A warm, sticky stream of blood seeps down my badly-bruised forehead into my eyes, but at least I manage to curl into a foetal position, as the car skids over the hard shoulder and strikes the kerb at the bottom of the embankment, after which, it rolls twice with me stuck inside, rattling like an egg in an empty egg-box. The next thing I know, I’m sitting bolt upright behind the steering wheel with my motor halfway up the grass verge, pointing down towards the motorway. But the danger ain’t over yet, because the car begins to roll gently back down the grass embankment and on towards the road. Determined not to end up crushed into a docker’s omelette under the wheels of a speeding artic on a Sainsbury’s Brussels sprout run, I scramble blindly for the handbrake, pulling it up with all my strength and nearly yanking it through the floor in the process. Thankfully I come to a grinding halt, half on the embankment and half on the hard shoulder, but for the next minute or so I don’t even know what day of the week it is, and nor the fuck do I care. But I do feel like I’ve been hit by an express train.
Gathering my senses I come to the conclusion that it’s bang on me, and I ain’t even tooled up. Plus, I’ve got twenty large in a carrier bag in the glove compartment. After fumbling down around the door and eventually finding the handle, I pull it up, only to find it jammed. Reaching across the passenger seat I try the door on the left, but it’s so badly buckled it won’t budge an inch. In a mounting panic I grab the twenty grand out of the glove compartment and start to crawl through the driver’s window that’s been shot out, only to be stopped in my endeavours by spiteful shards of glass sticking out from its edges, that begin to tear angrily into my flesh while wedging me in the tiny open space. Through strangled cries I scream for help from passing cars, but no one stops, ‘cos no one cares. So I start the agonising process of dragging myself out through the window, howling like a woman in labour as I do so, before falling head first out onto the tarmac, my head thankfully cushioned by the carrier bag full of dough. After dragging myself up from the floor and wrenching a mess of shredded glass from my stomach, I pick up the twenty grand and stagger in dazed confusion towards a nearby emergency phone. But then, for some unfathomable reason, I turn back to check the car for damage. The thing’s a total fucking write-off. Be ideal for a cut and shut!
A screech of tyres a little way up ahead on the hard shoulder alerts me to a car reversing backwards towards me at high speed. Gunless, and in no shape for any other kind of fight I decide to beat a tactical retreat. Trouble is, the blood that’s seeping into my eyes is blinding me badly, I can hardly breathe, and my whole body is screaming blue murder. Staggering back onto the grass verge I collapse onto to all fours and rub my face in the wet grass in order to clear my eyes of blood, then scramble like a demented monkey up to the top of the embankment, slipping and sliding on the sodden grass as I go. Finally making it to the top, and with my breathing as laboured as a miner with black lung, it strikes me I’ve got no Plan B. What the fuck do I do now? In front of me there’s temporary darkness. Behind me, eternal darkness. No fucking contest! So after struggling to my feet I start to leg it, landing straight into a field that’s just been ploughed. From the very first step the sodden mud wraps itself around my shoes turning them into Frankenstein boots. That, and the driving rain that’s turning the furrowed field to bog, means every step I take is sapping what’s left of my strength and breaking my heart. But I got no choice I must keep moving.
About two hundred yards in, my lungs finally give up the ghost, and I collapse face down into a large puddle before surfacing and gasping greedily for air. Turning back to face the motorway, I can just about make out the outline of two figures standing silhouetted against the road lights. Keeping my head down I turn and move forward once more, this time crawling for some fifty feet, until managing to drag myself back upright, to move off again across in the field in a slow painful trot. After what seems like miles but is probably only a few hundred yards, the ground begins to even out and the mud slowly changes to the well-tended grass of a school playing field. Stopping once more to take a breather I scan around, relieved to see the flickering lights of a tiny village ahead. But all of a sudden, through the hissing of the pelting rain, I make out the sound of a helicopter approaching. It can mean only one thing. Old Bill knows something’s gone down. On one account it means I’m safe from the hellhounds on my trail. But on the other, the chopper carries an infrared night vision camera which narrows my chances of escape somewhat. And the last thing I need right now is time in the slammer trying to explain away a carrier bag full of wonga and a car with a bullet hole, registered to Mickey Mouse Motors on the Mile End Road.
