Page 6 of Crave

It didn’t add up.

Nor did it matter, though. Stranger’s a stranger.

I cut down the back road where Tyler sat in the passenger side of my motor, windows steamed, bass low in the speakers. It wasn’t only him waiting either. A kid sat on a pushbike by his open window. Boy couldn’t have been more than thirteen, with his palm out as if expecting pick ’n’ mix to be passed over. But it wasn’t sweets he was after, and we both knew it. Cause we didn’t sling Haribo. We didn’t move no corner-shop knockoffs either. The food we handled was for heads chasing a different kind of sugar.

Not actual food.

Powder. Pills.

Gear keeping our customers up three nights straight then crawling back for more.

Y’know, the good shit.

And I ran this Hackney drug line. Me.

“Oi!” I barked, cutting across the road.

“What?” the little man shot back, lip curled, hood up, perched on a nicked BMX as if it made him bulletproof. Brazen. Someone had filled his head with that old shit: act hard, and you’ll get to roll with the mandem.

Not me, mate.

“Who the fuck you talking to, bruv?” I closed in, slamming my palm down on the roof of the blacked-out Audi.

The kid flinched.

And fuck. I knew him. Course I knew him. I knew every little fucker in the Badlands of Hackney. Few on the good side too. Not as many anymore, granted. Not since I’d chosen this career path. And when I say chosen, I mean it was handed to me with cuffs.

“Billy Amos.” I clicked my tongue, shaking my head in disappointment as I looked him over. “Ain’t you supposed to be at home? New little sister in the cot, yeah? Dad inside?”

His jaw tightened. Tried for indifference. Failed. “So?”

Course it bothered him. Kids like Billy always thought they hid it well. I’d been him once, pretending it didn’t matter that no one at home gave a toss whether I came through the door or not. My old man had never been around to shame me, but Billy’s dad? Nicked from his postal job for stealing parcels. That weren’t glamorous on the estate. If you were going down, it had to be for class A or GBH. Something that stuck. All that did was leave this kid scrambling for respect. For a name. That’s why he was here, wide-eyed and starving for someone like Tyler to hand him a scrap of credibility.

Smoke curled out of the open passenger window as Tyler flicked his fag to the kerb. “Chill, Razor. Kid’s collecting for me.”

No.

Fuck. No.

I bent down, getting my face level with my second. I ran this line. Tyler backed me. He didn’t bring in runners without my say. Nor did he answer back. That was a step out of line.

“I told you. No kids.” I fixed him with a glare, then took in his squat shoulders, cheap gold chains, half-faded ink crawling down his arm, along with the chipped front tooth torn from a fight I’d had to finish for him, the pale crescent scar by his jaw from another one, and asked myself, again, why I put up with his shit.

Tyler was a walking reminder of who dragged him out of his scrapes every time. With his puffer slipping off one shoulder as if lifted from a charity bin, trainers scuffed to shit, fingers twitching for a swing, Tyler was desperate to prove he didn’t need me. And yeah, he was hard. Brought up same as me. Learnt how to survive the street because there wasn’t anything else for us to become.

But I was harder.

So I hammered the rule home. “Not from our estate. Ever.”

Tyler slammed back against the headrest. “Fuck, Razor. Ghost’ll scoop him up if we don’t. You wanna lose the patch? Tell Cormac you handed Hackney over for a thirteen-year-old kid?”

Ghost. That name boiled my blood. Real name, Leon Morris. Why he had to have such a shit alias was beyond me. He did the same work as me, only for a different boss. Same rules too, only his were dirtier. He ran a line the way rot spreads: fast, careless, poisoning everything it touched. Dealers, runners, corners. All feeding upward to a man I’d never meet and would hopefully never cross.

See, a line wasn’t just product. It was people. Corners. Schools you didn’t touch, blocks you did. Kids who ran packets for cash and men who enforced when someone got brave or stupid. It was order. And this was my order. And Ghost had been bleeding into it for weeks. Quiet at first, testing edges, whispering promises to lads who were too young to know better.

And now his boss had given the nod to worm his way onto our turf.

Which meant my boss would expect blood for it.