Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (10 page)

‘Are you sure?
It’s n
ot much of a fucking safe house is it?’

‘You got any better ideas?’

‘Well no…’

‘So what’s wrong with this bloke Scampi’s place?’ I asked
from over their shoulders like a kid sat in the back of the car wondering where we were going
,
and
not sure I really wanted to know the answer.

‘Scampi’s a cook,’ said Scroat, as though that explained everything.

‘He’s a fucking
tweake
r
, that’s what he is
,
’
countered
Bung.

‘Well we ain’t got a lot of choice at the moment have we?
’ snarled Scroat which seemed to
summarise
the position fairly well
as far as I could see
.
‘
So shut
the fuck
up and take what you’re given.
’

With the news that one of the
Scandinavian
clubs was now over here and expected to come gunning for us as the price of getting their Brethren colours, for once in my life I found myself actually agreeing with Scroat. Not that I’d want to make a habit of it.

*

Scampi’s place turned out to be
a small
,
rather tired looking
red brick
farmhouse
in bay windowed Victorian villa style
. It was
stuck scruffily
behind a high hedge of overgrown leylandii
down a track off a qui
e
t back road somewhere in the nondescript countryside left over between Reading and Basingstoke.

It was miles away from anywhere, or about as far away as you could get in this neck of the woods, and I soon found out why as Scroat buzzed the intercom
. A
fter a moment we heard the click of the electronic bolts being released and
then Scroat pushed open the heavy steel door and we filed inside after him.

‘Jesus Christ, what the
hell
is that smell?’ I coughed
, gagging on the acrid stench as we stepped inside
.

Rotten eggs is about how
you
would
start to
describe it, mixed in with petrol and something else that I couldn’t quite identify.
But that simply didn’t do it justice.
You
’d
g
e
t a headache
just
from the fumes catching at the back of your throat as you walked in through the door. Still I guessed there’d be the odd painkiller
lying
around
inside
if I needed one.

‘Like th
e
man said, Scampi’s a cook
,
’
Bung observed.

‘And a good one too
,
’
Scroat added approvingly.

The
eye-
watering
smell didn’t seem to be bothering the big
bare-chested
guy shambling towards us
down the hallway
. But then from his big too
thless grin and slightly unfocu
sed eyes, I guessed he was
accustomed
to it by now.

‘Used to be,’ muttered Bung under his breath in a tone of disgust, ‘it happens to all of them, comes from tasting too much of the product as they go.’

Scampi was fully sleeved, one of those guys who had obviously decided that his arms were going to look much better coloured in. As he brushed past me I saw he had a full back pack,
the club colours inked in life-
sized across his back.
But his tattoos weren’t what had caught my eye about him. Instead it was his gaping maw.
Scampi had a bad case of m
eth mouth
and from that and the chemical stink surrounding us it was obvious where we were
. It
wa
s
only
a frigging meth lab. And this was
Scroat’s idea of
a safe house?

The big guy bear hugged and backslapped Scroat
just
inside
the door
, gave Bung a forearm to forearm handclasp
,
and then introduced himself to me as he shut and bolted the steel reinforced door behind us with a slightly slurred, but quite unforgettable, ‘Hi, I’m Scampi, I make meth and kill people.’

Meth
amphetamine
is dangerous
stuff
. And not just if you stick it up your nose.

There’s a number of recipes
that people have come up with over the years. F
or small quantities
you can use
the shake and bake or the Nazi process
which seemed popular with amateurs
. But for bulk
, commercial
production the red, white and blue me
thod, either the cooked or cold-
cooked versions
, were the ones you went for
.

As he led us along the hallway into the house it was clear that Scampi was cooking on an industrial scale. The place had been turned into a factory with a different stage of the process in each room.

Meth is seriously addictive
gear
, it’s one of the reasons dealers like it because once you’ve got your customers
on the hook
, they can’t help themselves but they will just
have to
keep coming back for more
and more
. But it has its downsides
, to put it mildly,
and
meth mouth,
a tendency to
have
your teeth
simply fall out
was just the start of it. As a rule, speed freaks were notorious
for becoming
paranoid, and at worst it often led
on to
full blown amphetamine psychosis.

But Scampi was different, at least for now. I think he must have just had
a
hit before we arrived, and a pretty big one at that since he was clearly on his up phase and still
o
n a bit of a rush.

It was what you took it for after all, those feelings of euphoria, increased libido, a
lertness, concentration, enhanc
ed energy,
inflated
self-esteem, self-confidence, sociability. And then off the scale into mania, the delusions of
grandeur
, hallucinatio
ns, excessive feelings of power
and invincibility
, and full blown megalomania
. All
entertain
ing enough, but then when you mixed them
up
with
having to run
a
terrifyingly
dangerous chemical process was when it got really interesting. It was no wonder that they reckoned the reason
for
most meth labs
being
discovered in the
States
was when the fire brigade got called to an explosion.

