It was February 14th when I went outside again. Meagan suggested we go to a nearby Italian place for lunch. Not because it was Valentine’s Day, although that might have stirred the thought, but she said it was time for me to get some fresh air. I was content with the stale air of the flat, but she insisted.
It seems strange when I look back on it, being anxious to be on the street. Maybe I thought I was going to slip into the life of a bum again. Maybe there were bigger issues at play.
After we’d eaten what turned out to be some excellent pasta, we walked for a while until we found a friendly looking bar. I didn’t recognise the area at all, but didn’t want to ask. It didn’t matter anyway.
Meagan hopped up onto a bar stool, ordered shots, and said, ‘Just like old times, eh, Micky?’ She’d dressed up and was being as cheerful as she could.
The barmaid brought the vodka shots and left with the twenty I laid on the bar. ‘Almost.’
‘Cheers,’ she said, and knocked her glass against mine. We slammed them.
I choked. It was the first shot I’d had for a long while. ‘Shit,’ I said, ‘that caught me by surprise.’
‘Not like you, Micky. You must be out of practice.’
‘With most things.’ She gave me a knowing grin and looked away.
‘So what will you do, you know, for work and stuff?’ She must have seen a shadow pass across my face. ‘There’s no rush or anything; I like having you at the flat. You can stay on as long as you like.’
I knew what she was saying, but couldn’t respond in the way she wanted me to, so I said, ‘You’ve been great, Meagan. If we hadn’t bumped into each other that day, I don’t know where I’d be now.’ I laid a hand on her back as I leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘Thanks. You’ve been brilliant. I owe you heaps.’
‘No, you don’t. Like you said that night you had the run-in with Fish, we back each other up.’
‘Even so ....’
She suddenly paled and turned her face away.
‘What’s wrong?’
She didn’t answer immediately. She seemed to be watching something in the behind-bar mirrors.
I turned to look, but saw nothing wrong. ‘What is it, Meagan?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Bullshit. What’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothing. I’m just being stupid.’ She crushed her cigarette into the ashtray, faced me again with a tight smile. ‘I thought I saw Fish.’
‘Was it him?’
‘I didn’t see his face; it was just the way he moved. You know what I mean? People move in a certain way.’
‘You mean hunched over with knuckles dragging the ground? That sort of moving?’
She lit another smoke, knocked her glass against the bar.
‘Have you seen him lately? Has he called you?’
Two streams of smoke escaped her nose. ‘Last time I saw him was that night in the bar. He tried calling me a few times, but I let the calls go unanswered. Didn’t want to talk to the pig.’
‘Probably wasn’t him. It’s been a year since you’ve seen him.’
‘Was it really a year ago you bounced his head on the bar?’
‘More.’
We sat reminiscing for an hour, left and slowly wandered towards home. She was still a bit unsettled, and leaned into me as I put an arm around her waist. That night I felt highly protective of her. She’d pulled me out of the shit. I owed her, and I didn’t like seeing her rattled by the possibility of running into a goon called Fish.
The further we walked, the more she relaxed. We turned onto a busy street and I realised where we were. It was Crown Street, one of my old haunts, but the southern end, which meant we were in Surry Hills. I felt uneasy, but shrugged it off, assigning it to inner demons and memories dragged forward by Crown Street.
‘This isn’t the same way we walked earlier, is it?’ I asked.
‘No. We’ve gone round in a big loop. It’s nice to walk though, isn’t it?’
‘You don’t walk enough behind the bar?’
‘It’s not the same. That just makes me bloody knackered. This sort of stimulates me.’
‘I seem to have been walking a lot for the past few months.’
She stopped and looked me in the eyes. ‘That’s over now, Micky.’ Then she smiled, put her arm through mine and we continued walking. After another ten minutes, we turned down Palmer Lane and I recognised our outbound route. The flat was just five minutes away.
Meagan checked the time again. ‘Nearly six. Just time to get home, changed, and leave for work.’
‘Call in sick.’
‘I can’t, but I’m going to knock off early. It’s about bloody time I had an early mark.’ She paused. ‘Why don’t you come in for a while—if you feel like it. Thursdays have been pretty quiet lately. We can hang-out like old times.’
