Hard Light- Infamous

by Warren Hately

  “If you believe it, Mick, that’s good enough for me,” Mike said finally. “Count me in, alright? I’ve got a cricket bat in the back for times just like this.”

  As simple as that, Flanagan’s brewing rage dissolved into a gentle laugh.

  “How did you become such a soft touch, Mike? You hard cunt, going into bat for some little girl?”

  The cabbie said nothing, probably unsure whether to be embarrassed or proud. When they pulled in behind the Civic, abandoned at the front of the yellow apartments, Mike’s eyes widened as Flanagan dug around beneath the seats and came out with the two handguns.

  “So which one do you fancy? Neither’s licensed. Can’t be traced.”

  Flanagan’s mirth widened at Mike struggle to frame a suitable reply. While he was still trying, Flanagan tucked the pistols away, one either side of the small of his back.

  “I appreciate the lift, Mike. This is more than you should stick your nose into, OK? I’ll call you and your cricket bat when I’ve done my private inquiries licence and we’re knocking down doors on bill defaulters and cheating husbands. Alright?”

  “Flanagan, I. . . .”

  “I don’t want you caught up in this,” Flanagan said more firmly. “It’s not your decision, so you don’t need to feel shit. Go pick up some tourists or something.”

  He patted the top of the cab and walked slowly back to the Honda.

  *

  THE LIGHT CAME down watery and filtered by the yellow paintwork of the rendered bricks as Flanagan ascended the same stairs he’d so recently tumbled down, riding a famous West Australian footballer like a snowboard to the well-watered lawn and concrete footpath below. Unsurprisingly, the apartment’s heavy door was closed, the security grille locked across it.

  After quietly checking the front, Flanagan went down the steps and sought down the side of the end row apartment. There was a covered archway – recycled red bricks and an extravagant vine used to fake the age – beside the end apartment, wide enough for a car to drive through to the narrow parking lot out back. Beneath the overhang, the vines had already wormed their way through the cut-price mortar, tickling Flanagan’s face as he crept along.

  The Saab seen earlier was parked crookedly across two bays at the back of the first apartment. Further along, a sun-faded old Citroen and a Mazda 4WD sat silently in their berths like sleeping cattle. The same kind of rustic brick wall backed the apartments, with tall, country-style gates painted Tuscan red and flowering with strangler vine.

  Flanagan unhitched the gate. A pool of light fell through sliding glass doors almost identical to the ones at his sister’s house. Otherwise, the brick patio held an old wooden outdoor set and a portable clothes line, lace panties in flower. Inside the back room, a kitchen, Flanagan spied a wooden spiral staircase leading to the upper floor, an expensive-looking scullery of pots and pans suggesting – along with a brimming spice rack – a genuine cook.

  He could only hope the back door was unlatched.

  Flanagan’s phone suddenly lit up, the sound like frogs mating sounded shockingly loud in the 1am dark. Rather than switch the phone off, he dug it out quickly and depressed the green button.

  “Who is this?”

  “Mick? It’s your mother.”

  A shadow moved down the stairs to the inexplicably well-lit kitchen.

  “Shit. Do you know what time it is?”

  “I know, Mick. I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about you.”

  “I can’t –”

  “Nuala said you’re not leaving this thing with the Jacobsen girl alone. Mick, don’t you have any sense left? Or are you just chasing a skirt?”

  Flanagan didn’t know whether to be shocked at his mother’s suggestion or horrified at the looming prospect of discovery. He disconnected the phone and started the process of turning it off, crouched in a shadowed niche along the brick wall. The sliding door opened and a flashlight beam – weak from low batteries or just made in Thailand – played across the small back yard.

  “Is someone there?”

  The woman’s voice was only half-convinced, and therefore not completely wary. Flanagan saw the peroxide blonde, waiting until she had her back slightly angled before he became a streak, slipping behind her and putting a hand over her mouth, the phone pressed into one of the muscled grooves at the small of her back.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “I’m coming in.”

  She said something incomprehensible and Flanagan pulled her back into the apartment. Closing the glass door, he found the kitchen lights and turned them off before releasing his hostage.

