No longer feeling his own injuries, Flanagan vaulted the closer seat, mercifully vacant, and came down like a vulture on the spread-eagled youth. Three good punches to the head and the would-be gangsta was spewing corn and yoghurt all over himself. After a quick kick in the nuts and another back-hander, the young man was lucky not to choke as he went all rubbery and lay curled on the floor, completely inert.
Flanagan had the Python at the small of his back. He pushed the second couch across the marble-tiled floor, causing a tasteful sheepskin rug to pile up into the ever-widening spillage beside hoodlum number two. The Glock automatic lay where Flanagan expected. He retrieved the gun and ejected the full magazine just to be sure, rounding on Roosveldt where he barely managed to pull himself up at the corner of the room.
“Flanagan, fuck, give me a break.”
“No cigarettes for you this time, Prickles,” Flanagan said, walking across breathlessly, the matte black inches of fatalism protruding from his hand too all-important for the half-beaten gangster to note his shakes.
“Flanagan! No way, no way.”
Roosveldt tried to stand, but his own legs were so wobbly he wound up on his knees, the single step to the terra cotta tiles of the entrance immediately behind him.
“You can’t kill me,” Roosveldt whispered, perhaps imagining himself able to convince Flanagan otherwise. “You can’t kill me. Please.”
“I’m not going to kill you, Peter,” Flanagan said. “Not if you tell me what I want to know. Where’s the girl?”
“The girl?”
Flanagan broke his own rule and closed to a distance where he could grab the kneeling man by the throat. Ordinarily, he might worry about losing the weapon. Instead, he pressed the square end of the pistol between Roosveldt’s eyes, the skin on his forehead remarkably slack.
“Allyson, you cunt.”
“I don’t know, boss, I don’t know. I don’t, please.”
The smell of urine grew steadily worse until Flanagan backed away in distaste. He aimed the gun at the middle of Roosveldt’s chest, and as his mate coughed himself back into consciousness, Flanagan drew the revolver with his other hand and pointed it into the sitting room.
“Tell me, Peter.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“You know they have her, though.”
Roosveldt was nodding before he realised, finally completing the motion with a more definitive gesture, eyes barely willing to rise.
“Who has her? Carlo?”
“Charlie’d never touch this with a ten foot pole, mate. . . .”
“Carlo Franco’s up to his fucking armpits in this, Peter.”
Roosveldt dropped his eyes again. Across the smoky-floored room, Peter’s house guest leaned on one knee and a hand and finished spitting up sick.
“Mate, I don’t know what this is about,” the other bloke muttered. He was much like Prickles, all trendy sportswear and an addict’s physique.
“Shut your hole,” Flanagan growled, feeling his hair-trigger return. “I’ve got an awfully strong urge to shoot at least one of you cunts just for giving me a work-out.”
“You said you weren’t gonna –”
“You haven’t told me shit,” Flanagan snapped. “Where does Hopkins live?”
“Claremont,” Roosveldt replied.
“You know the address?”
“Sure.”
Flanagan pulled his pen and notebook from his jeans pocket and tossed them beside the suspicious mess at Roosveldt’s feet. Both the youths were shaking badly, taking over duties from Flanagan who’d grown calm amid the incessant talk. Roosveldt leaned over the booklet and awkwardly wrote in black pen across the back pages.
“Now get over with your mate,” Flanagan said, gesturing with the Glock before tucking it away.
He changed hands with the Colt and picked up the notebook.
“If I find out you know a damned thing about Allyson, you know I’ll be back to kill you,” he said.
“I’ll be fucken long gone,” Roosveldt stammered with his usual honesty. “I don’t know shit, mate. I don’t know shit about anything.”
“I doubt Carlo keeps you around for your looks.”
“If they took your girlfriend, there’s no way she’ll be at Hopkins’ place,” Roosveldt said. “Charlie’s got houses all across the city.”
“Yeah,” Flanagan said.
And he could only smile, albeit grimly, as he thought about Allyson’s ledger that listed them all.
