Washed Up

by Berry, Tony

  ‘Bloody bully. Let her go. She’s done nothing.’

  Bromo glimpsed the sharp downward movement of the gun barrel seconds before it landed, smashing deep into his shoulder, knocking him sideways along the settee. His bulky guardian glared down at him, showing no emotion, cold, unblinking. Just doing his job. Bromo stared back, reminded of a recent browse through the Cook’s Companion where one breed of potato was described as round and red-skinned with deep eyes and waxy flesh.

  ‘Hi, Spud,’ he groaned.

  The man raised his gun, ready to bring it down again.

  ‘Cool it,’ ordered Bomber.

  Bromo watched the gun being lowered. He breathed easier. Bomber turned Lottie to face the wall and knotted the blindfold behind her head. He called out to the unseen man in the hallway.

  ‘All tied up, boss, and ready to go.’

  ‘Bring them through. I’ll get the car doors open.’

  Bromo strained to listen to the voice. Running it through his head. Trying for a recent connection.

  ‘Make sure no one sees you.’

  Fat chance of that happening, thought Bromo. This wasn’t Neighbourhood Watch territory. The few people at home during the day were mostly night workers or regular clubbers grabbing much-needed sleep. They stayed indoors. Too much happened out on these streets that was best not to get involved in. He watched Lottie shuffle uncertainly across the room, Bomber guiding her gently, a hand on her elbow. It seemed out of character. A tender bruiser. As they reached the exit into the hallway, he collected Adriana with a firm hand on her shoulder.

  She tried to shrug him off. His hand dug in deeper. Not such a gentle bruiser after all. Bromo sensed Adriana’s screech of pain – a sound that never came. It was muffled by her gag. She stumbled into Lottie. Bomber herded them together, pushing them out into the hall.

  Bromo watched groggily, letting his head clear as he weighed the possibilities facing him. The odds were as good as a three-legged donkey in the Melbourne Cup. Adriana and Lottie were out of action. That left at least three against one, and two of those three were thugs who acted first and thought later. They also had guns. The donkey had a better chance. His eyes focused on Lottie’s backpacks.

  ‘They’ll need their bags,’ he said.

  Anything to create a distraction, a delay.

  ‘They’ll get ’em!’ snarled his guardian. ‘Bomber will pick them up.’

  It was information. Enough to let him know his present status of one-on-one would soon deteriorate into two armed heavies against one semi-trussed lightweight. Not good. He studied the knots in the wooden floor, weighing his chances, breathing deep to still his nerves.

  ‘I need to stand,’ he said, keeping his voice calm and even.

  There was no response. He took it as permission. He cautiously raised himself back into a sitting position, again testing the cuffs. No give. A wasted effort. He leaned forward, ready to rise, putting pressure on his knees, gaining leverage, feeling the weight on his ankles. Briefly he wondered if this was what shot putters did as they stood in their cage, tossing the shot from hand to hand, crouching, balancing, transferring their weight from leg to leg, concentrating the mind, deciding the precise moment for release. Or a hammer thrower, arms fully extended, taut, their hands entwined on the grip like someone manacled. Handcuffed. Bromo uncoiled his body, fast, arms straining rigidly in front of him, going up and out in a big arc, a hammer thrower’s swing, his knuckles striking hard into the cheek of his minder, the metal of the handcuffs cracking into the bone of his jaw. The man staggered backwards, but didn’t fall. Bromo dashed towards the door. He saw the looming black shape of Bomber powering towards him down the hallway and felt the rush of air at his back as the man he’d called Spud whirled round after him. There was a thud of bodies colliding, the crack of something heavy and unyielding hitting his skull. And blackness.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Peter Jardine intended turning up outside the girls’ house simply as a precaution, one purely of his own making. He saw it as a watching brief, as they used to say out there on patrol. The order was always to watch for trouble but keep well clear unless absolutely necessary. Let the locals sort it out whenever possible. Today, Bromo was Jardine’s local – there to collect Adriana and Lottie and get them out of harm’s way. Trouble was not on his agenda.

