Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,55

goods in his hands, a mask over his face, but then he got levelled by some copper who picked him out of the crowd and took him off his feet with a punch. The guy restrained him, and two weeks later Leon was in the dock and given a sentence of thirteen months. He had just turned eighteen, so juvenile centres weren't an option any more.

For the first time in his life, Leon was going to prison.

Leaning against the wall, he drew on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes, blowing out the smoke. A lot of lads from his area wanted to serve time. They felt it gave them street-cred and reputations on the estate as hard men. But Leon knew the moment he walked into that place that he was in deep shit. This wasn't a two or three weeker at some soft-as-shit juvenile facility, with lots of team-building exercises and counselling with biscuits and cups of tea. As he was led to his cell in the middle of the queue of new inmates, the prisoners already there shouting and baying at the new meat from their cells, he knew he was looking at over a year in that place.

And he knew he needed to make friends quick.

Luckily, he had. A lot of the rioters started getting sent down there, and they quickly grouped up, watching each other's backs as best they could. But Leon didn’t join them. Instead, he started spending all his time with his new cell-mate, a huge black guy named Luther. Luther was on a two year stint for armed robbery, a career criminal who’d been on the wrong side of the law his entire life. He was from Croydon and made his living robbing drug dealers. He was a guy Leon had actually heard about on the street. Although never actually coming across him, his name definitely preceded him.

Leon never let it show, but Luther saved him in there. Luckily for Leon, the bigger man had taken to him straight away, acting like a mentor, and Leon had spent almost every moment outside the cell with him, both to learn from the man and also so he was protected. Shankings and gang-rape occurred almost daily, the guards turning a blind eye most of the time, but Luther was a guy who no one messed with. He was six-five and thickly muscular, he and his gang monopolising the weights area in the yard every time they were out of the cells, working out for hours at a time and loading up on steroids smuggled in from the outside through the kitchen workers. And Luther’s reputation definitely did precede him. He'd started out doing hit-work for a gang in Brixton, and although Leon never knew for sure how many men Luther had killed in his lifetime, he knew it was more than you could count on your fingers and toes. He had educated Leon about the benefits of crime, how to cheat the justice system and how to make the most profits for when he was back out on the street and ensure he never got sent back. As long as you don't kill anyone, you're good, Leon had said.

Or if you do, make sure no one ever finds the body.

Given his size and being well aware of how much he intimidated people, Luther said that he’d moved from murder into robbing dealers and gang members, and although Leon's physique changed dramatically over the months from hitting the weights with the older man, he knew that using his size like Luther wasn't a path he could go down when he got out. Play to your strengths, Luther had said. Leon had told him about his past, dipping on the Underground and stealing wallets and purses, robbing posh kids and tourists on the street for maybe a hundred quid a pop. But after spending time with Luther, the younger man realised he'd been selling himself short. There was a hell of a lot more out there if he had the balls to go after it.

He was in the wrong game.

Leon had educated him about burglary, how he could make more profit from one empty house than he could from robbing ten tourists. He’d told him the ways around an alarm system and how to get anyone to open a safe. With the men, it’s easy, he'd said. Don't bother with idle threats or violence. Just strip them naked, get a sharp knife from the kitchen and put