by Luke Preston
He was getting used to the pain, so when the hitter stepped back for a third blow, Bishop was ready. He caught the bat in his left hand and threw a right hook into the hitter’s knee. It buckled. He cried out in pain and crashed to the ground.
The hitter pulled a sidearm. A round went off: buried in the roof. Bishop wrapped one of his big hands around the hitter’s wrist, slammed it and the weapon into the floor. Drew up his fist and slammed it into the hitter’s face. A tooth scraped Bishop’s knuckle. Didn’t slow him. He kept pounding.
His eyes were vacant and his actions came from a place deep in his subconscious where the memories of his mother’s body slumped over the kitchen table lived. He remembered the vacant look on his father’s face. He remembered feeling helpless. He remembered never wanting anyone to get hurt again.
When he finally stopped, Bishop looked down. He had beaten the hitter’s face into the carpet.
Then Bishop remembered the girl on the phone. He climbed to his feet and picked up his weapon. Bishop worked his way up the narrow staircase. A submachine gun hung over the edge and randomly sprayed the wall.
Bishop froze, waited.
Held his breath.
The shooter peered over.
Bishop put one in his neck, another in his eye. His body slumped over the banister.
A row of doors lined the walls on the second floor. One opened, and Bishop swung his weapon toward the sound. The man was in his forties, dark, with a moustache. He held an MP5 to the head of a petite teenage girl in mismatched underwear. His other hand was wrapped around her mouth. Her snot ran over it. He yelled something in a foreign tongue and stepped backwards through the door behind him, closing it with his foot.
Bishop could foresee how the next hour was going to unfold. SOG would try to negotiate. Negations would fail. The shooter would put a bullet in the girl and one in himself and that would be the end of that. Bishop had to act, now.
He thought about how short the girl was and how tall the shooter was. He aimed accordingly. Took a breath and blasted one round through the door. He heard a thump, kicked the door open. The girl in mismatched underwear stood staring down at the corpse at her feet. Traumatised, but alive. To the right, the floor creaked. Bishop swung his weapon and took aim: more teenage girls. They said nothing, but they didn’t have to. Their eyes begged for help.
A muffled scream rose up from the basement.
Bishop whispered to the girls, ‘Stay here.’
He descended the staircase four steps at a time. Back in the foyer, SOG had just begun to sweep in through the front door.
Bishop found the basement door and kicked the bastard in.
It was dark, empty. Movement in the corner caught his eye:
Chloe.
He ran over, fell to his knees. She was drenched in blood. Coughed a spray of it into the air. Bishop tried to apply pressure to her wounds, but there were too many and he didn’t have enough hands.
‘Medic!’ he shouted. ‘Medic!’
Chloe tried to move.
‘Stay still.’
‘It hurts,’ she whimpered.
‘I know, baby. I know.’
‘Am I going to be alright?’
‘It looks worse than it is.’
Chloe grabbed hold of the back of Bishop’s head and pulled him near. She was weak, and struggled to say the words that eventually came out. ‘Justice. It’s Justice,’ she said.
The ambos ran down the stairs. Pushed Bishop aside and went to work.
It was dark; he couldn’t see what they were doing. ‘Is she going to be alright?’
‘Keep back, sir.’
Bishop did as he was told.
Slowly the ambos stopped working. One of them leant on his heels while the other wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving blood on it.
‘Is she alright?’ Bishop asked.
‘No’.
‘I told her everything was going to be alright.’
The ambo began to say something comforting but Bishop wasn’t listening. He slumped to the floor and stayed there as the crime scene came alive around him.
He waited until after the Homicide detectives arrived, until after the photographs were taken and until Chloe Richards’ body was laid in a government-issued body bag and taken away.
What was left of the shooters was still in the lobby. Their blood was sprayed on the walls like a bad Jackson Pollock painting. His steps slowed when he saw what he had done to the hitter with the cricket bat. What was left of his face was a mash of bone and pink and it was hard to make out where he ended and the carpet began.
