Cracking Up (21 page)
I was pumped-up and felt I had no option but to leg it because I weren’t legit. You can fuck right off, I remember thinking. It seemed like I was always knocking on the BIG PRICK in the sky’s door and, anyway, I would rather have swallowed a pint full of piss than wait around to be carted off to a decrepit Dutch dungeon and the dark, depressing world of long-term imprisonment and I felt another shot of pure adrenaline surge through me, as a warning shot was fired up into the air and I ducked down a side street. Fear had given performance-enhancing qualities to my feet, just like Forrest Gump. I continued running down an alleyway, jumped over a succession of walls and running through a builders yard I managed, against all odds, by moving at hyper-speed even though the moments felt stretched and like I was going superslow, to make good on my escape from pistolero-toting DUTCH BACON. When I removed the motorcycle helmet I was sweating cobbs, drained, my body shaking from the rush. I dumped it in a wheelie-bin in an alleyway and, casual-like, slow-slouched ambled onto a main avenue to catch a tram which seemed hellishly slow and had me looking out the back-window for pursuing bizzies. I eventually alighted at a stop near my hotel and I could hardly walk the short way back to the Cozy Inn because my knees were knocking like a pair of castanets.
When I got back to my room, I fell to my knees and panted like a perv making a dirty phone call. My face was flushed and my body was still shaking from the electric adrenal storm. I had tasted that incomparable rush of having escaped - of having actually been caught red-handed and facing certain incarceration - and getting away. Come on, Ow-wee, lad!
Caspar would tell the bizzies a load of shit. The verbal diarrhea poured out of his mouth in hot and gushing streams; he gave them a false name and an address and, to his credit, refused to name his accomplice. Frequently, every word he said would be a bare-faced lie and the Dutch bizzies weren’t quite sure he was even speaking English with his thick, Arabic-Scouse accent. He would be operated on, stitched and cleaned up but would be kept in a guarded custody suite of the hospital, monged out on morphine-like painkillers, as the bizzie mafiosi wanted to know who he was and they were serious. So serious, in fact, that they had sent out for a mobile fingerprint scanner.
Being penniless and in fear of being caught by the police in a strange country is no laughing matter; It was last. I was trapped there. I was ready for the taking. I had no money. I was risking it just by returning to the hotel room because the filth are ALWAYS there behind you because it’s a TOM AND JERRY scenario. Once Caspar was ID’d the bizzies would be investigating and doing the rounds of the tourist hotels on the lookout for his accomplice. Talk about a being a target in a tight spot. Dog Sick would have to sort it out from his end, I reckoned, and gave him a bell. “You two are a pair of fucking chancers,” he laughed at me. “Fucking cracking me up here, lad. Always pumped up, you lot. You know what, our kid? You lads need to keep your wits about you, knock them Class As on the head and defo that Special K shite.”
Because he was a full-on, notorious drug dealer, I wondered where the fuck he was coming from and felt like telling him to wind his neck in, but just agreed with his hypocritic notions to keep it sweet: “Yeh, I know …”
“Anyway, roll your sleeves up coz I’ve got a job on for you.”
One of his drug couriers was in Amsterdam to get in fresh supplies and snide passports. Dog Sick wanted me to give him a hand in bringing the stuff back home. Sounded kosher to me. “Fucking nice one Sicko!”
It turned out that Dog Sick had gotten nearer the source of bulk powder buys in the drug exchange of The Dam. He had gotten the price brought down to a sensible level and was going to get right on to this life-changing venture. He was cutting out the middle men because he was not content to be paddling around in small ponds anymore. He was looking towards swimming with the big fish, grabbing all that the drug world had to offer. He suddenly had the opportunity to make a lot of money very quickly, and in true entrepeneur-like fashion, he was going to seize it with both hands.
After I put the public pay phone down, I didn’t hang around. I got down The Sweaty Betty, a battle cruiser not far from Dam Square where that old Amsterdam street banter of “Coke, smack and Es” can be heard. I wanted to get down there double pronto and link-up with this kid doing the driving and get the fuck out of the city sharpish like. Paranoia was beginning to creep in as I realized it was only a matter of time before the Dutch police would find me; then the fucking shit would hit the fan and it’d come on top for me.I was double cacking my kecks at the thought of getting nabbed by the bizzies and being trawled off to a dibble shop, where a bleach-stinking holding cell would be waiting for me.
