at Pete.
‘I’m eyeballing two cop cars,’ Sasha said as James picked up the bag of money. ‘Grab what we’ve got and ship out.’
Savvas emerged through the front door, followed by Kelvin – who’d donned a mask – and Wheels, who had the backpack stuffed with drugs on his back. As they made a dash for the stairs down to the ground, the dangling man lost his fight to haul himself up the railings and crashed two storeys to the ground.
When they emerged into the courtyard at the bottom he was spread-eagled on the concrete, groaning for help. James did a three-sixty and saw that one of the Salford boys had been shot in the leg as he ran off and now lay unconscious between two parked cars. He also noticed blood spattered up the inside of a BMW windscreen. There was no sign of Sasha, Martin or the two men who’d been in the shoot-out on the balcony.
‘Nightmare,’ Wheels said, as he handed the pack full of drugs to Bruce, then ripped a plipper out of his pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat of a Honda Accord. The siren of an approaching cop car sounded like it was less than a street away.
Savvas squeezed up on the back seat with James and Bruce then slammed his door. They hadn’t stopped to open the boot and the drugs and money were piled up on their laps.
Wheels scraped the Micra in the next bay as he reversed out at speed. James looked over his shoulder and saw the nose of a cop car pull into the street as they tore off.
38. PARTNERS
Ideally the Mad Dogs would have kept the Salford Boys contained inside the flat. The dealers could hardly have dialled 999 to report that their drugs had been robbed and the cops would never even have known that a robbery had taken place.
But the operation had spilled on to the street and half a dozen Rudge Estate residents had called the cops. There was a dead man in a BMW and two more Salford Boys in a mangled state on the pavement. The cops would also find the flat upstairs with the five hostages tied up in the living-room.
So whilst Sasha was glad to have nabbed a backpack stuffed with drugs and a hundred grand in cash, he knew the cops would be sniffing around. None of the dealers would talk, but the cops put a lot more effort into a murder than a robbery and the forensic team would pull the hard front to pieces.
To cover their tracks, Sasha wanted everything burned. Everyone abandoned their gloves and masks inside the Honda, and once he’d dropped everyone off, Wheels took it straight to a breakers’ yard. Within an hour of the raid, the interior was burned out and the metal shell had been squeezed into a tiny cube. Once he got home, Wheels would clean up the guns and drive them sixty kilometres to an industrial unit where Sasha stored equipment used in robberies.
Kelvin was the only gang member who’d gone unmasked and ungloved inside the hard front and this made him vulnerable. He’d been in prison, so the cops would have a sample of his DNA and they’d pull him in for questioning if they detected it. But Sasha looked after his own and Kelvin would be protected with an alibi.
Kelvin could easily claim that his DNA was in the flat because he’d been there to visit a friend and Sasha would fix things so that he could say he was doing a cleaning job at a local betting shop at the time the robbery was taking place. The betting shop was owned by one of Sasha’s cousins and they’d fake the surveillance videos inside the shop with the proper date stamp and everything. The cops probably wouldn’t believe it, but a jury would almost certainly give him the benefit of the doubt.
As a final precaution, James, Bruce and everyone else involved in the raid was ordered to put their outer clothes and shoes into bin liners as soon as they got home. The bags either had to be burned or dumped in a communal bin at least three kilometres from where they lived. Obviously James and Bruce didn’t want to lose their clothes – including their nanotube-reinforced tops – so they gave them to Chloe to take back to campus.
*
By noon James was exhausted. All the running around in body armour had made him stink, but he ached