*
ROOSVELDT WAS PROBABLY right. It didn’t mean Flanagan could resist taking the fight right to the footballer’s roost. It was the kind of bullshit malarkey he imagined the coaches saying to rouse their players, a goal and a point behind going into the fourth quarter. Brett Hopkins had made those kind of comebacks his territory. Now it was time to take it all away from him.
He refuelled the Civic on Stirling Highway, wondering how long it would take Peter Roosveldt to get on the blower. If he didn’t call Hopkins directly – and there was nothing to suggest Prickles would or wouldn’t – then it would be a relay race until Hopkins heard about Flanagan on his way. The urgency spurred him on, paying at the cashier in record time and burning rubber, however improbably, as the Honda tore back out onto the road.
Flanagan called Teneille as he approached the outskirts of Claremont.
“You better go back to your mother’s,” he said without preamble.
“Mick, what’s going on?” she said, more together than she sounded or perhaps the other way around.
“These guys probably know I’m coming. It’s best not to give them any excuse, alright? Go to your mum’s and I’ll call Lord when I know what’s happening.”
“You’re going to need a lawyer if you go on like this,” Teneille said.
“Prophetic words, love, prophetic words.”
He tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and it started ringing again. Flanagan recognised the number as the same he’d ignored several times before.
“Give me a break, detective,” Flanagan muttered. “I’m doing your job for you.”
Hopkins lived on a wide, quiet road near the train line, the Royal Showgrounds within spitting distance, close enough to require a dinky little “please do not park on the lawn” sign staked into the curb-facing sward.
The house itself was surprisingly conventional for a man of Hopkins’s tastes and means. It was old Australian, a converted half-brick weatherboard cottage straight out of The Sullivans, a low red brick fence with a letter slot dividing the footpath from the front lawn. A cool million-plus, probably, in this part of the world. A single lemon tree stood in the front yard, obscuring the windows on the left side of the red concrete steps and brick-enclosed porch. There was a Merc convertible and a Ducati motorcycle in the drive, which ended in a green latticed gate. Beyond that, Flanagan could see a twenty-foot boat covered with a tarpaulin.
“Too good for you, Hopkins,” Flanagan said, thinking of his own impending slice of the Australian dream.
Both guns were concealed in the Honda. If they were going to have it out, Flanagan wanted to test his knuckles on Hopkins’s famous face one more time. He also doubted the footballer would be packing any guns of his own. It didn’t seem his style – though hanging out with Carlo Franco and his mates might lead to almost anything, he had to concede.
It was twilight as he approached the side gate. Gently easing the catch, Flanagan opened the green latticework a bare minimum, angling his body to slip through the gap and easing the gate again behind him, not closed, a quick test of the hinge assuring Flanagan it wouldn’t ride back on its own without a strong wind.
The side of the house was surprisingly neglected, paint flaking from the boards, a shed at the terminus of the drive with both doors open and musty darkness within. It all bespoke the original condition of the property, the parts people wouldn’t normally see left to their ugly selves, a little like Hopkins himself. The side windows were curtained, the back corner
of the property an architect-designed add-on, huge glass windows mostly veiled by white, floor-to-ceiling drapes, gaps sufficient to reveal a home gym, weights and treadmill, wall-bracketed TV and entertainment system. The yard beyond was little more than a strip of turf culminating in a new outdoor barbecue and a round table with a café-style awning.
Flanagan was just contemplating his approach around the glass rear of the house when he heard a door slam. Back down the drive, he saw Hopkins in brown-and-black padded motorcycle leathers slipping into a helmet as he straddled the Ducati. The bike was alive in a second, Hopkins walking the machine backwards onto the street and preparing for take off. Flanagan crouched in the shadow of the dormant boat, not wanting to turn any pursuit into a chase. He understood Hopkins was pretty good at getting away from the police when he wanted, which failed to explain why a few of them might be willing to bash Flanagan as a favour to the star. The ribs would take weeks more to heal, though from past experience he knew in two-and-a-half weeks the broken ends had already started to knit. Another flogging would end any fantasy of being hale and whole by Christmas, he knew.