  “What’s your relation to Brett Hopkins?”

  “It’s you again,” she breathed hoarsely. “The fucking psycho.”

  “It’s Hopkins who’s the psycho, lady.”

  The woman watched him with big blue eyes, heavy mascara bleeding into rings smudged across her eyelids. If there was a definition of cheap blonde in an encyclopaedia somewhere, chances are she was pictured. Even in her pyjama top and knickers, the woman’s make-up was still trowelled on. Although alarmed, she looked on with surprisingly little fear, almost a spectator to her own plight.

  “I thought they locked you up?”

  “I’m an innocent man,” Flanagan snapped, hating the words as much for the corny sentiment as the name of the old Billy Joel song. “What’s Brett Hopkins to you? Your boyfriend?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Lady, you don’t want to ask me that. What about Allyson James?”

  “Yeah, she stayed here. So what? She’s a fucking whore, you know. There’s no way Brett’s to blame for anything to do with her.”

  “She’s only sixteen,” Flanagan snapped, than had to add, “I mean, seventeen.”

  The woman shook her head for a wordless moment, finally abandoning any wrestle with logic, unable to digest the words of someone she clearly considered a maniac.

  “What do you fucking want from me?” she bellowed hoarsely instead.

  “Where’s Hopkins now?”

  “At home? I don’t know.” She was angry and crude and didn’t care who knew. “Why don’t you fucking ask him? Or shouldn’t you be staying the hell away?”

  Flanagan had already released her, but now the woman took her chance for an exit, storming through to the living room at the front. It was only moderately tidied-up from before.

  “What’s your name?” Flanagan called, following her.

  “Madeline.”

  “Surname?”

  “Do you think you’re a cop or something?” the woman fired back, opening the front door and motioning for Flanagan to continue through.

  Flanagan stared at the pulsing black rectangle, mustard-coloured light reflecting off the exterior brickwork, and realised just how tired he was.

  “Maybe I need to think this through,” he said weakly.

  The woman started to cry in frustrated, juddering gasps. Ashamed of himself at last, Flanagan dipped his head and walked past. A tight-lipped apology didn’t quite make it to his lips.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  HE SLEPT UNTIL the sun rose and then, blinking at the light through the windshield, dragged his jacket across his head and twisted in the cramped back of the Civic, sleeping through until noon. When he woke, his ribs stung like barbecued meat, his eyes were glued shut with crap, and drool formed a crust across the two-week stubble of his beard.

  For September, it was like a winter revival under the Norfolk pines at South Beach. Flanagan levered himself upright eventually and cranked the Civic’s rear window. He rolled and lit a cigarette and coughed as harsh squalls threw themselves across the windshield of the car. Gulls and odd bits of debris manoeuvred strangely through the air ahead of the gale, other vehicles in the car park mostly travellers and well battened down.

  There was the lure of coffee at the end of a two-hundred metre dash to the café in the north end of the beach toilet block. The plastic sails were down, gloomy waitresses dissecting their lives
in the misery of the cramped kitchen abutting the male swimmers’ showers. Flanagan limped in from the cold and ordered take-away, a big cup, but then pulled a plastic chair across the scratchy concrete and enjoyed the view through a single plexiglass window, the beach in chaos as lines of wavy grey intervened all the way to the horizon. The odd swimmer or dog-walker made an appearance as the rain eased, but soon it was back on again, and nary a soul crossed the esplanade of slick grass for a whole half-hour.

  The papers were speculating on the Grand Final, only a fortnight away. Hopkins’ squad was going into the semis on Saturday against Geelong. As usual, the eastern states papers hoped the West Australians would lose. Just as predictably, the whole state was behind Hopkins’ side now the other team had bowed out. The thought of such vast accolades made Flanagan ill. And not for the first time or the last, he wondered in what dark hole Allyson Jacobsen had been disappeared – or if she was still around to tell the tale at all.

