CHERUB: Class A

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Baby cakes?’ Kerry shouted, pressing her knee in harder as Costas gasped for breath. ‘Nobody calls me baby cakes.’

  ‘OK,’ Costas gurgled. ‘I’m sorry. You can go with James.’

  Kerry stood up and let Costas sit still while his face returned to its normal colour.

  ‘You surprised me,’ Costas said angrily, as he got to his feet. ‘But you better not try anything like that again or I’ll seriously hurt you.’

  Kerry couldn’t help grinning. ‘I’ll try to keep that in mind.’

  Costas made sure nobody was around before unzipping his backpack. Kerry and James each grabbed two plastic-wrapped bricks of white powder and tucked them in their backpacks. James started walking away.

  ‘Hang on,’ Costas said. ‘Unless you want me to keep the eighty quid.’

  Kerry snatched the money out of Costas’ hand.

  ‘Pleasure doing business,’ she said.

  She started jogging after James.

  ‘Eighty quid, James?’ Kerry said angrily. ‘I can’t believe you tried to rip me off when you’ve got a roll of twenties in your pocket and I’m only getting pocket money.’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ James lied. ‘You can have half, of course.’

  ‘I’m keeping the lot,’ Kerry said, tucking the money into her jeans. ‘Unless you want to fight me for it.’

  16. LOST

  James and Kerry stepped off the train on to the platform at St Albans.

  ‘It’s a shame we couldn’t have got here earlier in the day,’ Kerry said. ‘St Albans is really historic. There’s Roman ruins and mosaics and stuff.’

  ‘Tragic,’ James said sarcastically. ‘Nothing gets my pulse racing like a good mosaic. We’re not going into town anyway. We’ve got to get out to some housing estate.’

  Taxis were lined up outside the station. The driver wanted to see James’ money before he’d take them anywhere. The ride took them past farms and some seriously expensive houses, then from nowhere they found themselves surrounded by graffiti and concrete. It was like an alien spaceship had sucked a housing estate out the middle of London, then decided it didn’t like the look of it and dumped it in the middle of nowhere.

  The cab pulled up outside a shopping arcade. Everything was boarded up, except a pub that had been converted into a snooker club. It had a reinforced metal door and bars over the slits of glass that passed for windows.

  Kerry looked around nervously as the cab pulled away. It was already turning dark.

  ‘It must be the pits living in a place like this,’ James said. ‘Thornton may be a dump, but at least it’s near to town. Out here you’ve got nothing.’

  It turned out the shops were the high point of the area. Beyond them were eight low-rise housing blocks. Three were boarded up, with CONDEMNED BUILDING notices and signs warning people not to go inside without masks to protect them against asbestos dust. There was a pack of dogs roaming around, druggies in dark corners and the only normal-looking people you saw walked fast, like they were afraid of being mugged.

  James got the directions out of his pocket.

  ‘Twenty-two, third floor, Mullion House.’

  They found Mullion House, then walked up a foul-smelling staircase and along the third-floor balcony. The door numbers ended at twenty. James rang the bell and an Eastern-European-sounding woman shouted out of the letterbox in bad English.

  ‘What is you like?’

  ‘Do you know where number twenty-two is?’ James asked.

  ‘What?’ she shouted.

  ‘Number twenty-two?’

  ‘Wait. I fetch my son.’

  The kid who came to the letterbox was about ten. His English was perfect.

  ‘There’s no number twenty-two,’ he explained. ‘I think all the floors are the same. It only goes up to twenty.’

  ‘Cheers,’ James said miserably, turning away from the letterbox. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ Kerry asked.

  ‘There’s obviously a mistake with the address,’ James said. ‘I’ll call the lady who rings my deliveries through. She’ll sort us out.’

  James pulled his mobile out of his tracksuit and dialled. The phone made a bleep and a message flashed on the display: No Signal. Kerry tried hers and got the same.

  ‘Crap,’ James said. ‘You really know you’re in the middle of nowhere when you can’t get a mobile signal.’

  Kerry looked down off the balcony towards the shops.

  ‘There’s a phone box by the bus stop,’ she said.