Bishop used the wall to hold himself up. He wanted to vomit but swallowed hard, pushing everything back down. He made it out of the lobby, onto the front steps of the building. He tried to get air into his lungs with gasping, deep breaths. Tears streamed down his face and he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.
He felt a calming hand on the back of his neck and his breaths drew longer, his hand stopped shaking and his mind slowed.
Patrick Wilson looked over his shoulder at the corpse in the lobby and sat down. ‘You’re alright, mate, come on,’ he said with a hand rubbing Bishop’s back.
‘Did you see what I did in there?’
‘You did what needed to be done,’ Wilson said.
Bishop wiped the cold sweat from his brow. ‘There’s something inside me I don’t understand.’
Blue light from an unmarked crossed Wilson’s face as it arrived on the scene. He put a hand on Bishop’s shoulder. ‘Sometimes a little violence is not a bad thing.’
He told Bishop he was a hero. That he took down five traffickers, sex offenders. Scum. He told him that he saved the lives of sixteen under-aged girls. That he would get a commendation, a medal even. But when Tom Bishop thought of Chloe Richards or the five men he had just killed, he didn’t feel like a hero.
*
It was near dawn by the time Bishop arrived home. His feet moved slow, his body was heavy; pushing through the front door felt as if he were trying to move a wall. He closed it gently so as not to wake Alice and moved through the room collecting the clothes she had left strewn over the floor and on the backs of chairs. He folded them into a neat pile on the edge of the kitchen table. His shoulder was sore, his back ached and he wanted to wash the smell of ugliness off his skin.
He had stepped through the hall and wrapped his fist around the bathroom doorknob before the sound of vomiting on the other side stopped him.
Bishop rubbed his tired face and sighed.
When the toilet flushed, he knocked. ‘Is everything okay in there?’
‘… Everything’s okay.’
Bishop took a half step toward the kitchen before slowing to a stop. He looked back at the door. ‘Do you want to talk? Is that how your mother does it?’
The door unlocked with a click. Alice sat on the floor with her back to the bath and her head in her hands. She had been crying but was now all cried out and there were no tears left.
He sat next to her. His big knees up near his chin and his arm around her shoulders. He pulled her close. ‘Everything will be okay,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
She let out a long howl that muffled into his leather jacket.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s okay.’
When she calmed down she told him the father was some piece of shit that gave her three hundred dollars for an abortion and told her to lose his number.
He told her everything would be okay.
He thought of Chloe Richards and the next time he said those words they sounded hollow.
Chapter Nine
Flashing lights ripped through the morning sky. The block was cordoned off, yellow tape and rookie uniforms pushed the spectators away but didn’t stop them from eyeballing the scene and recording what they saw on their mobile phones. The flow of traffic from the eastern suburbs into the CBD crawled to a stop turning the far end of St Kilda Road into a car park.
The scene ran
from the café shopfronts on one side of the road, over the six lanes and one tram line to the café shopfronts on the other. Dawn’s Coffee & Muffins had zigzag bullet holes through its lettering. Rounds were buried in the trees on the footpath and were being dug out by forensics while the car alarm of a Mercedes screamed from a peppering of machine gun fire it had taken while parked on the side of the road. The sound bounced off the buildings and rang in everybody’s ears.
Shell casings littered the street, and body bags lined the footpath. Ambos wheeled another to the side of the road, pulled it from the gurney and laid it on the concrete, where it became the ninth in a row. It sat disjointed and folded over itself.
Bishop had sat on the gutter and watched as the number of body bags that lined the road grew.
The detectives huddled around the wreck of the armoured truck. It was bashed and bruised with the left side sunken on the road from two blown tyres. Water pissed out of the radiator: the result of hitting a divider in the road. The rear doors hung open, warped from the force of the explosion.
