Hard Yards

by J. R. Carroll

  And then the Candyman had to feature. Of course, she had been expecting him all the time. Bowman had let himself in – with a key. He must be a dear friend indeed if she entrusted him with a door key. So ‘Why didn’t you …’ meant Why didn’t you use your key? She’d thought Barrett was Bowman, bringing candy. No wonder she was so deflated. But she was prepared to tolerate his presence and listen to his speculations. She knew Barrett would leave once Bowman did arrive. Andrea was in a drug relationship with Todd Bowman. Even though he had seen the evidence, Barrett still found it hard to accept.

  So … Mick Dawes was off tap. Comprehensively shot, Geoff said. Who would want to knock off an old lag like him? He was practically dead anyway. Dawes didn’t have active enemies anymore, surely. It was the end of an era: the last of the old hard men. According to Geoff, he was in the grip of emphysema; he already had one leg in the grave. Someone must have decided to do put him out of his misery and shove the rest in.

  ‘They bowling-balled him,’ Geoff said, watching the news on TV. ‘Three shots in the back of the head, from close range, from a handgun. According to police reports, he was lying on his face, as if he’d been made to kneel, then whacked from behind.’

  ‘An execution,’ Barrett said, and helped himself to a cold can from the fridge.

  ‘An execution par excellence. Professional job.’

  ‘I wonder why anyone would bother.’

  ‘Well, that’s the question. Clearly he’d put someone offside big time, poor old bugger. I wonder what happens to his wife now. Did I tell you she was off the air? He reckoned she talks to the fucking teapot.’

  ‘Poor old Mick.’ Barrett sat on the bed and gave his attention to the TV screen. There was an Olympic update, something about swimmers being randomly tested for steroids. Stern warnings were being issued. Then, when the next item came on, his eyes opened wide. There he was, big as life: Ernesto Tucci, attired as always in high-priced Italian threads, being escorted by homicide detectives into a police station. With him was an equally snappily dressed Carla Wilkins, who was described by the reporter as Tucci’s ‘wife and legal representative’. Police wished to interview Mr Tucci in relation to the recent shooting murder of ‘disgraced businessman’ Anthony Diaz. Tucci was expressing his opinion of the matter by kicking out at the cameramen and telling them to do things that were mostly beeped out.

  ‘You might say the shit has flown,’ he said to Geoff.

  ‘Yeah, and he’s it,’ Geoff said. ‘Clock him, will you? You’d think he was the fucking Lord Mayor instead of the shit carter.’

  ‘That woman of his looks the goods, though. Dressed for the occasion as usual’

  ‘Does she ever. Miss Tutti-Frutti herself, the shameless little strumpet. Christ, I wouldn’t mind shafting

  ‘Are you kidding? She’d skin you alive inside a minute. Save it for your wet dreams, Tex.’

  ‘Oh, get outta town, will you? One minute I’m a baby snatcher and now I can’t cut it with the world’s champion root-rat.’

  ‘Well, she is over eighteen, I’ll pay that,’ Barrett said, watching the woman in question swipe her briefcase at a reporter.

  It was an unusual set-up, a career criminal being married to his solicitor, but it had certain advantages. She was always available, she was fiercely devoted to her old man and their sprogs and she took no shit from fuzz, prosecution lawyers or even magistrates. Hard cops quailed before her when she was in full flight. Carla was in fact a brilliant if erratic criminal lawyer, and ‘Hollywood Jack’ knew he’d had the best of all worlds when he’d wooed her into the clan. She was good, she was free, and as a bonus he got to bang her every night.

  Carla Wilkins. In recent years she had become quite a hot property, ever since her name was first linked romantically with Tucci’s. Before that she was just another suburban solicitor trying to turn a buck representing stiffs. But she was always going to make it, because she was special in more ways than one. In a personal TV interview, she’d once said she understood the power of sexual allure early in life, and Carla had that in hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. Her first love affair, she claimed, had been with a teacher at high school when she was twelve years old. She married a much older man at age eighteen, during her first year at university, and although the union ended in divorce before her graduation, she’d kept her ex-husband’s name because she preferred it to her own, which was Latvian. Even when she’d married Ernesto, she’d hung onto the old name, because by that time she was known professionally by it.

