You Don't Know Me

I suddenly felt like she was slipping out of my hands. All I wanted was our life back again. I wanted days where we went together to Barnardo’s while she picked out books. Evenings where we could just lie on the sofa and watch a film without having this weight on our minds. I wanted to be able to look in those eyes of hers and see myself in them. I wanted to recognize her again.

Look I knew that there weren’t no way that Guilty was going to be able to take out Face using his own wits. Face was just too smart and would have outmanoeuvred him in a second. And I also knew that there was no question that Face had to be taken out, if we wanted to live. I knew from a theoretical point of thing that this was all true. But I still couldn’t make the jump from what seemed logical on paper to reading about it in the papers. It seemed mad to me. Mad that we had to actually be talking about killing a person. Fuck we had already nearly killed one boy. By accident I mean. But this was some next shit.

For one I wasn’t that happy about dragging Ki into yet another situation. She had had enough drama to last her a dozen lifetimes. She didn’t need a planned killing to add to it. And as unbreakable as she seemed to be, I knew that even she had her limits. She might have seemed to the outside world like she was solid. Like a V8 engine. But you know you put any engine under pressure and it’s going to break. You can red-line it every now and then but you don’t want to be red-lining all the time. And she had been in the red for some time. Anyway, I didn’t want to be driving her to her limits again. And the way that I saw it was that I was responsible for this whole thing. I couldn’t get her into another thing.

Then there was the risk involved. Face wasn’t just smart enough to outwit Guilty, shit a five-year-old could outwit Guilty. Face was too smart, even for Ki, maybe. Sure she had skills, but I knew the limit of her skills, high as they were. What I didn’t know were the limits of his. How high did he go? And if this shit went sideways, it wasn’t a game where we could reload and get another life and try again. If this went wrong and Face dried us out, we would die. No question. He would ice us in a second.

And then. And then there is the simple fact of life. It was a life after all was said and done. His life was still a life. I know that Ki had put a bullet in Jamil and nearly killed him and I know that we then dumped him as if he was dead but that was just more like an accident kind of thing. Ki shot him by accident. She never meant to kill him. I don’t think she even meant to shoot him. And yes I can see that he survived her bullet and that was an accident too. They say I maybe helped him survive by taping up his bullet hole and that it stopped the blood loss. I don’t know about any of that for real but what I do know for sure is that if I helped him live, that was an accident too. I didn’t plan on saving his life, but I didn’t plan on shooting him either.

But this thing was different. I knew that this guy would kill me, kill Ki, kill Curt, kill our families in a heartbeat. Did that make it okay to kill him? I don’t know man. But still, unless he was there in front of me, holding a gun to me, I didn’t feel right about killing him like this. You know, like planned. It was like shooting a dude in the back. It didn’t feel right to me. To plan a killing of a living breathing human being ain’t like an accident kind of thing. It ain’t like causing a war so that someone else pulls the trigger. If you plan to do it, that is next level shit. That in my book is a murder.

Break: 10:45

32

11:20

Curt left later that day and we all agreed that we would think about what had to be done and meet up again the next morning. The more I looked at it, though, the more it looked as if this had to be done. But I still couldn’t get my head around it. Why did I feel so bad about it? He was going to kill me if he ever saw me. And here I was feeling guilty about it. Was it that much different from shooting that guy under the bridge when I took Ki? Would I feel okay about it if the man was in my face waving a gun at me? Could I shoot him then? Did I have to wait for that to happen? Is it still like a self-defence kind of a thing if you know a person will definitely kill you if he gets half a chance? But you take your chances before he does? I don’t know, truth be told. It’s proper confusing me.

That night Ki and I sat up and talked some more about it. She had spent a couple of hours writing down some details about the plan in a notepad and made me read them. But the more I read them the crazier it all sounded to me. We needed a gun. We needed to know where Face would be at. We needed an exit strategy. And we needed more luck than a human being could expect to get in ten lives. Suddenly I couldn’t hold it down any longer.

‘We ain’t doing it,’ I said to her, throwing her notes down on the table.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks me.