Serious People (33 page)

Mickey looked across at the Blake brothers’ bar. “What a hole.”

“Yeah, it don’t look that happening,” Seamus nodded.

“Right, before we go in, I need to bring you up to speed on a few bits and pieces,” Mickey said. “Mr. O’Neil set Leroy on a little task for the business and the reason we’re here is because it seems he’s come up with something.”

“I was wondering,” Seamus replied. “This Leroy just snaps his fingers, and we come running.”

“Leroy Elkins is a someone, Seamus. If he asks for a meet, we go to the meet. He’s serious people and when you’re serious people you get more respect than your average Joe. Understand?” Mickey said. “And secondly, he’s a friend of the firm.”

“I’ve heard he has a mixed reputation…” Seamus started.

“Shut the fuck up Seamus,” Mickey snapped. “If Mr. O’Neil heard you say that you’d have a proper problem.”

“Sorry Mick, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Seamus said.

“You’ve got to learn to shut your mouth sometimes Seamus,” Mickey said, stopping to glare at him for a moment. “I fucking mean that. If I’m gonna start vouching for you to have some more responsibility, maybe starting working on your own, you have to understand when to just keep stum.”

If he was going to start empowering Seamus with some of his work, Mickey knew that he needed to further his apprentice’s education. He certainly wasn’t going to agree with Seamus about Leroy, even though he understood the Jamaican’s mixed rep. Leroy was one of Charlie’s best friends and there was a question of respect at play here; O’Neil clearly trusted Leroy. However, Mickey had heard all the rumours about the Jamaican, about a bad job in Manchester and, more significantly, he'd seen the cowardice of the man first hand.

It had been sometime near the end of the eighties or early nineties. By this point, their bank job gang had racked up enough money so that all of its members could now begin to think about their retirements. Leroy, though, always had one more plan, one more easy job to do.

And the other fellas always had time to listen to Leroy’s one last plan, a characteristic that  Mickey found highly irritating. All they
should
have been thinking about at that point was what to do with the pound notes that they already had between them.

Mickey had always felt strongly that the gang members should bow out while they were at the top of their game. Their bank jobs had become infamous in all the red top tabloids, and bank staff were now falling over themselves to hand money over to the crew. This was largely down to the staff being well briefed on the opportunity for the potential good press that would follow from making the bank robbers go away quickly, without hurting their customers. Also, on a couple of occasions now the customers had started to threaten the staff themselves, urging them to get the money to the gang immediately, so as to ensure their safety. There had been at least one rather unfavourable tabloid story, when a customer had said he’d been exposed to unreasonable danger because of how slowly his bank had responded to the robbers.

So, all in all, it was easy money; the result of good sound planning mixed with the perfect tactics.

But life was never meant to be this sweet—the trick was to end the raids then before someone else ended them. Mickey had begun to see the early signs it was time to stop.

In the last few jobs, for starters, the gang’s planning had not been so sound. Leroy had become more reckless; he had said it was so the gang could progress to another level and that you always needed to keep challenging yourself or you lose your edge. But both Robert and Mickey had not been so sure.

One night, late in Mickey’s Irish Club, when it was just the three of them, Robert tried to speak to Charlie about the situation with Leroy. It was one of the few fallings out Mickey could ever remember between the two men.

At the time, Robert was playing pool with Mickey, whilst Charlie was nursing a glass of whiskey and reading the paper. Robert leant down on the table and concentrated on a difficult shot. “Last time shouldn’t have happened Charlie. That's all I’m saying.”   

The ball went straight into the corner pocket. Robert looked up at his friend for a response, but Charlie ignored him and continued to read his paper. Robert looked across at Mickey, to gage his thoughts on the statement. But Mickey knew far better than to choose sides in this type of debate and now started to focus solely on the pool table.

Robert leant into the table again and readied another shot, looking up at Charlie before he moved the cue. “You know the guy’s just a fucking adrenaline junkie right?”

Robert forced the cue through the shot far too quickly, taking his annoyance out on the pool table. The white ball rebounded aimlessly two or three times, thus giving Mickey two shots because of the foul. It had felt like divine intervention for Mickey at the time; removing any need for him to get involved in the conversation.

Mickey started to look around the table, bending down to eye level, reviewing all the possible shots available. Mainly though he was playing for as much time as he could get; trying to see how the conversation, which was now waiting to ignite around him, would end.

“I mean honestly,” Robert continued. “On that last raid, I ask you? There was a bloody one-way system to drive through, on the getaway route? And there was the safe—I mean a time delayed safe? You could have the most terrifying rep in the world and there ain’t anything that could speed that fucking thing up.”

Charlie looked up from his paper. “There were a couple of flaws on the last job. I'll give you.”

“Charlie, a couple of flaws? We could have all been banged up on any of the last couple of jobs, just down to that prick wanting to take more risks. Why do you think he insists on always being the driver? It's so he’s got an excuse to drive like a fucking manic!”

Charlie put the newspaper down on the bar calmly and looked across at Robert. “I trust Leroy completely. I’d back him no matter what, just like I would with you, Robert. So please don’t talk like that about him.”

Robert didn’t bother arguing further; he knew when the law had been laid down. Charlie rarely lost his temper. Instead he used an icy cold calm voice, when he needed to make a point, and this carried just as clear a message as any pyrotechnics.

The reinforcing of Leroy’s status within the gang, moreover, had led to them taking on their highest risk job yet. It was one that Mickey was convinced Robert would never have agreed to, had it not been for the conversation which took place over the snooker table that night, and the apparent hopeless prospect of any disagreement with one of Leroy’s ever more dangerous schemes.

