Page 48 of Corrupt

But before I did that though, I had a fucking duffel full of Pretty Poison breathing in my boot that needed sorting.

So about ten, I got in the Audi. Drove up the high street and parked a couple rows over from the phone repair shop, on the same cracked white lines where I’d parked a hundred times before. I walked the rest of the way, and Hackney had that baked-in smell of petrol, bin bags, and someone grilling chicken too early that had become a familiar backdrop to my day-to-day. But the phone repair shop I needed was right there, open and sat wedged between a bookie’s and a chicken shop, its QUICK FIX REPAIRS neon sign missing half its letters.

I pushed open the door.

Tariq, as usual, was behind the counter, screwdriver in hand, gutting a half-dead iPhone. Same Nike tech fleece. Same turban. Same sharp eyes clocking every detail in under a second.

“Razor.” He gave me a once-over. “You look like shit.”

“Need something checked.”

“Straight to it today?”

“No time for pussyfooting. And I need it quiet.”

His eyebrows twitched. Interest, caution, curiosity all tightening in the same breath. “Another phone?”

“Something else. For your back room.”

Tariq’s brows shot up. So I took a sliver of foil from my jeans, no bigger than a fingernail, and placed it on the counter. Barely visible. Tariq swept it up as if it were a dropped SIM card.

His face tightened. “Pretty.”

A look from me shut him right up.

He jerked his chin towards the door. “Turn the sign.”

I walked back to the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and locked it.

Tariq lifted the counter flap to let me through, and I passed over, through a beaded curtain, into the cramped back room. Same soldering irons. Same bench lamps. Same cracked-paint walls. But the far corner looked newer. As if it were some makeshift lab cobbled together from a chemistry starter kit and a prayer. Reagent bottles. TLC plates taped to the wall. A scale with the label peeled off. UV torch. Chemical wipes. Nitrile gloves.

And someone sitting at the workbench.

Tariq dealt in phones. Repairs, trade-ins, stolen handsets passed on for a tidy sum. But his cousin? His cousin was my asset. Sami. Young. Wiry. Hoodie up. Glasses slipping down his nose. Couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. Some university chemistry student. Fuck knew where, didn’t care. Quiet as sin. And he did this kind of thing on the sly.

My type of man.

He looked up. “Oh. Hey.”

His voice cracked on the ‘hey’. Poor sod. He knew who I was.

Tariq jerked his chin towards him. “He can do a prelim. Then a deeper check later, if you want.”

Sami swallowed. “What you got?”

I tried not to let my shoulders tighten as Tariq opened the scrap of foil, tapped out a few rose-tinted granules onto a glass slide and clicked on the UV lamp for Sami to check. The crystals glowed faintly. Pink-gold, almost luminescent, and Levi’s face flashed through my head again. Pale, still, the ambulance lights flashing blue over his skin. I shoved the memory down to do this. Save face. Y’know, be Razor.

“Mad colour,” Sami said. “Aesthetics’ on point, at least.” He dripped reagent onto one granule. It fizzed, bloomed colour. “MD. At least partly. No PMA reaction so far.”

My jaw unclenched a fraction.

Sami leant close, watching the colour shift with a scientist’s hunger.

“I’ll need a bigger fragment.” He peered up at me all big eyes, as if he’d asked me for a semen sample. “Like… half a point.”

Tariq looked to me for permission. I hesitated. Because I knew the cost of this stuff. But Levi tilted somewhere behind my ribs, and I nodded. So Tariq scraped a little more into a labelled tube and handed it to Sami.

“Can you do a full check today?” I asked.