Chapter 11
Kramer’s heart is thumping hard as he walks.
His breath clouds in front of him. The night is cold, the sky overhead clear of clouds. You can’t usually see the stars here in the city, not with the light pollution, but a few have prickled through. The moon is bright and full, a worn silver coin hanging over the city.
He shivers as he walks, his teeth chattering.
It’s partly the cold, but most of it’s adrenaline.
That’s okay. When he first started working the doors, Trevor told him it was natural to be scared.
Everybody is scared of physical confrontation.
On the door, you have to hide it, but only on the surface, only ever from your opponent.
If you hide the fear from yourself, it fucks you over, but if you’re canny you can use the adrenaline. That’s what gives you the edge.
Ideally, though, he wants to dampen it down a little before he reaches his destination, so he rolls saliva around in his mouth. That’s another piece of advice Trevor gave him: control the fear by rolling spit. It works too, although he doesn’t know why.
So he walks, trying to stay calm but ready. Trying to keep everything coiled up for when he needs it.
Not far now. Not long.
Kramer checks the carrier bag he’s holding.
If there was anyone around, to all appearances it would just look full of laundry.
That will be his immediate explanation if he’s stopped by the police.
It’s unlikely they’ll search the bag. If that happens, he’s in deep shit.
Hidden beneath the clothes, there’s a ten-inch double-bladed machete, a luminous green water pistol full of ammonia and a hammer.
Not that he’s spotted any police so far, mind, and he doesn’t really expect to round here. So he won’t see those items again until he reaches the house he’s heading to, on the edge of the Fairfield estate.
Kramer leaves the main street and heads down a ginnel, lined on either side with tall wooden fences.
It’s the quickest cut-through. A few bends and he’ll be out onto the edge of the waste ground, then just across to the estate beyond.
He’s been there before, from time to time, calling up debts.
It’s certainly the place for them: a maze of grey, one-storey blocks, with lots of little alleyways in between; all feral kids, barking dogs, and bins lying in the middle of the streets.
The whole place is one big fucking debt.
He doesn’t think too much about what he’s going to do when he gets there.
It’s pointless to get ahead of yourself.
Knock on the door. When it opens, or if it doesn’t, kick the fucking thing off its hinges – then go in.
A face-full of ammonia to put anyone down, then it’ll be hammer in one hand, machete in the other.
That’s as far as he’s thinking, because when you get hung up on a plan, you get strung out when the plan goes wrong.
He’s seen it with traditional martial artists on the door.
In the dojo it’s all straight lines, but there aren’t any straight lines when you’re rolling around on the fucking pavement. You need to adapt.
But he knows this: a message needs to be sent.
The first time it happened on the doors, it was some dealers trying to muscle their way in, figuring they were fifteen strong and the door team were five.
Trevor explained to Kramer what would happen and asked whether he was cool with it, and Kramer said he was.
They picked out the main guy and, the next morning, staged a little home invasion: smashed his knees and elbows with a hammer and stabbed him up a little.
He didn’t die. Didn’t tell the police either.
But most importantly, he didn’t turn up at the club again. None of them did.
The difference tonight is that he’s doing it alone.
But that’s okay – and even if it wasn’t, it’s the way that it needs to be, because the slight was personal: the bodybuilder, Connor, mugging him off in front of everyone last night.
Making threats, fancying himself. Kramer isn’t the biggest guy, and probably looks like an easy mark to make for a guy on the up.
Of course, anyone who’s anyone knows Kramer behaves badly out of hours.
Maybe Connor has been told since, as he didn’t turn up at the club tonight.
But that isn’t good enough.
All it took was a few discreet enquiries to find the guy’s address.
He steps out of the end of the ginnel.
It’s four in the morning, so the wasteland looks deserted.
The ground is pale and dead-looking; what isn’t open is just patches of shivery grass and larger clumps of night-black bushes.
Even a dumping ground like the estate needs one of its own.
The wasteland is the kind of place you find burnt out cars and illegally tipped rubbish – piles of counterfeit CD cases and ragged bags of old, torn clothes.
Kramer picks his way carefully along one of the makeshift paths that leads across its heart.
He can see the sprawl of the estate in the background, the houses as dull grey and dead as teeth in the dark.
His breath still fogs, but he can hardly see it now. His trainers crunch softly on the gravel and dirt. At his side, the bag rustles.
Kramer follows the path through a cluster of bushes. Up close, the leaves are almost invisible in the darkness. The branches are skeletal. In front of him, it’s difficult to see –
He stops.
There is someone a little way ahead of him.
He starts swirling the saliva round his mouth again. The figure is about ten metres away, but it’s impossible to make out any details. Not big, not small. Little more than a silhouette of a human being against a silhouette of bushes.
But facing him. And standing very still.
For a moment, Kramer does the same. Neither of them moves.
Then the figure turns around and walks away, disappearing off to the side, round the back of the bushes.
Kramer remains standing in place, but a few seconds later, relief floods him, and he almost laughs at himself.
It was just someone doing the same thing as him – taking a shortcut across the waste ground, coming the opposite way.
The guy saw Kramer, froze up, and decided it was sensible to back off and go a different way.
Obviously, he doesn’t look like someone to mess with. What’s that saying? Wouldn’t want to meet him down a dark alley. That’s what the guy is probably thinking about him right now.
Kramer shakes his head and starts walking again, slightly annoyed. Despite the fact that nothing really happened, the encounter has given the adrenaline a little kick and brought it to life: started it working before he wants it to. He feels invincible right now, but that’s –
He stops again.
Someone else is standing there, backed into the bushes where the stranger was. Kramer can see the red glow of a cigarette in the darkness.
Two guys meeting up out here? Well, there’s certainly an explanation for that. Not one he cares for, exactly, but not one he’s scared of either. He’ll just walk past – he starts doing so – and ignore the man …
But it’s not a cigarette, he realises. The light from it doesn’t fluctuate. Doesn’t change.
As he reaches the spot, Kramer peers into the bush and sees the red LED light burning small and intense between the leaves. Then the black circle of a lens. A camera, pointing into the bush on the opposite side of the path.
He turns.
There’s a small clearing there. There is a chance – briefly – to see the woman lying on her back there, and to see there is something wrong with her. To realise that she is far too still and that her face isn’t where it should be.
But there is not time to put all the facts together in his head and make sense of what is happening. Because right then, he hears the quick, heartbeat punch of feet in the gravel behind him, and the whipping, wing-like sound of polythene cracking the night-time air.
And then nothing.