There was a flash. Flanagan just had time to throw himself down as the muzzle of a shotgun appeared, preceding the roar that threw sparks and deadly shrapnel down the claustrophobic space. The moment Flanagan heard the ka-ching of the pump action, he scrambled up and forward, cannon-balling into the recess of another doorway as the weapon roared again.
“I said police!”
“Fuck you you are!”
Flanagan looked into the room behind, the door on its hinges thanks to him, several rows of old trestles covered in computer hard drives, a mountain of used cardboard boxes and plastic DVD cases in the far corner. There was a window, too, old security wire pushed roughly out, something about the nicotine-stained curtain flapping in the breeze eerily suggestive.
He hissed under his breath, hefting the Glock and peering back up the hall, the noise from at least two people in the living room outside a cause for concern. He heard more voices, words unclear, a woman with them. Flanagan’s stomach tightened with simultaneous hope and fear.
Getting down low, he duck-walked across the lino, assimilating the view through to the rear of the property, the mattresses in the abandoned kitchen, the expensive-looking couches in the lounge with heavy white sheets nailed to the rafters. The video camera on its tripod. A laptop open and displaying an image of Stonehenge. Over it all, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes and sperm rising above the damp.
A woman and two men were halfway through the back door. The last of them wore a leather motorcycle jacket without patches. He turned at the flyscreen and worked the shotgun again. Flanagan lifted the pistol, and still in a squat, paused for aim and then just hung there, he and the other gunman staring at each other across a distance of twenty feet, baulking at the blank finality of what came next. Then the biker was gone. The screen door swung shut with a bang, and cursing again, Flanagan staggered from his crouch to follow.
The woman’s histrionics sounded like gale-force laughter until Flanagan realised she was nearly shrieking prayers outside at the top of her naked lungs. The three escapees bunkered down further in the backyard, the biker tough sheltering them with his bulk. The second man was unarmed, a surfer or stoner with a mop of tangled blonde hair, a dirty shave and thongs on his feet. Hardly the footwear for a crisis, Flanagan thought, the shotgun caroming again, wood and ancient flywire shredding a metre away. After a moment’s hesitation, Flanagan poked the handgun over the edge of the solid lower half of the back doorframe and the harsh industrial hammer of the Glock resounded twice, far off to the right, no chance of killing anybody except perhaps a peeping tom.
Flanagan chanced a peek. A quick scan of the ragged back fence-line revealed no gates, an ancient garage tilt-a-door looming in faded blue paint to the right. The surfer was yanking on the handle for all he was worth, but it just wasn’t happening. His expression, glancing in quick jerks back the way of the house, betrayed fears that a neglected spot of DIY was going to get them all killed.
“Throw down the shotgun and we’ll talk,” Flanagan yelled.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” the biker replied. “You get the fuck out of here. You’re not police. You’re gonna bring the pigs down on us, you crazy fucken arsehole.”
Flanagan’s calves were cramping in the squat. He waddled around. It was all suburban quiet again, no sign of police, perhaps a voice, a child maybe, a block distant yelling to his mother, the distant hum of traffic away on Marmion Street.
“I’m looking for Allyson Jacobsen. Maybe you know her as Allyson James,” Flanagan called out.
“What? Alice in Chains? Fuck off, man.”
“Charlie Franco brought her here.”
“Man,” the biker bawled back, emotion straining his voice, “if you’re crossing Carlo, you’re fucken with your life. Come out so I can shoot you.”
Flanagan thought about letting the Glock reply. There could be no real vengeance. When he chanced a look again, the biker was distracted, caught in a confab with his raggedy mate. Flanagan uttered a grunt of decision and rolled out the door ignoring his aching side and back.
He came up with the automatic in a classic crouch, but the shotgun remained at bay. The biker’s crystal blue eyes caught on his for a moment, the white teeth and Nordic good looks that helped make him a small screen film star fretting at the lip of his blonde beard. Then he gave a jut with his chin and his accomplice stepped forward.
