Hard Light- Infamous

by Warren Hately

  “I’ll continue my role as chauffeur inside, milady,” Flanagan grinned, snatching a trolley from a young guy in yellow safety gear passing by.

  Teneille adopted a suitably posh expression and they role-played without speaking all the way past the butcher and into the supermarket.

  Ennui soon kicked in. Teneille was a thoughtful shopper whose search for the exact same product she purchased last time at another store was hampered by a major refit of the supermarket interior. The organic breakfast cereals were in with the nappies, while the soy milk aisle was a quote-unquote “disaster”. Flanagan added a few items of his own including some t-shirts and boxers from the short clothing aisle. After the fourth aisle and thirty minutes, he popped a packet of biscuits and started munching Chocolate Desserts with veiled dwindling enthusiasm.

  “Do you want to skip ahead and do the meat?” Teneille asked.

  “You don’t have an organic butcher in mind?”

  “Mick,” Teneille tutted. “You really do think I’m quite the lady of the manor, don’t you? Just get some steak and free range chicken. Sausages, too. We’ll have a barbie.”

  “No worries.”

  As if let off a leash, Flanagan slipped through the store like he was in fast forward. A woman carrying a lapdog with her own plastic trolley in tow gave him a foul look as he scooted ahead. It only took a minute, the wad of money in his pocket dissuading any careful budget.

  He returned to Teneille in the canned foods aisle. He came around behind her as a guy with a full head of dark, curly hair sighed loudly and shook his trolley, faking ramming it into her.

  “Jesus darling, would you hurry up and get out of the fucking way?”

  Flanagan dropped the meat in a slapping pile as Teneille turned to watch the stranger twist backwards, his hair in Flanagan’s fingers, a pained expression crossing his unshaven face.

  Flanagan scooped a can of Roma tomatoes from the shelf and slammed it hard into the stranger’s face. Then he threw the man forward into the sudden silence, sweeping his foot under one ankle. The man lost a designer thong in the process. Once he was down, Flanagan dropped to his knee, picked him up by the hair again, and repeated the trick with the can three more times.

  There was a scream behind them. A friend in designer surf wear staggered around the corner, hands to his head as he rushed forward in his thongs and clawed at Flanagan.

  “Get off him, you bastard!”

  Flanagan melted as the newcomer came on, hands slapping ineffectually as the second man tried to grab what was no longer there. Flanagan moved his forearms across to block a few blows and repented, hooking his arm across the second guy’s wrists and clubbing him in the face at short range with an elbow. In just as quick a move, he reversed the elbow, and the sound of the newcomer’s cheekbone popping reverberated in the laminated corridor.

  Blood ran freely down the victim’s chin and Flanagan backed away, grabbing the shoulder of the bloke’s shirt and twisting and tugging him around until he was so off-balance it only took a push for him to end up in a heap across his unconscious friend.

  “Tell your mate to watch his mouth,” Flanagan said.

  He considered putting in the boot and caught Teneille’s open-mouthed fury instead. She grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him away, their cart and the meat trays forgotten.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed. “For God’s sake, Mick.” She looked around, her hand about his wrist as she tugged him after her. “We’d better go.”

  They came out into the express lane and waded through a sea of office workers and mums holding their morning’s catch, excusing themselves, Flanagan wiping his elbow on his black t-shirt as they cleared the store and rapidly started for the exit at the other side.

  “That was totally out of control, Mick. A total over-reaction.”

  “You’re probably glad we didn’t go to your local shops now.”

  Teneille shook her head and tittered nervously, glancing at him with a kaleidoscope of emotions playing across her face.

  When they reached the car, she took the keys before finally releasing his wrist. They were standing close with nothing to show for their morning’s work except elevated heart rates. Teneille’s face was flushed. It was a good look.

  He grinned lopsidedly and although her eyes were sparkling and she laughed in return, there was hesitation and reprimand in their regard.

  “I can’t believe you fucking did that,” she said.

  Flanagan chuckled to hear her curse, patently aroused, hands shaking as always after a burst of action.