Old times; I wondered what they were. I’d lost sight of them and wasn’t sure I wanted to go back there, but I got the feeling it was important to her. Something in the tone of how she said it, sort of persuasive. I gave her arm a squeeze. ‘Sure, as long as it won’t cause you any drama.’
‘Nah, I’m the boss tonight.’ She smiled her crooked, self-conscious smile and was almost pretty. As we walked on, I thought about how she must have felt at times when people said unkind things about her facial looks. How many times had a guy checked out her body, then looked at her unremarkable face and sneered or walked away. I never classed her as ugly. She wasn’t, but neither could I describe her as pretty, or even good looking. Her plainness had become invisible to me by the time we’d cemented our friendship while working together. She was just my mate Meagan: Camels and shots after hours, good-natured banter and innuendo as we worked the bar together, and the occasional night of lust and release.
Her arm still hooked through mine, I felt the need for genuine connection, not just longing for a killer body. As we walked towards the flat that had become home for me, thanks to this girl on my arm, I thought I felt a genuine affection for her. Perhaps it was misguided gratitude mixed with ongoing dependence. Whatever it was, I wanted to take all of the hurt out of her life and make her feel pretty and feminine, if even for a short while.
When she left for work, I hung back, saying I’d be there after a couple of hours. I didn’t want to spend all night propping the bar up, watching her work, snatching moments of conversation between customers. By ten or eleven, the crowd would thin out to a few regulars, and the three old guys who were always there until close. I’d get stick from them about something, as I always did. After having to warn me about payback after I hit Fish, they seemed amused by my naivety.
At ten o’clock, I left home and walked to Darlinghurst, arriving at Frankie’s at eleven-fifteen. Meagan smiled when she saw me come in, and she indicated a stool at the far end of the bar, close to the gate. She swept past as I sat down, laid the smokes and lighter in front of me, and shortly after, returned with two shot glasses of vodka. We clinked and slammed them.
‘How’s it been so far?’
‘Pretty quiet really.’ She lit up, pulled smoke into her lungs, exhaled heavily through her nose. ‘He didn’t like it when I said I had to leave early, but I’ve covered for him so many times, he couldn’t say much.’
‘Fuck him. Fuck him in his ear,’ I said. It brought the crooked smile to her lips and a light to her eyes. ‘You can always tell Ray that he’s skimming if he gets shitty.’
‘What? Like you did with poor old Lenny?’
‘Nothing poor about Lenny, other than his choice of friends and taste in women. Has he or Pinklips been in?’
‘Haven’t seen them since he got the shove. He’d know better than to come back and tempt Ray—’
‘To kill him?’
She gave me a good-natured scowl as she went to serve a woman waiting at the other end of the bar. Twenty minutes later, Janet arrived with a tattooed guy who I’d seen someplace before, but couldn’t think where. I noticed Meagan looked a bit nervous when she saw him
, but didn’t say anything to her. We left as soon as Janet was sorted, ambled along Darlinghurst Road towards William Street and home.
‘Who was the guy with Janet?’ I asked.
‘Dunno. He comes in once in a while, but never really speaks.’
There was something she wasn’t telling me, but I let it slide. We waited at the corner of Darlinghurst and William for the crossing light, and I was reminded of all the nights I’d spent in that area. All the money I’d blown.
We crossed and cut down Kirketon towards Crown. It was a narrow lane with a mix of light industrial units and terraced houses, footpaths barely wide enough for one person. When I heard a car engine approaching slowly from behind, I looked over my shoulder, wondering what was bothering me. Then I realised it was because the headlights were off.
I found out long ago to meet a threat head on. I wasn’t armed, not even with a sap. I’d let all that slide with everything else, but I still had the ability to fight, so I let Meagan’s arm slip from mine, turned and approached the car. Twenty feet away there was enough street light to see the man sitting in the passenger seat was the tattooed Neanderthal who came into the bar with Janet. Sitting beside him, was Fish.
I turned to shout a warning to Meagan to get out of there, but the roar of the engine and scream of the tyres drowned my voice. The car shot forward. It hit me before I could react. There was more screaming from the tyres, doors banged, and I faded in and out of consciousness.