  James looked down. ‘I’d put the odds of it working at something like a million to one.’

  They didn’t have any other choice, so they went to take a look. The phone wasn’t so much vandalised as annihilated. There was no glass, no handset and no buttons; just a burned-up mess.

  ‘This place is giving me the creeps,’ Kerry said. ‘Do you think they’d let us phone from inside the snooker club?’

  ‘I wouldn’t chance it,’ James said. ‘It looks like the kind of place where you’d get your throat cut.’

  ‘So what then?’ Kerry asked.

  ‘Let’s get the hell out of here. There’s no way to call another cab, so we’ll wait for the bus. Our phones will work once we get into town. I’ll make some calls and sort this shambles out.’

  They wandered across to the bus stop. Kerry glanced at the timetable.

  ‘There’s only one bus an hour,’ she said. ‘I think we just missed one.’

  There was hardly any traffic about. They sat on the pavement near the bus stop with their feet in the gutter. Kerry picked a dandelion from a crack in the tarmac and twirled it between her fingers.

  ‘Do you think you’ll get in trouble with KMG for this?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve got the bit of paper with the address written in Kelvin’s writing, so they can hardly blame me.’

  ‘It’s pretty incredible,’ Kerry said.

  James nodded. ‘Especially when you think what these drugs are worth.’

  ‘How much?’ Kerry asked.

  ‘There’s twelve kilos. I sell coke for sixty a gram and there’s a thousand grams in a kilo. So each kilo is worth sixty thousand pounds. That’s … seven hundred and twenty thousand altogether.’

  ‘Wow,’ Kerry gasped. ‘That makes our eighty-pound delivery fee look a lot less generous.’

  ‘Course, that’s the street price and this is being sold wholesale, but I’d still bet KMG isn’t shifting this lot for any less than three hundred grand.’

  ‘You could buy a nice house with that sort of money.’

  James giggled. ‘Maybe we should do a runner.’

  ‘You know, it’s cool the way you can do those sums in your head.’

  ‘I’ve been able to do it since nursery,’ James said. ‘Before my mum died, she ran this huge shoplifting gang and she got me to work out her sums; like, who owed how much and who was due what wages.’

  ‘Did she ever get busted?’ Kerry asked.

  James shook his head. ‘Nope. But when I was little, I used to have nightmares where the police came and took Mum and Lauren away. Junior made some comment the other day about his dad ending up in prison. He acted like it was a joke, but I could tell it worries him. I remembered how I used to be, and it made me feel really shitty about us using him to help put his dad in jail.’

  ‘I suppose every bad guy has someone who loves them,’ Kerry said.

  They watched the sunset as the minutes dragged by. When the streetlights flicked on, James looked at his watch.

  ‘The bus shouldn’t be long now,’ Kerry said.

  Three lads came out of the snooker club and started walking towards them. One was a big guy in his twenties, with a beard and curly brown hair down his back. The other two were skinheads in their late teens. Probably brothers, with ghostly complexions and spindly limbs. They weren’t the first people who’d passed by, but something about them put Kerry and James on edge.

  The taller skinhead stopped by
Kerry.

  ‘Waiting for a bus?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Kerry said, standing up. ‘That’s what people usually do at bus stops.’

  ‘I thought you might be waiting for a hunk like me to come by and sweep you off your feet.’

  The shorter one gave James a shove. ‘You her boyfriend, blondie?’

  ‘Piss off,’ James said, shoving him back.

  ‘Got any money?’ Shorty said, eyeballing James. ‘Not for very long you won’t have.’

  Both skinheads pulled knives out of their pockets. CHERUB training teaches you to make an instant decision when you see a knife: either grab the assailant’s wrist before the blade is in a threatening position, or back away if you don’t have time. James and Kerry went for the first option, grabbing the two skinny wrists and yanking their arms behind their backs. Kerry twisted the tall one’s thumb until his knife dropped on to the pavement, then smacked his head against the concrete bus stop. After freeing the other knife, James punched Shorty in the back of the head, before ducking down and picking both blades off the floor. He handed one to Kerry.

  ‘We don’t want trouble,’ Kerry said, waving the knife. ‘We’re just waiting for the bus.’