  Jardine wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find. Perhaps a Yellow Cab, the girls’ baggage piled on the footpath, Bromo tapping his foot impatiently, urging them to hurry up. Whatever it was, the sinister black limo parked outside where he reckoned the girls’ house would be wasn’t part of it. It stood out like a ballet dancer at a boot-scooters’ convention. The broad-shouldered man standing alert and erect alongside the vehicle set off more alarm bells. He looked like a bouncer who’d gone astray, wondering what he was doing standing guard in a quiet suburban street. He was a man lost and disoriented without a crush of unruly night-clubbers to cow into line.

  The black limo and the bouncer told Jardine’s sixth sense everything it needed to know. Well, almost everything. No one was holding up signs telling him where he’d find Bromo.

  Jardine eased his foot off the pedal, keeping the engine running. He made a show of looking for a parking spot, his attention focused on trying to squeeze between a delivery truck and an old Ford Falcon resting on wooden blocks, its wheels gone and a pink council sticker adorning its windscreen. The speed of the action that followed took him by surprise. The bouncer flashed a quick look up and down the street, then waved towards the house. A thin, wiry man, dapper in a business suit, emerged guiding a stumbling, blindfolded woman. The bouncer opened the limousine’s rear door wide and together they bundled the woman into the back seat. The door slammed shut and the dapper man scurried back into the house.

  Jardine switched off the ignition and reached to open his car door, moving quickly. Bugger the watching brief, his ingrained reaction was to intervene. A flash of movement up ahead stayed his hand. The scene of a few moments ago was being repeated except that this time the woman – smaller and darker than the first – was struggling and twisting in the dapper man’s grip. The bouncer grabbed her, pinning her arms to her side, and pushed her into the limo, all fight gone.

  A short, squat elderly woman, no more than hedge high, her thinning hair a mass of untamed white curls, shuffled out from the cottage next door. Her pink dressing gown was loosely gathered over floral pink pyjamas that flapped above pink Ugg boots. Jardine watched her cautiously unlatch her gate and peer at the limo. The woman raised her arm; the bouncer raised his. To Jardine, it was like a mime show. Unheard words were exchanged. The woman briefly held her ground. The bouncer advanced, oozing aggression. The woman retreated, latched her gate and disappeared indoors. End of play.

  Jardine weighed his chances: there were at least three of them and only one of him, two if Bromo was around and capable. All hopes in that direction were dashed before he’d had chance to consider them. The bouncer on the footpath waved another “all clear” towards the house, opened a car door and rushed forward to lend his muscle to the other two men. They were manhandling Bromo’s limp form, one at his shoulders, the other at his feet. Between them they folded him into the car. One bouncer scurried around to the driver’s door while the other two men scrambled in next to him on the passenger side.

  Jardine watched as they drove off, sinking low into his seat and waiting to see if anyone else emerged from the girls’ house. A twitch at the blinds of the neighbour’s windows indicated the pink woman was the only other witness. No one had noticed him.

  He could drive away and no one would ever know. There’d been a time when he would have thrown himself into the action, no hesitation. Today, he’d wimped out and become a bystander. He pondered the reasons. Cowardice? Fear? The onset of middle-aged apathy? Whatever, it wasn’t a Peter Jardine he could live with and already the pangs of guilt had begun coursing through him.

  He put his old rust-bucket Toyota saloon into gear and drove slowly a
long the vehicle-filled street, trying to concentrate on the sleek black limo some hundred metres ahead. He was irritated, frustrated. Too often his eyes were distracted, having to stay alert for stray pedestrians wandering out from between the line of parked cars. There were too many jaywalkers for driver comfort.

  Fortunately, there was no way the limo would roar off out of sight. For once, he was grateful for the snail’s pace progress of Richmond’s traffic. Here, all road-users were made equal. A super-charged Porsche progressed at the same pace as a clapped-out Cortina. Only bikers and cyclists ever jumped this queue. Even joggers and walkers moved faster.