Back at The Sweaty Betty, I took up position in a dark corner of the bar, ordered a Heineken and waited for this kid to turn up so that we could get on the road. It was doing my head-in; it felt like a fucking lifetime because I was stressing like a dumb twat about getting collared. After an hour I was beginning to give up hope that he would show. I was fucking panicking, looking towards the door everytime it opened and some punters strolled in. I had more beers, slowly getting on the piss to pass the time. After five or six bottles I’d managed to calm me-self down when a tap on the shoulder made me turn round. This lad stood there, grinning like he was my long-lost cousin or something.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Fuck! I hate it when that happens. I grappled desperately in the depths of my mind for a flicker of recognition but it was taking too long and I finally had to admit my ignorance. “I’m Sinkie. We was in Bechers Block at the same time. Had it on smash in there, lar, didn’t we? Play Station 2, Sky, Spice, the fucking lot, lad!”
“Fucking hell! Yeh, top one. Sorry, Sinkie lad; it’s all coming back now.” Bechers Block was the remand unit in Altcourse nick.
I immediately brightened at the prospect of being able have the crack and ease up with a blast from the past. He led me out of the pub, over to an underground car park beneath the Bijenkorf and he stopped dead besides a boss 2013 Honda Civic in seriously good nick. As we got in, he began to explain how the drugs were hidden in this fine specimen of wheels.
We set off confidently down the road, cruising inconspicuously out of the city. We were on the open road, heading towards The Hook Of Holland, when my mate decided to put his foot down, rapidly ripping it ahead, driving as if he were on a getaway, dodging in and out of traffic like a top idiot. I tried telling him we were standing out like sore thumbs with the speed we were doing and to CALM DOWN, YOU FUCKING NUTTER! It only served to encourage him all the more, as he took my criticism as a challenge. Fucking show off, or what?! I clocked an unmarked police car up ahead just at the very moment that my mate seized the opportunity to overtake, giving it full throttle and really playing the road for all to see. His focus was set dead ahead, as I tried to warn him about the bizzies. The police pulled us within seconds.
Now the bizzies aren’t complete retards and they knew by instinct that we were serious wrong uns, up to no good and could smell a pair of guilty rats like us from ten yards. Being the suspicious and cynical lawmen that they were, they demanded the car documents and passports, refusing to believe the blatant lies we served up to them in answer to their interrogating tactics. We were getting all defensive and protested our innocence, claiming to be nothing but naive thick-as-pigshit tourists, unaware of the speed limits in The Flat Place and pleading to be allowed to continue on our journey before we missed the ferry back to dear old Blighty. By way of an apology, we solemnly promised that we wouldn’t do it again - HONEST! But being police trained professionals, they had observed we were sweating like bastard rapists and the fuckers insisted on searching the vehicle, ordering us out of the car. This is definitely it! I thought. The fucking shit is going hit the fan here and it’s about to come right on top RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW Ow-wee lad. But try as they might, they couldn’t locate the hidden trap in the dashboard. The trap was connected to a pressure sensor under the driver’s seat. You had to sit in it and have all the car doors closed before the stash spot could be opened, which is unheard of during a typical roadside search by trafficos. They came back from searching the motor, looking sorely disappointed and issued us the standard on-the-spot speeding fine, warning us to SLOW DOWN! We were lucky bastids, escaping by the skin of our teeth. The pair of us breathed massive sighs of relief as we settled back in the motor and drove off, at a passive speed mind you, down the road towards the ferry port, looking in the rear view, calling them all the cunts under the sun and laughing nervously at yet another close call.
30.
We made it back to THE POOL with the contents of the car intact, insuring a top welcome from Dog Sick on our arrival. His face was beaming; he was in top spirits about the way things were developing. He was off-loading huge amounts of gear, on the verge of becoming top drawer, raking it in by this time and on the way to making his fortune; the transition from scummy street dealer to top lad supplying kilos had been amazingly rapid. Thousands of punters were hounding us to sort them out. The general public were more than happy with the price and quality of the spread on offer and merely requested more of it, demanding a top chemical release so they could feel on top of the fucking world and never mind what THE LAW says.
