KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (7 page)

‘Where did you get that?’

‘One of our visitors left it. I’m just looking after it for him.’

‘Dave you fool, you know there are armed police out there just waiting for a chance to shoot you and you go round with a gun.’

‘Your idea of leaving a message at Topfield’s a good one,’ I said, trying to change the subject. ‘It’s the only point of contact I have with these …’

‘Stop it! Give it to me. This thing’s going to end up in the deepest part of Loch Lomond.’

‘But Janine, it gives us protection. It’s only ironmongery.’

‘Yes that’s what I’ll tell the Police Complaints Commission when they approve of the police shooting you because you were carrying an unlicensed firearm. Some good that’ll do us!’

I held onto the gun.

‘All right, Dave, we’ll strike a bargain. Give me the gun and I’ll go to Scotland like a good girl and get out of your way while you do whatever you’ve got to do.’

8

Tuesday: 3.15 a.m.

I phoned Bob’s private mobile number from a public call box. I had no idea of his location apart from Manchester.

Janine had dropped me off at the end of Deansgate before heading off towards the M62 and the M6 north. I was disarmed but as Janine well knew Bob Lane has a brother, Clint.

Clint’s real name is Vincent Anthony Lane. He was nicknamed Clint by his own father after a film star. No, not Clint Eastwood but Clint Walker who starred in a cowboy series called ‘Cheyenne’ which capitalised on his massive height. Walker is six foot six, a mere child compared to the height Clint Lane eventually reached, but Lane senior was impressed enough to dub his growing son ‘Clint’. The name stuck and is virtually the only legacy any of the family received from their father of whom none of them will speak but who was no longer on the scene when I became acquainted with the Lanes.

In terms of weaponry Clint counts as heavy artillery.

Clint has served as my bodyguard before. In a very special way Clint is equivalent to a whole squad of minders. On one occasion he’d defended me from an angry crowd by swinging a twelve foot long steel scaffolding spar round his head.

Clint’s a gentle giant, over seven feet in shoes and socks and built like a main battle tank but his intellectual development hasn’t matched his physical. He’s not ‘care in the community’ or anything. Well, he is in a way. That is, he’s had some care and still needs it but he functions well in most situations.

Jan has taught him to read: slowly but he does read and what’s more he remembers what he’s read.

Clint was married to Naomi Carter, who was Jan’s nanny when she was still trying to make a go of her journalistic career writing on women’s issues for the
Guardian
and other papers. Naomi eventually dumped him saying she wanted more excitement in her life, sad woman. She’s now working as a carer in an old folk’s home in Nottingham.

To my mind life with Clint had to be more exciting than that.

Clint works on a farm. The constant hard labour, involving lifting awkward animals, bales of hay, and even pulling tractors out of ditches has developed his physique to frightening proportions. He has to have most of his clothes specially made.

The local thug community are in terror of him. Unfortunately those two fire bombers weren’t locals. They definitely weren’t local knuckle-draggers, not the steroid-crazed types you’d expect at a firebombing party at all. I replayed the attack over and over in my mind.

We’d been very, very lucky.

If things had gone as they’d planned we’d have had no chance. I shivered and not from the night air. Paranoid I may be after being unjustly locked up and finding every man’s hand against me but sometimes a touch of it pays off. But for the clattering cans rousing me and the creaking gate alerting Jan we’d be incinerated corpses now and our children with us.

Yes, the killings would be headline news for a day. Some people would be shocked but incendiary attacks are everyday occurrences. I could easily imagine the snide briefings some coppers would give the press … ‘
bears all the hallmarks of a gangland killing’
. That’s what they’d say before making backhanded references to my many alleged scrapes with the law.

Gangland was just what it wasn’t. The way the tall guy had rescued the shorter one at risk of his own neck was completely untypical. A local villain would have saved himself first. Hell, a local villain would have been out of there the instant he spotted me poking the shotgun towards him.  Those two were ex-military or ex-police: trained men who knew exactly what they were going to do and came with back-up in the shape of extra fire bombs in case their first try failed.

Clint could supply muscle but was that going to be any use against professional killers?

