Death in a XR2

vi) Death in a XR2

"I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came." – Job 3:26

They called him Crazy. He had been waiting on the corner of Barnes Street for an hour now, smokin white and fumbling with the keys on the ignition. Small time dealer, but big time smoker, there was not a vice he’d tried his huge hands at. Whether it was pimping, armed blags or simple street robbery – he was a jack of all trades but a master of none. In the glove compartment of his battered GTi was his latest toy.

Excitedly, nervously he kept getting taking it out, toying with it - feeding its power. He’d used other shooters before, but not real ones. This was a dead weight of black cold metal, the genuine article. This was as heavy and as dark as his heart.

Crack wired and running out of it fast. His only thought was to get more. Of course he had a job in hand; he was Deano’s man now. Deano had set him up with his first pipe of that evening. Round at Deano’s yard, he watched as the yardie had put the forty stone on the table. Watched the room disappear as his vision narrowed into the pearl of white crack and the glass pipe, then the flame from his lighter licking its base as the milky crumbs dissipated to smoke before his eyes. It filled his lungs first and then his being. Now, he had become the destroyer...........

Since those moments had passed he had been on a mission, the forty stone wouldn’t last and Deano had promised him more if he accomplished his part of the deal. What the man had wanted was a kind of Biblical revenge. His boy Pablo had been shot at up on Robin Hood Chase summer gone, in an infamous incident where he'd lost the top part of his ear.

Deano explained, “It dat dere Bible. It say – eye for and eye and tooth for a tooth. It only be righteous – man, my ‘yout lost his blut clat ear.”

Deano continued as if he was speaking from a pulpit in stentorian tones, “I wanna get back at these St Ann's bad men. The lord gives me the right to avenge and deal with der badness in dere 'arts. Then they will know the voice of de almighty. Shoot ‘im, yeh – but do not kill him. Shoot his arm or his leg…den when you done come back and Deano will treat you right, innit..”

All that mattered to Crazy now was his next fix. He was waiting for the red Ford Fiesta XR2 to slip into Barnes Street and then blast away. Those fools he thought the Meadow’s boys and the St Ann’s crews even thinking of trying to play with the big boys. No - it was folly to try beat the yardies at their own game and a foolishness that came at a terrible cost..

Let them shoot each other up, in their little petty gangland disputes he thought- but in the case of Pablo they’d over stepped the mark, you just couldn't get away with that kinda shit man? No, whatever happened now was justice, like Deano said it was all in the hands of providence now.

He drove his vehicle to the prearranged spot on Leburnan Grove, ready for his yardie paymaster to pick up later. Next suspending his disbelief, as he undid the glove compartment for the final time taking the plunge to become the author of horror. There was to be no turning back now - NO. Glancing up and down Barnes Street and perspiring with a mixture of excitement and fear,
“Where are they….it must be time” he muttered to himself.
Under the subway, he noticed two addicts waiting to score – and his heart skipped a beat. They were waiting for his man – but he was waiting to settle his very different score.

When the car finally arrived to meet its nemesis – Crazy was anything but prepared. The driver, a youth of no more than seventeen quickly pulled up and then seemed to dart out the car. He was en route to meet the drug fiends down in the subway, but this wasn’t the man himself, it was a mere boy.

For a few seconds, he thought of running back to the GTi and then telling Deano they hadn’t arrived, but he told himself – I ain’t no pussy hole, I always keep to my word and when I've been paid I always see it through – this and this crack man, it was tasty! Panicked, confused he noticed that there was someone still in the Fiesta in the passenger seat. In his cracked up mind he heard a voice telling him, that this was it. This was his chance to prove he was a real man - a real bad boy.

The weight of the gun was nestling in his sweating hands, seemingly pulling him towards the vehicle. As he grew closer he could sense that it this was the other dealer Deano wanted to make pay, he could see the characteristic baseball cap that he knew this man often wore.

Now his crack demons sensed that inside the Red Ford Fiesta there would be more crack concealed within. Like an evil arachnid lodged in his cerebellum, these wraiths were spinning thoughts of cruelty and greed, goading him on to destiny.

Man he bet in the red Fiesta there was a rock of crack so big, it would make an ostrich egg look small! His perceptions flickered, the drugs he had consumed earlier with the onset of belated heroin withdrawal were fogging his vision. He lifted his arm, moved the gun to the firing position and shouted “Yo! Get out, the car – I’ll shoot yo if you don’t!
His mind faded at this point. The glimmer of streetlights and his hot breath in the February air were the only things he could clearly sense.