  “We’d better go,” he said.

  She stopped him with a hand in the middle of his chest. Flanagan was back in an instant, a contrite schoolboy always hoping the teacher might be up for a bit of inappropriate conduct of her own.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Teneille, you’ve got to stop asking me that question.”

  “Excuse me for saying you seem a little pent-up.” She paused, braced herself and asked, “Is it your father? It must’ve come as quite a shock.”

  Flanagan glanced at a security guard looking around from the automatic doors to the centre. He put his arm around Teneille, shepherding her toward the car.

  They entered the coolness of the covered lot.

  “Mick?”

  “I don’t really need a counsellor, Teneille. I appreciate your. . . .”

  He shrugged wordlessly.

  “My concern?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you know those guys were gay? They were harmless.”

  Flanagan sighed. “No, I guess I didn’t. Does it matter? Does some guy get to act like an arsehole just because he’s a queer?”

  If her horrified expression counted for anything, Flanagan was grateful she said nothing. Teneille unlocked the car and they got in.

  “And do you go around beating up everyone to correct the wrongs of the world? Or just for your friends?”

  “It means something to be my friend,” he said more seriously than he believed, wanting to instil something, anything worthwhile into actions he knew seemed beyond the pale.

  “You’d better be careful, Flanagan,” Teneille said. “If words gets out being your friend comes with a personal bodyguard service, you’ll be a busy boy indeed.”

  He knew she was laughing now, and it encouraged him to grit his teeth and play nice. She threw the car into a careless sort of reverse, and as a horn honked somewhere, they shot out from undercover and back along Cantonment, the Overflow not yet open on the other side of the street.

  EIGHT

  FLANAGAN DIDN’T KNOW when his penance would end, but the least he could do was carry in their day’s second lot of shopping from the car.

  The morning was unseasonably warm, all the moisture in the yard rising to what might seem like tropical humidity to the naive. Teneille threw open the front door and unlatched the French doors on the veranda to create a conduit for the weak sea breeze. Once he’d dumped the bags in the kitchen, Flanagan left the sorting for the lady of the house. He was barely into the bathroom, wondering why he hadn’t bought any beer, when the phone wedged into his pocket started to chirp. Doyle again.

  “You’ve got a little shit-bag in your sights, Flanagan,” the veteran copper said without any preamble. “Peter Wayne Roosveldt, age 29, two six-month stretches for stealing a motor vehicle and assault on top of other charges. Got an address for you in Cottesloe.”

  “I’m not far away. Give it to me.”

  Once the details were out of the way, Doyle was back to his usual self.

  “Now, you’re not involved in something you should be leaving to the police, eh son? This cunt’s got form, known associates and so on.”

  “Anyone I should know about?”

  “Charlie Blanco. You know him?”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Carlo Vincenzo Franco, also known as Charlie Franco, Charles Franco and ‘Franco Blanco’ as he’s been dubbed by The West. Drugs, rackete
ering, tomfoolery.”

  “Sounds like you should have him on the payroll.”

  “No jokes from you thanks, Michael.” Doyle adjusted the phone with the receiver crunching against his stubble. “Shit-bags like this are not my type. You could fire at will, for all I fucken care. Course, then I’d have to arrest you.”

  “Thanks for the warning, Frank. You’re on my Christmas card list.”

  Later, he inhaled smoke meditatively through his nostrils, vaguely aware of Teneille bustling around inside. Then he was out the door with the leather coat over one shoulder.

  “I’m gonna go see this bloke, Mr Smokin’.”

  Teneille held a pile of canvas boards, coming from a side bedroom she used for a studio. She froze in the hall, half-stooped, and looked with concern at him and the door like they were one in the same.

  “Take it easy, OK?” She grinned then at the ridiculousness of it all and added, “If you feel yourself getting angry, take a few deep breaths.”

  He stared at her a moment, the grin building.

  “I think you want me angry, for this one.”

  “Remind me to teach you how to meditate one of these days.”

