Bradley had been in the business longer than most. He had been assassinating people for about 13 years and had contacts in all the organizations in Melbourne and Sydney. If he had wanted, he could have had Ginger and Terry eliminated at any time. It may have been out of respect for George that he did not. He wasn’t actually sure. By the beginning of 1996 Bradley had amassed all the money he was ever going to need. He had not been fingered or described since the Kingston case eight years earlier. He had stopped taking simple, little jobs. His reputation commanded a high rate of return and he even commanded a consulting fee. He had never taken on an apprentice, though there was one young man who had been so insistent that he had pretended to take the boy under his wing and fed him to the crocodiles instead.
One of the things Bradley had learned from his study of George Kingston was that stability deflects suspicion. The authorities had never suspected George Kingston of anything. He had a position and a means of income. He did not spend extravagantly: his vehicles were not top of the line, his house was enough for his family but no more than they needed, he dressed professionally but not in silk, and he went to work in the morning. Bradley truly admired his choice of professions. An insurance agency allows the staff to take care of the business while the boss is out doing other things. Bradley had emulated this theme by starting up several convenience stores and petrol stations. The staff took care of the business when he had prior commitments. The business gave him the air of respectability and something to occupy his time between his less socially acceptable assignments.
Any job Bradley accepted now was a matter of choice. He would assassinate someone if he wanted to. Two years earlier a member of the organized crime network had tried to extort a job out of him, threatening to expose him to the authorities if he did not comply. That man had been found at the bottom of a ravine, in the charred remains of his own car with the bodies of his wife and two children.
“Uncle, I want to know.”
“Boy, I need you to realize where we are and what we are doing. You will address me as Horace, or better yet, Mr. Paylee. If they take us, do not reveal even your name as long as I am alive. I will arrange the solicitor and we will work from there. If I am killed, deny all knowledge of my activities and tell them that I wouldn’t tell you what we were doing here. Deny everything and call Mr. Streng. He will get you out and provide representation.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Paylee.”
“Now what is it you want to do?”
“I want to know why he killed my father and mother. I want to know if it was a paid job and if so, who paid and why.”
“I hope you understand what you are asking me for. That turns this into a complicated procedure instead of a simple killing.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that.”
“And what will you do with the information you have, once you have it?”
“Then I intend to kill him as well.”
“The man that paid the job?”
“Yes, sir. Whoever made this happen will pay.”
“I don’t think you understand the ramifications of what you intend to do. The men who pay for other men’s lives are protected well and avenged if they come to a difficult end.”
“What are you saying?”
“In short, you are going after the sort of tree that sprouts dozens of branches when you cut off the top. You can prune the top, this bloke in this case, but if you wish to kill the tree you need to go very deep and kill the roots. The roots are protected by the branches. Do you see what I am saying?”
“I think so. You mean that to get to the man who ordered it done I will need to get past all manner of protection. I’ll need to kill all the killers first, before I can get to the real objective.”
“That’s right. I would advocate a simple head shot from a distance and leave it at that. We have our alibi and no one will be the wiser. You will be vindicated and I can go back to being a rancher and farmer. There is a lot to be said for a quiet uneventful life.”
“How many men have you killed, Mr. Paylee?”
“Only a few, but this is not about me. This is about you. I know your father did not want this sort of thing for you. He wanted you to go to university and study to become a doctor or some such.”
“I’m sorry, but the time for that is passed. If you don’t wish to assist me in this, I will do it alone.”
“Not bloody likely. I refuse to have your blood on my hands. If you try this thing alone, you end up dead. That is not a possibility. That is a certainty. I will not have you go off half-cocked. We do this one and then set up the next one. You’ve been waiting half your life but you have much to learn before you can go any further.”
“The door opened. Our man is coming out.”
“Keep your cool, boy. This man will know we are here if he sees too much of this van. Get in the back so he can’t see you.
Both of them were in the back watching with scopes when the Bradley exited the house and got in the Cadillac. There was no doubt that he noticed the van parked down the street; he looked right at it for a second more than another man might have.
“That’s him, isn’t it,” Ginger said.
“Should we follow him?”
“No, boy, to follow him would be to cement his suspicions. He is a professional killer and like all professionals he is paranoid. You remember asking me why we had no television? I’ll tell you now, that a television will fill your head with all sorts of false impressions about what a man can and cannot do. If this man sees this van elsewhere, he will know we are watching him. He has already marked us once. We will need to move quickly, but we know nothing about what the man is doing and I no longer have the contacts that allow research. We need to be in his house when he returns and I am willing to bet he has an alarm system we will need to bypass. I’ll take the torches, you grab the toolbox and follow me.”
