Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,56

it to their balls. Works every time. With women, he explained that the threat of rape was often sufficient. But women are tougher than men, Luther told him. You have to know how to push their buttons. If they have a family, pull the kids out of bed and put a blade on them. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, they’ll open Sesame. Leon had grown close to the older man and had been sad the day he left him behind. But he had walked out of that place a changed man, physically and mentally, his body no longer a boy's and his brain full of new knowledge. He'd heard a saying once and now he understood what it meant.

A man had to go to prison in order to learn how to become a criminal.

Since he'd left prison, he'd followed Luther's advice explicitly. Aside from his recent three-weeker, he'd been out eighteen months and had knocked down six mansions in Surrey and a townhouse in Chelsea, the profits huge, way into six figures, close to a mil. It was only his mate’s sheer carelessness at the footballer’s flat which meant they'd got caught, the idiot not checking the alarm system properly. Leon had learned another lesson that night. Never depend on other people.

So from now on, he worked alone.

Taking a last draw on the cigarette, he flicked away the butt, letting it smoulder on the pavement. He'd been wandering past the building, some kind of hospital or old-people's home, and had seen two cars in the parking lot that had instantly caught his eye. One was a silver Mercedes. It looked less than a year old, fresh off the line. He didn't know enough about licence plates to judge what year the car had been registered, but that didn’t matter. It looked new and it looked expensive. He figured he could get five figures for it easily at a chop shop he knew in Hackney. The other car was just as nice, a black BMW. He'd had to make a choice, but he'd already gone with the Mercedes. He preferred silver cars anyway.

Pushing back off the wall with his foot, he pulled a tennis ball from his pocket and started to walk into the parking lot.

He saw some old man was sitting on a bench across the tarmac by the wall, but what looked like a nurse was helping him up to take him back inside the building, leaving Leon all alone in the car park. He smiled, bouncing the tennis ball on the ground as he walked.

In the joint, Luther had taught him how to steal cars. He’d explained that the movies got a lot of shit wrong, but they also got some stuff right, and a lot of the high-tech shit they showed like pin guns and diagnostic blank keys normally worked. It would just cost you thousands of pounds to get the equipment. But Luther had taught him a trick, one so incredibly simple that Leon couldn’t believe more people didn't know about it. The lock to most cars had the grooves for the key. Six pins, usually. Once the key slid in, and the pins were pushed down, the mechanism released, and with a twist the door would open.

But the pins also reacted to pressure.

Arriving by the Mercedes, Leon took a look either side of him then looked down at the tennis ball in his hand. He had driven a small hole in the ball with a knife, about the size of a pea, and he twisted the ball so it was showing, then put the hole against the lock of the Mercedes. Checking either side, he held it to the lock then hit it hard with his right hand, pushing all the air out of the ball and into the lock. There was a click and he saw all four plastic locks rise beside each window of the car.

The car was now open.

He smiled, then pulled open the door and ducked inside, tucking the ball back into his pocket. All the high-tech shit and gadgets were out there, but nothing worked better than a cheap old tennis ball.

The next part was a bit harder. He pulled a knife from his pocket quickly and removed a small panel under the ignition. He could see three wires, two red, one black. This part worked just like in all the movies. Separate the battery and starter wires, strip off the plastic sheaths, touch them together to spark