CHERUB: Brigands M.C. - Robert Muchamore Page 0,87
bottles.
‘Pink champagne,’ Lauren grinned. ‘We’ve gotta get some of that.’
‘No you won’t,’ Joe said. ‘There’s only six bottles and it’s expensive. We need to mix and match, a few trays of beer, a few bottles of this, few bottles of that. There’s so much booze here nobody will notice as long as we don’t take too much of one thing.’
Anna opened the top of her gran’s shopping trolley and slid in two pallets of beer, then began topping it off with bottles of vodka, gin and bourbon. Across the room, the boys filled their cases with as much beer as they could cram in while Lauren went into the fridge and got lots of fruit juices and bottles of Coke to use as mixers.
‘Drunken sex orgy here we come!’ Joe grinned as he zipped his case and gave it a tug that almost wrenched his arm off. ‘Jesus that’s heavy.’
Anna and Lauren had reached the same conclusion about their haul.
‘We’ll never get this lot on to the bus,’ Dante said.
‘I could steal my dad’s car,’ Joe said. ‘It’s an automatic, he let me drive it around our house a couple of times when he first got it.’
Lauren and Dante had both been trained to drive by CHERUB, but kids driving cars in daylight was dodgy and letting on would blow their cover.
‘How about I call a taxi?’ Dante suggested, as he pulled his mobile out of his jacket.
Anna giggled and gave Dante a kiss. ‘My clever boy,’ she grinned. ‘And so much less risky than stealing the Führer’s sixty-grand Mercedes.’
*
The battle at Stoke Gifford services had been horrifying, but the police didn’t have the guts or manpower to stop a hundred-strong convoy of outlaw bikers, so the slightly depleted band cruised on towards the Rebel Tea Party.
At Swindon, Vomit led everyone a couple of miles off the motorway for an unscheduled stop in a Tesco car park. The bikes queued for petrol, while women from one of the coaches headed into the supermarket and cleared the shelves of sandwiches, Scotch eggs and individual fruit pies.
James found himself the centre of attention during the impromptu car-park picnic that followed. Dirty Dave relayed the story to a circle of bikers, their women and a few kids.
‘Thought this spiked hammer was going through my skull,’ Dirty Dave explained. ‘But this hard little bastard comes in and floors him. Then we took out four more of those pansy-arsed girl-guide Vengefuls, didn’t we champ?’
Dave put his arm around James’ back and gave him a hug that sent his Mr Kipling’s cherry slice spilling out of its foil dish and spinning towards the tarmac. James couldn’t actually remember Dirty Dave doing any of the fighting, but he let this detail slide.
‘This kid’s gonna be a kick-ass Brigand some day,’ Dirty Dave said. ‘I’d bet my own cock on it.’
‘Small bet,’ one of the women shouted.
Everyone laughed, but James was surprised to find a serious looking Führer pulling him out of the circle.
‘What’s up?’ James asked nervously.
The Führer smiled. ‘Sounds like you showed class back there, but we don’t want you getting nicked. Have you got the chain and hammer?’
James pulled the chain out of his pocket. ‘The hammer’s stashed in my bike.’
‘So you’re smart and tough,’ the Führer nodded. ‘Never leave a weapon at a crime scene. It’ll have fingerprints and DNA all over it. I want you to hand them over to me.’
‘What for?’ James asked.
‘The breakdown truck’s gonna take a little detour. Friend of a friend runs a scrap yard not far from here. He’s gonna burn up or melt anything incriminating.’
‘Right,’ James said. ‘I’ll go get them.’
‘You need your riding gloves but they might have blood on them, so throw ’em on the fire when we get to the Tea Party. There’s stalls there selling all kinds of biker kit. I’ll sort you out if you’re short of money.’
‘Right,’ James said. The Führer was evil, but he couldn’t help admiring the man’s leadership. While other bikers bragged and ate pork pies, the Führer was like a machine, working out the police’s strategy, tracking down and destroying evidence and making calls to his legal team, back in Salcombe.
‘Most importantly, kid,’ the Führer said, wagging a finger in James’ face, ‘if the cops pull you over, keep your mouth shut and wait for our lawyer. They’ll never prove you didn’t act in self defence unless you let something stupid out of your mouth.’