Cracking Up (22 page)

I heard Dog Sick shouting to us from the living-room. “You two are fucking gold dust. Sort yourselves out. Get a brewski. Go in the kitchen and grab them.”

We walked through the hallway and into the kitchen, reached into the big Yank fridge and grabbed a few bottles of Becks. A couple of bashmen were at the kitchen table, examining the hard, crystalline bricks of coke, a fair indication of truly high-level purity. A kilo bought in The Dam would usually be 80 percent pure, 90 if you were lucky, because it was diluted with a cow dewormer, levamisole. The bashers worked at it like mad scientists, bleach testing samples from each kilo, trying to detect any other impurities. Pure coke dissolves clearly; and so does levamisole, and it looks like pure coke too. Any other cutting agents turn a funny colour and sink to the bottom. They weighed it, cooked it until the additives sizzled away, revealing the weight of the pure flake when placed on the scales of a triple beam. Maybe I’d been a tad hasty by throwing two fingers up at the Chemistry teacher in secondary school and getting expelled.

We went into the front room to neck our beers while Parra kept a beady eye on the bashmen, standing over them with a Glock 9 tucked into the small of his back. Dog Sick was grinning and sprawled out on a real Italian leather sofa, flicking a half-smoked spliff of Dutch Isolator weed into an ashtray held by Cat sat next to him, declaring that he had it made and was going to get blitzed, fucking blitzed. He was tipsy on Grey Goose vodka and Red Bull, and planned to get some new ink in celebration. “All right, roll your trackie bottoms up,” said the inkman, a bald head nut with a full skull tattoo named Scratch. Dog Sick flicked his Havaianas flip-flop off, rolled his Armani Jeans trackie leg up over the knee and exposed his calf. In ballpoint pen, were written the words MONEY BAG$.

“So what mad shit do people get tattoos of?” he asked Scratch.

“One lad I did had the KFC logo tatt’ed. Instead of Colonel Sanders face though, he wanted Wayne Rooney. He reckoned he loved both of them - KFC and Rooney! This other lad had one done pissed up - a 3D tatt of Cheryl Cole holding a tampax coz when he was reborn he was going to come back as one of hers and get shoved up her meathole.”

Dog Sick chuckled. “Funny as fuck.”

“All right, mate. You up for this?” Scratch said.

“All day long, lad.”

Scratch fired up the needle, which began buzzing loud and clear.

This was Dog Sick’s first tattoo on his calfs, but he had lots of others. A load of tatts on his top half. Among them emblazoned in red on the inside of his left forearm $HININ $TAR; I NEVER HE$ITATE on the inside of the right forearm; across his beefed-up back in Khymer script were the words that translated as IF YOU DON’T GET WOT YOU WANT YOU BETTER WANT WOT YOU GET; and, in Gothic letters, across his belly, UNIQUE.

Scratch leaned in with the needle. Hip-hop played on the iTunes library, competing with the widescreen TV. He wrote the m, then the o. “How you getting on?” he asked.

“Sweet as!” Dog Sick said through gritted teeth. Next to him on the couch, his bird Cat was cracking up, loving it when Scratch did the g, hit a nerve. “Fuuuucka!” Dog Sick growled.

“Sorry, man. Nearly done,” Scratch said.

Scratch had a quick puff on the spliff while Dog Sick pulled himself together and then finished the job. “Thank fuck for that!” Dog Sick said.

He got up off the sofa just as his mobie went off. He picked up; it was his connection in Amsterdam and he wandered into the kitchen while chewing the fat on the phone. He’d purchased a cardboard box full of phones from a seller on eBay. He been using them all for THE BIZZO, and this one was for staying in touch with his peeps in The Dam. The sim cards were bought seperate and pre-paid, attached to no name, untraceable or so he thought. The models themselves were fucking ancient, network free Nokia 3100s that he refused to upgrade because he was somewhat suspicious after being followed by an unknown car at three in the morning a few weeks previously. The unmarked vehicle had been tailing him through the mostly deserted streets for a good hour and he’d been trying to shake it off, taking cues from Hollywood action fillums, but the car just kept popping up in his rearview mirror. Then the penny dropped: It was an obvious bizzie surveillance trick; his late-night movements were being tracked via his smartphone. Maybe it was his suspicious nature, but he really began to take notice when he was stopped for speeding in a red Hummer on the Wirral without a license and insurance. Despite searching the vehicle and finding fifty grand in twenty pound notes inside it, he wasn’t nicked - they let him drive off and that’s when he well and truly knew big brother was watching and that he was proper fucked.

