The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  And then one day someone did.

  One of his dealers, a skinny Younger called Clyde, got held up at knifepoint by three gangbangers from the Clifton Road Shooter Posse, who forced him to hand over his drugs and money. Then, because he didn’t have enough stuff on him, or maybe just for fun, Ramon wasn’t sure, they’d shanked Clyde in the leg and left him on the ground bleeding. The three attackers hadn’t even bothered covering their faces. It was a blatant act of disrespect and it demanded retribution.

  The one who’d done the shanking was quickly ID’d as Marlon ‘Raver’ Jones, and he was the one who was going to have to pay.

  Three nights later Ramon had gone to Raver’s ground-floor flat in the middle of the Clifton Estate. This was pure enemy territory but, even so, Ramon had turned up alone. He wanted to show the world that he didn’t need anyone else to help settle his business. He’d been scared though, he remembered that, and he’d had to force down his fear, knowing from long, bitter experience that the moment you show weakness, you’re dead. So he banged on Raver’s door, demanding that he come out and face him. Ramon knew he was in there. He could hear Raver’s mum yelling at him, wanting to know what was going on. When no one answered, Ramon began kicking the door, trying to smash it off its hinges, but someone bolted it from the inside and the door held.

  By this time a crowd was arriving. There were probably a dozen of them, mainly Shooter Posse Youngers on their bikes, a couple of Elders in there too. They started yelling abuse at him, then pulled up their hoods and moved towards him, their numbers making them brave as they tried to cut off his escape. One of them pulled a shank from inside his jacket and held it up in the air, a grin on his face. The others howled and whooped. They thought they had him.

  Which was when Ramon took the gun from the waistband of his jeans and pointed it at the crowd. The look on his face beneath his own hoodie must have told them he was serious about using it because they stopped dead. All of them. At the same time.

  Ramon could have left it at that. There was no way they’d challenge him with a gun in his hand. He could have ridden out of there, having made his point by disrespecting Raver in his own ends, thereby increasing his own rep.

  But he didn’t. Instead he pulled the trigger, shooting wildly into the crowd, not bothered about who he hit, rage and excitement exploding within him with such force that he didn’t even have time to think what he was doing. One of them went down, rolling over in the dirt, and as the rest of them fled in all directions, abandoning their bikes where they fell, Ramon turned and fired the remaining bullets into Raver’s front door. Then he got on his own bike and rode past the kid lying on the ground without even stopping to look at him.

  Three days later the Feds came crashing through Ramon’s front door and arrested him at gunpoint for the murder of fifteen-year-old Terrell Wright. Ramon hadn’t been expecting them. He knew the kid had died and he felt bad about that, but he’d assumed that people would be too scared to talk to the Feds and finger him for the shooting, and as it happened, no one actually had. Unfortunately for Ramon, the estate’s recently installed network of CCTV cameras had captured the whole thing, and he’d been ID’d from the footage.

  In the face of the overwhelming video evidence, and on the advice of his brief, Ramon had pleaded guilty to manslaughter, claiming he’d been terrified of the mob approaching him, and had only fired warning shots. The jury didn’t buy it though and convicted him of murder, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of fourteen years.

  He was sixteen years old.

  That had been a lifetime ago, but he still often thought about that night when he pulled the trigger and killed Terrell Wright and the fourteen years of his life it had cost him for maybe ten seconds of true power. It was a price that hadn’t been worth paying, and now, as he sat in the van listening to Junior ramble on in the driver’s seat, he felt the regret washing over him again. What a waste of a life. He couldn’t go back inside again. He’d rather die than that, which made him wonder what the hell he was doing here, sitting in a van on a freezing headland overlooking a black sea, miles away from home. But then Ramon had always had a knack for attracting trouble.

  Junior was talking about money, which he did a lot of the time. ‘If I could just save up a hundred grand – that’s all, just a hundred – that’s me sorted. Then I’m done. All them other boys, the younger ones, they just want to live large. They’re not thinking about the future. You’ve always got to think about the future, Ramon. You get what I’m saying?’

