Chapter Two Razor #2
Fenboys. Rival crew. We’d had run ins. Who hadn’t. I’d ended most of them.
I sucked in a breath. “You mix kids into that, you’re not matching. You’re begging Ghost to take the lot. And the pills? Who’s pressing them? We need the source.”
“Bloke out of Bethnal Green. Claims he’s got a mate on the docks. Jax, or whatever. Pills look clean but they’re turning to chalk. He’s punting them stupid cheap. Shifting ’em faster than we can test ’em. And the feds are circling. Ambos had three OD callouts off the same batch last week.”
Overdoses. The word cut cold in my mouth. It wasn’t the money that prickled. It was the bodies.
“We don’t push that shit, Tyler.” I punched the wheel. “Not that junk that kills heads. You know my line.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” His impatience bled more than his nose. “But Ghost’s undercutting, people are walking off. Runners want safer cash. Kids like Billy are cheap and desperate.”
I flicked the indicator once, then off. Rain ticked on the bonnet. “Runners can be replaced. Kids can’t.” I spat the words. “We keep our customers clean, our runners adults, our product tested. That’s why we last. That’s what keeps me breathing. And you by my side. Whatever. You get that?”
Tyler narrowed his eyes, playing the hard man, but the cloth in his grip told me he’d felt the slam. “So what then? We sit and watch Ghost take the patch?”
“No.” I put my hand flat on the wheel. “We do what we always do. Close ranks. Cut Jax out if he’s rolling poison.
Pull our guys from the Kingsley run and replace with trusted heads.
Put Ste on watch at the drop points; he’s got eyes and no love for that prick Ghost. Clean the product. Test every batch.”
Tyler barked a laugh that wasn’t amused. “Testing costs money.”
“So does a funeral.” I looked at him. “You do what I say. Use Sami from the phone shop. Tariq’s nephew. He’ll test for cut price. And you bring me intel first. You don’t bring kids. You don’t cut prices to chase volume. We protect our own. Ghost pushes kids, he pushes his luck.”
“And enforcement?” he asked, quieter. “If we move on Ghost, he don’t play nice.”
“That’s the point.” I looked him dead in the face. “He’ll come hard. He’ll try to scare us. Try to burn our runners. We answer with muscle where we have to, with clever where we can. We don’t play his game by his rules.”
“Right. So we pull Jax, we move Ste, we—”
“We move clean,” I cut in. “We make the price worth the risk. Take the corners back one at a time. And if Ghost gets clever, we hit his runners where he’s thin. Quiet. Surgical. No noise. You with me?”
Tyler stared, then that cheeky smirk crept back. “You mean like when you dealt with Kev last winter?”
“Exactly like then.” I let it sit, the way we took back Kev’s strip with quick pressure, sharp steps, no mess. “Only cleaner this time. No kids. No smack. No loose cannons.”
He exhaled hard, rubbing his nose. “You’re nuts, you know that?”
“Maybe.” I steered us through the backstreets, checking faces, corners, the usual. “But I’m still here. You’re still here. You stick on my line, you follow my steps, and when something shifts?” I glanced at him. “You come up with me. Simple.”
Tyler swallowed, shoulders squaring. “Right. So… we move tonight?”
“Not tonight.” I watched the street for a second, thinking through runs, alibis, safe houses. “Tonight we plug holes. Test what we’ve got. If Jax’s batch’s chalking, we quarantine it. If Ghost tries to flex, we respond with a message. Small, public, enough to remind people who runs this patch.”
He nodded. “Alright, Razor.” He blew out a breath, tried for a joke, but the laugh died in his throat. “Just… don’t go soft on me, yeah?”
“I was never soft.”
And I wasn’t. Whatever I chased in the dark when no one was watching didn’t make me weak.
It made me reckless. Stupid, sometimes. Like tonight.
I had my flaws, but softness wasn’t one of them.
And that rent boy in the alley knew exactly how hard I could be.
Now Tyler did too. Different lesson, same truth.
I wasn’t soft.
I was rock fucking hard when I needed to be.
I flicked my eyes his way. “You got on the wrong side of my rules tonight. Undermined me in front of a mouth. Don’t do that again.”
Tyler licked the blood off his lip and yanked his puffer straight. “Yeah. Got it.”
We rolled slow then, headlights slicing into thin, silver strips along our patch.
We kept the radio low, nothing but bass humming under the quiet as we did the round.
Our jobs, as it were. Picking up paper from the runners, clocking who was short, who was slacking, who might need a word.
Same shit, every night. Money in, product out.