  Carla Wilkins was a sexual dynamo. That quality, combined with an IQ that was off the scale, made her very formidable. Physically she was slinkily seductive, though not beautiful in a conventional way. She was quite small and svelte with a pencil-thin waist, light brown hair that was usually dishevelled, flashing green eyes that were aslant and feline, a petite button nose and extraordinarily thick lips that sat on her face like red velvet cushions. When she smiled she revealed front teeth that were noticeably gapped. Carla didn’t smile a lot, because of her teeth and also it wasn’t sexy to smile. Her medium-sized cone-shaped breasts jutted straight out; they were invariably clad to their best advantage in body-hugging diaphanous blouses or angora sweaters. Now in her mid-to late-thirties, Carla Wilkins – swivel-hipped, tight-skirted, stiletto-heeled – was a lethal package composed of passionate Baltic blood, potent brain power and a raw sexual drive that produced its own vapour trail, like an animal’s spoor. Apparently this last quality could only find full gratification in the highly charged world of a violent, psychotic hoodlum like Ernesto Tucci.

  Barrett had actually gazed upon those naked, cone-shaped breasts with their unusually dark aureoles and nipples – nipples that grew to an inch in length when stirred. He knew she had a long, pointed tongue and strong hips and thighs, compared to the waist that was so slight a man could fully enclose it in two hands, and that she had only had a few wispy strands of pubic hair. He’d even had a front-on view of her wide-open beaver in action, first with her fingers in it, then her spouse’s well-oiled hard-on. So had Geoff O’Mara and thousands of other people in Sydney. About five years earlier, Ernesto and Carla had staged a marathon sex romp with another, unidentified, couple in a luxury hotel room, and for reasons known only to themselves they’d decided to videotape parts of it. Later, however, the other couple had an acrimonious break-up, and in the fallout their copy of the tape had landed in the wrong hands. It wasn’t long before extra copies were being made and circulated, then copies of copies, and so on, until the Tutti-Frutti Tape, as it became known, was the staple topic of conversation at every cocktail and dinner party in Sydney. The centrepiece consisted of a ten-minute, close-up sequence – shot in real time – of Carla Wilkins sucking on the Tucci cock: he is sitting naked on a couch while she kneels between his legs, snorting and snuffling away like a deliriously contented pig in a trough full of offal. While she is doing this Ernesto sighs deeply, strokes her head and repeatedly moves her lank, mussed-up hair out of the way. Words are occasionally exchanged, but the sound quality is too poor to catch what they are saying. When he finally comes, Ernesto gives her a lovely pearl necklace, but she wears it over a lot more than her neck.

  The Tutti-Frutti Tape rocketed Carla Wilkins to bad-girl stardom, a status she came to relish once she saw how she could use it. She appeared on every TV talk show, featured in glossy magazines and was even offered her own adult ‘sex therapy’ program on Pay TV, which she declined. From here it was a short step to novel writing, and when the right contract came up she took to it like a hungry vixen in a fowlyard.

  In her first book, Ice Queen, Carla introduced her serial character: a ravishing, highly successful, unnamed international hit woman who lives in an exclusive alpine retreat somewhere in Europe. Here she spends most of her time skiing, gambling in casinos, driving fast sportscars down mountain roads and shagging princes, dukes and filthy-rich tycoons whenever she pleases. But then a call comes and she has to leave her playground in order to whack o
ut an important Spanish politician. She does this by arranging an ‘accidental’ meeting with the subject, leading him on, giving him a sniff of tail. After some to-ing and fro-ing, she persuades him to drive her to an isolated country location, where she garrottes him while they are fucking in his car. To get rid of the evidence, she props the victim behind the wheel and pushes the car over a precipice into a bottomless canyon, then coolly makes a call on her miniature cell phone. In no time she is picked up by a chopper and taken back to her mountain retreat, a million bucks having been paid by electronic transfer into her numbered Swiss account. Strong on glamour, graphic sex and clinical ultra-violence, Ice Queen was a smash hit. Three more books with near-identical ‘honey trap’ plotlines quickly followed, and Carla apparently made enough money out of them to scale back her legal work to virtually only handling matters for the Tucci brothers – a brief that certainly kept her busy enough.

  ‘Anyhow I’ve got a bit of an idea I might run past you,’ Barrett said. ‘On the matter of Duane.’

  ‘Go on,’ Geoff said.