“There’s someone wants to talk to you,” the biker said.
It took Flanagan a moment to register the second man held out a mobile phone. Flanagan stood as the tension bled from the scene.
“Who is it?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE WELSHMAN’S VOICE came on with just a fraction of hesitation.
“Flanagan? What are you up to, you mad cunt?”
“RJ,” Flanagan replied in a strangled voice. Surprise veered abruptly into disappointment it wasn’t Franco.
“That was you, at the rehearsal rooms?”
“Is that what you call them?” Flanagan asked.
“You assaulted two of our men.”
“That’s a fancy word, RJ. Try again.”
“I’m asking you what you’re up to, you fucking Mick,” the Welshman hissed.
The unbridled menace was new. Flanagan was so surprised that he actually stopped and took notice.
“I’m working my way through your operation until I find Allyson,” he said.
“You’re still on about the girl? Fuck.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
RJ grunted, snapped a command to someone with his hand over the receiver. When he came back on, the hard tone was gone. Something masquerading as sorrow replaced it instead.
“Take the phone and get out of there. I’ll call.”
With the line going dead, Flanagan looked over the others as he slipped the phone without explanation into his jeans’ pocket. The girl had her arms clutched over big breasts, the udders to match her cow brown eyes and muted expression.
“The police will be on the way,” Flanagan said.
He turned abruptly and walked back through the house, over the crunching glass, the fallen man wisely gone. The Civic was back in action a moment later, Flanagan trying to defeat the surge of his bowel-loosening nerves at the thought the police might swoop at any moment and derail what was currently passing for his latest plan.
People in the street took down his number as he passed, but for now, Flanagan dismissed the concern. Once at the corner, he eased into the stream of ignorant traffic and accelerated away as hard as the four-cylinder engine would go.
RJ called as he slowed for the lights near Stirling Highway and the bridge, the Honda’s nose pointed back into Freo, afternoon sunlight pearlescent through the thin, but all pervasive cloud cover. Cop cars and an ambulance hurtled past the other way and the Welshman’s laugh underscored the moment as Flanagan fumbled to depress the right button on the foreign phone.
“I’m in traffic,” Flanagan growled. “Make it quick.”
“The girl’s not worth it, Flanagan. If you’re ready to deal, I’ll give you the address.”
“Tell me.”
“No, you first,” RJ said. “Lampey rang and said some guy was impersonating a cop and waving a gun around.”
“It’s Prickles’ gun,” Flanagan replied.
“Don’t let the police find it,” RJ said. “Now tell me how you’re finding out our places.”
“Beginner’s luck,” he spat.
“She’s not worth this, Flanagan,” RJ said. “If I give you the address, you’ll play nice?”
“I just want the girl.”
He tried to control the note of anger and disgust in his voice, stuttering with the effort.
“OK,” RJ said. “Carlo would skin me alive for this.”
North Fremantle was just on the other side of the river.
*
WHOEVER WAS RESPONSIBLE, they’d done it quick. Bruises covered Allyson’s grey arms and legs. Her breasts had shrunk w
ith starvation until they were just sharp points beneath her dirty white singlet.
Flanagan knelt in the kicked open doorway of the serviced apartment in plush Doepel Street, the outside rendered in cheery peach-coloured limewash paint that couldn’t do a damned thing to chase away the rainy day or the fact a teenage girl had been held captive and died inside.
She was sprawled on the carpet in the middle of the empty living room, feet twisted in defeat just beyond the reach of daylight’s cold fingers trying to creep towards her down the hall. Although there were signs people had been inside the unit – the kitchen was a mess with the usual incrimination of take-away containers, empty whiskey bottles and cigarette butts in the sink – the place itself wasn’t furnished.
Flanagan stayed crouched over the dead girl for so long he realised he’d started to fall asleep, kneeling, either exhausted or blacking out with the pain in his side to one degree or another that it didn’t matter. Allyson’s wrist lay in his palm. Bites in the cold flesh showed where she’d been restrained, but maybe it wouldn’t be enough for the Coroner. The only thing clear was the needle jutting from her other arm, her body depleted from day after day on the junk. Now it just looked like a habit gone terribly wrong.
