by Harry Crooks
“Put the fucking phone down!” Caspar yelled at a woman who was talking on her mobile phone when we ran in. With her arms outstretched and her body lying on the ground, she slowly closed her phone, keeping her hands in open sight. The two other lads headed straight to the cases that displayed the watches and gold necklaces. They knew exactly where to go and what they were looking for because Dog Sick had genned us up on the layout.
Fuck me, all of a sudden, one of the women, dinky and getting on a bit, got up off the floor and waded into one of the lads. She was giving him a barrage of foul-mouthed abuse and battering him with her handbag. The fearless would-be wonder woman was obviously in no mood to be a compliant victim and flew into a civic rage with the intentions of putting a stop to our criminal enterprise. Not that old chestnut, I thought. Please don’t pull that stunt on us now. That’s all we need.
I barked at her to shut up, snarled at her for creating and in the end was faced with no other option but to switch my grip on the burner to the barrel, lift it up and smash it down on the top of her skull, vicious like. Her eyes rolled around in their sockets and a set of false teeth flew out of her gob, the knees gave way and she collapsed on the spot. It was birdies tweeting around the head time and she’d pissed her bloomers. Warm rivers of blood streamed down her face, the stupid fucking bitch and her stupid heroic blood. She was groaning and barely conscious. “You stupid fucking cow,” I growled.
SMASH! Fucking hell, what a commotion and the punters nearly died of fright as the shattering sound of the glass scared the shit out of everyone. Trim and Dobber were bashing the display cabinets, grabbing gold chains and trays of Rolexes and stuffing them into rucksacks. Their fingers worked like fury as they pinched the smart bling.
There were tens of thousands of pounds in the sacks now, Rolexes and thick gold chops worth a fucking mint. We’d only been at it for a couple of minutes, but smashed it and it was time to burn it out of there. “Come on! Let’s go!”
We got off the mark, scadoodled, made a run for it. We pushed past nosey shoppers congregating outside and, as we had no time for decorum, brandished the shooters menacingly and shrieked. “Get out of the fucking way!”
We headed for a nearby alleyway where we had left two scooters with the engine’s running. We buzzed out of there on the scooters, ripping up the road like we were in some Moto GP, dodging in and out of traffic like top lunatics. A few miles down the road, behind a petrol station, we leapt off the mopeds, jumped into our getaway motor, waiting with Dome at the wheel, and bombed it out of there. Trim and Dobber zoomed off on the scooters, while Dome gave it full throttle, burning it all the way back to the safe house where Dog Sick was waiting to check the stolen spoils.
23.
The next night, the top tier of the Ju$tu$ Crew were massed at the home of one of the joeys mams. His mam and her boyfriend had gone away for a few days and the typical house party was in progress. I couldn’t believe they had trusted the little muppet with the family home even for just a brief period. I mean, he could have had any old low life scumbags in off the street to trash the place. He did. He had us lot.
It was past midnight and the crew had taken the whole house over, pure partying with a top sound system blasting out the latest urban tunes. The entire gaff was packed out; there were loads of birds and loads of booze, loads of drugs and loads of dancing. The party was banging, the birds moving like Shakira and I even managed to cop for this bird who I’d had my eye on for some time, a sexy little bitch. I was after horny sex with this teenage Lolita-like diva, gagging at the prospect of getting to grips with a stunning piece of female flesh in a session of wild fornication. We vanished upstairs to his mam’s vacant bedroom for a mess about, going belly-to-belly, making some noise and pulling fuck faces when there was frantic banging on the bedroom door.
It was a manic Caspar. He’d got a call from one of our joeys who had spotted a carload of lads, dressed in black and ballied up, at the end of the road. I ripped myself off the bird and dressed in two seconds flat, put on my bulletproof, then flew down the stairs, out the front door with Caspar and a couple of the other lads following in my slipstream. I was outside the house, halfway down the close, and clocked the Astra at the junction at the top of the close. We ducked down for cover behind park cars because it looked like typical drive-by tactics were being employed. The junction was an ideal place to rain some burning fire down upon us, as it allowed for a quick getaway and easy access to the Drive that acted as the estate’s ring-road. The headlights were off but I could just make out the front passenger masked up, leaning out the window, then saw flashes as he cracked off six quick shots of semi-automatic fire. I winced as I heard bullets ripping through car windows, spraying shards of glass all over the pavement and road, blasting ragged holes in the metal bodywork of the parked cars we were huddled behind. Then the driver put his foot down, the back tires screeched and whistled as our attention was momentarily distracted from the lad creeping up behind us. I heard him shout. “You’re fucking dead!”
