You Don't Know Me

31

This plan of Ki’s I was telling you about yesterday, the plan to take out Face. I don’t really know when it was that we basically started taking our lead from Ki or why. It might have been just that she was smart or it might have been that we didn’t have any ideas. But what you could say was right about then, Ki was directing ops. She was the General in our little three-man crew.

I still wasn’t sure what Ki meant about ‘us’ having to deal with Face. I mean I didn’t think she meant like we literally had to do it ourselves. Just maybe you know put things in place so some next crew member from Glockz could do it. Or something anyway. Something that didn’t mean that we physically had to do the thing.

Yeah I meant killing him. Straight up. But I was saying that I didn’t think that she meant that we had do the killing ourselves. So you know, you ain’t catching me out on that.

So yeah, I’ll say it again, it makes me look guilty. But like I said I didn’t think she actually meant that we kill him. So the next day, we arranged for Curt to come by so we could chat it out with him. We couldn’t raise him on his phone and we figured that he was ditching sims as usual. But Ki tracked him down in the end by phoning Mum’s, where he just happened to be.

‘Come round,’ I said, ‘we need to chat,’ and I put the call down. Ki gave me another one of them smiles that I am supposed to be able to decode but can’t.

When he came Curt was proper on edge.

‘Shit is going down,’ he says as he pulls his coat off and slings it over a chair.

‘Before we get into that,’ I say handing him a beer before he takes one, ‘what you doing round my mum’s?’

‘You mean round at Bless’s,’ says Ki smiling like this is a joke.

Curt nearly drops his beer.

‘Nothing man. Just making sure they safe innit,’ he says going kind of purple. ‘Anyway, word on the street is –’ he starts when suddenly Kira laughs out.

‘What you talking like that for?’ she says.

‘Like what?’

‘Like you’re a seventies pimp from American TV?’

For some reason that makes me laugh too. ‘Yeah man. What’s with the jive talking?’

‘Whatever,’ he says, ‘but shit is going down.’

‘Like what kind of shit?’ I say.

‘Like the smelly kind. Face shot at Guilty this morning.’

‘What? Is he dead? What the fuck man?’ I say my eyes wide open and serious now.

‘Nah man. He shot at him not shot him. Well not Face exactly but one of his Tinies. Four of them came on bikes. They rode past the club just as he was coming out and one of them fired off like a hundred shots at him. Not a fucking one of them hit him if you can believe it.’

‘Shit,’ I say and look at Ki.

I know to you this sounds weird. Gangsters on bikes. But as I said before the whole drug thing is like an army. You know Generals, Lieutenants, Soldiers. Well, Generals and Lieutenants and some Soldiers drive cars. Other Soldiers, younger ones, the ones we, I mean they, call Tinies, they ride bikes.

You might have seen these young kids on bikes tearing your streets up. And to you it might seem like they just schoolkids. But what you should know is that that shit ain’t always random, and these kids ain’t always just school kids. These are drug dealers. They are soldiers-in-waiting, at ten years old. And when they ride, they ride in formation. Depending on how many there are, a couple might ride up front and scope out the territory. The man with the gun will be back a little, flanked on each side by another couple of out-riders. They shield him. They scope their target. They ride past. Boy with the gun shoots and rides off. The rest take whatever drugs and money they find and bang – they’re gone.

And the chaos that follows afterwards with all of them riding off in different directions, that’s not random either, it’s thought out. Spread out. Don’t get caught. If there’s heat around, the gun will get dumped. No prints on it either since these boys are wearing latex gloves. These little boys, they are smart.

So anyway Curt tells us that some Tinies just tried to kill Guilty. And Ki goes mad.

‘We need Face gone. Like now,’ she says her eyes narrowing at us both. ‘If we leave this much longer Guilty will be dead and we will be next. We have to move on this.’

‘Is that all? Why didn’t you just say so? Hang on a second while I call fucking rent-a-hitman,’ I say. Ki gives me a look.

‘Nah man it’s okay,’ Curt says after a while. ‘We can do this.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll let Guilty know that he’s being set up and he can organize a trap,’ says Curt, ‘and then, you know, ambush Face. Or something.’

Ki and I both look at Curt and whatever it is we are trying to say to him he understands and looks down at his feet.

‘Look we all know even though he is a bad man and whatever, Guilty couldn’t even spell ambush. No. We need to do it,’ says Ki.

‘No fucking way,’ I say. ‘No fucking way’.

‘We got no other choice,’ she says and folds her arms into a tight knot.

I suddenly felt like she was slipping out of my hands. All I wanted was our life back again. I wanted days where we went together to Barnardo’s while she picked out books. Evenings where we could just lie on the sofa and watch a film without having this weight on our minds. I wanted to be able to look in those eyes of hers and see myself in them. I wanted to recognize her again.

Look I knew that there weren’t no way that Guilty was going to be able to take out Face using his own wits. Face was just too smart and would have outmanoeuvred him in a second. And I also knew that there was no question that Face had to be taken out, if we wanted to live. I knew from a theoretical point of thing that this was all true. But I still couldn’t make the jump from what seemed logical on paper to reading about it in the papers. It seemed mad to me. Mad that we had to actually be talking about killing a person. Fuck we had already nearly killed one boy. By accident I mean. But this was some next shit.

For one I wasn’t that happy about dragging Ki into yet another situation. She had had enough drama to last her a dozen lifetimes. She didn’t need a planned killing to add to it. And as unbreakable as she seemed to be, I knew that even she had her limits. She might have seemed to the outside world like she was solid. Like a V8 engine. But you know you put any engine under pressure and it’s going to break. You can red-line it every now and then but you don’t want to be red-lining all the time. And she had been in the red for some time. Anyway, I didn’t want to be driving her to her limits again. And the way that I saw it was that I was responsible for this whole thing. I couldn’t get her into another thing.

Then there was the risk involved. Face wasn’t just smart enough to outwit Guilty, shit a five-year-old could outwit Guilty. Face was too smart, even for Ki, maybe. Sure she had skills, but I knew the limit of her skills, high as they were. What I didn’t know were the limits of his. How high did he go? And if this shit went sideways, it wasn’t a game where we could reload and get another life and try again. If this went wrong and Face dried us out, we would die. No question. He would ice us in a second.

And then. And then there is the simple fact of life. It was a life after all was said and done. His life was still a life. I know that Ki had put a bullet in Jamil and nearly killed him and I know that we then dumped him as if he was dead but that was just more like an accident kind of thing. Ki shot him by accident. She never meant to kill him. I don’t think she even meant to shoot him. And yes I can see that he survived her bullet and that was an accident too. They say I maybe helped him survive by taping up his bullet hole and that it stopped the blood loss. I don’t know about any of that for real but what I do know for sure is that if I helped him live, that was an accident too. I didn’t plan on saving his life, but I didn’t plan on shooting him either.

But this thing was different. I knew that this guy would kill me, kill Ki, kill Curt, kill our families in a heartbeat. Did that make it okay to kill him? I don’t know man. But still, unless he was there in front of me, holding a gun to me, I didn’t feel right about killing him like this. You know, like planned. It was like shooting a dude in the back. It didn’t feel right to me. To plan a killing of a living breathing human being ain’t like an accident kind of thing. It ain’t like causing a war so that someone else pulls the trigger. If you plan to do it, that is next level shit. That in my book is a murder.