Now he was headed the way he’d been going before, parallel to the coast but many blocks from it, the elevation giving him a grand glimpse of a half-mile of Fremantle cityscape and then the permafrost blue of the Indian Ocean, half-a-dozen tankers in various exit and entrance trajectories for the port, the postmodern architecture of the quay mixing perfectly with the old and new, the Port Authority tower the dominant erection on the coast. It was all just a blur as Flanagan struggled to keep on speed, the cops with their reclaimed Stinger taking no more than ten seconds to fire up behind him. Flanagan drove blind, trusting to luck across several more intersections before the cops behind him, sirens blaring, weren’t quite so lucky, and a milk truck with a freckled beauty on its side suddenly came from nowhere and collected them like so much extra baggage on their path continuing down the hill.
The judder and scrape of metal and fibreglass sent a shiver down Flanagan’s spine, but he wasn’t so silly as to pass up the chance given. Like death itself, he knew other cops were still out there. He wheeled the Civic hard uphill again and cut back on to Hampton, the South Street intersection a good time to lose them. Something sounded broken and loose as he veered away at Captain Midnight’s, the pub in the middle of a daytime image change, painters’ scaffolds at all points, and Flanagan let out the breath he’d been holding for five minutes and hoped to God he wasn’t about to discover he had a flat as, distantly, a cop car hurtled through the intersection with South Terrace, ahead but divergent to where he wanted to go.
The panel at the front of the car broke free, including the licence plate, crunching hard as the Civic ran over it. Then it seemed like whatever was holding the little car back was gone. Flanagan’s hand curled almost affectionately around the gearstick as he continued uphill, retracing half-forgotten traffic routes in his mind.
TWENTY-NINE
IT WAS NEARLY dark at Franco’s house.
For a day that felt like an eternity, it was a wry natural indicator of the passage of time that twilight would be falling as Flanagan coasted in neutral down the cul-de-sac into which Carlo Franco had made his home. Despite the day’s rains, the whole suburb seemed dry, parched, summer like a far-off cry, as real as it ever could be at the end of football season.
An array of options seemed like no choice at all to Flanagan, who felt the girl’s diary beneath the seat of the Civic as palpable as tachycardia, heavy as a granite headstone. To add insult to the day’s injuries would only be worse; and to a man who’d most recently fled police capture through violence, a little further didn’t seem a long way to go. Because the Glock came with no spare clip, he thrust the Python into his belt only marginally unsure about blowing his crotch apart in his haste.
Security at the gate wasn’t just the two starved-looking guard dogs which came out to him. The black chrome gate was tall and topped with points making getting over tricky. Without a flash kit, he knew he wasn’t getting in quick enough to escape attention.
His eyes went to the whitewashed walls of the Franco manse as he drew the pistol and looked back at the gently-snarling dogs. Flanagan was still assessing his chances scaling over, other hand tight around one of the thick black bars, when the front door of the big house opened.
The Welshman looked like the Grim Reaper for the iPod generation. The black Bonds hoodie and telltale white earphone cords were effective accessories to the familiar shotgun the big man carried by his side. The weight of the weapon hung from its matte pistol grip as he half-lumbered down the steps and across the drive. He pocketed something as Flanagan caught his approach, the phone just one of several bulges discernible in RJ’s outfit.
“I thought you had his phone?” the Welshman, conversationally, inquired.
RJ clicked his fingers and the two Dobermans came to him, then he slowly returned his gaze back through the bars, taller already, and only bolstered by the driveway’s natural incline.
“I guess it’s time just ran out,” Flanagan said.
“I hope you didn’t run out the credit talking to the police, Michael.”
“Michael? That’s a bit rich,” Flanagan said. “It’s a bit late to be showing concern now.”
RJ waited until he felt he had Flanagan’s shattered attention. The weakening light was against them. He made an oblique gesture, half-conciliatory, the rest derogatory.
“I didn’t know about the girl.”
“Which part?”
“That they would kill her. I gave you that address in good faith,” the Welshman said.
“Prove it,” Flanagan replied.
