Hit

by Tara Moss

  Mak nodded. ‘Gee, you’re good. I can’t tell you how many Australians think I sound American.’

  ‘You’re married to an Australian, then?’ Bogey asked.

  Mak felt her throat tighten. ‘Well, no…’ She raised her left hand. ‘See, no rings. I am in a relationship, but not married. Or engaged.’ Next subject, please. ‘You’re from Darwin? I’ve never been.’

  The Elvis man nodded casually. ‘It’s beautiful, but isolated. How long have you been in Oz?’

  ‘A year or so. So, are you in the band with Drayson?’ she asked, wanting to keep the subject off herself and her relationship with Andy.

  ‘I used to be in Possum,’ Bogey said. ‘But not any more. I make furniture now. I have a little shop down in St Kilda.’

  Mak watched him speak, struck by the fact that Bogey was actually very attractive, in an artistic sort of a way. Beneath those big, black-rimmed glasses he had long, dark lashes and sympathetic brows. He had roughed up his even features with the light stubble along his jaw and the spiked-up hair, Mak noticed, but it didn’t change the fact that he was classically handsome. His mouth had a pleasing shape, with a plump cupid’s bow in the centre that she tried not to stare at.

  Slow down on the wine, girl. You are going to need to be sharp later…

  ‘How nice,’ Mak said. ‘What kind of stuff do you make?’

  ‘Custom furniture,’ Bogey answered. ‘Cabinets, chairs, tables—that sort of thing. I work with a variety of materials.’

  ‘Ha!’ Donkey blurted from across the table quite unexpectedly, intruding on their conversation. ‘He also works with pine.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Please ignore him,’ Bogey said softly, not meeting the other man’s eyes. ‘You’re in Melbourne for work?’ he asked, attentively directing his focus to Mak.

  Mak was about to answer him when Drayson piped up from the end of the table. ‘Go ahead, tell her your trade.’ He leaned forwards and grinned with a tannin-stained mouth while Loulou clung lovingly to him. She’d abandoned her chair to perch in her lover’s lap.

  Mak waited for Bogey to respond but he tried to deflect the interest in himself by raising the bottle of pinot noir and asking if anyone wanted another top-up.

  ‘Come on, Booooogey Man!’ Donkey called obnoxiously. He was obviously stirring the pot about something, and it seemed to be a little annoying to Bogey, who heard the nickname and rolled his eyes.

  ‘I make furniture,’ he repeated, looking down at his plate. He doesn’t seem to like talking about himself, Mak noticed.

  ‘Come on. Your trade,’ Drayson said, not letting up.

  This is beginning to sound like a good story, Mak thought, intrigued when the teasing wouldn’t stop. What was it about his trade?

  Bogey took a breath. ‘Technically,’ he said softly, ‘my trade is coffin maker.’

  Mak’s jaw fell open. Now he had her complete, undivided attention. ‘A coffin-maker? I haven’t met a coffin-maker before. How interesting.’

  ‘I haven’t done it for a while,’ he said dismissively into his glass. ‘I don’t know why they want to bring it up.’

  Here he had been shy all evening and he was quite possibly the most interesting person at the table. She wished she’d got him talking earlier. She wanted to hear more. ‘How long did you do that for?’

  Bogey shifted in his chair. ‘I worked full-time as a coffin-maker for about five years before starting with furniture. The work was fine, but I prefer to make furniture for the living.’

  Coffins. Furniture for the dead. Mak had never thought of it that way.

  ‘He’s the Booooogey Man!’ Donkey yelled with glee, clearly thinking himself very clever. Mak was starting to see that the man was, quite literally, rather asinine. Perhaps he had done too many steroids to get that physique, or snorted one too many protein powders? She wondered if he was one of the reasons Bogey was no longer with the band.

  ‘Come on, Bogey, tell us more!’ Loulou said enthusiastically. ‘Her dad’s a cop and she loves the gruesome stuff!’

  Oh right, I love the gruesome stuff. Thanks, Loulou.

  ‘Your father’s a cop?’ Bogey asked, catching her eye.

