‘What kind of evasive action?’
‘One of them had a gun. I got it off him, there was a struggle, and I shot a couple of them.’
‘But not Mitchell,’ put in Tommy hurriedly. ‘He’s fine.’
‘Are they dead?’ demanded Wolfe, clearly working hard to keep his voice down.
I shook my head. ‘I took one of them with leg shots. The other got hit in the gut with a ricochet, but they’ll both live.’
‘I don’t believe this. Mitchell’s a reliable source. Nothing like this has ever happened before.’
‘I don’t like being insulted, no matter who the hell it is. And being called an undercover cop is an insult in my book.’
I became conscious of Haddock standing very close to me. ‘Why’s he accusing you of being a cop if you ain’t one?’ he said quietly, bringing his immense head close to my ear. ‘Why’d he bother saying that, uh?’
I’d taken a big risk by admitting to them that I’d been accused by one of Mitchell’s people of being a cop, but in my experience, it’s always best to confront these sorts of issues head-on. Keeping up my aggrieved act, I turned and looked Haddock in the eye. ‘Because he made a mistake, that’s why.’
A low growl came from deep inside him, and he began to sniff, his nose going up and down with exaggerated movements.
‘What’s your problem, friend? You got hay fever or something?’
He stopped, glaring at me with slit-thin eyes. ‘You think you’re funny, boy, but you ain’t.’
I knew then that I’d made an enemy of Clarence Haddock, but I also had no choice but to act the way I did. So much of criminal life is macho posturing, using your personality, your reputation, your size as a means of intimidating those around you. To back down in a confrontation is a sign of weakness, and if you want to be taken seriously by the big boys like Tyrone Wolfe, you just don’t do it.
‘He can’t be an undercover cop, Clarence,’ said Tommy. ‘He shot two blokes. Coppers don’t do that.’
‘It’s a good point, Clarence,’ put in Wolfe, seeming to appreciate this pretty obvious point for the first time. ‘But I’m going to need to speak to Mitchell and iron this shit out. Either of you two got a clean mobile?’
‘I got one,’ Haddock answered, still staring at me, although he’d moved his face back a little now so we were no longer quite so intimate. He pulled one out of one of the dozen or so pockets of his knee-length black shorts and chucked it over. ‘I got my eye on you,’ he said, pointing a stubby finger at me as Wolfe went through a door at the end of the room to make the call.
Deciding to bin my two-a-day habit for now, I lit a much-needed cigarette.
It wasn’t long before Wolfe was back in the room. ‘Mitchell ain’t happy, Sean,’ he told me, shaking his head.
I was prepared for this and had already thought of my retort. ‘Neither am I, Wolfe. You think I want to have to go off shooting people? It’s risky and it’s bad for business. I’m no nutter. I’m just an ordinary bloke looking for a decent job, that’s all. Now, you send me out on a delivery to pick up your guns, and I don’t complain, I just do it. And then some toerag who needs his eyes tested, a poxy little chef who was probably stoned up to the eyeballs, reckons I’m a copper who nicked him years back, and then suddenly the guns are out and it’s looking like I’m a dead man if I don’t do something, when all I was guilty of was doing you a favour. It’s not even as if you were paying me for it, for Christ’s sake.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Wolfe, lifting his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘I get the picture, and I’ve sorted stuff now. Mitchell’s pissed off about his boys, but he knows you weren’t to blame.’
‘Are his boys OK?’
He nodded. ‘They’re getting treatment and they won’t talk, so there’s going to be no repercussions, although I don’t think Mitchell’s going to want to deal with us again for a while.’
His words relieved me, but I didn’t show it. ‘I’m not saying sorry. I did what I had to do.’ I took a drag of the cigarette. It was time to move things along. ‘So, you’ve got the guns. Now, are you going to tell me who we’re supposed to be grabbing and how it’s going to work, so I can decide whether I’m in or not?’
Wolfe looked over at Haddock, who nodded. He might not have liked me much but apparently that wasn’t going to stop us working together.
There was a long silence in the room before Wolfe finally spoke again. ‘I can’t tell you who we’re snatching until the last minute. That’s the client’s orders, all right? You’re going to have to trust us on this.’
In the past, Tyrone Wolfe had always planned his own operations, and the whole idea of a client paying someone like him to carry out a kidnap was pretty much unheard of. Even the term ‘client’ seemed weird coming out of his mouth. But if there was one, then I needed to find out who he was. So I asked him.
‘I can’t tell you that, either,’ he answered. ‘He wants to stay anonymous.’
I sighed. ‘Look, you spend all day giving me the tenth degree, saying you can’t trust me because I might be an undercover cop, then you go and expect me to trust a man I’ve never met, and whose name I don’t even know. I mean, how the hell do I know that he’s not a cop?’
‘Because I’ve known him for a long time, and more importantly, he’s got the money. All you’ve got to do is a little bit of crowd control and cover our backs while we snatch the target. Do that, and you’ll be a hundred grand richer. Guaranteed.’
I frowned, still confused as to exactly what I was getting involved in. ‘So, it’s a hit?’
Wolfe shook his head. ‘No. We just hold up the guards and retrieve the guy. The client takes it from there.’
‘And what’s the client going to do with him?’
Wolfe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t told me, and I haven’t asked. It’s not my business. And it shouldn’t be yours, either. Are you in?’
Of course I was in, but I was surprised they were giving me the choice now that they’d told me the details. Then I realized that the reason they were was because, having shot two men, I could hardly go to the police and report them myself. I was going to have to think very carefully about how I got round this.
In the meantime, I was still playing the part of an unemployed thug in need of some quick cash. Which meant demanding that advance on the hundred grand, because failure to do so would just look suspicious. ‘You said it’s thirty grand up front.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, you get me that and I’m in.’
For the first time in my presence, Tyrone Wolfe grinned. Even Haddock seemed to relax. And Tommy was beaming from ear to ear. He came over and clapped me hard on the back. ‘You’re part of the crew now, Sean.’
‘Welcome aboard,’ said Wolfe. ‘You won’t regret it.’
And then the man who’d murdered my brother put an arm round my shoulder and pulled me to him. And I had to make myself smile back at him, knowing that finally I had the opportunity for revenge I’d been waiting almost fifteen years for.
Ten
My brother John was the kind of guy everyone liked. He had a big grin and an infectious personality. He was always helping people out — friends, family, neighbours, everyone. He used to do the shopping for the old lady who lived down the road, and when she died, just after his sixteenth birthday, she left him five thousand pounds in her will. And do you know what he did? He gave a thousand of it to the local army cadet corps where he was a member so they could buy some new equipment, and another fifteen hundred to my mum and dad to put towards a family holiday for us all. That was John for you. Generous to a fault.