Only the journal, stuffed into its usual holster beneath the passenger seat of the car, could argue otherwise.
Paperwork was at a premium in the apartment. As the police made their inevitable arrival, Flanagan walked weakly into the kitchen and lit a cigarette and picked up the neat rectangle of red-and-white paper, triple-folded amid the debris to make sure no-one would miss the real estate agent’s letter, forged God-knew-when, asking Miss Allyson James to pay the latest four weeks’ rent owing since her tenancy signed in May.
“Cunts,” Flanagan said and coughed, crumpling the sheet into a ball as the quavering voices calling him to stand still echoed down the hard plank hall. It was one piece of evidence the cops might miss, at least, and before Flanagan tossed it into the sopping sink, he filed away the realtor’s name for another time and place when men with handcuffs wouldn’t be there to protect Charlie Franco.
*
THE TOUCH OF steel around his wrist seemed to bring Flanagan out of his morbid reverie. He turned and looked at the young constable expressionlessly, the only betrayal of humanity his widened eyes as he parsed surprise, and took in the sight of the cop’s face so close to his, every pore and follicle of moustache leaping into vivid detail.
“I’m sorry,” Flanagan said brokenly. “I’m not done here.”
His only thought: Charlie Franco.
Before the cop could snap the other half of the cuffs in place, Flanagan drove the cup of his open palm into the officer’s inside elbow. Turning with the momentum and melting aside, he had the policeman’s arm up and behind his back in an instant. Turning still – the first, muted syllables of surprise still forming in the back of the cop’s larynx – Flanagan put his free hand at the back of the officer’s head and guided him almost gently into a judo flip, breath exploding from the younger man’s lungs as he landed on his back on the hard floor.
The prone cop popped the buckle on his holster and Flanagan paused, timing the kick to send the gun skittering into the shadows of the kitchen. The second cop, a woman rendered squat by the huge utility belt, came pelting up the hall. Flanagan turned his back and did what was needed, disarming the cop of each item in his arsenal as they were drawn, the telescoping baton, the capsicum spray, the mobile phone.
The female cop entered and chose badly, trying in decency to take him down with the nightstick instead of drawing her gun. It was good training badly applied. Flanagan was a streak, no resemblance to the grey-faced ghost who’d knelt beside the dead girl. He swung the second half of his loose silver handcuffs like the latest spring fashion, perfectly collecting the policewoman’s wrist. The mechanism snapped in place, and continuing his pirouette, Flanagan caught the officer up in his rainforest dance, slipping sideways across the room and bringing her with him. First direction, second direction – she jerked like a rag doll under his guidance, continually off balance. A quick snapping kick and her legs collapsed and she struck the parquetried kitchen floor with the back of her head and went quiet.
Flanagan knelt beside the woman and fumbled for her keys, watching the first cop scramble upright and pull his radio free to start calling for back-up. Flanagan wasted only long enough to disengage from the female cop, snapping the loose second cuff around and snapping it onto his own wrist. Then he tipped an imaginary hat to the downed policeman and bolted for the door.
The police car was parked behind the Civic. He had to back-and-forth a few times before freeing himself, and while the temptation there was to add insult to injury – and madness to suicide – by taking the police cruiser for his ride, in the end, sheer practicality won out. He hadn’t kept the keys to the cop car and the Honda was small and manoeuvrable enough to win free. Within a minute, he was over the Freeway, across the traffic bridge, and hurtling down Stirling Highway for High Street, Fremantle, and the shortest route possible to Charlie Franco’s house.
He called Triple-O with the purloined mobile, the numbers weirdly arrayed on the hornet-coloured device with the five in the middle enormous. The pre-recorded voice told him the main police number that he only remembered he knew the moment it was relayed. Then he hung up, called the less urgent line, and rolled the dice with destiny.
“I need to speak to a Detective Frank Doyle.”
