot longer getting there than he had expected. He was half an hour late.

The flat was in a small block, new and well-kept. Not private though, in terms of getting in and out, a front door the whole street could see. If someone was keeping an eye on Usman’s flat then they were bound to notice Martin showing up looking shifty. As a matter of routine he looked around, but he couldn’t see anything out of place. Wasn’t sure he would recognize if there was, given that he had never been here before. He rang the bell at the front door and Usman buzzed him in. Usman was waiting in the corridor up the stairs for him, front door of his flat open.

‘Come on in, man,’ he said. He was dressed in a T-shirt that looked like a manic child had scrawled all over it and a pair of baggy jeans with a long silver chain hanging off the pocket. Martin said nothing, went inside.

Inside was the flat of a man who earned. Every little thing looked new, shiny and expensive. Even the artwork on the walls looked like it would cost enough money to make the seller laugh behind your back on your way out of the shop. It was a young man’s flat, full of gadgets and bad taste. When he had a partner, had kids and responsibilities, things would change. He would learn to save; he would learn that there was no shame in having the second most expensive version of something.

‘You want a beer or something?’ Usman asked him, leading him into the living room.

Martin sat in the leather recliner Usman had intended to use. ‘Nothing. Just information about this job and a lot of it. What it is, when it’s happening. I want to know everything.’

‘Right,’ Usman said, sacrificing his own beer and sitting on the couch. He had Martin on the hook and he wasn’t going to give him any chances to get away. ‘You can take your jacket off, man,’ he said, ‘unless you’re planning on doing a runner.’ Try and get the little bastard comfortable.

So much for giving the impression that he wouldn’t stay long. Martin took his jacket off, put it over the arm of the chair. He was impatient, his instinct told him he shouldn’t be here. Not just because it was Usman’s home, but because it was only a couple of months after a major job with him. Martin didn’t know Glasgow and its industry well enough to take any sort of risks, and here he was taking a sizeable one. Maybe back home he would work a couple of jobs in quick succession but that was different. He knew the business there, knew how people would react and what toes he could afford to dance on when. The politics here played a different tune. Here he still had to learn.

‘Right,’ Usman said, clapping his hands together. ‘This one’s a tiny wee bit complicated, so if there’s anything you don’t get, you just butt right in and ask me, okay?’

Martin smiled. This wasn’t going to be nuclear physics; it was going to be a job. There was no way it wasn’t going to be some variation on a job he had done before. There were only so many ways to make money ripping people off, very few deviations from the norm, and none that he hadn’t at least tried before.

‘Okay, here’s the thing. There’s this guy called Chris Argyle. You heard of Chris Argyle yet?’

Martin nodded and shrugged at a name he remembered only vaguely. Moments like this, he realized how little he did know. He heard names occasionally, but they weren’t repeated often enough in his company for the memory to stick. That was becoming a problem.

‘Well, Argyle runs a pretty major importing business. The guy’s growing fast, a real player these days. Not young, I don’t think, but he got into it late. People want him on their side, right, cos everyone wants the growing power on their side, you know. Now, I think – and I just think, right, I don’t know for sure – that he’s moving towards working full-time with a guy called Don Park. You heard of Don Park? Doesn’t matter, he ain’t a big deal in this job. We need to be more worried about Argyle, he’s the one we’re screwing here. So this Don Park, he’s a sort of rival of Peter Jamieson’s. It’s complicated, because Park doesn’t run his own organization, but he kind of does. The guy who controls the organization is old, on his way out. Guy called Alex MacArthur, you might have heard of him. Dying, is what I heard, but that might be bullshit. People always gossip about old folk, saying they’re half-dead and all that. Park’s going to replace him one day anyway and everyone knows it. So Argyle’s helping Park by setting up a deal with the Allen brothers. You heard of them?’

Too many names. ‘No,’ Martin said.

‘Okay. They run a dealing operation, street-level stuff. Quite a good operation though. But they’ve always been careful; made sure they didn’t get into any battles they couldn’t handle. They stayed outside of the city, most of the time. Worked their own patches. Thing is, I know they’re brewing up a deal with Argyle. He supplies, they distribute. Simple enough, but if Argyle is working with Park then it means the Allens are taking sides.’

‘Against Jamieson,’ Martin said, getting the hang of it.

‘Exactly.
Exactly
. So there’s a lot of people with an interest in seeing that little venture fail. Big people.’

‘So if we do something against Argyle, there are many others to take the blame.’

‘Yes, you’ve got it, wee man, got it in one go. No one’s gonna finger us; they’ll be too busy chasing after Jamieson’s men, or some other organized mob. Whole list of better candidates to get through before they’d even think of little old you and me.’

‘Which means nothing if there is no job,’ Martin said. He was here for detail that hadn’t yet been forthcoming.

‘Well of course there’s a job. I wouldn’t have called you up if there wasn’t a fucking job. You’ll no get me crying wolf, I’ll tell you that. I have a job. All planned out. See, this is a big step for them, the Allens especially, and they’re not working face to face. They’re using other people to set up the first deal for them. What do you call them, intermediaries, right? Third parties. Keeping a layer of someone else’s flesh between them this first time. Cash handover for a large supply.’