Dog Sick was larging it up by this time, driving boss motors, decked out with ten-grands worth of Zenith watch, splashing out in casinos and shagging gold-diggers left, right and centre. These frantic come bags were all desperate to get a little bit of Dog Sick to themselves, fucking machines that put a price on their pussies. He hit the VIP lounges on the town nightclub circuit in style wearing nothing but top-quality designer labels, armed to the teeth with nose candy and cash spilling out of deep pockets - shouting in bottles of Cristal. He’d copped for this one bird Cat, who was a good-looking piece of cunt. She looked just like somebody really famous: Tulisa. She boasted about being a glamour model, but had worked as an escort and had gone as far as exchanging bodily fluids with Premiership footballers. She kept in touch with one of them, sending him texts - as is the way with young slappers sometimes. Dog Sick simply announced that she was his squeeze now and tried to control his jealousy in the face of her ongoing friendship with the famous international player. But the green-eyed monster is human nature and, the chilling thing was, as a solution to this headache, he came up with the mad idea of sending me down a fucking great big tree-lined avenue flanked with mansions and toss a handgrenade over the high walls of this lads exclusive property. I told him it was a brainless scheme and would make too many waves, refusing to have anything to do with the lunatic notion, especially as he was top scorer for the team I supported. There is a code of conduct even among drug-dealing scum that says you tell the feller hands off she’s mine to his face, preferably with the aid of a fist to drive the fact right home. I mean his bird was his bird when all’s said and done, but she was no better than a two-bob prozzie as far as I was concerned. Apart from the silicone tits and fuck factor, I didn’t know what he saw in the lousy bitch; she was just a glorified brass - from her tits to her clit!
The crossing from Holland to Harwich confirmed that maybe I wasn’t sailor material. I chucked up the minute the ferry lurched against first wall of rolling waves and recalled that I was usually dog rough even after a short trip on the ferry across the Mersey. I was shaking like a shitting dog as the ferry plowed through the mammoth waves of a black, rotten North Sea Force 9 gale. It was a fucking nightmare of a trip to be experiencing sober, but the crew had shut the bar and duty free shop because bottles and glasses were getting tossed around like plates at a Greek wedding, smashed to bits by the violent, lurching motions of the ship. Obviously we were going to have to gut it out and I told myself to GET A GRIP AND CALM THE FUCK DOWN because we weren’t on the Titanic, for fuck’s sakes. Putrid pools of passenger puke puddled the floors and I had to be careful not to slip and break my neck during the short walk back down to the car deck after six hours of sea-going psychological and physical torture. I could hardly walk and my brain was refusing to believe we’d survived the perfect storm. We disembarked from the roll-on, roll-off ferry in Harwich at about half-eight in the evening and bombed it down miles of motorways with the imported cargo, zooming up the M62 and descending into the city centre. We’d taken turns driving, guzzling power drinks to keep going and blaring Grime from the stereo - Manek’s Function Of The Low among others. It was raining in Liverpool, as far as I remembered it always had been and I caught sight of the illuminated Liver Birds which were as threatening as the dark sky and seemed to perch there, always watching like a Matrix surveillance team.
The car pulled into the underground car park and the relative sanctuary of Dog Sick’s newly acquired luxurious apartment in Beecham Towers. It was an exclusive kind of place which translates as expensive and would provide the ideal cover for a bash-house, as well as being a sound addition to his growing property portfolio. We cleared the stash spot out of kilos, stuffed them into a holdall, squeezed into the elevator with the weighty bag and ascended to the higher ground of this five star kennel.
A big fuck-off black lump, Dog Sick’s new right-hand man, let us into the flat. He was built like a tower block, looked like he could bend metal bars and, if he punched you in the face, it would take a couple of lads to pull his fist back out. Parra had a passing resemblance to David Haye with his cornrow braid job, had gold teeth galore and diamond studs in his ears. They called him Parra because he was that tall you would need a parachute to jump off him and he had a ferocious street tuff reputation. But he was up his own arse and barely acknowledged us as he snatched the bag off us and disappeared into the kitchen straight away to get the bashmen to test it, leaving us stood in the hallway like a pair of tits on a bull.
