Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (21 page)

‘
Christ mate, thanks. You know I’m going to owe you my life mate after this.’ I just shrugged.

‘
What else was it you wanted to know?’

‘
You said there was gear that had been dropped. Tell me about that, did it all land OK?’

‘
Seemed to, it ended up just past the cross and all the packaging seem to have survived.’

‘
So did you see it? What was the gear?’

‘
No. It was still all in its crates when we were at the clubhouse. Dazza had the guys get them out and then he told me to take the van and make sure I lost the pallet and the shutes so they wouldn’t be found. So I stuck them in my garage and had myself a bit of a bonfire at the weekend. But I do think I know where the stuff is.’

‘
Where?’

And he told me.

*

I couldn
’t afford to be spotted so I needed some wheels that wouldn’t be recognised. I called Sharon and told her to borrow one of her mate’s cars for the next evening.

‘
Is it gonna be OK? I wouldn’t want to get them in any bother.’

‘
It’s OK, it’ll be fine, nothing to worry about. Just a Sunday evening drive in the country. The motor’ll come back completely clean.’

‘
Promise?’

‘
Promise.’

‘
Alright then. I’ll call Julie and see what I can do.’

I took the back road, sweeping wide out to the west before it dropped down into the valley running south into the hills parallel with my normal route up and over the top of the moors. Eventually I turned off onto a small side road that snaked its way up into the hills, following the winding course of a steep sided river valley, before at its end rising up to join with the clubhouse road at a junction about half a mile past its entrance. So just before it started to climb I pulled over into the shadow of a fi
eld gate entrance about a quarter of a mile before the gate to the club’s drive and killed the lights. I pulled a small but powerful torch and my jemmy out of the bag I had bunged on the back seat of the little Peugeot 106 that no one from the club would recognise if they noticed it parked up. But to start with the moonlight would be enough to let me find my way.

It was Wibble who had given it away apparently. He had been whing
eing on the next time Billy had seen him at the clubhouse. He was all, ‘It was alright for you, you bastard, you got to fuck off with the van. Left me, Butcher, and the boys to hump the gear down the hill.’

‘
Down the hill?’

‘
Yep, that’s what he said.’

‘
Into the woods?’

‘
That’s what I’m guessing.’

We
’d both grown up out this way. As kids we had walked and cycled and explored. And one of the places that we’d camped had been the woods across the field and the road below what was now our clubhouse. And so we both knew what was there.

The land that came with the
clubhouse was a huge slice of the hillside up from the road and past the clubhouse to where a dry stone wall and rickety gate marked the end of the field line and the start of the moors proper. Below the clubhouse the land stretched down to the road, and then down again below the road towards the lower road that followed the snaking course of the shallow rocky river. The stretch between the two roads was heavily wooded and so as a club we never used it much, except as a handy additional source of firewood for party bonfires. It was one of the regular chores for the strikers to be sent down there with axes to chop stuff up to make sure that there was always a ready stash in hand for the summer parties.

I climbed over the gate and was instantly hidden from the road by the darkness of the trees beyond. I hadn
’t been here for years but I was sure I would remember the way easily enough as I headed along the overgrown remnants of the old mine path, two huge piles of tailings growing on either side of me. Opening some crates when I got there was going to be interesting.

As I felt my way through the trees on that old familiar path it seemed to me that t
oo much business, too much serious money had rotted what we were about. I think Billy saying that he had thought I was there to kill him had shocked me more than I had realised.

That wasn
’t what we were about. Not in my book.

O
K, so back in the old days, Gyppo, Billy and I had been in business, we had dealt a bit of blow and a bit of whizz, but the main thing about being in the club had been about belonging, about being with your mates.

Now though, through
Dazza I was involved in serious dosh and serious shit, and when the stakes had become as high as this, the game had got serious for everyone involved. It was becoming play or be played. How had it come to this, I wondered, that our loyalty to our club and our bros could end up with Billy being scared I’d come to kill him?

But in reality, it was inevitable
, I knew. I had seen it ever since the outset. And so ironically had Billy, although he had always assumed that he would be on the inside rather than out in the cold. But with too much cash available to the top guys in the club from escalating into serious business, it was no wonder that the old solidarity had rotted out of the club. What we were about had been perverted. Loyalty was no longer a two-way street, but something that a ruthless inner clique could exploit for their own profit.

Dazza
had needed to clean house alright. But it hadn’t been for the good of the club. It had been for the good of his deal, it had been to ensure the coast was clear for his big scheme, whatever it was.

I had reached the low opening of the mine entrance.
Right then, I thought, now we’ll see.

The hills round here were riddled with holes from lead mining that had gone back hundreds of years. There were shafts hundreds of feet deep which had generally been capped off with concrete for safety to stop sheep and people falling in. Then there were the old drift mines, levels going straight into the hillsides. The more public ones were generally fenced off or had metal grill
es across them to keep wandering Joe Public out. But there were still plenty of unblocked openings to underground tunnels if you knew where to look. And we knew that one of these was in the woods.

Billy and I had
joked with Dazza that this was one of the reasons that The Brethren had been interested in our territory. Holes could be useful.