  They were on Church Street, heading towards Victoria Street. Jardine tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as the lights at the Highett Street intersection brought everyone to a halt. Stop, start, stop, start. That had been the intermittent order of progress ever since he’d fallen in behind the limo as it pulled out from the kerb outside the girls’ house.

  The slow procession through narrow back roads, on to Swan Street and left into Church, had given him plenty of time to think, yet he still didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t even sure he was doing the right thing, whether he should pretend what he’d seen hadn’t happened and get on back to the refuge. There was plenty to do there looking after the charges he already had without worrying about Bromo Perkins and his couple of strays.

  ‘Guess I’ve only got myself to blame,’ he reflected as the traffic resumed its forward crawl as far as the fire station, sitting squat and alert opposite the gloomy high-rise towers of the Housing Commission flats.

  The lights turned green up ahead at the Elizabeth Street intersection and Jardine saw the limo’s right-side indicators start flashing. It swerved out into the centre of the road and veered off down a side street. Warning bells clanged as Jardine cut across the path of an oncoming tram. He was still accelerating as the car hit a speed hump, jolting him up from his seat, his hands briefly loosening their grip on the steering wheel.

  A hundred metres ahead the limo turned right. Jardine followed, into a broad street lined by stocky flowering gums valiantly thriving in their brick surrounds despite a drought-driven lack of water. He was in unfamiliar territory. These were the quiet backwaters of Richmond. He saw the street as a grab-bag of building styles, enough to give any self-respecting architect a month of nightmares. A squat pair of cottages nudged a spreading federation weatherboard. Looking down on them from next door was a primly thin and flat faced three-storey cement block posing as someone’s home. He noted high walls with security intercoms protecting homes whose neighbours were happy to greet the world from behind low picket fences. Soggy clumps of unwanted local newspapers littered an unkempt garden of rampant vines and uncut lawn. It was put to shame by next door’s front yard collection of pots and tubs overflowing with flowering shrubs and thriving vegetables. Nothing was consistent for more than two homes at a time. A real estate agency’s billboard fixed to the front fence of a gloomy Californian bungalow proclaimed “This could be your new home”. It certainly could if you lacked any aesthetic sense and felt like spending half a million on a dark and cheerless building with heavy window frames quartering the glass into tiny panes and a roof of broken tiles layered in clumps of moss.

  The limo’s brake lights came on as it made another right-hand turn, this time into a wide laneway skirting an ugly block of flats – six up and six down. They sat sullen and uncared for in a garden of concrete splattered with pools of oil from residents’ cars. Facing the flats from across the laneway was an austere double-fronted clinker brick home with heavy metal shutters over its two front windows and an open-mesh steel grille preventing access to the front porch.

  Jardine slowed and watched. Houses here were on deep blocks and the lane seemed to run all the way through to the next street. He reckoned he could maintain his pursuit by keeping his distance and looking like yet another vehicle using the lane to beat the city’s complex system of one-way streets. He dropped down a gear and turned his car into the gap between the flats and the house. The limo was moving slowly down at the far end.

  Too late, Jardine watched it pull in to the left and its braking lights came on. The bloody thing was stopping. He was forced to keep moving. There was no reason to stop without rousing suspicion. The best he could do was to keep his pace slow and cautious, the look of a lost driver seeking a way through the maze of backstreets. It gave him enough time to discover the seemingly modest house on his left was actually a massively elongated structure with a modern two-storey brick extension. Corrugated steel sheets and beams of angle iron helped form supports and walls, creating an extension totally at odds with the original building at the front. Its only windows were wide but shallow slits of darkened glass high up under the eaves – dark eyes under a frowning brow. A heavy-duty roller door, the width of two cars, butted into the brickwork. Next came a recessed entrance with an ornately carved double door of varnished timber and a parking bay long enough for the limo to squeeze into.

