The Reverend Doctor took another deep breath and cut the intestinal wall. He pulled out a ball of deck tar that must have been the Devil’s own job to swallow.
‘You wily fox,’ he chuckled at Yoshi. It was a clever way to protect a pearl from being eaten by gastric acids, and if there were a pearl inside it would be of extraordinary size.
Forcing impatience out of his trembling fingers, the Reverend Doctor scraped gently at the tar with his scalpel. He was looking for a lunar lustre, and almost missed the revelation that awaited him.
His eyes widened in wonder at the perfection of the black pearl that appeared to be born from the darkness of the tar. It was worth a fortune, even to his untrained eye. His heart raced faster still, the tremble rose from his fingers to engulf his whole being, and he felt a surge that connected him to the people of this parish more powerfully than any prayer had ever connected him to God. He suddenly felt the swell of lust and greed that was the mainspring of men like Pierce.
How far could this pearl take him from the bond that tied him to the Torres Strait? Could it secure him the private practice on Wickham Terrace that would make his suit for Eliza’s hand undeniable, even to her father’s most stubborn resistance?
Could it fetch him further, to Harley Street?
The Reverend Doctor felt the furnace door of temptation open in his face. He tried to close it with faith.
How many missions and hospitals could he build with this one black pearl? How much good could he convert from the evil that seemed to glow in his hand? How poetic that he could carry God’s word to this barbaric frontier through the instrument of its own sin.
Then he saw, as if through Yoshi’s vacant eyes, an image of himself as fierce and menacing as Pierce. He shuddered with the thought.
‘Thank you,’ he said solemnly to Yoshi when the crisis finally subsided. ‘Thank you for the lesson. And please take my offering in return.’
He placed the pearl back into the dead man’s body, closed up the cut, and silently asked forgiveness for the untruth he would soon utter.
Dead Ringer
In five years as what he liked to call an elimination agent Harry had never had a request like this from a client.
‘You realise it will add significantly to the cost,’ he said, scooping the last of the cappuccino froth from his cup. ‘My operator will run the risk of being identified by the target.’
‘If your operator does the job properly, the target will be in no position to identify anything. She’ll be dead,’ Harry’s client hissed at him over her cappuccino. She was very careful not to get any froth on her lipstick.
‘Of course. But elimination is a risky business. There are variables and contingencies to ...’
‘Cut the bull and tell me, can you kill the bitch the way I want or not?’
Harry winced and looked around the coffee shop. It was crowded, but fortunately everyone else seemed too lost in their own conversations to have overheard. He made shushing noises with his finger to his lips and assured her he could deliver what she wanted. Harry hated words like kill. He cultivated a much nicer vocabulary of targets and eliminations and delivery systems. Sounding like a marketing executive, he thought, reassured clients that they were dealing with a professional. Harry liked being a professional, and this woman’s approach unsettled him.
‘I’ve told you before, money will be no problem.’ She put a slim black briefcase on the table and pulled out a manila folder and a chequebook. ‘Tell me the figure and I’ll write the cheque now. Fifty percent up front, the balance on satisfactory completion. Those are your terms?’
Harry smiled. This was better. This was businesslike. He particularly liked the manila folder. He slid his coffee cup out of the way to put his own briefcase on the table and pulled out a pocket calculator. Every inch the professional.
‘Absolutely,’ he said, tapping busily at the keypad. The numbers he punched were meaningless. He only turned the thing on as part of the show. He already had a figure in his head, and now he doubled it. ‘Sixty-eight thousand, two hundred and ten dollars. But I can round it down to sixty-eight.’
She wrote a cheque for $34,000 to the account name Harry had given her. It was one of several accounts he operated, carefully selected to match with the client’s own business so the transaction would not raise unnecessary official eyebrows. Harry prided himself on such details of professional discretion. He made sure his clients always knew how much of his services went towards protecting their interests, without informing them how much he protected his own. This coffee shop, for instance, where they had not met before and would never meet again, was in Bulimba, a long way off Harry’s Valley beat and even further from his client’s Hamilton neighbourhood. Before setting up the meeting, Harry had put her through half a dozen security checks that he told her about and almost as many more that he didn’t.
Harry opened the manila folder after she passed it across to him with the cheque. It contained a few sheets of word-processed paper and a colour photograph of a woman. Harry’s brow furrowed and his moustache bristled with surprise.
‘This looks like ...’
‘You no doubt recognise her from the social pages,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ said Harry. ‘And she lives in Melbourne?’
‘The addresses are in the folder. Home and office. Also the words I want her to hear.’
The woman stood up and tucked her briefcase under her arm. She made the movement look like a military drill. ‘There’s nothing else you need from me, I take it.’
‘Only the time frame,’ Harry said.
She considered some private possibilities and smiled to herself, then became businesslike again. ‘Any time before the end of the year will do.’
‘December 31 then, absolute deadline.’ Harry packed his calculator back in its case and cringed inside his expensively labelled suit. How could he have said dead?
She offered her hand at an angle, palm slightly down, so that Harry wasn’t sure whether to shake it or kiss it. He shook it and she said, ‘You may need every week of that time to track her down, though. This target, as you like to call her, travels on business quite frequently.’
