Stonedogs

by Craig Marriner

  At the Commodore driver’s window, its interior lit by The ’Dan’s headlights, my eye is jarred by the surreallity of the scene. Mickey Goldstein, chauffeur to the rich and lifeless. Dial 0800 666. He’s pale and jaded; seems too spent to open the door. Perhaps he’s just too pissed: the Jacks bottle in his gloved hand is significantly scrawnier. I open the door for him. In the passenger seat I notice that Dusty has his seat-belt on, baby-face lolling on a shoulder, and I surmise that Mick was forced to buckle him in when the pace Barry set keep throwing the homie toward the driver on left-hand corners.

  Helping him out: ‘I’m sorry you had to do that, man.’

  Dull: ‘Not as sorry as me.’ He backs away from the car as though it’s the Overlook Hotel, face suggesting his soul remains a guest. Pushing the Jacks into my hand, shuffling clear.

  On impulse I nail a long slug. It drops like water.

  Barry begins a rapid hunt of the area, selecting a wide tree trunk offering a chair-like space between thick roots.

  I sanction his choice immediately. ‘That’ll do us. A throne fit for a king.’

  Moving to prompt Mick back to work, I find him at it already; leave him be and fetch what remains of Steve; begin my own chores.

  Before long our tableau is nearing completion and we stand together, casting critical eyes, more united in purpose as a trio than perhaps ever before.

  Me: ‘Have we missed anything?’

  In time: ‘Not that I can think of.’

  My conscience orders the final brush-strokes with barely a shrug.

  Later: ‘Let’s get the fuck outta Dodge.’

  13

  Monday, 13 March, 9.18pm, The Smoke

  Around the Smoke Detective Constable Troy Wilkinson is renowned as a man in the know. And to those in the know the skinheads are moving up in the world. The recent amalgamation of the Smoke’s three internecine factions is proving, for the moment, a fruitful matrimony, and around town evidence is accumulating to argue that a neo-fascist extra-legal empire is on the ascendancy.

  It’s said that the Skins have significant holdings in an Onehunga chop-shop. Not to mention a legion of skilled jackers contributing to it daily.

  It’s rumoured that the drug trade among the follically absent is currently enjoying a period of sustained growth. With growing links to the Smoke’s high schools, and puzzling relations with more affluent demographic sectors, the Skins are apparently in the market for everything and anything.

  For those with the passwords, it’s alleged that house-calling ‘leisure therapists’ can be ordered through the Skin’s delightful website. Indeed, more hearsay suggests the Skins are involved in the current purchase of several K Road ‘establishments’, the recent escalation of property crime in this area having neatly driven prices down.

  As a fence, the variety of goods on offer through the Skins is second to none: Nike trainers to Sony Playstations; designer jewellery to Harley Davidsons. For the right price, a .357 Magnum Snubnose.

  Their facilities for illicit gaming are said to be on the rise. For example, if you’ve a dog you fancy, the Skins provide the forum for you to demonstrate and profit from its prowess. (Losers, of course, have invariably fetched their final sticks.)

  And — perhaps most disturbingly — conjecture whispers that, through younger members, the Skins are establishing covert recruiting offices in the Smoke’s high schools, offering cash and drug incentives to those who show interest. Indirectly, they also offer protection and fellowship, and, given the virulence of the Smoke’s colossal homie population, white trash youth are flocking to these banners in unparalleled numbers.

  Not that the city’s established federations are prepared to stand by and watch this usurping of their markets. Polynesian gangs — Black Power, Mongrel Mob and the Rabble — are said to have several destabilising actions in the pipeline. And it’s also been muttered that a list of the Skins’ Reichstag members is under assembly, something brown triggermen will soon attempt to shorten.