  “You can show me tonight. Ta-ta.”

  He was out the door and down the drive in two seconds. Leaves had settled on the Fairmont and he left them there, blowing them off in the first instants away from the sidewalk, some moisture on the oil-damp road and he was all but fish-tailing as he left.

  *

  FROM MOSMAN PARK, it was easy to follow the coast, down the ocean road going all majestic and shit before the serious money suburb of Cottesloe reared its head and calmed everything as if with some great invisible magic wand. The cliffs and gull-splattered scenery resolved into an idyllic beach surmounted with swards of reticulated grass, sandstone walkways and a huge beachfront terminus dating from the early 1900s. On the other side of the strip, chip shops and cafes and stores toting boogie boards added to the parti-coloured spectacle of schoolgirls in slender swimsuits and old frogmen committed to their laps wading through the traffic and the hundred-odd cars waiting for a place to park. Just a whiff of warm weather and it was on, like some secret surf carnival just announced, those crazy radio promotions from when he was a kid and they dug for real buried treasure in twenty cent pieces in the sand.

  Australia had gold coins these days, so imagine that, Flanagan thought.

  Peter Roosveldt was never going to make president, with or without the missing ‘e’. Nevertheless, he’d done well for himself with a tall white apartment, third in a double-storeyed row three blocks back from the beach and only a drunken stagger from the ever-popular Ocean Hotel. It was never one of Flanagan’s battlegrounds, preferring Steve’s in Nedlands after Uni, or cruising down to Freo to bang heads with rock stars and dockworkers in the vomit-upholstered pubs of South Terrace and the West End. The OH or O-Hell, as it was sometimes named in the media, was all about the beautiful people taking off their masks. A good Saturday night in summer was when they didn’t have to call in the mounted police, six paddy wagons to scrape up the wreckage of young toughs telling the world that made their parents what their kids now thought of it.

  The Fairmont went up on two wheels as Flanagan rode the curb, grass the consistency of cellophane audibly crumpling beyond the open window. He had a tape of Black Sabbath that only warbled a little, as well as a tendency to keep playing even when the engine quit. So he punched the deck with a finger and crawled out, no refuge in sunglasses. And as he stretched his back, Flanagan eyed up the impressive fortifications out front. Closing the door was almost an afterthought. He left the window open, the steamy warmth of the day never so palpable as amid the grass, the sea close enough you could taste the salt.

  Roosveldt’s apartment had a buzzer, the name O’Ryan engraved on a small pewter plate. Flanagan thumbed the requisite length of time and the gate clicked open with nary a word said. That suited him just fine. Hands in the awkward pockets of his jeans, he walked the truncated concrete path, cacti amid the Japanese pebbles, an old barrel sawn in half and filled with murky water but no fish, the pump still going all the same. The front door was painted white like the rest of the place and stood slightly ajar. Flanagan gave it a shove and walked in, standing insouciant beneath the lintel and slowly calling out.

  A man about the right age appeared in the gloom of the tile-floored interior, a white tank top, black track pants and yellow trainers his only clothes. He had short hair the colour of dishwater and a slightly haggard face that spoke of more than a passing acquaintance with hard drugs. Blue eyes, when they became visible, were sagged and watery, the pink below his eyes like something vaginal, translucent lashes flickering often.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you Peter?”

  The guy nodded and walked forward, wringing his hands on a white tea towel. Flanagan adjusted his stance only a fraction, waiting for Roosveldt to close.

  “My name’s Flanagan. I thought there’d be a few blokes here.”

  “No, it’s just me,” the other man said, mystified.

  “Cool. Do you mind if I come in?”

  Roosveldt walked to the door and Flanagan offered his hand. The other guy paused a moment, uncertain, then they shook as Flanagan produced Allyson’s photo from his back pocket.

  “What’s up?”

  “Do you know this girl?”

  He held the photo out and Roosveldt squinted before flicking on the light over the door. Terra cotta tiles leapt into clarity along with an expensive wooden wine rack just inside the doorway converted for storing shoes. Probably the sort of thing to make Teneille squeal with delight, Flanagan thought.

