Shredder

Book 0: Crusher

by Niall Leonard

Genres: YA Action & Adventure; YA Family; YA Social Themes

Synopsis

In the gut-wrenching third and final novel in Niall Leonard’s Crusher series, Finn Maguire is lured back into the warring factions of the underworld by way of blackmail.
 
Finn “Crusher” Maguire has one simple task: to set up a meeting. But when that meeting is between the Guvnor and the Turk, two psychotic criminals vying for control of London’s underworld, Finn’s task proves to be anything but simple.  As the city cracks under a blistering heatwave and the UK is rocked by a series of terrorist outrages, Crusher finds himself caught up in a gang war full of carnage, corruption and treachery. To save himself and the girl he loves from being shredded to a bloody pulp between opposing factions, Finn faces horrifying risks and impossible choices.

Release date: April 14, 2015

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Print pages: 384

Sample

One
After about three days I stopped pissing blood. By then I could open my left eye all the way, and the welts and bruises on my torso and legs were shifting in color from imperial purple to sickly yellow-green. I’d barely been able to get out of bed, but I hadn’t been able to sleep either, partly due to the pain, but mostly because summer had arrived at last--the sort of summer we weren’t supposed to have anymore, with the sun blazing down day after day from a cloudless sky, and the air hot and still and sticky, even at night. But as soon as I found I was able to stand up, dress myself and walk, I locked the house and limped towards the tube station.
I could see people in the street glance towards me and look away, some even shifting their path to give me a wider berth. They seemed to think getting worked over with chains and crowbars was an infectious condition, and if they bumped into me they’d wake up the next morning with a black eye and a split lip. At the station I stumbled onto the next tube train, lowered myself gingerly into a seat and stared at my dark reflection flickering in and out of existence on the carriage windows: just short of two meters tall, mousy-blond hair, built like a boxer, right now with the face of a punchbag. As the train rattled its way east and dived under the city, the relatively fresh air of the suburbs gave way to the hot humidity of the Underground, its tunnels and platforms stinking like a sauna full of pigs. As more passengers crowded in, their tension and fatigue and irritation were as tangible as the sweat running down our backs.
Even on the broad granite-paved concourse of King’s Cross Station, sheltered from the sun by tall walls of red brick, the air was close and stale. Heading for the ticket office, I passed armed cops strolling slowly through the crowd, fingers twitching on the trigger guards of their submachine guns, caps pulled down over their eyes so you couldn’t tell when they were watching you, or profiling you. There’d been a terrorist attack on London a few days back, I remembered now, somewhere in the city center--I’d heard about it on the radio while I’d been washing bloodstains out of my clothes. A suicide bomber had detonated a backpack full of explosives in a department store packed with shoppers for a summer sale. Seven people dead, a score injured, some seriously; but if the Londoners around me were anxious or apprehensive that the same thing might happen to them, it didn’t show. I guessed we all felt the same--that the slim chance of sudden, messy death and dismemberment was just some more shit we city dwellers had to deal with, like the heat and the traffic and the sweaty, heaving crowds of other Londoners.
The train for York stood sleek and gleaming at the platform, its engines thrumming on standby. The interior was so fiercely air-conditioned I shivered with cold as I settled down in a seat towards the center of a carriage, with a table where I had room to stretch out my long aching legs. It was an off-peak service, so few people had bothered to book themselves seats, and as departure time approached several other passengers staggered up, hefting bags slightly too big for the aisle, hoping to join me at the table. I didn’t exactly glare at them, but my body language and my battered face must have shouted that I wouldn’t welcome company. They lugged their bags and staggered on. Fine by me; I needed time and space to think about what had happened, and what I had been told to do, and what I was going to do instead. I’d been thinking about it for days and even now I wasn’t sure if this was a good idea. But almost imperceptibly the train jolted into motion and slid from the dark station platform out into the hard blazing sun, heading north, and it was too late to turn back.
My name is Finn Maguire; as a teenage amateur boxer I was nicknamed Crusher, because I was good at it. It was my dad who signed me up for boxing lessons, to try and straighten me out after a stint in juvenile detention. The ploy had worked, mostly--I’d abandoned my early career as a petty criminal and gone straight, and the skills I’d learned in the ring had come in handy, especially after my dad had been killed.
That was ages ago now, way back in the spring. At seventeen years of age I was alone in the world, though not exactly penniless; I owned a poky house in West London, had a few hundred thousand Euros in the bank and a castle in Spain I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. I’d inherited all that after my dad died, and none of it made up for losing him. When I’d set out to discover who’d murdered him, the trail had led to a gangster called Joseph McGovern--“the Guvnor”--undisputed king of the London underworld, if you believed the tabloids. I’d been there when a crooked cop working for McGovern had turned on him and got shot, and I’d only survived to not tell anyone the tale because the Guvnor had taken a shine to me. That was an honor I would gladly have avoided.