  As pugnacious as they are, this intelligence gives the Skins reason for pause. Because for all their burgeoning might, they will be several years yet in matching the power base of the Polynesian gangs. Also, members of the Skins seem to hold the prospect of prison in greater regard than do their adversaries — perhaps because these adversaries have had a three-decade head-start in the ‘manning’ of the nation’s penitentiaries. Whatever, this tentativeness leaves the Skins handicapped in the extremism with which they might campaign. Even the connections the Skins maintain with New Zealand’s more moderate white supremacist gangs are of little avail: on the maps of these, the Smoke has long been daubed an impregnable shade of black.

  Which, in a manner of speaking, accounts for Detective Wilkinson’s evening vigil outside the Skins’ three-storey headquarters in deepest darkest Penrose.

  The plainclothes policeman remains uncertain whether or not the Skins yet associate his big, beige Falcon sedan with the long arm of the law. In case they do, though, he’s parked some fifty metres from the entrance to the urban fortress — a swinging section in the corrugated iron, barbed-wire fence.

  Though tonight is exceptional — he’s scouting the ground for an upcoming raid — that Troy’s reduced to spending his evening thus disposed, when he might have been at home soaking footy-training aches in the spa pool with Gale, is a source of vexation to the big redhead. Because, as much as his business here is, in truth, of an extra-vocational nature, until today it’s been child’s play for a veteran like Troy to arrange for underlings to carry out the bulk of his round-the-clock surveillance. Their observations and photos are handed directly to him and then either added to official records, or to Troy’s personal dossiers.

  Dossiers he refers to as ‘The Excrement Files’.

  For though Troy is remunerated handsomely in his after-hours role as ‘chaperone’ to the Skins’ enterprise, experience tells him that when working both sides of the ball paddock one can never have too much talent on the bench, available for subbing.

  On top of this, Troy is coming to suspect that the party bankrolling the Skins is vastly more solvent than he’d first been led to believe, and as soon as his homework helps him put a name to this shadowy face, Troy will be in a position to negotiate an improvement of his fee.

  How the Skins had known to approach him, of all the coppers at City CIB, had been a strong clue in itself.

  The risk to Troy, of course, had been significant — as much as the Police Complaints Authority is a departmental rubber stamp, lefty libertarians are not above the use of agents provocateurs. Troy’s need of the capital, however, had been dire. What with the hammering Denise had given him in the family court, the amount any self-respecting detective is obliged to spend on wardrobe; the payments on the houses and boat; Gale’s modelling courses; the cocaine that work pressure forces him to use (a substance not always readily available in the evidence room) …

  Of course, given the opportunity Troy would far rather earn this money legitimately. But years of watching inferior cops making promotion ahead of him through no merit but colour — beneficiaries of furtive equal rights covenants, shady quotas from Wellington — has Troy convinced his career is at its peak. And, sadly, the lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed — the privileges earned by a cop who clears the streets of so many pieces of shit — simply exceeds the salary he presently commands.

  He once considered transferring from the Smoke and its hordes of kaffirs to a place where a good white copper might get a fair go at advancement. But any servant of the public who gives as much to the job as Troy does needs a regular source of release — aside from rugby, golf, and boating — and Troy knows that elsewhere in the country the amphetamine scene is lamentably lacking.

  So for a few years now, occasionally, Troy’s been balancing his books with a little ‘personal policing’, performing good deeds for society usually forbidden by the pedantry of due process … and meeting a few bills at the same time. Because what type of banana
republic are they trying to make of his wonderful country when a businessman who creates thousands of jobs, who earns his country billions of dollars, can’t phone for a couple of call-girls now and then and blow off some steam? Where’s the harm in stressed executives snorting a little coke with their cognac after a hard week at the office? And should they find themselves needing to drive home, surely the torrent of water they draw for the community merits them a little partiality?

  But are your average coppers — those making detective sergeant ahead of Troy — willing to apply the law with such innovation? Is your standard dipshit bobby capable of withholding the common-criminal tag from some understimulated corporate leader who, bored with the constant sex his position wins him, needs occasionally to dip below the age of consent? Of course not! Troy, though, for one, is utilitarian enough to act on the fact that a minor loss of childish purity is outweighed greatly by this self-same CEO effectively feeding, housing and educating thousands of kids.

