Cracking Up

by Harry Crooks

  “Fucking hell! Yeh, top one. Sorry, Sinkie lad; it’s all coming back now.” Bechers Block was the remand unit in Altcourse nick.

  I immediately brightened at the prospect of being able have the crack and ease up with a blast from the past. He led me out of the pub, over to an underground car park beneath the Bijenkorf and he stopped dead besides a boss 2013 Honda Civic in seriously good nick. As we got in, he began to explain how the drugs were hidden in this fine specimen of wheels.

  We set off confidently down the road, cruising inconspicuously out of the city. We were on the open road, heading towards The Hook Of Holland, when my mate decided to put his foot down, rapidly ripping it ahead, driving as if he were on a getaway, dodging in and out of traffic like a top idiot. I tried telling him we were standing out like sore thumbs with the speed we were doing and to CALM DOWN, YOU FUCKING NUTTER! It only served to encourage him all the more, as he took my criticism as a challenge. Fucking show off, or what?! I clocked an unmarked police car up ahead just at the very moment that my mate seized the opportunity to overtake, giving it full throttle and really playing the road for all to see. His focus was set dead ahead, as I tried to warn him about the bizzies. The police pulled us within seconds.

  Now the bizzies aren’t complete retards and they knew by instinct that we were serious wrong uns, up to no good and could smell a pair of guilty rats like us from ten yards. Being the suspicious and cynical lawmen that they were, they demanded the car documents and passports, refusing to believe the blatant lies we served up to them in answer to their interrogating tactics. We were getting all defensive and protested our innocence, claiming to be nothing but naive thick-as-pigshit tourists, unaware of the speed limits in The Flat Place and pleading to be allowed to continue on our journey before we missed the ferry back to dear old Blighty. By way of an apology, we solemnly promised that we wouldn’t do it again - HONEST! But being police trained professionals, they had observed we were sweating like bastard rapists and the fuckers insisted on searching the vehicle, ordering us out of the car. This is definitely it! I thought. The fucking shit is going hit the fan here and it’s about to come right on top RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW Ow-wee lad. But try as they might, they couldn’t locate the hidden trap in the dashboard. The trap was connected to a pressure sensor under the driver’s seat. You had to sit in it and have all the car doors closed before the stash spot could be opened, which is unheard of during a typical roadside search by trafficos. They came back from searching the motor, looking sorely disappointed and issued us the standard on-the-spot speeding fine, warning us to SLOW DOWN! We were lucky bastids, escaping by the skin of our teeth. The pair of us breathed massive sighs of relief as we settled back in the motor and drove off, at a passive speed mind you, down the road towards the ferry port, looking in the rear view, calling them all the cunts under the sun and laughing nervously at yet another close call.

  30.

  We made it back to THE POOL with the contents of the car intact, insuring a top welcome from Dog Sick on our arrival. His face was beaming; he was in top spirits about the way things were developing. He was off-loading huge amounts of gear, on the verge of becoming top drawer, raking it in by this time and on the way to making his fortune; the transition from scummy street dealer to top lad supplying kilos had been amazingly rapid. Thousands of punters were hounding us to sort them out. The general public were more than happy with the price and quality of the spread on offer and merely requested more of it, demanding a top chemical release so they could feel on top of the fucking world and never mind what THE LAW says.

  Dog Sick was larging it up by this time, driving boss motors, decked out with ten-grands worth of Zenith watch, splashing out in casinos and shagging gold-diggers left, right and centre. These frantic come bags were all desperate to get a little bit of Dog Sick to themselves, fucking machines that put a price on their pussies. He hit the VIP lounges on the town nightclub circuit in style wearing nothing but top-quality designer labels, armed to the teeth with nose candy and cash spilling out of deep pockets - shouting in bottles of Cristal. He’d copped for this one bird Cat, who was a good-looking piece of cunt. She looked just like somebody really famous: Tulisa. She boasted about being a glamour model, but had worked as an escort and had gone as far as exchanging bodily fluids with Premiership footballers. She kept in touch with one of them, sending him texts - as is the way with young slappers sometimes. Dog Sick simply announced that she was his squeeze now and tried to control his jealousy in the face of her ongoing friendship with the famous international player. But the green-eyed monster is human nature and, the chilling thing was, as a solution to this headache, he came up with the mad idea of sending me down a fucking great big tree-lined avenue flanked with mansions and toss a handgrenade over the high walls of this lads exclusive property. I told him it was a brainless scheme and would make too many waves, refusing to have anything to do with the lunatic notion, especially as he was top scorer for the team I supported. There is a code of conduct even among drug-dealing scum that says you tell the feller hands off she’s mine to his face, preferably with the aid of a fist to drive the fact right home. I mean his bird was his bird when all’s said and done, but she was no better than a two-bob prozzie as far as I was concerned. Apart from the silicone tits and fuck factor, I didn’t know what he saw in the lousy bitch; she was just a glorified brass - from her tits to her clit!

  The crossing from Holland to Harwich confirmed that maybe I wasn’t sailor material. I chucked up the minute the ferry lurched against first wall of rolling waves and recalled that I was usually dog rough even after a short trip on the ferry across the Mersey. I was shaking like a shitting dog as the ferry plowed through the mammoth waves of a black, rotten North Sea Force 9 gale. It was a fucking nightmare of a trip to be experiencing sober, but the crew had shut the bar and duty free shop because bottles and glasses were getting tossed around like plates at a Greek wedding, smashed to bits by the violent, lurching motions of the ship. Obviously we were going to have to gut it out and I told myself to GET A GRIP AND CALM THE FUCK DOWN because we weren’t on the Titanic, for fuck’s sakes. Putrid pools of passenger puke puddled the floors and I had to be careful not to slip and break my neck during the short walk back down to the car deck after six hours of sea-going psychological and physical torture. I could hardly walk and my brain was refusing to believe we’d survived the perfect storm. We disembarked from the roll-on, roll-off ferry in Harwich at about half-eight in the evening and bombed it down miles of motorways with the imported cargo, zooming up the M62 and descending into the city centre. We’d taken turns driving, guzzling power drinks to keep going and blaring Grime from the stereo - Manek’s Function Of The Low among others. It was raining in Liverpool, as far as I remembered it always had been and I caught sight of the illuminated Liver Birds which were as threatening as the dark sky and seemed to perch there, always watching like a Matrix surveillance team.

  The car pulled into the underground car park and the relative sanctuary of Dog Sick’s newly acquired luxurious apartment in Beecham Towers. It was an exclusive kind of place which translates as expensive and would provide the ideal cover for a bash-house, as well as being a sound addition to his growing property portfolio. We cleared the stash spot out of kilos, stuffed them into a holdall, squeezed into the elevator with the weighty bag and ascended to the higher ground of this five star kennel.

  A big fuck-off black lump, Dog Sick’s new right-hand man, let us into the flat. He was built like a tower block, looked like he could bend metal bars and, if he punched you in the face, it would take a couple of lads to pull his fist back out. Parra had a passing resemblance to David Haye with his cornrow braid job, had gold teeth galore and diamond studs in his ears. They called him Parra because he was that tall you would need a parachute to jump off him and he had a ferocious street tuff reputation. But he was up his own arse and barely acknowledged us as he snatched the bag off us and disappeared into the kitchen straight away to get the bashmen
to test it, leaving us stood in the hallway like a pair of tits on a bull.

  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.”