  The two skinheads didn’t back off, but they didn’t look confident either. The guy with the long hair had waited in the background the whole time. He moved up between the skinheads and smiled.

  ‘You two seem to know some pretty fancy moves,’ he said, breaking into a grin. ‘You got any that will stop one of these?’

  He slid a sawn-off shotgun out of his jacket and pointed it at them. James looked at Kerry, hoping she had some smart move up her sleeve, but she looked as scared as he felt.

  ‘This is a twelve gauge,’ the guy with the big hair explained. ‘One shot will blow the pair of you to smithereens. So, if you want to live beyond the next few minutes, you’re going to do exactly what I say. OK?’

  James and Kerry both nodded.

  ‘First of all, pass the knives back to their owners, handles first.’

  The skinheads took the knives.

  ‘Now put your hands on your heads.’

  Once their hands were on their heads, the skinheads rummaged through James’ and Kerry’s pockets, taking their money, keys, train tickets and phones. Then they stripped off their watches.

  ‘Now, lose the backpacks.’

  ‘You know you’ll be in serious trouble if you take those packs?’ James said. ‘You’ve no idea what’s in them.’

  ‘I know exactly what’s in them,’ the hairball laughed. ‘And you can tell Keith Moore that if he sends any more grubby little brats down here, we’ll give them a lot worse than the beating we’re about to give you.’

  Shorty looked back at the gunman. ‘Can I have his trainers before we batter them?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Shorty pointed at James’ trainers. ‘You said we could keep whatever we nicked off them. Those trainers are a hundred and nineteen ninety-nine. My little brother would love ’em.’

  The gunman shook his head in disbelief. ‘Go on, then.’

  James looked mortified as he surrendered his almost-new Air Max.

  ‘Now,’ the gunman said, smiling sweetly, ‘after we go, you’re gonna walk or crawl the hell out of here. If I ever see you again, I’ll be the last thing you ever see. And I wouldn’t bother waiting for the bus. Kids kept chucking bricks through the windscreen, so they stopped running them after dark.’

  The gunman made James and Kerry lie flat on the ground with their hands behind their heads, then he told the skinheads to give them a good going-over.

  17. CRAZY

  Kerry and James crawled out of the road and lay in the grass verge behind the bus stop, catching their breath. As kickings go, it hadn’t been bad, but they’d have plenty of bruises in the morning.

  ‘I guess they wanted us fit enough to walk home and give Keith his message,’ Kerry said.

  ‘How’s your knee?’ James asked.

  ‘I’m OK. Your lip’s bleeding.’

  ‘You feel up to walking, or do you want to rest for a minute?’

  ‘I can walk,’ Kerry said. ‘What are we gonna do?’

  ‘Exactly what the man with the gun told us to do,’ James said. ‘It’ll take at least an hour to get into town. Or if we pass a phone box that works, we can call home and reverse the charges.’

  ‘This will ruin the mission,’ Kerry said.

  ‘Nah. I’ll just explain what happened to Kelvin. It’s obvious we’ve been set up.’

  ‘What if they think you were in on it?’ Kerry asked. ‘There’s plenty of delivery boys. If there’s any doubt, KMG will just dump you and use someone else.’

  James realised she was right. ‘They’re not exactly gonna be happy about me losing three hundred grand’s worth of coke, are they?’

  ‘They’ll check all of us out,’ Kerry said. ‘Not just you and me. Kyle, Nicole, Ewart and Zara will be under the spotlight as well. The whole mission will be down the toilet.’

  ‘I don’t see how we can get the drugs back,’ James said. ‘That guy had a gun. I don’t even have trainers.’

  ‘He was small-time,’ Kerry said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You heard what the skinhead said when he took your trainers. That hairball was paying them by letting them keep our stuff. That’s hardly the modus of a big shot.’

  ‘OK,’ James said. ‘He’s small-time, but he’s still got a gun.’

  ‘He won’t kill us in a million years,’ Kerry said. ‘He’s been paid a few hundred quid to scare us, grab the drugs and send a message to Keith Moore. There’s a huge difference between that and murdering two kids.’