McGovern had had to leave the UK while the fuss died down, and in his absence contenders had been scrapping over his empty throne; the eventual winner turned out to be not much older than me--a foreigner known simply as “the Turk.” Somehow he’d heard that I was McGovern’s pet, and had turned up on my doorstep four nights ago with half a dozen heavies in tow. It was they who’d worked me over by way of payback for interfering in their boss’s business. They would have kept going until I was nothing but minced offal, but it turned out the Turk needed me to introduce him to the Guvnor. He’d made it clear that if I refused it wouldn’t just be me who would suffer.
Beyond the train’s tinted windows the northern countryside was tearing past in a green blur. A large, bored young woman in a polyester housecoat pushed a rattling trolley loaded with junk food up the aisle. She didn’t flinch at my battered face when I flagged her down and ordered some food, because she never even glanced at me. She plonked a shiny plastic apple and a slopping beaker of scalding coffee onto my table, slowly counted out my change and moved on, thanking me in a singsong voice that sounded like a voicemail droid. I sipped carefully at the coffee, waiting for my swollen lip to sting. It didn’t. I always healed quickly; it was one of the few things I had going for me.
I wasn’t scared of the Turk, any more than I’d been scared of the Guvnor. I felt fear, yes, but not for myself. I’d learned in the boxing ring that you can channel fear, so it focuses you and drives you, and it was driving me now, north to the city of York. I had no close family, and few friends anymore: the only person I cared about was a girl called Zoe Prendergast. Somehow the Turk had learned about her, and how I felt about her--and that was weird, because I hadn’t known that myself. Not until the Turk had shown me that video of her going about her student life, unaware she was being observed, oblivious to the fact that she was a cheap chip in a poker game being played by two psychos hundreds of miles away. As soon as I’d seen the footage I’d known that if it was the last thing I did on this earth I’d see to it that Zoe was safe.
I had two choices: I could do what I was told, and track down the Guvnor somehow, and not tell Zoe of the danger, or I could take her out of the equation--warn her about what was happening, urge her to run, to find safety somewhere. Maybe the Turk knew beforehand which I would choose--he’d already been playing me for weeks, tugging me back and forth on a string like a cheap plastic yo-yo--but I’d given up trying to second-guess him. All I could do was what I thought was right. And I was pretty sure that meant telling Zoe everything. I couldn’t phone her--I wouldn’t have known where to start, and I wasn’t sure she’d even believe me. If I was going to tell her, it had to be to her face.
If I was going to tell her.
Suddenly I felt the train slowing; we were already approaching York station, and I could see up ahead the golden walls of the old city, gleaming like a Disneyland castle and dotted with tourists. I wondered if they knew that not so long ago those walls had been decorated with heads on spikes and bodies rotting in cages being picked to pieces by crows. As I stepped down from the train onto the long curving platform of York station a wall of hot air hit me--fresher than London’s secondhand smog, but just as oppressive. According to the street maps on the Net it was a ten-minute walk from here to Zoe’s place; ten minutes to change my mind. I could give myself more time, I knew, if I joined the sunburned tourists waddling up and down, taking badly composed photos of each other on their compact cameras. But I turned right out of the station and headed south towards Zoe’s house.
Soon I felt as nervous as a thirteen-year-old on his first date. Would Zoe even be glad to see me? Her online page still said she was “not in a relationship,” but last time I’d looked one particular guy seemed to appear in every recent picture she’d posted, rubbing elbows with her. Maybe offline he was rubbing more than her elbows, but if he was, Zoe didn’t care to advertise it. To hell with it, I thought. I’m not bringing her flowers, I’m here to warn her that her life is in danger.
Except . . . I was the reason it was in danger, and by disobeying instructions I’d made that danger much, much worse. Suddenly I understood that I wasn’t here just to help Zoe--I was here because I wasn’t prepared to take orders from a sick, vicious little shit like the Turk.
It wasn’t too late; I could still turn back, let Zoe go on living her blissful student life, drinking and shagging and sleeping through lectures, unaware of the Turk’s knife at her throat. Even now, when I was right outside her place--the tall, crooked, crumbling student house I’d seen in Zoe’s postings--with my hand resting on the latch of her garden gate, looking up the path to her dented front door, even now I could turn back. The next train back to London left in twenty minutes. If I set off now I wouldn’t even need to hurry.
I dropped my hand from the gate, stepped away and turned round. And walked right into her.