  Ramon looked at him and saw a pasty-faced white man with a nose that had been busted so many times it actually changed direction as it came out of his face. Junior was thirty-eight but looked older. He was an ex-boxer who’d spent a long time in the army, and had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Junior himself, he’d killed a total of ten men in battle, but Ramon reckoned he was bullshitting. He was a hard man, there was no doubt about that, but somehow he didn’t have the eyes of a killer. Still, he was high up in the crew and right now he was Ramon’s boss.

  ‘So when am I going to get a chance to run with the big boys, Junior?’ Ramon asked him.

  Junior grinned, showing teeth that looked like he was wearing them in for a dog. His breath smelled like blocked drains. ‘Soon, mate. You’ve been doing well.’

  This was true. Ramon had worked hard these past six months. He’d been involved in some rough stuff since joining the bottom rung of the Kalaman outfit. Most of the work had been debt collecting. A lot of people owed the outfit money and some of them couldn’t pay (no one ever chose not to pay, that would have been suicidal). Usually a visit from Junior and Ramon was enough to motivate the debtor to somehow find the money, but occasionally a more forceful approach was needed. One time, Ramon had had to hold on to a guy while Junior held a knife to his girlfriend’s face and threatened to slash her. Another time he’d held a man down while Junior broke three of his fingers with a hammer. It wasn’t nice work but Ramon had done it without complaint. Just like when he’d been a kid strutting round the block with a gun in his waistband, he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he justified it by telling himself these people weren’t innocents, they were idiots who’d fucked over the wrong people. And he had a firm rule: he wouldn’t hurt kids. Whatever people might think, Ramon had morals.

  ‘The thing is, Ramon, you’ve got to be patient,’ continued Junior. ‘Shit, you spent enough time inside, it can’t be that hard.’

  ‘I didn’t join to shake down debtors. I joined to be a soldier.’

  ‘And you’ll get your chance,’ said Junior. ‘I’m going to put in a recommendation.’

  Ramon grinned. ‘Seriously? Thanks, man.’

  But Junior was already looking away. ‘Hold on, what’s that?’ He picked up a pair of binoculars and stared out of the windscreen. ‘That’s them. They’re here.’

  Ramon looked out to sea and immediately spotted the approaching lights. Their cargo was coming in.

  Nineteen

  ‘Tango here, we’re in place,’ said Junior, producing a satellite phone from beneath his seat and sounding like something out of a cop show.

  A tinny voice gabbled something down the other end of the line, and Junior ended the call and turned to Ramon. ‘You ready? We take them off the boat and put them straight in the back. No messing about. Understand?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ramon, and got out of the van. He wasn’t particularly nervous. Although it was his first time dealing with the smuggling side of the business, there was no reason to expect any trouble. Junior had done this run at least a dozen times before and every time it had gone smoothly. The beach they were on was in the middle of nowhere so they weren’t going to be spotted and, according to Junior, the only coastguard boat patrolling this stretch of coast would be somewhere else tonight.

  It was a clear night and cold as they climbed down the sand dune on to the beach and walked towards the sea. Ramon, who’d only ever been outside L
ondon on a handful of occasions, found it hard to believe there were places in England with this much space. The beach seemed to stretch for ever and there wasn’t a single light on it in either direction for what seemed like miles.

  Junior caught him staring upwards as they walked. ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ he demanded.

  ‘The stars. I’ve never seen this many before. There’s millions of them.’

  Junior made a noise like a fart, which he often did when he was annoyed. ‘Jesus, Ramon, they’re just lights in the sky. Watch where you’re going. This ain’t a school trip.’ He switched on the torch he was carrying and pointed it out to sea, waving it from side to side as he walked.

  The beam was narrow but intense and Ramon could see a dark shape with no lights on it out at sea and a smaller shape coming towards them. From the low thrum of the engine and the shapes sticking out of it he judged it was a dinghy with quite a few people in it. Someone on the dinghy flashed a light back and then straight away put it out.

  They stopped near the sea’s edge, and Junior switched off the torch.

  Ramon was thankful the water was calm. He’d never learned to swim and didn’t like the idea of wading out to sea unless he absolutely had to.