Exhausted, I move towards the village, with the helicopter’s flashing lights closing in fast, and my slow painful trot now reduced to a Quasimodo limp. Scrambling out of the playing field I hit hard road, enabling me to step up the pace and make my way past a sub-post office to my left and a thatched-roof pub to my right, before coming to a large house, perched back off the road and fronted by a gravel drive.
Seizing the opportunity I dive to the ground and roll under a Volkswagen camper van parked up on bricks in front of its garage, where I lay still, fighting to regain control of my breathing. The noise of the chopper’s blades intensifies, reaching deafening proportions. Peering gingerly out from underneath a gap in the bumper of the vehicle that’s sheltering me, I watch in awe as powerful arc lights sweep the nearby gardens, illuminating flowers and bending them double with the powerful swish of its rotor blades.
Fuck me, I’m thinking, now I know what a poor old fox feels like when it’s being hunted. But instead of being pursued a posse of chinless Berkshire Hunts, I’m being chased by a posse of flying pigs, hunting down a free man like he was a runaway slave. I swear to fucking God this country’s getting more totalitarian by the minute. Wouldn’t mind but they’re chasing the wrong fucking hombre, the fucking mug cunts. I’m the poor cunt that’s been shot at. But at least I still had the presence of mind to remember that infrared cameras can’t see through metal. All that dough they’ve spent on all that modern technology and you don’t have to be much cleverer than a fox to outwit them. What a terrible waste of taxpayers’ dough. Glad I don’t pay none.
So, for the moment I’m sweet, amidst the chaos of Old Bill’s chopper. Snug as a bug in a rug, and all I’ve got to do is lay low here for an hour or so, because Old Bill’s tightened purse strings mean they can’t afford to stay up there all night wasting precious juice and manpower. Then all I have to do is bell a pal to come down to pick me up and run me home. I live to fight another day.
I’VE JUST PULLED up outside our firm’s safe house having spent the last fortnight in my Brighton pad, coked out of my canister and paranoid to fuck, having narrowly escaped getting topped. I was getting up in the mornings bruised and battered and with my whole body racked with pain. To ease the hurt and soothe my troubled mind I’d start the day by necking three fingers of Gentleman Jack, and then sniffing up a couple of lines, before settling down with the bottle and sinking into TV hell, like some wheelchair-bound catatonic in a nuthouse. Daytime TV’s horrific enough stone cold sober. The preserve of Valium-addled housewives, dole cheats and smeggy students on the skive. But when you’re jacked-up on hillbilly jook juice and the Devil’s Dandruff, it becomes a horrendous pustule of pug-ugly mooeys spouting inane banter, alongside battalions of pointless fat bastards from pointless provincial towns, shoehorned into two-bob market tat, salivating over sex as if they weren’t the most repugnant creatures waddling the fucking planet. Night-times were the worst. Loneliness would creep up on me like a plague rat. Things went from bad to worse as my paranoia increased with my drug and booze intake, and the slightest sound in the street outside would have me dropping to the ground and crawling my wooden floors, decked out in nothing but underpants and a pair of wrap-around Armani shades, gun in hand, ready to blow the brains out of any would-be assassin. Mostly it turned out to be passing posties or milkies.
