Cracking Up

by Harry Crooks

  It wasn’t The Ritz, but we’d booked the Cozy Inn because it was cheap as chips and within walking distance of the red-light district. The place was mostly full of sex tourist but it was forbidden to bring sex workers back to the crummy, cramped rooms; so the front-of-house receptionist acted more like a frigging bouncer, treating guests like the naughty perverts and degenerate druggies that they were, trying to sneak in prozzies and illegal substances. Fucking cheek or what?

  Caspar was complaining that there was nothing on the tiny flat-screen telly, which was on top of a low dresser at the end of two single beds. I stood on my bed, reached up and pulled the battery out of the smoke alarm; then rolled a spliff perched on the edge of the bed while he channel hopped with the remote control until he finally found something decent to watch: HEAT. Fucking gleaming! One of my favourite fillums because the life of a real criminal is pretty fucking crap and you’d be a top twat for thinking otherwise, but we all had plans for doing bigger and better crimes. Being the big man doing the big job for big money just like De Niro. Okay, so you’d always be looking over your shoulder for a Pacino type of character to quash the caper, but that was all a part of it; it was a game of cat and mouse, after all.

  We watched the fillum in a large, billowing cloud of the strong Dutch smoke. The movie inspired us to plan another bling-sting the following day because we’d tipped our pockets onto the bedside table and counted a paltry twenty-odd euros in our possession. Fuck it! We’ll pull a stunt. If it came on top the worst that could happen would be a stretch in a farting Dutch nick, a fucking doddle for the likes of us, then deportation back home afterwards. Worth the risk then because nothing ventured, nothing gained. A smash and grab was amazingly easy to do: We had the know how, the bottle to get in there and get out in one minute tops. It sounded like a pretty fucking good idea at the time.

  We were settled down with another heavily loaded spliff and taking in the flick, getting excited over the shoot-out at the end, when there was a knock on the door at about three in the early morning hours. It was a hairy moment because we were expecting to be confronted by irate hotel management, complaining about the noxious smoke coming from the room. But when I got the door, there were two fit birds staring at me with batting eye-lashes, waiting to be invited in. They were smiling impishly and asked if they could join us for a bedtime spliff. They’d been returning to their room on the opposite side of the corridor, after a night out on the town. They had acquired Donner Kebab takeaways on their way back and we had the munchies. Come-ed in! I invited them. We passed the hefty draw, smoking Bio Highrise to our hearts content, munching on the condemned meat wraps, then polishing it off with a nibble of space cake; it did the trick. We were all chummy and warm like Thailand. A bottle of Jagermeister was retrieved from the girl’s room and we shotted on top of everything else, guzzling it straight from the bottle, babbling a load of shite until the girls got their dainty knickers off and we went at it like porn stars. Caspar was giving his fancy bit a really good dicking, loud and leery like. “Love this wet pussy! You love this big dick in you, dontcha?”

  “Oh yeh, babe!” She said. “I can feel it all the way up in my fucking throat.”

  He was getting well into the mucky chit-chat, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to shag in front of your mate while he’s nuts deep in a frantic damp patch himself in the next bed. I went at it for half-an-hour, back-scuttling and playing with her clit ring, crotch pumping and loins burning until we both hit the target and fuck this piss-taking world that treats you like a stupid cunt.

  29.

  We kicked the birds to the kerb after the communal bunk up, despite enjoying a good seeing-to and we weren’t so callous as to let them go empty handed. There was plenty of Bio Highrise left after all. We’d bought far more than we actually needed at the Smoke Circle coffee shop, underestimating the potency of the smelly green stuff and didn’t fancy our chances of trying to smuggle the stinky stuff onto an Easyjet flight. When Caspar eventually managed to drag himself out of his pit, his brains were fried through substance and alcohol abuse. He was grinding his teeth, pacing and twitching, muttering and the only sense he was making was nonsense, before pulling himself together and informing me that he had a bad feeling about THE BLAG and was sure we were going to screw it up. But I wasn’t about to let him bottle out of it. A fucking bastard of a dilemma was glaring at us full on and there was no escaping from the stark emptiness of our pockets. We had to do something to remedy the situation, fast. We couldn’t ignore our crippling cash shortage following the weekend binge of sex, drink, drugs and tattoos. We were skint as fuck and, I thought: Fuck that! I ain’t having it! In my devious little brain, the blag was the quick-fix solution to our severe lack of money and no means of making any without resorting to crime.

