“I could just shoot you now,” he said flatly.
“It would be murder.”
“You couldn’t testify.”
“You’d be nailed on the forensics, Charlie.”
“Don’t fucken call me that,” Franco said again. “I suppose you think you can testify? I’ll fucken haunt you, buddy.”
“Haunt away,” Flanagan said. “After what you did to Allyson, you can’t scare me off. There’s a debt that needs to be paid.”
“That stupid bitch,” the other man sighed. “Fuck.”
Almost lazily, Flanagan stepped forward as Franco’s eyes rolled away. Despite his cut hand, Flanagan’s fist landed hard enough to make the mobster’s jaw snap. He toppled like an Iraqi statue, and not quite unconscious, lay on his belly on the ground moaning, hands clutching at his face.
Flanagan stared down at his hand, level now and shaking with adrenalin, the gory wound weeping fresh red. His eyes shifted, refocusing from his hand to Carlo’s back.
“I’d piss on you if I could,” he muttered.
THIRTY
THE POLICE CAME with handcuffs even though he was wounded, and Frank Doyle was there no more than ten minutes after the first jack-booted Golden Boy charged through Carlo Franco’s front door. It didn’t stop them dragging Flanagan across the uneven floor, bullet casings rolling beneath his thighs, catching beneath his heels and slipping free as he tried to right himself. Doyle did the right thing, in hindsight anyway, hanging back and watching with a judicious look on his stubborn, iron-moustached face.
The first moment’s peace came in the back of a police cruiser. No ambulance for him. Doyle appeared at the window with his expression solemn and unchanged, leaving Flanagan with an empathy for goldfish as he sat slumped in the rear. Doyle rapped the window with his knuckle, the same thing he probably would’ve done to Flanagan’s skull had the glass not intervened.
“Hang in there,” the words came muted through the glass. “Keep your shit together and say nothing.”
Flanagan knew they were wise words. Even without his interrogation training, he was too shattered to give the police what they wanted. Two of their officers had been assaulted in the course of events, regardless of the positives gained, and the clannish bastards weren’t about to forget it just because Flanagan was a family friend. Doyle knew better than to play that card, especially in a crowd with feelings running high. The shotgunned carcasses didn’t help, though neither of Charlie’s accomplices were actually dead, however close to it they might come before daybreak. Flanagan closed his eyes with a sweet sense of surrender, cruelly woken only a nanosecond later, it seemed, as two big cops climbed into the sedan and started up with the bells and whistles, the loose blue-metal of Franco’s drive spitting up under their tyres.
“Where are we going?” Flanagan managed to ask.
“Cockburn,” the non-driver said. He rested an elbow with fake nonchalance over the back of the seat. “You’re Mick Flanagan, right?”
Through eyes like smeared glass, Flanagan dumbly nodded, the man’s flat face and huge pores anonymous to him.
“You don’t remember me? John Kressler. We went to school together.”
“I remember you,” Flanagan lied. “We weren’t friends.”
The cop stared at him for a long moment, a sudden coldness creeping back.
“That’s right.”
Flanagan closed his eyes and leaned back.
*
THE STATION WAS mercifully small. They gave him the medical cell to sleep in, and halfway through, in the small hours of the morning, an achingly good-looking paramedic came in and stripped him down and cleaned and taped his cuts and grazes and pronounced him well enough to imprison properly. As he was shuffled down into the holding cells, Flanagan was marched past a tired-looking Frank Doyle propping up an off-white wall. Doyle forced a pack of cigarettes into his hand.
“I’ll see you in the morning, Mick.”
The feeling in his head and the taste in his mouth cast Flanagan back to the hours spent as a younger man after nightclubs had closed and the sun was yet to rise. He limped into another fresh hard bed and doubted he could sleep as sleep came almost instantly and flung him hard along time’s unforgiving corridor to halfway into the next morning.
