“If you’re picking your fucking nose and miss Kai, then I will personally kick your nads back into your torso.”
“Take it easy, Heiko, don’t piss yourself. I’ll pay attention.”
I was waiting at the end of the tunnel and could see Kai running toward me through the long, straight glass tube.
He was yelling something like: “They’re coming! The cocksuckers from Gladbach! They’re here!”
I took the stairs down to street level in a couple leaps, twisting my ankle, and ran against the pain. Over to the parking lot, where the whole gang was already waiting and rubbing their hands.
“All right. Good job, Heiko,” and then Axel turned to Tomek, who was supposed to lead the splinter group. “You’ll come out in front of Kaufland supermarket.”
Tomek and the others ran across some company’s grounds to position themselves in an alleyway that came out at about where the corridor did, in order to attack the flanks of the Gladbach group. Axel and the larger group of men followed me back to the end of the sidewalk. Until we arrived, Jojo was supposed to try to pin down some of the Gladbach bastards from the hiding spot he’d taken up on the roof, in typical sniper fashion. He was our best marksman with the Airsoft. A true fucking ace with the gun. His rifle packed a punch, but nothing that could really harm anyone from that distance. It was just supposed to provide some distraction. It was such an awesome feeling, I can still remember how the phalanx of hooligans was running behind me. I kept on looking back and felt like the leader of a horde of rhinos or something. Even if I once heard, I think, that they’re loners. Regardless. It’s all about that feeling. All of them on the double. And I’m out in front of them. Even if I wasn’t allowed to participate in the actual clash. At any rate, we turned onto the sidewalk and could already see the group from Gladbach bellowing, and heard the dull shots of Jojo’s air rifle. Then Axel resumed the leadership. Like in fucking Jumanji, when Robin Williams yells, “It’s a stampede!” Galloping toward the guys from Gladbach, who are still totally preoccupied with dodging Jojo’s BBs. Just before Axel and the others reached them, Tomek and his group came out of the alleyway between Kaufland and the factory grounds and had just knocked a couple of them over. Then Axel and Hinkel, who was a little more fit than he is today, and Töller and the rest of them reached the opponents. Unfortunately, the four of us had to watch from a safe distance, but I still felt like I was in the middle of it and would catch some punches, but dodge even more, and dish it out myself. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. That’s how much it was thumping inside me.
I almost feel like a salt-of-the-earth working man when the alarm makes me roll out of bed at four thirty in the morning, to knock back a quick cup of coffee and then roll down the highway, half asleep, to my construction job. But that’s where the comparison breaks down. I don’t work in construction but rather a knucklehead gym, and it was my uncle calling, not the alarm, that yanked me out of my hammock.
“Heiko, get up. You need to come to the gym right now. You have to give me a hand with something. Get your ass up and don’t fall back asleep!”
He personally meets me up at the driver-side door and pulls on my arm, tugging me inside. There’s a pile of cigarette butts next to the back door, smoked down to the filter.
“What’s going on?” I ask, and notice that the thing that had been scratching my neck the whole way was the label of my sweatshirt. It’s on backwards. While I slip out of the sleeves and rotate it around my body till it’s right, Axel explains the situation: “Check it out, it’s like this. One of the Angels called me earlier. Said he had a tip from a friend in the drug squad—”
“The rockers have pals in the police department?” I ask.
“Pals, friends, informants. Doesn’t make a fucking difference right now. Listen to me, for fuck’s sake! Anyway, they’re really worked up right now. Reason for existence or some sort of bullshit. There’ll be raids conducted all over the state today. Don’t know who they have it from. Maybe it has something to do with the van. Fuck!” My legs suddenly start to tingle. As if they’re telling me to run. “Anyway. We’re on the list too. You have to help me get rid of a couple things before they come over.”
“And when is that?” I look at the clock on the wall. Five twenty.
“He couldn’t say exactly, but before eight for sure. Come on!”
He pulls stacks of paper from the file cabinet, and just when I think that’s all of it, he goes somewhere else and gets just as much paper as before. And plastic bags full of vials and pills.
“Fuck, where was all that?”
“Stop asking retarded questions. Run that shredder!” He points to the big office shredder, a massive white block, as big as a copy machine that dominates a corner of the office. I’d always asked myself why he needed such a huge paper shredder. Well, there you have it, I think to myself, and start pushing stacks of paper through. The machine is running at top speed. Rattling like a tractor or a mower whose blades kept hitting rocks. I don’t have much time to look over the contents of the papers. Seems more like scratch paper. Bullshit scrawled all over. Most of it looks like some sort of lists of names and corresponding numbers or sums of money. Some of them, this much I could gather, not peanuts. Once a bucket is full, I take it to the showers and dump it out on the tiles there, sloped down toward the drain in the middle. Then I douse it with lighter fluid and light it up. When the scraps of paper have burned down, I turn on the showers. My uncle says we don’t have to worry about clogging the drain right now, but the drain is nothing more than a big pipe in the ground with a large grill attached. It’s not going to clog that fast.
“They’ll smell it,” I say and wipe the sweat from my forehead.
“Smell what?”
“Well, that someone was playing with fire. Know right away what went down.”
“So what,” he yells from the office, “does that give them any evidence? Nope! So shut up and keep at it!”
Because the shredder is the hardest working employee this morning, I’ve soon destroyed all the paperwork. While I’m at it, my uncle’s busy using all the toilets in the building to dump bags of drugs and flush them down.
The whole time he’s babbling away: “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Break my neck. Break my bones.”
Once in a while, I see him pause, pick out certain pills from the bag, and throw them down the hatch. I help him flush. A rainbow of pills swirls down the drain. Even after he’s stopped talking to himself, I think about his words. All these years, I’ve never asked what actually goes on in here or what I may be missing. I wasn’t tremendously interested or just thought it was okay. My god, letting the bikers hawk their wares here. But I wouldn’t have done it differently if I was the boss. But that’s exactly it! Who’s actually the boss? Or bosses? Then for some odd reason, I think of an old TV series with a similar name. I think it was Who’s the Boss? Fuck if I know why I thought of that. Just occurred to me.