Powder Wars by Graham Johnson

his mum and dad in a tenement block off’ve Scotland Road. Gets there, knocks on the door, he answers, I drags him onto the piss-smelling landing and batters him there and then. Am kicking fuck out of his head and ramming my boot into his bollocks. Cunt is writhing around in agony. Picks him up by the hair, drags him over to the metal railings and starts twatting his head and teeth on the metal crossbar. Blood everywhere, in all fairness. Not only that but I’m half thinking his ma is watching all this from their kitchen window.
    I’d already battered Dicko once before, a few years earlier. Was how we met in fact. So I’m still booting fuck out of him when Snowball comes running out of Dicko’s ma’s kennel. But I’m thinking there’s no way Snowball is going to jog in. He’s a shithouse, knowmean? But while my back is turned he gets me right on the crown with his fist, the sneaky cunt, and I go down. Stars and all that. I’m half conscious.
    A few seconds later I’m coming round and I feel that they’ve picked me up and are carrying me across the landing. Don’t know where this is going in fairness, but do not have the means to fight back. I can feel myself being manhandled across the iron crossbar at the top of the wall over which is a four- or five-storey drop. Suddenly I can see the ground. I’m half hanging over the edge. I’m dead, no two ways. If they throw me off at this height. Pure pulverised, I am, no two ways.
    But I could sense they were struggling. Dave Dicko was a near-dead man walking after his thrashing, wobbling and blabbering all over the show. So I kicks out wildly. Grabs the fucking railing and would not let go for the life of me. Snowball was punching and biting me. Kicking my hands. Doing everything to make me let go, la. Digging his nails in. Pure birds’ stuff. But pure willing he was, to throw me off. After all I’d done for the little cunt, as well. But would I let go? Would I fuck. Don’t know how, but by my own physical strength I edged my way back to safety. Pure contorted my way over the railing, grabbed Snowball who was now realising the balance of power was shifting, and punched him. I battered them both. They were both covered in blood. I gave them one hell of a beating. Snowball never robbed one of my lorries again and Dave Dicko never stepped out of line.
    After a few years with the Hole in the Wall gang it started to dry up. So I started to plan my outro. We started losing money. I remember it began after we’d planned to do this tyre warehouse, which had thousands of big wagon wheels inside and all that. These were fetching big money at the time and I had good connections in the haulage industry to fence them through. We did the business and I made about eight grand off my end, which was about a grand-an-hour in my estimation. The lads who we sold them to were screaming out for more. So we lined another tyre warehouse up in St Helens, but when we got there it was too belled up. Alarms were becoming fashionable then and this one was a shocker so we aborted the mission. But by this time the lads were getting greedy. They didn’t want to go home empty handed, cut their losses and that. So Dick the Stick backed the wagon into a warehouse depot on an industrial estate nearby and opened the doors. It was a slaughterhouse with a huge refrigerated storage area. So we cleaned it out of the meat, steaks and all that. It was a quick hit. A chancer, but we got £1,500 each. I was slowly realising that the Hole in the Wall gang had possibly peaked. That kind of tank was no good to me, in all fairness.
    The next job was a huge cigarette warehouse in Speke, Liverpool. If it came off, this was big time, worth tens of grands to us, so we had a team of seven men looking at it. We’d done these before and it had always been a military operation. In. Out. Get paid. But the card-marker who’d put it up had got his gen