  “Cas, if you don’t get on with this stunt, you’re a fucking soft twat!”

  “Nah, man! I don’t want to do it, I’ve got bad vibes about this one, Ow-wee.”

  “You soft cunt!”

  “I’m not a soft cunt, man! You know I ain’t no shithouse.”

  “Just do it, then. We’ll be in and out in two minutes flat and, ermmm, we’ll be brewstered. HAPPY DAYS!”

  “NO WAY! I’m not doing it.”

  I was having none of it and wasn’t about to back off. “Bollocks, just fucking do it will you and stop mincing about like a fucking fanny.”

  Caspar, browbeaten and under pressure to prove himself, finally agreed to do the dare because, at the end of the day, he didn’t want to look like a fucking fart and realised that if we didn’t blag it we wouldn’t have it - the money, I mean!

  He was hopping about on pins, scared shitless that the caper was going to go tits up and there seemed little harm in him doing one last bump of Special K before we Scouse swagged it out the hotel and, for fuck’s sake, lifting two motorcycle helmets carelessly left in reception and winking at us. Spotting a scooter parked up outside in the road, we pushed it around the corner, busted the ignition and steering lock with a screwdriver, and ripped away at a relatively legal speed so as not to attract the unwanted attention of the local filth. My focus was set dead ahead on a jewellery store we’d sussed out previous, as we zipped along a metropolitan stretch of busy tarmac, choking out stuck behind an exhaust-farting diesel bus then, overtaking blindly into oncoming cars as the possibility of sudden, stomach-churning road carnage loomed larger than life and twice as deadly. Caspar’s arms were gripped tight around my waist, hanging on for dear life and I could feel him shaking like a shitting dog. What seemed like a lifetime later, it was with a huge sigh of relief that we plunged out of the manic traffic flow and parked the machine in a secluded alleyway round the corner from the shop where we ended up seriously putting our necks on the line.

  I quickly surveyed the street, scanning for the presence of bizzies then, in a ball-aching moment of adrenalin and fear in a potent mixture, darted into the shop with a claw hammer firmly in my sweating palm. I began to shout like a man possessed by the devil, waving the hammer in the face of the shop assistant and bellowing at him to GET ON THE FUCKING FLOOR! NOW!

  Caspar was shitting bricks but had entered the shop behind me and with no time to waste proceeded to smash the fuck out of the display cases. Fucking hell, what a commotion. His fingers worked like fury, as he grabbed the most desirable rings and necklaces and stuffed them into a rucksack that we could easily carry back on the bike. The few female customers in the shop were screaming because the sound of smashing glass was splitting the air, jarring and startling everyone, inciting the heroic assistant to have a go at me. He got in a few good shots, nearly knocking my headgear off but I managed to stay on my feet and carelessly swung the hammer full force at his shoulder because there was definitely no time to waste now - it had to be a case of exerting extreme force for the quickest possible exit. I was in some sort of trance, reacting on animal instinct and there really was no thinking about it, as I crashed the hammer into the side of his head, splitting
his skull wide open and knocking him clean off his feet. It was a proper brutal moment of beserk action and, I swear, his head hit the floor before his arse did. I looked over the counter and he was collapsed in a pool of blood as big as a dinner plate, eyes rolling about in his skull, twitching and completely fucking out of it. Near his temple was a ragged hole the size of a fifty pence piece. I noticed his wallet sticking out of his back pocket and went around to dip him. “What the fuck are you doing?” Caspar shouted. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I snapped out of it; it was time to scatter and we tore out of there, dashing around the corner to the scooter. We ripped the bike out the alleyway and onto the main street, giving it full throttle and really playing the road for all to see. We were completely super-charged with adrenaline and the flight factor had well and truly kicked in. Whooo hooo! I thought. We’ve done it all right, and now all we have to do is get the fuck out of here. We were ripping it down the road like we were on some top superbike. How the fuck were we to know that some stupid old cunt in a Volvo would pull out in front of us, totally mis-judging the speed we were flying at and then, fucking nightmare of nightmares, stalling his motor. There was the piercing squeal of tires, as we braked hard and got the wobbles, started skidding like Celebrities On Ice and ended up smacking head first right up the fucking arse end of the motor, full-on. The front of the moped disintegrated, as Caspar fucking took off, flying through the air like a crash test dummy and landing in the middle of the road, in a crunch of bones. I did a somersault over the handle bars, skidded over the roof of the Volvo and landed on the bonnet. At first I just lay there on the warm bonnet for a split-second; it was a birdies tweeting around the head moment, then I was thinking: Fucking Hell, I can’t believe I dodged that one! I’d taken a big bump and needed to pick my arse up and get out of there double quick.