  Mak nodded. And my boyfriend, but I don’t want to think about him right now…

  ‘Well, it was before I moved to Melbourne from a town near Darwin,’ Bogey explained. He did not seem entirely comfortable in the role of resident curiosity, but he continued nonetheless. ‘I was a teenager. I studied as a coffin-maker and worked for the local funeral parlour. It was no big deal. I lived in a small town, so everyone had to multi-task. I would pick up the bodies in my van, bring them back to the freezer, measure them up, build a coffin and then drive them out to the funerals. For a while there the funeral van had P-plates on it.’

  Probationary driver’s plates on a hearse—that would have been a sight to behold.

  ‘He had to do everything,’ Loulou said, chin in hand and long-lashed eyes so wide that the tips curled right over her arched pencilled eyebrows. ‘Imagine…’ She was clearly mesmerised by her own maudlin thoughts. She blinked her eyelids and they looked to Mak like two black butterflies taking flight.

  ‘Did you do any embalming?’ Makedde asked him matter-of-factly. If he had to multi-task, it was a good possibility.

  ‘No,’ Bogey said, ‘I didn’t learn embalming. I don’t think it would have been my thing. I don’t know that I could…’ He trailed off thoughtfully.

  ‘I once met an ex-model who was a part-time make-up artist, part-time embalmer,’ Mak offered. The model had been a stunning young woman, and unique thanks to her unusual trade. Like Bogey, she had needed some encouragement to talk about it, and most of the clients she worked with in the fashion industry had no idea of her day job. ‘She did the faces of both the living and the departed,’ Mak said. ‘She was a very interesting girl. Very level-headed. Someone has to do it, after all.’

  Bogey nodded. ‘Not me, though. I still remember some of those people as it is.’ His eyes stared into space as he recalled something of his former career. ‘The toughest one…the one who always gets me was this Aboriginal guy. He’d hanged himself in one of the overnight cells and the police called me to pick him up. When I came in he was still hanging there. I didn’t like that. It wasn’t my job—I just picked them up. I didn’t…you know, take them down or prepare them. I could see this guy’s face as he hung there from a noose he had made of his clothing, and it really disturbed me. The anguish on his face was terrible. He had not died peacefully. The pain in that cell was…palpable.’ Bogey swallowed and took a breath. ‘I did what I had to do, but that image really stuck with me. The next day—and I swear this is true—I was in the line-up for the welfare cheque for my mum, and this guy at the front of the queue starts screaming his head off. I looked up to see what was happening and it was him. It was the same guy I had taken down from his home-made noose and put in the freezer. I freaked out completely. I ran up to him and embraced him, and said, “Oh my God, you’re alive! How can you be alive?”’

  Mak was stunned. She was stuck on Bogey’s every word, right along with the entire table, although presumably they had heard the story before.

  But…?

  ‘The man in the queue was the identical twin brother of the man who had hanged himself in the cell,’ Bogey explained. ‘Identical. He needed his cheque early so he could afford to get to the funeral. But they refused him.’

  Mak didn’t know what to say. ‘That’s very sad,’ she managed. She could see it was not just some spooky party tale to him. To Bogey, that memory hit a real chord.

  After a brief, eerie silence, Donkey, with all the sensitivity of a sledgehammer, broke into another of his hecklings. ‘Tell her about the bikie gang! Go on, tell her! This is a great story. You’ll love this.’ He chuckled to himself in anticipation of the story.

  Bogey now appeared a little less awkward about telling the tales of his past, but it didn’t stop his hesitations. ‘I am sure Mak is bored with all this.
It was such a long time ago.’

  ‘No. I find it interesting…if you don’t mind telling me?’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’ He took a sip of his wine before continuing. ‘Well, I got to be known for making good coffins—remember, this was a small town, so there wasn’t much competition. There is a gang in Australia called the Coffin Cheaters. You may have heard of them, I’m not sure. The Coffin Cheaters are a big bikie gang, and they swung through our little town and asked me to make some coffins for their clubhouse—you know, Eskies, tables, that sort of thing.’

  Everyone else at the table had clearly heard the punchline of this story before, and they were grinning while they watched Mak for her response. She simply nodded for him to go on.

