Cracking Up (18 page)

He joined in, singing the chorus from the song, the theme from the American telly show COPS. “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gunna do? Whatcha gunna do when they come for you? …”

We burst out laughing, splitting our sides. He left the gun on the table, came back to crash on the sofa and built a spliff. We Cheech-and-Chonged it, getting stoned together and watching telly. There was something on the news about the world ending 2012. “End of the world, innit,” Caspar said.

I sucked on the joint and turned to face him. “Oh yeh?”

“According to the Mayan calender, yeh!” He seemed sold on the idea.

“What’s supposed to happen?”

“The whole shithouse goes up in flames, that’s fucking what!”

“What do you want to do before you burn?”

“I want to go to the Dam, get to grips with a slimey brass and smoke some boss weed,” Caspar said. “What about you?”

“Fuck! Sounds good to me. It’s a plan then.”

“Innit!” he said, laughing. “One day, Ow-wee, one day, mate … All this graft will be worth it. We’ll be brewstered, we’ll show the cunts!”

We rolled another spliff and settled down, playing the Xbox again. A short while later, one of the joeys phoned up. The gen was: Mug Fam spotted! Kitted out in black and ballied-up. Prowling up and down Bullpitt Avenue, Bola inside with bad intentions, an intimidating act of urban provocation and dare.

We were extremely stoned, stinking of homegrown weed. The ketamine laced pussy smoke had burned our throats, got into our lungs and made it hard to breathe; it made our heads spin and legs go wobbly. My chest was wheezing and I was so dizzy that I was worried I might pass out. But I came up with A GREAT IDEA: A cock’s out shoot-out. It seemed like a fucking brill, typically weed-inspired notion. A few cheeky bumps of Special K up our hooters and we were good to go; it was going to be jaw dropping, adrenalin-buzzed, spine-tingling stuff. The idea was meant to be a textbook case of a drive-by shooting. Strike with stealth, storm the opposite faction and shoot off: Mini-Scarface.

I told Caspar to grab the Big Mac and we ripped out of there rapido style. Caspar got behind the wheel of the A3. Scouse grime blared out the speakers, That’s Juvey & Eddie Mac’s Turn That Shit Up. We barreled it, racing down the road like Lewis Hamilton. The night was brass monkeys, bitterly cold. I was wearing a North Face Parka and a scarf wrapped around my head like a hoodie. I had the Glock jammed into the waistband of my trackies, sitting in the passenger seat, as we rolled through the feral zone of The Shooting Range.

Caspar had the Big Mac in his lap and a scanner tuned in to the local police frequency was sat on the dash, as he bunged a pinch of Special K up his bugle. We were a fucking nightmare on four blown-up tires, as we pulled onto Bullpitt Avenue and I spotted the joey who had clocked the Mug Fam stalking. He was on the pavement, in front of the scruffy shopping parade. All the shop shutters were down, daubed with footie graffiti, gang slogans and grass shout-outs. Little IQ was with a small cluster of louts under a broken street light. He was decked out in his usual clobber: A black Nike jacket, a hoodie pulled up over a woollen Berghaus hat, black and blue Nike trackie bottoms unzipped at the ankles and black, red and white Reeboks. The other similar-dressed nasty shites were circled around a young girl, fourteen if that, with heavy makeup and tottering heels, menacing her with threatening talk. The girl was fronting, telling them to FUCK OFF!!! and LEAVE US ALONE!!! One of them knocked her to the ground and she screamed, scared shitless.

Caspar had curbed it and I wound the window down. “Get your arse over here!” I shouted to Little IQ. “Where’s that bunch of tossers?”

“They’ve been up and down the road for the past half-hour. In a black RAV4. Are you going to take the blurts out?”

I leaned out the car window and punched him sharply in the nuts. Not hard, just a playfull tap, using his ball-bag like a speedball and making him groan and double up. “You dirty little bastid,” I said to him. “What are you doing with that bird? That’s Trim’s cousin, that is.”

“I didn’t know who the bitch was,” he pleaded, as I grabbed the Glock and jumped out the car, giving Little IQ a sneaky knee in the nuts on my way past. Behind him, I could see the bird being closed in on with menacing intent. One of the lads was wearing a black Location jacket with built-in goggles, another had a scarf over his face; so they couldn’t be identified because CCTV cameras were mounted on the outside of shop walls. It was dead obvious that they were after a bit of gang-bang material and the tarted-up schoolgirl fitted the bill.

