First thing you always notice going into a stranger’s gaff is the smell. Damp and smoky, that sickly-sweet smell of a spoonful of gear. It paints a picture. Once you’ve seen one gaff you’ve seen them all. 

I let the Opel roll into the spot in front of the apartment building. One of Finto’s fellas coming up short on his ­ dividends, we’d been told. 

Made-in-Turkey Finto Maher, with the hairline to his eyebrows and the gnashers like he had the back side of a train ticket stuffed into his mouth. Rough cunt, but weren’t we all? 

Flute there, stony and quiet in the passenger seat as usual. I was starting to think that he was just an odd bastard with not much more to him. Didn’t stop me following his lead, though. 

Not that I enjoyed being told what to do. I was Wardy. Tony bleeding Ward. Lethal weapon forged in 1997 with a rap sheet that’d put them all to shame. Wild card just waiting for my time in the sun. Let someone else do the thinking. The things you tell yourself. 

I knocked the engine off. The Opel was a boxy little hatcher with a baby-blue paint job. A Corsa-A GSI. They don’t make them like this any more, and I don’t mean the engines. I couldn’t give a rat’s about what’s under the hood, I’m talking about the way this yoke looked. All them straight lines. Cars of its like today look like bubbles. They lack character. The Opel used to be my ma’s, but really it’d been mine before it was ever mine. 

Once I started stealing the keys it wasn’t long before she let me have it altogether. First thing I ever owned, and it had been waiting patiently for me in Kenny Boyle’s driveway all those years I was away in England.

Flute got out first. This area was the council’s abandoned child. They were coming to the rescue all too late, building reams of new gaffs for foreigners to clash with poor Irish locals who’d been left here the whole time listening to the screech of hot motors in the early hours of the morning. What stood was apartments and low-roofed houses, blocky and different-coloured. 

Big black streaks of damp down the cream-coloured sections. These buildings were meant to look cheerful, to convince the people who moved in back then that this was a place where they’d be looked after. 

The December air was baltic, but my flash new Arc’teryx jacket did well to keep it out. Flute had the fur from the hood of his Canada Goose parka pulled in close to his head. I told him earlier he looked a fucking eejit in it. Paired with those all-black Air Max Pluses, he cut the same shape as half the youngfellas who dealt for chaps like the one we were about to meet, and the ones who like to let on that they did. Outstraight, everyone wanted to look like a real-one but it didn’t take much to find out who was only a spoofer these days. Flute would tower over any of those little wannabes anyway, the size of him. The parka was too short for him nearly. I would have sized him up by one, brought him somewhere to take in the extra length so it landed just right on the thighs. His wide shoulders meant his sleeves came up a bit short for my liking too. I wasn’t jealous of big lads for that reason. At least I could stay looking sharp no bother to me. 

The grey aul day did the place no favours, but it gave a sheen to Flute’s blue eyes – like a husky, or one of those pitbulls with the grey-blue coats. One of those dogs that stare at you without so much as a tail wag. The sort that’d make you think twice about reaching your hand out. They were something else to look at, all the same. Gorgeous animals. 

I stretched my arms and legs in anticipation. I could feel the buzz around my joints. I followed Flute up the outside staircase to the front door of one of the terraced gaffs, doing a little chicken dance with my arms to loosen up my shoulders. 

The gaff had another apartment underneath it that wouldn’t get any sun on a good day. I’d been in a few gaffs like that in the past, not needing to really know if the sun was up or not so long as there was enough supplies to go around. Back then I was only a messer. 

Flute knocked on the door. No answer. It was freezing. 

‘He’s deffo still in bed,’ I said. I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets. I saw us both there in the glass, the size difference between us. I thought of that old cartoon, Pinky and the Brain. I straightened up to look bigger. I wasn’t a short-arse or anything, but he sure made me look like one. Not far over the way a group of four or five teenagers were watching us and making no effort to hide it. I could hear them muttering to each other. 

Flute knocked again. Then he tried the handle of the door and lo and behold, the fucking thing opened.