Cat was wearing an expensive pink velour track suit, plastered in fake tan and busily engaged in her favourite activities: Tweeting, Facebooking on her iPhone and staring vacantly at QVC on the 50-inch Smart TV while toying with her nose piercing. “Why don’t you get a tatt, Ow-wee?” she said, momentarily distracted by my presence and attempting to wind me up with those collagen lips. “You need to man up?”

“Just don’t like needles!”

“Why’s that then? Coz they hurt?”

“Got spiked with smack when I was seven. Got rushed to the ozzie and was in a bad way for days. That’s why I hate needles.”

She looked genuinely shocked. “Sorry, Ow-wee! I didn’t know. Who’d do something like that to a little kid?”

“Me old feller. He was a scuzzy smackhead, suppose he thought it’d be a good laugh. Right fucking arl-arse he was.”

“Sounds sick in the head,” she said. “Did you get him back for it?”

“Nah! He topped himself. OD’d before I got out of ozzie.”

Dog Sick swaggered back into the room with a really nice piece of bling round his neck. A package had arrived with the powder and he opened it to find the fucking belter of a gold chain staring back at him. It was a complete suprise that had been gifted to him by the wholesale shifters in The Dam as a goodwill gesture. “Boss, them chops, lar,” I remarked; they were as thick as gym rope.

“Nine ounces of solid gold, our kid. The top lads in The Flat Place had it made for me. Gleaming, innit?”

“What’s the inches on that?”

“Thirty-fucking-six. Don’t think it looks over the top, do you?”

“Nah, man! Fucking quality, that is.”

“It’s a great feeling, Ow-wee, you know what I mean like? The way I grew up; I wouldn’t have any of this stuff, if it weren’t for the bizzo. The chain and all this, you know.”

Fair play to the geezer as he was a big fan of bling. He was buzzing like a kid at Christmas and, although the jewelery was a perfectly good enough reason in itself, in fact his eyes were shining with excitement at the plans he was making. He had been talking covertly in conspiratorial whispers and hushed tones in the quiet hallway with Parra. They’d been awaiting the arrival of the consignment from The Tulip Gaff and were now plotting and scheming over the next phase of the operation. They both had that look; it’s a look I’d seen many times before in the run-up to doing a big job; it’s a look that can mean only one thing - money! In the kitchen, the bashmen were double dancing on the kilos with benzocaine, I could hear the Magi-Mix fluffing it up and then the hydraulic press compressing the powdered mix into blocks. They would spend the whole night preparing and packing the goods ready for the big deal that was about to be pulled off. The Stoke contingent were waiting somewhere in that sodden urban urinal known as Hanley to get their idle hands on the devil dust. They had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the big bit of the white gold dust because it had looked a pretty good proposition. Spermy had been desperate to get this deal sorted, handling his end of the business in HMP Altcourse receiving phone calls and passing on vital messages about THE DEAL to all the parties concerned because Dog Sick had promised to bankroll his escape if everything went to plan. Dog Sick had at last set up this money-spinner and was now waiting to get his cock sucked. The final move would be arranging a convoy of cars. Dobber, Sinkie and myself would be in the Honda leading the way with Dome, Melt and Kushie following in another vehicle as a form of back-up. The day of the deal going down was imminent, the following day in fact.

I got off to Sinkie’s flat. We both needed to get our heads down after travelling all that way from Holland and get some rest before we made our way back down to the Potteries. There was some nervousness about being tailed by the bizzies because Dog Sick was sure they were lurking in the shadows somewhere. In the event we had no trouble and the journey down there on the busy M6 passed without incident. I enjoyed the ride since it took my mind off Caspar because I’d had a sleepless night stressing about how I was going to break the news to his sister. When we got to Hanley we pulled up outside a bumfuck council house, the local lads welcomed us with open arms and we all went inside and did the handover. I managed to get on to the fact that they were slightly pissed off with us because we had not taken the risk of bringing down some bangers but the deal went down smoothly. The dosh was put in the stash spot and we were away with big buzzing grins of relief and heartfelt promises to do it all again soon.

31.