  ‘I did it for them,’ Bogey said, ‘and in exchange for furnishing their clubhouse with coffins, they tattooed me and gave me more drugs in that week than I have seen in my life since.’ Bogey looked to the table. ‘That’s all. That’s the story. Okay, someone else tell a story now…come on, guys.’

  Mak was mesmerised. She wondered about the tattoos he might have. What would a gang like that brand someone with? A great big coffin, maybe? A skull and crossbones? Was Bogey a ‘MUM’ tattoo kind of a guy with a nice, big fat heart inked onto his bicep under those black T-shirt sleeves?

  ‘How long ago did all that happen?’ Mak asked him.

  ‘Oh, about ten years ago. Ages.’ Mak began the mental calculation and Bogey confirmed her guess. ‘I was about eighteen at the time,’ he said.

  So Bogey was twenty-eight, only a year younger than her. For some reason he looked younger to Mak—perhaps compared to Andy’s hardened gaze. Drayson and Donkey were probably in their mid-twenties, and Maroon was the youngest at the table, Mak guessed. It was always impossible to guess Loulou’s age. She had the energy of a child, and her skin was always hidden under layers of carefully applied make-up. But Mak knew she was older than she let on—Loulou had even rubbed out the birth date on her passport.

  ‘So Bogey’s eighteen,’ Loulou said with glee, the wine making her yet more animated than usual, ‘and he’s driving a van full of bodies and a hearse, working for the Munsters’ bloody funeral home and getting tattooed by a bikie gang. Awesome,’ she said. ‘Makes Six Feet Under look like the Brady Bunch.’

  Bogey gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘The family I worked for was a little strange, I have to admit. Some of those things stay with me,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, like those tatts,’ Donkey quipped, laughing.

  ‘Yeah, like those.’

  Mak had the feeling that Bogey had meant the dead people he had seen, not the bikie tattoos he’d been branded with. As Mak herself knew, seeing a dead body—any body—was an experience that stayed with you, but especially when you see someone who has had their life ended violently. Images like that stick with a person for life. They had driven Andy to drink, and Mak to insomnia at one point in her life. Everyone handles the trauma of being introduced to violent death differently. But Mak felt that the peacefully departed had a different impact to offer. She felt that it was healthy for a young person to see a dead body in the morgue or in a hospital as part of their learning about life. That was how it had happened to her: she had seen her first dead body with her detective inspector father at the age of twelve. The impression she’d had, that the person lying on the slab was an empty shell and that some mysterious life force had very obviously moved on, had given her a belief in a spiritual realm that religion alone had not fully explained to her since. She’d seen that there was something there—something real and yet otherworldly. Something.

  There is no way to adequately describe death to someone who has never seen it.

  ‘Learning about death can teach us more about life,’ Mak whispered quietly for Bogey alone.

  He turned to her and nodded. Their eyes connected again. It could be that they shared a common bond in death; maybe it was that which she had noticed in him earlier.

  ‘Anyway, I am a furniture-maker now,’ Bogey said, for the moment wrapping up his tales of life as a teenage taxidriver for the departed.

  ‘Yeah, he’s boring now,’ Donkey said, and downed his glass of wine.

  Mak didn’t think he was boring at all, though. She found her eyes drifting down to his lips again, to that plump cupid’s bow, before she pulled herself back.

  No, Mak. You don’t want to start looking at him like that.

  CHAPTER 27

  Warwick O’Connor.

  Luther recognised the name. When he’d last heard of him, Warwick was pushing drugs to kids at the preppy schools on Sydney’s north shore. It seemed his career had not evolved all that far since then. Luther found the house Warwick shared with his wife, exactly where his instructions indicated. According to his information, Warwick had no children and no known pets. That meant no barking dogs.

  Good.

  Luther Hand sat outside the house of Warwick O’Connor, watching and making plans. It was late, and Warwick’s wife, Madeline, was home. He saw her in her pink bathrobe as she pulled down the curtains and settled in for the evening, cigarette dangling from her lips. Warwick wouldn’t be going out; they were packing it in for the night.

  The woman would die only if absolutely necessary.