But that was before the down as it
wore
off, the irritability, the aggressiveness,
the anxiety, the fatigue, the tremors, the depression, the headaches, the delusions, the repetitive and
obsessive
behaviours, and of course, the, paranoia, the fear, the figures you caught just out of the corner of your eye.

And that was when you became really dangerous,
both
to yourself and to those around you.

Worse, Scampi had become a
tweake
r
, someone who used their cook
’
s perks to
take
the product to stay awake and keep on doing the job. The trouble was that inevitably it then got to you. As cook after cook around the world all eventually found to their cost, but no one ever learnt, once you started off down that road, given how addictive the shit was, you were never coming back.

Whatever the reason, and frankly I wished he would stop since the less I knew about what he was up to the better I felt about the situation, Scampi just wouldn’t shut up and insisted on giving us the tour as we
walked through the house and towards the
stairs.

Sandwiched between Bung up front and Scroat behind I couldn’t see either of their faces. But if I was a betting man I wouldn’t have had any money on either of them being impressed. If there was one thing above all else that the club was looking for and expected absolutely in a
striker
,
and then a
full patch
,
it was security and secrecy
. A
nd yet
,
here was Scampi blabbing about his business in front of me
,
a non-member. We all knew it was the meth talking, but it was still Scampi’s mouth that was running off. I didn’t give much for his chances in the long term if he kept that up.

I studiously didn’t want
to
hear
. What you quickly learnt as a crime journalist visiting the less salubrious type of watering holes was to be scrupulous about not listening to other people
’s
conversations that didn’t concern you. What you didn’t overhear, didn’t make you a potentially inconvenient witness.

But by the time we’d had the full Scampi guided tour, there wasn’t much scope not to know anything about what he had going on.

*

‘I’ve set it all up sweet, it’s just like a real factory. I’ve got my prep in the rooms at the front,’ he said
,
waving into what had obviously been the lounge. Now trestle benches ran alongside each wall.

Delia had nothing on cooking with Scampi.

Like with all good cooks Scampi was fanatical about sourcing
only
the best quality ingredients and controlling as much of the process as possible himself.

Whether you were hot cooking or cold cooking, the basic ingredients of the red white and blue method were the same, and with meth the first tricky part was always getting hold of your main active constituent, pseudoephedrine or pseudo for short. Either you had to have a contact somewhere overseas where they could get it in industrial quantities
,
the way they used to be able to in Oz, and then smuggle it in to you, or you had to extract it from over the counter decongestants which you then had to bulk buy.

Seeing as there weren’t any catering sized cans of Australian peaches lying around it didn’t surprise me to see that Scampi must have laid claim to the worst sinuses in the world. Stacked next to a row of five gallon drums of solvents in the corner were a shed load of Sudafed boxes.

Scampi was really proud of this part of his process because he’d really got it sussed.

Once h
e’d stripped the dye and wax from the pills with ethanol and ground them into powder, he needed to shake them
,
mixed in with methanol for about twenty minutes. But this was hard work for any significant quantities, so Scampi’s solution had been to invest in one of those industrial shakers, the sort of thing they use for mixing up paint to your required colour in a DIY store.

When they were left to settle out, the pseudo floated to the top and the other crap s
a
nk to the bottom so Scampi could
siphon
the methanol/pseudo liquid off the top, filtering it as he went.

The next part of the fun of meth cooking was driving the alcohol off until he was left with a white powder. It was a sensitive process, too much heat and it would turn yellow
,
telling you you’d burnt it. Some cooks used a hairdryer for fine control. Scampi
,
it seemed
,
preferred an oven. But whatever a cook used, the fumes, if they didn’t catch fire, made your eyes water and hacked at the back of your throat, so I could understand why Scampi had a couple of respirator masks hanging from a hook on the wall.

In the other room across the hallway Scampi made his blue
;
his iodine crystals, and his red
;
his phosphorus catalyst.

The room was set up much like the first one, with trestle tables arranged around the walls. Only on this side of the house he had rows of large plastic drinks bottles for the iodine and supplies of tincture, hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid, as well as a small chest freezer on the floor with a little kitchen timer on the side for producing the gooey dark black purple mess of the iodine crystals he was looking for.

As with most of the rest of the process, getting the red phosphorus was a case of solvents a go-go as the approved Scampi method involved cutting the striking strips off books of matches, soaking them in a bath of acetone to add a pear drops scent to the heady mix of fumes already in the air, and then scraping the phosphorus off with a razor blade before leaving it to dry.