“Rape’s our game!” I heard one of them taunting her, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a big, fuck-off knife.

“FUCKING LEAVE IT OUT, NOW!” I growled at them, because I was top dog and they were just dry humping puppies, learning how to bark proper. It was a way to impose myself on the little gob-shites and, anyway, between the lot of them they didn’t have a good fuck in them.

I flashed the piece and the lads backed off. I helped her up, then pointed to a dark, unlit alley just a little way up the street. “See that alley down there? They were getting ready to drag you down there and rip your knickers off! Now get on home!”

She had no reason to disbelieve my claim, and thanked us that I had come to the rescue. Yeh, it was a close call and, yeh, the estate really was that dangerous a place, especially after dark.

All of a sudden, the RAV4 appeared, out of nowhere, on the opposite side of the road, parallel to ours. Crammed inside were that bunch of ballied-up fuckers. The rear passenger window of the Toyota wound down, a gloved hand pointed a chrome-plated .357 revolver and pulled the trigger. There were three ear-splitting cracks of gunfire and each blast was deafening like a fucking bomb going off. “YOU FUCKING CUNTS!” I heard Caspar bellow at them, as the three bullets thudded into the offside of our motor, stippling the A3 with bullet holes in a gut-wrenching moment.

Bystanders started screaming and scattered like spooked cats, fleeing over walls and running off in fear, ducking behind cars and bolting for escape routes. The young uns I had been chastising weren’t too happy about being in the line of fire, they immediately turned and ran like Forrest Gumps, as I instantly scrambled down behind a parked car. Caspar was trapped and could only duck in his seat, as a bullet grazed his nose. Then, in a momentary lull in the action, sat up and put his foot down and the A3 rocketed down the road as its windscreen was blasted out. I lifted the Glock, using the bonnet for cover and started shooting.

Now it was the Mug Fam’s turn to be target practice, a bullet ripped through the shooter’s hand. The pain must have scorched through his hand because he screamed his fucking head off. He was going to have to learn to wipe his arse with the other hand for the time being. Shooter disabled, all they could do was fucking take off and their motor shot off down the road like a drag racing car. Caspar had executed a u-ey further down the road and was ripping it back down in the direction of the fire-fight. He’d flipped out and was driving like a complete lunatic, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and must have been feeling really pissed-off because he was firing a barrage of bullets out of the open driver’s side window with the machine gun in his other hand. The darkness became illuminated with the pin-point flashes of light sparkling from the snarling Big Mac. He was missing spectacularly, as lead slugs slithered through parked cars, ricocheting off the pavement and lodging in tarmac. But a split second later, the rear window of the RAV4 was sporting a large gaping hole courtesy of the ammo that hurtled down the street. The glass exploded in a razor-sharp arc and the broken shards scattered, slashing the eyebrow of the back seat passenger and bloodying his eye. The white-knuckled driver hunched over the steering wheel and put his foot down, tearing off at a break neck speed, as blood sprinkled out of Bola’s eyebrow. Caspar slammed on the anchors and pulled over to let me in. I was wired on adrenalin and watching sworn enemies disappearing like ghosts into the night. The scanner on the dash was buzzing and beeping, and it was time to scarper because we were getting a little bit nervous about attracting the unwanted attention of the armed bizzies. “Get the fuck out of here,” I instructed Caspar, and he revved the engine, making enough noise for a warm-up at a Grand Prix, and we zoomed out of there, burning rubber.

After the shooting, the Mug Fam continued to drive like maniacs, flying to the hospital, screeching around corners and jumping red lights before squealing around a bend and losing it. Bola’s pupils were saucered with panic and he screamed from the back seat. “Slow down! Fucking slow down!”

The next thing: It was like slow motion, as they plowed into the arse end of a parked car. It was a Volvo, built like a tank and the front end of their motor went fucking BOOM! There were crunching and shattering noises on impact. They were only a few hundred yards from the hospital, but the RAV4 was totalled. Steam hissed from the radiator into the cold night, all their lot bailed out and legged it. The driver had gone face first into the windshield and bounced off the roof. Blood and snot were running out of his nose; he was battered to fuck from the accident, his nose all over the place, cuts all over his head and bleeding from the scalp. “Ahh! Me fucking face,” he was groaning. “I’ve bust me fucking nose. Ahhh!”

