by Kim Westwood
Anwar reaches up to a lantern hanging from a sprinkler pipe and the gantry is revealed in an uncompromising light. Gail runs a hand across her jaw. I see the marks on her cheeks from where she’s been gagged.
‘How excellent to see you, Salisbury,’ she says. Then, ‘You’re bleeding.’
‘Fell off my bike,’ I say ruefully, and she raises an eyebrow.
I grin like a fool — until I remember who’s about to arrive. ‘Doug and the others will be here any minute.’
Neither of them seems overly perturbed. ‘I’ve been making arrangements for that,’ Anwar replies. Confused, I glance down to Marlene. Her chaperones have mysteriously disappeared.
A figure steps into the factory space, torch beam flashing. The beam fixes on her.
‘That’s my favourite frock, Marlene — bit nippy for it tonight, though.’
Marlene and her frock together with Doug tweaks a memory in me of the service alley beside the Neighbourly Arms, Marlene captured in my mind’s eye, in flagrante. I realise Doug was the other in the clinch. Little wonder he looked familiar that night at Gail’s.
As I descend the steps, three NVB lackeys emerge from the corridor. The other two are probably guarding the entrance. Coming straight from the speakeasy relieved of their tasers and nightsticks means they’ve calculated good odds for themselves. Maybe they didn’t pay enough attention to Marlene’s departure with her two buddies.
Doug’s gaze goes from me to the gantry, Gail there next to Anwar still holding the crowbar. He speaks almost lazily. ‘Here’s a turn-up for the boys back at HQ: three curfew-breakers loitering suspiciously on private property, one with a weapon.’
Plan B a failure, he’s reverted to his official role.
Marlene makes her move. ‘Doug, I’m so glad you’ve arrived. I hope you don’t think it was me who brought these people here. They found out all by themselves.’
I want to smack her for oh so many reasons. The innocent act may be her last desperate throw of the dice, but surely she doesn’t think he’ll buy it?
The answer is in a curt ‘Shut it, Marlene.’
Mr Perspicacious.
Doug turns to the nearest of his lackeys. ‘Get the others.’ To the other two he says, ‘Search that one.’
That one would be me.
Right on cue, the protection duo return hauling a slumped figure each. They prop the bodies against a wall then go stand in the exit.
‘I was going to warn you about them before you so rudely interrupted me,’ Marlene snipes.
Doug’s three shift uneasily and look to their ringleader. He probably told them this would be a simple job, easy money. But with the humiliation at the speakeasy and now the change of odds, their thoughts are clear as neon: easy money is slipping from their grasp.
As Anwar and Gail gingerly make their way to the factory floor, I walk up to Doug. It’s all I can do not to take a swing at him.
‘We’ll pass on the offer of a trip to Neighbourly Watch Central,’ I tell him. ‘Here’s your insurance policy.’ I shove the jump drive into his hand. For Gail, and my sister.
He pockets it, surprised.
‘Michael believes you stole it from his house. My advice is, run with that. We all want a happy ending, so if you and your goons leave, we’ll consider our grievances null and void.’
The protection two move obligingly from the exit, but Doug shows no sign of leaving.
He sneers at me. ‘Tough talk, coming from a skinny-arsed genderbender. I wonder does that swagger of yours match up to reality?’
I stare at him. I didn’t know I swaggered.
I’m worried he’s about to pull another swifty when I hear it — and so does everyone else. A rumbling in the distance, like a battalion of tanks.
The rumbling turns throaty. The tanks have V8 engines and exhaust modifications. The sound rolls along the street and enters Ferguson’s lot, burbling up the service road then around the back, the side, the front, until the entire building is reverberating. As the smell of petrol seeps in, I want to rush excitedly to a window and hoorah like a kid: Skinny has brought the street armada to Ferguson’s.
The circle complete, engines idle soupily. Then the horns start up a tooting, shrieking cacophony. Engines rev again and blatt more fumes, then cut out. It’s eerie, the sudden silence, as if all the air has been sucked from the building. Transfixed, we wait.
Skinny saunters in.
His racing leathers are a patina of famous brand names and fancy stitchwork; his metal-toed boots clip loudly on the concrete. Instinctively he seems to know who the protection duo are, and gives them a deferential racer’s salute. They return his gesture with nods.