  Luther could pick the lock on the front door, make his way up the stairs and be in the bedroom in minutes. The main target would then be eliminated. But he resisted. He would adhere to the plan. If he went in now he would need to kill them both, rough up the house to make it look like a botched robbery and get out again. The police would take somewhat more interest in a husband-and-wife dual homicide. There were better ways to eliminate someone like Warwick, and Luther guessed that that was why his client wanted him to wait until Warwick was outside his home. A person like Warwick had crossed so many people that the list of suspects with sufficient motive would be endless. As long as it looked messy, it would be assumed that a rival thug committed his murder.

  Your days are numbered, my colleague.

  Luther packed up his things and prepared to make his way to Surry Hills.

  It was nearly time to execute his first hit.

  CHAPTER 28

  By eleven Mak was preparing to make her exit from the party at Drayson and Maroon’s Elwood apartment. She stood and began collecting the plates to take to the kitchen.

  ‘Thanks for dinner. It was lovely.’

  ‘You’re a guest here. You don’t have to do that,’ Maroon said of Mak’s plate collecting.

  Mak waved the comment away and kept stacking dishes. She moved around to the other side of the table, and when she took Donkey’s dirty plate she swore he looked straight down her top. ‘So you model, right?’ he said, sounding like he had downed one too many. After dinner he had moved onto a steady diet of beer. ‘You were a supermodel, right?’ he stated more than asked.

  ‘Supermodel? Noooo, I wouldn’t say that,’ Mak responded. ‘I modelled for a number of years. It paid me through uni, that’s all. I don’t really do it any more, though.’

  Mak took the stack of plates into the kitchen, happy to disengage.

  ‘You look like you could still model,’ Donkey called after her as she went. She could feel his eyes wander over her backside. Nice.

  When she returned he had not dropped the subject. ‘You could still model,’ he repeated, slurring his words slightly.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m much happier in my new career.’ Not that I’m practising yet, exactly. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the fashion industry seems rather partial to the sixteen-year-old couture-waif look this particular decade. I’ll be thirty soon. That is ancient in modelling years, you see. It works a bit like dog years.’

  There were a couple of laughs at the table.

  Bogey stood and collected the napkins. When he passed her he said, ‘You are a beautiful woman and you will always look precisely the right age for who you are.’ He said the words in a low voice, meant only for her.

  Mak grinned, but she didn’t know how to respond. W
as he trying to flatter her? Because if he was, it was working. She felt a slight blush coming on.

  ‘Wow! You are 250 in dog years!’ Donkey blurted insensitively, breaking Mak’s train of thought.

  She smiled despite him. ‘You mean 210, if I catch your drift,’ she retorted. ‘But no. I think that if I was to put it in numbers, models are actually closer to one-and-a-half years for every human year, not seven. Yes. I think that’s probably it,’ she decided. ‘A fifteen-year-old model presents like a twenty-two-year-old. A twenty-year-old is a bit like a thirty-year-old, and so on.’

  Maroon frowned. ‘That’s a scary theory.’

  ‘Not quite scientific,’ Mak said, ‘but I think it might have merit.’

  ‘That’s it. I hate fashion magazines,’ Maroon said bitterly. ‘They are a man’s conspiracy to keep women preoccupied with their appearance so that they can’t do anything more significant that might upset the status quo.’

  ‘That’s a good theory to a point, but everything I’ve seen tells me that women fuel fashion magazines, not men,’ Mak challenged. ‘Most men would rather look at any sexy woman than the androgenous teens modelling expensive couture in Vogue. They like pin-up curves or toned athleticism, neither of which particularly feature in fashion mags. It’s not about men. If it were, the models in men’s and women’s magazines would be the same shape. In my experience, most guys hardly care what a woman is dressed in or if she wears her hair in the latest style, so long as she is somewhat sexually attractive and, on a subconscious level, fertile-looking to them. Women tend to be much harder on other women than men are. There is a whole language of body shape, clothing styles and attitude for women.’

  ‘That totally sucks. We should be able to be ourselves.’

  ‘And no one is stopping us. When I see a fourteen-year-old in a skin-care ad I find it farcical, not threatening. But I do wish sometimes that those magazines would allow their models to age. Look at Christie Brinkley—she’s gorgeous. And there must be lesser-known women out there who could be modelling into their forties, fifties and onwards, too.’