Martin leaned forward in the deep chair.

‘Thought you might like the sound of that,’ Usman said with a smile. ‘I know who’s doing the handover on each side. The Allens have got a woman called Sarah McFall working their end of it, but she’s no good. Too sharp. She knows what she’s doing. We won’t get it easy off her. The guy Argyle has working his end for him, that’s our target. Aiden Comrie. Been a street dealer for years. Must have lucked out and made some sort of connection with Argyle to be able to work a deal this size. This is way over his head. Guy’s a bit of a moron; he should be easy to pick up. He’s the man we go for.’

‘So he will have the drugs?’ Martin said with a frown. He didn’t want drugs. Stealing drugs meant selling drugs, and selling drugs meant multiplying the risk many times over. He wanted money, and nothing else.

‘He’ll be handing those drugs over to the lovely Sarah. As soon as she fucks off out of our way, we pick up Comrie and the money.’

Martin paused. ‘The man and the money?’

‘Yeah, see, I been thinking about that. We need to buy ourselves a little bit of time, right. I been thinking about it every which way and I reckon we need to take him too. Maybe, I don’t know, we need to kill him. Maybe not. Depends on how we work it. You would be more of an expert on that than I am so you can probably make your own mind up there. But there’s going to be a shitload of money and some serious people waiting for it. If we nick it and run, he only has to make a phone call and we have a hundred mad bastards chasing after us. Everyone Argyle has working for him, for a start. Maybe a bunch of Don Park’s men as well. That’s more shit than I want on my fingers, you know.’

‘So we take him,’ Martin said slowly. ‘They don’t know where he is. Don’t know where their money is. They wait a little. Then they think maybe he has run with their money.’

‘Exactly. That he’s run off with it, or that he’s crossed over to someone else with it. Even if they think it’s been nicked, it ain’t going to be us they blame, not if Comrie can’t point the finger at us.’

‘And you know that he will do this handover alone? If he has people with him . . .’ Martin said, and shrugged. More people meant changing the approach completely, or abandoning it.

‘Nah, they’re working this alone. Just him and McFall so far. I don’t see that changing. One on each side. Makes sense to keep it that way. Safer, stops anyone getting spooked by numbers. They might have other people nearby, wouldn’t be surprised by that. People to drop them off and take them away. That’s why we have to be fast and careful about this.’

Too many mights and maybes. Martin was shaking his head. ‘You know where this will happen?’

‘No,’ Usman said. Didn’t like admitting that. ‘But Comrie’s an easy tail. We follow him to wherever and we strike. It means being ready. Tailing him all the time, the both of us. It’ll be soon though. A few days, at the most. They’ve already had one meeting. Next step is the handover, surely, so we got to be on top of this right now.’

Martin groaned a little. There were so many holes for them to fall through, so many assumptions that couldn’t be shaped into fact. This was a job that invited failure. The odds of him being on his own, out of view, long enough for them to take him and the cash were not great. The odds of them getting him and the money out of view long enough to make this clean were worse.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Usman told him, holding up both hands. ‘I know. It ain’t a perfect job. We might have to ditch the fucking thing before it even starts. He turns up at that meeting and there’s three other guys there, we might have to walk away. That’s the way the business goes though, right? This one’s a bit of a gamble, but there’s value there. I’m talking big money on this one, way bigger than the bookies. Think about what sort of money they’ll be handing over for a big deal like this. Fifty grand, minimum. I ain’t going to get myself killed over my half of that, but I’m going to have a look and see if it’s gettable, you know.’

There was a slightly pleading tone in his voice by the time he finished. Trying to be reasonable, make it sound like there was nothing they disagreed on about this job. Martin didn’t say anything, not for a long time. He was piecing it together, working out all the terribly sensible reasons that he shouldn’t do it. Even if Comrie was alone, there was a chance the handover could be somewhere public. Not
very
public, not busy, but somewhere Comrie’s probable backup could keep watch. If they were seen taking him there would be a chase on, which was the last thing they wanted.

But there was one reason to do it. Twenty-five grand, minimum. Put that together with the savings he already had and that would push them up over thirty grand for a deposit. A chance to have the house to themselves. An investment in the relationship. Putting roots down.

‘We will start this job,’ Martin said. ‘Maybe we will not finish it. Maybe it will become as silly as it sounds right now. We watch this man, and if the chance is there then we do it. We don’t force it, not if it’s not going to be easy. Not if it’s going to turn into the wreck it sounds like. But if it doesn’t, if there is a chance that we can do it and do it well, then we will do it.’

Usman grinned. He had him. A risk this big and Martin was still on board. That meant he was determined, or desperate, to make the job happen. That was as much as Usman could hope for.

14

Gully had the unenviable task of watching the flat first. That was the problem with being the part-time, lower-ranking guy now, he had to take the shit jobs Nate gave him. No longer dishing out tasks like he had in the old days, working for the Knights. Back when Gully was the man.