Page 14 of First Blood

She understood that rappers and other celebrities had recently popularised the teardrop and hoped none of them ended up in prison, because newbies with teardrops made a lot of enemies.

Although she’d never been tempted to get one herself she understood that for some they were a personal expression; some were sentimental, some were statements but many were about a sense of belonging to some kind of group or gang both in and out of prison.

Every gang she’d heard of had some kind of mark. The Crips had many; some linked to disrespecting rival gang The Bloods. Even Hells Angels had a marker – AFFA, standing for Angel Forever, Forever Angel.

Gangs, the swallow.

‘Aha, got it,’ she said, tapping her nails on the desk.

She grabbed the jacket that had been off her back for less than fifteen minutes and headed back into the general office.

‘Forget Jerry Walker for now, Bryant. I need you to come with me.’

She knew where she’d seen this particular tattoo before.

Chapter Eleven

It was a thin line that separated the D for Dudley postcode from the B postcode for Sandwell and mattered very little for most people but a hell of a lot for two groups of people.

The Deltas was a gang that had grown out of the Hollytree estate back in the Eighties when the place had turned into the council’s dumping ground for evictees from other estates.

Over the years the gang had spread out from the estate, and despite the occasional turf war with the BBoys, both gangs had maintained an uneasy peace since a revenge war between two particular families on different sides of the dividing line had ended in a nine-year-old boy being stabbed to death during a fight. The whole of the force knew it was a tentative cease-fire and could be sparked back into all-out bloody war at any time.

Kim dragged her thoughts back into the car and tried not to show her frustration at the leisurely pace at which her new colleague drove the Astra Estate. After her Kawasaki Ninja it felt like a whole lot of metal.

‘You wanna check the cost of putting me on your insurance, Bryant. I’ll pay.’

He laughed politely.

‘Yeah, I’m not kidding,’ she said, as he neared the location to which she’d directed him.

Twice already she’d felt like a speeding car in her mind with the brakes suddenly slammed on. She expected her mode of transport to keep pace with the thoughts and developments in her head.

‘Okay, stop here,’ she said, as they reached the Holy Trinity Church in Old Hill.

‘Don’t they congregate down by what used to be the Blue Oyster chippy?’ Bryant asked, of the local faction of the BBoys.

‘I don’t want all of them,’ she answered. ‘Just one of them.’

And she knew exactly where he’d be.

‘Wait here,’ she said, as Bryant unclicked his seat belt.

She got out of the car and headed to a small underpass that led onto the Riddins Mound estate.

Built near the Halesowen Road overbridge in the 1960s, Riddins Mound consisted of 547 homes across three tower blocks, seven three-storey blocks of flats, nine maisonette blocks and four bungalows. Due to the estate falling into decline by the early 1990s one of the tower blocks was demolished while the rest of the estate was refurbished and community facilities improved.

As she’d suspected she saw a man sitting huddled on the ground. His jacket although dirty was of good quality and his shoes had better soles than hers. His hair was as long and straggly as she remembered it.

He held out a metal can, shook it and a couple of coins rattled.

‘Cut it out, Dundee,’ she said, coming to stand before him.

‘Aw, shit, what you want?’

This was a man she knew well and who also knew her. She’d arrested him for low-level drug pushing more times than she’d had hot dinners. If he emptied his pockets she’d be able to stay high for a month.

When Dundee’s shop was open he tied a bandana to the balustrade at the top of the underpass, and right about now folks would be looking out of their windows to see if Dundee’s weed store was open.