by Peter Corris
The car was parked partly in the shade, but it must have heated up at times and something of the smell of my urine remained. The beer was on the seat and the cosh was in the glove box but my blood went cold when I saw that my pistol wasn’t there. The only explanation for its absence was Clinton and that made me very worried. According to the firearms regulations I was supposed to report the loss of the weapon immediately, and how was I going to do that without screwing everything up? Worrying about it made me almost forget the pain as I drove home. An irrational young man, inexperienced with firearms, in possession of a high-powered weapon and eight rounds of ammunition was a recipe for disaster. And what was I going to tell his father?
The counter on my answering machine told me there’d been six calls. Three of them didn’t matter, but three were from Rex Nickless. I checked the office number and found he’d called there the same number of times. On the third call in each case he sounded very testy—more the building site foreman with the hard hat and the rough tongue than the besuited executive. He demanded an update on my activities.
I rang his office and was put straight through.
‘Hardy,’ he said. ‘I got your report and then heard fuck-all. Where’ve you been?’
‘In hospital. I got knocked about.’
‘You sound funny.’
‘A broken jaw’ll do that.’
‘Was it Cousins?’
Easy to evade that one. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Stop pissing me about. I’m still paying you. Have you found him or not?’
‘I’ve spoken with him, yes.’
‘Did you tell him what I wanted?’
‘He doesn’t trust you or me.’
‘Who cares? He’s in trouble if he doesn’t do what I want. Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Jesus! You let him go?’
‘Mr Nickless, I was lying in a hospital bed with my jaw wired up and a couple of metres of strapping around my chest. He’s six foot two and fourteen or fifteen stone. I wasn’t exactly in a position to detain him.’
It’s strange how you can visualise the behaviour of a person on the other end of the phone when they’re not talking. I suppose it’s something you pick up from the breathing, the pauses. I could see Nickless gripping the receiver with whitening knuckles and loosening his silk tie with the other hand as he fought for control over himself. His money usually gave him all the control he needed over other people, except his wife and ‘George Cousins’. And me.
‘Listen, Hardy, if you’re out of hospital you must be okay. Maybe you can’t drive. We have to meet. Tell you what, I’ll send someone around to your place to pick you up.’
I thought about that very quickly. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Make it in an hour or so. My doctor’s coming around in a few minutes to look me over again.’
‘Right. I’ll see you soon.’
I rang Ian Sangster and told him what I’d done. He swore and said he’d come to see me after his surgery hours. I said I’d be at his place instead, inside fifteen minutes.
‘Can you walk?’
‘Just.’
Clive’s taxi was in the street so I limped next door and asked him for my mail. He was surprised to see me and told me how crook I looked. I thanked him and took the couple of uninteresting-looking letters.
‘Did your mate call in?’ he asked.
I’d moved away and turned towards the gate, now I turned back and felt pain shoot through my chest.
‘What mate?’
‘Bloke knocked at the door yesterday as I was going out. Young guy. Tough-looking. Said he was a friend of yours. I told him where you were.’
I didn’t like the sound of that, but there was no point in putting Clive on the spot. ‘Oh, him, yeah, sure. He dropped in.’
‘Right, Cliff. Take it easy.’
Good advice and I’d have been glad to adopt it if I hadn’t had at least six things to worry about. The exertion had tired me. I put a banana and some milk in the blender and slowly drank the result. Then I had a large Scotch and drove the short distance to Sangster’s surgery.
He smelled my breath. ‘I see you’ve been on the mother’s milk.’
I consulted my ancient Swatch. ‘This can’t take more than thirty minutes.’
‘You’re going to a disco?’
‘Hah.’ With difficulty, I stripped off my shirt. Ian removed the strapping, inspected the damage and re-strapped me. He examined my jaw, took my temperature and manipulated my neck. It all hurt but I was stoical.
‘Tough guy,’ he said. ‘You think I don’t know what you’re suppressing?’