The noise that woke him was the cell door, opened just wide enough to admit the slim figure of Detective Constable Pringdegar, the uniform working the door release eyeing Flanagan like a dangerous zoo exhibit. Mahmoud looked considerably less concerned. A disposable lighter was in his hand and he flicked the spark wheel casually before tossing it onto the end of Flanagan’s bed. Flanagan just licked his dry, aching lips and sat up, a thin grey blanket across his waist in the chill container of his accommodation.
“You don’t appear to have a valid permit for that revolver you were waving around,” the detective said.
“I wasn’t waving the revolver around. It was in my pants.”
Flanagan lit a cigarette and disowned the lighter straight away. Pringdegar eyed the smoke for a moment and then snapped his fingers at the cop outside the bars. The young guy disappeared for a moment and returned with a tin ashtray. Pringdegar set it in place.
“Your hands swabbed positive for cordite.”
“Of course,” Flanagan said. “If you’d been there, you would have known. No need to test me.”
“Well, I wasn’t there, was I?” the cop replied, almost bemused. “Seems my cards and constant phone calls weren’t good enough to get an invite. Not so Detective Inspector Frank Doyle, however.”
“I know Frank,” Flanagan shrugged. “He’s solid.”
“You should’ve given me the chance.”
“You should’ve done your fucking job while Allyson Jacobsen had a chance, Pringdegar,” Flanagan growled. “Don’t talk sweet to me. I may be wrecked and facing a string of charges, but don’t think I don’t have it in me to wipe the floor with you if you so much as fucking smirk at me, you smug-looking fuck.”
Without turning to acknowledge the uniform beyond the door, Pringdegar raised a cautioning hand and shook his head. His expression seemed to form itself into the very one against which Flanagan had warned.
“I’ve had plenty of time to read the background on you.”
“If you say so,” Flanagan replied. “I very much doubt there’s much to read.”
“Yes, there does seem to be quite a bit missing from the last few years,” the detective said. “Do you want to tell me about that? Or do I have to ask Detective Doyle?”
“I don’t think Doyle will tell you shit,” Flanagan replied.
“Well, that’s why I’m asking you.”
Flanagan raised his eyes and breathed out smoke, crushing the rest of the cigarette with casual disregard for the Manchester.
“Sorry,” he said. “No can do.”
“We have the girl’s diary in our possession too,” Pringdegar said, changing tack once more. Flanagan only nodded.
“As I intended it to be. I’m willing to testify against him, against Franco.”
“A plea bargain? That’s not very stoic, Mick.”
“I never said anything about a plea.”
“Then what are we charging him with?”
“There’s plenty of evidence there and I’ll back it up. Be creative.”
The Sikh stared at him for a long moment and then abruptly stood.
“That won’t be for me to do,” he said. The door clacked open. “It appears you’re not my captive any more.”
Without another word, the detective slipped through the bars, adjusted his sports coat, and walked out of sight.
Flanagan looked down and realised he hadn’t noticed Pringdegar pocket the lighter.
*
AS SOON AS Flanagan started to inch back toward sleep, three big cops came down the concrete hall and yanked open the door, wasting no time in assisting him to his feet and propelling him, sans footwear, back along the path they’d come. Flanagan took it in the shoulder from the bar
s as they shuffled along, but they hardly slowed. After a few hours’ sleep, he felt stiffer than shipwrecked leather. The sucking feel of hunger deep in his forgotten bowels seemed almost absurd among the competition of his other hurts.
They guided him upstairs of the freshly-painted station and then down a carpeted hall lined with various bits and pieces of propaganda framed in plexiglass. The ghost of his reflection suggested he could try colour co-ordinating more with black and blue, the right side of his face puffed up to near Elephantine proportions, his lower lip only held together by the pretty paramedic’s clever elastic clips.
“I need a drink of water,” he grunted.
“Give me five minutes alone and you can have a big swig of piss,” the nearest cop said.
They pushed him forward.
A door opened ahead. The two suits already present seemed to insist on a sober demeanour, and Flanagan barely glanced up, took in Doyle in shirt-sleeves in the far corner, and then he allowed himself to be folded down into the best seat in the house. One of the two grey suits immediately circled. The other gave the uniforms their leave.
