Heavy Duty Attitude (22 page)

Who was he calling?

 

And why was he using my phone to do it?

*
‘So what about him?’ Toad asked again, nodding at me.

‘Oh just stick him in the hole for now,’ Wibble instructed, his mind obviously elsewhere.

 

Oh shit, I thought, I really was dead already.

He must have seen the expression on my face since he smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry mate, I need to think about what to do about you, so it’s not that sort of hole. At least not yet.’

Toad and Scroat tipped the chair backwards and dragged it and me bodily across the room, through a doorway into an inner hallway and then into the first room off it where unceremoniously they just let go of the chair, letting me and it fall heavily to the floor. There, rather than the further kicking I had instinctively started to try as far as I could whilst still strapped to a chair, to roll myself into a ball for, squirming in anticipation of trying to keep my kidneys on the ground, they just dumped me.

But it was a sixties built thin walled flat, one of those where you could hear next door’s every fart, and so from where I lay I could still hear what was going on in the living room through the thin partition and open doorways. *

They had left me there with instructions to keep quiet and stay still although there really wasn’t a lot else I could do.

 

Back inside the other room there was a knock and the clank of the door being opened to admit someone.

Then as they moved between the lounge and the kitchen to make some drinks there was a discussion, some of which I could overhear and some of which was obviously about me.

‘…well he can’t stay here.’
‘But there’s nowhere else to put him.’
‘For the moment…’
‘Yeah well…’

‘Do we need him?’ said a new voice that with a chill I recognised as Bung’s.

 

Wibble’s voice cut through above them.

 

‘Well he’s here now. Might not have been the smartest thing in the world to do…’

 

There were some unintelligible objections, then Wibble’s voice again. ‘Yeah yeah, I know, you had to do something, I get that…’

 

More rumbles.

‘Well, whatever,’ he said, sounding dismissive, ‘it doesn’t matter now. The fact remains he’s here now and we can work with it. Now, does everybody know what they’re doing?’

There was the sound of a round of affirmative grunts.
‘You finished?’ asked Wibble.

‘The first bit yes,’ said Toad. ‘I still need to do the wiring but we had to stop to bring matey boy over here and see what to do.’

‘Can you get the rest done tonight d’you think?’
‘Yeah, should be able to if we get back over.’

‘OK then, let’s get organised. It would be good to get it all ready tonight,’ Wibble instructed, before adding ‘and Bung, can you sort your lad out?’

‘Sure, no problem,’ said Bung smoothly, ‘I’ll catch him first thing.’ Oh God, I thought to myself. That had to be Danny they were talking about Bung sorting. What the fuck had I done?

Just then there was the sound of a mobile phone ringing. Not mine this time, It was Wibble’s.

 

‘It’s him,’ he announced and the others all fell silent as Wibble answered it with a cold ‘Hello?’

‘Yes?...
‘How did?...
‘You’re fucking joking?...
‘No, not on this, we need to speak…
‘Yes now!...
‘Here, the usual place…
‘How long?...
‘OK, well hurry it up then. I’ll be waiting.’
I heard the click as he snapped the phone shut.

‘Right then,’ he announced to the silently waiting group, ‘Bung, make the calls, I need everybody together for a meet tomorrow morning.’ ‘We’re on?’

 

‘It’s on. Surprise, surprise, they completely fucked it up and the tosser is on his way here now.’

There was the sound of a general exodus from the flat to do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing; until as far as I could tell the only people left were Wibble, Bung and me. But since no one came in to see how I was doing it was difficult to tell.

*
I think it was just about midnight before Bung appeared in the cell doorway.

Bung slipped out a knife and wrenching my arms up from where they were taped to the arms of the chair so that he could get at them, slashed through the tape at my wrists and elbows before letting them fall again.

‘You might as well make yourself comfortable,’ he grinned, ‘you’re going to be here for a while.’
I slumped down and with an effort and a thump rolled the chair over onto its side. My hands were an agony of pins and needles as the blood began to flow again while I fumbled with what felt like swollen and cartoon sized fingers and thumbs to pick an edge of the gaffa tape from off my face, and then once I had a fuzzy hold of it, with a rip and a grimace, to tear it from across my mouth and gasp for some precious fetid air again.