  Nonetheless, many of Troy’s more sanctimonious superiors would take a less upbeat view of his ‘moonlighting’ should they ever learn of it. A fact that had weighed on him heavily when the infamous Jim Singleton had bought him a beer in a club one night, taken him aside.

  Jim was distinguished throughout the Smoke for his work with delinquent youth. More specifically, delinquent white youth.

  When this minor detail of Jim’s selfless toils had emerged a few years back, the press has taken Singleton to the cleaners, and it wasn’t long before Jim’s ideology was unmasked. A member of white supremacist groups since his youth, when the scandal-crested Jim had made appearances on current affairs programmes, defending his principles, naming himself reformed, an advocate now only of ‘non-violent National Socialism’.

  An oxymoron few chose to take him to task over. The episode was allowed to blow over; Jim to return to his work, although the true nature of his labours was more ominous by far than anything the media had unearthed.

  Warily accepting Jim’s offer, Troy had proceeded to find reason to arrest and incarcerate several prominent figures from the Smoke’s principal skinhead packs. With inside assistance this had not proved difficult, and the removal of these reactionaries smoothed the way for the amalgamation Jim had been conspiring toward for some time.

  When the actions of this new super-gang grew noteworthy enough, Troy had gone to his superior with a mountain of dire tidings, and, through the credit of his earlier busts, contrived to have himself placed in charge of a small taskforce trusted with monitoring skinhead developments. A position from which Troy — on top of fulfilling the ‘assignments’ Jim issued him with — was able to create for himself all manner of freelance work, regularly tapping the flow of ready cash that the Skins seemed in sudden possession of.

  A level of solvency Troy’s investigations were unable to attach solely to the Skins’ unsubtle shift into the world of organised crime.

  Jim remained unforthcoming about benefactors, but as Troy featured from time to time on the payroll of several of the Smoke’s prominent business circles, he had to assume that an element of the corporate quarter had found reason to take an interest in the Smoke’s fastest-growing gang: Jim hadn’t pulled Troy’s name from a hat.

  The quality and quantity of a lot of the narcotics Troy had discovered the Skins to be moving also pointed to this. Because for those with the international contacts, and with the courage — or the proxies — New Zealand was all but an A-class virgin.

  Awaiting penetration.

  About fucking time, too.

  And so long as Troy’s ‘Excrement Files’ could be made extensive enough, soon enough, Troy had visions of carving for himself a prime slice of this very large platter.

  For now, though, it was business of a less lucrative nature.

  His recent preoccupation had left one or two of Troy’s superiors disgruntled with his work rate. There was even talk of demoting him from the taskforce.

  What he needed was a good high-profile bust. Something like a bank robbery. Or a juicy murder. Fat chance of that under present circumstances.

  For the keeping of appearances then, at around eleven o’clock on Tuesday night, Troy — along with two carloads of uniforms — plans to smash in the gate to the Skins’ headquarters and conduct a raid with, ostensibly, the enthusiasm for which he is notorious.

  The Skins know the bust is coming. Of course. Down to the precise minute. They may well have a little business on the cards at around ten o’clock — their customary time for drug deals — but they’ve assured Troy the place will be cleared and sanitised by 10.45.

  It’s been arranged that Troy’s search team will locate little of a lawless nature inside. A gram or two of speed in the possession of one member; perhaps a switch-blade on another. He does, though, have clearance to prosecute these with maximum vehemence, and might even record an incarceration in his taskforce’s credit ledger.

  The Skins, it seems, are at last reconciling themselves to the tactic of ‘strategic imprisonment’.

  Monday, 13 March, 10.30pm, The Smoke

  — Jesus fucking Christ, Gator! I still can’t get over this. This house has been no stranger to weed since I moved in, but this … this is like something off a Cheech and Chong flick! I’m not sure how much more drying duty the microwave’s gonna stand, and, for the first time ever, I’m about to run out of pound baggies!

  — Barry and Sally should be back with more soon.

