I Love My Smith and Wesson (19 page)

When the brothers were stoned beyond redemption, they vandalized the buildings on their own street. They held mock trials, in which they found their property guilty of being working-class and shot it. So far, they'd spared the lives of the houses they lived in, but it was only a matter of time before these dwellings also faced death by firing squad.

Whenever they went anywhere, Chris would drive and his big brother would wind down the window to shout obscene abuse at innocent bystanders.

Joggers. (“You running bastard!”)

Fat people. (“You fat bastard!”)

Girls they wanted to fuck. (“You sexy bastard!”)

Girls they didn't want to fuck. (“You ugly bastard!”)

Women in saris. (“You wog bastard!”)

People in wheelchairs. (“You crippled bastard!”)

Middle-aged women. (“You menopausal bastard!”)

Middle-class women. (“You posh bastard!”)

People who looked terminally ill. (“You dying bastard!”)

Old people. (“You dribbler bastard!”)

The Medinas believed they could do or say what they liked to anyone, without fear of comeback. In most cases, this was true.

But spitting on Rawhead's shoe?

That was a bad mistake.

*   *   *

The street the Medinas owned was called Stainer Street. A fitting name for a thoroughfare spattered with every conceivable form of human and animal filth. Even without a map, Rawhead would have found the Medinas easily.

Rawhead was wearing his long black coat. He had a pair of matching Ruger Magnums in his trouser belt and a short, wide-bladed knife in the side pocket of his overcoat. On foot, he skirted Stainer Street to familiarize himself with the geography of the battleground. Stainer Street marked the end of a block. To the south lay several identical roads. In the opposite direction stretched a vast area of dog shit–encrusted waste ground, where Rawhead had paid two kids twenty each to guard his car, with the promise of the same again if he returned to find it still had wheels.

Rawhead crossed the end of Stainer Street. A big fat intellectual was standing guard in the middle of the road. Behind him, partygoers were dancing in the street, whooping and shrieking in a desperate attempt to convince themselves they were having a great time. The intellectual spit on the ground as Rawhead walked by. Without reacting, Rawhead turned right into the neighboring street. The windows of the houses were vibrating with the noise.

An old man in a vest was standing on his doorstep. He addressed Rawhead as he passed. “Twice a week we get this fucking lot! My wife's fucking bedridden. I've written to Environmental Health. Have they done anything? Have they fuckers like!”

Rawhead nodded politely, walked back the way he'd come, and watched the big fat prick waving a taxi full of party guests into the street. When the car had driven off, Rawhead whistled to the fat intellectual. The intellectual glared at him. “What?”

“What's the capital of Denmark?” said Rawhead.

“What?”

“It's a general knowledge question,” explained Rawhead calmly. “Name the capital of Denmark.”

The intellectual took a step toward him. “Fuck off! You stupid fucking pillock…”

“If you don't know the answer, just say so.”

As the guy walked forward, Rawhead stepped back.

“What about Holland? Surely you can name the capital of Holland?”

The intellectual swung a kick at him. The kick almost connected. Rawhead felt the breeze against his knees.

Before the aggressor could recover his balance, Rawhead stepped forward, drove the knife behind his windpipe, and twisted. The intellectual staggered, his lips moving as if he was trying to say something. Blood spurted freely.

“Say it; don't spray it,” said Rawhead.

Wearily the victim sank to his knees and lay down. A seismic shudder passed through him and then he lay still.

He died as he lived. Pointlessly.

*   *   *

Keith Medina was upstairs in his room with two teenage stinks. The music was so loud that the floor was humming. The girls were meant to be putting on a show for Keith. Chris had asked them to wear corsets, frilly knickers, stockings, and suspenders, and had loaned them an enormous vibrator. But the teenagers looked more like two dumb supermarket checkout girls pricing a cucumber. It was obvious that they weren't really lesbians and it was debatable whether they even made the grade as whores. So far, their efforts had been so lame that Keith couldn't even get a hard-on.

It was conceivable that his lack of enthusiasm owed something to the mound of cocaine on the dressing table. Every few minutes he returned for another snort. That was the maddening thing about coke. Once it had got you as high as you could go, high enough to make any further dosage pointless, you still went back for more.