From my restricted vantage point on the floor as I lay wheezing to get my breath back again and tried to make what sense I could of my situation, I peered around me. Once upon a time it had obviously been one of the bedrooms. Now as I lay there still curled up against the chair, my ankles still trussed with duct tape that I hadn’t even started to struggle with yet, I could dimly make out a bed, and in the corner what looked like one of those chemical toilets you have in caravans and that sort of thing. Beyond the bed I could see the windows which had been boarded over with the perforated steel sheeting that councils use to seal off condemned and empty buildings.

‘What’s this all about?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see soon enough.’
‘Have you had other people here?’

‘What do you think? You reckon we set all this up just for you?’ he shook his head in disgust, ‘Jesus, you don’t think you’re the first we’ve had to take care of do you?’

Take care of in the keep sense I hoped. Not in the get rid of sense. ‘All the same, you’re staying here for a while, and piece of advice?’ ‘Yes?’

‘You keep your mouth shut while you’re here unless we want to talk to you. You understand?’

 

Oh I got it alright…

There was a clang as a steel barred grille shut across the doorway and the rattle and click of a bolt being shut and padlocked and that was it, I was to all intents and purposes locked inside a cell. I was a prisoner and they were right. I wasn’t going anywhere.

So it looked as though they had thought this through. It was a prison alright, and not one where anyone outside could see, or I thought, hear me.

 

Saturday 22 August 2009

 

I guess it was about two or so in the morning before there was a knock at the outer door.

‘It’s him,’ I heard Bung say.
‘Alone?’
‘Yes, looks like it.’
‘Alright then, let him in,’ Wibble instructed.

And from where I sat and listened it was immediately apparent who
they
were and what they had
completely fucked up
, although really it should have been obvious already.

The visitor was Thommo, and he’d come to report what had gone down, which was nothing good. In fact it was, as advertised, a complete fuck up. Cambridge had gone after Noddy.

 

Thommo had personally led the attack on the home of The Mohawks’ president in the new regime which was out on a farm Ely way.

Noddy as the ex-Capricorn P and representative of the larger club had taken the top slot with Leeds Kev of the zombies taking the VP position on the ticket so that both predecessor clubs were represented in the merger. Being the more local and senior officer he was the most obvious target, something that the Cambridge crew should really have taken into account in their planning I guess.

In any event, Thommo, his crew and their strikers and various tagalongs eager to be seen to be on board had tooled up with axes, petrol bombs, pistols and shotguns, before riding over in a couple of old transits. The plan had been to park the vans up in the woods along the lane that led down to Noddy’s place and then split up to creep down either side of the track to surround the place from both sides. The petrol bombs would go in the windows to set the place on fire and The Brethren crew would be waiting outside the doors to take out whoever the fire flushed out from inside.

The only problem was that The Mohawks had been waiting for them.

‘It was a complete fucking ambush!’ Thommo was complaining. ‘The squaws must have known we were coming. They were camped outside in the woods, and just as soon as we pulled up they opened fire. The guys didn’t stand a chance. They just fucking riddled the first van before we could get a fucking door open. I reckon one of them must have had one of the AKs that they used the first time. The others had shotguns and stuff. We got some off ourselves but we just had to hightail it out of there.’

‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Our guys?’

We had to dump Timbo outside A&E. Santa’s got a bad one in the arm and Kenny caught a load of shot in the leg but Oddball’s wife’s a nurse so she’s cleaned and sewn both of them up OK. Otherwise it’s minor stuff, cuts and bruises.

‘And them?’

‘Fuck knows. Like I said, we rode straight into an ambush. We popped off what we could but fuck it, after that it was just about getting the fuck out of there.’

‘So you never got near the house?’

 

‘Shit no. Have you been listening to what I’ve been saying? They were waiting for us I tell you.’

‘Christ. What a fuck up.’
*
‘Well that proves it,’ I heard Wibble say.
‘Proves what?’ Thommo sounded puzzled.

‘You’ve got a snitch in your crew haven’t you? You said it yourself, they must have known you were coming. So someone’s feeding stuff to the squaws. Stuff from the inside. How else did they know what was going to go down?’

