Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Read Free Page A

builders’ merchants to order 2,000 stock bricks, 50 kilo bags of ballast, sand and cement. While he was gone Danny headed down the eroding stairs, snapped on the yellow bulb and made a start.
    The drill head bit into the mortar. Danny worked it up and around, so that he could prise out a section of the retaining wall. The dust was fierce, and the noise. Danny kept at it, imagining that the wall was someone he wanted done with, some towel-head in the desert or Skank, his persecutor. He shot the heavy drill head from the hip, like an action man in a boys’ comic, and felt the mortar judder, then disintegrate.
    A chunk of the wall fell out. Even in the murky light of the cellar Danny could see that there wasn't earth – which he had expected – lying behind it. Instead some kind of milky-white substance. There were fragments of this stuff on the bit of the drill, and twists like coconut swarf on the uneven floor.
    Danny pushed up his goggles and pulled down his mask. He squatted and brought a gloveful of the matter up to his face. It was yellowy-white, with a consistency somewhere between wax and chalk. Danny took off his glove and scrunged some of it between his nails. It flaked and crumbled. He dabbed a little bit on his bottom lip and tasted it. It tasted chemical. He looked wonderingly at the four-foot-square patch that he had exposed. The swinging bulb sent streaks of odd luminescence glissading across its uneven surface. It was crack cocaine. Danny had struck crack.
    Tembe was put out when he got back and found that Danny had no use for the stock bricks. No use for the ballast, the cement and the sand either. But he did have a use for Tembe.
    ‘You like this shit, that right?’ Danny was sitting at the kitchen table. He held up a rock of crack the size of a pigeon's egg between thumb and forefinger.
    ‘Shee-it!’ Tembe sat down heavily. ‘Thass a lotta griff, man. Where you get that?’
    ‘You don’ need to know. You don’ need to know. You leave that to me. I found us a connection. We going into business.’ He gestured at the table where a stub of pencil lay on top of a bit of paper covered with calculations. ‘I'll handle the gettin’, you can do the outin’. Here –’ he tossed the crack egg to Tembe ‘– this is almost an eightf. Do it out in twenties – I want a oncer back. You should clear forty – and maybe a smoke for you.’
    Tembe was looking bemusedly at the egg that nestled in his palm. ‘Is it OK, this? OK, is it?’
    ‘Top-hole! Live an’ direct. Jus’ cooked up. It the biz. Go give the hint a pipe, see how she like it. Then go out an’ sell some.’
    Tembe quit the kitchen. He didn't even clock the brand-new padlock that clamped shut the door to the cellar. He was intent on a pipe. Danny went back to totting up columns of figures.
    Danny resumed his career in the crack trade with great circumspection. To begin with he tried to assess the size of his stock. He borrowed a set of plumber's rods and shoved them hard into the exposed crack-face down in the cellar. But however many rods he added and shoved in, he couldn't find an end to the crack in any direction. He hacked away more of the brickwork and even dug up the floor. Every place he excavated there was more crack. Danny concluded that the entire house must be underpinned by an enormous rock of crack.
    ‘This house is built on a rock,’ he mused aloud, ‘but it ain't no hard place, that the troof.’
    Even if the giant rock was only fractionally larger than the rods indicated, it was still big enough to flood the market for crack in London, perhaps even the whole of Europe. Danny was no fool. Release too much of the rock on to the streets and he would soon receive the attentions of Skank or Skankalikes. And those Yardies had no respect. They were like monkeys just down from the fucking trees – so Danny admonished Tembe – they didn't care about any law, white or black, criminal or straight.
    No. And if Danny tried to make