  I looked around me and saw the battered body of Caspar, arse well and truly on the ground, hammered to fuck in the middle of the road. He was in bulk, writhing like a wounded animal, screaming out in intense agony. Pain seared through every nerve ending in his knees because he had hit the ground hard and landed awkward-like, instantly shattering a knee-cap and dislocating the other badly enough so that he was completely knackered and in no fit state to escape. An ambulance would be called for and he would be whisked off to hospital to be operated on and stitched up, kept under observation and nursed back to health before being sent to a detention centre to await trial.

  A big bastard bully of a copper came bounding out of nowhere, his big fuck-off hands snatching hold of my collar and ragging me off the bonnet, the fucking prick, then body slammed me onto the road, pushing me helmet first into the tarmac. That was all I could see through the clear acrylic visor and my mind went blank. I could hear myself breathing. My heart was beating so loudly I could hear it in the helmet, overlaid with the sound of passing traffic; they sounded so close they could have run over my head. The bizzie issued the warning that if I attempted to resist, he’d bust a cap in my arse using his Walther P5. A quick thrust and my arm was twisted halfway up my back; I was being jerked to my feet with brute force and frog-marched towards the pavement, bent over double to keep my wrist from being broken. I was pinned up against a wall and he shifted his grip on my arm while trying to slap the handcuffs on me, letting go for a fraction of a second and I automatically spun free and a sudden flash of panic energized my legs into a top sprint as I made one last dash for freedom. I was flying through the air; my feet didn’t touch the ground, I felt like Ben Johnson in the dirtiest race of all time and soon gained the upper hand, out-running the fat fucker with ease. He was obviously incensed that I’d had the gall to casually break the laws of his land, then attempt to bolt for it, wound up because he had the feeling that I was taking liberties and was well fucked-off. The pig-dog nearly burst a blood vessel in his indignant rage as he barked at me: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  I was pumped-up and felt I had no option but to leg it because I weren’t legit. You can fuck right off, I remember thinking. It seemed like I was always knocking on the BIG PRICK in the sky’s door and, anyway, I would rather have swallowed a pint full of piss than wait around to be carted off to a decrepit Dutch dungeon and the dark, depressing world of long-term imprisonment and I felt another shot of pure adrenaline surge through me, as a warning shot was fired up into the air and I ducked down a side street. Fear had given performance-enhancing qualities to my feet, just like Forrest Gump. I continued running down an alleyway, jumped over a succession of walls and running through a builders yard I managed, against all odds, by moving at hyper-speed even though the moments felt stretched and like I was going superslow, to make good on my escape from pistolero-toting DUTCH BACON. When I removed the motorcycle helmet I was sweating cobbs, drained, my body shaking from the rush. I dumped it in a wheelie-bin in an alleyway and, casual-like, slow-slouched ambled onto a main avenue to catch a tram which seemed hellishly slow and had me looking out the back-window for pursuing bizzies. I eventually alighted at a stop near my hotel and I could hardly walk the short way back to the Cozy Inn because my knees were knocking like a pair of castanets.