Keep it tight, keep it moving, keep the line breathing.
By the time the streets thinned, and the heads shuffled home to burn out, it was late enough to leave it.
I dropped Tyler outside his gaff. He lived with his girl.
Decent sort. She’d tear him a new one the second she noticed his nose bent sideways.
Still stuck by him though. God knows why.
Lad was a dirty fucker whenever she wasn’t in eyeshot.
But Courtney chased the dream harder than he did, convinced I’d drag him up the ladder one day.
Problem was, lads like Tyler only ever ended up in two places: rising with me…
Or sinking in the Thames.
“You wanna come in?” Tyler angled his head, one foot out the door. “Courtney’s got a mate round. You remember Shanice?” He laid on the puppy-dog eyes. “Spare bed for you. Warm body. Gotta be better than your mum’s sofa in that dump.”
I looked at the mid-terrace, front room lit up.
On nights I couldn’t face going home, I crashed there.
Courtney fed me, fussed, played mum. And every so often she dragged round a mate I had to pretend I was grateful for.
Tyler asking now was his way of making up for the screw-up tonight.
Any other bloke would’ve taken him up on it.
I had, before. Fucked his girl’s mates more than once just to prove I could.
Shanice was one who always came back for seconds without asking questions.
But that buzz had burnt out.
Faking it stopped tasting right once I realised how empty it was.
“Nah. Gotta get back for Kee. She needs milk for the baby.”
Tyler tutted. “You know she could get her own council flat now.”
“Not as easy as you think, Ty. And who the fuck’s gonna look after her and the baby if she’s shoved cross-borough? Her waste-of-space boyfriend? Man’s lucky he’s not already in the pit.”
“There’s talk, y’know? Why you ain’t done Darren in yet.”
I tightened my grip on the wheel, jaw locked. “Biding my time.”
“Laters.” Tyler hopped out, trying for a swagger even though he was hurting.
I watched him go, knowing Courtney would ice him out and lecture him before morning.
He’d spin some bollocks story about fighting off a group to save face, because she’d go nuclear if she knew he’d earned that broken nose by mouthing off to me.
So I pulled off and headed back to the block. Let him have his moment.
Not before jumping out at the local Co-Op and stocking up on a carton of baby milk.
Then it was on to Tower Estate, Hackney.
The place I’d come up and was still tied to me no matter how much cash I carried in my pocket.
Four grand easy on a good night. And tonight was one of those nights.
Didn’t matter, though. No way to rinse the concrete out of my blood.
And those towers rising black against the sky, slabs of grey piled on grey, windows glowing in patches where curtains hadn’t been nailed up, were mine.
Yeah, the stairwells reeked of damp and diesel, spray paint curling off the walls where old tags bled into new, and there was always a light busted, a door hanging on one hinge with some flats pulsing grime out their windows till three a.m., but it was home.
Where people knew me. Counted on me. And kept their mouths shut as long as I kept the corridors clear of chancers.
That’s how I bought loyalty.
I took the stairs two at a time, concrete echoing under my trainers, up and up until I hit the eighteenth floor.
I was out of breath sure, but it was better than standing boxed in a steel coffin stinking of piss.
At the top, the corridor stretched narrow, walls painted once-upon-a-time cream, now yellowed with smoke and grease, and my door waited halfway down, metal scuffed, frame patched where it’d been kicked in twice before.
Inside there wasn’t much, either. Technically it wasn’t mine. It belonged to my mum. Or, well, the council loaned it to her when I was born. A two-bed place she never escaped. And as long as she and my sister Keeley were here, so was I.
I let myself in, checked Mum’s room first. She lay half-buried under the duvet, hair a bird’s nest, one arm slung over her eyes as if she couldn’t face the world. On the bedside table sat an empty vodka bottle. Usual sight. But I’d seen worse. Seen her worse. Still hit me like a gut punch, though.
“Ma?” I kept it to a whisper. You don’t shout at the dead, and you don’t shout at the person you once begged to take care of you. “You alright?”
She groaned and rolled away, throwing her other arm over her face.
So I went in, lifted the bottle she’d be clawing for later, and carried it through to the kitchen.
The place was chaos. Baby bottles stacked beside rusting pans, steamers with no lids, and broken shit cluttered across the counter.
I put away the baby milk, then rinsed a glass, filled it with water, took it back to Mum’s room, and set it down on the bedside.
I slipped a couple of fifties under it, too.
She wouldn’t thank me. She never did. But she’d use it.
Maybe not for the right things, but enough to keep her alive another day.