  — Yeah, so long as Rick’s car don’t shit itself on them. Fucker’s been running rough as guts for weeks. What’s our grand total getting up to, Mick?

  — That’s the majority of it bagged and weighed, Bum. That bag you’re fine-tuning now will be pound sixty-four … I’ve gotta go take a slash.

  — Yeah, well just remember not to touch any of the baggies until you get your dish-gloves back on: the last thing we want is prints on the plastic. Those hessian sacks I dug out are sweet, though. They’ll take ten pounds each.

  — No worries.

  — OK, that’s more than enough for my man in Henderson. Mind you, when he sees the quality of these fucking things, I wouldn’t be surprised if he scrapes together some extra laros and ups his order. Pass us another bud to top this one off, will ya, Gator? Too big. Yeah, that’ll do it. Fuck, there’s gonna be some mighty disappointed Rabble members in a coupla three weeks. Are ya’s sure you got away clean? … I know, I know, it’s just that you two look like conscripts back from the Eastern Front, and I’ve never seen Barry so keen to rack up sack miles — ya’s have only been back a few hours and he must’ve banged Sally in the dunnie there at least five times already. I bet that’s what’s keeping them now. Promise me ya’s walked away sweet as!

  — Promise, man. The secret is known to us and the grave. Like I said, though, Bum, we passed a heap of oinkers on the way back. That’s why we’re keen to keep The ’Dan off the road for a few days.

  — Like I said, if ya’s need an alibi just ask: you blokes were round here drinking my piss all weekend … and there were four of my mates enjoying your company also. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve entertained people in just such an official capacity. Just make fucking sure I get a bit of notice before any pork trots round here poking its snout in the door.

  — Cheers, man, but there’ll be no need for that. Unless I tell you different, just play it like none of us have ever met you, let alone visited.

  — Never?

  — Ever.

  — Sweet. Shame Steve had to hitch home for work so soon, though. I dig that dude, eh. Fucking top cunt. Make sure ya bring him when you’re next up. Gator …? Gator!

  — Ahhhh, yeah. Sure thing.

  — Sounds like Barry and Sally back now.

  — Just shift the curtain and make sure of that, will ya, Mick?

  — It’s them.

  — Cool. Where’s The ’Dan’s keys? I’ll shift it out of the garage for a sec and back Rick’s wagon in while me and Barry load ’er up. I suggest you two get som
e kip before your eyes drop out.

  By the time we hear Bum return, pulling into the garage soon after 3am, I’ve barely slept.

  Neither have I shed Steve a tear, an inability that has me trying to brand myself a total bastard.

  Not that I’m in danger of breaking into a Brit pop number either.

  I can feel the grief gathering, behind the leaden dyke, but its weight is yet contained with ease.

  As if I’ve been spiritually napalmed.

  Indeed, the bleak stoicism that has been with me so long shows so few signs of taking leave, it’s beginning to scare me.

  Is such a thing possible? I guess anything’s possible in the fantasy world we’ve been building these past two days.

  The urge to phone Tania — I owe her a goodbye — is overwhelming; her image the only thing eating at this coffin round my chest. But I’m scared the mere sound of her voice, my name on her lips, will split the dyke wide open.

  And that can’t happen.

  Not here. Not now.

  One thing I do know, one thing the three of us have agreed upon: as soon as we’ve unloaded enough gear, as soon as we can throw together a paint-job for The ’Dan, we’ll be stopping at Vegas only long enough to collect passports.

  Mick’s thinking Darwin.

  Barry’s thinking Tahiti.

  I’m thinking (Mt Albert Public Library) the Northern Urals.

  Mick, Barry and Sally have been sampling the merchandise all night. For me this isn’t an option. The ramifications of ushering paranoia and introspection into my wasteland could prove incalculable.

  Bum, striding through the door like a man who just buggered a supermodel, kicking it shut behind him: ‘Where’s Barry?’

  Mick: ‘In the dunny shafting Sally again. Can’t ya hear them?’

  Bum, louder: ‘Barry! Your presence is required.’