The moving suit was the slimmest of the two. Grecian good looks and a smile Flanagan knew was just begging to be acknowledged hovered as he poured water from a silver jug into a stout glass. An olive-skinned hand pressed the glass forward, a twisted white gold wedding ring front and centre.
Flanagan took the glass and barely looked up. Drinking was a careful act, and it was a long time coming. His cigarettes were in the cell, but there was something acerbic and politically correct about the new offices that he figured he’d be pushing things to ask for vegemite toast, let alone a cigarette, so he let the cold water loll over his tongue for a few seconds as peripheral vision did its work.
The second man, a slight paunch concealed by his buttoned-up jacket, folded his let’s-get-down-to-business arms high across his chest. Almond eyes, almost Arabic, bore down from his relaxed position. Flanagan got a sense of salt-and-pepper curls in such profusion as to suggest a haircut threatening regulations, but coupled with the abandoned tie, the expensive suit, and the hand-woven European linen shirt, it gave him a rakish, confident bearing even though he had the look of a man not quite deserving it.
Fortunately or otherwise, it also made Nigel Fields quite hard to forget.
“Flanagan,” the Federal agent said with a gravid warmth – fatherly, displeased, and yet ultimately accepting. The accent was broadly Australian, a regular Bryan Brown drawl that took most by surprise – also something Nigel thoroughly enjoyed.
Flanagan took a moment longer savouring his drink before placing the glass down. He left his hand there. Nigel raised an eyebrow as Flanagan looked up, but the contact broke quickly as Flanagan shifted his gaze to the drinks-pourer, backed off now, and then to Frank Doyle. The older copper looked sagged, every inch his age and growing older by the minute, rugged cop physique only just held together by a sort of weary doggedness. He wore the strain on his face and in the telltale spots beneath his armpits. Yet he managed to raise both eyebrows in a sympathetic fashion Flanagan knew he probably didn’t deserve.
“Nigel,” Flanagan said at last. “It’s been a while. Are you stationed in Perth or have you just come over for my sake?”
“We’re the field office here,” his former colleague said. “I married a local girl and put in for the transfer. I expected to run into you well before now, until tonight, and I had the … opportunity to read your file.”
“You’ve been away,” the second agent said needlessly.
Flanagan sighed and pushed his face into his palms like they were a basin of warm water.
“Let’s just get this shit over and done with,” he sighed.
“Mick,” Doyle said, waiting until Flanagan rose again before adding, “these fellas have been explaining a few things that maybe weren’t clear before.”
“Such as?”
“I think we should be asking a few more questions first, Flanagan,” Nigel said softly. “Like, where you have been, and how come we don’t have any exit interviews on your file?”
“I guess I organised my own exit,” he said.
“And you returned to the country how?”
“Hmmm . . . personal enterprise.”
“Mick, you should maybe think about playing straight,” Doyle said.
He made a face and his hand hovered over his side, the shirt taut where regulations expected him to be a good schoolboy and tuck it in.
“Until we have a proper debriefing with an asset, Flanagan, I guess you could say you are still classified government property.” Fields gave the tiniest of wry grins. “How does that sound to you?”
“Any other day I wouldn’t like it much,” Flanagan said.
“You’ll have to trust me, then.”
“The South Metro super’s on his way down, Mick. He’ll want an explanation. I don’t know it’s going to cut it, just telling him you’re Errol Lysaght’s grandkid.”
“Maybe he can explain to me why it’s so fucking hard to get his officers to do their jobs, then,” Flanagan sniffed. “What’s the chance of a smoke?”
“About fuck-all,” Doyle said, the hint of a growl in his voice.
“Fucking cops,” Flanagan replied, intending it to be a joke, but the old thing was rearing its head again, the irrefutable fact that it was true. The iron cast of Frank Doyle’s disapproving glance, the looming solidarity with every other cop just because they shared the badge.
“Watch your mouth, Mick.”
Flanagan glanced around the room. Nigel looked curious, while his offsider seemed downright uncomfortable. Doyle, on the other hand, looked like he had his foot in a rabbit trap.