The big man stood watching him for several seconds. Finally, he tugged back the hoodie, his pale head standing out in the gloom more like a skull than ever before. His eyes went to his hand, which quickly stabbed an entry into the keypad set behind the leftmost pillar. The gate clicked open and started to concertina apart. Flanagan only watched, fatigue making him nonplussed as the dogs hurried around his legs, sniffing him over. His nerveless gaze returned to the Welshman’s shotgun.
“And that?”
RJ shook his head. “I don’t need it, anymore.”
He hefted the weapon sideways and thumbed his loose sleeve to polish the grip. Before he could ditch the gun, almost disgusted with himself, Flanagan snatched the weapon by the middle of the ejector slide and the Welshman offered no response. Instead, they went their separate ways: Flanagan, up towards the house, and RJ clicking the dogs onto their leads and taken them with him down to one of the cars collected in the dead end beyond the drive.
“Watch your back, Flanagan,” RJ said.
But Flanagan said nothing.
*
RJ LEFT THE front door conveniently open. Now armed to the teeth, Flanagan kicked it open properly wide and fired at the first movement he saw. The light was poor, as any defender would want it to be, and it took a few moments before Flanagan, advancing, could identify Peter Roosveldt’s laying on his side behind the overturned sofa, blood that was black in the weak light seeping from the scrawny pusher’s side.
Flanagan crouched beside the kid and gently felt the pulse at Prickles’ neck. At once, the young man’s eyes flashed open, sweat springing into profusion across his pale, acne-scarred face. A useless hand clutched at Flanagan’s jacket and was shaken off.
“Just lay there and bleed for a bit.”
He pumped the next cartridge into the shotgun and stood, scouring the shadows of the room. Franco had Nero-like aspirations and the entrance to his Coogee mansion was palatial to say the least. There were marble stairs going to the right, a landing with wooden rails above him. A heavyset door directly behind where he’d made a mess of Carlo’s couch was the same one he’d seen RJ use. With some misgivings, Flanagan stepped across the debris-strewn room and used his elbow and shoulder to open the heavy door.
A tranquil corridor ran beyond. Tasteful vases with plastic orchids were perched atop expensive-looking dark-wood stands. Several of the antiques obscured the view down the right side of the hall, another wooden doorway Flanagan could spy in the gilt-edged mirror hung on the wall to the left. The corridor ended in breezy white curtains and French windows, perhaps an inner courtyard beyond. Flanagan advanced slowly, ever cautious, adrenalin cooling within him like the sweat on his back, becoming sticky, making him sluggish and restrained.
Thoughts about who Franco’s designer might be were thrown aside as he moved on, taking a quick look into a reader’s alcove, the walnut shelves surprisingly heavy with books, matched by a marble recess containing a framed A4 watercolour.
Overhead, the sound of running on the second floor carried as clearly as the heartbeat in Flanagan’s ears. Resisting the nonsense urge to cock the shotgun again, at the bend, after a cautious scan around, Flanagan followed the hallway as it veered to the right. A nineteenth-century fold-out table carried a disused silver service set. It sparkled in the dust-heavy sunset coming through the windows. Going low, sensitive now to the doorway ahead as well as the one behind him, Flanagan eased aside one of the
gauzy curtains and watched two men dressed like retired boxers vault down from a faux-Italian structure far too grand to be a mere veranda. Franco’s ambitions clearly weren’t curtailed by either architecture or finance. The only failure in the overall scheme of things seemed to be not dressing his goons in such style as to match his courtly aspirations. The unreflecting black of their sub-machineguns, cradled nonchalantly in arms like experienced fathers with young babies, gave their gym suits a more sinister aspect.
Flanagan’s eyes twitched as he tracked their intended path and considered the doorway ahead. He scurried forward in his crouch, not completely hell-bent, as yet, on killing every last one of them. In a cold, remote and unpleasant part of his mind – a cerebral Guantanamo Bay – the only one he really wanted was their boss.