‘Well…’

 

‘And it’s not just now is it? What about the Toy Run? Someone snitched then as well…

 

Thommo started to protest but Wibble wasn’t having any of it.

‘Oh come on Thommo for fuck’s sake, we all know it even if no one’s saying it. How else would the squaws have known what we were going to announce?’

Thommo tried again, ‘Well other people knew…’

 

‘Not fucking many, that’s for sure,’ snarled Wibble, ‘and how many people knew about your little trip tonight?’

‘Well…’
‘No you’ve got a snitch, and this needs sorting pronto.’
‘So I’ll…’

‘So you’ll just shut the fuck up and I’ll tell you what to do,’ Wibble ordered and Thommo fell silent at last.

‘You’ll get all your guys together,’ Wibble continued authoratively as he issued his instructions, ‘it’s full high church. You’re calling a crash meeting tomorrow night at your clubhouse, and once everyone’s there, you keep ’em there. D’you get it?’

‘Yes but…’

‘But nothing. You just do what I’ve told you to do. In the meantime I’ll get our crew together as a nutting squad and we’ll head up to meet you. Once you’ve got everyone there, send someone over to fetch us. Someone I know. Who’s your junior patch at the moment? The one who was on the door last time we were down?’

‘Mikey?’

‘Yeah, that’s the one. Send him. We’ll arrange to wait somewhere local, at the Little Thief or whatever, for him to come and fetch us. Then me and my guys’ll come over and you and me, well mate, we’re going to sort out your little snitch problem once and for all.’

‘What if anyone can’t make it?’

‘Well if anyone no shows, they’re your snitch for sure aren’t they? Still, whatever. You get the guys together, you send Mikey and then you keep everybody else with you at the clubhouse till we get there, is that understood?’

It was understood.

 

Thommo left with his orders.

*
It was difficult to tell for sure but I guessed it was about midday.

There were more voices next door. People had been arriving over the last half hour or so and sorting themselves out with drinks in the kitchen.

Sorting out their own drinks just confirmed what Wibble and Bung had already said. It meant that there weren’t any strikers around; if there had been no full patch would have lifted a finger in the kitchen, expecting without question to be waited on.

‘OK then,’ I heard Wibble’s voice rise above the other to call them to order as I guessed they must have perched themselves around the assortment of battered sofas and chairs in the flat’s living room.

‘Let’s get started.’
*

‘So what happened?’ someone asked in a Geordie accent. So Toad was back then I realised, but then I’d assumed he would be, to represent the North. ‘Well according to Thommo it was a straight out ambush, and the twats walked right into it.’

 

It wasn’t a meeting I realised. It was a council of war.

There was a chorus of groans and ‘Oh shits’ which Wibble had to shut down a couple of times as he gave the assembled group a flat report of what Thommo had said last night, about how The Brethren had been beaten back, together with his interpretation of the implications.

‘The squaws were waiting and ready for ’em. That’s clear enough. So to me that means they had to have been tipped off by someone.’

There was a general murmur of agreement.
‘And that someone, whoever the fucking rat is, has to be on the inside.’

The growl of agreement from inside the room made my hair stand on end. Christ if there was one thing that all outlaw bikers hated with a vengeance, it was someone who betrayed a club’s secrets. In their lives, someone who ratted them out, whether to the cops or a rival gang was the lowest of the low, the absolute scum of the earth.

Informers are a dying breed
wasn’t just a joke as far as these guys were concerned. It was the law they all lived by.

 

‘So it’s not just the squaws anymore,’ he continued, ‘We need to sort out Cambridge once and for all as well.’

Again there was a noise of agreement, although more subdued, more circumspect this time, as if the men in the room were waiting for him to make himself and his intentions plain, or as plain as they would ever be expressed in words.
‘They brought the whole of this shit down on all of us and now they can’t handle it. So somebody needs to arrange to take care of business, agreed?’

This was a language and an issue they all understood.

One of the first duties of a charter was to hold their turf for the club and if they couldn’t control their local patch, then they didn’t deserve to wear their patches anyway. Worse still I knew from my conversation with Bob, Wibble would be concerned how this might reflect on the national charter as a whole.