Next thing I knew, there were cops and an ambulance. I was lifted onto a stretcher, a clear plastic mask over my face. A needle pushed into my arm. I was in the back of the bus. Everything faded to grey.
Mourning
I woke feeling like shit. There was a white plastic clip on the middle finger of my right hand and a line running into my left arm from a bottle on a stand. It was daylight, but that’s all I knew. When I tried to get up, everything hurt. I couldn’t push through the pain barrier.
The room was small and smelled of stale food and disinfectant. There was an array of monitors on a trolley to my right and a well-worn tub chair on the left.
When I lay back and closed my eyes, I remembered walking down a narrow road with Meagan, a car approaching, and then ... then fucking Fish and the tattooed arsehole ran me down. Meagan? Was the screaming I heard from the tyres, or was it her?
I ripped the clip from my finger and tried to sit up. Alarms sounded. Seconds later, a nurse came into the room. She took one look at me, turned, and called to someone in the corridor. An orderly came in, and between them, they forced me back down. The nurse stuck me in the arm and the lights went out again.
When I next woke, there was a beefy nurse with a kind face sitting in the tub chair. She got up, looked at me, and pressed a button beside the bed. Less than a minute later, two cops walked in. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I still felt guilty. Cops do that to me. My head was foggy and I couldn’t make out where I’d seen them before. They identified themselves as DS Norris and DC Pine. Then it came to me.
Norris stepped forward. ‘How are you feeling, Mr DeWitt?’
The nurse walked behind them and stood by, watching the monitors. I looked at Norris, his thousand-dollar suit and manicured nails, remembered what a supercilious arse he was.
‘Outstanding. Yourself?’
‘Could you tell us what you remember about the events of last night, Mr DeWitt?’
I didn’t answer.
‘You were walking in the area of Kirketon Road and Crown Street. Can you remember what happened?’
I needed to stall until I knew what had happened to Meagan, whether she’d bolted, or maybe they’d beaten or abducted her.
‘I guess someone must have jumped me.’
He didn’t believe the scam; I could tell that from his eyes. After a five-beat he said, ‘No, you weren’t jumped or mugged. We have a witness. You were run down by a car.’ he watched me intently for a reaction, ‘the same car that hit and killed Meagan Silverton.’
It hit me like a bullet in the chest. Meagan dead? No. The fucker’s playing me, trying to screw information from me. Meagan couldn’t be dead. It was impossible. The prick must have caught my reaction, but I didn’t care anymore.
‘Women have a habit of dying around you, don’t they, Mr DeWitt?’
‘Go fuck yourself.’ I looked away.
‘We know you’ve been staying at her flat for the past few weeks. Did she express any fears? Get threatening calls or anything like that?’
DC Pine took a step forward and asked, ‘Do you recall the make and colour of the car?’
‘No.’
‘Not even the colour?’
‘It was dark.’
‘You didn’t see the driver, or if there was more than one person in the car?’
‘It was dark.’
Norris said, ‘You’d been drinking with her at Frankie’s Bar in Darlinghurst, is that right?’
I knew they’d have a dozen witnesses to that.
‘And you were walking back to your flat. Sorry, Ms Silverton’s flat.’
Ms Silverton. I realised that until then, I hadn’t even known her last name. Never asked; never cared enough to ask. How could she be dead? I shrugged, winced with the pain of hitching my shoulders.
‘Were there any disturbances in the bar?’
‘No.’
‘None that you are aware of?’
When I didn’t answer, he slid the leather-bound notepad from his pocket, made a note, and read for a few seconds. ‘Do you know a person by the name of Philip Pfiscanski?’
Fish! Now I had a name—Philip Pfiscanski! I could feel the rage building. I wondered if DS Norris could sense it. The monitors could. I turned to the big nurse and said, ‘Could I have some water, please?’
She placed a plastic beaker with a straw close to my lips and let me drink, then checked the monitors and said to Norris, ‘That will be enough for this morning, detectives.’
Norris knew he wasn’t getting anywhere with me and wasn’t likely to, so he didn’t protest, other than to cast a warning look at me and say, ‘We’ll come back and see you later, Mr DeWitt.’ He pulled a card from the breast pocket of his expensive jacket. ‘If, in the meantime, you remember anything ....’
