Free Cracking Up by Harry Crooks

ON TOP OF THE HEAD AND SLOWLY GET OUT OF THE CAR! The driver was slow in reacting, the bizzies were wired to the mains. Electricity had replaced the blood in their veins, but the driver was frozen at the wheel. It was like a fillum in slow motion. Then it was in fast-forward. The bizzies smashed out the side window, broken glass scattered, pitting the driver’s face. They yanked him through the car window with extreme force as he wriggled about, resisting. His bloodied face was pushed into the tarmac, a knee buried into his back, arms twisted behind him and metal handcuffs clamped on his wrists. They pulled him from the ground using his cuffed arms as a lever and led him off to a waiting meat wagon. The two bizzies frog-marching him were getting in some sly digs and the bummer in charge with the loud hailer gave them a warning to lay off with witnesses about. The lad was shouting and complaining, calling them every name under the sun. It was a raw scene of intense anger, the lad was blazing as they struggled to bundle him into the cage in the back of the meat wagon. I recognized him; it was Harpik, a Mug Fam enforcer. He was called that because he was clean round the bend.
    When the police searched the car they found a Mac-10 spray-and pray, two Baikal handguns and ammo stashed in the boot. The Mug Fam were buying weapons, they were preparing for some war business.
    I retreated from the window and ended up rolling another draw, smoking it in the front room where I put a DVD in the player, Scarface. What a top fillum. We were a long way off from the Scarface world of grotesque amounts of money, phenomenally priced mansions, fucking flash motors, tasty birds and mountains of the wicked devil dust to tickle our nasal passages. But to a bunch of fucking villanous, low-life losers like us lot, we looked up to Scarface and a top lad like Curtis Warren was our role model and Pablo Escobar, a father figure.
    My mobie rang. It was Dog Sick. “All right, there, our kid?”
    “Yeh, sound,” I said. I asked after Spermy. Turned out that he had been operated on, the wounds cleaned and stitched up, but he was being drip fed morphine to mong him out, incapacitate him. Dog Sick had employed the services of a brief to make sure Spermy’s human rights weren’t violated, but the bizzies meant business. They had posted an armed guard and there would be no legging it from the plod mafiosi in the hospital. They were taking statements from witnesses and retrieving forensic evidence with a view to locking him up and throwing away the key. In the meantime it suited their purposes to keep him drugged up to the eyeballs and treat him like a mushroom: Feed him shit and keep him in the dark.
    I shared the bit of intel I’d witnessed from my bedroom window. “Listen: Just had a load of drama out in the road …”
    I went on to tell him about the armed police ambush that had been executed.
    “Yeh, knew that was going happen,” he said.
    I couldn’t believe my ears. Was Dog Sick a slippery snake in the grass?
    “What do you mean like?” I asked.
    “I had Harpik lifted.”
    “What do you mean EXACTLY?” I was amazed at his nerve.
    “There’s an arms dealer, I know, owed me a solid. I gave him some tools to sell to Harpik, he even helped put them in the boot for him. A little tinkle to my mole on the force and game over. He got pulled and he’s offski.”
    “Fuck me! That’s a bit off, innit?”
    “It’s nothing personal, our kid. Strictly business.”
    Enough said! But I didn’t work that way. If I had a problem I sorted it myself. No way would I have involved the bizzies. The only thing to gain from back-stabbing behaviour like that was a bad name. Dog Sick was playing a dirty and dangerous game: If anybody found out what he’d been up to his street credibility wouldn’t be worth spit and he’d be a marked man.
    Fuck that for a game of soldiers, I thought. Pissing the bed! We were supposed to be pulling the bizzies plonkers and