The first of the men threw the slatted wooden door open. Flanagan’s shotgun took him in the middle of the chest. A triangle of white t-shirt and much of the front of the man’s hooded sweat burst open, the force flinging him backward like from some medieval contraption. At the same time, and almost comically, the door he had so recently thrown open now rebounded from its arc and slammed back, rebounding off him as he staggered and slid through to the room beyond. Flanagan caught only a glimpse of the second figure, thick eyebrows below a shaven head, eyes wide, and he wisely threw himself down as the wooden door, already juddering open again, coughed up pieces of wood, the air dancing with splinters, the hallway tiled to dado height bursting asunder with nothing more than hissing gunshots thanks to a tube silencer.
Flanagan replied with another caroming shotgun blast, ejecting the smoking cartridge as he rolled the other way across the hall and staggered to his feet, running into danger only to dive hard to the right, a second retort of silenced shots ripping up the boards at his feet, the silver service exploding into the air like a Disney choreography sans music. The hall’s end gave a good two feet of proper wall space to the immediate right of the torn doorway. Though he knew the second gangster was behind it, Flanagan shucked another cartridge and thrust the barrel one-handed and blind around the doorframe. The recoil nearly broke his wrist. Rather than the deathly silence he half-hoped and feared, Flanagan heard the once-familiar clattering fuss of a magazine swapped over.
“I’m after Carlo” he bellowed. “I’ll fucking grease you if you don’t make a run for it, you shit-for-brains.”
Moving the ejector again, Flanagan gave no more than three or four seconds before throwing himself across the threshold in a move that would’ve been painfully derivative if the stakes weren’t so high.
Yet having slid into the now-yawning back room, apart from a carpeting of brass-jacketed shells and the first gangster laying twisted on his side, Flanagan couldn’t see a thing.
*
THE SECOND GUNMAN had given in to unexpectedly good sense and fled. Getting up self-consciously from his heroics on the floor, Flanagan moved as silently as he could across the polished boards. His heel wobbled as it came down on bullet casings. No lights were on in the back, but the dying courtyard daylight threw a milky glow over the left side of the room. An illuminated doorway and service counter revealed a fully-stocked kitchen to do a city hotel proud. That door was ajar. Beside it was a heavier door suggestive of rooms elsewhere, perhaps another hall. Across the far side of the room there was more of the nineteenth century décor, greenish tiles highlighting the tasteful boards not yet redecorated by gunfire. Almost hidden, another door occupied the far corner with the back wall.
Outside the windows, it was all bore water-stained concrete pillars and roll-on lawn, the previously sighted arcade the porch to another, more recent wing added to the Franco manse. The last two gangsters had left the French doors ajar, and as he moved past, confirming his latest victim was still breathing, Flanagan crouched and peered through.
The bloke in the kitchen would’ve caught him entirely unawares except his heel caught the bottom of a rack of pans as he hurled himself over the counter, rolled, and came at Flanagan with a serrated knife. As it was, Flanagan only had time to take in the sight before the knife caught the shotgun with enough force to knock it from his grasp. Flanagan threw himself back so hard that he cracked into the glass panes of the French windows, billowing curtains like a cape behind him; and he turned away from another pass of the knife with a split-second to spare, clutching the white sheets double-handed and yanking a length of them down, brass rings spilling like coins across the hard wood, muffled where the curtains pooled in the shadowed recesses.
His attacker was dark and bearded, a Hollywood bad guy with a Lebanese cast. The sculpted facial hair belied youthful features, but his dark eyes glimmered fiercely. Thrusting the taut length of curtain in front of him, Flanagan stepped away from the cracked window panes moving slowly, offering just the first inference of his jungle-taught dance. The other man’s eyes flicked nervously to the ground, watching Flanagan’s steel-capped toes.
“What the fuck is that?” he gruffly demanded.
“You never seen an Irishman dance a jig?”
The gangster gave a growl and came again with the knife. Flanagan performed the knife capture with expert precision except for one detail – the bloke pulled his wrist back so fast that the wavy-bladed knife drew a thin red line across the top of Flanagan’s palm. He gave a sharp cry, releasing the tension in the garrotte. Straight away, the Lebanese man came again, working close like any expert with a knife would, the blade stabbing with a meaty sound through the middle of Flanagan’s palm.