  ‘Well, we want to find him, right? Draw him out before he hits our man.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Bunny told all those reporters he was thinking of going to the Wentworth Park dogs tomorrow night. It was on the six o’clock news. Pretty good chance Duane saw that.’

  ‘Probably. So …’

  ‘So why don’t we have a little chat with Bunny? He’s a pig-headed son of a gun – if he wants to go to the dog races, he fucking will. We saw the way he related to Walter Motzing over that sightseeing trip. I was thinking … what if we hired some extra people and fixed a little trap for Duane?’

  ‘You mean – use Bunny as a scapegoat. No joke intended.’

  ‘Yeah. He’s ballsy enough to do that.’

  Geoff thought about it. ‘It might work,’ he said. ‘Or it might backfire. In which case we’d look pretty sad.’

  ‘Worth a try, though?’

  ‘Sucker-punch him,’ Geoff said, starting to like the idea.

  ‘You bet. Sucker-punch his arse.’

  ‘Guess we could talk to Bunny. No harm in that.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him right now.’ He stabbed his speed dialler on his phone and waited. When the sprinter answered, Barrett outlined his plan.

  Bunny chewed it over and said, ‘You know, I wasn’t real serious about that.’

  A thought occurred to Barrett. ‘What prompted it, anyway? I mean … how did you know about Wentworth Park, for a start?’

  ‘Oh, some newshound told me.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘No, no. While back. When I was at the Sebel. He called for an interview and mentioned the dog races.’

  ‘He called you on the phone?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was his name, this … newshound?’

  ‘It was … Ted something. Yeah, Ted Sylvester, as in Stallone. Call me Sly, he said. American, from Cleveland.’

  ‘He said that – call me Sly?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Mainly to himself, Barrett said, ‘Son of a bitch. I’ll bet it was him. He was playing games. Sly fucking son of a bitch.’

  ‘You mean … Sly, as in …? Shit. Could be.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll check on him. So, Bunny, what about this idea of ours? We’ll have extra people mingling in with the crowd, and if this so-called Sly from Cleveland shows his face, we bust his chops. You’ll be safe – we’ll give you a bulletproof vest, just in case.’

  Silence at the other end. Then Bunny said in his slow drawl: ‘You know, man, back home I’d have my own way of dealing with this asshole. I’d ram a big hogleg .357 up his fat cracker’s ass and blow his shit clean through his mouth.’

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’ Barrett said.

  ‘That’s affirmative, man. Count me in,’ Bunny said.

  ‘Walter won’t like it.’

  ‘Walter ain’t my daddy. And I’d sure as hell prefer to make a move than wait for this sucker to try again. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Good man. But listen, maybe you shouldn’t give Walter the whole story. Just tell him you’re going to a dog meet and you’ll have a small army looking after you, okay? No need to worry him unnecessarily.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The bunny’s in motion,’ called a disembodied voice as the furry lure sang along the electrified wire. ‘Racing.’ The boxes opened and eight dogs hopped out in pursuit of their quarry.

  ‘Go the black,’ Barrett said, only to see his selection and a couple of others broadsided on the first turn and put out of the race. ‘Bad scrimmage,’ the racecaller said. ‘Big trouble back there. In the meantime Monster Man careers away from his inside alley …’

  ‘Monster Man,’ Bunny cried. ‘Go, my man.’ Triumphantly he waved his ticket aloft as the red dog swept down the straight to score running away. ‘Ten to one,’ he said, ‘times twenty bucks the win and place.’

  ‘Nice one, Bunny,’ Barrett said. But he was thinking: How is it that dudes like Bunny Delfranco always win, no matter what they do? He won the first race too. ‘What’d you have, Tex?’

  ‘Pink dog,’ Geoff said, crumpling his ticket. ‘Yours knocked the shit out of it. Thanks a bunch, partner.’

  ‘Didn’t help me none. Pink’s always dodgy anyhow, from the wide draw.’

  ‘They’re all fucking dodgy, mate,’ Geoff said.

  Bunny was calculating: ‘Let’s see … that’s two hundred, plus a quarter … two-fifty … plus my stake … two hundred ninety bucks. Shit, man, how easy is this?’

  ‘It’s easy enough if you’re in on the fix,’ Geoff said. ‘Otherwise it’s a fucking raffle. Your mutt copped the elephant juice tonight instead of the Prozac.’

