The Chop Shop

by Heffernan, Christopher

  He relaxed his hand and exhaled as she gave him a smile. “I thought Richard was picking me up.”

  Samantha's smile faded, replaced by a few creases across the brow. “We've got problems. A lot can happen in a week. What happened to your face?”

  “Did you see what happened on the news over there? The US military were a little overzealous in their questioning of me. Fighting has broken out between multiple states. It's another war. They only let me go so quickly because somebody put in a good word with their commanding officer.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “We should get going. Harris wants you back at the shop tomorrow. My car's outside.”

  They walked towards the exit.

  “What's the situation on the streets?” Michael said.

  “It's calmed down a bit, for now. Harris is really pissed about something, though. He blew a fuse at me yesterday because I sent something to the wrong office. It's the first time I've ever seen him give a damn about something so petty before.”

  A young man with a drooping moustache leapt in front of him, clutching examples of fake identity cards in his hands. The ink had smudged on some of them until the writing was illegible. Michael sidestepped and hurried to catch up with Samantha.

  “I hate this place,” she said. “It's worse than Lower London. Every lowlife, criminal and nutcase trying to ply their trade here. Let's go out this exit; I can't stand those teenage prostitutes.”

  They found the prostitutes and pimps by the doors. The one with a dark, bushy beard wolf-whistled at Samantha as she walked past them.

  “Hey, you work for me? I give you lots of money, everything you want. These little bitches are useless.”

  Samantha swallowed the lump in her throat, and she walked faster, eyes focused straight ahead, fighting the urge to look back.

  “I am here every day if you change your mind,” the European called after her.

  She fumbled with her keys when they reached her car. Its body was red and possessed a few more curves on it than the junk he drove, but the paint was scratched, and one window sported a spider-web crack in the corner.

  Michael saw the pimp coming towards them, grinning with his yellow teeth at Samantha. “Hey, we got off to a wrong start, yes? You and me, let's go to the pub. I give you anything you want and more. Ditch this fucker, he nothing compared to me.”

  “Piss off back to Serbia, or whatever shit hole you came from,” Samantha said.

  The man's grin faded. “You fucking whore. I'm not giving you a choice.”

  Michael slammed both palms into the pimp's chest, and then grimaced in pain as it felt as though he'd hit a brick wall. The man slapped him across the cheek and spun him hard into the car.

  “You little pussy. I'll break you in like one of my bitches.”

  He swung a punch at the man, but an open palm swallowed his fist. The pimp wrenched his arm aside, and Michael struggled against his hold until a blow struck him square on the jaw, opening up his lower lip and splattering his blood over the car window. The man released him, and Michael sank to the ground.

  He reached for his mouth, trying to stem the flow of blood, but his effort was futile, and the pimp grabbed Samantha by the scruff of her coat. Michael tried to stand, then collapsed onto his hands and knees as it felt like his brain was haemorrhaging from the impact.

  The pimp landed beside him a second later. He shrieked like a woman, clutching at the butterfly knife buried in his left eyeball. A spasm of pain crippled him, until he worked up the courage to pull the knife out. His eyeball came out the socket, still attached to the blade and trailing optic nerve.

  He cried tears from his remaining eye. “You bitch, you fucking bitch. I'll rape you all night long.”

  Michael stood up. Blood ran down the front of his white shirt. He kicked the pimp in the groin, and then again and again, losing count of how many blows he planted there until the man rolled onto his side and puked.

  Samantha pulled him away. “Michael, let's go. Forget him.”

  He kicked the man one more time for good measure, before getting in the passenger seat. Pain still grieved him, and he buried his face in a hand, feeling the car rumble as Samantha keyed the engine. She reversed, and the car gave a violent jolt, followed an instant later by another, as she reversed over him.

  Samantha drove away, and the wheels left a bloody trail in their wake.

  “I think you just killed him,” Michael said.

  “And it feels wonderful. You're still bleeding. Are your teeth okay? There's a packet of tissues in the glove compartment.”

  Michael felt around his mouth with a finger. “I don't think anything is broken.”

  He pulled the glove compartment open. Two blister packets fell out onto the floor, each one still holding a few left over pills. Michael picked them up and held them to the light, eyeing the antidepressant name printed over and over again on the foil wrapper.

  “I forgot they were in there. Just forget you saw them,” Samantha said. She kept her eyes on the road.

  “This was what David was ribbing you for?”

  “Yeah, but I don't want to talk about it, okay?”

  His head was still splitting from the pain as well as jet lag. He turned away from her and leaned his head against the door window, feeling the surface of the road vibrate through the glass. He watched the white road markings pass him by like a flat-lined electrocardiogram.

  Chapter 10.

  Richard was waiting for him in the street beside the police compound, just past the entry checkpoint. He sat on an overturned box, reading a newspaper. Michael approached him, but he didn't look up, and the only expression on his face was a frown, as he stared at an interior page of the London News.

  “What are you doing out here?” Michael said.

  “I'm in deep shit, at least, according to this journalist I am. Things have really gone to hell while you've been gone. Harris kept chucking me on dead end crap that nobody cares about until you came back,” Richard said. He turned the paper around so Michael could see.

