Blackout (Sam Archer 3) by Barber Tom

Author:Barber, Tom [Barber, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

Just outside the parking lot of the hospice, a teenager in a matching white Adidas tracksuit leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette and looking into the car park. He'd been walking past, heading down to the bookies to place some bets on the Premiership football this weekend, when something had caught his eye. He'd stopped and lit a cigarette, and was now taking a closer look at what had grabbed his attention.

His name was Leon. Just turned nineteen years old, he'd been in and out of juvenile detention centres and then prison since he could remember. He'd just finished his most recent stint twenty two days ago for breaking and entering. He and two friends had gone after an expensive apartment in Fulham that they knew belonged to a Premiership footballer. The guy was on over a hundred grand a week, so they knew there would be plenty of cash-value stuff to steal inside.

Leon had been cautious and planned ahead, waiting outside in the car with the other two and watching the player head out with his girlfriend on a Saturday night. However, every alarm went off the moment they picked the lock and stepped inside the front door. There were cameras all over the building and on the street outside and although they got out, two days later Leon and his two pals were hauled into Hammersmith and Fulham in handcuffs and booked. It was the latest in a growing list of convictions, the first of which was a simple fine for possession of marijuana, and was a list he knew without a doubt would get longer.

He'd started when he was thirteen. Like most kids in his area, he used to go down to the park and sniff glue or smoke puff, drink bottles of cider and try to get lucky with the local girls. But then he'd begun smoking more and more, and by the time he was sixteen he’d developed a fondness for cocaine that had taken all of his money. By that point he'd already stopped going to school. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been. And two months after his sixteenth birthday, his mother kicked him out of the house after finally having enough of him stealing from her. He didn’t only take cash, he stole stuff in the house that was worth anything and traded it in, and the final straw was when he stole a favourite necklace from her dresser and pawned it for fifty quid.

Out on the street, broke and alone, he’d started staying at hostels, with friends or at homeless shelters. He’d also started pick-pocketing to keep himself going. He didn’t have any qualifications and no way was he going to do manual labour or construction jobs for a living. Although he'd been nervous about pick-pocketing at first, worried he’d get caught, he'd been surprised at how easy it actually was. Given the congestion and close proximity of passengers on the trains on the Underground, a simple two finger

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