  He could now see there were at least ten people on the dinghy, all crowded together. The driver, a middle-aged white guy in a beanie hat, cut the engine and the dinghy drifted in the rest of the way, coming to a halt just a few yards from shore. The driver chucked a rope and Junior caught it, telling Ramon to give him a hand getting the boat in.

  Ramon grabbed the rope and pulled hard. He was a big man and strong too from all the weights he’d done in prison, and between the two of them they quickly got the boat aground.

  That was when Ramon got a good look at who was in it. Apart from the driver, the rest were all young girls shivering in skimpy clothes with packs on their backs. They were barefooted and carrying their shoes and they looked scared. Ramon wasn’t very good with ages, but he reckoned these girls were all about seventeen, eighteen, and they were all really hot-looking. Fresh meat, Junior had called them, and both he and Ramon knew exactly where they were going.

  The driver glared at the girls and made an impatient gesture for them to get out of the boat. ‘Go, go, go,’ he said in a foreign accent. ‘Hurry, hurry.’

  The first girl stood up unsteadily and almost fell over but Ramon put out a hand to help her. She grabbed hold of it, but the moment she looked at his face, her expression changed. She looked like she’d just seen a monster. Ramon had seen that look on people’s faces plenty of times before, but something about the way the girl’s lips curled, like she was disgusted too, made him want to hit her. But he was a professional so he helped her ashore, then put his hand out to a second girl, who kept her head down and didn’t even look at him.

  It was the third girl who caught his attention. She had darker skin than the others and was much more pretty. And, as he grabbed hold of her arm to steady her and helped her out, she actually smiled at him too. Not just any old smile either. It was a real one that reached right the way up to her big brown eyes, eyes that instantly reminded him of his little sister, Keesha. In that moment, something awoke in Ramon that he hadn’t felt in years and years.

  Protectiveness.

  ‘Come on, move it, we need to get out of here,’ snapped Junior and, reluctantly, Ramon let the girl go and reached out his hand for the next one.

  When all the girls were huddled together on the beach, looking cold and nervous, Junior told Ramon to grab the large black holdall on the floor of the dinghy, then push it back out to sea.

  Ramon was used to being ordered around by Junior. He didn’t like it but he accepted it because he knew the rules in the outfit. You obeyed your boss without question. The moment you didn’t, you were out. And Ramon couldn’t afford to be out. He leaned in and grabbed the holdall, hearing the clank of metal knocking against metal inside as he threw it over his massive shoulder. Then he bent down, grabbed the dinghy with both hands and pushed, watching as it slid back into the water, before turning away as the guy inside started the engine and it disappeared into the gloom.

  Junior was herding the girls up the beach, like a Nazi guard from one of the documentaries Ramon used to watch in jail, making them run, and pushing the stragglers so they kept up, while Ramon followed behind. Now that they had their cargo, it was important they get out of here fast without attracting attention.

  When they returned to the van, Junior threw open the double doors at the back and pushed the girls in one at a time, telling them to be quick. Ramon took up a position on the other side, and he was gentler as he helped the girls in. He tried to catch the pretty girl’s eye again, but he didn’t manage to before Junior grabbed her and got her inside.

  They were a sorry sight, Ramon thought as Junior asked who among them spoke English. Five of the girls put their hands up, which Ramon thought was pretty impressive. One of the hands belonged to the pretty girl. Again he tried to smile at her but she was staring at Junior who was speaking now.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘you all keep quiet in here. Tell the others. If we stop at all, no one says a word. If the police find you, they will deport you to your countries, so you must be silent. We are going on a journey to London now and we will be there in two hours. Then you will be met by the people you will be working for.’

  Ramon felt an unexpected and unwelcome pang of emotion as the pretty girl smiled again. She looked happier than the others, like she honestly believed she was going to be doing a proper job, like cleaning or waitressing, not being fucked for money until she burned out. Junior had always told him that he had to treat everything they did together as purely business, nothing more, and never to get squeamish about any of it. ‘I know that ain’t going to happen with you, though, Ramon,’ he’d said. ‘I can see you’re a man with no feelings.’