  “Jesus, that’s Allyson, right?”

  “Allyson Jacobsen,” Flanagan said.

  “She said her name was James. Allyson James.” He looked at the photo again. “How long ago was this taken? It looks like last week.”

  “It probably was,” Flanagan agreed.

  He pushed into the room and let his scowl widen, his shoulders swinging freely with arms much heavier than they’d been last time he’d swum at Cottesloe Beach. Peter Roosveldt stumbled back and held up his hands. The photo disappeared.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m a friend of the family. We’re not very happy with you, Peter.”

  “What are you talkin’ about, mate?” Roosveldt said, junkie whine throwing his voice up an octave.

  “You’ve been fucking this girl? Giving her drugs?”

  Flanagan pushed him in the middle of the chest and Roosveldt toppled over a low flannel settee bordering the living room. The younger man recovered quickly enough, rolling into the glass-topped coffee table framing someone else’s travel photos. Then he sprung into an unconvincing fighter’s stance.

  “Mate, I don’t know what you’re fuckin’ on about.”

  “I think you’ve got a sense now you’re dealing with a girl who’s sixteen. A private school girl. Her parents are pretty unhappy about the way her life’s been heading, thanks to cunts like you.”

  “Old enough to bleed, mate, old enough to butcher.”

  Flanagan sneered and came around the couch without much hesitation, grabbing and slapping at Roosveldt’s hands as they swung into useless fists.

  “You’ve got the wrong fucken guy, mate,” the lad said. “You’ve fucked up. Big time.”

  “Tell me.”

  Flanagan surprised him, backing off and watching Roosveldt go wary too, neural pathways firing in ways that could only lead to trouble. Flanagan stepped close again and Roosveldt started confessing so fast he practically threw up his breakfast.

  “She’s one of Charlie’s birds. I never fucken touched her, mate.”

  “She was seen getting out of your car. We noted the plates.”

  “Yeah,” Roosveldt quickly shrugged. “So what? I drive all Charlie’s girls around.”

  “Charlie’s girls? Who’s Charlie.”

  “Charlie Franco, you fucken dumb cunt.”r />
  Flanagan abandoned his crouched readiness and stood straight, waggling a finger. “Lose the potty mouth, pal, or I’m going to cram that coffee table up your arse.”

  “Don’t you know who Charlie Franco is? Jesus.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Jesus. Allyson’s just a piece on the side. I don’t even know if she’s his. She’s just around, you know?” Roosveldt looked at Flanagan’s hand like he could see the photograph still there. “No one had any idea she was under age though, mate. She said she was nineteen.”

  “You know a girl when she’s nineteen and when she’s sixteen, Peter,” Flanagan said, disappointed.

  “Yeah, maybe. But I wasn’t the one fucking her. It’s Charlie you oughta speak to, not me.”

  He rubbed his hands over his bare arms and moved away from the coffee table like Flanagan’s threat only just registered. Flanagan made no further move and after a few seconds, the younger man looked like he might just be able to relax.

  “Am I keeping you from your medicine, Peter?”

  “Na,” Roosveldt shook his head and actually laughed.

  “Alright. Take me to Charlie then. It seems like we need to talk.”

  As quick as it died away, Roosveldt’s laughter returned.

  “You’re kidding me, right? You want to meet Franco Blanco?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re a tough guy, huh? Balls of steel?”

  “I’m just a friend of the family. Allyson’s gone missing and we’re concerned.”

  Flanagan held his gaze and Peter sobered, glancing around and shrugging and picking up his Galaxy from where it’d flown.

  “OK. I gotta make a call.”

  Flanagan nodded. “I’ll have a drink, while you’re at it.”

  NINE

  THE ALFA ROMEO slept in the garage behind the row of townhouses. Peter Roosveldt helped himself to an Adidas jacket as they moved together out to the rear of the apartment, walking through a tastefully-decorated garden, sheer simplicity either side of a winding concrete path.