‘Look, Ian. I need to be up and doing. I’m taking your fucking steroids and the other bombs you’ve prescribed. I don’t feel too bad, but I need some painkillers that’ll cut in quickly and won’t make me drowsy.’
He rummaged in a drawer and produced a bottle. ‘I can’t think how many times I’ve broken the law in treating you.’
I took the pills and let him help me on with my shirt. ‘It adds spice to your life. Thanks, Ian. You’ve done a great job.’
‘You’ll live at least until tomorrow. With you, that’s about as much as anyone can say.’
‘We’ll have that drink soon.’
I cracked a can of the warm beer and used it to wash down one of the pills. I drove to a point higher up and one street away where you can observe the area in front of my house if you know how to position yourself. I sipped at the beer and waited with a pair of field glasses finely adjusted to the distance. The pill and the alcohol started to take effect and I was able to perform a few gentle stretches and regulate my breathing.
Eight minutes before the hour I’d stipulated was up, a car stopped outside my house. Blue Camry. I noted the number. Two men got out. They were both big and looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. Both wore dark suits and ties and one had his hair pulled back into a knot at the back of his head. The other hadn’t done anything with his hair except shave it all off. His bald dome glistened in the late afternoon light. They pushed open the gate and advanced towards the front door. I lost them on the overgrown path.
You can’t get to the back of the house outside from the front without a machete; the bougainvillea is a knotty, thorny maze between the house and the side fence. I couldn’t see these two risking their thousand-dollar suits on that. They reappeared, conferred, and walked along to the alley a few doors down to take a look at the back. They were doomed to disppointment there as well unless they had a rope and some other shoes in the boot. My back fence is an ordinary, very weathered, paling job, but it sits on top of a two-metre high sandstone wall.
Back they came to the front looking very pissed-off and a bit hot. The blocks in my street are deep and the walk back up the alley is steepish. I was untroubled in the shade and wearing a light shirt; walking around in the sun in a suit wouldn’t be comfortable. They looked up and down the street, perhaps searching for my car, perhaps because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. Baldy leaned against the Camry and lit a cigarette while his mate pulled out a mobile phone and made a call. Then they got back into the car and drove off. They didn’t look like draughtsmen or office wallahs who might work for Nickless. They looked like muscle.
22
In response to my phone call, Wesley was at my house in half an hour. He was reassuringly massive in his jeans and sweatshirt. I needed reassurance.
‘Mandy’s okay,’ he said, acknowledging my enquiry. ‘What’s up?’
‘I know where Clinton is. I’ve seen him and talked to him. He’s not rational and you almost wouldn’t recognise him physically. He’s put on twenty kilos, he’s got a busted nose and a flattened mouth and he wears dreadlocks.’
‘Who cares? Where is he?’
‘He’s at a house in Ryde. He’s working for a guy named Stan Morris as a standover man.’ I touched my jaw. ‘He’s the one who did this to me.’
‘Jesus, it can’t be true. He’s . . .’<
br />
‘He’s been through hell, Wes. He’s changed. He fought in one of those smokos they hold in the backblocks. And there’s worse.’
‘What?’
‘He’s planning to kill the man who supplied Angela Cousins with the steroids. He’s expecting to meet up with him very soon, could be any day.’
Wesley shook his head. Sweat beaded his upper lip and forehead. ‘My boy wouldn’t kill anyone. Not possible.’
‘He’s got my gun to do it with.’
That convinced him. ‘We’ve got to go to the police.’
‘With what? We’ve got no grounds to call in the police against Morris. We’ve got nothing on him.’
Wes acted as if he hadn’t heard me. He shook his head and pointed to the phone. ‘C’mon, you must have cops you can trust. You can arrange something.’
‘I don’t and I can’t.’ My own feelings of guilt about the gun made me testy. ‘How about this? D’you want me to get in touch with Nickless and have him accuse Clinton of kidnapping and extortion? We could probably get the cops in on that.’
‘No, of course not. Why can’t I just turn up there and say it’s your father and . . .’