  “That's not a very flattering picture of you.”

  Richard folded the paper and frowned again. “We wasted some fuckers dealing drugs and stolen goods from a company warehouse, like you do, and there's three guys in the back room trying to get out through a window, but the door wouldn't open properly. Long story short, there's five of us trying to smash the door down until somebody managed to blow it off the hinges. By the time we get in there, they're all gone, along with all their drugs and their money.

  “You know who's waiting for us when we come out? Some pencil-necked journalist. He blinds me with the flash on his camera and then he just vanishes. I hunt that stolen property down to the building, we waste four of them, recover the property, and what does the paper run? A story about police incompetence and escaping drug dealers.”

  “They run stories about fat, bankrupt celebrities indulging in surgery on one page, and on the next it's stories about pretty young blondes from rich families starving to death from anorexia. Forget it. Nobody will care in a week. Life goes on,” Michael said.

  Richard tossed the paper into the bin, as they walked towards the station.

  “It's eight-fifty by my count. Sam said we have to meet Harris at nine. He wants to see us. Not the way I want to come back to the office today,” Michael said.

  They passed through the main entrance, nodding to the policemen on guard duty.

  “You're in luck, because we're not meeting him in his office. Our investigation is temporarily suspended. Temporarily is the keyword, though. Don't ask me why, because he's been all over us like a bad rash about that killing. Hill and his rabble are going to be there as well,” Richard said.

  Michael hit the lift button harder than he intended. He grimaced.

  “You look a little tense. And bruised. What happened over there? What did Harris have you do? And don't tell me you were on holiday.”

  The lift arrived. Michael waited until the doors closed behind
them. “It was about our case, so no yabbering to anyone else, okay? God knows how he got the money for it, but he hooked me up with some people in DC. It was unofficial, but I think they were probably government or something, doing a little on the side for the money. I'll tell you more later.

  “I got shot at by armed militia on the way back, and then the US military seized me, put me in a cell and did the whole waterboarding thing. Somebody must have put a good word in with the commanding officer, because they let me walk a couple of days later. There's infighting between different states now, as well as with Mexico.”

  “Shit, they're really going for another civil war?” Richard said, shaking his head.

  They stepped out of the lift.

  “Somebody assassinated the president. I don't think you'll get a more definitive answer to your question.”

  Richard sighed and took the lead. “Two thirds of the world is in ruins from the last war, and now they think it's a good idea to have another one? They're pissing it all away like a bunch of idiots.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  Harris and some of the other policemen were already in the briefing room. The major nodded to him as they entered. “You made it back in one piece, I see.”

  “Just about. We'll need to talk,” Michael said.

  “Later. There are some pressing matters we need to see to. Take a seat. We're early, but I'm going to start anyway.”

  “Where's Hill?” Richard said.

  “In the armouries. He's already aware of what's going on. I'll cut right to the chase, seeing as most of you have heard something about it already. We're not meeting the crime targets set by the government on our contract, and that applies to all the other stations as well. With the chaos and rioting going on lately, we're falling even further behind.”

  A few of the men muttered in discontent to each other.

  “Headquarters is not happy, the company is not happy and you can be assured that it's going to reflect upon revenue streams. There have been people in the government who have wanted to ditch Assurer's contract for a while now, so my orders have come straight from the top, and now I'm giving them straight to you: do whatever you need to in order to make up lost ground. It'll cost the government a lot of money they don't have to change up the contract prematurely, so we should be okay as long as we can give them a bone.

  “I don't care if you lie, trick, frame, forge or kill. You get me some results. We're short-staffed, I know, so everyone is going to be on the front lines. Detectives will be generating intelligence, and the rest of you, crack skulls. Get moving.”

  They filtered through the doorway and took the lift down to the parking area.

  “Tell me you've got some leads on the side we can follow,” Michael said.

  “I don't. Informants, people on the wanted list? Forget it.”

  “Great. We can sit in the car on a street corner and wait for somebody to get mugged.”

  “We've been lagging on this stuff for a while, but it's only become an issue since people have been opening up on us in the streets. See where I'm going with this?” Richard said.

  “Unfortunately. It stinks more than a piece of rotten meat.”

  Corporal Hill waited outside by an infantry fighting vehicle. He wore a gas mask and CRBN suit beneath his combat equipment.

  “Nice outfit. You planning on walking down the catwalk?” Richard said.

  Hill stuck a gloved middle finger up at him. “I've got to go and hit a suspected drug plant. We've known about it for ages, but never had the time to go after it. If it isn't there anymore, then we'll make one up and log it anyway.”

  “Have fun,” Richard said.

  The corporal passed them a folded up piece of paper. “Here's a little tip to help get you lot started. Firearms seizures are one of the biggest things we're falling behind on. Take a gun from the evidence locker and make him squeal; he's got some gang banger friends, so make him give up their location. We'll be finished by the time you get it out of him, so we'll roll them up together.”

  Michael pulled up outside the estate and its tower blocks. Two were demolished ruins, nothing more than rubble that had been picked at and scavenged from for years. The other three stood twenty floors high, nearly touching the underside of the Upper London plate.

