Free The Face (Harry Tyler Book 1) by Garry Bushell

Certainly the Taylor boys, Saunders and a couple of other licensed dealers were sending out for more Charlie than they had sold in many a week. It was pukka “Club Class” cocaine too, cut straight off the block. No wonder there was what seemed like a two-mile tailback in the gents.
    At 9.17 pm barmaid Lesley Gore had to ask Johnny to tell the lads to stay out of the ladies. Not because the delicate flowers wanted a piss in private, but because they couldn’t get to the arse-level cisterns to toot their own gear. What a fucking night! The sounds were good, the gear was great, the River Ooze was flowing. Pint glasses were drained as soon as they were full. It was like the charlied-up clientele were out to drown themselves in one huge, gut-bloating cascade of fermented jolly juice. Johnny Too felt splendid, the King in his castle, surrounded by his troops, his ’ounds. “Staunch” to a man, every last one of them.
    “Break out the bubbly, darlin’,” he told his wife, Sandra. “I’ve gotta ’ave a lash. Me back teeth are floating.”
    “Ain’t ’e charmin’?” Sandra laughed. But as soon as John was in the gents he was on the mobile phone to Geraldine telling her exactly how he was going to make missing the party up to her.
    Sandra was bottle blonde, an ex-model, wannabe cabaret singer heavily adorned with weighty but tasteless jewellery. She had ebony eyes, large breasts and less than perfect skin, and she was pregnant again with their third child. She went to the fridge and brought back a jeroboam of Moet which Pyro Joe popped open with a have-summa-that Grand Prix winner’s flourish to roars of approval from the older men gathered around him. Everyone was a face. Anyone who meant anything in South London was here tonight. If you were invited you turned up and put up with the “fuckin’ racket”.
    You had to show respect, even if it meant just a glass or two of shampoo before it was off in the chariot up to a grown-ups’ club in the West End.
    At 9.38 pm, Lucy Loud turned off the head-splitting drum and bass, and the Ned erupted in a raucous rendition of Happy Birthday – “’Appeee birfdayyy, dear Steven, ’appy birfdayyy to you-ah.”
    The sense of event had lured the Bakers into dropping their guard. No sentries had been posted. No one had noticed the two unmarked removal vans pull up a street away, just behind the gas board van that had been parked up for a couple of hours. On other nights the van might have been spotted and given the once over but not tonight. Who would be mad enough to take on the Bakers when the whole firm was about them?
    At 9.45 pm precisely, the rocket went up. The removal vans dropped their backs and disgorged 80 policemen. Four unmarked dog vans appeared from nowhere. Young PC Perry Jackson, 22 and keen, was the first to reach the Ned Kelly. His intention was to nick a Baker. Jackson booted open the doors and came to a dead stop. There was no way forward through the pilchard-packed punters. “What the fuck?” he said.
    As the shouting started, the music went off. Girls screamed and bottles started to fly in the direction of the uniforms. For each cop who entered five wraps of cocaine hit the floor and were ground under foot. Some of the flying bottles smashed windows, officers were trading punches with revellers, dogs barked, girls sobbed, voices raised in hatred, and then CRACKKKK! The unmistakable sound of a handgun discharging silenced everyone. A policeman went down. It was Perry Jackson. Almost immediately it seemed like everyone present was trying to get out through the pub doors at the same time. It was like a boil bursting, one of those tough ones that spurts out and whacks you in the eye.
     
     
    Now police and thieves were fighting toe-to-toe in the street as well as the pub. Car windows went in. The air was thick with shouts and screams once more, only now they were mixed with car alarms and sirens, and the acrid stench of CS gas. Inside, Perry Jackson, who