From the time the gang started their bank jobs right to the finish, there was an ever growing list of financial institutions who all gave similar statements to the press. Most included a line that resembled: “As a way of protecting our customers, if one of our branches are targeted, we will ensure money is handed over as quickly as possible. Our customers’ safety is our number one priority.”

There was, however, one bank who took a different approach—The Northern Alliance Bank. Their chairman gave quite the opposite statement, just as his competitors were bowing down to the robbers.

“We must not try and appease these criminals by making bank raids easy, by suggesting that money will be handed over quickly,” the chairman had said at a press conference. “All you will achieve by this, is to nurture a culture of violence. Our competitors are indirectly making a statement to all the would-be bank robbers out there that all you need to do, in order to be successful, is to attack members of the public. This is surely the most irresponsible of lines any bank can take?”

The chairman was as strong as his word. Instead of briefing his staff to deal with the robbers quickly, he invested in state of the art time locks on his bank’s safes, further supplemented them with back-office doors that were also equipped with similar mechanisms. His banks also installed an advanced CCTV system, which sent a direct feed to local police station control rooms, and finally there were emergency shutters that dropped down over cashier desks at the press of a panic button.

Then, as the final act of supremacy over any robbers, he took a selection of tabloid journalists on a tour of some of the branches. This led to the headlines like “Northern Fort Knox,” and “The bank that won’t be busted!”

To the man’s credit, his approach had worked; the gang went nowhere near any of the Northern Alliance branches. And by the early of the nineties, his example was beginning to encourage other banks to change their security strategies.

“Blood, we gotta put this bank on its knees, or we all done!” Leroy preached to Charlie, Robert and Mickey one night. “If we don’t put these bitches down, we’re through.”

Before Mickey knew it, Leroy’s few words led them to plan for the impossible task of taking down a Northern Alliance bank.

Despite the planning, the job was a horrendous disaster. Not only had they ended up choosing the branch with the most state of the art lines of defence, but they had gone in at the quietest time of day. The bank was empty, not even one customer.

The cashiers had put down their protective shutters the moment they had entered. And as there were no customers in the queuing area, the gang were devoid of any opportunity to force the cashiers to let them in. They then seemed to take what seemed like hours to look for different options to get to the cash but all were usless.

“Out, out, out!” Charlie had shouted.

And with that Mickey had led the crew back out of the doors; and he was the first to see that Leroy and the car were nowhere. Across the last few jobs, the gang had averaged a two-minute window between entering the bank and making their getaway, or at the very most four minutes, if something didn’t go to plan. They had never taken anything close to the time they took that day. So Leroy had bottled it. Mickey knew it instantly.

“Where’s the car? Where’s the fucking car?” Robert shouted, his voice barely audible over the incoming police sirens.

Then Mickey said something that even to this day he would struggle to explain. The only thing he could put his words down to was his experience from the night Charlie had given Leroy his unwavering backing.  “Leroy’s tried to draw a cop car away from us,” Mickey heard himself say. “I saw it when I came out—a copper just sped around the corner. Leroy clocked him, saw us coming out, and must have tried to make the bill think we were all already in the car!”

Mickey saw in the corner of his eye the harsh look that Robert gave him at the time. He knew it was a lie and, although in the many years that followed Robert never challenged Mickey on this moment, he must have known that Mickey the Bag’s story was untrue; there was no question of that.

The moments that followed were just a blur. Charlie broke into a car that was parked nearby and the rest of the gang all dived in after him, making a somewhat unlikely escape.

The gang met up with Leroy, at the agreed meeting point later that night, by which time Leroy must have heard the story Mickey had created for him. When he saw Mickey he said, “See blood that’s another one you fucking owe me.”

It was too late now for Mickey to change his story so he just nodded and shook the man’s hand. But things were never quite the same after that job. There were just a couple more successful raids that followed the Northern Alliance job before the gang decided to retire with their riches. As for Leroy, he had already started to drift away from the rest of the group. 

“So, are we going in then Mick?” Seamus asked.

Mickey looked across at the battered front of the Blake’s Bar. I hope this is worth it, he thought, as he nodded and walked towards the bar.

The place was pitch black as he and Seamus opened the doors and strode into the building; on another day Mickey might have clocked this as strange. But his experience of Elkins  reminded him of his love for the melodramatic. They both had made their way to the middle of the room by the time Mickey realised that the door was being bolted behind them.

A moment later Mickey started to make out a variety of different shaped silhouettes in the dark, scattered all around them. His eyes strained to make out the detail.

“Oh shit,” Seamus gasped.

It was not until the lights were turned on, a moment later, that the situation became clear. The two men were surrounded by guys, all armed with a range of different types of bats and knives.

Mickey dropped his bag to the floor, as he took in the situation around him. “Stay by my side Seamus,” he hissed. “By my side!”

It was the lack of an instant reply which made him turn to look towards Seamus. The giant ex-boxer already had his hands to his throat; he was covered in blood. Only his experience of many other murderous situations stopped Mickey instantly losing his head.

Seamus looked desperately towards Mickey, his eyes screaming at his colleague to save him. Mickey was not moved; he recognised a dying man when he saw one. Within a second the giant was on his knees, and a moment later he was face down in a growing puddle of blood.

Mickey’s mind was remorseless; he had no time for sentiment if he was to stay alive. And as he was trying to work out what kind of trap he had walked into, he noticed Leroy’s familiar face, appearing behind the bodies of the other armed men. As his vision became more used to the dark he could see Leroy clearly, he was standing on top of the pub’s bar, with about ten or so heavy set men in front of him.