Jazz erupted in shrieks. She tried to get up from the sofa and reach her husband. Chris held her back. Bryant got up.
‘And then I’m going to blind you in one eye. There’s no way around any of this. I want you to understand that. You and your friends picked on the wrong black girl.’
Dixon came out of the chair, screaming. For a brief second he reached Mike with his fists. Then the hollow boom of the Nemex shook the room and Dixon was convulsed on the floor, blood soaking the crotch of his jeans. The new sound that came out of him didn’t sound human.
Mike Bryant got back to his feet, bleeding from the mouth. He got his breath back, then very carefully sighted on Dixon’s left knee and pulled the trigger. The white supremacist must have passed out because the noise stopped. Bryant wiped his mouth and lined up on the other leg. By now Jazz had given up fighting Chris and was holding onto him as if he could rescue her from drowning. Her tears burnt on his neck. He covered her ears with his hands as Mike pulled the trigger for the third time.
In the cordite-reeking quiet, he watched as Bryant stowed the Nemex, took out a steel-cased pen, bent to Dixon’s head, peeled back the eyelid and jabbed hard into the eye beneath. It all seemed to happen very slowly and without sound and somehow he found that his gaze had slipped away by the end and focused on the sleek lines of the entertainment deck.
‘Chris.’ Bryant was leaning over him.
‘What? Yeah, yeah.’
It took both of them to unfasten Jazz’s grip on Chris. When they had finally tugged her away, Bryant crouched in front of her and gripped her lower jaw in one hand. In the other, he held up a folded wad of notes.
‘Alright, now listen to me. This money is for you. Here. Here, take it. Take it, for Christ’s sake.’ Finally, he had to open her hand and fold her fingers around the notes himself. ‘If you want him to live, you’d better get help for him soon. I don’t much care if he lives or dies, but if he lives you tell him. He, or anyone else around here, touches another person with the surname Morris or Kidd, I’ll come back for the other eye, and I’ll kill your son.’
Her whole body jerked. Bryant took her hand and squeezed the money into it again.
‘Now you tell him that, and you make sure he understands I mean it. I don’t want to come back here, Jazz. I don’t want to do it. But I will if your fuckwit racist husband and his friends make me.’
In the car, Bryant put his hands on centre of the steering wheel in front of him and pressed his body back into the padded seat. He emptied his lungs in a long, hard single breath. Then, he just stared at the windscreen. He seemed to be waiting for something. There were lights on in some of the houses, but either no one had heard the gunshots or no one had any interest in finding out what they signified.
‘Did you mean it?’ Chris asked.
‘The eye?’ Bryant nodded to himself. His voice was barely above a murmur. ‘Oh, yes. People like that, they’ve got to have something to lose. Otherwise, you’ve got no leverage on them.’
‘No, his son. Did you mean it about his son?’
Mike looked across at him, outraged. ‘Jesus Christ, of course not. Fuck, Chris, what kind of man do you think I am?’
He was silent for a while. Very faintly, the sound of a siren came wailing to them out of the night. Bryant looked at his watch. He grunted.
‘Fast. She must have called a pricey one.’
He started the engine. The BMW’s lights carved up the gloom in the poorly lit street.
‘Let’s get out of here, huh? We’ve got a lot to do.’
It took them the rest of the night to find the other two men. Both were young, neither had a family and it was Friday night in the zones. Troy Morris’s information gave starting points, but from there on in, it was hard work. Mike drove, Chris checked streets, house numbers, the names on dismal little neon signs. They worked their way through mistaken addresses, dimly-lit pipe houses, underground clubs with promising names like Cross of Iron and Endangered Race, brothels, fast-food stands and even a local paycop garrison near the river. Everywhere they went, Mike Bryant brandished the Nemex or thick wads of cash to almost interchangeable effect. The money worked more often than the gun. It unzipped the right lips, opened the right doors.
They found the first man at a hot-dog stand, drunk and swaying. He didn’t know they were looking for him. No one had bothered to warn him. The white supremacists weren’t big on solidarity, and besides, functioning phones weren’t all that common in the zones. The landlines got fucked up by technosmart vandal gangs and mobile cover was a bad joke, fatally compromised by rolling waves of government jamming aimed at satellite programming like Dex and Seth. Wheeled transport was all but non-existent. People didn’t get about much, messages even less.
Bryant leaned on the stand, bought the man a burger and watched him eat it. Then he told him why he was there. The man took off, trying to sprint. They went after him. Halfway down a side alley they found him vomiting up Mike’s burger and the rest of the night’s intake. Mike shot him four times in the groin and stomach with the Nemex, then bent to peer at the damage in the dim light. When he was sure the man was bleeding to death, they left him alone.
They had to drag the second supremacist out of a bed that wasn’t his own in a fifteenth-floor apartment that reeked of damp and rat poison. The woman next to him didn’t even wake up. When they got him into the living room he was mumbling, incoherent with ingested chemicals and sleep. They took an arm each and ran him head first against the balcony window until it smashed through. Outside, on the glass-strewn balcony, dawn was turning the night air slowly grey and there were birds singing in the trees below. Neither of them were sure if the man was dead or not. They stopped over the body, careful to avoid getting glass in their hands, picked him up and threw him over the rail. The birdsong stopped abruptly with the impact on the concrete below. In the kitchen, Mike left money for the broken window.
Chapter Eighteen
The sun caught them leaving the zones somewhere south of London Bridge. The streets were already full of pedestrians on their way to work and Alike had to hoot repeatedly to get them out of the road as they approached the checkpoint. Queues backed up hundreds long, snaking randomly away from the various turnstile entry points. There was even a queue at the road barrier, three rusting buses that looked almost pre-millennial, one of them belching oily fumes from its exhaust. Beyond the checkpoint, glimpsed through the low rise of preferential South Bank housing, gold light impacted and dripped on glass skyscraper panels across the river.
‘Jesus, look at this,’ said Bryant disgustedly. ‘Emissions monitoring, my fucking arse. Look at the shit coming out of that bus.’
‘Yeah, and it’s packed. We’re going to be here for a while.’
It was true. Armed guards were ordering the passengers out of the first bus, lining them up. The first line had already assumed the position - right hand on the back of the head, passcard held up in the left. A single guard moved down the line, scrutinising the cards one at a time and swiping them through his hip unit. Every second card needed repeated swipes.
‘Don’t know why they bother,’ Chris yawned with a force that made his jaw creak. ‘It’s not like there’s been anything resembling terrorism in London for the last couple of years.’
‘Yeah, and you’re looking at the reason why. Don’t knock it, man.’ Bryant drummed his fingers on the wheel. ‘Still, this is going to take forever. You want to get breakfast?’
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Chris twisted about in his seat. A handful of frontages down the street they had just driven up, a grimed sign said Cafe. People flowed in and out with paper packets and garishly coloured cans.