You Don't Know Me

‘What I said. We ain’t doing it. We ain’t wasting two men without like a proper need for it.’

‘Proper need? What about your life? What about my life? Is my life not a good enough reason for you?’ Her eyes are electric again.

‘Ki, your life is one thing. We got our lives. We can go away. Scotland, whatever. Spain, we were going to go to Spain. We still can. We got the dollars. We got a choice. Let’s just go. I can’t be doing no killing. And I can’t be letting you get involved in no killing.’

‘Me?’ she says her voice climbing. ‘Can’t let me get involved in no killing? Shouldn’t you have thought about that before? Before you went and pulled me out of Glockz with all guns blazing?’

‘What could I have done?’ my voice following hers upwards into the sky. ‘Left you there? What choice did I have?’

‘What choice do you have now? Really? You disappear and Bless will be killed. Your mum too. Face won’t stop. You know that. He’s a machine. It’s just a matter of time before he sends his little biker boys round to your mum. You want to wait till they’ve fired off a hundred shots at your mum? Or are you hoping they might miss her as well?’

‘Until he’s aiming a gun at me, he’s just a person, Ki.’

Suddenly she stops whatever it was she was doing and drives them eyes straight into mine.

‘Is this what it is? You worried about your soul?’ she says almost laughing but not in a way that made me comfortable.

‘Soul? I ain’t said nothing about soul. I’m talking about a life. A real human. You are talking about killing a person. Planning it and executing it. Executing him. We’d be the same as him Ki, if we did this.’

‘We are nothing like him. He murders people for money. He murders people for kicks and licks. He is a drug dealer. You are a car dealer. You are not him. We are not him. Nobody will cry for him. Trust me. Nobody. Not even his mum. He wrote this ending. Not us. He did it,’ she says her voice calming now a little. She takes a deep breath and then looks at me, her eyes a bit softer than before. ‘Now do you want to look at the details again or not?’

‘No, man,’ I say, and snatch up the pad she is waving in my face. ‘I’ve read it.’

‘Good. We start going over this properly tomorrow. When Curt comes in the morning, you stay with him until you get this down perfectly.’

‘What about you? Where will you be?’

‘The mosque,’ she says and picks herself up and goes to the bedroom, leaving me staring at her notes. This is going to be a disaster – I can feel it.

The next morning Curt comes knocking on the door just in time for breakfast. It is as if he can smell the eggs cooking. He nods a hello at Ki and pulls up a chair.

‘So Ki got a plan?’ he says to me but indicating to Kira who is plating up eggs for him.

‘Yeah,’ I say and show him the notepad.

He sits down at the table and starts to read. By the time he is finished he is smiling.

‘Girl,’ he says to her holding up the pad, ‘respect.’

‘You eat your breakfast,’ Ki says in reply, ‘I’ve got some last minute planning to do. By the time I come back though, you two need to have this memorized,’ she adds and then before I can say goodbye, she is gone, her burkha under her arm.

‘What’s up?’ Curt says looking at me, seeing that I am on edge.

‘Nothing.’

‘’Kay. Then … what’s with the atmosphere?’

‘I’m stressing about Ki innit.’

‘Why?’

‘Everything man. This plan about killing Face. It is madness bruv. We can’t go round shooting up no gangsters. We ain’t in some movie.’

‘Feel you bruv. But what is our choices right now, though?’

‘Well we could just jet out of here. Go on the run.’

‘Shit blood. You know you ain’t leaving your sister. And your mum, I mean. We got no choices right now but to do this thing.’

‘Okay. Let’s say you’re right. We don’t have no choice. I get it. We can’t run. We can’t go Feds. We can’t just wait to get merked. So we do this thing, yeah. So tell me one thing. How the fuck we going to do this,’ I say shaking the pad at him, ‘this plan? How we going to bump this Face man?’

‘We shoot him. Just like Ki is saying.’

‘Yeah. But how are we supposed to find him? It’s not like we can phone his secretary to find out where he’s at.’

‘Ki innit,’ he says as if the answer was staring me in face all along.

‘Jokes blood, ha ha. Okay then. How is Ki going to find that out?’

‘She just knows innit,’ his face flat.

‘What do you mean she knows?’ I say proper confused now.

‘She just knows shit.’

Curt takes a giant forkful of egg into his mouth and then cocks his head at me like now he’s the one who is confused. Then he says this: ‘Well all the bits of info she been feeding me has been checking out. It is all solid vine.’

I take a breath trying to work out what he’s saying.

‘What? Kira has been giving you vine? What kind of fucking vine, blood?’

‘Just like, don’t go there today – so-and-so going to be there.’

‘Ki? You sure?’

‘Yeah I’m sure. You think that Guilty dodged them bullets by chance? Kevlar bruv.’

‘What?’ I say surprised. Like proper shocked. I didn’t even know what the boy was talking about to even ask all of the right questions.