"Just tell me where he lives," I said.
He shook his head. "I don't know ... nobody knows."
"I don't believe you."
"I don't know," he spat- "It's the fucking truth!"
I didn't want to believe him, but the way he said it — the passion in his voice, the fear in his eyes — I was pretty sure that he was telling me the truth.
"What about a phone number?" I said.
O'Neil shook his head. "He doesn't give it out."
"So how do you get in touch with him?"
"You don't... if he wants something, he gets in touch with you."
"How?"
"He'll send someone ... or maybe get someone to call. One of the kids, usually."
"What kids?"
He shrugged. "The kids, you know ... the little fuckers who want to be Crows." O'Neil looked at me, a bit more confident again now. "You'll never find him, you know. Not unless he wants you to. And then you'll wish you hadn't."
"Yeah?"
He grinned. "You've got no fucking idea what you're dealing with. When he finds out what you've done tonight —"
"How's he going to find out?"
O'Neil hesitated for a moment, then he just shook his head and shrugged again. I raised my arm and moved my hand towards his face, palm first. I let the energy flow into my skin, feeling it pulse and burn, and I could see my hand glowing with heat as I moved it ever closer to O'Neil's face. His skin was reddening now, his forehead dripping sweat, and he was starting to panic — straining backwards, arching his neck, trying to get away from the heat.
"No!" he screamed. "No! Please, don't... please ..."
I paused, my hand a few centimetres from his face. "How's Ellman going to find out I've been here?"
"He won't... I won't say nothing," O'Neil spluttered. "I promise ... I won't tell him —"
"Yeah, you will. I want you to tell him."
I heard the siren then. Faint at first, but rapidly getting louder. I got up, went over to the window and looked out. Beyond the burning Golf, I could see the flashing blue lights of two police cars speeding down Crow Lane. I knew that no one in Crow Town would have called them, especially about something as trivial as a car on fire, so I guessed that they were on their way to somewhere else. But, just to be on the safe side, I tuned in to the police radio frequency and simultaneously hacked into the communications system at Southwark Borough Police Station to find out what was going on. And it took me less than a second to discover that I was wrong — they weren't going somewhere else, they were answering a call from a passing motorist about a burning car outside Baldwin House.
"Shit," I muttered as the two patrol cars turned off Crow Lane and started racing down towards the square with their lights and sirens blazing.
I knew that I was probably safe enough staying where I was, that the police were probably just going to check out the Golf, make sure it was nothing more serious than just another burning car ... then they'd probably just wait for the fire service to arrive and leave it to them. The last thing the local police would want to do at four o'clock in the morning was to go round Baldwin House knocking on doors, waking people up.
So, yeah, I was probably safe enough staying where I was ...
In this stinking flat.
Surrounded by drugs and guns ...
And drug dealers ...
Electrocuted drug dealers.
One of whom was tied to a chair.
No, I realized, probably wasn't good enough. If by any chance the police did find me in here, I'd have a lot of explaining to do.
I had to get out.
I moved away from the window and quickly went over to a table in the middle of the room. It was piled high with clear polythene bags filled with what I assumed was heroin and cocaine. I picked up two bags of each and put them in my pockets.
"Hey!" O'Neil called out. "What the fuck are you doing?"
Ignoring him, I reached out and picked up a small black automatic pistol from the table and put it in my pocket with the drugs.
Car doors were slamming outside now.
Police radios were squawking.
It was time to go.
I turned to O'Neil and said, "Tell Ellman I'm coming for him." And before he could answer, I walked out of the room, went down the hallway, opened the flat door and left.
As I headed down the corridor towards the fire exit, I called 999 from my iBrain.
It was answered almost immediately. "Emergency. Which service?"
"There's been a murder," I said, pushing open the fire door. "6 Baldwin House, Crow Lane —"
"Just a moment, sir. I need to know —"
"It's on the ground floor, 6 Baldwin House," I repeated. "The Crow Lane Estate. Someone's been shot."
I ended the call.
The fire door opened out to the rear of Baldwin House — a concreted jungle of weeds and wheelie bins and broken syringes and dog shit — and from there I headed south, away from the tower, scrabbling down a shallow grass slope to a makeshift path that led me along a dip in the fields all the way back to Compton.
By the time I'd crept back into the flat and tiptoed down to my room, the police officers dealing with the burning car had been alerted to a possible fatal shooting at 6 Baldwin House, and they'd sealed off the area and were waiting for additional officers and an armed response team to arrive.
As I got undressed and climbed into bed, tired and drained, I wondered what the police would think when they finally smashed O'Neil's door down and found that there was no dead body, no murder, just three slightly battered drug dealers, all of them tied up, and a flat full of drugs and guns.
Would the cops care that they'd been wrongly tipped off?
Did I care whether they cared or not?
I didn't know.
I didn't care.
I lay down in the darkness and tried to think about myself and what I'd just done — my violence, my rage, my savagery — but I couldn't seem to find anything in me to feel anything about it. I knew that I'd done it, and I knew that there was a reason for doing it, and I knew that — despite the validity of that reason — I still ought to be feeling some degree of shame or remorse or guilt or something ...
But there was nothing there.
No feelings at all.
Just me and the darkness ...
And iBoy.
Us.
Me.
And i.
We lay there in the silence and thought about ourselves. What were we doing? And why? What were we trying to achieve? And how? What was our goal, our plan, our aim, our desire?
What was our reason?
The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
It was 04:48:07.
We closed our eyes and waited for the sun to rise.
10001
A fugue state is a dissociative memory disorder characterized by an altered state of consciousness and an interruption of, or dissociation from, fundamental aspects of an individual's everyday life, such as personal identity and personal history. Often triggered by a traumatic life event, the fugue state is usually short-lived (hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity.