Point Blank

never happened. But at the same time—he had to admit it—part of him wanted it all to happen again. Sometimes he felt that he no longer belonged in the safe, comfortable world of Brookland Comprehensive. Too much had changed. And at the end of the day, anything was better than double homework.
    He lifted his bike out of the shed, unlocked it, pulled the backpack over his shoulders, and prepared to ride away. That was when he saw the beaten-up white car. Back outside the school gates for the second time that week.
    Everyone knew about the man in the white car.
    He was in his twenties, bald-headed with two broken stumps where his front teeth should have been and five metal studs in his ear. He didn’t advertise his name. When people talked about him, they called him Skoda, after the make of his car. But some said that his name was Jake and that he had once been to Brookland. If so, he had come back like an unwelcome ghost; here one minute, vanishing the next … somehow always a few seconds ahead of any passing police car or overly inquisitive teacher.
    Skoda sold drugs. He sold soft drugs, like pot and cigarettes, to the younger kids, and harder stuff to any of the older ones stupid enough to buy it. It seemed incredible to Alex that Skoda could get away with it so easily, dealing his little packets in broad daylight. But of course, there was a code of honor in the school. No one turned anyone in to the police, not even a rat like Skoda. And there was always the fear that if Skoda went down, some of the people he supplied—friends, classmates—might go with him.
    Drugs had never been a huge problem at Brookland, but recently that had begun to change.
    A clutch of seventeen-year-olds had started buying Skoda’s goods, and like a stone dropped into a pool, the ripples had rapidly spread. There had been a spate of thefts, as well as one or two nasty bullying incidents—younger children being forced to bring in money for older ones.
    The stuff Skoda was selling seemed to get more expensive the more you bought of it, and it hadn’t been cheap at the start.
    Alex watched as a heavy-shouldered boy with dark eyes and serious acne lumbered over to the car, paused by the open window, and then continued on his way. He felt a sudden spurt of pure loathing. The boy’s name was Colin, and a year before, he had been hardworking and popular. These days, he was just avoided. Alex had never thought much about drugs, apart from knowing that he would never take them himself. But he could see that the man in the white car wasn’t poisoning just a handful of dumb kids. He was poisoning the whole school.
    A policeman on foot patrol appeared, walking toward the gate. A moment later, the white car was gone, black smut bubbling from a faulty exhaust. Alex was on his bike before he knew what he was doing, pedaling fast out of the yard and swerving around the school secretary, who also was on her way home.
    ‚Not too fast, Alex!‛ she called out, sighing when he ignored her. Miss Bedfordshire had always had a soft spot for Alex without knowing quite why. And she alone in the school had wondered if there hadn’t been more to his absence than the doctor’s note had suggested.
    The white Skoda accelerated down the road, turning left and then right, and Alex thought he was going to lose it. But then it twisted through the maze of back streets that led up to the King’s Road and hit the inevitable four o’clock traffic jam, coming to a halt about two hundred yards ahead.
    The average speed of traffic in London is—at the start of the twenty-first century—slower than it was in Victorian times. During normal working hours, any bicycle will beat any car on just about any journey at all. And Alex wasn’t riding just any bike. He still had his Condor Junior Roadracer, handbuilt for him in the workshop that had been open for business on the same street in Holborn for more than fifty years. He’d recently had it upgraded with an integrated brake and gear lever system fitted to the handlebar, and he only had to flick his thumb to feel the bike click up a gear, the lightweight titanium sprockets spinning smoothly beneath him.
    He caught up with the car just as it turned the corner and joined the rest of the traffic on the King’s Road. He would just have to hope that Skoda was going to stay in the city, but somehow Alex didn’t think it likely that he would travel too far. The drug dealer hadn’t chosen Brookland Comprehensive as a