Chancer

Ross Greenwood

Description

How far would you go to protect your friends?

Will, Carl, Aiden and Darren are inseparable from the day they meet at school. The combination of Will’s street smarts, Carl’s brains, Aiden’s loyalty and Darren’s fearlessness mean they are a force to be reckoned with, and together they feel ready to take on the world.

But solidarity can’t insure against tragedy, and when life tests the boys to their limits, slowly the four choose different paths as they take the step into adulthood.

Darren has always been the one to take chances, with a dangerous side that's a blessing and a curse. As the years pass by, Darren’s schemes and mistakes start to weigh heavily on his friends. One fateful day, Will finally has to decide if friendship and loyalty are worth risking everything for.

Life doesn’t always give you a second chance to make the right choice…

This book was previously published as LAZY BLOOD.

What readers are saying about Chancer by Ross Greenwood:

'This book will blow you away.' White Books

'Funny, shocking, sad.'Reader's Select

'I can honestly say that this book had me hooked from the start.’

''I even found myself getting up at night just to read a few more chapters.'

'Really great read with strong characters, and an ending I didn't see coming!

'Miss this real page-turner at your peril.’

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Policier
• Mashups
• Humorous
• Thrillers
• Coming of Age
• Adventure (Guyana)
• Suspenso
• Friendship
• Street crime
• General officer
• City Life
• General
• Adventure
• Crime
• Suspense
• Thriller
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Boldwood Books
• Date de parution: 23 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781802804027
• Langue: English

Extrait

CHANCER



ROSS GREENWOOD
CONTENTS




I. The End


Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3


II. The Beginning


Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47


Author’s note

Acknowledgments

More from Ross Greenwood

About the Author

About Boldwood Books
Pete White,
1946 - 2018,
Sorely missed, until we meet again
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
FERNANDO PESSOA
PART I

THE END
1
25TH AUGUST 2014

Prison. Again. This time, though, people had died. His mind flickered back to his previous stay many years ago. He remembered smiling at the banal promises of the great unwashed as they assured each other this would definitely be their last time inside. Did they believe it? Was it just more jail bullshit? Or was it the need to talk and to hope?
Well, he had known back then it would be his first and only spell inside and he had scornfully smiled at those deluded souls, confident that he wasn’t like them. Yet here he was. Not for a short sharp shock for a driving offence that had typically been Darren’s fault. This time, he could spend the rest of his life here.
Will shook his head gently; even now he was still blaming Darren. He wouldn’t be doing that any more. The thought of his friend started to unlock the door on the compartment in his brain where he had put last week’s disaster. Not now, he thought, but the horror was building there, bulging and pulsing, demanding to be heard and let out. It was like the police investigating a crime. At first, gently knocking and peeking through curtains before quietly leaving. They would be back though and more insistent, until the door was broken down and all hell was let loose.
The prison van lurched as the obese driver got out, bringing him back to the present. He could see him through the tinted window searching in his pockets. The huge sweat patches on his shirt grew bigger as he hunched his back to light another roll-up. An hour they’d been parked outside the prison. It was his third cigarette.
He might as well have had it in the van as he seemed intent on blowing the smoke back into the cab. It could have been his intention to wind them up. He must have known nearly all of the prison population smoked and after the trauma of today’s events the new residents would be begging for one. More likely though it was just a lack of thought, or interest, but Will was confident it would soon provoke the idiot in the cage in front of him into another round of ranting.
Will let himself debate for a moment which part of his anatomy he would donate for a shiny unopened pack of Benson and Hedges Gold, but he doubted he’d have been able to smoke it anyway as he was so dehydrated. As luck would have it, the driver had parked at such an angle that the powerful evening sun was beating directly on his side. They called them sweatboxes because the sensation was that of a takeaway rotisserie, gently cooking those within. The last drops of glistening moisture collecting on the glass sides. He could almost hear God’s voice in the distance saying, ‘Your punishment starts here.’
Not only was he parched, but he was bloated too. Last time he was here, he could remember vividly an old man on the wing saying, ‘Do not get nicked on a Saturday, it’s nasty. It’s two days until the courts open, so you’re in the cop shop until then. That’s two days of microwaved all-day breakfast, three times a day. No showers, no books, no sleep, no fun.’
Sage advice as it turned out. Since Saturday Will must have had five meals, admittedly not all breakfasts, but reheated aeroplane food basically, and he had the bloating feeling that went with it. He felt if he could get a fart out it would last a good minute, leaving him kneeling on the floor exhausted but temporarily happy.
No such luck. He also had the cramps such fare induced and was bursting for a wee. Two hours he suspected he’d been stuck in the van, as obviously they’d taken his watch, as well as his shoelaces, to add to his disorientated state.
The other two occupants had already been inside when he’d got on, possibly from another court. That meant their bladders too must be under considerable pressure. He’d only heard the guy on his left speak once, about an hour ago. He had a mature voice, even elderly sounding. Most likely he sounded different before this journey began. Suddenly from nowhere, the man cried out.
‘Please, sir, I really need to use the bathroom,’ he said. Almost like Oliver Twist, polite and educated. Will suspected it would be a long time before the poor guy would be using a toilet that could even remotely be described as a bathroom. No one bothered to reply.
As the driver got on and the van lurched the same way, liquid rippled into Will’s compartment and he knew someone’s resolve had broken. Don’t think about it, he thought. You clearly wouldn’t need to be Galileo to locate the source but it was the weakening effect it was having on his own self-control that was more concerning. He stared down as it trickled around his laceless shoes and into some slits in the floor and idly wondered if the van was designed that way, or that the drainage system was a lucky fluke. It wasn’t going to make the van smell any worse however, as that would have been impossible.
He knew he was responsible for his part of the aroma, maybe more than his fair share. His shirt was attached to his back like a layer of cling film and his jeans felt as if they weighed three times more than when he put them on. They sat below his hips heavy with sweat, his belt long gone. The worst was his underwear. He could have wrung the sweat out of his socks and he dreaded to think on the state of his boxers. Will wasn’t sure where the drone of the idling diesel engine finished and the hum of his own body began.
He was perched forward on the small seat with his head resting on the panel in front. Another trickle of sweat ran off his head and down the side of his greasy face, leisurely bouncing off his stubble as it slalomed down to his chin and then hung there like a diver on the high board. As it dropped, he felt a pressure on his chest. A rising panic coursed through his body, his brain fluttered with thoughts of completely losing it.
Deep breaths, Darren always said. Control your breathing and you control your fear. A deep breath of the fetid enclosed air was far from appealing but he didn’t want to be one of those carried off the van, a sobbing, snivelling, weeping mess. It always got back to the wings, so he sucked it up.
Will blinked the stinging moisture out of his eyes and tried to think of happier times. He remembered a sunset, the moment the sun went down and the temperature dropped, and tried to sear the moment onto his fragile mind.
2