The background whirred and clicked a few times. A polite woman asked for the number he was calling from so Detective Inspector Doyle could ring back.
“I don’t know the number I’m calling from. Can’t you trace? Fuck,” he sighed. “I’ll just wait for Frank.”
He drove one-handed across the city, the quay and its cranes more memory than actual backdrop as valuable seconds trickled by. There were sirens growing in the background, but for now he ignored them.
“OK, this is Doyle,” a gruff voice eventually said.
“Frank, it’s Mick Flanagan.”
The silence lasted long enough to give Flanagan a clear guess at how much the senior cop knew. Then Frank cleared his throat with a growl loud enough to scare cancer, and the conversation began like the brief bout of stage-fright had never happened.
“Mick Flanagan. OK. What can I do for you?”
“You’re scaring me Frank,” Flanagan replied. “What should I take it to mean you’re playing ignorant?”
“Hard to be ignorant with a certain little fuck setting off police sirens across half of South Metro. That’s you, I take it?”
“News travels fast,” he said.
“What are you on?” Doyle asked.
“Look Frank, I’m taking a punt. I’m on my way to Carlo Franco’s house with a dead girl’s diary that incriminates that creep six ways to Sunday.”
“That sounds like a police matter to me, son.”
“Me too,” Flanagan said. “Shame I couldn’t rely on the police to do anything about it when it mattered.”
Doyle paused, asking in a very hushed and Catholic tone of voice, “This girl, she’s the body?”
“Allyson Jacobsen,” Flanagan replied, almost as formal. “I – I guess I’d like to be the one to tell the parents.”
“Well, you’ve blown that now,” Doyle grunted, back to form, papers rustling in the background along with a play of voices, many of them insistent.
“Frank. . . .”
“Flanagan, I need you to stop, pull over somewhere, and have a think about what you’re doing. From what I hear –”
“Frank, it’s not going to happen,” he answered. “Listen up. I don’t know how much credit this fucking phone has.”
“Hmm, I’m listening.”
“I’ll give you Franco.”
“Like he’s yours to give,” the old cop growled. “Go on.”
“I’ll give him to you. I’ve got the diary. I’ll testify with what I know.”
“It’s pretty s
haky, son –”
“I’ll relate whatever Franco says when I tell him about the diary, when I show it to him.”
“Flanagan, that’s fucken suicide,” Doyle said.
“We’ll see. I’ll give you Franco. But then you’ve got to help me get Hopkins.”
“Right,” Doyle said slowly. “Still with the footballer.”
“Don’t start with me, Frank.”
“No, you’re right. We’ve got a case to make there.”
“Will you help me or not?” Flanagan asked.
“Jesus, son,” Doyle said at last. “I don’t know that’s my offer to make.”
And then the phone went dead.
*
THE POLICE CAR slewed out of a side street onto Hampton Road with sirens and lights enough to wake the devil. Teneille Tennyson’s Civic gunned for all it was worth, but the big police V8 was too much the panther, careening up and alongside Flanagan with a cop the complexion of mashed banana making frantic hand motions for him to pull over. Although it was a zippy little car, Flanagan knew he could never out-run them. Instead, he swerved in, side panels crumpling, and the surprised cop had to steer hard to avoid taking out a row of parked cars and an old-fashioned concrete bus shelter. They fell behind as Flanagan cut right across oncoming traffic, and rear tyres snaking, belted down a sloping cross street.
They were still back there, somewhere, but a second patrol Commodore poked its nose out at the next intersection. Flanagan spied the passenger cop jump out and flick a concertina of plastic spikes most the way across the street in front of him. The Stinger, as it was known, would pretty much reduce the Civic to its axles. Veering hard to the left and taking the intersection the patrol car had staked out, Flanagan stripped the tail lights from a parked vintage Cortina, went up on the opposite sidewalk as he turned, sent a female jogger bounding up athletically over a low concrete wall, and after denting another sedan parked on the cross street, tore away in a haze of burnt rubber.
Hard Light- Infamous Page 21