Powder Wars by Graham Johnson

late.
    â€˜Quit while you’re ahead,’ that’s what I always said. This was going to be my gap year, if you will. A time to chill out and ponder about the future. I looked forward to these little furloughs, in all fairness. It got me thinking that I might have preferred my life more if I’d gone straight. In fact, I used to imagine how sound it would be just to have an ordinary job, like everyone else.
    To be honest, I used to fantasise about it. About getting up and going to a factory and that. Weird I know, but it used to give me a warm feeling. It goes without saying that I had well enough dough stashed away from all the devilment to keep me going for a long, long time during a crime-free period. There was also the Oslo, which was ticking over just nice. It was throwing up half-decent bits of work every so often – one offs and that, to be fair. Also, under the good husbandry and stewardship of my good self and the wife, my legit businesses were beginning to reap in some half-decent wages as well. Nothing mad, but wages is wages at the end of the day.
    Taking long holidays here and there was something I’ve often done throughout my criminal career. Get a good score and go straight for six months. It was something all of us did: Billy, Ritchie, Ronnie, even my auld feller and that. Even if me dad got £20,000 out of a safe, he’d be out tarmacing or whatever the following week or doing the demolition or whatever. Keeping things looking normal to the outside world.
    It did us good, these straight-goer breaks, because more often than not it was a chance to get into some other legit business. Was also a good opportunity to get the busies off’ve our backs and all, too. We were always under surveillance for something or other and the busies were always TO’ing [turning over] my kennel looking for swag.
    As if, by the way. By that time we had a good network of lockups and safe houses and that, even our own little warehouses well out the way and that. Those early morning calls were most unnecessary. In all of their relentless searches, the busies could never get nothing. Frustrated to fuck, they were. To wind me up they’d confiscate my cars saying that they could forensic them or what have you. Just harassment and that, but no use whinging about it. The police couldn’t prove nothing, but they were definitely getting wise to the Hole in the Wall and being a straight-goer for a while meant that they had to take you off their target list. They couldn’t justify putting a van on your plot if you weren’t committing crime. But no matter how comforting time out was, it was never long before the urge to get up to no good came back.
    Towards the end of the year, myself, Ronnie and Ritchie met up to plan what we were going to do. Ronnie wanted to get back into the warehouses, but Ritchie told us about these top card-markers he’d been getting into. Card-marking is basically safe-cracking and commercial burglaries in which we were getting our cards marked about hidden cash and jewels and so on. But Ritchie’s card-markers were triple-platinum, knowmean? Only interested in big hits and they weren’t timewasters, so they said.
    â€˜Nice one,’ I said to him. ‘This could be a nice way of easing ourselves back into gainful employment.’
    On the first one, the card-marker told us about a millionaire businessman who was skanking the tax big time. He was putting all his money, including the slotted tax, into diamonds. He figured that one day he might get an early morning call off the Revenue and his master plan was to just pure offski with the jewels, knowmean? Spain, Kenya wherever. But he didn’t figure on being taxed by us first.
    The card-marker told us that there was about £50,000 to £100,000’s worth of these jewels in one safe alone, in a house off Prescott Road in Liverpool. The card-marker also told us when the family went out, their comings