The Chop Shop Read online

  They talked amongst themselves with fatigued mumbles and whines. Michael held his breath, clamping one hand over his mouth so he didn't gag on the smell. One of them sniffed at the air. Feet appeared at the end of the chimney, filthy calf muscles twitching. The man stood there, groaning, as a lump of dribble and saliva slipped from his mouth and splattered on his toe. He ran away, and the others followed him.

  Michael hit the illumination button on his watch, and the digital display lit up. He waited two minutes before finally crawling out of the chimney, and there they were, still visible in the distance, hunting rats around an overturned lorry. It was five-thirty now. He wanted to go home and forget about the day. His nerves were shot, his head dizzy and his muscles burning. He marched on towards the last warehouse.

  Rusted shipping containers filled the interior, stacked tall enough to reach the roof. The locks were all forced, and nothing remained inside them. He swept the shadows with his pocket torch as he stalked the aisles. Something shiny lay discarded on the ground.

  He knelt down and pointed his torch at it. A shred of plastic sandwich wrapping with a smear of white mayonnaise still on it. Michael scribbled the shop's name into his notepad. The darkness faded at the other end of the warehouse. He slowed, holding his breath, and flicked the torch off.

  Light came from around the corner behind the next row of shipping containers. He reached into his coat pocket for the radio, only to hesitate. The warehouse was so silent he could almost hear the pounding of his own heart. He pressed his back to the container and edged forward, peeking around the corner.

  Michael squinted as the light blinded him. Offices. The windows were smashed; glass lay scattered across the ground. He saw a man sitting inside with his back turned. Michael pointed the gun at the back of his skull.

  “Turn around slowly.”

  The man gasped. His spine stiffened as he raised his hands. “Don't shoot me. I'll leave and never come back, I swear.”

  He turned around, dressed in faded clothes full of holes. His grey beard had grown long and wild. “I thought this place was abandoned. I didn't know you were coming back. Please, don't shoot me.”

  Michael lowered his gun. “Who are you?”

  “Me? I'm just Bob. I'll be going now, if you let me, I mean.”

  Michael raised his police identity card for the man to see. He stepped over the broken glass and moved closer. “I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  Bob looked up at the ceiling. He pressed his hands together. “Oh Jesus, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Look, if I'd known you guys were all police officers, I would have gone a hundred miles in the other direction.”

  “Be quiet and stop making so much noise. People have ears, you know. Is there anyone else here with you?”

  He shook his head. “I came here on my own. The lights were on earlier, and they're never on normally. When your guys left, I thought maybe you might have left something behind. Food, drink, something I could salvage; stuff like that. I wasn't trying to rip you off. I swear.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, they weren't Assurer police officers. How many were there?”

  “Five or six of them. They had equipment with them, but they put it all in their truck and drove off through a gap in the fence.”

  Michael slid a five pound note across the table. “Get out of here and go buy yourself something to eat. Watch out for those crazies in the white sheets. It's best if you don't come back. Ever.”

  Bob was still for a moment. His eyes darted back and forth between Michael and the money. He extended a hand, slid the money into his pocket and took lame steps out of the office. “I hear you, I hear you. They aren't too dangerous if you can keep your distance. You learn how to move unseen when you end up on the streets, otherwise you become dead.”

  Michael waited for the man to go. He searched the office for evidence, but the place had been stripped bare of everything except the tables and chairs. A dog began to bark outside. He tensed up and removed his gun from its holster.

  Silence returned. He turned off the lights, took up his torch again and made for the nearest exit. Michael stopped; something protruded from the darkness in the corner. He turned the torch on it. The shadows flickered, and he saw concrete stairs going down into the ground.

  Michael took a deep breath. His muscles trembled as he padded down the stairs. They turned a right-angle and went even deeper. He paused on each step, listening to the silence before he dared to continue. The door was open.

  He flicked the light switch and squinted until his eyes adjusted. A portable generator and boiler took up most of the space. Neither worked. A syringe had rolled against the wall, and a trace of transparent liquid remained inside, still fresh. He reached for his radio and decided to call it in.

  It was nearly eight in the evening when he got home. He locked up his car, secured the perimeter cage and held his nose to block out the stench as he went inside his flat.

  The smell was starting to seep beneath the door now. Michael kicked the draft-stopper against it and dumped his briefcase in the corner. He stood for a moment in the middle of his flat, not thinking, not moving, just savouring the comfort of home, and then he finally slumped on the sofa. He turned on the television, flicked through all five channels and turned it off again.

  Sometimes he thought he needed a hobby, something that didn't involve his job, but there was nothing. Gone were the days of first world comforts, replaced by a simple past time called survival, and everybody got bored of that one eventually.

  The day left him feeling filthy. He ran a hot bath and sat idle in the water, propping his head up with one hand and an elbow on the side. Silence grated on his nerves, so he wiped the water off his hand and reached over the side of the bath to flick the switch on the radio.