Accepting Clint’s services and taking care of him while he provided them was the normal price of asking Bob Lane for a
favour and I was about to ask him for a biggie. I wanted the use of his current safe house.

The bond between Bob, Clint and me goes back a long way. Bob saved my neck when I was starting out as a PI. He had no particular need to help me then but he did. Why I don’t know. Maybe he figured he might need a friend one day or just liked the colour of my bonny blue eyes but help me he did and since then we’ve exchanged favours more times than I can count.

If Clint has a menacing appearance so does Bob. The man’s almost as wide as he’s tall and there’s very little fat on his solid frame. If his brother’s built like the fabled brick shit-house Bob gives the impression that he could walk through the wall of one. He used to be called ‘Popeye’ by people stupid or brave enough to risk a broken limb. That was back when he ran one of the hardest crews in Manchester. His crew was never openly criminal. Bob made his money fending off the real criminals who were battening on the city’s flourishing club scene with little opposition from the police. He was always willing to trade blow for blow with the lowlifes in ways which the likes of Uncle Lew and the top coppers looked down their noses at.

Though he worked on the borderline of legality and may have strayed across it (and who was I to judge him), there’s one reason which has kept Bob Lane on the side of the angels.

That reason is the memory of his mother, a tiny little woman, the complete old fashioned ‘mum’ with her grey hair in a granny bun and a pinafore over her dress. If Clint and Bob could terrify any number of local nuisances and would-be ‘hard men’ the pair of them lived in equal fear of Mrs Lane. To this day a reminder that his sainted and long dead mother wouldn’t approve is enough to quell Clint when he gets above himself and it keeps Bob on the straight and narrow too.

Yeah, I know … get the violin section out. It’s corny but true. But for his mother and her memory, Bob and Clint Lane could have been the worst criminals to hit Britain since the Krays.

Bob owns several clubs and is always awake in the wee small hours. It’s hard to keep up with what his clubs are called at any particular time but the changes in the drinking regulations have been a godsend to Bob. He’s coining it. He’s also gone into student haunts in a big way; fancy places with loads of plate glass, abstract art and ‘all the lager you can drink for ten quid’ nights.

‘Mr Lane’s executive assistant,’ the female voice answered.

‘Tammy it’s Dave, put Bob on will you?’

Tammy Marsden is Bob’s squeeze. She’s been with him for some time. A luxuriantly upholstered former lap
-dancer, Tammy has expectations and sees Clint as an obstacle in her path to matrimony. However, I sense her intended has doubts. Bob wonders if he’d pass on Clint’s handicap to children of his own. I’ve begun to think that he uses Clint as an excuse for delay. He’s heard the relevant medical advice often enough.

I overheard a whispered consultation and then he came on.

‘Dave, me old fruit and nut cake, what’s troubling you at this hour when an honest businessman such as yourself ought to be clocking up the zeds?’

‘So you’re admitting that you’re a dishonest businessman are you?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean, dishonest? These are my office hours, besides I’m paying so much tax these days I sometimes think I’m keeping the Royal Navy afloat on my own.’

‘Yeah, you are since HMRC caught up with you and what’s the Navy these days. Down to their last few cockle boats, aren’t they?’

‘OK, OK, Sarcasm Boy, what’s the prob?’

‘The prob, Bob, is that I’m stuck on my tod without wheels. I’m in a call box at the end of Deansgate and I’ve just had a home visit from some rather nasty gentlemen who wanted to incinerate me.’

There was no sharp intake of breath. That’s one of the things I like about Bob.

‘Anybody dead?’

‘One hurt, one of the opposition that is.’

‘And the family?’

‘They’re all well and now heading for the hills at high speed in my only vehicle. The other’s damaged. That’s why I need transport that can’t be traced to me.’

‘You know I only asked if there were any dead first because I trust you to protect your family. I’m looking forward to being
Baby Cunane’s godfather.’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ, Dave, I don’t know what to say. Do I know any of your playmates?’

‘They’re definitely not our local scallywags. I’ve never seen them before. One was burned with his own firebomb.’

‘Badly burned?’

‘Yes.’

‘How sad, I’ll put the word out round the local hospitals. They do burns at Wythenshawe don’t they?’

