You Don't Know Me

‘We need more food,’ she mouths so as not to disturb Curt’s call. I nod back but I’m not really paying her any notice, for all the listening I’m trying to do is to Curt’s call. I see Curt’s face changing colour. When he finally puts the phone down I get the feeling that whatever was being said on that call wasn’t going to be one of them good news bad news things. It was all going to be bad bad news.

‘Bad bad news,’ Curt says finally. ‘We are in shit.’

Ki sits down at the table as if she is in slow motion. The colour leaves her face.

‘What do you mean?’ I say trying to keep my heart from hitting my balls.

‘So that was Guilty.’

‘Yeah I guessed, and?’ I say.

‘Well, you know these Olders JC is linked up to?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well these ain’t just any Olders.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This crew ain’t just a regular fucking Olders crew.’

I look at him blankly.

‘This is Face’s crew,’ he says and then I understand.

Ki looks at us both then, her face still innocent.

‘Who’s Face?’ she says slowly.

‘Face,’ says Curt as he puts his head in his hands. ‘You want to know about Face? Okay then let me tell you a story about this motherfucker.

‘So one day last summer Face was up at a club with his Lieutenant when some Pagan stabbed up his left-hand man while he was in the toilets.’

‘So?’ says Ki. ‘One gangster stabs another one. Standard.’

Before I can explain Curt cuts back in.

‘No man. It was a big deal. Stabbing up a man’s Lieutenant is properly serious shit. A General and his number two are basically like brothers. You know how it is,’ he says to me. ‘One will take other man’s bullet. Even his jail time if he have to.’

I nod but truth be told I ain’t really as down with all this as Curt is.

Curt takes a swig of beer and then continues his story. ‘Anyway this dude gets stabbed and Face is wild. If he had been there next to him I ain’t even sure the shit would have happened. But he wasn’t and now his two was nearly dead. And Face was on the warpath.

‘So where he might have spent some time trying to find out who had done this, this time he didn’t have to do shit. He found out the next day.’

‘How?’ says Ki leaning forwards.

‘Easy, the man himself fucking advertises it. He goes and makes a load of T-shirts with the man’s face on it with the letters R.I.P. and hands them round his crew.’

‘Shit yeah I heard about that,’ I say suddenly remembering.

‘Face though ain’t no ordinary gangster. He is like a genius you could say. He is like a strategizer. And to cut a long story up, Face guessed the guy was going to try and ambush him. And he knew that the other crew wouldn’t be starting no shit unless they thought they could win.

‘So Face played it smarter than the other man. He got a few of his young soldiers, Tinies, together and sent them on a mission to track the guy’s movements.’

You looking kinda blank at me again. Is it Tinies? Yeah okay. So ‘Tinies’ are like soldiers-in-waiting. They are just kids really but the gangs like ’em for all kinds of reasons. It’s messed up but the shit is what it is.

So back to this story Curt is telling.

‘He wanted to know where mans was on any given day. Which clubs did he go to? Where was his ride last spotted? How many people was he with? Where did he go when he left a club? Where was his base?’

‘But hang on,’ says Ki, ‘he’s using kids?’

‘Shit, yeah he was using kids. Face was the first one to use kids. “Get some respec’ or get some holes”. That was his like recruiting line.’

‘No, I mean he’s supposed to be this genius and he is using children?’

‘That was the genius man. Because they was just kids, no one gave them a second blink. They were more or less invisible. No gang expect trouble to come from ten-year-old boys in school uniform.

‘And that is how in a week Face found out where mans lived. Then one morning, very early, like before even the sun was awake, Face pulls a balaclava over his head and goes into his house with two of his men. They drag him out of bed and lash him to a chair and then they spend twenty minutes heating up the end of a wheel brace with a blowtorch right in front of him.

‘And all the time it was heating up, Face is whispering at him, “Where’s your P? Where is it at? Where’s your stash? Give it up.”

‘Then, when he don’t get no answers, and once the iron was glowing hot, he takes it and holds it like an inch away from the man’s eye.’

‘Curt,’ I say at this point knowing what is coming, ‘I think that is probably enough.’

‘No. I want to know,’ Ki says, eyes wide open.

‘Well what can I tell you? He holds the iron in front of man’s eye, slowly heating the air in front of it, until the eye goes pop. After that, with all that shit coming out of his eye socket all over his chest, man pretty much drew him a map to where the stash was. Something like a hundred grand came out of that taxing, in drugs and dollars. And guns. But that wasn’t enough as far as Face was concerned.