I’d hit rock bottom and m
y incessant wanking was in danger of tearing off my foreskin, so I bit the bullet and dialled up the old love of my life, the one who fucked me over while I was in the nick, and who broke my heart like no other ever could or will again. My stomach turned over as she answered the phone. A thousand butterflies taking penalty kicks with pickled onions. A blast from the past, that low, husky growl of a voice that always did have the ability to send me loopy. I didn’t know how she would react on hearing from me, seeing as the last time we were together her I stuck a shotgun in her mouth and threatened to blow her nut off. But to my relief she was sweet, over the moon to hear from me. I ran through the little escapade about me being ambushed on the motorway and how I nearly copped a hitman’s bullet in the back of the nut. She burst into tears, which made me feel a whole lot better straight away. She said she was now working as an air hostess and flying out of Gatwick. Reckoned she had a red-eye out that night and wanted to come down to show off her uniform and spend some time with me, just for old times’ sake. Feeling newly buoyant I tidied up my flat, showered and washed the Gorgonzola from out of my foreskin, then got down to setting the scene for seduction. Two bottles of Cristal, a dozen freshly-delivered red roses, a compact full of premium charlie, with the mirror highly polished, a huge bowl of premium weed, and the pièce de résistance, a hardcore bluey, ready to be flicked on in the middle of any romantic encounter.
She turned up looking magnificent, as she always did. I dimmed the lights, and she got to talking about her new boyfriend and how he was the new love of her life and how they were soon to be getting married. Half an hour, two glasses of bubbly, four lines of charlie and a fuck-off blunt rammed with wicked Jamaican Sensi later, I had her bent double over the back of my Italian leather sofa, face down, skirt hitched up around her waist, and was plunging into her like a Dyno-Rod service engineer on ephedrine. And as I pumped away and she hollered and hooted, it suddenly struck me that this was what this cunt was doing before she was coming up to see me, sitting like a lemon in the nick and believing in the pair of us. My mood darkened with the realisation that this bitch had the fucking audacity to come swanning into prison, dressed head to toe in clobber that I had paid for while still dripping cunt juice and spunk from a previous fucking. My happy pumping turned to angry thrusts, and I began to tear into her pussy, poggering it without mercy, and causing her to scream and cry with pain. But it weren’t enough. So I grabbed hold of her head and shoved it deep into the sofa, my mind hell-bent on suffocating the cheating slag, while fucking her like the two-bit whore she still was.
I wanted her to die just at the very moment I shot my bolt into her. I wanted to feel the power of taking life and giving life in the same instant, the last gasp of her cheating breath expiring just I exploded, sending a million sperm bursting forth to multiply. Swimming like Olympians, first one to the egg gets to fertilise it, only to find that after all that effort the egg is dead and barren. That would be sweet poetic justice. But thankfully common sense prevailed and I had the presence of mind to pull out and also release her head. I stood up and buttoned myself up and then stared down at her with barely disguised disdain, as she just lay there heaving with sweat and sobbing and telling me it was the best fuck she’d had in years and how she still loved me. But the heat of passion had turned cold with ejaculation, and I just wanted her out of my sight and back out of my life. As luck would have it she was running late and didn’t even have time to wash before rushing to catch her plane. And the last abiding memory I have of the silly cunt is watching with no small amount of satisfaction, as she unknowingly sashayed out of my apartment with my come-juice drying all over the back of her brand new uniform. It was revenge of sorts, but not enough for what she put me through. If there was any real justice in this world, her plane would drop out of the fucking sky halfway over the Atlantic.
REACHING THE DOOR of the safe house sees me feeling sort of happy to be alive. Back on terra firma, as it were, and into the swing of things. Ain’t nothing like a brush with death to make a man realise he’s got to grab life by the throat before it kicks him in the bollocks. But that don’t mean I ain’t hell-bent on revenge. Not only am I still badly bruised, but my ego has taken a severe battering, which means I’ll be pushing hard for instant retaliation. I can’t be sure, but I’d have my life on it that the assassination attempt came from Smoothound, via that toerag Ronnie Olive. But although I’ve played the shooting over and over again inside my head, I can’t come up with a concrete ID on either of the two men that bushwhacked me. Handshakes all round, and a soaking wet smacker on the cheek from Kelly Amore as I stroll in. Surviving an attempt on one’s life earns maximum kudos amongst your own people, and it feels good that they’re glad to see me alive. And so they should be, I’ve put more than my fair share of bread on the table, and helped keep this firm successfully off the straight and narrow. Granted, Danny’s shrewd, but Stevie and Frankie are seaside donkeys who’d be getting nicked every five minutes if weren’t for me and him. And all of them would still be living in ex-council houses and holding their hands out for protection money from terrified publicans, if yours truly hadn’t shown them how to expand and crawl, glistening like Christmas trees, out of the ghetto with absolutely no flies on any of them whatsoever.