Bishop circled. The three guards were dead. The driver lay slumped across the bonnet. Halfway between the passenger door and the rear lay the second guard, facedown in a pool of his own blood. Judging by the amount his heart had pumped out, he hadn’t died straight away. The third lay at the rear. Cut in half with automatic weapons when the doors exploded.
Lieutenant Rayburn was in charge of the scene. He had a small face with big features and at some stage in his teenage years had had bad skin that left scars on his chin and cheeks. Shorter than most men, he had hunched shoulders that gave him a silhouette not far off that of a bulldog. He’d spent half his career in Major Crimes working under Cliff Moore and when Moore retired, Rayburn was bumped up. He had gotten lazy and fat since he was made CO and all his clothes were half a size too small. He ran his thumb between his waistband and gut so he could draw a breath as he made his way through the crime scene.
He called for his detectives. They assembled around him. Cooper was a beast of a man. Six foot five, size fourteen boots and hands the size of dinner plates. He and Rayburn had been partners since they were both in uniform. Warren was smaller but in better shape. He didn’t smoke, drink or curse. He had transferred in from Special Operations three years earlier after he busted his ankles when a rope snapped abseiling down the side of a building. Russell had worked undercover before Rayburn had recruited him. He was unassuming and plain faced. He used it to his advantage and people opened up and told him all their secrets without realising they had.
After he was made CO, Rayburn put together a tight crew and the bosses had high hopes, although they never understood the inclusion of Con Taylor. As a man he was a pig and as a police officer he was barely effective. The VPD had been trying to bounce him for years and at the time Rayburn recruited him he was just coming off suspension. Taylor followed him around like a sick dog and most people believed that Rayburn didn’t have the heart to put him down.
Ellison had been called in from Sex Crimes and stood shoulder to shoulder with the detectives.
Rayburn paced and ran his thumb under the waistband of his trousers again. He shouted over the howl of the car alarm. ‘We’ve got innocent people dead. Bystanders, witnesses, security guards. We’ve got fifteen million dollars missing. Call your families, cancel your plans. Nobody goes home until we’ve got these dogs in cuffs. At 5:27 AM,’ he, nodded back at the wreck, ‘truck 177 left Crown Casino and headed out to deposit the night’s earnings. Somewhere between 6:07 and 6:20, some wannabe gangsters ran them off the road. They then proceeded to blow out the rear doors and execute the guards, as well as any passing bystanders. That’s three guards and nine dead witnesses as far as we know, though others might have fled to safety. If they exist, we need to find them.’ He pointed to badges, assigned duties. ‘You all know what to do, so do it well. And for Christ’s sake, someone turn off that fucking alarm.’
The unit dispersed and an obedient uniform rushed toward the Merc, leaving Rayburn and Bishop alone.
‘What about me?’ Bishop asked.
Rayburn lit a cigarette, let the smoke leak through his words. ‘I want you to go home, get some rest.’
‘I don’t need rest.’
‘I need people who are on the ball, and you look far from that.’ He pointed to the gash on Bishop’s head. ‘See a medic and go home.’
He walked off as a news chopper swooped in and hovered a few hundred feet above them. Half the cops on the street waved it away, but it was too late: the images were already in the lounge rooms of the world. The chopper disappeared into the skyline. The fading noise of its engine was replaced with a sound Bishop had heard a thousand times and still hadn’t got used to: a woman in pyjama pants and a puffy jacket broke the police tape and ran toward them, sobbing and wailing. Bishop stepped forward, grabbed her. He buried her face in his jacket, hugged her close so she didn’t have to see the world for a while.
An ambo waited patiently until she let go of him, then walked her away from the scene.
‘Fucked up, isn’t it?’ Ellison kept her gaze focused on the cigarette she was struggling to spark up in the wind. ‘It always amazes me how they get here so fast.’
‘Would you take your time?’
‘I just meant—’
‘I know what you meant.’ Bishop waved his hand to let her know it was okay.