  The music came out too loud. He dialled back the volume until he could hear himself think. This song was new to him. Strange, he thought he'd heard all the left over music they played on the Lower London stations. The audio crackled, distorting the singer's voice in places like a tin can full of wasps. Twenty years old he guessed. It was too different to the music they made now.

  The foxes were already howling and whining when he got round to eating his dinner of plain rice and soggy vegetables. He moved closer to the window, watching them prowl the streets for scraps. They passed his window, dozens of them, each one taking the time to sniff at anything that seemed edible.

  His dinner tasted terrible, so opened his window, tipped the leftovers off his plate and watched them feed.

  Michael stuck his head through the doorway and into the operations room. Corporal Hill sat slumped in the chair, helmet by his foot and rifle resting unloaded in the corner. He groaned and shifted position. His eyes were still shut.

  “Corporal,” Michael said. “Corporal.”

  “What? What is it? I'm trying to sleep.”

  “It's eight forty-five in the morning.”

  Hill snorted. “Exactly. I've been kept on patrol all night and when that clock hits nine, I'm going straight home. What do you want?”

  “The trouble by the listening post; did you manage to nip it in the bud? I had a friend there.”

  Corporal Hill sat up straight. “Oh, that. Yeah, we got there. We popped a couple of them with the autocannon, and the rest split before we could take any prisoners. Your friends in the listening post were fine. I doubt there'll be any more trouble there now. We got seven kills, no casualties on our part. Pretty good shooting if you ask me.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  “It's all good. Now you would look at that? It's nearly time for me to go home. I'm starving.”

  Michael continued on to the detectives' office. Richard leaned back in his chair as he sipped from the foam cup of coffee. “Hey, mate.”

  “Hey,” Michael said. “Where's everybody else?”

  “Late, I guess. There's some shit going on down the road. They're probably caught up in the traffic. They mentioned it on the rad
io.”

  “I didn't have mine on. Did you turn anything up?”

  Richard frowned. “No, they're all useless. Deliberately useless, I expect. You?”

  “Yeah. Get your coat, we're going to Lower Westminster. I need to check out the business registries. I'll tell you more in the car.”

  “We should take my car,” Richard said when they exited the building. “It's faster than the piece of junk you're running. No offence.”

  “Fine.”

  They set out on the road, finding themselves stonewalled in traffic behind a red double-decker and whatever else lurked ahead of it. The bus was covered in gang tags and graffiti, and wire mesh protected its windows. Michael leaned against the glass and spotted a yellow and red sign just past the bus. “Roadworks.”

  “I should have taken the other way. Sorry,” Richard said. He sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Listen, I don't think we got off to a great start. David is a bellend, and so are Heather and Maria, but Archibald is sound. Our introduction in the office could have been better.

  “Connor was a good detective; we hadn't been working together that long, and then a couple of gang bangers plugged him in the face. They're still out there, you know, getting off clean without a single shred of grief.”

  “Don't worry about it, I understand.”

  “So, want to cut me in on the loop about last night?”

  Michael explained everything. Traffic started to move again.

  “At least it's a lead. I don't know how far we can follow, though. Harris is twitchy. Don't tell him I said that, but he is; he doesn't always have an eye for the long term. Maybe it's our corporate superiors breathing down his neck or something, I don't know, but he'll yank a case in the blink of an eye if he thinks there's an easier target. Short term gains, long term losses.

  “I mean, he'll nip stuff in the bud if it gets serious, but stopping it from getting serious in the first place? Forget it.”

  Traffic stalled them again on Putney Bridge. Floodlights illuminated the river Thames, where rusted barges and crashed aircraft protruded from the water's surface on a bed of scrap metal and debris. Dead bodies caught on the metal, bobbing up and down with the current. Some were fresher than others. The remains of a Russian fighter jet sat on top of it all like a crown.

  The river turned green, its natural colour, when the lights swept across.

  “For God's sake. Road works, police checkpoints, traffic jams; we'll be lucky if we even get back to the station by night,” Richard said.

  An Assurer police tank and personnel carrier were parked just off the road at the other end of the bridge. The traffic inched through the checkpoint in small fits of movement. Finally they made it to the front of the queue. They rolled down their windows and flashed their identity cards at the police officers.

  “Same team,” Michael said.

  One of the policemen scanned the cards with a laser. “Where are you going?”

  “City records. We're investigating a case.”

  “Go on through,” the policeman said. He waved for his section to move the barrier.

  They drove on. Michael stared at the postcard resting on the dashboard. Blue seas, even bluer skies and a sandy white beach with palm trees; a digitally altered image of what life would never look like.

  “Where is that?”

  “The Bahamas. It's just a postcard I found somewhere. I like it, it's a nice picture. Too bad I'll never go there; I could save a year's salary, and it might just get me out over the Atlantic before they dropped me out the emergency exit. Where would you go?”

  Michael shrugged “I wouldn't go anywhere. You become desensitised to living here, right? Everything bad that happens, you just chalk it up as another ordinary day, because it's normal and you see it all the time. Go to a place like that and then come back here again? It's going to be one hell of a wake up.”

  “If you had told me that a couple of years ago, I'd call you cynical. Nowadays? Nowadays I think you've got the right idea.”