  He unrolled the notes he made at Nuala’s place and started at the beginning. Something in the original, slightly haphazard way Allyson’s ledger started showed the book was hardly the result of fastidious research as he traced Allyson’s journey through the underworld into which she’d eventually vanished. Flanagan could only hope at some point in that narrative, some obvious locality might present itself, even if such hopes were like throwing darts in the dark.

  *

  THE HONDA FOLLOWED the weather, or visa versa, as the white hatchback headed inland. Flanagan was travelling without a phone now, the dead battery a relief. Instead, he had the unlicensed Glock in his lap, hopefully not linked to any major crimes in either the past or the future. The silver Python was under the seat, snug on the carpet, heavy as a chunk of Martian ore.

  The rain made the world a kaleidoscope as vehicles slewed left and right in the rain, headed to the city. Flanagan was relieved his first port of call didn’t require a long journey as the hail kicked in, and thunder, somewhere far away in a sky turned black, peeled across the heavens.

  Although he didn’t know Fremantle’s outer suburbs well, O’Connor was simple enough. Off the artery of South Street, he found the complex of industrial buildings Allyson described enough in her journal, shy to the streetscape, a huge paint-flaking skip poised like a barricade at the top of a sloping concrete drive.

  Although the Honda was a quiet car, Flanagan switched to neutral and killed the engine as he coasted the hump and steered into the nearly deserted lot. An old white Kingswood sedan with dented sides and a bleak-windowed grey Econovan were parked together intimately, the only other vehicles within eyeball of the street. The drive ended at a chain-link fence and a severe slope, a vacant lot on one side a BMX fantasy for local delinquents, roller-shuttered businesses in a row to the left. One of the shopfronts had a sign so old he couldn’t read it. Sitting in the car, effectively masked by the rain, Flanagan counted down from the entrance one last time to make sure he had the right place and then carefully folded the diary under the front seat with the other gun.

  The rain gave him long enough for a cigarette, then he went across like a ghost, cursing through gritted teeth and under breath as the glass door triggered an old shop bell. The tinkling was muted by the downfall on the tin roof above. Nonetheless, something in the cadence of the muffled thumps and grunts beyond the deserted, rank-carpeted office changed.

  A peeling whiteboard on wheels partly blocked the door. Flanagan glimpsed a dark shape move around the corner, several small rooms set like giant boxes among the warehouse, each with its own smaller roller-doors gaping open. Flanagan had the automatic in the small of his back, his hand already twined around the grip, and when a broad figure appeared at the edge of the unlighted distance, Flanagan whipped the weapon up in a police crouch.

  “Police! Don’t move.”

  The baseball bat fell from the Maori man’s hands and rebounded with a stiff crack from the concrete floor. Flanagan hurried across the space with the pistol still extended, whatever his victim expected next, a handcuffing or a quick search, there were no plans to avoid a sudden blow to the side of the neck. Bigger men had gone down more quickly, but the Maori still managed to get his hand over the end of the gun’s sight as he melted. Flanagan shook him loose, but then an accomplice bolted from another room, plastic-wrapped bundles in his arms, going deep into the warehouse like a proverbial rat.

  “I said hold it right there,” Flanagan barked.

  He gave chase, booted feet squeaking on the sheer surface, the slim figure ahead of him rebounding off sea container walls as he veered right and then left.

  A rectangle of light ahead offered sanctuary, a naked globe dangling from a supply cupboard, just a glimpse of hacked tin and bare insulation stuffing suggesting an escape route. But Flanagan fell on the man with the same routine, the heavy pistol catching him across the back of the skull, collision with a brimming shelf inevitable.

  The plastic bags burst beneath the courier. Flanagan clamped his fingers across his face as the powdered heroin rose like a cloying gas in the snaking concrete hall made from sea container chambers all around. He grabbed the unconscious man and dragged him back a few metres, the light from the hidden doorway less strong, the man’s face, as he turned over, little more than a Rorschach test. Flanagan pulled him by the dirty neck of his Whitlams t-shirt. Grey eyes in a face greasy with acne flicked open.

  “Where’s the fucking girl?” Flanagan growled.

  “What girl?”

