iBoy (29 page)

“Nothing,” Ellman said. “Everything’s cool.” He looked over at O’Neil. “You didn’t find anything, did you?”

Still staring at Tweet, O’Neil shook his head. “Not yet . . . but I haven’t checked the other rooms yet.”

“Don’t bother,” Ellman told him. “It’s all sorted.”

“What do you mean?”

Ellman ignored him, turning back to me. “Do you have to actually touch people to do that? I mean, can you do it from a distance?”

I hesitated for a moment, instinctively holding back.

Ellman said, “Don’t fucking
think
about it, just answer me.”

I sighed, realizing that there was no point in lying. If I told Ellman that I
could
zap from a distance, he’d want me to prove it. And I wouldn’t be able to. And if I told him that I wasn’t going to prove it, he’d hurt Lucy. So I had no choice but to tell him the truth.

“I can zap stuff from about three feet away,” I said. “No more.”

He nodded, watching as Tweet got to his feet.

“OK?” he asked him.

Tweet glared at me. “Yeah . . . yeah, I’m all right.”

Ellman grinned at him. “You don’t
look
all right.”

“I’m fine,” Tweet growled.

Ellman turned to me. “Yo said he tried to stab you, but you did something to his knife.”

I nodded. “It’s the electricity . . . it gives me some kind of force field.”

“Yeah? So if Tweet wanted to smack you in the head for what you’ve just done to him, what’d happen?”

“He’d get hurt even more.”

Ellman smiled. “You bulletproof, too?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “No one’s tried to shoot me yet.”

Ellman looked at me for a moment or two, his eyes seeming to gaze right through me, and then O’Neil called out, “She’s waking up,” and we both looked over at him. He was leaning round the doorway, peering down the hallway.

“The old woman,” he said, turning back to Ellman. “She’s coming round.”

“Tie her up,” Ellman said. “Get her out the way.”

As O’Neil nodded and headed off down the hallway, I had to force myself not to say anything, not to do anything . . . not to give in to the murder in my heart.

I looked at Ellman. He was just sitting there now, smoking a cigarette, staring at nothing, his face a mask of concentration . . .

I glanced over at Lucy. Blood from the cut on her face had dripped onto her nightgown, and her face was pale and frightened, but as she looked back at me in the silence, I could see a hidden strength in her eyes, some kind of faith . . . a belief that, despite everything that had happened — and everything that
was
happening and could possibly happen — we’d both get out of this in the end.

She truly believed it.

I smiled at her, trying to show her that I shared her belief.

Even though I didn’t.

“It’s a shame,” Ellman said.

I looked at him. “What?”

He sighed. “You and me . . . we could really have been something together. With your powers and my experience . . . I mean, fuck Crow Town, we could have had anywhere we wanted. We could have made fucking
millions
. . .” He looked disdainfully at me. “But you could never do it, could you? You’re too fucking weak. Too fucking
righteous
.” He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t work with that. It’d drive me mad.” He sighed. “Like I said, it’s a shame . . . but business is business.” He smiled at me. “That’s all it is, you know . . . all this . . . the old woman, the bitch over there . . . you . . . it’s all just business.”

I didn’t even bother looking at him.

He sniffed. “Yeah, well . . . we’d best get on with it.” He stood up and called out, “Yo? You finished in there?”

O’Neil called back from Gram’s room, “Yeah, just a minute . . .”

“What you doing?”

“Nothing, just looking around . . .”

“Leave it. We’re going.”

“There’s some nice stuff in here. Jewelry, a laptop —”

“I said fucking
leave
it!” Ellman barked. Then he turned to Tweet. “Call Gunner, make sure we’re clear, then check the corridor.”

Tweet pulled a phone from his pocket, hit a button, and went out into the hallway. I listened in to the call and tracked it to another mobile in the square down below, somewhere near the entrance to the tower.

Yeah?

We’re coming out. Everything all right?

Yeah, it’s quiet.

“Get up,” Ellman said to me.

I got up.

Tweet came back in. “It’s all clear.”

Ellman nodded. “You go first. Hash, you follow him.” He turned to O’Neil, who was standing in the doorway. “You follow Hash, OK?”

O’Neil nodded.

Ellman said to me, “You follow Yo. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be right behind you. Hash?”

“Yeah?” Hashim said.

“How’s it going with that gun?”

“My fucking hand hurts.”

Ellman said to me, “You hear that? His hand hurts. It’s been taped to the gun for about an hour now, so his finger’s probably getting a bit numb. It won’t take much for him to pull the trigger. And it’ll be your fault if he does. You got that?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.”