  When I got back to my room, I fell to my knees and panted like a perv making a dirty phone call. My face was flushed and my body was still shaking from the electric adrenal storm. I had tasted that incomparable rush of having escaped - of having actually been caught red-handed and facing certain incarceration - and getting away. Come on, Ow-wee, lad!

  Caspar would tell the bizzies a load of shit. The verbal diarrhea poured out of his mouth in hot and gushing streams; he gave them a false name and an address and, to his credit, refused to name his accomplice. Frequently, every word he said would be a bare-faced lie and the Dutch bizzies weren’t quite sure he was even speaking English with his thick, Arabic-Scouse accent. He would be operated on, stitched and cleaned up but would be kept in a guarded custody suite of the hospital, monged out on morphine-like painkillers, as the bizzie mafiosi wanted to know who he was and they were serious. So serious, in fact, that they had sent out for a mobile fingerprint scanner.

  Being penniless and in fear of being caught by the police in a strange country is no laughing matter; It was last. I was trapped there. I was ready for the taking. I had no money. I was risking it just by returning to the hotel room because the filth are ALWAYS there behind you because it’s a TOM AND JERRY scenario. Once Caspar was ID’d the bizzies would be investigating and doing the rounds of the tourist hotels on the lookout for his accomplice. Talk about a being a target in a tight spot. Dog Sick would have to sort it out from his end, I reckoned, and gave him a bell. “You two are a pair of fucking chancers,” he laughed at me. “Fucking cracking me up here, lad. Always pumped up, you lot. You know what, our kid? You lads need to keep your wits about you, knock them Class As on the head and defo that Special K shite.”

  Because he was a full-on, notorious drug dealer, I wondered where the fuck he was coming from and felt like telling him to wind his neck in, but just agreed with his hypocritic notions to keep it sweet: “Yeh, I know …”

  “Anyway, roll your sleeves up coz I’ve got a job on for you.”

  One of his drug couriers was in Amsterdam to get in fresh supplies and snide passports. Dog Sick wanted me to give him a hand in bringing the stuff back home. Sounded kosher to me. “Fucking nice one Sicko!”

  It turned out that Dog Sick had gotten nearer the source of bulk powder buys in the drug exchange of The Dam. He had gotten the price brought down to a sensible level and was going to get right on to this life-changing venture. He was cutting out the middle men because he was not content to be paddling around in small ponds anymore. He was looking towards swimming with the big fish, grabbing all that the drug world had to offer. He suddenly had the opportunity to make a lot of money very quickly, and in true entrepeneur-like fashion, he was going to seize it with both hands.

  After I put the public pay phone down, I didn’t hang around. I got down The Sweaty Betty, a battle cruiser not f
ar from Dam Square where that old Amsterdam street banter of “Coke, smack and Es” can be heard. I wanted to get down there double pronto and link-up with this kid doing the driving and get the fuck out of the city sharpish like. Paranoia was beginning to creep in as I realized it was only a matter of time before the Dutch police would find me; then the fucking shit would hit the fan and it’d come on top for me.I was double cacking my kecks at the thought of getting nabbed by the bizzies and being trawled off to a dibble shop, where a bleach-stinking holding cell would be waiting for me.

  Back at The Sweaty Betty, I took up position in a dark corner of the bar, ordered a Heineken and waited for this kid to turn up so that we could get on the road. It was doing my head-in; it felt like a fucking lifetime because I was stressing like a dumb twat about getting collared. After an hour I was beginning to give up hope that he would show. I was fucking panicking, looking towards the door everytime it opened and some punters strolled in. I had more beers, slowly getting on the piss to pass the time. After five or six bottles I’d managed to calm me-self down when a tap on the shoulder made me turn round. This lad stood there, grinning like he was my long-lost cousin or something.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Fuck! I hate it when that happens. I grappled desperately in the depths of my mind for a flicker of recognition but it was taking too long and I finally had to admit my ignorance. “I’m Sinkie. We was in Bechers Block at the same time. Had it on smash in there, lar, didn’t we? Play Station 2, Sky, Spice, the fucking lot, lad!”