Ammunition by Ken Bruen Read Free Book Online Page A

ambulance, say he was a victim of a mugging. Get the gear stashed away. The rest of you go home, I’ll be in touch.’ They stood for a moment, staring at him, and he said:
    ‘You did good.’
    He took another swig of the bottle and took off through the back garden. He dumped his balaclava in a bin, kept to the back streets moving fast and, on the edge of Clapham, hailed a cab, got in the back, and he was out of there. The driver, smoking a joint, had the radio on, loud. McDonald settled back in his seat, as Dire Straits sang.… ’The Sultans of Swing.’
    A wide grin began to move across McDonald’s face. He watched the streets as the cab sped on, groups of people everywhere and he thought:
    Man, my work has just begun .
    Foley, the desk sergeant, got the call about a shooting and mini-riot, and asked:
    ‘What else is new?’
    Friday night, the animals were out to play, he his copy of ‘Heat,’ three bacon and tomato sandwiches, a flask of tea. He settled himself in his chair, put his feet up, thought:
    Ah, this is the life .
    He loved the weekend, they wouldn’t be dragging the scum in until about three/four in the morning, so he had a good two hours of reading and at least a half hour of kip.
    Back home, McDonald was in the bath, his head back, Thin Lizzy booming from the speakers, a glass of Scotch on the rim of the bath, and he thought about Dad’s army… thought, with deep satisfaction:
    Didn’t they do fucking great .
    Trick, meanwhile, was having his jaw wired and that, plus the kick in the balls, had deprived him of speech, not that he had a whole lot to say, except perhaps:
    ‘Fuck me.’
    The knife wielder was having one of his legs amputated.
    In another hospital, not a mile away, Bill suffered a massive coronary and was dead in twenty minutes.
    The docker began to weep.

HAPPY SLAPPERS
     

 
    A NEW PHENOMENON HAD swept the country… happy slapping. Young people strode up to an unsuspecting individual, slapped them harshly across the face, and used their mobile phone camera to instantly sent the shocked reaction to all their friends. It had mutated to extreme forms, one case where a teenage girl was photographed as she was raped. In its lesser form, members of the public, usually single women, were approached by a young person and, out of the blue, walloped into the face as the camera recorded and transmitted instantly their reaction to the assailant’s mates.
    It was becoming a national pastime.
    After the terrible bombings in London, it actually increased, photos of victims, their faces covered in blood, were snapped by youngsters on the prowl. The tabloids loved it, displaying shocked outrage, of course, but it was the sort of story they couldn’t invent and there was no indication of it abating. Psychologists, sociologists, et al. wrung their collective hands and said it was a sign of the corrosion of society and one more stage in the total breakdown of moral values.
    A teenage boy, arrested after he’d happy slapped a woman in her seventies.
    Asked why he did it, said:
    ‘ ’Cos it like, you know, rocks.’

11
     
    FALLS APPEARED FOR duty with her stripes proudly displayed on her arm, she tried to appear cool with it, but a shit-eating grin threatened to engulf her features at any time. The other cops, grudgingly went:
    ‘Sarge.’
    The term like bile in their respective throats. She was summoned to Brown’s office. She was confident the Super had a little congratulatory speech prepared, the first black female sergeant! She thought to herself:
    It’s been a long time coming .
    And she resolved to be suitably humble and, what was the term, yeah, self-effacing.
    She knocked on the door, her sense of anticipation at its zenith. She was taken aback to see PC Lane there, the fuck was he doing at her moment? Lane was the lamest cop on the force, so bland he could only be described as beige. He’d had one moment of glory when he was photographed with Tony Blair, but old Tony had lost a lot