The van jumped forward as the driver suddenly engaged the gears and Will banged his forehead on the front partition, forcing him into the present again. The barrier rose as they rolled towards the entrance. He wasn’t sure if the prisoner in front had been asleep and this had woken him, or if he had been waiting for this moment to resume his baiting. As the huge prison entrance door slid open and welcomed them into its dark mouth the youngster let out a cheer, stamping and drumming his feet, shouting through the crack in his door.
‘Yee haa, paedo. Welcome to hell. Bruv, you’re gonna need a new ass after they’ve finished with you in here. No escape in those cells. You’ll be like a kid-fiddling rat, stuck in a trap. If I see you, man, I’m gonna cut you up.’
Jesus. Will winced. YOs. Bloody Youth Offenders. All bluster and posturing. No doubt chest stuck forward as he bellowed in his best street accent. Will hoped he hadn’t been so irritating and stupid when he was young. He grimaced as it came to him that it was more than twenty years since he had turned eighteen and he was pretty sure he was in deeper shit than most in here. So who was the fool?
These kids nowadays all seemed to have ADHD and verbal diarrhoea. Surely with all that pent-up energy being locked in a cell was the last place you would want to be? No wonder they went nuts when they were let out on association.
The banging caused the guard to shout through to the back.
‘Jake, can it now, you idiot, or I’ll issue you with a warning.’
‘Like I give a shit, screw,’ the lad retorted. ‘You make me laugh with your fucking bits of paper. You don’t know who you’re dealing with here. Go get your friends, put your riot suits on. I’m gonna fuck you up.’
Will pushed up on his seat to give his arse a break from the unforgiving hardness and gave himself a smile. It should be very concerning when you were on first-name terms with the prison transport staff. He had heard a similar threat from a prisoner on his last stay, but it had come from a forty-year-old black man who could do the frog song with his chest muscles. The man had been bear-sized, well over six feet tall and holding a pool cue and ball. It had carried a lot more weight.
Prison was surely a great place for role models and learned behaviour. He suspected the officers would know exactly what they were dealing with here and this vocal lad would be sobbing for the mum he never knew before the night was out.
The screws weren’t your enemy here anyway, time was. Time was a strange commodity. Here you couldn’t give it away, yet to a dying man it became the rollover lott