Ultimatum Read Online Free PDF Page B

five inches tall and two hundred and fifty pounds of pure, rippling, three-hours-a-day weight training’s worth of muscle, with a face like a bull and the kind of coal-eyed glare that puts the fear of God into citizens and criminals alike.
    Every few days LeShawn and his crew would travel round to all of Tyndall’s establishments and collect 80 per cent of the takings, the other twenty being paid to the dealer who ran the premises. In order to minimize the risk of being stopped by the cops or, worse, being ambushed by people keen to get their hands on all that cash, LeShawn always varied the days he carried out his collections, and the order he visited the crackhouses in, and he liked to use different vehicles. Street legend had it that in all the time he’d been doing the job, no one had ever held back cash from him, or tried to take it.
    And now all that was about to change.
    The job had been planned down to a tee. LeShawn might have worked hard to keep his movements unpredictable but it was his leather jacket that let him down. It was a knee-length black thing that he always wore when he was out on business, supposedly because it made him look cool and menacing, like Arnie in the first
Terminator
movie. It hadn’t been very hard to get a GPS sewn into the lining. A quick and silent break-in at one of his girlfriend’s places when he was staying over a couple of nights earlier, and five minutes later there were four of them planted, so if one ran out of batteries we could just switch on another. The GPS units were attached to a laptop in which the coordinates of all eleven crackhouses had been entered. As soon as LeShawn visited two of the addresses within fifteen minutes of each other, an alarm sounded, letting us know that he was almost certainly on one of his collection runs.
    So there I was, sitting in a Volvo C60 on a grimy, litter-strewn council estate in south Tottenham, with Cecil in the driver’s seat next to me, watching the GPS’s progress on his mobile phone. Three minutes earlier LeShawn had stopped at crackhouse number eleven, the last on his list, two hundred yards from where we were parked.
    Cecil was short, wiry and very, very hard. He had a very small bald head that reminded me of a fly’s, and the kind of terrifying glare that sets all but the most physically confident men on edge. He was looking at his watch, counting down the seconds. LeShawn and his crew didn’t like to hang around any longer than they had to at the places they visited. They went in, got the dealer to hand over the contents of the safe, gave him his cut, and left. It wasn’t their job to see if the money tallied with the amount of coke entering the premises. This was done separately by Tyndall’s finance people. The average length of time from the moment LeShawn’s car stopped outside a crackhouse to the moment it started moving again was four minutes and fifteen seconds. The one he was visiting now took slightly longer at four minutes and fifty, because there was a bit more of a walk to and from the front door.
    Which meant it was time to move.
    Cecil gave me a curt nod. ‘You ready?’
    ‘Sure,’ I said, sounding calmer than I felt. The adrenalin was pumping through me, heightening my senses. This job may have been planned to the last detail, but both of us knew better than most that in fast-moving, violent situations, the first casualty is usually the plan itself. The key when things go wrong is to ride with the punches and not panic.
    Cecil switched on the engine and pulled out, taking a left at the end of the road.
    The area was vaguely rundown but money had been spent keeping the streets clean and the walls free from graffiti. Low-rise sixties council blocks painted a tasteless mud-brown stretched out on either side of us. The road was quiet. Not many people commuted to work round here, and those kids who weren’t bunking off were already in school.
    Halfway down, a gunmetal-grey BMW X5 was parked illegally on the