Cry Uncle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The J. McNee Mysteries by Russel D. McLean

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dundee 2012

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  The J. McNee Mysteries by Russel D. McLean

  THE GOOD SON

  THE LOST SISTER

  FATHER CONFESSOR

  MOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED *

  CRY UNCLE *

  * available from Severn House

  CRY UNCLE

  A J. McNee Mystery

  Russel D. McLean

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2014

  in Great Britain and 2015 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2015 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Russel D. McLean

  The right of Russel D. McLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  McLean, Russel D. author.

  Cry uncle.

  1. McNee, J. (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Murder–

  Investigation–Fiction. 3. Dundee (Scotland)–Fiction.

  4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8450-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-565-0 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-613-7 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  This one’s for

  Al Guthrie

  Secret Agent Man, Blasted Heathen, Master of Noir. And without him, McNee would never have made it to publication at all, never mind lasted for five books.

  Thank you.

  DUNDEE 2012

  The old man kneels before me. Spreads his arms. Lowers his head. Showing regret for what he has done? Or acceptance for what he knows has to happen?

  ‘Do it, then, you prick.’

  I’m shaking. My breath is shallow. Staccato. Something in my chest vibrates with every puff of my lungs.

  After all these years, it ends here.

  Like it began. In the rain. Blood mixing with water. Unspoken anger. Another man waiting for me to decide his fate.

  I was ready to kill a man then.

  Do I still have that within me?

  Or have I changed?

  The rain batters down. We’re both soaked through. The water rivulets down my face, gets in my eyes, obscures my vision.

  Over the noise, the old man says, ‘This is what you wanted all along. Do it.’

  I lock my arm. Committing. My fingers snake around the grip, index extending to the guard.

  The gun trembles.

  I think to myself, that after all this time, I have to do this. For everyone the old man killed. Directly. Indirectly. For every injustice carried out in his name, under his orders.

  Whether or not the old anger burns, from a pure and pragmatic point of view the world is better off without men like David Burns.

  He deserves this.

  No trial. No jail time. No cushy, gentle death as a guest at Her Majesty’s pleasure. No, not for David Bloody Burns. He was always going to die like this. Maybe not with me at the other end of the gun, but someone. Someone who hated him. Who understood what they were doing. Whose actions were justified. Maybe not in the eyes of the law, but under a grander and greater kind of justice.

  The old man isn’t afraid. Acting like he welcomes death. And maybe he does. Maybe he’s prepared himself for a moment like this. Or maybe he knows that, just a few moments ago, he stepped over the line. Going from a man who could justify what he had done to a man who committed violent acts for no other reason than it was in his nature.

  Or maybe he’s banking on the fact that he knows I won’t pull the trigger.

  After all, I’m the good guy. The man in the white hat. For all my flaws, I have always tried to do the right thing. The only men I ever killed, I killed them because they were threatening my life and the lives of those closest to me.

  At least in part.

  So what is my justification here?

  Why do I have to kill David Burns? Why is there no other choice?

  Seven years ago I shot a man. Knocked him off his feet. Watched him die in the mud and the rain, his blood diluting as it sopped through his shirt.

  He deserved to die.

  Same as the old man does now.

  Yes. David Burns deserves to die.

  I can end all the years of misery and heartache. To gain some kind of justice for all the people caught in his sick pool of self-indulgence and greed.

  So do it.
/>   Do it, you fuck.

  Do it!

  My finger finds the trigger.

  He remains on his knees with his head bowed. ‘I didn’t kill Ernie. I didn’t kill your fiancée. I didn’t bring you to this. But if it makes you feel better …’ Is he taunting me?

  I had it all back. Had it together. Was moving on. Rebuilding my fucking life. And what was it that pulled me back down? Back to this?

  David Bloody Burns.

  Always David Burns.

  The albatross around my fucking neck.

  I see it, now.

  Everything leads here.

  High above the city. Surrounded by the dead and dying. Blood diluting in the rain.

  Making this choice.

  All I have to do is squeeze.

  All I have to do is squeeze. And it ends.

  Tonight.

  In blood.

  It’s so easy.

  He lifts his head. Maybe thinking that I won’t do it. That I won’t kill him.

  He thinks he knows me. He has manipulated me every step of the way.

  So here, now, I have to make a choice.

  No hesitation.

  Trust your instincts, McNee.

  He starts to smile.

  I squeeze.

  ONE

  Three days earlier

  Findo broke down the door, roared on through. Shouting. ‘Rise and shine, fucking cuntybaws!’

  I followed behind. Cricket bat in hand. Mask over my face. Full on frightener. Yelling at the top of my lungs. The adrenaline pumped. Didn’t make me feel good.

  But this is what we were paid to do. Who we were paid to be. The heavies. The bad guys. ‘The welcome wagon,’ as the old man had said.

  At the time, I had tried not to let my distaste show. This was my life, now. This was who I had sold my soul to become. And even if it was a lie on my part, I found it hard to justify what I did in the name of my cover. Knowing that others were doing worse, that the old man was treating me with kid gloves.

  This kind of job made me sick to my gut. Going against everything I had once been. Making a mockery of the copper I used to be, the investigator I had become. Knowing what I was doing, the reasons I was doing it. I wanted to walk away every time, throw my hands in the air and say, ‘Fuck you.’ But I couldn’t do that. I was in too deep. I had no choice but to pretend like everything was OK.

  Pass the bloody Oscar.

  Or maybe not, because the real reason I felt sick was that I knew some part of me was enjoying this. How else could I have convinced the old man of my apparent change of heart? Of my willingness to give up everything I had to work with him?

  Some skinny prick with a bad case of bedhead poked his head out from one of the rooms. Findo went for him with the pipe. The others pushed past me. There were five of us, but me and Findo were the go-to-guys. The ones in charge. We said how fast, how hard, how far.