  Richard found somewhere to park close to Lower Westminster. They journeyed the rest of the way on foot, approaching concrete blast walls defaced with pink and white graffiti. A surveillance camera pivoted in their direction.

  Business people swarmed the streets, too poor for Upper London and too rich for Lower London. Three policemen stood to the side with a sniffer dog on its leash. The queue to enter the security zone stretched down the road and around the corner.

  Richard smiled to himself as they jumped the entire line and headed straight for the checkpoint. “This job does have its perks.”

  People stared at them; part envy, part frustration and part curiosity. They passed through the checkpoint and left the lines of people behind them.

  “Let's hope this business is registered. It doesn't take much for somebody to open up shop in some abandoned dump and start selling pilfered goods, bad food and God knows what else. Nobody in the council would ever know unless they wanted to be legit,” Richard said.

  “Maybe, but the way I see it, nobody wants to buy food from an unregistered shop. Even the poor tend to hold out for enough food stamps to buy proper food rather than eat the shit that some of these lowlife arseholes peddle. So, whoever bought that sandwich is either wary enough that he's willing to risk food poisoning or disease, or he bought it from somewhere legitimate.”

  The business registry stood eight stories high, surrounded on all sides by countless more metal and glass buildings. Private military contractors patrolled the alleyways, mingling with people who never gave them so much as a second glance. Steam rose through grates in the ground and swallowed them up like early morning fog.

  They walked up the stairs. Richard stopped at the door, moving aside to let a woman in business suit, short skirt and boots pass by. He watched her behind for a moment.

  “Okay, there's one thing that bothers me about all this. Stuff gets left behind all the time; evidence, whatever, it happens. But that's just it. You found a used syringe and a scrap of sandwich wrapper. These people stripped that place clean of everything else in less than a couple of hours. You know what I mean? You were right, these guys are professionals and I really don't like pissing up their tree.”

  They walked inside. A contractor stood off to the side with his carbine, six feet tall and wearing a pair of orange ballistic glasses.

  “It's a different company guarding this place every time I come here,” Richard said.

  “Hey, I don't like the look of you. Up against the wall, now,” the contractor said.

  Three other contractors appeared from around the corner. The men were on them before Michael could blink, pinning them both to the wall. He tried to remove his identity card, only for one of the men to snatch it from him.

  “You might want to check that before you start breaking bones,” Michael said.

  “Yeah, get the fuck off me.’I don't like the look of you'? You're going to need a better excuse than that, you twat,” Richard said.

  One of the contractors removed their holstered weapons and held them up for the others to see. “Carrying firearms is a serious offence.”

  “Right. We walk into a fucking government building carrying loaded weapons, just so we can get arrested.”

  Michael felt fingers curling around the back of his neck; they dug deeper into his flesh, and he tensed up, grimacing at the pain. He looked out the corner of his eye at the contractor inspecting his identity card.

  “Sorry,” the man said with a smile. “Our laser scanner is faulty. I'll have to go and get the replacement, but I'll try not to take too long.”

  Richard attempted to move. The contractor tightened his hold until he forced a grunt from him. He squirmed and muttered an insult under his breath.

  A small crowd watched them from behind security glass and a second set of doors. One worker was whispering something snide to a female colleague; she let slip an expression of amusement.

  The contractor returned with the same laser scanner on h
is belt and read their identity cards. “It does seem that you are authorised to carry those weapons. My mistake. You can't be too careful these days. I mean, they did blow up a police station, didn't they? Let them in.”

  He spoke every word with the sincerity of a child in a secondary school drama class.

  Michael rubbed his neck. He snatched the card back from the guard and slammed the door open hard enough to rattle the security glass. The onlookers turned away and departed.

  “That's a very unbecoming attitude, young man. You should be ashamed of yourself,” one of the contractors said, feigning the voice of an elderly lady.

  He heard the sound of their laughter for several seconds, until it was cut off by the security door shutting behind them both.

  “We can't let that slide,” Richard said.

  They approached the reception desk, hidden behind another screen of armoured glass. “What are you going to do? Piss in their cup of tea?”

  Richard looked back over his shoulder and scowled. “I'll think of something.”

  Michael tapped on the glass. The reception raised her eyes from the computer screen and looked them over with a disapproving stare. She was in her sixties, hair turning grey, and there was a miserable air about her, as though their very presence had somehow offended her.

  She pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

  Her voice was monotone.

  Michael showed the receptionist his identity card. “We need access to the business registry.”

  She frowned. “You can wait one moment.”

  One moment was thirty seconds of non-stop typing. She hit the door buzzer.

  “The next time you delay a police officer, you're going to have a lot more than dementia to worry about,” Richard said into the microphone.

  The receptionist said nothing. They went through the door and into a corridor of bright lights and partition walls.

  “What a cow. I hate coming to this place.”

  A crowd of people surrounded the lifts, so they took the stairs to the third floor. He found a room of public computers and slumped down into one of the chairs, feeling the hard plastic digging into his flesh.