Lawless - [12]

Fabio Danieri watched with satisfaction, feeling so wired that he could barely keep still. Shout at anyone loud enough and they crumbled, anyone in the armed forces could tell you that. And sweet Jesus, could he shout. They all could, all his boys, all the little gang he’d grown up on the Clerkenwell streets with, they were swearing and screaming at the tellers, Move! Do it! Hurry Up!

And like dumb cattle the tellers were obeying, ladling the loot into the bags, pushing them back over the counter.

Piece of piss, thought Fabio.

Then they were leaving the building, hurrying out – not too fast – to the car where Derby their jockey sat at the wheel of the high-performance car, engine running. They whipped off their balaclavas as they went, piled in, and Derby was away, slowly at first, sedately, but soon…

‘Holy fuck!’ shouted Derby, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror.

‘What?’ Fabio strained to see. A cop car was nudging in behind them.

‘Shit,’ he said. They had the bulging bags of cash stacked up around them. Quickly Fabio and the others started stripping off their boiler suits. Fabio was wearing jogging shorts and a black T-shirt under his. He could hear the bank’s alarms going now.

‘It’s OK. No lights, no siren. Just a patrol car, it’s nothing,’ said Derby.

Then Fabio saw the customers running out of the bank, waving wildly to the occupants of the police car, pointing to the car stuffed with men and bags with Derby at the wheel.

‘Double shit,’ said Fabio. ‘Hit it, Derby.’

Derby wasn’t called that for nothing. Give him a few thou of stolen horsepower and he could outrun anything the filth could chuck at him. It was close, but they raced through the streets and finally Derby gave them the slip. The boys dumped the car and the bags in a coach depot car park, stashing the cash all over their bodies under their clothes. Then they split up – and shit here came the filth again, just as they were saying their farewells.

‘Leg it!’ said Fabio.

All the boys scattered.

‘Oi! Stop right there, arsehole!’ shouted one of the police, coming up fast at Fabio’s rear.

Fabio had no intention of stopping. He took to his heels, hurling himself down an embankment straight into a huge patch of brambles. The copper – no doubt dreaming of promotion – followed.

Both men started swearing and wincing. Shit, those things hurt.

It was the death of a thousand cuts. Flesh tearing, blood dripping off him like raindrops, Fabio hauled himself out of the damned brambles, seeing the copper still in there, trapped, struggling, trying to break free. Fabio sped off as fast as he could. He found himself in what appeared to be a deserted storage depot, surrounded by lorries in for repair.

Exhausted, he ran to the nearest shed door, slid it open. He slipped inside and slumped down on the floor, sweating, bleeding, shaking with the force of the adrenaline pumping madly through his veins. Minutes passed. He got his breath back, and… then he heard it.

A police radio, crackling, coming closer.

Shit.

He had to get out of here. He had the cash stuffed down his underpants. He inched open the door. No one in sight, but they were there, he could hear the bastards.

Fabio slipped outside, looking around for a way out. Quickly he pulled himself up onto the low roof of the building and nearly messed himself when a policeman went straight by the door, talking into his radio. A couple of seconds earlier, and he’d have seen Fabio coming out.

But Fabio had been lucky. And he meant to stay that way. When he was sure the copper was out of sight, he jumped from the roof onto a wall, and then almost fell down onto the other side, which turned out to be a main road. A road he knew.

Thank you, God.

He grinned triumphantly then broke into an easy loping run, heading homeward. He was fit as well as handsome, he took care of himself. He was just a jogger now – so long as nobody looked too closely at the scrapes and the bloodstains, and the black top hid a lot of it anyway. All around him, bedlam was breaking out. Cop cars sped past, blue lights flashing, sirens wailing.

Fabio trotted on, knowing precisely where he was going. In fact, he was getting tired of this, getting away with things by the skin of his teeth, these little bank jobs. But he’d accumulated a good bit of stake money in the process. Soon he would start getting into something far more lucrative and less risky.

Fabio had been working on a plan. The smash-and-grabs at the banks had brought in cash, but he was making a name for himself and that was dangerous: it was time to quit while he was ahead. The drugs game was a much better bet. Friends in the trade had told him the figures, and they were mind-blowing. He could buy a load of coke in Colombia for three or four grand, then sell it on for thirty grand in the UK. What was not to like?

Furthermore, he had a ready market in the clubs his family already owned. He could get people in his pay circulating among the socialites, the carefree daddy’s-little-rich-girls-out-on-the-town, and they could knock it out for a thousand pounds an ounce, netting him a clear thirty or forty grand profit on every deal.