Keith dipped his forefinger in the white powder and then reached down the back of his boxer shorts. He'd read somewhere that taking cocaine up the arse helped avoid nosebleeds. Hadn't Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac done it? But what about arsebleeds? There was only one fucking way to find out. He shoved his finger as far up his rectum as it'd go and waited. Nothing.

One of the girls on the bed belched. They both rolled about laughing, as if flatulence was the very pinnacle of wit. For them, it probably was.

There was an Uzi submachine pistol on the dressing table. Keith picked it up, eyes watering as he turned back to the bed. Over the pounding music, he thought he could hear a woman screaming.

“You idle fucking stinks, I've seen more convincing dykes in fucking pantomimes. Now make a fucking effort or I'll shoot your tits off.”

Uncowed, the girls continued to snigger. It was amazing, the ignorance of modern youth. Keith was glowering down at them, wondering which one to maim first, when he registered that the woman was still screaming. The sound was coming from outside.

He looked out of the window and saw a man capering round in circles, blood fountaining from his cranium. It seemed impossible that he could be losing so much blood yet still keep upright. It looked like Barney, who used to play rugby for Salford. Barney was one of their best men.

Barney flopped forward onto his hands and knees and Keith saw his open mouth and realized it was him who was screaming. There were shouts, more screams. There was a loud bang. Then a crowd of people surged away from the house, into the middle of the street. People panicking, fighting, pushing one another out of the way.

A woman with blood on her face and dress took off her stilettos and ran away down the road. Keith didn't know what the fuck was going on. He hurriedly pulled on a pair of jeans—the thought of being attacked in his boxer shorts appalled him.

*   *   *

Zippa Jay was in the long living room. He was using the smaller rig that he reserved for private houses, yet his speakers still reached the ceiling. These days, it was literally an act of charity for Zippa to play a house party. He made more money as a producer/mixer than he'd ever made as a club DJ. One of his own masterpieces was on the turntable, a fucked-up psycho remix of the theme from
The Magic Roundabout,
yet no one in the house seemed to realize how clever he'd been.

From his place at the mixing desk Zippa could see all three entrances. He kept watching the doors, hoping that no one in the dance community would walk in to catch him playing a wanker's private party. Gangsters were meant to be cool. But the Medinas weren't cool. They looked like secondhand-car salesmen.

A bruiser disguised as a waiter offered Zippa a glass of champagne from a tray. Zippa accepted, but he was bored and ill at ease. He didn't feel safe. He was only playing the gig because Chris Medina had asked him and Zippa had heard distressing stories about what happened to people who disappointed the brothers.

Chris Medina pushed his way over to Zippa with a request. As Chris bellowed in Zippa's ear, hand dangling over Zippa's right shoulder in an overfamiliar way, Zippa smelled rum on the gangster's breath. “We got a problem, pal.”

What?
mimed Zippa.

“None of us recognize one fucking tune you've played so far.”

“Ah. That's because tunes aren't exactly my thing.”

“Have you got any proper dance music? Like the Bee Gees or something?”

“Er, no.”

“What about northern soul?”

“Mainly, I've got techno or trance.”

“No northern soul?”

“No.”

“Well, what kind of fucking DJ are you?”

Zippa glanced at the door, saw a man with a hood on his head pushing through the guests. Normally, Zippa would have found the sight alarming. But he was more concerned about how the conversation with Chris Medina was going.

“If I gave you a pile of my own records, would you fucking play 'em?”

“It's kind of difficult…” said Zippa, squirming.

“Yeah. And it's also kinda difficult to talk when you've got no fucking teeth.”

“Pardon?”

“I said it's … Oh, fucking forget it.…”

The waiter who had served champagne to Zippa asked the man with the hood a question. The hooded man must have given the wrong answer, because the waiter tried to take a swing at him. Zippa didn't see how it happened, but the next second there was a loud bang and the waiter seemed to vomit blood. Some of his blood hit Zippa in the face. People started screaming and running. In slow motion Chris Medina looked toward the sound, reaching into his jacket as he turned.