Bola had slammed his knee on impact but was limping down the road to A&E. Blood was pumping out of his head and hand; he was really fucked up but was gritting his teeth, putting his head down and plodding on.

He was on the point of collapse when he made it to ozzie and stumbled in to the emergency ward. He was desperate for some immediate assistance, but nurses and security insisted he had to book in at reception because casualty was a pretty wild place to be; there were all sorts of injuries and nasty goings on at every turn. The police arrived while he was being treated, because that was what the hospital was required to do when they treated shooting victims. The bizzies grilled Bola on how he’d been shot. He made up a rapid blag about being popped after having his bling ripped off by some low down street robbing team, but the bizzies knew that he was lying and weren’t falling for that one. They told him he’d better come clean because they’d found the abandoned, mashed-up RAV4 complete with bullet hole just down the road. Bola felt the same way about the police as he did about AIDs; so he just grinned and told them to fuck off. The bizzies didn’t bat an eyelid; it was obvious they were used to these kind of evasive bullshit responses. “You know who popped me,” he said, mugging them off, while retaining his street cred with omerta.

The bizzies kept Bola in custody overnight to give them time to analyse tissue swabs to test his hands and clothes for traces of gunpowder. He was held in the secure unit, where I phoned him and taunted. “Is that the best you can do, muppet man? You can’t do us, no fucking way man!” I laughed at him. “You can’t top us! We’re fucking bulletproof! Fuck off!”

Of course, another reason Bola lied to the bizzies was because he had shot first with his own banger. If the police could prove that, then Bola was potentially on the hook for an attempted murder charge, same as us lot. No guns would be found, but spent cartridges were recovered at the scene and identified by ballistics as being from the three types of guns used. And one fired casing would be found inside the RAV4. Also, he didn’t snitch to the bizzies simply because he didn’t want them to get in the way. He was planning to resolve the turf dispute himself, in his own murderous fashion.

Another thing that irritated the bizzies was that the street was crowded that night. The Mug Fam had been blasting at us like gunslingers, we were spraying bursts of the machine gun fire maliciously. The two cars were being used for target practice, tearing up and down the road; it was like fucking Mexico. But the police could not locate witnesses; no one dared to comitt the mortal sin of grassing, a despicable act punishable by social banishment - or worse.

The silence was deafening, as no one wanted to be labelled a snitch for fear of brutal retaliations: houses firebombed, revenge attacks or shootings, female relatives sexually assaulted and all round intimidation at the gangs doing. Mobile phone cameras, text messages and social networks would spread the word about who was doing the grassing; blurts would be threatened, because they had hemmorrhoids on their lips from kissing the copper’s arses. And the bubblers got the message: Piss the bed and you’re dead meat; they might as well have signed their own death warrants. Because there was a code on these hard and unrepenting streets: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

27.

I met up with a prison officer we called Lard Arse in HMP Altcourse’s car park. The fat bastid was edgy as shuffled his blubbery frame into the passenger seat of the Mitsubishi Colt hire car. I passed him a BMW key fob phone because I didn’t think Spermy would appreciate having to shove a Blackberry Curve up his bumhole. I also handed over a package given to me by Dog Sick. I didn’t ask what was inside the package because I already knew: Nasty. I didn’t ask about the connection between Dog Sick and the screw. Lard Arse obviously thought it was worth whatever risks he was taking.

Criminally low wages played their part, as contraband was covertly smuggled into the concrete cunt by the screws. Lard Arse had no particular reason not to co-operate: He knew that fellow officers were bent, taking back-handers from the likes of Dog Sick arranging drops and flooding the prison system with drugs because the big bunch of cellies inside wanted to get off their faces coz it felt so fucking good and, fuck me, prison’s boring.

As I stepped into the visitor’s centre, clips from my own time in this very same nick flickered through my mind and I froze on the spot questioning the sanity of returning to a scene of such institutionalised bollocks. The petty rules and regulations were evident from posters and procedures, specially designed to get right on visitors and sitting tenants tits alike, constantly reminding you that you were merely shit on the sole of the prison systems big fuck-off boot. Trudging slowly inside that hate factory was like licking shit off a nettle, a sense of foreboding preceded a bout of involuntary dry heaves, then I remembered the mission; to see my mate Spermy, let him know the nasty was on its way, sell the contraband at inflated prices and amass enough readies to sort out his crippling cash shortage, because it’s crap being skint in the harsh confines of the concrete cunt. Now where was the harm in that?