Harry waited until she had disappeared around the corner before putting his briefcase back on the table. He ordered an Irish coffee with double whisky and opened his Filofax to the section marked Consultants. This was the part of the elimination agency business he enjoyed, matching the man to the job.
He ran a neatly manicured fingernail down the list of names and frowned. Interstate assignments were always tricky. The added anonymity that came with a different city was offset by the extra risk of working on unfamiliar territory, and the best operators would want an arm and a leg for this one. The requirement to deliver a personal message to the target was the challenge. It didn’t enter Harry’s head to take the money and make the termination without the message. That would be below his professional standards. But he knew his consultants did not always share his ethics.
Harry pondered the problem all the way to the bottom of the Irish coffee. He was at the point of just giving the job out and to hell with ethics when the solution came to him.
Muldoon.
Of course, Muldoon would be perfect. Too rough under any other circumstances, but just the boy to accept this assignment as a challenge. He’d probably even videotape the event if Harry pushed him hard enough.
Harry went to a phone booth and dialled an 018 mobile number.
‘Yeah?’
The din of a public bar at full tilt echoed behind Muldoon’s voice and for a moment Harry almost succumbed to an attack of professional standards and hung up. Instead he said, ‘Are you interested in an assignment? Major league.’
Harry winced at the expletives that roared in his ear and said, ‘If that means yes, call me at the Kangaroo Point office at four o’clock. Not on that bat phone, either.’
He hung up and walked to his car. Telephones made Harry nervous. You never know who else is
listening, particularly talking to someone with a record like Muldoon’s. That’s why Harry didn’t use a mobile himself. But his business functioned on phone calls. They kept the parties out of direct contact with each other. Quarantining, Harry called it, and it was his insurance policy. Muldoon would be briefed strictly on a need to know basis.
Harry arrived at the phone box in Kangaroo Point with five minutes to spare. It was one of a dozen marked on a list Harry sent to his consultants. He changed the list every six weeks.
Harry let the phone ring exactly five times before he answered it.
‘Major league. You mean it?’ Muldoon asked after he had got through Harry’s security protocol. He was trying not to sound excited. This would be his first paid hit.
‘Interstate job,’ said Harry.
‘Cool!’ Muldoon’s excitement rose an octave. ‘What’s the score?’
‘Six thousand. Three now, three on satisfactory completion.’ That was something else Harry liked about the elimination agency business, the margins.
Muldoon could not stop himself whistling into the phone. Six grand for what, a couple of days? A week’s work, tops. Then he thought it was not good to sound so eager, so he said, ‘How many?’
‘One. But there are conditions.’
‘Such as?’
‘You have to deliver a last-minute message.’
‘You mean, like, say it personally?’ Muldoon was grinning. This would be fun. But he still didn’t want to come across as an eager amateur.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but you pay expenses on top. I travel first class.’
Harry wondered whether to haggle. He knew he could beat the kid down, but he’d already been on the phone for five seconds longer than his security limit.
‘First class flight,’ he said, ‘and two nights five-star. After that you’re on your own.’
That’s how, a few days later, Muldoon opened the package delivered by a newspaper boy who was wondering how to spend the twenty dollars he’d just earned and found two wads of meticulously sorted banknotes. $3,000 plus $1,500 expenses, clipped to two sheets of paper and a photograph of a woman.
The following Friday afternoon Muldoon was at Eagle Farm airport. If his ancestry had been from the other side of the North Irish Sea, he would have pocketed the money and booked economy. That’s what Harry had expected him to do. But Muldoon was relishing the feel of the thicker square metre of carpet in front of the first class ticket desk, and hoping the cute attendant could not see the tattoo on his forearm under the sleeve of his new white shirt. She mustn’t have, because she told him his ticket would get him into the private lounge.
He was ordering a beer at the lounge bar when he saw her. He couldn’t believe his luck. He checked the photograph in his wallet to make sure and smiled to himself. This was going to be the easiest six grand he’d made in his life. He had his hit in his sights without even leaving town.
Muldoon took his beer to a chair that gave him a clear view of the woman and the two men she was with. They were dressed for business and they were talking seriously. Muldoon heard enough of their conversation to learn that the men were on the next flight to Melbourne and the woman had just flown in. He played a hunch, cancelled his flight, and sprinted to where he’d left his old Falcon in the long-term car park.
He played a second hunch and followed a limo to the kerb outside the terminal. His guess was right. The woman marched out of the terminal and into the back of the big white car. She handed the driver a neat leather overnight bag.
It was an easy tail up Kingsford Smith Drive and across the bridge at Breakfast Creek. The rush-hour traffic made it harder through the valley into the city, but he still had the limo in sight when it turned towards the setting sun and swept down along the river again on to Coronation Drive. He was close behind it when the driver turned right past some old terrace houses, cruised to the top of a slope, pulled a sharp U-turn and dropped the woman in front of a poofy looking bunch of bars and cafes.