Rawhead was holding a Magnum revolver in each hand. He shot Chris in the right thigh. Chris gasped and fell. The gunman walked over him, using his chest as a stepping-stone. Without even glancing down, he shot Chris Medina through the right eye, taking out the back of his head.

Zippa went to the microphone and made a passionate appeal. “Please. Give peace a chance!”

Rawhead gave peace a chance for precisely one second. It didn't work for him. In order to inflict maximum pain, he shot the DJ's beloved mixing desk. The music died, and Zippa wailed in mourning.

All you could hear now was screaming. There were three staircases. Rawhead took the one to the left, climbing toward a rush of bodies coming downstairs. At the sight of Rawhead they turned round and charged back up. Rawhead ascended steadily, stepping on people, squeezing past bodies pinned against the wall.

On the landing, he avoided the crush by turning into one of the bedrooms. Inside, two men and three women were fucking on a huge bed while three of their friends stood around and watched. One of the spectators was filming the action with a video camera. As Rawhead walked through, the guy with the camera turned to film him instead.

With one swipe, Rawhead knocked the camera out of its owner's hands. It fell to the floor and smashed. The cameramen was about to protest but fled when he saw who he was dealing with. The people on the bed just carried on fucking.

When Rawhead reached the far door, two holes ripped open in the plaster above the doorjamb. An instant later the clatter of automatic fire filled the room. Rawhead turned and saw Keith Medina firing some kind of automatic weapon.

Rawhead fired once, with his left, and saw a bite-sized chunk of fabric fly out of Keith's right shoulder. The Uzi jerked in Keith's hand and he kept firing, cutting down the three spectators standing by the bed but missing Rawhead. There was a pause; then Keith slithered down the wall and his twitching finger hit the trigger again. This time he shot four of the people on the bed.

The survivor, a guy with a shrunken reproductive organ, was cowering on the floor behind the bed with his eyes closed. The thought crossed Rawhead's mind that he'd be hiding, too, if he had a dick that small. He locked the bedroom door just as someone threw their full weight at it. The door quivered but held.

Rawhead walked over to Keith Medina, who looked up at him helplessly. It was hard to see why a bullet in the shoulder should bring down such a hard man.

But real life isn't like the movies. Getting shot is a terrible ordeal for the body and the spirit.

Rawhead reached into Keith's jacket and withdrew a bulging wallet. Dad Cheeseman's money, plus Rawhead's expenses.

Almost lazily, he tilted the gun in his left hand until it was pointing at Keith's head. Then he squeezed the trigger.

There was shouting outside the door, the bulldog sounds of angry men. Calmly Rawhead walked across the floor, stepping over the dead and dying.

Soar in eternal bliss, my friends.

At the far door, Rawhead peeled off his hood and threw it down. He thrust his guns back into his belt and buttoned down his coat. He walked out of the room, passed through a small, malodorous bathroom, and rejoined the landing. A woman who either was drunk or had fainted was lying in his path, moaning softly. Rawhead scooped her up as if she was a child and made for the stairs.

People were sitting on the stairs, completely stunned by what they'd witnessed. Down below, a man with crazed eyes was waving a handgun about, creating fresh ripples of panic among the fifty or so guests remaining. “Nobody move. Nobody leaves this fucking house until I fucking say so.”

Doing a perfect impersonation of a shocked, grief-stricken bystander, Rawhead staggered down, the woman murmuring in his arms, to the gun waver. “Why?” said Rawhead, tears in his eyes. “Why?”

“Out of the fucking way,” said the heavy irritably, waving Rawhead aside with the barrel of the gun.

It was that easy.

Still carrying the injured woman, Rawhead staggered out into the street.

Emboldened by his action, others followed Rawhead out into the night. There was another henchman on the far pavement, pointing a shotgun at the house. He was a kid of seventeen, his eyes dilated by fear. The dead rugby player was lying in the middle of the road.

“Why?” said Rawhead, appealing directly to the kid. “
Why?
” It was a perfectly reasonable question, to which the kid had no reply. Rawhead laid the injured woman at his feet like an offering. “Please. Please. Get her to hospital.”