‘Andy Pandy.’ He grins roguishly at me and winks at Gail, then claps Anwar on the back like an old friend. Swivelling to Marlene, he treats her to a fast once-over. ‘Who’s the show pony?’ he asks, and she huffs offendedly.
‘The one with the key,’ I reply. ‘Not that we needed it.’
Skinny fixes finally on Doug. ‘And here’s Mr Important.’ He struts over, facing off with his opposition even though he reaches only to the other’s shoulder. ‘My cavalry is bigger than yours,’ he says.
Doug is circumspect enough not to reply. His offsiders have edged away from him. They take a few more steps backwards then seize their chance, retreating down the corridor. No one moves to stop them.
Outside, a cheer goes up and the horns ring out their strident tones again. The three are running the gauntlet of the street racers. If they get through the circle, it’ll be a long walk back to the city.
A different sort of din starts out front, accompanied by more shouts. There’s the clang of metal on metal, and smashing glass.
Skinny cocks his head at Doug. ‘Mate — you’re gonna need a new ride after tonight.’
He turns to us. ‘When your business is done here, come tell me.’ Then, boots and buckles jingling, he exits the building.
Gail limps off the bottom rung of the stairs.
‘I’m sure Doug won’t mind me saying we’ve had some rather intense discussions here,’ she says. ‘But while the conversation was scintillating, I’m afraid the accommodation was below par.’ She looks at our sparkly turncoat. ‘We spoke at length about you, Marlene, and I’ve had time to consider your needs. Doug brought me some documents to sign —’
Marlene is already dashing up the stairs, which puts paid to any theory I might have about high heels inhibiting their wearer’s capacity for speed. I hear the office filing cabinet drawer being slid open.
Gail continues. ‘A legally binding agreement …’
Marlene returns to the landing, brandishing a sheaf of papers.
Gail lifts her gaze. ‘For a transfer of ownership.’
Marlene stills, not sure what’s coming.
‘What did he tell you?’ Gail asks her from below. ‘That they were my embryo-transfer documents and as the recipient you needed to sign too? Did he make you do it blindfolded? Because what you signed — as a witness — was the handover of Cute’n’Cuddly Pty Ltd to Doug Smeg Enterprises.’
Marlene shrieks her disappointment and flings the papers over the railing. Several sheets flutter down. I pluck one from the air and shine my bike light on it. A page of legalese in tiny print. It could be anything.
‘Well then,’ Marlene says sharply from above. ‘I have some show and tell of my own.’ Haloed in the gantry lantern’s glare, she leans over the railing like an opera diva ready to spout an aria. Trust her to go for the theatrical reveal.
‘It’s about my sperm donor.’
I glance at Doug.
‘We met here every Sunday and did it like hobos in that disgusting room. I jerked him off into a jar. It turned him on like crazy. Ask him. He especially liked it when I wore a prayer shawl.’
I think back to my first visit here. That explains the sequin in the sackcloth.
‘The candles and the porn were for ambience?’ I enquire.
‘Doug’s idea of forepla
y.’ She snorts. ‘But he didn’t care about the décor so long as he got his equipment serviced.’ She turns to Doug. ‘You thought you were going to be a daddy, didn’t you?’
‘The little fellas are excellent swimmers,’ he says, and Marlene begins to laugh hysterically. She’s been treading such a tightrope of manipulation and deceit, I wonder if something’s finally snapped.
‘I lied, Dougy,’ she coos. ‘Someone else was going to do those particular honours, because you’re firing blanks. I saw the results onscreen at the fertility clinic and none of them were even wriggling. You’ve got two saggy scrotal sacs of duds!’
‘You lying cunt.’ Doug goes for the stairs.
He reaches her in a series of heavy-footed lunges, but she lifts one spike-heeled foot with the agility of a kickboxer and shoves it straight in his chest.
I revise my opinion of stilettos. Speed and accuracy.
Surprised by her unexpected force, Doug is sent down a couple of steps. He grabs the railing and the entire construction judders. He launches for her again. This time the railing snaps off in his hand like a piece of peanut brittle and he tips forward, nose to metal.