  Bunny looked sideways at him, cocking an eye: was that a hidden message?

  ‘Bad loser,’ Barrett said. ‘I’m sticking with the strength from now on. What’s your fancy in the third, Bunny?’

  Bunny turned to his form guide. ‘Well, now, let’s see here …’

  Strange, Barrett thought, how winning a couple of hundred bucks brought a glowing smile to the face of a man who, if he were not already rolling in it, soon would be. Of course it was the adrenalin rush – the drug all gamblers and sportsmen live for. It hadn’t escaped Barrett that the lure on the wire, fake as it was, was the target of snarling, snapping canines, while the real Bunny standing next to him was in much the same predicament. It didn’t seem to bother him, however. Barrett looked around: the half-dozen security men they’d been able to find at short notice – mainly off-duty cops – weren’t far away, each of them strategically positioned so they had every direction covered. They looked like ordinary punters in the crowd, except these guys weren’t ordinary – they were all carrying concealed weapons. Barrett had called the chief of the US press corps, and he’d never heard of Ted Sylvester – because there was no Ted Sylvester. Bunny had said that Walter ‘freaked’ when he told him he was going to the puppies. Wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had the entire National Guard protecting him.

  ‘If I was your daddy, I’d whip your ass,’ Walter had told him.

  ‘Fucking Nazi,’ Bunny had said to Barrett and Geoff in the car. ‘Anyways I don’t even need a freakin’ coach – I know how to run.’

  *

  Tonight he had on a Mark McGwire signature baseball cap pulled low over his face, a pair of electric blue aviator’s shades and a Nike tracksuit with the collar turned up. Because he was big anyway, you’d never know he had on a Kevlar jacket under it. People in the crowd didn’t give him a second look.

  ‘In the third,’ Bunny said. ‘I’m going for … lemme see, what’s this here … Brigalow Bandit. Sounds like a mean pooch. Got some form, too, has the bandit. Ha ha. Number three it is, my men.’

  ‘Good enough for me,’ Geoff said.

  ‘I’m not arguing,’ Barrett said. ‘You going to the ring, Geoff? Here, whack this fifty on Brigalow’s snout for me, will you?’

  ‘Tell yo
u what,’ Bunny said. ‘I’m going to collect my winnings, so why don’t I put the bets on while I’m there? I might even need a leak.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Barrett said.

  ‘You gonna hold it for me too, buddy?’

  ‘No chance. Right city, wrong hombre. Come for Mardi Gras if that’s your caper. But I’ll check out the toilet before you go in.’

  Bunny pocketed his winnings, placed the three bets with the same bookmaker and then sauntered off towards the lavatory block with Barrett and the off-duty cops never more than a few yards from his side. Wherever he went, they floated around him like pilot fish, yet always managed to remain inconspicuous. Barrett’s eyes moved constantly among the punters; his zip-up leather jacket was half-opened so that the Sig’s heavy, cross-hatched butt was always within easy reach. When they got to the lavatory, Barrett put a hand on Bunny’s arm, cautioning him, before entering and making sure all was in order. He came out, nodded, and Bunny went in.

  Barrett had taken perhaps ten seconds to inspect the lavatory, but that was all Edward needed to make sure the black man in heavy disguise was in fact his target. There were a few black African heads drifting around the place, and some of them in tracksuits, but he’d seen Delfranco on TV, and the clincher was his skin: it was not truly black, but the colour of creamed coffee. The guy was obviously a half-breed. He thought he remembered Barrett from the stadium, although he wasn’t completely sure because he was wearing different clothes, but when the man went into the lavatory, obviously to check if a killer was waiting inside, he knew he was the bodyguard. So where was the other bastard, the heavyweight? He’d be here somewhere – out in the bleachers maybe. He’d be hard to miss. Wasn’t a real big crowd, so Edward had needed to hang back a ways, across the other side of the betting ring, concealing his face behind a newspaper form guide. He decided not to follow them back outside. Mr Smith was in his belly bag, but you couldn’t whack someone inside a racetrack and get away very easily. Daylight saving had started early because of the Olympics, and that made Edward’s job harder – it didn’t get dark until fucking half past eight. He did have a chance to take him out at Paddy’s Market while that chick was fucking around with his feet. That was a good set-up because Edward could have then disappeared into the Chinatown crowds, but the drawback was there were two cops standing nearby. This was a much better situation now.