I’d told Wes about his son’s masquerade but he seemed to have forgotten. ‘Can’t do that. He’s supposed to be an Aborigine, remember? How’d he explain things to Morris? That’d put him right in the shit.’
‘So you’re saying we have to do it ourselves? We have to front up to this Morris character and try to get Clinton away from him.’
‘Right. Ordinarily, I’d tackle it myself with another pro or two, but I’m somewhat incapacitated. And normally the last thing I’d do is involve a client directly, but I reckon you’d have more influence with Clinton than anyone else on the planet, if we can just get at him properly.’
‘Given that Angela Cousins is dead,’ Wes said quietly.
‘Yeah, that’s right. Look, I have to assume Morris has a couple of other guys with him, especially if he’s waiting to do a big drug deal. But you must’ve been in some fights, Wes.’
‘Uh huh, very few. You look like this, the drunks and even the racists, they pretty much leave you alone.’
‘Must have done your National Service when you were in England.’
He suddenly looked older and sadder, which was not what I was hoping for. ‘Yeah, I did it. In Northern Ireland.’
‘Perfect,’ I said.
I told him about the set-up at Ryde—the size and operation of the gate, the height of the fence, the floodlights, the kind of neighbourhood. He listened intently. It seemed that he’d got rid of all doubt; now he was totally committed. He absorbed the information instantly and I could sense him processing it the way a military field officer does, the way I’d done myself in Malaya but a long time ago and with varying degrees of success.
‘Houses next door?’
I racked my brains. I hadn’t been planning on anything like this when I’d been there. I hadn’t been planning anything and a few minutes later I was in cloud cuckoo land. I tried to visualise the houses on either side and couldn’t. All I could see was the trees, then I remembered.
‘Corner block. House on the other side much the same as the others in the street. No brick fence. I think.’
‘You think. Okay. What about the fence along the open side?’
Open side. Military terminology. Encouraging. I tried, but I couldn’t stay with him on it. ‘I don’t know. Didn’t notice.’
‘That could be good. You’d probably have noticed something formidable. Right, well, this sounds fairly satisfactory. You see, if this Morris hasn’t got any real idea of security or any military experience, he’ll assume all you need is something impressive and high-tech out front. That’s bullshit. Any piece of territory has points of vulnerability right around the perimeter. Well, I’ll ring Mandy and tell her I’ll be a bit late. Oh shit, you are thinking of doing this tonight, aren’t you? You’re up to it, are you, Cliff?’
Of course I was. After a couple of Ian’s pills and a shot of whisky and with the cosh in my pocket and the illegal Colt .45 automatic I keep for emergencies coming along with me for the ride.
‘Sure.’
The night had turned cool, enabling me to wear a light jacket with a pocket big enough to hold the Colt. I gave Wes the directions and we took both cars. The pills helped; I could feel the pain in my side when I shifted gear and turned the wheel but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. We drove down the side street and inspected the length of Morris’ property. Wes had overestimated my powers of observation—there was a high cyclone fence running from front to back. We stopped further down the street and went into a huddle.
‘Depends on the neighbours now,’ Wes said. ‘He controls the space in front and down that side. He doesn’t control the back and the other side. Let’s take a look.’
The cyclone fence only ran a metre or so across the back; after that it was a standard paling job.
‘Easy,’ Wes said. ‘Over into the other place and then over the back fence.’
‘Wes,’ I said. ‘I can’t scale any fences just now and anyway, I just happen to have a pair of bolt cutters in the car.’
He turned on me angrily, the first sign that he was on edge. ‘You’ve been pissing me about, man. Letting me do the military bit.’
‘No. We’re going to need all the experience we can muster. You were dead right. This fence is his Achilles heel.’
That soothed him. He grinned. ‘I like to work with a man with a classical education.’
‘Penguin Classics,’ I said.
He chuckled. ‘Doesn’t matter. Okay, let’s check that the fence isn’t wired up, which I doubt because any stray dog could set it off, and cut a hole big enough for you to walk through.’