  In the old days on the estate, Ramon would have taken that as a compliment. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Junior shut the van’s double doors and they climbed back into the cab. Ramon put the holdall in the space behind the front seats and Junior covered it with an old blanket before looking at him carefully.

  ‘The chances of us being stopped by the Feds are a thousand to one up here, but you know the drill if we do.’

  Ramon nodded. ‘Yeah, I know the drill.’

  ‘What is it? Remind me.’

  ‘I thought you knew it.’

  ‘Don’t fuck me about, Ramon. This is serious.’

  Ramon sighed, irritated that everyone seemed to treat him like an idiot. They’d been through this a dozen times already, but Junior was going to make him go through it again. ‘If we get stopped out here, and there’s no one around, I pull the gun. And yeah, I’ve checked it. It’s loaded. We cuff the Feds and nick their keys. If they get too good a look at our faces, we take them somewhere quiet and finish them.’

  ‘As a last resort.’

  ‘Yeah, as a last resort. If we get stopped on main roads with cars around we try and blag it. If that don’t work, we pull the gun again, cuff them. We get stopped in London anywhere, we abandon everything and run.’

  ‘That’s exactly it.’

  Junior switched on the engine and they pulled away.

  ‘What’s in the holdall?’ Ramon asked him.

  ‘You ask a lot of questions, bruv. Too many.’

  ‘You ask me to threaten the Feds with a gun, maybe even shoot a couple of them, you might as well tell me why.’

  Junior grunted. ‘What do you think’s in there? Guns.’

  He switched on the radio and the cab was filled with the boring Yankee rock music Junior liked to listen to.

  Ramon fell silent and opened the window to let out the worst of Junior’s stale breath. Jesus, he hoped they didn’t get stopped. He could feel the uncomfortable bulge of the pistol – a Browning, just like the one he’d blown Terrell Wright away with – in the waistband of his jeans. Junior had said the chances were a thousand to
one, but bad luck had always followed Ramon around like a stray dog. It wasn’t that he didn’t have it in him to threaten or even kill a Fed, but the last thing he wanted in the world was to go back to prison for the rest of his life.

  When he leaned back in his seat, he could hear the girls whispering in the back. There were at least two conversations going on in different languages. The girls sounded excited, as if they were going on an adventure, and he thought of the pretty girl with her smiling face and wondered what she’d be like in a few hard years’ time. Cynical, angry and lost, probably, just like the rest of us. Junior was right. It was best not to think about it.

  On the radio, the rock music stopped and the news came on. The lead story was about two missing girls whose bones had been dug up somewhere out of town, followed by the double shooting of a lawyer and his client in the lawyer’s home. Apparently the killers had also opened fire on a cop who was there but hadn’t managed to hit him.

  ‘Pity they were crap shots,’ grunted Ramon, who hated the Feds as much now as he had all those years ago back on the block. ‘They should have killed the bastard.’

  ‘No way,’ said Junior, shaking his head angrily. ‘The first rule is you never kill Feds unless you absolutely have to, especially if you’ve just shot two other people. Otherwise all you’re on is the wrong end of a total shit storm. There’s no need to shoot when they’ve got no guns. The boys had their faces covered so they couldn’t be ID’d, so all they needed to do was mosey on out of there. That’s the professional’s way of doing things, Ramon, and if you want to be a pro, that’s what you’ve got to do.’

  Ramon looked at him. ‘Shit, Junior. The way you’re talking, it sounds like you were there.’

  For a couple of seconds, Junior didn’t say anything, just looked straight ahead. He didn’t look happy.

  ‘That wasn’t anything to do with us, was it?’

  ‘You know, I like you, Ramon,’ Junior said eventually. ‘You do what you’re told, you served your time without ever snitching on anyone or going stir crazy, and you know how to kill. But there are two things you’ve still got to learn. One: you only kill people when it makes a profit, or it protects one. And two: don’t ever ask too many fucking questions. That way you wind up back in the slammer. Or, worse, dead. You understand me?’