  Young children played amongst mud fields covered in rubbish and debris. They wore tattered rags and sheets for clothes, moving barefooted and bow-legged over splinters, brick and the odd syringe. Their bellies were bloated, whilst their bones stuck through paper-thin skin and the flies never seemed to leave them alone.

  The smell of burning human waste met his nose as soon as he stepped out of the car. Black smoke rose from the fires.

  “This doesn't seem like a good place to leave your car. You should have parked a few streets back,” Richard said.

  “Good luck trying to walk out of this dump if we get into trouble. He's on the top floor of that tower.”

  They followed the concrete path to the tower block entrance, stepping over dog faeces and rotting meat. A Rottweiler darted from the bushes and lunged at them. The chain leash snapped taut and yanked the beast back, and the dog bared its teeth, barking, still struggling against its restraint.

  Richard kicked a tin can at the dog. It lunged at them again, continuing to choke itself on the collar. Yellow plastic tape criss-crossed the lifts. Michael continued up the stairs. He could smell the scent of cooking in one of the flats. Curry or kebab, perhaps.

  The concrete floor had been defaced with colourful graffiti and gang tags, just like the walls and ceilings. Butcher Boys was the most common tag, edging out older ones that hadn't been touched for longer than he cared to guess.

  He was out of breath by the twelfth floor, and he stopped at the balcony and looked out across the urban decay.

  “What a dump. Everywhere is a dump these days, but this place manages to take the prize. I give it a few months before half those children are dead and replaced by the next lot,” Richard said.

  Michael nodded. “Things are going to get worse, and they'll keep on getting worse for a while yet. Another decade, perhaps, and maybe things will have stabilised a bit, if we're even still around to see it. Best not dwell on it, eh?”

  Richard looked over the edge. “That's a long drop down there. It was twice as long for Jim Belton. I wonder what he was thinking during the fall?”

  “I'm more interested in what he was thinking before the fall. Everything after that is irrelevant to the shooting at his home. Let's go, we've wasted too much time already.”

  They turned and found themselves face to face with a tattooed old lady, with a dozen piercings across her face and ears. She only had one arm. The other had been amputated at the elbow. She limped forward, scowling at them. “Who are you? I know everyone here, but I don't know you.”

  “We're here to visit somebody. An old friend,” Michael said.

  The old lady spat at their feet. She reached into her purse and pulled out a revolver with a barrel twice as long as her index finger.

  “You're corporate scum pretending to be policemen. You don't scare me. A teenager tried to rob me two weeks ago; I blew his brains out with this, and I'm still finding chunks in the carpet, after I fed his body to that mutt by the entrance. It leaves a nasty stain. Where the hell were your sort then? His parents live next door. They don't even care, because they're too busy needling up. Fucking half-breed bitch.”

  “Half-breed?” Michael said.

  “Mixed-race. You stupid or what? She put the gun away and forced a cigarette into the corner of her mouth.

  A firework went off by one of the bins below. The old lady lit her cigarette, inhaled for as long as she could, and then blew it all in their faces. She hobbled away towards the stairs.

  “Now that's just charming,” Michael muttered.

  They made their way up the rest of the stairs. Both of them pulled their guns as they approached the door. Most of its red paint had flaked away and was scatte
red across vomit-stained concrete. Loud music blasted from inside an adjacent flat, as Richard kicked a rat away.

  Michael rang the doorbell, but nobody answered, so he rang it again, and then again. He saw a silhouette approached through the frosted glass. Richard exchanged a nod with him.

  The door opened an inch until the security chain was taut. Jason Simons peered through the gap at them. “Who are you?”

  Michael slammed his foot into the bottom of the door, and splinters erupted, as the chain burst free of the wood and the door swung wide open. Jason fell backwards. He rolled over onto his belly and tried to crawl away, shrieking to whoever else was in the flat with him. Richard kicked him in the groin.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “Watch him,” Michael said, moving into the flat, gun raised and finger resting on the trigger guard. Yellowed wallpaper peeled away to reveal mould and grime, and a strange smell hung in the air. He fought the urge to cover his mouth.

  Three pregnant women sat around the lounge table, whilst the toddler by their feet played with a plastic action figure missing both legs. An assortment of buckets, chemicals, cleaning fluids and powders adorned the table. Michael finally relented and cupped a hand over mouth and nose.

  Their flesh was stretched over brittle bones, cheeks hollowed out and their eyes receding into sunken sockets. The woman on his right snatched a revolver from the table and pointed it at him.

  “Put it down,” Michael said, placing her forehead between his weapon's sights.

  Her only response was a dead-eyed stare and a trembling in her hands. Michael trained the pistol on the bulge in her belly. “Put. It. Down.”

  She dropped it. The weapon hit the side of the table, bounced and landed on the floor beside the curly-haired toddler. Michael kicked it away before the boy could pick it up.

  “Richard, drag his sorry arse in here right now.”

  Richard hurled Jason across the room. He crashed through the table, breaking the wooden legs under his weight, and chemicals spilled across the carpet. Jason's women remained unmoved by the sight, even as the child began to wail and cry.