The Power(16)

She shakes her head.

‘OK, then.’

He shows her how to do it, with a rolled-up fifty from his wallet, and tells her she can keep the note when they’re done, perks of the job. She feels very clear and very clean when they’ve done it. It’s not that she’s forgotten what happened to her mum. Her anger is still pure and white and electric, but she doesn’t feel the sadness of it at all. It’s just a thing she heard about once. It’s good. She is powerful. She has this whole day in her fingers. She lets a long arc go between the palms of her hands, loud and sparking, a longer arc than she’s ever managed before.

‘Whoa,’ says Ricky. ‘Not in here, all right?’

She brings it down and leaves it glittering around the pads of her fingers. It makes her want to laugh, how much she has and how easy it is to set it loose.

He tips a little bit of the powder into a clean bag and pops it into her jeans pocket. ‘Just in case you need it. Don’t do it unless you get scared, OK? Don’t do it in the car, for Christ’s sake.’

She doesn’t need it. Everything belongs to her, anyway.

The next few hours are shutter-snaps. Pictures like on her phone. She blinks and there’s a picture. Blinks again and there’s something else. She looks at her watch and it’s 2 p.m., looks a moment later and it’s half past. She couldn’t worry about anything if she tried. It’s good.

They’ve drilled her in the plan. Primrose is going to be there with just two blokes. Weinstein, his mate, has sold him out. Brought him to this warehouse saying he needs to have a meeting. Bernie and his boys will be waiting behind some of the packing cases with the guns. Two of the boys will be outside to close the doors, seal them in. Take them by surprise, let her rip; all done and home in time for tea. Primrose won’t expect it. Roxy’s only really coming along because she deserves to see it happen, after what she’s been through. And because Bernie’s always been a belt-and-braces man, that’s how he’s survived as long as he has. So she’s hiding upstairs in the warehouse with a peep-hole view down through the grating of the upper level, surrounded by boxes. Just in case. She’s there, looking down, when Primrose arrives. Shutter open, shutter closed.

When it goes down, it’s quick and deadly and a complete clusterfuck. Bernie and the boys are downstairs, they shout to Weinstein to get out of the way, and Weinstein does this thing, this shrug, like he’s trying to say, Hard luck, mate, hard cheese, but he ducks down anyway as Bernie and his sons advance, and that’s when Primrose starts smiling. And his blokes come in. So many more of them than Weinstein said he’d have here. Someone’s fucking lied. Click goes the shutter.

Primrose is a tall man, thin and pale. There’s twenty of his blokes here if there’s one. They’re firing, scattered around the entrance to the building, using iron half-doors up against the rails for cover. There are just more of them than Bernie’s men. Three of them have Terry pinned down behind a single wooden crate. Big, slow Terry with his huge, white, acne-marked forehead, and as Roxy watches he peeps his head out from behind the box. He shouldn’t do that, she tries to shout, but nothing comes out.

Primrose aims carefully, taking all the time in the world over it; he’s smiling as he does it and then there’s a red hole in the middle of Terry’s face and he falls forward like a felled tree. Roxy looks at her hands. There are long electrical arcs passing between them, even though she doesn’t think she ever told them to do that. She should do something. She feels afraid. She’s only fifteen. She pulls the little packet out of her jeans and sniffs up some more of the powder. She sees the energy running along her arms and hands. She thinks, and it’s like a voice outside her whispering in her ear: You were made for this.

She’s on an iron walkway. It’s connected to the metal half-doors downstairs which Primrose’s men are using for cover. There’s a lot of them down there, touching the iron or leaning against it. She sees what she can do all in a flash and it makes her so excited she can barely sit still. Her one knee starts jiggling. This is it, these are the men who killed her mum, and now she knows what to do. She waits until one’s resting his fingertips on the rail and one’s leaning his head against it and a third’s clutching on to a handle to lean down low to fire. One of them gets off a shot that hits Bernie in the side. Roxy breathes out slowly through pursed lips. You’ve had this coming, she thinks. She lights up the rail. Three of them go down, backs arching, crying out, fitting and gnashing and eyes rolled back. Got you. You asked for it.

And then they spot her. Freeze frame.

There aren’t many of them left now. They’re evenly matched, maybe Bernie’s even got the upper hand, especially cos Primrose is a bit scared now; you can see it on his face. There’s thundering steps on the iron stairs, and two blokes try to grab her. One of them leans close to her, cos that’s scary to normal kids, to any little girl, and it’s just instinct, but she only has to put up a couple of fingers to his temple and let a jolt go across his forehead and he’s fallen to the floor, crying bloody tears. The other one grabs her round the waist – don’t they know anything? – and she gets his wrist. She’s learning it doesn’t take much to stop them touching her, and she feels pleased with herself until she looks down and sees Primrose heading out the door that leads to the back of the block.