Cracking Up (17 page)

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.”

I saw the motor approaching from down the street and darted towards it. As the motor slowed, I jumped in the back, Caspar in the passenger seat, crouching down. “Did you fill him in?” Dobber asked.

“I think so,” I said, uncertain. “Don’t know for sure.”

“You don’t know?” Dobber said.

“The Big Mac jammed,” I said. “I licked off four shots with the Glock. Hit the target with two out of four. Defo.”

“Maybe we should go back and finish him off,” Dobber said.

But just then the police scanner crackled with the news of the shooting. The neighbour must have called the bizzies. It was time to scarper before the bizzies landed. Dobber hit the juice, headlights off, ripping it out of there double quick, driving like Paul Walker from The Fast And The Furious, dodging in and out of traffic like a top lunatic. We clocked an unmarked police car up ahead on the opposite side of the road. Dobber gave it full throttle and really pushed the motor for all it was worth. The pigs did a u-ey and chased after us. There was talk of ditching the shooters out the car windows, then Caspar realized that the silencer was missing and I started screaming at him, calling him all kinds of useless cunts, but then the scanner broke the news that Doubtie was still alive as on the scene officers requested an ambulance.

“Dumb and dumberer, you two,” Dobber quipped, as the motor was doing the ton through built-up areas and he drove an absolute blinder on the busy roads, giving them the slip and flying off to our despised end of town, where the robbed car was dumped and burnt out. Melt was on hand to pick us up in a hired car, and give us a lift back to a safehouse on the estate where we could slip out of contaminated clothes, ballies, gloves, bag them up for disposal and shower up.

Doubtie was carted off to hospital in the back of an ambo. He had been shot in the gut twice, and once through the arm. Only the skilled hands of the surgeons at the RLH saved his sissy arse. After the operation he was handcuffed to an ozzie bed and kept in a secure unit. Two armed police officers were stationed outside his door because he was considered a flight risk among other things. There was a tube up his nose, an IV needle in his arm and a catheter shoved up his japs eye but, when interviewed by detectives, he stuck to the no-grassing code and would tell them sweet fuck all. Hats off to him.

26.

One night, after a hard days narco graft, flogging our remedies, we were in Giselle’s house, in Motley Brow, a stone’s throw from the martketplace at Gravesend Close. We were slumped down on the big leather sofa she’d bought from DFS, playing Fallout 3 on the Xbox and mowing down virtual enemies on the big-screen telly in wordless concentration. But before long, Caspar spat his dummy out, tossing his controller on the floor in frustration at being spanked, the big fucking baby.

He went upstairs to the loft where he had stashed the Mac-10. He came back with the gun in a kit bag: He was a soft-looking, almost pretty boy with alabaster skin and cherry red lips, and he dropped the ugly, little weapon like a stale dog turd on the front room table. He set about cleaning it like a pro, poking a rod down the barrel. He was bone-thin, a skinny shit and ghostlike. That’s why we called him Caspar. But still, there was something scary about him. His hazel eyes were feral-like, glassy and jittery, and he was a loose cannon because he was always racking up lines and dabbling in that toxic crap known as Special K. He often stayed up all night, off his cake, playing the Xbox for hours, twitching and mumbling to himself.

While he was polishing the weapon with some oil, he said. “You know, I could take some wankers right out the picture with the Big Mac. Top a lot of peeps with this, lad. It’d be thrill-kill toasted carnage.”

Then, admiring the firepower, added. “This beast is so fucking rugged, man. It’s murderous.”

He asked me to snap a photo of him holding the weapon with his mobile phone and WhatsApped it to a few mates. Caspar loved that machine gun and said that when we made it big-time he was going to have it dipped in gold. He hammed it up, impersonating a psycho-killer. “And then I can look the part, hurting and killing haters with a blinged-up burner. I’m a pure fucking evil dog, lar, and that’s no bullshit.”

“You’re a sick, dangerous fucker,” I mocked, then started singing: “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gunna do? Whatcha gunna do when they come for you?”