It all builds to the fact that I’m going to be pressing hard on this payback because I know that if someone shot at Danny, we’d already be on our way to sort it out. And I ain’t playing second fiddle on no one’s roof.
‘So, it was definitely Smoothound?’ says Danny, as I flop down into a leather recliner, while Kelly Amore dutifully wheels in an horribly fucking ornate, claw-footed tea trolley, stacked chocca with all manner of gut-busting cakes, alongside beverages.
‘Fucking right!’ I say, helping myself to a Viennese cream slice and a bone china cup of piping hot coffee. ‘He was as close to me as I am to you.’ Which is of course an out-and-out stinking porky, but it don’t matter. I ain’t here to sow seeds of doubt, but to reap the whirlwind of revenge. Besides, I know this came from Ronnie Olive. Proof? I don’t need proof. This is a kangaroo court. Her Majesty’s got no jurisdiction behind these walls. I can feel that slag’s fingerprints all over my aching bones and that’s good enough for me. Plus here’s the deal, even if it didn’t come from Ronnie Olive this time, it could well do in the future, and it’d be just as hard to tell, because that slippery little cunt won’t be pulling the trigger. I don’t suppose he’s held a yogger for thirty stretch. All he’s going to do is put another one of his impressionable arsewipes on a promise. And believe me, they’re lining up over in south London to his wipe his jacksy clean, for even the tiniest piece of action. So the way I figure it is we hit him or his people hard now. Not only will it slow him right down, but word will also filter down through all the right channels, which means that anyone else who wants to have a pop will have serious second thoughts because they’ll know our retaliation will be swift and merciless.
And more to the point, if anyone’s likely to get topped out of our little firm it will be me because I’m the easiest target, flying about and out on the Joe Brown nearly every fucking night. Danny? All that cunt does is sit round the safe house eating roast dinners and having his bollocks sucked, which is fair enough, if that’s your bag. And the only time you only see Stevie and Frankie is when there’s pound notes on the table. And there’s one other thing that’s really rankling me. Smoothound and Ronnie Olive disrespected me at Danny’s old man’s funeral in front of three hundred proper people. OK, so Smoothound got a severe beating, but this ain’t about straighteners. You disrespect me in front of my people, you have to go, simple as that. This ain’t no fucking school playground. I put my flick-comb and conkers away when I sprouted my first bollock hairs.
‘So we gotta hit back straight away,’ I say.
‘Slow down a minute,’ says Danny. ‘We don’t even know if it was Ronnie Olive. We’ve fucked so many people out there it could’ve come from anyone.’
‘Well personally I rat
her like my fucking head,’ I say, turning my gaze to Stevie and Frankie, who are sitting schtummo like a couple of schoolboy dunces. ‘Not only that,’ I add, perching myself on the edge of my chair and pointing an accusing finger, ‘but whoever came for me must have picked me up from you two’s car front.’
This last statement causes the room to bristle with nervous tension, leaving me to begin to lap up the proceedings with growing satisfaction, as its implications begin to register, whirring maniacally inside dense skulls like a Las Vegas fruit machine firing up to spunk out payola jackpot. Smiling inside I then move in for the kill.
‘So I say bollocks to it, ‘cos apart from the drug fuck-up in Blackpool, Ronnie Olive ain’t gonna suffer being humiliated at the funeral any more than any of us would. And if you lot want to sit back and wait for one in the fucking nut when you’re getting into your motor, that’s up to you. But me, I say cut out the cancer now, right at source.’ After settling back once more to finish off my cream slice and theatrically lick my fingers clean, I then have to suffer a few seconds of toe-curling silence, interrupted by only the occasional loud slurp of coffee being drunk. Then Danny speaks.
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