CHERUB: Mad Dogs (29 page)

But that was far from their only problem. Sasha knew the time and place that the deal was going down, but he didn’t know how many men the Salford crew would bring. Seizing the drugs had been easy because the dealers were at home and half asleep. But the northerners were coming to do a hundred-grand drug deal, which meant they’d be right on edge.

But Sasha was a pro. He’d been robbing drug dealers for more than twenty years and he knew his stuff. As well as Kelvin, Savvas, Wheels, James and Bruce inside the hard front, he had two men poised in a flat three doors down, a youngster down in the road who was supposed to slash the northerners’ tyres when they arrived and a man stationed on the roof of the next block with an assault rifle and optical scope. The whole team was linked with walkie-talkies and Sasha himself would run the show from the flat across the street where James and Bruce had mounted the surveillance.

The wait became painful. James had a layer of sweat between his skin and his body armour and it itched like crazy. His watch seemed to be going in slow motion as ten o’clock came and went.

They’d put the boy in the back bedroom out of harm’s way, but he wanted to carry on playing and he cried until Wheels banged on the door and threatened to whack him.

At 10:07 the youngster down at street level put a message over the walkie-talkies. There were six black men in two cars. Five of them stepped out, while one waited in the driver’s seat of a BMW.

‘Martin, I want both cars immobilised as soon as they’re out of sight,’ Sasha replied.

James had never spoken to Martin, but he was only seventeen and he sounded out of his depth. ‘I can’t, boss,’ the kid said. ‘There’s a guy sitting behind the wheel.’

‘You’ve got a gun,’ Sasha said bluntly. ‘Use it.’

A shiver went up James’ back when he heard the order over the radio. This had always been serious business, but Sasha giving the order to put a bullet through someone’s head made it a hundred times worse. His voice was flat – like a man ordering a latte rather than an execution – and CHERUB’s ethics committee wasn’t going to like it one bit.

‘Boss, are you sure?’ the kid asked. ‘There’s people around and you told me I was only gonna slash the tyres—’

‘Do what you’re told,’ Sasha shouted. ‘If I have to come down there and sort the cars out I’m gonna be sticking bullets through two skulls, not one. Now what’s their status?’

‘Five men heading upstairs,’ Martin said shakily. ‘Two have got big bags – the money, I guess.’

‘You reckon, Sherlock?’ Sasha sneered. ‘Units inside the house, are you ready?’

Savvas stood less than a metre from James as he spoke into his radio. ‘Good to go, boss.’

‘Units at number sixteen, I want you out on that balcony blocking off the staircase as soon as the Salford boys go inside,’ Sasha said.

A fresh voice came out of Savvas’ radio. ‘Roger that, boss. We’re all set.’

It was only two floors up, but it seemed like the walk from the car park took the Salford crew for ever.

‘They’re out on the balcony,’ Sasha said. ‘Keep this channel clear unless it’s urgent. Good luck everyone.’

The doorbell rang and Kelvin walked slowly towards the front door as Savvas pointed his gun at the hostages. ‘I’ve got two hundred rounds a minute out of this baby, so if I hear so much as a sharp intake of breath I’ll waste all five of you.’

Out in the hallway Kelvin opened the front door to the five northerners.

‘You must be Pete,’ Kelvin said. ‘Come right in, it’s in the kitchen.’

The leader of the Salford boys wore sunglasses and had a full beard. ‘Who are you?’ he spat, talking fast and going for his gun. ‘Where’s Tyler? Nobody told me about a change of personnel.’

Kelvin raised his hands anxiously. ‘Peace, brothers,’ he said, as he stepped backwards. ‘The major just called me over here to do this thing. I don’t know about who goes where, or who you supposed to be seeing.’

‘Show me the shit,’ the bearded guy said as he stepped into the hallway, but he was highly suspicious and he pointed at the two men holding the bags of money. ‘Wait out there and one of you call Major Dee and ask what the
hell
is going down.’

James and Savvas could hear everything from behind the living-room door. Kelvin didn’t have a gun and would be a dead man the second the Salford boys got their call through to Major Dee. The plan was to wait until the northerners and the money were in the kitchen where they’d be easily contained, but Savvas realised it was never going to get that far and raised his walkie-talkie up to his lips.

‘All teams move,’ he said.