We were right, but for the wrong reasons.

Torch on, I splashed into the entrance. These mines were always dug running slightly upwards into the hillside so that water would naturally drain out and even today a continual stream of cold water flowed out of the dark entrance and cut its way down the hillside to join the river below.

The crates were there
as I had expected, piled up about forty or fifty feet in from the entrance. They were at the first junction where the tunnel divided into two at right angles where the old timers had started to follow two separate veins through the surrounding bedrock limestone and had left a little raised platform at the junction that was therefore dryer than the floor.

I gave a sigh of relief.

I knew there had been a chance that Dazza would have had them moved, but I hadn’t thought it had been a big one. After all, if it was Billy talking that Dazza was concerned about, then as far as Dazza was aware, Billy didn’t know where they were and getting guys together to move them somewhere else would have seemed more risky than leaving them where they were.

They were safe enough, no one ever came here. There were nutty guys who liked exploring these old holes but this was on private property and there
’s no way that the club would have ever given anyone permission to explore the woods, Dazza or no Dazza.

As I suspected
, the crates had all already been opened once to check the contents, so no one would notice my jemmy marks if they came back to look at them.

I fitted my wrecking bar under the lid of the first one and prised it up.

‘Oh shit!’ I said out loud. And then I prised the lid off another, and then another, not quite believing at first what I was seeing.

B
y the time I’d finished, it was quite a haul.

The first and second crate I had opened were
AK47s. But there was more.

A crate of longer barrelled rifles with telescopic sights
.

A
couple of boxes of handguns with matching silencers.

Ammunition.

Military style walkie talkies.

What I assumed was a supply of plastic explosives.

But the pièce de résistance had to be the two RPG7s with a supply of rockets.

So that
’s what the dosh to Sergei’s accounts had bought.

As I stood and stared
around me at what I’d uncovered I gave a low whistle, ‘What’s he planning? To start his own fucking war?’

I toyed with the idea of helping myself to a gun but decided it was better to leave it be.

But then, I asked myself, as I started to carefully replace all the lids so that no one could tell I’d been there, if he’s dealing with The Brethren’s main enemies The Rebels, then who the hell’s it going to be against?

9              THE TURN

Billy wasn’t at Prayers on Monday. I assumed he was
following Dazza’s instructions and just laying low.

Early on Wednesday afternoon
Dazza picked me up from home in a black BMW.

‘
Get in, we’re going for a drive.’

‘
New car?’

‘
Hired for the day.’

He clearly wasn
’t in a chatty mood.

We only went across town, climbing up the back road. Uneasily I realised we were heading towards Billy
’s place, a feeling confirmed when Dazza turned off into the estate of detached executive homes high on a hill overlooking the town where Billy had bought himself a four bedroomed house with the cash from his dealing. We parked up a little way before we got to the house but from where we could see the front door and Dazza killed the engine. Stay there he said, hopping out of the driver’s door and into the back seat.

A moment later Butcher appeared from out of a footpath on the other side of the road and came strolling along the pavement to slide in behind the wheel beside me.

‘OK?’ asked Dazza.

‘
OK,’ said Butcher, without looking round.

‘
Now what?’ I asked, wondering why Butcher hadn’t taken off the pair of thin black leather riding gloves he was wearing.

‘
Now we wait,’ said Dazza

‘
Are we watching Billy?’

‘
What the fuck does it look like we’re doing? Now shut up will you?’

‘
That’s him,’ said Butcher about an hour later reaching for the car keys, as a hundred yards or so down the road Billy came out of his house and walked across the road to where his car was parked.

We edged out into the road behind his
car as he headed off round the corner and slipped out into the light traffic on the main road, taking up station a couple of cars behind him as he headed down the hill into town. Dazza and Butcher obviously wanted to keep close enough to see which way he was going but far enough back not to be spotted which was why I realised that he, or more likely someone on Dazza’s behalf, had hired, a car that Billy wouldn’t know.

‘
What are we looking for?’ I asked.

‘
He’s heading towards the cop shop isn’t he?’

‘
Oh come, on he’s just heading into town. He could be going anywhere.’ I said, although yes, he could be, I thought as he turned right at the junction at the bottom of the hill onto the main shopping street; or out to Enderdale.

We
turned right as well, still keeping our distance, but up ahead he was still just in sight, caught as the traffic bunched up again at the traffic lights. The cop shop was dead ahead across the lights, while left was out towards Enderdale and the clubhouse.

From where I was sitting in the stationary car I couldn
’t see whether he had any indicators going, although knowing Billy and how he drove a lack of them could mean anything or nothing. The lights changed to amber and then flicked to green. The car at the front of the queue pulled away straight ahead. Billy was second in line. I held my breath. Billy’s car moved forwards and then to my relief he pulled left and disappeared round the corner.

Most of the traffic headed straight over with only a couple following Billy. Butcher ran the lights just as they switched to red. The road wound round a couple of snaking bends as it worked its way slightly uphill so at first we couldn
’t see Billy ahead of us but Butcher gunned the car through the twists to catch up with the car ahead and as we eased round the last bend and onto the long first straight up out of the valley we could see Billy’s car about quarter of a mile ahead.