  ‘Supposing you’re right,’ James said. ‘How do we find this guy?’

  ‘I think there’s only one road in and out of this chunk of paradise and we haven’t seen him leave. We’re looking for a tall, fat drug dealer with tons of curly hair and a beard. I bet one of the scumbags hanging around here will be able to put a name to a description like that.’

  ‘And we just walk up and they’ll tell us?’

  Kerry shrugged. ‘We’ll make some excuse why we need to find him.’

  ‘The thing is,’ James said, ‘if you’ve just ripped off KMG for three hundred grand, you won’t be hanging around here for long.’

  ‘I know,’ Kerry said. ‘But he doesn’t think KMG will know what’s happened until we get into town. He’ll be off his guard for the next hour or so.’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ James smiled. ‘I’m really gonna go chasing after some gun-toting drug dealer in my socks?’

  ‘I think it’s worth the risk, but I’m not forcing you. If you’re not up for it, we’ll head home.’

  James thought for a second as he dabbed his bloody lip on the bottom of his T-shirt. He didn’t fancy their chances. If it had been anyone but Kerry, he would have said no.

  ‘Let’s go and get shot,’ he said, climbing to his feet and taking his first painful steps since the beating.

  They cut around the back of the shops, dodging the snooker club in case anyone inside spotted them. They found a couple of skinny women at the bottom of a staircase and got blank stares when they described the hairball. They got lucky on their second attempt, when Kerry described him to a group of teenagers.

  ‘Was it some kind of heavy metal T-shirt?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kerry said. ‘Do you know where we could find him? He dropped his keys outside the snooker club and we picked them up.’

  ‘Sounds like Crazy Joe,’ one kid said. ‘He lives in Alhambra House. You want to be careful, he’s a serious lunatic and he’s drugged-up half the time.’

  ‘You know where exactly?’ James asked.

  ‘What do I look like?’ the kid laughed. ‘Directory enquiries? Try the second or third floor.’

  ‘Cheers,’ James said.

  ‘Nice socks,’ the kid replied.

  Alhambra House was the furthermost block. There
were twenty flats on each floor, but finding the right one was easier than they expected. Loads were boarded up and most of the others didn’t look the part: old-person-style wallpaper in the hallways, or ethnic names written under the doorbells. Joe’s flat turned out to be a giveaway: the front door was painted black with a devil’s-head knocker and underneath the word Joe’s was written in Tippex. They peered through the glass. There was an Aerosmith poster pinned to the kitchen wall and all the lights were on.

  James and Kerry didn’t have their lock guns or anything with them. They couldn’t get in, so they had to lure Crazy Joe out.

  ‘Check he’s at home first,’ Kerry said. ‘Ring the bell and run.’

  James pressed the buzzer and they sprinted to the end of the balcony and hid in the stairwell. Crazy Joe waddled on to his doorstep in his T-shirt and boxers and looked down the balcony. He swore about bloody kids and went back inside.

  ‘So now what?’ James asked. ‘If he’s half undressed, he’s probably home alone.’

  ‘There might be a girlfriend in there as well.’

  ‘I don’t reckon any woman lives in that house,’ James said.

  ‘Based on what?’ Kerry asked.

  ‘Did you see the filthy sink and cutlery piled up on the draining board?’ James asked. ‘That’s a single man’s kitchen if ever I saw one.’

  ‘There’s something messed-up about this,’ Kerry said. ‘You’d think he’d be running or driving some place in a hurry, not sitting around in his underwear.’

  ‘None of this makes any sense,’ James said. ‘Everything else I’ve done for KMG has run like clockwork.’

  ‘Joe might have friends nearby,’ Kerry said. ‘We need to take him down quickly and without making a noise.’

  Five minutes later, Crazy Joe emerged from his flat a second time to find James grinning at him.

  ‘I warned you,’ Joe sneered.

  As Joe lunged for James, Kerry landed her hardest punch into the side of his head. It hit the sweet spot above the eye socket where the skull is thinnest, giving Joe’s brain a good rattling. All his muscles went limp and James had to dodge out of the way as he slumped across the balcony.