Hopkins’s departure was relatively sedate. Though he had an opportunity now to search the house for signs of Allyson’s disappearance, Roosveldt’s words about Charlie Franco came back ringing twice as true for media-shy Hopkins. The chances Allyson was locked up in some kind of basement or back room were positively remote. Knowing the footballer’s cold streak, Flanagan glumly acknowledged Allyson would mostly likely be in a shallow grave somewhere if Brett Hopkins was the only one calling the shots. If Allyson was still alive, with all due irony, it was probably thanks to Carlo’s ruthless sense of self-preservation.
The Ducati moved off, and Flanagan bolted down to the Civic and thumbed the door lock and slid behind the wheel, gunning the engine in two seconds flat and throwing the automatic into drive as Hopkins’s tail lights disappeared around the very end of the street.
It turned out to be a short drive. The two vehicles weaved in and out of light traffic, the motorcyclist unaware of his tail, Flanagan keeping it cool in the little white car, wishing for just a little of the Fairmont’s grunt. Hopkins headed west, crossing the train line at Eric Street and sedately revving the powerful bike, joining with the flow of Rav 4s, Toyota 4WDs and sleek European sedans, their windows darkened in the name of privacy, entering the back streets of wealthy Cottesloe like it was The Hague.
Flanagan was grinning. Roosveldt had called the footballer while Flanagan was outside the house and Hopkins had literally got on his bike to go and see what Prickles was on about. Flanagan was going in a loop, smiling all the way back to Roosveldt’s street until Hopkins suddenly took a right turn off the roundabout and gunned it up a quiet, acacia-lined avenue.
The Civic almost failed to follow. With tyres crunching heavily over the curb, Flanagan hauled at the wheel until he had the Ducati in his sights once more. He was just in time to see Hopkins turn again. Many of the east-west streets in the elderly area were separate lane affairs, divided in the middle by thick-turfed median strips wide enough to end much of Perth’s housing problems. Hopkins tore across one of these and turned right at the far side, spinning his rear tyre as he pulled the bike into an uncharacteristic mustard-yellow apartment, the first in a row of three. All the other houses spoke of old money or the usual West Australian resources boom. Flanagan noted the other vehicle in the drive was a Saab with new number plates.
Hopkins was off the bike and bounding up the steps with his helmet under one arm quicker than Flanagan could even indicate right and follow. As he gave way to an early model Corolla and then shot forward to the next intersection, Flanagan’s heart began to race as the reason for Hopkins’ pace seemed as obvious as it was terrifying.
Allyson.
He braked in a squeal of tyres on the street in front of the first apartment and didn’t even close the door as he charged huffing up the stairs, crashing past a few potted ferns and a brass wind-chime as he threw open the metal security grille door.
But the woman in Hopkins’s arms was a stranger. Peroxide blonde curls fell across her shoulders like the perfect accessory to frame the stunned and apoplectic cavity of her open mouth. She wore the season’s elastic white tank-top and tan cargo pants, girlie alligator-tread Blundstones on her feet. Hopkins in his motorcycle leathers was suitably Mad Max, a hint of stubble and his helmet-tousled short hair whipping towards Flanagan as the intruder forced his way in.
“You!”
It was the only thing Hopkins had time to gasp as Flanagan tackled him to the floor, the pair surfing across a fake Persian rug and into the bottom of a set of leather settees. Hopkins got his palm up under Flanagan’s chin and levered him away, but not before Flanagan landed a solid right to the footballer’s cheekbone. It felt as chiselled from rock as it looked. Flanagan readjusted his weight until his knee came down on Hopkins’s crotch, and in a show of extreme resilience, the other man flipped Flanagan over and headbutted down, crunching forehead against forehead as Flanagan defended himself the only way possible with his own hard head.
The girl started screaming. Flanagan’s interrogation was a roar.
“Where’s Allyson?”
“Fuck you, Flanagan!”