“It’s was, yeah,” Flanagan shrugged, “s’posed to be a joke, I guess. Not funny.”
“You haven’t killed anyone, Mick, but you’ve come close, and a few officers are sporting more than just bruised egos.”
The interview room door opened. A young officer, blonde, wispy hair across his top lip, stuck his head into the room and slowly looked around before settling on Doyle.
“Superintendent’s here.”
Doyle looked at Flanagan and then the ASIO men.
“Escort the prisoner back to his cell.”
*
THE SUPERINTENDANT WAS a man of action. It only took an hour and twenty minutes before he insisted on seeing Flanagan himself. The blonde cop came back again, curiously indifferent to precedents, and insisted on cuffing him before more of the big desk sergeants came down and led him back up to the neat room in the nice new station.
Bevilacqua had a dark, well-polished forehead that seemed to dominate his face once he removed the peaked cap of office. The ubiquitous thick ethnic moustache and stubbly chin completed the picture, except for his eyes, which were chocolatey black and cartoonishly sincere even in the interview room’s bad light. He hunched over his side of the desk like a man with few illusions and an even less developed need to project them, which was strange, in Flanagan’s experience, coming from a senior policeman. Doyle was at the back of the room, standing with poor posture again, and he gave a slight dip of the head to indicate Flanagan should pay attention.
“So you’re Errol Lysaght’s boy.”
“Grandson,” Flanagan said. In the time since he’d spoken last, his swollen lip must’ve grown. He winced immediately, felt the skin brittle, pustulent.
“Errol’s boy all the same,” the super said. “I heard about you when you must’ve still be in shorts, Michael.”
“Call me Mick. Or Flanagan’s better.” The odd turn of phrase, in shorts, very much a cop thing, all polished wood batons and brass.
“I knew your mum,” Bevilacqua said.
He smiled and Flanagan inwardly cowered, here we go, waiting to be told how much the Superintendent always fancied the old lady or something, but mercifully Bevilacqua didn’t go there. Instead, he shook away the cobwebs and drew a manila folder previously ignored on the gunmetal desktop. He shook it ope
n, took his time to get the paperwork out, discretely slipping on wire-framed glasses, taking them off again for a quick shirtsleeve polish, and then inspecting the almost see-through pages with a degree of forced chagrin.
“There’s a case here for obstructing police, aggravated assault public officer times two, failing to stop the scene of an automobile accident, firearms, possible top category … and that’s without mentioning all the little shit we could and probably should pile in on top.”
Bevilacqua didn’t look up until the finish. Those puppy-dog eyes were moist, but unblinking. Flanagan suspected there were no waterworks forthcoming on his behalf, but he could imagine the chief belting out a passable Mario Lanza, not a dry eye in the house.
“You had a kind of ‘Hey kid, I fucked your mother’ look in your eye for a moment there,” he said.
The superintendent’s face went through a flicker of emotions before he settled on aggrieved and objecting.
“Anne Lysaght? You couldn’t have known your grandfather well if you thought he’d ever let a dirty wog touch his golden-haired little girl.”
“Actually, that’s exactly what I thought, hence my surprise,” Flanagan said, speech slipping on all the sibilants with his busted lips.
“Hmmm, I knew your mum, like I said. Barbecues and things. A very decent lady. I met your dad, too. He seemed like a very bad egg. Not good for her.”
“Maybe you’re right. Either way now, he’s dead.”
Bevilacqua grunted. “Let me tell you a story,” he said.
“I respected your old man, your grandfather. Errol was a tough nut. I saw him clear whole footpaths full of guys would’ve made you and me shit our pants . . . Well, me, anyway.”
Bevilacqua gave him an appraising look that could have been less theatrical, though why the police super with a supposedly open-and-shut case on him would want to fluff him up, Flanagan couldn’t guess.
“It’s gotta be said Errol wasn’t a great friend to ethnic people. An’ God help the poor Aboriginal who crossed his path. Very much an Old Testament type of guy. Us Italians, we can appreciate that though, and on a working level, there wasn’t a guy in the whole force I’d rather have take my back than your granddad.”
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