As he struggles upright, there’s an almighty crack. The structure beneath him sags, unhitched from the gantry, a metre gap opening to where Marlene is on the landing. He scrabbles for a hold as the stairs tilt and strain and the anchor bolts are wrenched from their base plates. Then the entire structure buckles like meccano and crashes to the ground, Doug with it.
We rush to where he’s contorting, eyes wide, on the concrete, his body tangled in rusty iron. The piece of stairway poking from his chest doesn’t look good.
‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ Marlene shrieks from above as Doug vomits a gout of blood, and a pool of black begins to seep across the pale cement.
Anwar and the protection duo crouch both sides of him, trying to staunch the flow, but it’s coming out of so many places. The next spurt gets them all.
Doug’s body tenses to hiccup another viscous mass, then goes slack in a long gurgling exhalation, like a drain emptying.
One of the protection duo has her fingers pressed to his carotid. Appalled, we wait. She looks up at us, shaking her head.
‘Inshallah.’ Anwar passes a hand across Doug’s eyes and closes the lids.
In the shocked silence, the sounds of the outside begin to filter back. Marlene totters around the gantry and clunks noisily down the far steps, oblivious to their missing bits. She crosses the factory floor, stopping a safe distance from where Doug’s body has been skewered by wreckage.
‘Oh my God,’ she moans, hand over mouth.
‘Salisbury,’ Gail says quietly. ‘Would you fetch the blanket from the office?’
30
Ferguson’s big front doors have been dragged open, Anwar using the crowbar to break the rusty locks. Revealed outside is an impressive line-up of fetishistically accessorised custom rebuilds parked nose to tail.
The circle opens for the protection duo’s nondescript van to reverse up to the entrance, then Doug’s wrapped body is carried out and slid in the back while Marlene leans against a wall, sobbing inconsolably. Anyone would think she’d just lost her one true love. There’s no sign now of where Doug met his demise, the clean-up executed with such clinical efficiency that I suspect the Red Quarter two have done this before.
We exit the factory blood-spattered and filthy, but it doesn’t seem to bother Skinny. Growing up a gender transgressive in Melbourne’s gangland ’burbs would have been a Lord of the Flies experience.
‘Pleasure doing business,’ he says to Gail and Anwar, shaking their hands.
He comes over to me and murmurs, ‘Hot stuff, your boss. You should bring her to the Bend for a race meet. I’ll show her some classier ways to get a thrill. As for you, Andy Pandy …’ He eyes me in a fresh appraisal. ‘Got your place in Black Beauty reserved.’
He’s an incorrigible flirt and a rock-solid ally. Small wonder Lola loves him to bits.
‘See you there,’ I reply, and this time I mean it.
I thread my way between two handsome fenders and cross the factory car park to collect my bike. Closer, I see the gate has fallen on it. Closer still, I see the gate is flattened on it. When the cavalcade bulldozed their way in, they must have run over both. I stare in dismay at the mangled blue frame and wheel rims with their spokes popped out; once such a thing of beauty and grace, a thing of joy. Nearby, my helmet is just shattered pieces of shell and strap.
I prop up the gate, then drag the bike out and carry it back across the car park, bits dropping all the way.
A racer approaches me from the pack: Skinny’s rival from the night Anwar and I handed over the racing fats.
‘That yours?’ she says, consternated.
I nod.
‘I’m real sorry. The Purple Princess went over so easy — I never saw nothin but the gate.’
I look to her truck, the parade leader. My bike was crushed by a bruise-coloured six-wheeler twin cab.
‘That’s okay,’ I say, watching Gail help Anwar close the factory doors. ‘It’s just a thing. Replaceable.’
I lay the bike in the back of Anwar’s van. There’ll be time later to grieve.
The racer crowd have moved en masse to the middle of the car park where Doug’s eco-lite has been stripped of all its bits, the sad brown metal shell now getting enthusiastically doused with something flammable.
The first puffs of black smoke go up and the racers cheer.
‘We should leave before the bonfire celebration,’ Gail suggests.
