Free Angel City by Mike Ripley

lady doctor, comes round first thing in a morning, just to check on us – them.’
    â€˜Then let’s go. The meter’s running, so to speak. Waiting time’s extra.’
    Minicabs, which Armstrong now pretended to be, don’t have meters, just rates per mile, and any extra waiting time usually came out as the driver’s tip.
    Tigger nodded gratefully but still did not move. Down the street, a couple of women on their way to work crossed to the other side of the road to avoid walking near us.
    â€˜Come on, Tigger, let’s roll.’
    â€˜I can’t lift him by myself,’ he said, his voice cracking.
    I bit my lower lip, then opened Armstrong’s door and reached into the glove compartment for a pair of the plastic gloves I’d used before when we were in the van.
    I pulled them on and took Lee by his left arm and leg, leaving Tigger to handle the damaged side, and we bundled him into the back of the cab.
    Tigger sat with Lee’s head in his lap and didn’t say a word all the way over to Lincoln’s Inn. I made a mental note to remind myself to burn the gloves as soon as I got the chance, and to steal another three pairs from the garage the next time I filled up with diesel.
    It pays to think ahead.
    Â 
    Despite its resident population, Lincoln’s Inn Fields still remains a regular pit-stop for real black cabs and real cabbies. You can find up to 20 parked along the east side of the Fields at certain times of day, near the public toilets, which, surprisingly, given the resident squatters, are in pretty good shape. It is sufficiently off the beaten track to enable a professional musher to have ten minutes with a newspaper, a sandwich or just a quick kip, without being pestered by potential fares or, even worse, tourists wanting directions but not a cab ride.
    I turned Armstrong into the Fields from Holborn and pulled up, not wanting to go round the square and mix with the professionals. They didn’t like delicensed black cabs being run by anyone in London, and certainly not operated as minicabs.
    â€˜Where’s this medic, then?’ I asked Tigger over my shoulder.
    â€˜She should be ... there ... over there by the camouflage basha.’
    I spotted what he meant. Someone had used Army camouflage netting, two poles and two branches of a plane tree to construct a three-sided tent with a sagging roof. Outside it stood a tall, thin woman in a white surgical coat. She seemed to be negotiating with the inhabitant of the basha and not at all keen to bend down and crawl inside.
    I turned back to Tigger. ‘Can he walk?’
    â€˜I doubt it,’ he said. ‘But he’s breathing more confidently.’
    Oh great. We faced the prospect of carrying him between us like some safari kill. As if Tigger couldn’t draw enough attention to himself normally.
    â€˜What’s the medic called?’ I tried.
    â€˜Doc,’ said Tigger. Then: ‘Where are you going?’
    â€˜To see if she makes house calls.’
    She did, or at least she thought it perfectly natural to treat a comatose young druggie with a broken hand in the back of a taxi at the side of the road as the civilians wandered by to their office jobs.
    â€˜Doc’ had spine-length hair twisted tight into a pony tail and segmented every three inches or so by a coloured rubber band. As she bent over to look at Lee in the back of Armstrong, I could see that her designer-label jeans fitted her well, with no visible panty line.
    In an accent that I later found out was Canadian, she gave me instructions to drive to what she called a safe house on Gray’s Inn Road, close to the hospital. There were no prizes for guessing it was a house occupied by medics – students and junior doctors – who ran a vigilante rescue service for druggies and drop-outs. I’d heard of a similar operation up at the university teaching hospital that ran a helpline for sexually transmitted