“All right, let’s go.”

Here are comedy and tragedy . . . Here is melodrama . . . Here are unvarnished emotions. Here also is a primitive democracy that cuts through all the conventional social and racial discriminations. The gang, in short, is life . . .

Frederic Thrasher

The Gang
(1927)

It was 03:15:52 when we left the flat and walked down the corridor to the lift. There was no one around. The tower felt cold and empty. A predawn silence pervaded the air, adding to the sense of emptiness, and the sound of our footsteps echoed dully in the stillness. As we approached the lift — which had been jammed open with an iron bar — I wondered if this was going to be my final journey . . .

My final time in this corridor.

My final time in the lift.

My final time in the concrete splendor of good old Compton House.

I smiled to myself, thinking —
well, it could have been a lot worse, couldn’t it? Of course, it could have been a whole lot better, too . . .

As we got into the lift and the doors closed, I glanced at Lucy. The picnic we’d had just a few hours earlier seemed to belong to a different world now, a world that existed a thousand years ago. And while, at the time, it had felt like the beginning of something between me and Lucy, it was now starting to feel like it was all there was ever going to be: the beginning, the middle, the end. But even so, if this
was
to be my final journey —
our
final journey — that brief time we’d shared on the roof together would still be the best time of my life.

Yeah
, I thought, smiling at Lucy,
it could have been a whole lot worse.

“What are you smiling about?” Hashim sneered at me.

I looked at him. “Not much. Just thinking how lucky I am, that’s all.”

“Lucky?” he said, shaking his head. “You fucking freak.”

As the lift reached the ground floor, I said to Ellman, “What have you done with Lucy’s mum and her brother?”

He didn’t say anything, he didn’t even bother looking at me. He just waited, his eyes taking in everything, as Tweet checked out the ground floor, making sure there was no one around. Then, after a signal from Tweet, Ellman gave Hashim the nod, and Hashim moved out of the lift with Lucy. O’Neil followed them. Ellman looked at me, jerking his head, and I followed O’Neil, with Ellman close behind me.

Outside the tower, two black Range Rovers with tinted windows were waiting by the doors.

Now that I was sure we were leaving the tower, I sent the text that I’d already written in my head to the local police and ambulance services. The text read:
URGENT!!! PLEASE HELP!!! CONNIE HARVEY, AGE 54, HAS BEEN ATTACKED AND HAS SUFFERED A SERIOUS HEAD INJURY. SHE NEEDS IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. SHE HAS BEEN TIED UP AND LEFT IN HER ROOM BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANTS AT FLAT 4, 23RD FLOOR, COMPTON HOUSE, CROW LANE ESTATE, CROW LANE, LONDON SE15 6CG. MRS. MICHELLE WALKER AND HER SON BEN MAY ALSO NEED ASSISTANCE AT FLAT 6 ON 30TH FLOOR. THIS IS NOT A HOAX. PLEASE HURRY.

The two Range Rovers both had their engines running. While Tweet and Hashim and Lucy headed for the one in front, Ellman told me to follow O’Neil to the other one. I watched over my shoulder as Hashim and Lucy got awkwardly into the back of the first one, with Tweet getting into the front passenger’s seat, then Ellman opened the back door of our Range Rover and told me to get in.

I got in.

He got in beside me.

O’Neil sat in the front passenger seat.

The guy in the driver’s seat had his hood up, and all I could see of his face in the rearview mirror was a pair of dark glasses and a raggedy twist of beard on his chin. From his phone records, I knew that he was Gunner.

“All right?” he grunted at Ellman.

Ellman ignored him, watching the car in front pull away. Then he just said, “Go.”

We turned right out of Compton and headed south along Crow Lane, both cars cruising along at a steady 40 mph — not fast enough to get stopped, not too slow to attract attention. Ellman lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat, looking totally relaxed and at ease. I gazed out through the window for a while, watching the estate pass by — the kids’ playground, the low-rises, the towers . . . Fitzroy House, Gladstone, Heath. There were a few people around — some gang kids hanging around the towers, one or two passing cars — but they might as well have been on another planet for all the good they were to me. I didn’t need telling again that Hashim would shoot Lucy if I tried anything. So I gave up thinking about it.

“Where are we going?” I asked Ellman as we passed Heath House and carried on heading south.

“You’ll find out when we get there,” Ellman said.

I looked at him. “How did you know it was me?”