Wheels was the first one out of the living-room door, whilst Bruce came out of the bedroom on the opposite side of the hallway. As the Salford boys reached for their guns, Kelvin spun around and made a lunge towards the relative safety of the kitchen.

Meanwhile, two more of Sasha’s men had burst from a flat along the balcony and ran towards the three Salford men in the doorway. James and the hostages jolted with fright as gunfire echoed along the concrete balcony.

As Kelvin scrambled into the kitchen, the man with the beard took aim at his back; but Bruce shoulder-charged and knocked him to the ground.

‘The money’s moving away,’ Sasha screamed over the walkie-talkie. ‘The guys with the bags are running back towards the stairwell. That driver
better
be dead, Martin.’

‘It’s cool, boss,’ Martin said proudly.

‘Cut them off at the bottom of the stairs, kid,’ Sasha ordered. ‘I’m coming down to back you up.’

While all this was going on James waited in the living-room guarding the hostages. He dived to one side as a ricochet shattered the barred window. The chunks of flying glass had enough momentum to tear down the curtain rail, flooding the gloomy space with sunshine.

Out in the hallway Kelvin had wrapped a muscular arm around the bearded man’s neck and was giving him a beating.

The three Salford boys who’d been in the doorway were retreating under heavy fire from the men out of the flat two doors along, but that still left Bruce in a tight hallway with Pete – the bearded man’s second-in-command – less than two metres away.

Pete was pulling his gun and Bruce realised he couldn’t beat him on the draw. As a shot tore down the hallway, Bruce dived low, expecting to get hit. But the bullet sheared through the door at the end of the hallway and Bruce found himself with his arms locked around a set of chunky thighs.

Bruce was extraordinarily strong for his size. He grabbed Pete’s shooting arm and pushed his hand upwards so that his second shot tore through the ceiling, then twisted him into a thumb lock, making the gun drop out of his hand.

Worried by the sounds of struggle, James raced out into the hallway to check that Bruce was OK. He saw Bruce drive Pete backwards out of the front door and pin him against the railings outside. Bruce had to back up to make enough space to swing a punch and finish his opponent off, but as he let go he noticed that one of the Salford boys with the bags of money had doubled back and was sprinting along the narrow balcony towards him.

Less than three metres from Bruce and running at full pelt, James couldn’t see any outcome apart from Bruce getting knocked down. As James snatched his gun from its holster and almost tripped over Wheels – who’d been knocked down during the struggle – Bruce swung around. His elbow caught Pete in the side of the head, knocking him sideways, then he turned his back on the man running towards him and leaned forward.

As the dude crashed into him, Bruce let him roll over his back before springing up and tossing his assailant high into the air. If they’d been on the ground he would have slammed down on his back, but instead he went head first into the banister atop the metal railing.

The blue sports bag rattled a boarded-up window and hit the balcony, but the man who’d been holding it found his fingers clutching wrought-iron posts as his legs slipped over the edge, ten metres above ground.

Sasha’s voice came out of Bruce’s radio as he took a final knock-out swing at Pete.

‘I’m eyeballing two cop cars,’ Sasha said as James picked up the bag of money. ‘Grab what we’ve got and ship out.’

Savvas emerged through the front door, followed by Kelvin – who’d donned a mask – and Wheels, who had the backpack stuffed with drugs on his back. As they made a dash for the stairs down to the ground, the dangling man lost his fight to haul himself up the railings and crashed two storeys to the ground.

When they emerged into the courtyard at the bottom he was spread-eagled on the concrete, groaning for help. James did a three-sixty and saw that one of the Salford boys had been shot in the leg as he ran off and now lay unconscious between two parked cars. He also noticed blood spattered up the inside of a BMW windscreen. There was no sign of Sasha, Martin or the two men who’d been in the shoot-out on the balcony.

‘Nightmare,’ Wheels said, as he handed the pack full of drugs to Bruce, then ripped a plipper out of his pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat of a Honda Accord. The siren of an approaching cop car sounded like it was less than a street away.

Savvas squeezed up on the back seat with James and Bruce then slammed his door. They hadn’t stopped to open the boot and the drugs and money were piled up on their laps.

Wheels scraped the Micra in the next bay as he reversed out at speed. James looked over his shoulder and saw the nose of a cop car pull into the street as they tore off.