Into them, I mean.
She was with him, the guy from her Facebook photos. He was nearly as tall as me, and wiry, with startling ice-blue eyes, reddish-blond hair and cheekbones that could cut steak. You could tell he and Zoe were together--together together--just by their proximity, the way he hovered within grabbing-and-snogging distance. Also by the bright pink flush on Zoe’s face when she saw me standing at her gate. She looked guilty, I realized, as if I was some Victorian husband who’d found his errant wife in a brothel. Her big green eyes were staring, her full lips had parted in surprise, and for once she seemed lost for words. A tiny part of me felt gratified by her reaction; the rest of me felt as excruciatingly embarrassed as she must have been, because it suddenly felt as if we were in a cheesy TV soap. It was Zoe’s friend--boyfriend, whatever--who cracked the awkward silence with an easy laugh. He had beautifully white and even teeth, I noted, trying hard not to hate him for it.
“Hi,” he said, as if he already knew who I was. Did he? I wondered.
“Finn . . . what the hell are you doing here?” I could see Zoe struggling to comprehend my presence here in a different city; I was a character from another life, a dark, bitter and sordid one she had tried to leave behind. And I hadn’t even told her the bad news yet. “And what the hell happened to your face?” she said.
“The usual,” I said. I looked at her companion.
“Patrick, this is Finn . . . a friend of mine from London.” She didn’t look at him, I noticed, or at me when she made the introductions. Perfect Patrick flashed his perfect teeth again and extended a hand. I shook it; his grip was cool and firm, strong without being macho. He worked out, I could tell, and the easy way he moved suggested he’d trained in fighting--something trendy, I guessed, like kickboxing or capoeira. I could see him measuring me up the same way, and hoped my livid scars counted in my favor.
“Finn, hey,” said Patrick. “You coming in?” A Londoner, and expensively educated, by his accent. He stepped forward and opened the gate.
“I need to talk to Zoe,” I said. “It’s kind of private.”
I could see Zoe trying to read my battered face, and I tried to keep my expression neutral, because this was none of Patrick’s business. But Zoe had already guessed that I wasn’t there to take her to tea, and what Patrick couldn’t pick up from me he was picking up from her.
“You can use our room,” he said. “I’ll chill in the kitchen, fix us some coffee.”
Our room. He’d hardly spoken ten words, but he’d already established ownership. Slick. Zoe noticed it too, and a frown flickered across her heart-shaped face.
“No, we’ll take the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll see you in a minute.”
Patrick shrugged as if it made no difference to him, gave me a friendly nod and flashed his dazzling smile. “No problem,” he said. “Laters, yeah?”

The kitchen was badly painted in bright colors and filled with shabby mismatched furniture. It smelled of mice and old tea bags.
“What was wrong with those halls of residence?” I said.
“Everything. And you can’t stay there during the summer break. Patrick suggested I move in . . . into this house, I mean.” She was blushing again. It occurred to me briefly that I should let her off the hook, make some comforting comment about what a nice bloke Patrick seemed to be and how glad I was to see her doing well. I didn’t, though.