‘They do but he could be anywhere.’

‘So Janine, has she done a moody? I know she doesn’t go for the rough stuff.’

‘Our separation’s only temporary while I get this bother sorted.’

‘
Bother
he says. I like it. Someone firebombs your house and its bother. Wheels aren’t much of a problem, Dave, but there must be something more I can do.’

‘Actually Bob …’

‘Spit it out!’

‘I don’t know who these people are at all. I have nothing on them, zilch.’

A vision of Lew’s notebook sitting in my safe not half a mile away flashed before my eyes. Could I use it to bargain with them?

‘So, what’s the plan?’

‘Find out who they are, I suppose. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that because if I do identify these bastards they’ll have no option but to slot me. Janine has this idea that if I convince them that I know nothing and have no hostile intentions they’ll lay off.’

‘Hmmm, that doesn’t sound too likely if they’re already trying to wipe your clock. Dave, with you things are always too far gone to be settled with a friendly chat over a cup of tea.’

‘Yeah, lovely isn’t it? There’s more and it gets worse. I believe they’ve killed a relative of mine and when the police find out they’ll be all over the landscape in their size eleven boots.’

‘Will they find out?’

‘I’ve already tipped them off.’

‘So you’d like somewhere to hide your weary head while you work out if the firebombing was just a friendly warning, like?’

He sounded perplexed.

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘I can do that for you Dave but make damn sure the house I send you to doesn’t get burned down. I’ve spent a fortune on it and Tammy loves the place.’

‘I don’t get into these things by choice.’

‘This relative, it isn’t old Paddy?’

‘No.’

I could have said more but there was no point in passing on information which could be fatal.

‘Thank God for that. Listen Dave, I’m beginning to wonder if knowing you might be bad for my health.  I’ve got spare wheels here that you can have but the difficulty is getting them to you. I can’t leave and I don’t trust you with Tammy … ’

‘Oh come on, Bob!’

‘No, stranger things have happened. Knowing your reputation as a lady’s man I wouldn’t care to put temptation your way. Back in the day you used to like your women hot and your curries mild.’

‘Bob, I’m happily married now.’

‘And wasn’t Tammy’s previous boyfriend the same, until his wife found out, that is.’

I could hear Tammy’s protests in the background.

‘Right, Dave, I’ll get a car to you. The keys of the house will have to wait for a while. I don’t have them here.’

I told him where I was.

‘There’s just one little problem. The only spare hands I’ve got here belong to your old prison buddy No-Nose Nolan and his oppo, what’s his name, the Scouser with the red hair?’

‘He’s called Lee and he wouldn’t thank you for calling him a Scouser. He’s just as much a Mank as you are.’

‘Nobody’s as Mank as me. Anyway, I use them as a pair of bookends on club security. It’s charity really because they’re both useless for anything apart from picking up litter. Sorry, rewind that. No-Nose has improved a lot since his illness which is why I
give him house room. In fact he’s becoming boring, giving me advice on my accounting system the other day he was but I’ll let you discover the new No-Nose for yourself. All I’ll say is brains can ruin a perfectly good gofer, which is what he was. He’s lumbered himself with that Lee, carts him around as if he’s his nurse. Lee is bad news and if I let him go, No-Nose will have to go too. Anyway, I’ll send them to meet you in Whitworth Street in two cars and they’ll leave you one.’

‘Thanks a bunch Bob,’ I said drawing in my breath. Was I going to get away without Bob’s ‘big ask’ which is what he usually calls taking responsibility for Clint?

I wasn’t.

‘Dave,’ he asked cautiously, ‘you don’t by any chance need Clint do you? No-Nose can pick him up on the way to you.’

‘Bob, I’m not in any danger. Let Clint get his sleep. Just the car, that’s all I need. I’m an innocent bystander in all this.’

‘I can go with bystander but innocent doesn’t sound like you, Dave, or maybe it’s the other way round, but if you say so I’ll take your word for it. It might be nice if you live to see that baby you’re expecting so how about Clint? He can watch your back.’

‘I’ll be fine, Bob.’

‘Go on, man, you need Clint and your Baby does too. I’ll tell No-Nose to pick him up. OK?’