Trey chuckled to himself.
‘I smell bacon,’ he said. ‘Delicious bacon. Yum yum – smell that pig.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what you smell. You in a gang, tough guy? Me too. I’m in the biggest gang in town.’
I patted him down, struggling to get my breathing under control, feeling myself trembling. I looked back at Jackson but he was calmly staring across the street, watching the entrance to Dabs.
I began pulling things from Trey’s baggy trousers. First a small cellophane wrap of white powder. ‘What’s this, coke? That’s up to seven years in prison for possession.’ Next a lightweight pair of knuckle-dusters. ‘Possession of an offensive weapon in a public place? That’s another four years. I don’t even have to plant anything on you, do I, tough guy?’ Then a lottery ticket. I laughed. ‘Your luck just ran out, Trey.’
And then his phone.
I pressed the photos icon. Then there were a number of options. All photos. Videos. Bursts. Recently Deleted. I pressed Recently Deleted. And I saw a crowded club. Laughter. Screams. And then Justin Whitestone staggering towards the camera, the blood streaming from his ruined eyes.
‘You piece of shit,’ I said, and banged the back of his head with his phone. His legs buckled but he didn’t go down.
‘I know my rights,’ he laughed, and I saw something that I had not expected.
He wasn’t scared of me.
And I needed him to be scared of me.
This was never going to work unless he was scared of me.
‘Max,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve got company.’
A car tooled slowly into the car park, music coming from inside, four faces, three black and one white, staring out as it circled us in a wide arc. The car stopped, its engine still running. Four doors came open. Jackson was already walking toward them as they got out.
‘Nothing to see here,’ he said to the first one, the driver, and hit him in the centre of his face with the palm of his hand, propelling him backwards, blood all over the hands clawing at the flattened nose. Jackson’s right hand, the same hand that had executed the palm strike, was raised in what looked like a peace sign until he carefully drove the fingertips of his index and middle finger into the driver’s eyes.
Then the other three were on him.
And Jackson took them out.
He slammed the side of his right foot against a knee and then his left foot into somebody else’s knee.
A few wild blows rained down on him but not for long. He waded into them with his low, hard kicks to the knees and his hands and his elbows in their eyes. I was starting to understand his fighting technique. Knees and eyes. That’s what he went for and it is difficult to do much of anything, let alone fight back, when your knees or your eyes are gone.
All you can do is crawl away.
And that is what they did.
The four of them crawled away.
Somehow they got into the car and took off.
But Trey N’Dou still wasn’t scared of me. He saw some weakness, or some reticence in me. Some line that he knew I would never cross. He looked at me and smiled. He knew I wasn’t going to take out his eye or destroy his knees.
‘I want you away from here,’ I said, and he laughed in my face.
‘And I want you to suck my cock until you love me,’ he told me.
‘Let me have him for a minute,’ Jackson said, pushing me aside.
He grabbed the Dog Town Boy, swung a leg behind him and pushed his chest with both hands.
Trey N’Dou went down like a Greek bank.
And then I saw the gun in Jackson’s hand.
It seemed to come from out of nowhere, but I knew I had watched him reach his right hand round to the back of his spine and produce it from under the Original Penguin polo shirt I had lent him.
Trey N’Dou saw it at the same time. I heard him whimper and then a hissing sound as he wet his baggy jeans. I could not breathe as Jackson straddled the Dog Town Boy and put the barrel of the gun in the kid’s mouth.
‘I can’t hear you,’ Jackson said, the boy gagging on the gun. ‘Louder. Come on. What is it you want? We can’t understand you.’
Trey N’Dou was begging for mercy with a gun in his mouth.
Jackson took it out.
‘Please. Please. Please.’
Jackson fired between his legs.
Twice.
I had heard guns fired with serious intent before. The sound always shocked me – the way it seemed to last for longer than it should, the way it seemed to rend the air, to tear it apart, to go on and on. Somehow this was different. The sound was more like two bombs going off.
I stood there paralysed, my ears ringing, my breath ragged.
I watched Jackson carefully pick up the spent brass from the gunshots.
He slipped them in his pocket.
‘Am I dead?’ Trey N’Dou said.
Jackson laughed.
‘If you were dead you would have one in your head and one in your heart. Listen to my friend. Get out of the Angel. We don’t give a toss if you go to Kingston-on-Thames or Kingston, Jamaica. Up to you. But you really don’t want to see my face again. No more warning shots.’
Lights were coming on all over the Liverpool Road.
There was a group of people outside the club across the street, cowering behind cars and looking across at us. The bouncer was nowhere to be seen. But in the distance I could hear sirens and I wondered if they were coming for us.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.
We did not speak for quite a while.
I drove to the canals of Little Venice and parked up next to a line of houseboats showing no lights. I turned off the engine.
‘Give me the gun, Jackson.’
He half-twisted, reached under his polo shirt and pulled it out. Then he gave it to me. I hefted it in my hand, feeling the weight of the thing, a bit less than a kilo, noting the way just the feel of it made my heart hammer in my chest.
‘It’s a Glock 17,’ Jackson said, as if I might be wondering. ‘Sometimes called a Glock Safe Action Pistol. It’s a nine-millimetre, polymer-framed, short recoil semi-automatic.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Polymer is what its frame is made of instead of steel – that hard plastic-type material makes it much lighter. Easier to carry, easier to conceal. Semi-automatic just means that when you fire a round, the spent brass is ejected and the chamber is reloaded.’
‘I mean – I don’t understand why you have it.’
He shrugged.
‘The Glock 17 is standard issue these days, although the British Army’s pistol of choice was the Browning for seventy years.’ He nodded at the gun in my hand. ‘I prefer this one,’ he said. ‘The Glock holds seventeen bullets – that’s why it’s a Glock 17 – the Browning only thirteen. And the Glock 17 is lighter, safer, more effective at close quarters when the fuzzy-wuzzies have got their hands around your throat.’
‘And you just decided to steal one, did you?’
He looked offended.
‘It’s not stealing. The British Army has got twenty-five thousand of these things. I need it more than they do.’
‘You fucking idiot.’
He watched me slip the handgun in the gap in my jeans where the bottom of my spine met the top of my butt. Then he smiled at me. The gap-toothed smile of Jackson Rose.
I felt like punching him in the face.
‘You’re not going to shoot yourself in the arse, are you, Max?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to shoot myself in the arse.’
He chuckled. ‘Good.’
My mouth was totally dry.
‘We did enough tonight to be put away,’ I said.
‘Only if they catch us. And they’re not going to catch us.’
‘Do you know who CO19 are, Jackson? They’re the Specialist Firearms Command of the Met. If they had seen you in that car park tonight, they would have killed you.’
He stared straight ahead.