She didn’t seem too worried. ‘This is fucking awesome; I’ve been waiting for a case like this for ages.’
‘They shifted you from SC?’
‘Only for a few days. They want a woman for the cameras and shit, but I don’t give a fuck.’ She adjusted her shirt. Like Rayburn’s, it was a size too small, but the smaller size fitted her better than it did him. ‘What’s our first move, boss?’
‘I’m not on this,’ he said. ‘Rayburn’s sending me home.’
‘Motherfucker,’ she spat. ‘You’re not going to let them get away with it, are you?’
The Merc’s alarm fell silent, but echoes of it rang in everybody’s ears for a few moments longer. A uniform pulled his head out from under the bonnet with a look of achievement on his face as if he had just solved the entire crime.
Bishop’s gaze lingered on the Mercedes. He made his way over to it with Ellison in his wake. She was still talking, but, although he threw in a mumble from time to time, he wasn’t really listening. Taking a lap of the Merc, he ran his fingers along the bullet holes, jamming his finger into each one as his thoughts swirled in a thousand different directions.
‘What is it?’
Kneeling down at the rear of the car, it didn’t take him long to find the reverse camera that sat just under the licence plate. He followed its line of sight: a complete view of the crime scene.
He looked up at the uniform. ‘Is the alarm disabled?’
‘Yes sir.’
Bishop scanned the street. ‘Give me your baton.’
The uniform handed it over, watching nervously as Bishop put it through the driver’s side window. Nobody noticed. He popped the boot and searched it.
‘When the alarm is triggered, the reverse camera automatically records.’
Bishop pulled the SD card and showed it to Ellison.
Chapter Ten
With the door closed, the only sound in the small office was the hum of the computer booting up. Bishop slid the SD card into the adaptor he got from tech and plugged it in. Despite how it was captured, the image from the back of the Merc was clear with a good angle on St Kilda Road, the disabled armoured truck, and a crime that was in process long before the camera started recording. Three masked gunmen swooped the rear of the truck relaying cash. Truck to car. Truck to car. Within fifteen seconds the bags were loaded in the boot and the gunmen fell back to their vehicle — nondescript — untraceable. They were almost in the clear when a guard dropped to his ankle and came up with a snub nose in his hand. He swung it toward the gunmen but they put him down before he could realise how much of a bad move it w
as.
The gunmen scanned the area.
Witnesses. Men going to work. Women in cars. Each and every one of them able to stand up in court and point a finger.
They unleashed hell. Nobody got out alive.
When the executions were over, the gunmen piled into the car and out of frame. Five in total. Identical clothing, identical weapons, and no identical features. The whole thing was over and done within sixty seconds.
Smart. Professional. Cool.
Bishop leant back in his chair and drew on his cigarette. He was about to turn the machine off, but in the final frames of the recording, a piece-of-shit Ford that looked parked and empty, pulled away from the curb and trailed after the getaway car.
A spotter. A lookout. Bishop tapped the arrows on the dirty keyboard and brought the footage back frame by frame. A hundred or so taps later, he leant forward and peered at the screen.
A licence plate.
Bishop wrote down the number, yanked the SD card from the computer and left the room.
Chapter Eleven
The CIB had come to life. The phones rang; some were answered, some weren’t. Every desk was occupied, and those without one worked from the floor. The coffee machine was in overtime, and the guys whose shifts had ended hours ago stayed on for no pay and forced themselves to think outside of the four corners they were used to.
Bishop shoved the crumpled paper into a uniform’s hand. ‘Run this tag, then run who the vehicle is registered to. I want sheets, known associates; everything you can find. Bring it to me and only to me, you understand?’
The uniform nodded. He had no choice and a second later was off and on his way to do the detective’s shit work and cursing under his breath.
In the chaos, on a bench, quiet and alone, sat a woman. Waiting patiently with her handbag on her lap and a scrunched-up tissue in her hand.