Dressed in a borrowed tee and trackpants while my clothes are being washed and dried, I’m sitting with Anwar in Gail’s living room, ensconced in the cushiony depths of her comfy white couch. The light of early morning filters benignly through her French doors. I could almost believe the last several hours have been a trick of my imagination — except my raw skin smarts under the surgical dressings on one palm and hip, and my urbane boss is bruised and limping.
Barefoot in loose linen pants and shirt, she pours tea the colour of a Scottish burn into three pristine china cups. The sugar goes in, granules slid off a silver teaspoon. I don’t know how she manages it, but everything with her is so effortlessly aesthetic.
She hands Anwar his, the chafe marks on her wrists showing against the pale fabric.
‘Something’s been bothering me,’ I say.
She glances up, teacup poised. ‘And what’s that?’
‘Do I swagger?’
She sets the cup on its saucer. ‘Yes, you do. It’s peculiarly endearing.’ Her gaze is gently mocking.
Well, that’s sorted then.
‘I’m sorry it took so long to find you,’ I tell her.
I don’t want to imagine what it must have been like, forty-eight hours in Ferguson’s office, Doug as keeper.
‘I had the utmost faith in you and Anwar to come through,’ she replies, lowering carefully into an armchair.
‘Thanks to Skinny, and no thanks to Marlene.’ Or me. I try not to think about how many clues I’d missed in the lead-up. Not a natural sleuth.
‘We’ll still honour our guarantee to her,’ Anwar says.
I look at him beside me on the couch, freshly showered and wrapped in a borrowed dressing gown. Leaving the paint factory, Marlene had refused point-blank to ride with a dead body, so he’d driven her home in his van. Now she’s going to be rewarded for her services with a regular supply of hormones, gratis. But how, exactly, did she help us? A single phone call to Doug made under guard at the Shangri-La.
‘My mistake,’ Gail says quietly, ‘was not seeing beyond Marlene’s narcissistic baby obsession to her involvement in the bigger game. Jilted, she’s a spiteful creature, and once Doug’s plan was under way, she couldn’t resist feeding me the story about a new player at Fishermans Bend, even if it risked them being discovered. She wanted to see me rattled — but even more, she wanted to do the rattling.’
‘Why did you believe her?’
‘There was no reason not to. She gets to hear a lot of things at the Glory Hole. This one had the ring of truth.’
So Gail’s ‘little birdie’ informant was actually a big glittery bird. Who hadn’t Marlene betrayed? I wonder how much was intended retaliation, her going to the Neighbourly Arms and hooking up with Doug, and how much was simply the compulsion to salve rejection with more sex.
My thoughts swing to someone else whose motives I haven’t entirely got a handle on. ‘Mojo Meg sided with us at the speakeasy when she didn’t have to. If she was prepared to do that, I don’t get why she hung you out to dry till then.’
‘Meg has no respect for those she thinks show weakness in their business dealings,’ Gail answers. ‘That I would let EHg and my own company be compromised like that was a sign of weakness to her. Her move to try and get C&C’s buyers list first, through you, was a pragmatic one — but everything changed once she realised it was Doug, an outsider, trying to muscle in on the Ethical network.’
‘I would never have given away anyone on the list,’ I say, dismayed.
‘I know that,’ Gail responds. ‘I counted on it. Don’t blame Meg for the recruitment drive; you’re too good a courier not to try to steal.’
Another thing occurs to me. ‘Marlene said Doug was going to “sort” his farm contact, but now we’ll never know who that was.’
She looks at me. ‘He did sort the guy; and then told me in some detail how …’ She rubs her wrists. ‘Remember the Rohypnol incident logged with Drugs Watch? It turns out that dairy worker was Doug’s supplier.’
An alarm starts in my head.
‘He was the caretaker of the dairy, and had access to all areas,’ she continues. ‘Apparently, when he realised he’d been drugged by on APV cell, he saw a way to get his revenge. The farm does a sideline in growth-hormone extracts got from the foals they send to the knackery. He’d been siphoning off some of the stuff and delivering it to Doug at Fishermans Bend for a cash dividend from Gateway Enterprises. The batch he’d put aside for his usual Sunday delivery was in the distillery room. He knew the EHg brand name was being used as the Trojan horse, and in his mind it’s people like those in the APV who buy that non-animal-cruelty stuff. He thought by spiking the batch he was poisoning his enemies.’