  As Jardine drew level, a man emerged from the door. The impression he got was of someone short and rotund, a ball of blubber on legs clothed in baggy tracksuit pants. A bright yellow T-shirt did little to hide the man’s bulbous girth. A floppy maroon sunhat overshadowed his face but Jardine registered him as oriental, probably Chinese, maybe Vietnamese. For a few seconds he thought the man was trying to attract his attention then realised the waving arms and whatever he was shouting were directed at the limo. Its driver was emerging from a suddenly opened door that came close to scraping the already heavily scarred paintwork of Jardine’s sedan. The driver shouted and gesticulated back at the Chinese man. Another man rushed from the building, then another Oriental, sickly thin and stooped, his feet bare, and favouring the baggy track pants and T-shirt fashion of the first.

  The limo’s passenger door opened. Jardine saw two heads bob up over the vehicle’s roofline. More arms were waving. The limo driver pointed to inside his car. Jardine recognised a good argument when he saw one, and this looked like developing into a beauty. It was as if he wasn’t there. A chance to make himself scarce.

  Jardine veered to the right to avoid the limo’s open door, stared straight ahead and increased speed. A few metres on, he turned left out of the lane and into a cobbled backstreet once used by the drivers of the night carts as they emptied the family cesspits but now a dumping ground for garbage and a grubby rear access for those residents with parking space in their yards and gardens. On his right, a couple of vacant blocks had been transformed into a small park bordered by native trees and shrubs. In the centre was a children’s playground with climbing frames, slides and swings. A coin-operated gas barbecue was set to one side and a couple of slatted wooden benches faced off across the grassed area. A young child swathed in a fluffy, pale yellow jumpsuit sat in the swing, chubby legs outstretched, as a woman in jeans and quilted grey ski jacket helped her gain momentum with one hand while holding a book she was reading in the other.

  Jardine checked his rear vision mirror. No one there. He stilled the ignition and opened his door. Nonchalance was needed. He put one hand in his trouser pocket, jiggling his keys, and strolled as leisurely as he could manage into the park. From its further edge he might get a view back into the laneway where Bromo and the girls remained imprisoned in that sinister black car.

  The woman looked up from her book as he neared. Her face was a giveaway. Jardine knew the signs, had almost expected them. She was wary, maybe fearful. Lone woman, lone man, a secluded park with no one else in sight. Not a good scenario in these nervy times. Jardine kept his distance, changing direction to walk past her rather than towards her.

  ‘I’m harmless,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  The woman briefly smiled and gave the swing another push.

  ‘That’s okay. You hear so many stories. But we can’t just stay home all day.’

  Jardine noted the edginess in her voice, a slight quiver that belied the weak smile. He kept walking tow
ards where grass met bushes.

  ‘This your local park?’

  Too late he realised it was an invasive question that did nothing to set her at ease. She nodded. Affirmative, but not encouraging further conversation. He nodded in the direction of the steel and iron extension.

  ‘Formidable looking place,’ he said.

  She thrust her book into her jacket pocket and stood behind the swing, both hands pushing on the back of the seat, closer to her child.

  ‘We don’t like it,’ she said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘The locals. The people who live here.’

  Jardine leaned into the bushes trying to see down the lane. The three men from the car and the two Orientals were grouped at the rear of the limo but there was little movement. A short stocky man had appeared, standing off to one side, one arm extended to restrain a sleek dog pulling on a leash. Jardine looked over to the woman.

  ‘So, what do the locals say?’

  There was that look again, anxiety bordering on fear.

  ‘What are you? A cop? One of them? You going to cause more trouble?’

  The woman grabbed at the swing on its upward curve. The child’s yells of protest were ignored as she removed the infant swiftly from the seat and bundled her into a three-wheeled pusher. Jardine realised he’d backed a loser, even in a one-horse race. The woman was in a hurry to leave. He had to tread carefully. Her movements were rushed and panicky. She needed reassurance.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to do with any of them,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m trying to help a mate in trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’