Ideally the Mad Dogs would have kept the Salford Boys contained inside the flat. The dealers could hardly have dialled 999 to report that their drugs had been robbed and the cops would never even have known that a robbery had taken place.

But the operation had spilled on to the street and half a dozen Rudge Estate residents had called the cops. There was a dead man in a BMW and two more Salford Boys in a mangled state on the pavement. The cops would also find the flat upstairs with the five hostages tied up in the living-room.

So whilst Sasha was glad to have nabbed a backpack stuffed with drugs and a hundred grand in cash, he knew the cops would be sniffing around. None of the dealers would talk, but the cops put a lot more effort into a murder than a robbery and the forensic team would pull the hard front to pieces.

To cover their tracks, Sasha wanted everything burned. Everyone abandoned their gloves and masks inside the Honda, and once he’d dropped everyone off, Wheels took it straight to a breakers’ yard. Within an hour of the raid, the interior was burned out and the metal shell had been squeezed into a tiny cube. Once he got home, Wheels would clean up the guns and drive them sixty kilometres to an industrial unit where Sasha stored equipment used in robberies.

Kelvin was the only gang member who’d gone unmasked and ungloved inside the hard front and this made him vulnerable. He’d been in prison, so the cops would have a sample of his DNA and they’d pull him in for questioning if they detected it. But Sasha looked after his own and Kelvin would be protected with an alibi.

Kelvin could easily claim that his DNA was in the flat because he’d been there to visit a friend and Sasha would fix things so that he could say he was doing a cleaning job at a local betting shop at the time the robbery was taking place. The betting shop was owned by one of Sasha’s cousins and they’d fake the surveillance videos inside the shop with the proper date stamp and everything. The cops probably wouldn’t believe it, but a jury would almost certainly give him the benefit of the doubt.

As a final precaution, James, Bruce and everyone else involved in the raid was ordered to put their outer clothes and shoes into bin liners as soon as they got home. The bags either had to be burned or dumped in a communal bin at least three kilometres from where they lived. Obviously James and Bruce didn’t want to lose their clothes – including their nanotube-reinforced tops – so they gave them to Chloe to take back to campus.

*

By noon James was exhausted. All the running around in body armour had made him stink, but he ached too much to care and lay face-down on his bed trying to catch up on his sleep.

Bruce had managed some sleep the night before, and couldn’t resist tickling the sole of James’ foot as he came back from the shower with a towel around his waist.

‘Leave off,’ James moaned.

‘That was such a buzz,’ Bruce enthused. ‘When I threw that guy over my back! Did you see how he looked when he was trying to hold on? It was like—’

Bruce made a face, but James didn’t bother pulling his head off his pillow to look. ‘You know, sometimes I wonder if you’re entirely right in the head?’ James said. ‘A fight in the dojo is one thing, but you seriously messed that bloke up.’

‘Why are you being such a misery?’ Bruce asked, as he rolled deodorant under his arms.

James finally turned to look at his friend. ‘Bruce, do all the girls on campus think I’m an arsehole because I cheated on Kerry?’

‘They talk about you,’ Bruce grinned. ‘Sometimes they slag you off, sometimes they say you’re cute. What matters is that they talk about you.’

James was baffled. ‘What are you on about?’

‘Haven’t you ever noticed that girls only talk about guys they fancy?’ Bruce explained. ‘They might be bitching or slagging you off, but they only talk about guys they like.’

‘I’d never thought of that,’ James nodded.

‘It’s guys like me who have to worry,’ Bruce said, as he pulled on a pair of jeans. ‘I’m skinny, I’m ordinary-looking and I don’t get sixth-form girls jumping on me in bathtubs. So don’t go moaning to me about
do the girls on campus like me
because you’ve probably had more girlfriends already than I’m gonna get in my whole life.’

‘You just need more confidence,’ James said, taking pity on his friend. ‘And you’ve got Kerry now. I mean, I don’t get on with her these days, but she’s still hot.’

‘I’m still a bit amazed that she’s my girlfriend,’ Bruce admitted.

‘Anyway,’ James said. ‘I’m thinking about me and Kerry, and my cheating on her was like a wedge between us. I could never really look her in the eye, because there were all these lies in the background. I don’t want it to be like that with Dana.’