I closed my eyes and lay back, my mind swimming with images of Ms Silverton. When I thought about how she’d helped me, how she’d been there when I needed someone, I thought the anger would explode out of my chest. I calmed my breathing and focussed that anger into hatred of the arsehole Philip Pfiscanski aka Fish.
Perhaps Betty, the nurse, had given me a shot. I don’t know, but I didn’t hear the dicks leave. When I woke again, it was dark and the tub chair was empty.
I lay awake until the sky started to lighten and there was the sound of movement beyond the door. Breakfast arrived in plastic bowls, was taken away untouched an hour later.
Mid-morning a doctor came in and read the chart, asked how I felt, and left. Not long after, Betty walked in and checked the chart and monitors. I watched her until she wrote on the chart. ‘What shape am I in?’
‘You’ll live.’ She gave me water, laid a hand on my arm. ‘Sorry about your friend. Do you want me to call anyone?’
‘Thanks, Betty, but no, there’s no one to call. How long before I can leave?’
‘Dr Thiesse wants you in for three days of observation. There’s nothing broken, no internal injuries, just extensive bruising. You were lucky.’
I didn’t feel lucky, just bruised much worse than any beating had left me. More than the bruising, I ached inside for Meagan. It just seemed so bloody unfair. She was no angel, but there was something fragile about her. As if her looks made her vulnerable to the Lennys and Fish of this world; accepting attention from arseholes at almost any cost, arseholes like me.
Betty finished fiddling with me, told me to get some more sleep, and left. I must have, because when I next looked up, Sonny was sitting in the chair beside the bed.
‘How you
feeling, Micky?’
I winced as I turned to look at him. ‘Never better, thanks, Sonny. What brings you here?’
‘Just wanted to see if you needed anything.’
‘I didn’t tell them anything, Sonny.’
‘Did you see them? Did you see who did it?’
Part of me wanted to say I hadn’t—the part that wanted to find and kill Fish with my own hands. But I knew I’d be stepping on a lot of toes if I did that.
‘It was that maggot, Fish. Him and a tattooed deadbeat who arrived at Frankie’s with Janet.’
‘What, Cheever?’
‘We didn’t get introduced. He looked like he might have been Italian. Dark hair swept back, muscle shirt, a stud in his ear. Arms covered in tats: real wanker.’
His jaw clenched, eyes narrowed. ‘Say nothing to anyone. Understand?’
‘Sure, Sonny. I need some clothes, and a hand to get up and out of here.’ He looked at me, stood, and left the room.
He returned five minutes later with a tracksuit and a pair of trainers. It took me ages to put them on, feeling every muscle and bone as I did. While he was waiting, he made a call on his mobile. A few minutes later, a guy walked in who Sonny introduced as his brother Tony. I walked out of the hospital supported by the two Islanders and was soon heading to the city. I expected to be dropped off at The Cross, but Tony drove directly to Meagan’s flat.
Getting out of the car left me weak and wanting to chuck. Sonny rolled the window down and said, ‘Stay inside and keep your head down. We’ll talk in a few days.’
‘Thanks, Sonny. Appreciate the help.’
He tipped his chin and they were gone. I didn’t have a key or tools to get in, so I knocked a pane of glass out of the back door with an empty wine bottle.
It was obvious the jacks had been there; things had been moved and there was a different smell.
The Beretta and burglary tools were hidden under the floor beneath the bed. There was no way I could move the bed that day, but from the looks of it, it hadn’t been touched.
For a long time, I lay there remembering Meagan. Thinking of the times we’d shared; her funny ways, and the mysterious side of her with her connection to Ray, Mitchell, and Sonny. She must have carried some weight with them for Sonny to come to the hospital that way, but she’d never spoken of it other than when she told me about the weekly kickback to Ray. It made me realise Ray had been bullshitting about harming her if I didn’t do his bidding. It was trying to prevent that, trying to protect her that had ultimately caused her death. If I hadn’t killed Carol, and then Jimmy Nono, I wouldn’t have burned the boat, wouldn’t have needed rescuing from the streets, wouldn’t have been walking down Kirketon, and she wouldn’t have been crushed beneath the wheels of a car.
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