King suddenly told him, holding up his hand for emphasis. ‘Looks like we’ve got a customer.’
Brown peeked through a spyhole in the rotting wood. ‘Aye,’ he admitted. ‘We do indeed.’
‘You know him?’ King whispered.
‘Aye,’ Brown smiled as he looked at the tall, skinny figure loping towards the flat. Even from a distance his drug-induced acne and sickly, deathly pallor was clear to see, his hair badly shaven by his own hand to save money that could be better spent on hard drugs. ‘That there’s Dougie O’Neil. Well-known lowlife, thief and scaggy crack-head of this parish. Dougie doesn’t care what drugs he’s pumping into his system, just so long as they’re class A.’
They watched O’Neil gently knock on the door before turning and checking the walkways below and above, as well as the forecourt littered with cars – always alive to danger, constantly alert, like an antelope on the Serengeti; prey to all and predator to none, except when he was engaged in acts of petty theft. O’Neil understood his lowly role in life to the point where he’d even had ‘Born to lose’ tattooed on the side of his neck. After what seemed a long time, the door finally opened, although, as per the usual modus operandi for house-bound dealers, the metal grids riveted to the walls across the doors and windows remained secure and unopened. They could clearly make out Micky Astill standing in the doorframe looking like a clone of O’Neil – his body and skin ravaged by years of getting high on his own supply.
They watched as a short conversation took place before O’Neil handed something as surreptitiously as he could to Astill who disappeared back inside, closing the door behind him.
‘Paranoid fucker,’ Brown whispered.
‘Yeah,’ King agreed. ‘Heroin and crack’ll do that to you.’
‘Aye,’ Brown nodded as they continued to watch O’Neil waiting outside the flat, on edge the whole time – needing his fix – fearful he’d either be arrested or mugged before he got the chance to get as high as a kite and, for a time at least, escape the utter meaningless of his life.
Eventually the door opened, causing O’Neil to stand close to the grid, bobbing up and down like an excited puppy waiting to be thrown its favourite toy. Astill quickly put his hand through the grid and waited a split second for O’Neil to hold his own hand under it. Momentarily the two hands appeared to touch, causing Astill to immediately close his door and O’Neil to scamper away towards the stairwell.
‘He can’t see us once he’s in the stairwell,’ King said, watching O’Neil as he disappeared behind the brick wall. ‘Now,’ he told Brown and they both slipped silently from their hiding place and moved quickly across the car park to wait for Born to lose to appear from the bottom of the stairs. A few seconds later, O’Neil duly obliged, walking right into their arms as he stepped from the entrance.
Without warning Brown grabbed him one-handed around the throat and squeezed hard on his trachea to stop him from swallowing any drugs he had in his mouth, while King pulled his arms behind his back and forced him to bend slightly forward.
‘Spit it out,’ Brown demanded. ‘Spit it out or I’ll fucking choke you.’ O’Neil spluttered and gagged as he tried to swallow, but Brown’s grip made it impossible. After a few more seconds of struggling, O’Neil succumbed to the inevitable and allowed a small yellowish rock, no bigger than a child’s fingernail, to fall from his mouth.
Brown snapped on a pair of latex gloves while King kept hold of the panting, gasping O’Neil and recovered the crack cocaine. Brown held it up to the light as if examining a diamond before dropping it into a small plastic evidence bag. ‘That’s you fucked then, Dougie,’ he told the luckless prisoner and slid the bag into his trouser pocket.
‘Leave it out.’ O’Neil coughed as he tried to talk. ‘It’s just one rock. Just a bit of personal. Come on, man. Let me off.’
‘We might think about it,’ King told him, giving him renewed hope, even if the rock and therefore the chance of escaping to the paradise of oblivion was lost to him. ‘But first I think we’d better search your flat. What d’you say, Dougie? Got anything to hide?’
His shoulders slumped at the prospect. ‘Fuck,’ he declared, closing his eyes and shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I just wanted to get stoned for a while,’ he told them.
‘Never mind, Dougie,’ Brown told him condescendingly, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You know what they say – Life’s a bitch, then you marry one.’
As soon as they entered O’Neil’s squalid flat the smell of decaying humanity, burnt heroin, crack cocaine and hopelessness assaulted them. It was a devil’s brew of a scent neither of them had ever experienced until they’d joined the police, but now they knew its signature all too well – a self-inflicted torture caused by the addict’s fear of opening a window and risking attracting the attentions of a passing policeman. Better to live in a putrid, airless hovel, again and again breathing in recycled air that had passed through diseased lungs a thousand times before. They pushed O’Neil along the short hallway ahead of them and into the pit of a sitting room, sparsely furnished with items donated to charity and others pulled from the skips of the more fortunate. The battered coffee table was littered with burnt-out homemade crack-pipes and tinfoil that had been used over and over to chase the dragon. O’Neil had made no attempt to hide it away.
Filth was everywhere. King doubted they’d find a single cleaning product no matter how hard they searched the flat. The old, rancid carpet stuck to the soles of their shoes as they walked around, pushing the still handcuffed O’Neil onto the threadbare sofa riddled with burn holes and stains while the surviving flies repeatedly crashed into the opaque windows above the many bodies of their dead comrades who now lay unburied on the window sill.
‘Jesus,’ Brown gagged. ‘I can’t breathe in here. I need some air,’ he told them and moved towards the window.
‘Don’t open the windows,’ O’Neil said with urgency. ‘You’ll let the flies in.’
‘Let the flies in,’ Brown replied, pulling a window open. ‘Poor bastards would rather commit suicide than stay in this shithole.’
‘Got any drugs stashed away?’ King broke them up.
‘Do I look like someone who would have drugs stashed?’ O’Neil asked. ‘Anything I get, I smoke,’ he assured them.
‘Fair enough.’ King saw his point. ‘Something else then? Something you couldn’t keep your thieving little fingers off?’
‘I ain’t got nothing,’ O’Neil pleaded with them, his feet tapping away agitatedly.
‘Best tell the truth,’ King warned him, looking around the virtually unfurnished flat. ‘Not like it’d take us long to spin this rat hole.’
‘I swear,’ O’Neil lied convincingly, but his startled eyes following Brown as he entered the bacterial bombsite of a kitchen betrayed him.
‘Fuck me,’ Brown declared. ‘You need an NBC suit before coming in here. How can you fucking live like this?’
‘A what?’ O’Neil asked, confused.
‘A nuclear, biological, chemical protection suit, you fucking moron,’ Brown explained. O’Neil just shrugged, but his eyes grew ever wider as Brown went straight to the cooker