The blade pulled free, and Flanagan turned his back and moved, corralling the guy with his back and shoulders, an unexpected elbow smash taking away much of the thug’s brooding good looks. With his target slackening, Flanagan changed tack again, wrapping the curtain tight around the man’s opposite wrist. He deftly kept the injured man off-balance long enough to capture his arm behind his back, cuffing it to the knife-clutching arm as well, the whole thing keeping him at an awkward, twisted angle, half-shrouded by curtain fabric. Flanagan twisted the white fabric with his bleeding hands, the captured man gasping, sweating and confused as Carlo Franco and two offsiders walked calmly into the room.
“Flanagan, you fucken creep, put Falcon down.”
There was a lengthy pause. Pushing every scrap of strength he still possessed, Flanagan took a long, grimacing sideways look at the mobster before throwing his captive to the ground.
“I thought we had an arrangement,” Carlo said.
“An arrangement? Fuck you.”
The wounded Lebanese man rolled over, arms still bound behind him like in a straitjacket. No one moved to help. The other gunshot victim nearby could’ve been dead or even dying as far as Carlo Franco appeared to care.
“Flanagan,” the mobster chided. “This isn’t like you.”
“You killed the girl, Charlie. And you fucked up.”
Never more rat-like than at that moment, Franco gave an oily grin and lifted an expressive hand to his ear.
“I don’t hear any fucken sirens, Micky.”
“No. You soon will.”
Carlo’s mirth drained away, the hawk nose and sunken eyes betraying the rigours of his lifestyle.
“You’re fucken loose, Flanagan. You know what I do with useless fucken dogs.”
He snapped his fingers and the two men hanging back simply glanced at each other, one holding another shotgun, the other a 9mm sub-machine pistol. The second goon ratcheted the slide on his piece and eyed Flanagan like maybe he was modelling himself on Eminem, but still a little undecided about it.
“Now’s your chance to get a murder conviction, mate,” Flanagan told him.
The two gunmen shot Franco nervous looks and the mobster snorted like the air itself annoyed him. He waved the hesitant pair away like they were of little consequence.
“Get rid of those fucken heaters, boys, and make yourselves scarce.”
“Heaters.” Flanagan merely chuckled.
“Carlo, what about . . . ?” The second one mimed the rest of
the question.
“I’m not running from my own fucken house. Now fuck off. You’re weak as piss, you fucken hard-arses.”
Flanagan merely stood and waited. The Lebanese bloke stood shakily and staggered off as well.
“Are we gonna have some sort of kung fu fucken showdown now or what, Flanagan? That’s what usually happens at the end of the level.”
“Do you know kung fu, Carlo?”
The mobster gave a snort to show how ridiculous the idea seemed. He tweaked his thumbs and moved his fingers on a phantasmal game controller.
“Then don’t give me any silly ideas,” Flanagan said. “The only thing you’ve done right is admit this is my show. You’re the fucking bad guy. I don’t know why I’m not kicking your arse even as we speak.”
“That’s a good question,” Carlo said.
He withdrew his nickel-finished Desert Eagle from the back waistband of his baggy tracksuit.
“You were going to say something before, I think,” Carlo said. “Explain to me how I fucked up. I reckon that might have something to do with why you’re just standin’ there like a pent-up fucken porn star who can’t get the stonk.”
“Allyson kept a diary, Charlie.”
Flanagan sneered as surprise registered in Carlo’s face like a prelude to a fully-blown seizure.
“So?”
“So, how many fucking dope houses and chop shops did you drag that girl through while you were playing the Mafioso, Charlie?”
“Don’t call me Charlie.”
“It’s all in there, anyway,” Flanagan said.
He shrugged, the tiredness coming on like waves. He couldn’t help eyeing Franco’s piece, but like with any true exhaustion, even the prospect of death now failed to still him. Far off, the mosquito-like wail of police sirens carried in the air. Carlo stood without expression, the gun heavy by his side.
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