On the way back I went over and over what I was going to say to Caspar’s sister, Giselle. The news I was bringing was totally crushing and she was going to blame it all on me and go ballistic, I knew it. No way could I have done anything for Caspar; not the way it all went down. He was my mate and I didn’t like to see him locked up especially in some far-flung land. Fucking hell, what else could I have done to help him in those circumstances? But it was with a great deal of shame on my conscience that I we stopped off at her house on the way back to break the news of him being banged up abroad. We pulled up in the Honda outside the house and I told Sinkie and Dobber to stay put as I exited the motor and made for the front door with a sizeable bung Dog Sick had given me to keep Giselle ticking over and sweet in the absence of Caspar. As I entered the house I could hear anguish in women’s voices and hysterical sobbing coming from the front room. There had been a dreaded knock on the door, bringing totally shocking and devastating news - their brother Mikey was dead. Blown to pieces by an IED, stepping right on one during a routine patrol in Helmand province in Afghanistan. She was screaming, hysterical, eyes frantically darting from one of her friends to the next as she cried out for someone to tell her it wasn’t true. She was shattered and trapped in a crippling moment of epic and acute grief. Sobbing her heart out uncontrollably, rivers of tears running down her cheeks as pain and anguish twisted her face. She had massive bumps on her head where she’d been flailing about like a whirling dervish, thumping her head against the living-room wall. I didn’t know what to say to her and I knew that deep down there wasn’t much I could have said or done to lessen the blow because the girl’s poor heart was being violently ripped out of her chest. She cried out for Caspar and all the others in the room looked at me. Fuck! I’d never felt so fucking bad in all my life. I just blurted it out and she began shouting her fucking head off at me. “I told Cas not to go there WITH YOU! He wouldn’t listen and now you’ve got him locked up.”

I felt like a total slime ball, like a shitty little low life scumbag, and wanted to implode on the spot. She was laying some more fucks into me and there was more screaming as I hastily beat a cowardly retreat. I felt sick with the knowledge that I’d forced Caspar into the failed criminal caper and now the kid was rotting in jail and didn’t have a clue about his brother’s end. What a fucking prick! A no-good rat in a shit-stinking sewer.

Later that night back in the confines of a mates spare room I banged my head with my hands in regret. I decided to smoke some draw. I couldn’t have made a bigger mistake. I thought about Mikey and about the death thing. I’d had my own close calls as a result of gangster politics and wondered how the fuck I’d managed to dodge the bullets, survive by the skin of my teeth and stay alive. My head was in bits, I smoked more puff and fell into a kip. I had THE NIGHTMARE, the same mad one as always about being chased and the mad dash up the stairwell of the block of flats, hurdling steps frantically, determined to reach the shining light on the top landing. The blood chilling shape shifter was breathing down my neck all the way up the stairs then, luckily, I snapped out of it before the inevitable conclusion and woke up with sweat oozing out of every pore, my heart thumping loudly in my chest, feet twitching where I’d dreamt I was legging it in my sleep. I lit another spliff and put the duvet over over my head, as I tried desperately to chill the fuck out because I felt like I was cracking up, suffering some kind of PTSD being as I was always in the firing line as a street solja. The draw seemed like the only way to blot out the anguish and angry demons running riot in my fucked-up brain. My thoughts returned to Mikey being torn in half and I suddenly realised my face was wet with tears.

32.

Spermy couldn’t wait any longer. The nick was doing his fucking nut in; it was pure torture. His court date was looming and the escape day was coming round slowly because it took about ten days in all to organize and get everything together: the motors, a sledgehammer, bolt cutters and the shooters. And not forgetting the small matter of a fake passport and money. Also, it was a very ambitious scheme that needed a lot of forward planning. Routes had to be studied, long hours were spent in deep conversation discussing the various merits of different tactics. we spent hours geeing each other up, completely focused on the task in hand and straining at the leash to get on with the manouvres. In the meantime, I was busy texting Spermy as we formed a plan for the big breakout. He had to get out of that stinking bumfuck of a place and the escape day came around eventually. The brazen snatch squad were gathered and waiting on a phone call. At nine in the morning, Spermy called us on the key fob phone that the fat fucking screw had slipped him inside. Fucking hell, this was it, I thought. It was time and our crack extraction team was dispatched to get him out of the grasp of G4S. I was teamed up with Dobber because he was a buckshee bastard with a commendable streetwise head on him for his tender years. He was the only lad I could possibly have pulled it off with, that is without the situation digressing into some fucking huge shambles; it’s not easy unceremoniously smashing up a prison van, ripping your best mate out of the back of it and legging it to a waiting car in rush-hour traffic, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.