  Findo always wanted to push farther.

  I was the cautious one.

  For oh-so-many reasons.

  One of the reasons the old man decided to pair us up. He liked the idea of opposites working together, figuring there was some kind of balance in that.

  I winced beneath my mask. My breath bounced back against me under the thick wool. My chin was developing a rash. I was being stifled. Wanted to push up the fabric, take in a gasp of pure air; a drowning man breaking the surface of the ocean. But I repressed the instinct, focussed on the task at hand.

  I pushed past the rammie that was breaking out around me, made for the room at the end of the hall. Kicked at the door. Got nothing but a sore leg. Went for the shoulder. Got it open, let the momentum pull me inside.

  The fat man roared at me as I stumbled into the room. He was naked from the waist up, hairy like an orang-utan that hadn’t got the hang of shaving. His jowls wobbled as he screamed. He had been trying to do up his belt, had given up on that when I blundered into the room with my size tens. He ran for me, head down. I figured I knew how a matador might feel. Every footstep from the fat man measured on the Richter scale.

  I sidestepped, and he carried on past me. His momentum slammed him into the wall. I swear, the whole building shook.

  I swung the bat and caught him in the kidneys before he could straighten up.

  All the same, he stayed standing. Turned. And grinned. His mass had absorbed the impact like it was little more than a swat from a rolled up tea towel.

  I didn’t pause. Swung back the other way, curving up, cracking the side of his face. He screamed something I couldn’t understand and went down on his knees.

  I allowed myself a little grin. Said, ‘This is your eviction notice.’ Worrying that maybe I was getting a little method about all of this. Too much into character.

  ‘Fuck you.’ The accent was strong, but the words were clear. ‘Fuck you, you Scottish fucking prick. Cunt!’

  First thing you should learn when you need a second language: how to curse.

  Lard-boy had it down good.

  Findo came through, finished what I had started by smacking the fuck’s skull with his pipe. The big guy went down. Still breathing, though.

  Thank Christ.

  Some things you have to do. Others, you’d rather not find out whether you can.

  ‘Real shitehole, this place,’ Findo said. ‘Fuck knows why the old man gives a crap.’

  He gave a crap because the Hungarians were stepping on his territory. Listen to his rants, he sounded more and more like the Daily Mail for criminals; talking all the time about how these foreigners were coming in, taking territory that belonged to men like him. What were they thinking, the old man would ask, opening up our borders like this? We were letting in a tidal wave of greedy, morally bankrupt arseholes.

  Aye, like I didn’t see the irony in his words. But I never said anything. Keeping the old man sweet was my job description. He had to trust me. Want to keep me close. That was the deal. That was the end game.

  That was why I was breaking into apparently empty warehouses and cracking the skulls of fat Hungarians while trying to figure out how to stop my psychopathic colleague from actually killing anyone.

  ‘Anybody else at home?’ Findo yelled. ‘This is your fucking wake up call!’

  Findo Gaske. The psychopath in question.

  Hard man. Gym freak. Clean-living thug. Way he told it, he used to have a bit of a habit, jacked it in when he realized you were better off as a supplier rather than a user. He’d always been a big guy, and when he went to David Burns to ask for employment, what he got was a gig smashing heads. As the old man said, ‘Some pricks, you just look at them and you know what their skills are.’ Turned out Findo was better than even the old man expected. If you get a job like that, it helps to enjoy it.

  His capacity for violence was one of the reasons Findo had more responsibility than I did. Just because the old man liked me didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of my moral compass. Hell, we’d fought about it more than enough in the past. He was probably still trying to figure out just how I had readjusted my morality that I would come to him looking for work.

  Findo had been working for Burns for a couple of years. Earned his way into a position of trust. Authority within the organization. That big head had a few brain cells working. He was more than just muscle. He knew when to deal out the pain and when to hold back. But he always preferred it when holding back was the second option.

  It was no wonder he didn’t take to me. Findo had worked to get where he was. I had waltzed in on the old man’s say-so.

  ‘Hear that?’

  I listened.

  ‘Bit heavy for rats, aye?’

  He had a point.

  The noise came from a back room. As we walked through, the bare boards creaked beneath our booted feet. I’d taken to wearing steel toes for gigs like this. Bit of advice that Findo gave me. You never knew what you were going to find, and if you had to give out a kicking, you wanted it to hurt.

  Also, wearing steel toes meant less broken foot
-bones if the thing you were kicking happened to hurt back.

  Working an undercover gig, you don’t want any cause for suspicion. What you want is to blend in. And sometimes that means doing things you found distasteful. Like maybe giving a guy a kicking when he didn’t deserve it. Or beating down some naked fat fuck with a cricket bat. And pretending like you’re enjoying it.

  TWO

  ‘You understand?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I know you feel like I manoeuvred you into this … but believe me, you were the only logical choice. And I needed someone who already had connections to the old man. Someone I could drop in fast. Someone David Burns would be pre-disposed to trust. He always treated you like a wayward son. You’ve admitted that yourself.’

  ‘Care to tell me why you needed someone so fast?’

  Sandy Griggs steepled his long fingers, looked at me over them. His red hair was tousled. Not out of any sense of style, but because he had other things on his mind than how he looked. There was shabby-chic and then there was simply shabby. Accounted for the wrinkled shirt and jacket he was wearing, too.

  We were in my offices at 1 Courthouse Square. Eight months before Findo Gaske beat the shit out of a fat Hungarian man, using a lead pipe.

  I had a knot in my stomach. In hindsight, bad as it felt, it probably wasn’t tight enough. But I wasn’t stupid enough to not be afraid of what was coming. Says a lot that agreeing to go undercover with the old man seemed the least dangerous of my options.