Hopkins jumped up and grabbed a lamp shaped like a pottery vase, a heavy electrical cable snaking across his fist. Flanagan rolled aside as the dark blue shards exploded like a shotgun blast across the white terrazzo tiles. A hastily-snatched cushion was Flanagan’s only defence as the talented midfielder snatched a cubic glass ashtray and a boxed chess set and threw them both. Flanagan lunged at him in the following lull, and they both went through the still-closing front doorway and down the outside steps, Hopkins cushioning Flanagan’s fall as the girlfriend shrieked again and grabbed for her iPhone.
The two men uncoiled painfully as they slid to the bottom of the concrete stairs. Hopkins bled heavily from a gash below one eye, though his padded gear had served him well on the way down. Flanagan hunched over, the pain like his a rib had pierced a lung.
“What’s it gonna take to get rid of you, cunt?” Hopkins gasped.
“Where’s Ally?”
“I don’t even know,” Hopkins spat. “I asked Charlie not to tell me.”
“You’re up to your tits in this.”
Hopkins glanced around, then dropped into a low wrestling crouch, silent suddenly, that feral shark gleam a familiar narrowing of his eyes and the musculature of his face.
“Come at me then,” he hissed.
They clashed like pit fighters, iron-hard fingers stabbing from hands like claws. Flanagan flicked an elbow into Hopkins’s face, force weakening. Hopkins put his knee into Flanagan’s side below the mending ribs. Then Flanagan got two hands on the footballer’s right wrist and he turned and pulled, the Brownlow medallist suddenly squealing like a caged animal as his whole arm wrenched painfully upward. Flanagan used the advantage to bat his elbow three times as hard as he could into Hopkins’s face, the other man almost mindless to the injury. He pulled his arm away in a move that could’ve cost him his career, desperate to relieve the trapped limb, and Flanagan’s right leg went out from under him.
Flanagan’s back hit the ground, and the cop dropped his weight onto Flanagan’s shoulders, the extended baton across his collarbones and windpipe. The cop’s partner was a squat brunette with a penguin’s gait and the sort of freckles he’d normally find hard to resist. But she was as good with the baton as her partner, and she belted Flanagan across the side of his knee as he kicked out, at the same time barking the news he was under arrest.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Flanagan growled between stolen breaths. “This clown’s aiding an’ abetting a possible murder.”
The female cop’s voice rang loud and clear.
“That’s Brett Hopkins, you fuckwit.”
TWENTY-FIVE
THE POLICE MEDICO left the room at the same time Mahmoud Pringdegar walked in. Flanagan wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but
the ethnic cop in shirtsleeves and blue jeans wasn’t it. Detective Constable Pringdegar wore fashionable light stubble on his face, his head a longish trim with an electric clipper, the odd grey hair among the blue-black though the cop couldn’t’ve been more than thirty-five.
“You’re Pringdegar,” Flanagan said softly, sitting up on the edge of the sick room gurney.
“That’s right, Mr Flanagan.”
“I need a cigarette.”
“We’ll go to an interview room. Come on.”
Despite the over-blown story from the cops who brought him in, Flanagan was suitably bruised and chastened that the Indian detective didn’t have any worry about him running off. Pringdegar walked lightly in his expensive fashion trainers, leather the colour of iced coffee. His white shirt was tucked into his jeans in the only concession to formality the policeman seemed to allow. The heavy silver-metallic watch on his wrist read the time as a little after 9pm.
“How did those Cottesloe cops treat you, Mr Flanagan?”
Pringdegar lead him along by the shoulder. Flanagan couldn’t help holding his ribs, like his body-wide bruises were putting stress on the recent breaks.
“You don’t need to worry. I’m not making any complaints.”
“It was good of them to drive you to Fremantle,” the detective said.
He led Flanagan out into the dingy blue-carpeted area between the half-divider desks that ran to the back of the fortified public reception. Through a doorway, uniformed cops everywhere, Flanagan glimpsed antique cells with their wild west iron doors jammed permanently open, boxes of paperwork rather than prisoners now held hostage. There was a modern door not far beyond. After spying a blue-gravel driveway through a barred back exit, Flanagan followed Pringdegar through.
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