I turned abruptly, the fucker had emerged from a gloomy alleyway behind us, which ran down the side of the party-house. As soon as the car had fucked-off out of there, the kid ran out of his hiding place, ballied-up and our eyes locked as he aimed a handgun right at me. When I saw the gun I thought I was a dead man. I’d always known it would be this way: When you were least expecting it, had left your weapon under a pillow and had your back turned, some fucking murderous little bastard would sneak up on you. And then fucking nightmare of nightmares, he squeezed the trigger but nothing happened, the gun jammed. As the panicked shooter tried to force the jammed bullet free, my brain sent a hasty message to my limbs to bust a move, quick style, or get blown away. I was squatting next to a car but burst into a sprint and launched myself at him like a mad kamikaze fucker. I hollered a war cry, tackled him and sent us both sprawling to the pavement. The gun went off, the bullet ricocheted off the pavement, ending up embedded in the wall of the party house. I was struggling with his arms, grabbing for the pistol and he was fighting back, kicking and biting. “Come on!” I shouted at the other lads.
Caspar kicked him in the side of the head and followed up by delivering more vicious kicks to his body. Then he moved out the way, allowing Dobber to take a turn, booting the fuck out of the lad until his brains were like scrambled eggs. I sprung up with the shooter. “Got the fucker!” I shouted.
The lad was trying to roll up into a ball, folding in like a foetus with head, belly and balls protected, but we were mob-handed by now and the lads were giving him a good kicking. “Stop it, stop it … you’re going to kill us,” he mumbled through bloody, shredded lips, but the boys continued doing him over.
“No one tries to do us and walks,” Caspar said, putting another boot in.
“Get him up and put him in the boot of the car,” I told Caspar.
“Are we going to whack him, Ow-wee?” Caspar said. “I’m feeling proper murderous.”
One of the lads popped open the boot of the motor. The battered would-be assassin was literally picked up with brute force and the intention of bundling him into the boot. But he was wriggling like fuck in an attempt to save his life. We were holding on to his arms and legs while he was flipping and flapping furiously. We were having a top fucking buzz as we man-handled and manoeuvred matey boy into the boot, but the fucker was frenzied and jerking around like he was having an epileptic fit. “FUCK ME - SOMEONE HIT HIM!” I shouted.
A joey lunged at him with a baseball bat, WHACK! I could hear the crack of the bat against his skull. “Enough!” I shouted.
The blow had split his head wide open, cracking bone and splattering blood. The body stopped resisting and went limp. “I think he’s brown bread,” Caspar said. “Dead as Elvis.”
“Get him in the boot. We’ll dump him off the estate. Keep the coppers off our case,” I said.
We threw him in the boot, slammed it shut. Then Caspar got behind the wheel, I jumped in the passenger seat and we h
eaded off towards the vast expanse of Sefton Park five miles away, Grime music blaring from the stereo, Rayzer’s Hometown. We ripped it out of the estate, doing about sixty miles an hour and still accelerating up the main road towards the city centre. At night the park was full of prozzies with their kerb crawling punters, flashers and doggers, benders cruising for a bum fuck in the bushes, prowling ASBOs up to no good. Because of an obvious lack of law and order, it would make an ideal dumping ground for a corpse.
BUMP! THUD! THUMP! I nearly shit myself. The bastard was still alive and kicking up a fuss. I remember thinking: This is one hard fucker to kill! As we were going along the main road the lad sprung the boot open, Houdini-style, and clambered out, bouncing and tumbling onto the tarmac. Caspar braked hard and the car came to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. The scuffed up, blood smeared, battered lad stood up on wobbly legs, stumbling down the road and screaming. “HELP! HELP! HELP!” There was nothing else for it; Caspar turned the car around and gunned the motor straight at him, scooping him up onto the bonnet then the arsehole fucking took off, doing somersaults in the air and landed in a crunch of bones. “That should sort that cunt out,” Caspar said, as we accelerated out of there.