  Flanagan’s fingers clenched and unclenched and finally let the man go. His head hit the floor with unexpected force and the escapee swore, writhing slowly on the concrete as Flanagan stood over him.

  “Her name is Allyson. Where is she? Tell me, or tell me who would know.”

  “I don’t know what you’re fucking on about, mate,” the skinny youth replied. He wiped spit from his mouth and sat up, drugs smeared like chalk across his chin and chest. “Charlie’s gonna be fuckin’ pissed off with you.”

  Flanagan held the Glock sideways so the other man could see it.

  “Feeling’s mutual.”

  *

  DRIVING HARD ENOUGH to make the Honda’s gearbox groan, Flanagan tore across the suburbs, Allyson’s journal on the passenger seat weighted open by the Glock like a street directory.

  Even Flanagan found it hard to believe genteel East Fremantle’s respectable façade could be so easily slid aside, and yet, there in the cramped pencil hand of the girl he sought, the detailed truth of what she knew was there for him to see. As if the address had only been glimpsed, the 12 was scored over many times, confirmed and underlined, a hesitant sketch of an interior half-glimpsed beneath it. Nuala’s concise and ineffably more adult biro remarks were crammed into the photocopy margins.

  It can’t be a drug house, Allyson had written, according to Nuala’s translation. Carlo and RJ go there after they’re stoned. I’ve only seen the front room. Carlo insists Danny escort me out. George Street has great chai tea and pizza.

  She was more than just an observant girl, he noted. She’d estimated the fourteen-metre street frontage, the traditional ten-metre setback characteristic of the old suburb and hard fought-for by the tiny town council. Yet Flanagan could only shake his head. It was one thing to wonder what made a smart and attractive young woman get into such a sordid business. It was another to grasp what it was she thought she was doing when she set about recording the exact details of everything she encountered, including building measurements. Surely, he thought, Tricia Renald wanted the dirt, not the planning details.

  Neighbours probably thought No. 12 was the only rental in the street, hence the rusting Falcon on the lawn, the milk crates beside the crumbling brick letterbox, the lustre long gone from the red cement slab path to the bushes overgrowing the once-fashionable art deco entrance. Few would guess it was owned by a multi-millionaire, though Charlie Franco’s name was probably not the first to trip off their well-articulate tongues if prompted.

  The parallel homes
were either crisp with preservation or Frankenstein monsters of postmodern architecture, studios and second storeys all but welded on to their provincial Australiana roots.

  Two more cars were in the drive: a newish 4WD and the sort of Commodore favoured by plainclothes police. Flanagan doubted they were about. A sense of flagrant disregard emanated from the house, a subtly-implied lawlessness God-fearing neighbours could easily choose to ignore. Allyson’s diary offered few clues. Flanagan shucked the Glock down the back of his jeans as before. The adrenalin had gone, leaving him cold, mouth like an ashtray, a dry coffee-and-sweat stink even he had to notice.

  There was a vague movement of the Venetians in the front room. Flanagan broke into a run, vaulted the red steps, cracking open the door with his shoulder and feeling the shards of glass tumble in huge pieces to the dank hall.

  There wasn’t much to it. The door came down in several large fragments basically on top of a man in a dirty yellow t-shirt and Adidas sweats. As the door collapsed and Flanagan saw his opportunity, he rode the separating panels, forcing the man down hard into the frame of another doorway just to the side of the hallway beyond. There was a grunt, the dull, unpleasant sound of a skull getting concussed, and then the meaty slap of the man going down in full, the rain of wooden fragments and glass a muffled percussion as Flanagan stepped over the groaning body, righting himself and scanning the hinted room adjacent, eyes almost immediately drawn, distracted, to the corridor’s end.

  “We’ve got company!” a brash male voice called.

  “Don’t move, police,” Flanagan yelled in return, doubtful about the lie as ever, glancing at his footing as he advanced. The carpet was fifty years old, moist enough to be sticky, caked with grime and dust, with ancient red-and-black lino curling at the entrance to the main room. The drawn blinds and the bushes outside conspired to allow little light. Under the strain of renewed adrenalin, it was all just movement and suggestion.