He saw his target and shot once, twice - four times. A man was felled as he tried to run from the car. Down to the dust, falling in slow motion before the sounds of the shot’s rang out their sad toll over the streets.

Crazy felt powerful, he was elated, gun drunk and like god himself. But he realised something was terribly, terribly wrong. The man he fired at, he realised, was just another boy – just a runner, the bottom of the ladder, and it was not the big time dealer he wanted. This boy, still moving, crying in pain was mumbling something to himself.

Crazy’s vision cleared – his heart, was racing as the weapon sank limp in his hand. After this orgy of bullets, he was as impotent as a crack heads cock, post coutus.

He looked at his victims dying face, a defiant but puzzled look of incredulity and anger. The boy however seemed less shocked than Crazy was himself. As the victim looked Crazy in the eye; Crazy noticed his face, he was handsome, not much more than schoolboy, with an intelligent look - full of the vitality of youth in its prime.

That night he was robbed of a life full of years. This certainly wasn’t the bloated middle aged dealer that Crazy had imagined in his crack rotten mind. For a fleeting moment this big bad man felt pity, humanity, remorse.

Then as Crazy's street persona switched back, even his face seemed to twist, to snarl and gloat – but he knew in his heart that this was the mother of all fuck ups. Years of drug abuse, of beatings as a kid and then of him himself dishing the beatings to others. This was the self-perpetuation of a circle of hate, the road that had turned him into what he was - hardwired for violence. His corrupted programming had been inflicted with a virus that ignored the human emotions of empathy, respect,sorrow and regret.

Now Crazy looked down again. This lad most certainly wasn’t a dealer afterall all. But as Crazy’s flight and fight responses kicked in, his only thought was of escaping the nightmare of his own creation.

The ignition was still running and keys in the car – simple. He got in, revved up and then slammed down the accelerator, speeding to the end of Barnes Street. Suddenly he felt better again, his cold calculating faculties taking charge of the moment. No problem - he thought as he quickly made plans – he knew a girl he would bully to let him in, he would take her crack off her and threaten her with the weapon. In her dingy flat he would hide the shooter. Later that day he would torch the car, yet another accomplice terrified, as they destroyed the evidence together.

The gun, which had seemed novel and new only minutes ago, now was his master, the arbiter of his wickedness and cruelty.

Around the corner, the boy was breathing his last on Barnes Street. His cousin (the lad who'd run to the subway moments before) had returned from the deal, he’d heard loud banging but that was all – in all his life he would never forget this moment, the look of someone cheated of such promise and hope - but for what? Now, he just sobbed over his dying bredren.

“I’ll be alright promise you - don’t you worry about me”

Those were the last words he was to utter on this earth. With kings and counsellors, yea - this brave boy lay down.

It would be eight long years, eight years of tears for his mother, his pals, and his family -before anything resembling justice was to be done. The secrets of the street, although often revealed to the dirty, despised, the voiceless and forgotten, ; in their invisible world, fear and indifference would cloak the realities of this crime.

Whispered over the rustle of tinfoil and hidden in the shrouds of white smoke, this story would certainly be recounted and distorted beyond measure……….

The police would take many years to ascertain the facts - so deeply buried and entombed, like everything else in the sunken city.

However, this was not to be totally in vain - this tragic waste of life. The death of this humorous, clever, playful, rascally boy was a tragic example of wrong place, wrong time. But this sad story was to prove an impetus for resolve against the apathetic attitudes that had allowed it to happen.

The evil of Crazy had been sown in the malignant episodes of his past. It was like almost everything leading up to this atrocity all his experiences before had primed him for it.

The boy was not forgotten like Christie who was found with a needle in her arm in a waste chute on Marple Square. Or like Josella, who had beaten and terrorised so badly by her pimp, that she hung herself in the stairwells of Cheverton Court.

No - it was to mark the start of a campaign to clean up the streets of Britain in a heroic attempt to rid them from gun crime. Such an alien, insidious intruder to our sceptred isle would not be tolerated - not in Nottingham. But in spite of all the best intentions it was still to bear more of its rancid fruit.

There is no glory in this world of drugs, of wannabe gangsters and deals gone wrong. Just sadness, sorrow and wasted potential – the lonely and the loathed, passed by the main stream like flotsam and jetsam. It was why Ben wanted so desperately to escape St Anns and why Caddy had chosen the slow death that is alcoholism.