“Eh?”

“iBoy . . . how did you know it was me?”

He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Not really . . .” I grinned at him. “But if this was a James Bond movie, this would be the perfect moment for the mad supervillain to show Bond how clever he is by unnecessarily explaining everything to him.”

Ellman smiled. “Yeah, just before he tries to kill the fucker.”

“And Bond escapes.”

He looked at me. “Real life ain’t the movies.”

“True.”

He smiled. “I mean, you think I’m going to hang you from a rope over a pool of fucking sharks or something?”

“Probably not.”

He laughed. “And you’re not exactly James fucking Bond, are you?”

“I suppose not . . . what about you?”

“What
about
me?”

I smiled at him. “Are you the mad supervillain?”

“Yeah, fucking
right
. I’m Hell-Man . . . I’m the Devil —”

“And I’m iBoy.”

He looked at me, genuinely amused.

I said, “So, how did you find out?”

He laughed. “It was the kid, the bitch’s brother . . . what’s his name?”

“Ben?”

“Yeah. He told Troy and Jermaine that when you were trying to throw Yo out the window, and his sister was watching, he heard her whispering something to herself.” Ellman shook his head. “The little shit thought she said
eBay
, but then Yo here remembered one of his crew calling you
iBoy
a couple of weeks ago . . . you know, like he was just fucking around with you at the time. So then we started thinking about it, looking into it, you know . . . and here we are.” He looked at me. “Satisfied?”

“Yeah.”

“You ready to be strung up over the sharks now?”

“No problem.”

He grinned at me for a moment, then he turned away and spent some time looking out the car window, checking all around, making sure that everything was OK.

“You see anything?” he said to Gunner.

“No, it’s cool,” Gunner said.

“OK, take the right by the bridge and head back north. Yo, call Marek and let him know.”

As O’Neil called the car in front and passed on the directions to the driver (who I guessed was Marek), Ellman leaned back in his seat again and carried on smoking his cigarette.

I gazed out the window for a while, trying to work out where we were going, but all I could tell was that we seemed to be going round in circles. I tuned in to the GPS signal inside my head, logged on to Google Maps, and let my iBrain do its stuff.

“So, anyway,” Ellman said casually, turning back to me. “You’re Georgie Harvey’s boy, yeah?”

I didn’t say anything, I just stared at him, wondering how the hell he knew my mum’s name.

He smiled. “I don’t suppose you remember her much, do you? You must have been about . . . what, six months old when she died?” He looked at me, smoking his cigarette, waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he took another drag on his cigarette, flipped it out the window, and went on. “Georgie was really something, you know. Did anyone ever tell you that? She was one hot piece of ass. Feisty, too.” He grinned at me. “Shit, man, that bitch could fight.”

I was so confused, so utterly stunned by what he was saying, I could barely breathe, let alone speak.

“What’s the matter?” Ellman said, grinning at me. “Didn’t you know about me and your mummy?”

I heard O’Neil snickering, but I didn’t take my eyes off Ellman. I
couldn’t
take my eyes off him. “You knew my mum?” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he said, leering, “I
knew
her . . . in fact, I was the first guy that Georgie ever
knew
. Of course, there were plenty more after me —”

“You’re lying,” I said.

He looked at me. “You think so?”

I nodded. “You never knew my mum.”

He laughed again. “I’m just telling you the truth, that’s all.”

“The truth?” I said, sneering at him. “What do you know about the truth?”

He stopped laughing suddenly and stared at me, his eyes dead cold. “I’ll tell you what I know,” he said icily. “Your mother was a fucked-up little whore who’d do anything for a line of coke, I know that. And I know how much effort it took me to break that bitch down and get her out on the streets where she belonged . . . and then what does she do? After everything I’ve fucking done for her? She gets herself knocked up and says she wants out . . . she wants out of the game . . . she wants to get
clean
, for fuck’s sake . . .”

Ellman paused for a moment, his eyes drifting away from me, and all I could do was sit there, totally numbed, unable to digest what he was telling me . . . or, at least, what I
thought
he was telling me. It was simply too painful to believe.

“Yeah, well,” Ellman said, his voice quite casual again. “She got what she deserved.”

“What?”

“She knew what’d happen if she left me. I mean, no one leaves
me
. No one. And she knew that. She knew what I had to do.”

“What . . . ?” I said, my voice barely audible. “What did you have to do?”

Ellman looked surprised, as if the answer was obvious. “I had to kill her.”

“Kill her?”