You Don't Know Me

32

Curt left later that day and we all agreed that we would think about what had to be done and meet up again the next morning. The more I looked at it, though, the more it looked as if this had to be done. But I still couldn’t get my head around it. Why did I feel so bad about it? He was going to kill me if he ever saw me. And here I was feeling guilty about it. Was it that much different from shooting that guy under the bridge when I took Ki? Would I feel okay about it if the man was in my face waving a gun at me? Could I shoot him then? Did I have to wait for that to happen? Is it still like a self-defence kind of a thing if you know a person will definitely kill you if he gets half a chance? But you take your chances before he does? I don’t know, truth be told. It’s proper confusing me.

That night Ki and I sat up and talked some more about it. She had spent a couple of hours writing down some details about the plan in a notepad and made me read them. But the more I read them the crazier it all sounded to me. We needed a gun. We needed to know where Face would be at. We needed an exit strategy. And we needed more luck than a human being could expect to get in ten lives. Suddenly I couldn’t hold it down any longer.

‘We ain’t doing it,’ I said to her, throwing her notes down on the table.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks me.

‘What I said. We ain’t doing it. We ain’t wasting two men without like a proper need for it.’

‘Proper need? What about your life? What about my life? Is my life not a good enough reason for you?’ Her eyes are electric again.

‘Ki, your life is one thing. We got our lives. We can go away. Scotland, whatever. Spain, we were going to go to Spain. We still can. We got the dollars. We got a choice. Let’s just go. I can’t be doing no killing. And I can’t be letting you get involved in no killing.’

‘Me?’ she says her voice climbing. ‘Can’t let me get involved in no killing? Shouldn’t you have thought about that before? Before you went and pulled me out of Glockz with all guns blazing?’

‘What could I have done?’ my voice following hers upwards into the sky. ‘Left you there? What choice did I have?’

‘What choice do you have now? Really? You disappear and Bless will be killed. Your mum too. Face won’t stop. You know that. He’s a machine. It’s just a matter of time before he sends his little biker boys round to your mum. You want to wait till they’ve fired off a hundred shots at your mum? Or are you hoping they might miss her as well?’

‘Until he’s aiming a gun at me, he’s just a person, Ki.’

Suddenly she stops whatever it was she was doing and drives them eyes straight into mine.

‘Is this what it is? You worried about your soul?’ she says almost laughing but not in a way that made me comfortable.

‘Soul? I ain’t said nothing about soul. I’m talking about a life. A real human. You are talking about killing a person. Planning it and executing it. Executing him. We’d be the same as him Ki, if we did this.’

‘We are nothing like him. He murders people for money. He murders people for kicks and licks. He is a drug dealer. You are a car dealer. You are not him. We are not him. Nobody will cry for him. Trust me. Nobody. Not even his mum. He wrote this ending. Not us. He did it,’ she says her voice calming now a little. She takes a deep breath and then looks at me, her eyes a bit softer than before. ‘Now do you want to look at the details again or not?’

‘No, man,’ I say, and snatch up the pad she is waving in my face. ‘I’ve read it.’

‘Good. We start going over this properly tomorrow. When Curt comes in the morning, you stay with him until you get this down perfectly.’

‘What about you? Where will you be?’

‘The mosque,’ she says and picks herself up and goes to the bedroom, leaving me staring at her notes. This is going to be a disaster – I can feel it.

The next morning Curt comes knocking on the door just in time for breakfast. It is as if he can smell the eggs cooking. He nods a hello at Ki and pulls up a chair.

‘So Ki got a plan?’ he says to me but indicating to Kira who is plating up eggs for him.

‘Yeah,’ I say and show him the notepad.

He sits down at the table and starts to read. By the time he is finished he is smiling.

‘Girl,’ he says to her holding up the pad, ‘respect.’

‘You eat your breakfast,’ Ki says in reply, ‘I’ve got some last minute planning to do. By the time I come back though, you two need to have this memorized,’ she adds and then before I can say goodbye, she is gone, her burkha under her arm.

‘What’s up?’ Curt says looking at me, seeing that I am on edge.

‘Nothing.’

‘’Kay. Then … what’s with the atmosphere?’

‘I’m stressing about Ki innit.’

‘Why?’

‘Everything man. This plan about killing Face. It is madness bruv. We can’t go round shooting up no gangsters. We ain’t in some movie.’

‘Feel you bruv. But what is our choices right now, though?’

‘Well we could just jet out of here. Go on the run.’

‘Shit blood. You know you ain’t leaving your sister. And your mum, I mean. We got no choices right now but to do this thing.’

‘Okay. Let’s say you’re right. We don’t have no choice. I get it. We can’t run. We can’t go Feds. We can’t just wait to get merked. So we do this thing, yeah. So tell me one thing. How the fuck we going to do this,’ I say shaking the pad at him, ‘this plan? How we going to bump this Face man?’

‘We shoot him. Just like Ki is saying.’

‘Yeah. But how are we supposed to find him? It’s not like we can phone his secretary to find out where he’s at.’

‘Ki innit,’ he says as if the answer was staring me in face all along.

‘Jokes blood, ha ha. Okay then. How is Ki going to find that out?’

‘She just knows innit,’ his face flat.

‘What do you mean she knows?’ I say proper confused now.

‘She just knows shit.’

Curt takes a giant forkful of egg into his mouth and then cocks his head at me like now he’s the one who is confused. Then he says this: ‘Well all the bits of info she been feeding me has been checking out. It is all solid vine.’

I take a breath trying to work out what he’s saying.

‘What? Kira has been giving you vine? What kind of fucking vine, blood?’

‘Just like, don’t go there today – so-and-so going to be there.’

‘Ki? You sure?’

‘Yeah I’m sure. You think that Guilty dodged them bullets by chance? Kevlar bruv.’

‘What?’ I say surprised. Like proper shocked. I didn’t even know what the boy was talking about to even ask all of the right questions.

‘Kevlar. Body armour. Guilty had body armour on. He was expecting to be rushed by Face. That is how he swerved them nine mils,’ says Curt smoothing down his shirt as if to show me where a person might wear body armour.

‘Yeah man. I know what Kevlar is. I mean, what? You trying to say Ki told you that Face was going to attack Guilty?’ I say not believing what I have just heard.

‘Straight up man. Time and date.’

‘Where the fuck she tell you she was getting this from?’

‘Mosque.’

‘What you talking about bruv?’

‘Mosque. She’s hooked up. She’s getting whispers. As I say, it’s all been checking out. Ask her yourself when she gets back. Shit I thought you knew. You didn’t know?’

‘No, I didn’t fucking know,’ I say.

I had no idea what the hell was going on any more. Ki is passing information to Curt to pass to Guilty about where Face is going to strike? Where the fuck was she getting this from? I couldn’t really believe it was actually from the mosque. What was I? Out of my mum yesterday?

What, she goes down there one day and suddenly she’s hooked into vine with one of the biggest gang leaders in the country? Nah, man. I didn’t buy that shit. And anyway, even if she was getting information from some next mans or woman for that in the mosque, how the fuck she know that she weren’t being stitched up by the man himself? This was classic Faceman moves. He was the information commissioner you get me. And this false feeding of intel was exactly what I would have expected of him. It would have made just the kind of story that people would be telling about him in years to come. Just like Face and the R.I.P. shirts.

‘Listen bruv, you wait here,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back.’ I look around for my keys and start heading out of the door.

‘Where you going man?’ he says puzzled, but not puzzled enough to stop eating eggs.

‘I’m going find where she’s at,’ I say and leave.