Caspar took a look in the rear view. The kid was still in the road, hadn’t moved. He thought that was the end of him. “Serves him fucking right. He had it coming.”
We were barreling it back towards our estate. A pack of mongrel dogs were sniffing around a bitch on heat in the middle of the road. Caspar said. “Right, watch this!”
“Watch what?”
“The fucking dogs. Banging the liver out that bitch. Watch this!”
He speeded up, but the horny dogs held their ground for an instant, pre-occupied with their canine orgy, then scattered in panic as he dropped into low gear and the engine roared. Caspar put his foot down and slammed the front wheel arch into one of the dogs. The poor mutt was too slow and too close, and got clipped. I heard a muffled bang, then a hideous yelping screech as the beast went tumbling across the road and under the wheels of a passing HGV which crushed it.
“Did you see that?” he shouted, smiling and grinning, a demented laugh-grin, chuffed with his handy work.
“You fucking wanker! What the fuck did you do that for?”
“Murderous, innit.”
We drove back to Caspar’s house. In the front room we rolled up a spliff and settled down to listen to the scanner. It was crackling away in the background when the news came through that a white male had been found on the main road with multiple injuries. He was torn up, in bits, barely breathing, but alive.
“Fucking can’t believe it!” Caspar said. “I knew I should have reversed over the cunt.”
24.
Back in the confines of my room, the Rizla’s came out for one last bedtime draw; the room began to fill with spliff smoke as I settled back in my own chronically smelly pit to await the next day.
I couldn’t have made a bigger mistake - skunk paranoia kicked in big-style. FUCK ME! I couldn’t believe it, that was the second time I’d nearly been filled-in in the space of a month. The mounting near misses were starting to get me down and a feeling of dread sent a shudder down my spine. I’d been fucking lucky, but good luck doesn’t last and bad luck endures. Was my time coming, I wondered.
I stopped myself, not wanting to think through the consequences of living an outlaw-driven life any further. I concluded that the violence was unavoidable and as addictive as any drug, a product of the struggle to provide ourselves with the means to survive in a society that didn’t give two fucks about us. As we battled it out for the necessaries of street cred such as MONEY, RESPECT and POWER, dying was the probable end result and preferable to the alternative living nightmare of being banged up in the concrete cunt.
I diverted my attention to finishing off the spliff burning between my fingers, then curled up into a defensive foetal position and battled with my thoughts until the sanctuary of sleep took over and freed me from the black clouds of doom in my head.
Something on the stairwell was after me again, chasing me up the stairs. It was big and fast. I ran from it towards the light on the top landing. I looked over my shoulder but there was just a dark shape coming after me. Catching me up. My palms were so wet they were slipping on the hand rail, as I launched myself up the steps in a terrified panic. Something was gaining on me in the darkness, stalking. Something hungry and it was just about to pounce when, in the early morning hours, I woke up with the sweat oozing out of every pore, my heart thumping loudly against my rib cage and I couldn’t control my slack bladder as a great burst of piss shot out of my japs eye and saturated my undies, bedsheets and mattress. It was with a great deal of shame that I recall hanging the mattress out of the bedroom window the next morning.
Maybe I was caining the weed too much, I’d been smoking incessantly for the last two weeks because I’d heard that Bob Marley smoked at least fifty a day and I was desperate to beat his record. I smoked myself into ecstatic oblivion. Each time a spliff was finished I rolled another one. Perhaps I was over-doing it though, the highly potent pure green would get me into a proper state when I slipped into unconsciousness, giving me the sweats and terrifying nightmares. Then there were the dark, depressing suicidal thoughts. I began to think again of getting my burner and doing it double quick - without all the thought and chit-chat. A matter of bottle. I wondered about my bottle.
25.