We did that and pushed through a few scruffy casuarinas. I was glad to see Wes hanging on to the bolt cutters as a weapon. That meant he was taking the danger seriously. I showed him the cosh as we crouched in the shrubbery at the side of the house. He nodded sceptically. I didn’t show him the gun. It was a while since I’d done this sort of thing and I was nervous. I’d never done it with a broken jaw, cracked ribs and stoked up on codeine and alcohol.
‘No dogs,’ Wes said. ‘That’s good.’
I hadn’t thought about dogs at all. That was very good.
The house was brick with a covered verandah running all the way around on the lower level and a deck at the sides on the top storey. At a guess, six bedrooms. There was an in-ground pool at the back, off to one side, balanced on the other side by a sizeable carport. There were lights on in the house and I could hear music playing; or maybe it was from a TV set. We crept around to the carport and found the Tarago and a Holden Commodore of the kind Greg Norman advertises.
As we stood there a car pulled up at the gates and the intercom sounded. A staticky exchange followed and the gate opened as the floodlights came on. A taxi backed away and a tall, slender woman wearing high heels, a short black skirt and a pink satin blouse strutted towards the house. Her blonde hair bounced on her padded shoulders as she reached into her purse for her mobile phone.
‘She’ll keep someone busy,’ Wes said.
‘Yeah. He’s so excited he’s forgotten to close the gates.’
We both got a better look and Wes said, ‘Oh, Jesus.’
She was slender because she was young, very young. The heavy makeup couldn’t disguise the fact. All her movements had a coltish awkwardness, sexually attractive I guess, to some.
She knocked, went into the house and the floodlights died.
‘How d’you see it?’ Wes said. He was rewarding me for the bolt cutters.
‘Two options. We sneak in, try to cut Clinton out somehow, or we do a diversion down here—drive a car into the pool or torch one, something like that.’
‘Which d’you favour?’
I stared at the house. I fancied some lights had gone on and others off but I wasn’t sure. We had no idea of the layout in there—stairs, doors, lights,
furniture.
‘Diversion,’ I said. ‘Chances are it’s Morris in the sack. If there’s anyone else apart from Clinton we can assume what we like—man, woman, tough, weak, who knows? But Clinton’s the muscle. If there’s something going on down here, he’s supposed to front up.’
‘Agreed.’
‘I warn you, he’s not going to be happy about our interference with his little plan.’
‘Bugger his plan. I’m his father.’
I guess that’s the way fathers can look at things if they choose. I wouldn’t know. There was very little light coming from the house and it was easy to sneak about in the carport, keeping in the shadows. The Commodore was locked. It carried a sign saying that it was protected by a Viper Car Alarm. Wesley pointed to it. I nodded and hunted around in the garage for something to throw. I rejected a screwdriver and a bottle as they are likely to bounce. A hefty shifting spanner seemed like just the thing.
‘You realise that this is all as illegal as hell, don’t you?’ I said.
‘So’s selling steroids and bashing people up. I’ll chuck that thing. With your crook ribs you’d probably miss.’
Call it pride, call it stupidity. I stood back and threw the wrench as hard as I could at the Commodore’s windscreen. It shattered and the alarm began to whoop. My ribs protested and my clenched jaw didn’t feel good either, but the result was satisfying. Lights came on in the house and the front door opened. Clinton shouted something, jumped from the porch onto the path and ran towards the cars. Despite his bulk, he still moved like an athlete. Wes got ready to intercept him. I got ready to scoot back to the hole in the fence. Everything seemed to be going to plan when the floodlights came on again and a car came roaring through the open gates, heading straight for Clinton and not looking likely to stop.
23
Wes threw himself forward, swept Clinton up and carried him out of the path of the car. It did stop, with a squeal of brakes, throwing a shower of gravel in all directions. Male and female shouts came from the house. The men who jumped from the car, leaving the driver’s door open and the motor running, were the two I’d seen at my place earlier. Same car. At night they looked bigger and more threatening. They moved towards where Wesley was holding Clinton in a bear hug. Big as he was and struggling hard, he had no chance against his father’s strength.