What Came Before He Shot Her

he sorted, mon.”

            The Blade smiled, without amusement or pleasure. “Listen to him,”

            he said. “Spite of everyt’ing, you are the mon. So. You ready for Rissa, den? She likes ’em young.”

            Arissa’s tongue came out and ran along the edge of the Blade’s ear.

            “You sort dat bloke?” Joel demanded. “Cos you and me, we had a deal.”

            The Blade’s eyes narrowed. In the car’s overhead light, the serpent on his cheek moved with the muscle in his jaw clenching. He said, “Get in, blood,” and jerked his head towards the backseat. “We got plans to make now you such a big mon.”

            Cal flipped the seat forward. Joel looked at him to see if there was a sign on his face that would tell him what was going to happen next. But Cal was unreadable, and the weed he’d smoked hadn’t loosened his features.

            Joel got into the car. A large dog-eared A to Z  lay open, facedown on the seat. When he moved it to one side, he saw that it covered a ragged burn hole in the seat’s upholstery. Someone had been plucking at this, and stuffing leaked out from inside.

            When Cal got back into the car, the Blade took off before the door was closed. Tyres squealed like something from a bad fi lm noir, and Joel was thrown back against the seat. Arissa cried, “Baby, do  it.” She draped her arms over her man’s chest and resumed licking his neck. Joel kept his gaze away from her. He couldn’t help thinking about his sister. She’d been the Blade’s, before Arissa. He couldn’t imagine her in this girl’s place.

            “How old’re you, blood?”

            Joel met the Blade’s gaze in the mirror. They took a turn too fast, and Arissa slammed to one side. She giggled, rose up, and hung over the front seat to ease her hands down the front of the Blade’s black sweater. Cal glanced back at Joel and offered him a toke of his spliff. Joel shook his head. Cal jerked the spliff towards him more insistently. There was something in his eyes, a message he was meant to understand. Joel took the spliff. He’d never smoked weed, but he’d seen it done. He sucked in shallowly and managed not to cough. Cal nodded.

            “Twelve,” Joel said in answer to the Blade’s question.

            “Twelve. T-welve. You a tough little shit. You di’n’t tell me before when I ask: You still got your cherry?”

            Joel said, “Neal Wyatt ain’t actin like he sorted, Stanley. I did what you tol’ me. When you doin your part?”

            The Blade said to Cal, “He still got his cherry. Dat’s cool, ain’t it.”

            With a look at Joel through the rearview mirror, he went on with,

            “Rissa likes to take boys’ cherries, blood. Don’ you, Riss? You wan’ to take Jo-ell’s?”

            Arissa disengaged from the Blade and looked Joel over. She said,

            “Wouldn’t last long ’nough for me to get my knickers down. Wan’ me to suck him ’nstead?” She reached for Joel’s crotch. Joel shoved her away before she made contact with him. He said,

            “Get your bitch ’way from me, mon. We had a ’rangement, you ’n’ me. Dat’s what I want to talk about.”

            The Blade pulled abruptly to the kerb. Joel looked out, but he didn’t know where they were. Just that it was a street somewhere with tall bare trees, fancy houses, and clean pavement. It was not a part of town he recognised. The Blade said to Cal, “Take her home. Me and the man  here have t’ings to discuss.” He turned in his seat and grabbed Arissa under one arm. He lifted her over—her legs flailing so that her knickers were on view—and he kissed her hard, with his mouth descending on hers like a punch. He handed her over to Cal and said,

            “Don’t let her have any more tonight.”

            Cal took Arissa by the arm. She protested, rubbing at her bruised mouth. “Mon,” she said, “I don’ want to walk.”

            “Clear your head,” he told her, and when Cal shut the door, he took off again, veering into the street.

            He drove rapidly and made many turns. Joel tried to memorise the route, but he soon realised there was little point. He had no idea where they’d begun this stage of the journey, so to know the path to their destination wasn’t particularly useful.

            The Blade said nothing to him until he parked the car. Then it was only, “Get out,” which Joel did, to find himself standing on a street corner in front of a derelict building. It had a brick exterior that was dingy even in the nighttime illumination from a streetlamp some twenty yards away. It possessed peeling green woodwork and a chipped and fading sign above a garage-size door. This said “A. Q. W. Motors,” but whatever business had been done in the building was long since finished. Boards and metal plates covered the ground-floor windows while up above, ragged curtains indicated that someone had once occupied a first-floor flat.

            Joel expected the Blade to head for this flat: yet another drum from which he could deal on the occasions when the Lancefield Court squat became too hot. But instead of taking Joel to an access for this building, the Blade took him around the side and towards the back. There, an alley gaped, shadows broken only by a single bulb of light burning on the back of a building some distance away.

            Behind A. Q. W. Motors, a brick wall fenced in a yard of some sort. A metal gate gave access to this yard and while it bore a lock which looked both official and impenetrable, this was not the case. The Blade took a key from his pocket and used it. The gate swung open soundlessly in the night, and the Blade jerked his thumb to indicate Joel was meant to go inside.

            Joel stood his ground. There was little point to anything else since, if the Blade meant to finish him off, he was going to do so no matter how Joel responded to the situation. He said, “We talkin about Neal Wyatt or what?”

            “How much mon is mon?” the Blade replied.

            “I ain’t playin riddles wiv you. Fuck it, blood. It’s cold as hell ’n’ I got to get home. ’F dis is just some sort ’f bullshit game—”

            “You t’ink everyone stupid just cos you are, bred?”

            “I ain’t—”

            “Get inside. We’ll talk when we talk. You don’t like dat, you find your way home. Nice warm bed, cup of Ovaltine, bedtime story. Whatever it takes.”

            Joel cursed for effect and went through the gate. The Blade followed him inside.

            It was dark as pitch within the yard, a place of shapes. Only by waiting for his eyes to adjust could Joel see anything. At that point, the shapes became old wheelie bins, some packing crates, a trunk, a discarded ladder, and weeds. At the back of the building, bricked-up doors gave access from the interior to a concrete platform. This extended the entire length of the building, raised four feet above the ground. Joel understood from this that they were at the back of an abandoned underground station—which was above the ground in this part of town— one of the many in London that had come and gone with the adjustment of the population and the alteration of various lines throughout the city. The arched doorways into the building gave mute testimony to that fact.

            The Blade made his way across the yard and across the broken remains of two railway lines. He leapt onto the platform and went across it to a secondary door. This was also metal and of the kind to keep out squatters and other vagrants, but it had provided no problem for the Blade. He unlocked the padlock as before and went inside. Joel followed him.

The old underground station had been altered in its use: from a transportation centre to an auto works. The icy air within still smelled of petrol and oil, and when the Blade clicked on a lantern he’d picked up near the door, it was to reveal that the erstwhile ticket window remained in place and an ancient tube map overhung with dust still displayed routes that were eighty years old. The rest of the place bore signs of different use: shelving for tools, a hydraulic lift, hoses dangling from the ceiling. Beneath these, someone had stacked wooden crates of recent vintage. The Blade went to these and used a screwdriver to lift the top of one of them.

            From what he knew of the Blade, Joel expected the contents of the crates to be drugs. He expected