The avenue was crammed with cars, so Muldoon whipped left into a side street. Damn! He’d never seen so many BMWs and Range Rovers crammed into one suburban street. He drove on anyway, and the sweat under his arms was not just from the hard red sun that seemed hellbent on impaling itself on the spiky stacks of the Fourex brewery over on Milton Road.
Two blocks down he got the break he needed. Wedged into a small V of land where the road crushed against the railway line was an old timber house with high verandas and flaking paint. An old mango tree filled the yard and stretched its arthritic branches out over the street. The roadway there was studded with rotting lumps of storm-dropped mangoes and streaked with vivid splashes of flying fox shit. Muldoon did what none of those BMW drivers dared. He parked his heap in the empty space under the tree.
He sprinted back up the street to where the neon lights were starting to wash the evening sky in delicate shades of pink and purple and started to hunt for his prey through the maze of tables and chairs that stretched up the slope of the footpath.
He got lucky for the second time that afternoon. He found her in the third place he looked, sitting alone at a table near a clump of palm trees. She looked like she was waiting for somebody. She ordered a drink.
Muldoon found a table he could watch her from and settled in for the wait. In his new shirt, tie and lizard-eye sunglasses, he felt completely invisible within the crowd that surrounded him. Like a hunter hidden in deep camouflage. To complete the cover, he resisted his thirst for a Fourex and ordered the same limp-wristed beer in a clear glass bottle that seemed to be the go here.
He watched her.
After a slow drink she flipped open a mobile phone and dialled. Muldoon couldn’t hear what she said over the chatter, traffic and mood music, but her body language was loud enough to get through a rock concert. Whoever she spoke to was very sorry about running late. Maybe they weren’t sorry before she called, but they sure must have been after she hung up.
She ordered another drink. That was the fourth Muldoon had seen her consume inside an hour. Halfway through it she did what he had been hoping for. She picked up her handbag and walked towards the back of the place.
Muldoon sauntered after her, casually as he could, past some swanky boutiques and around a corner to where a graphic sign politely pointed out the toilets. He was doubly relieved to find the men’s and women’s doors side by side. He’d had a couple of beers himself by this time.
He peed and waited until he heard the muffled hum of a hand dryer through the wall. With a glance to check that no one else was around, he wove out through one door and in through the other as fast and sure-footed as a full-back.
The woman was drying her hands in front of the mirror. She was alone; the cubicles were both empty. She saw him in the mirror. She turned to face him, her hands dripping water and her face ablaze with indignation.
‘Don’t you know you’re in the wrong place?’ she demanded.
‘Lady, I’m in exactly the right place.’ He grinned. He punched the button on the hand dryer to keep the noise level up.
‘Here,’ she snatched a neat purse from her bag, plucked out two hundred dollar notes and tossed them at him. ‘Take your frustrations out where they belong.’
He stepped closer towards her, screwing the bank notes into the white tiles under his foot. She had just given him a great idea.
‘How much more you got in there?’ he grinned broadly. ‘Make a nice bonus when I finish the job.’
‘Job?’ Her face suddenly went from anger to horror.
‘Man on a mission,’ he beamed. ‘And lady, you’re it.’
‘She sent you, didn’t she?’
‘Who sent me, Miss Banks?’
‘The bitch!’ Her voice was getting shrill now.
The dryer stopped, filling the small space with a cold, hard silence.
Muldoon punched the button again and wrenched the bag out of her hands in one sleek movement.
‘Got a message for you and everything,
’ he hissed.
He twisted the expensive leather strap.
‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ She put a shaky hand out. ‘You’ve made a terrible mistake ...’
‘That’s what they all say, lady.’ Muldoon was moving as he spoke. He used the one motion of whipping the corded strap over her neck to spin her around and pull her back to him. With one hand twisting the strap tight around her throat, he pinned her flailing arms to her sides and concentrated hard to remember the message.
‘Say hi to the old miser and tell him the empire’s in good hands.’ He smiled at her bug-eyed face beside his in the mirror and gave the leather strap one last violent twist.
He let her slump forward against the basin, punched the hand dryer again and ripped her handbag free of its strap. Robbery would be a good motive to keep the cops busy for a while.
Half an hour later he was back in the private lounge at the airport. Why waste a good first class flight ticket?
He was woken the next morning by his mobile phone, beeping and blinking on the bedside table.
‘Where the hell are you?’ a high voice rasped at him.
‘In bloody bed.’
‘You sound like it. Where’s the bed?’
‘Radisson Plaza, Cairns. If it’s any of your bloody business.’ Muldoon had recognised Harry’s voice.
‘Not Melbourne.’ Harry sounded flat. ‘Have you seen today’s papers yet?’
‘Are you kidding? At seven on Saturday morning?’ Muldoon blinked at the digital clock on the light control console.
‘Get the Courier Mail and call me back at New Farm.’
Muldoon dressed quickly and raced down to the shopping mall. He was excited. It must have been a good hit for Harry to call him so soon. Maybe he had another job? He bought the newspaper and sat down on the deck by Trinity Inlet to read it. He tore through the pages like a student looking up exam results until he found the story.
Murder by Sunshine Page 4