You Don't Know Me

I don’t know why she has done it. Even if he saw us, it didn’t matter that much that he needed to be shot. Would it have been better that he didn’t see us? For real it would have been. It would have been better that he didn’t have no stories to tell anybody who was prepared to listen to his bullshit. And better that he couldn’t tell no Feds anything if he wanted to be one of them kind of guys. But this? There was no need for this. This was the whole point of it. JC was nothing. I could have shut that fucker up in a second by myself if I had to. It was the Olders. It was the protection that protected him. We didn’t need him wasted. I look for Ki’s eyes in the darkness, as I draw up close, my heart now stopped. She looks at me. The eyes are blank. I cannot read them any more. Then she runs.

I watch her as she carries on running to the corner of the road, where a taxi pulls up, its yellow light harsh against the black sky. I look at Curt. His face says everything and nothing. He is cemented to the ground in shock as she disappears in the cab. In the end I have to physically pull him by the arm before he wakes up.

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We got to bounce.’

Since we have no time to think of a plan B, we follow the plan we had laid out at the beginning as best as we can now that Ki has done this. The bag is collected from the skip. The white sweatshirts come back on. The trainers too. In a few minutes we are back on the main road, waiting for a bus to take us home. We are wearing the same clothes that we left the flat in. We are all in white. The men who went into the club, if they ever try looking for them, were in black. It’s still a perfect alibi.

We burned the black clothes. We found a bit of greenery that wasn’t quite a park and not quite a verge and poured a load of petrol on them and lit them. The gun we buried. It didn’t matter that much if it was picked up since there were no prints on it and it was dirty anyway. The important thing was the DNA on the black clothes. That we had to lose and now it’s all gone into the grey sky. The ashes go up into the sky and then start falling again like dirty snowflakes. I look at Curt, as the ash settles on to his hair and his face. He hasn’t spoken a word since Ki shot JC. Nothing about this night makes sense to him any more. That much you can tell from his face even if you can’t tell a single other thing from it. It even don’t make sense to me but then Curt don’t know yet what I know.

When we reached the flat and opened the door, I had, truth be told, expected Ki to be there. I thought she would be sitting at the table even though I couldn’t picture her expression. I needed to see her. I needed to see her face so I could know that what had happened had happened. I needed to know why she had done it. I needed to know that the right thing had been done. Only her face could tell me that.

It was Curt who saw it first.

‘She’s been. And gone,’ he said and pointed to the table.

There, on it, was the sweatshirt she had been wearing. I recognized it from the Chinese writing on the back. On top of it was a gun, Baikal. Gangster’s gun of choice. The gun I thought was missing. She had it all this time.

Curt looked at me and then shook his head. ‘This is fucked up,’ he said.

I started to speak but he stopped me. ‘I don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to know.’

‘Look. This ain’t on me Curt. She did this shit by herself. And I ain’t even told you what went down in the toilets.’

‘Well it sure the fuck ain’t on me bruv. She’s your girl. The fuck she at?’ he says throwing his hands up in the air.

‘I’m supposed to know where she’s at?’ I start switching at him, ‘Why don’t you tell me where she at?’

‘Me?’ goes Curt coming right into my face. ‘Me?’

‘Yeah you. You’re the one who’s been giving her lifts to this mosque. You’re the one she splitting all this vine with bruv. All this, “Tell Guilty to get himself some fucking body armour.” ’

‘Fuck you bruv’ he says pushing me hard with a giant paw. ‘What I did, I did for you and your family man. Fuck is wrong with you? I’m supposed to tell Ki to fuck off when she asks for a lift to Elephant? Or when she tells me a bit of news?’

I look at him and then I am all out of answers. ‘I don’t know man. I don’t know anything any more,’ I say and sink to the floor.

‘Nah you don’t. You don’t know nothing,’ he says and turns and walks out of the door slamming it as he goes.

I waited for days for her to come back home or even to contact me but she didn’t. I even went to that building that I followed her to that day where I saw the blond guy. But nothing. The doors were locked shut. It was back to being what it had been before, just an empty building that you would walk past a dozen times in a day and not even notice that it had ever been there.