A fucking bitch of a problem was facing Dog Sick and he asked me for a meet to discuss remedying the situation, fast. The meeting point was the local McDonald’s, sandwiched between the cop shop and the shopping precinct. I was waiting outside in the car park when he rolled up in a less than discreet rented yellow Lamborghini and parallel parked next to the ancient two-door Audi A3 I had been using as a runaround. It was a beautiful thing to see in our run-down edgy estate, a yellow Diablo, brand spanking new. Talk about being flash! It was a rental but proof enough that Dog Sick was raking it in by this time; his meteoric rise from street slanger to drug kingpin had been amazingly rapid. Hundreds of punters were approaching us every day at the marketplace to score for their party funs. We were flogging it as fast and as easily as Mackey Dees sold burgers. Dog Sick was more than happy with the sales turnover of his drugs empire and consequently treated me to lunch, offering to pay for a super-sized meal deal. With such a gesture of generosity, how could I refuse? I was stuffing my face with the greasy cheeseburger, anorexic fries and brain-freezing coca-cola when he claimed he’d been ripped off on five keys of nasty he’d bought from a character known as Mrs. Doubtfire. He was called that because he’d done one from the nick and was so determined to avoid re-capture by the bizzies that he’d taken to dressing and living like a woman. Some lads reckoned he enjoyed cross-dressing, but no cunt would say it to his face because he had a reputation as a fearsome badman and looked a bit like Alex Reid.
Dog Sick had discovered that the purity of the smack was pitiful and he was raging over the major rip-off incident. We knew the pitfalls of selling crap smack, the punters wanted the toxic stuff and would just take their custom elsewhere; to the Mug Fam, more than likely. Dog Sick had deployed his own form of diplomacy, following the drug deal gone bad, involving a mutual acquaintance but had failed to retrieve his money. Now, it’s a dog eat dog situation in the drug game and if you allowed yourself to be ripped off just the once, you’re asking to be had over by any fucker from that moment on. Dog Sick’s reputation, and the Ju$tu$ Crew by association, was at stake and we weren’t about to be labelled as being soft cunts. Whatever happened, we had to be seen coming out on top. So, Dog Sick wanted us to inflict as much damage as possible on the big tarts blouse.
That night, me, Caspar and Dobber packed up everything we needed: A police scanner, ski masks, gloves, the Mac-10 and Glock and a shottie. After dark, we drove over to where Doubtie was holed up on the other side of town. Doubtie wasn’t home yet, as his gaff was dark inside, and we sat in the motor and set our
mobile phones so that we could speed dial each other at the touch of a button. For fuck’s sake! None of us had any credit left on our pay-as-you-go phones; so we drove to the nearest petrol forecourt to top up. When we returned to Doubtie’s, he still wasn’t there. I told Dobber to park a bit further down the street, where Caspar attached a silencer to the Mac-10; so it didn’t make an almighty commotion going off. It seemed like a lifetime but we were waiting for thirty minutes when Doubtie pulled a silver Mazda into the driveway of his house. It was about ten at night by now and his ken was down the dark end of the street.
Caspar exited the motor, carrying the Big Mac under his hoodie, and I followed behind him with the nine milli. We pulled the ski masks over our faces and were adrenalin-fuelled, hearts beating mad like. Doubtfire didn’t hear us as we crept up to the end of his drive. He was tarted up in his female disguise as he exited his motor, put the key in the front door and Caspar shrieked, “Oi, you fucking freak!”
“You what?” he said, turning around with a shocked look on his face and, before he knew it, Caspar aimed the Big Mac, pointed it at his chest and squeezed the trigger but the gun locked up on him. Now Maradona put it in the hand of God, but before Doubtie had a chance to reach into his tart’s handbag for his own semi-automatic, I stepped forward and licked off some shots with the Glock. There were a couple of bright flashes and two muffled cracks as bullets blasted through him. He was knocked off his feet and crashed to the ground like he’d taken a cannonball in the gut. Two spent shell casings clattered on the driveway. I squatted down to retrieve them, aware that they were evidence, and spied the curtains twitching in the front room window of the house next door. The crack of the gunfire had obviously alerted the nosey neighbours and the quicker we were up and out the better. I noticed the warm blood puddling in a slowly widening circle around Doubtie and he must have been incredibly fit and strong because he amazed me by scrambling to his feet in a flying panic, holding his hand over the trickling holes in his belly, blood pissing out of his gut-shots, seeping through his fingers. In a split second he fucking took off, lunging through the front door and slamming it shut behind him. I rapidly fired twice through the door with the intentions of finishing him off. One bullet missed but the other one tore through his arm, and he’d be left with entry and exit scars. A small one where the bullet entered, and a huge one where its exit basically exploded his forearm. I grabbed the cartridges, so as not to leave any debris lying around that could be used by the police against us later. We turned on our heels and legged it out the drive, sprinting down the street. I hit the button on the mobie, screaming. “It’s on top! Come and get us.”