Dressed in grey coveralls, they could have been plumbers or electricians, contractors of some kind. They both had engineers’ caps covering their blond hair. Once they were behind the building they opened the tool box and put on driving gloves. The back of the house was out of view from the neighbors. The alarm system was in place but it was the sort that activated when the door opened, not when the glass broke. It would have been deemed sufficient since there were bars set into the door. Your average thief would have been stymied by this arrangement but a well prepared man would not. It was a matter of minutes to cut through the bars with the small oxy-acetylene torch, then they broke the glass. Terry was inside immediately but Ginger waited a while, to make sure none of the nosy neighbors were investigating, and then he climbed inside as well.
The front door had a peephole instead of a window so there was no way one could see inside until the door opened. The only thing the invaders were concerned with now was that one of the neighbors had heard the glass break and called the constables. This did not happen.
The living room window had sheer curtains that allowed the occupant to see out through them but did not allow anyone to look in. Terry set himself up on the couch and watched the road and the driveway while Ginger scouted the rest of the house. He did not expect there to be any women in the house and he was correct. Their target was a bachelor. After ensuring they were alone, Ginger set up breakfast. They had both napped in the van and were quite keyed up so they were not in danger of falling asleep.
The Cadillac pulled in the driveway about four hours later. The man got out and looked down the street at the van. There was no doubt that he was suspicious now. After opening the door and keying in the alarm code, he turned around with a pistol in his hand. He wasn’t sure what had alerted him but he knew something was wrong. He could smell it.
“I know you’re in here, step out with your hands up or I’ll kill you right there,” he said.
Terry was terrified. He and Ginger had been careful not to disturb the living room but Bradley had known anyway. Between the living room and the kitchen was a counter, with stools, that served as a dinin
g room table. Terry stuck his hands up, above the counter but did not reveal the rest of his body. He was waiting.
“All right, you little wallaby, step out where I can… Unggg.” The crackle of the stun gun cut his sentence short but it also tightened his finger on the trigger. The shot went wide but the report was loud. More than one such shot and the neighbors would surely report it as gunfire.
The invaders wasted no time in binding their victim’s hands, feet and mouth with duct tape. They would have taped him to a chair but there was no appropriate kitchen chair to use so they stood him against one of the pillars that connected the kitchen counter with the ceiling and taped him to it.
“How did you know he would know?” Terry asked.
“It’s a function of the business. While most men would stand there thinking something is wrong but doing nothing about it, this man suspected something and pulled his gun. He has probably worked up more enemies than us and knew somebody would come for him some day. Check the front; I’ll check the back. He might have company.”
“I came pretty close to getting shot.” Terry’s hands were still trembling.
“Actually, I was in more danger than you. I expected him to take off his jacket and put it in the closet, that’s why I was in there. I couldn’t see him when he turned around. If he’d seen me coming out of that closet door, I’d have caught that round. He would probably have shot you too.”
“So we got lucky?”
“Luckier than we deserved. It was a sloppy setup and I didn’t even know it until it went down.”
“What’s next?”
“That’s up to you, boy. You have the man. You wanted some answers. Get them.” Ginger lit a cigar and sat down on the couch.
Terry was shaking worse, now. He was shaking with rage and fear and anticipation. He walked into the kitchen and picked the cutting torch out of the cabinet where it had been stashed, but he was shaking too badly to light it. He sat down on the couch, next to his uncle, trying to calm down.
“The first time is the hardest. The first time you kill a man, the first time you torture a man, it gets better as you get practice,” Ginger told him. “This man has killed enough that he doesn’t have a conscience any more. He would kill you as easily as slapping a mosquito. Go look in his eyes and see if he still has a soul.”
Terry did not move. He had slaughtered chickens and sheep but this was different. He was paralyzed by the prospect. All the way here from the coast he had been anticipating the moment, but now that it was here, he found himself unable to act.
“Allow me to demonstrate. There is no need for subtlety in this. The subtlety was all in the preliminaries, the action itself is brutal and messy.” He stood from the couch with the cigar in his teeth and walked across the living room. When he reached the man taped to the post he punched him in the face. “See, no subtlety, no planning, no remorse. This thing shot me and your mother and your father and he would have shot you if he could have. I believe he tried. So, do what you wanted to do all these years.”
Terry rose, walked across the floor and reached into the man’s back pocket, pulling out his wallet. Then he went through the rest of his pockets finding his keys, a cigarette lighter, a pack of cigarettes, a money clip with a wad of bills, a pocket knife and a full clip for the man’s pistol. The money went into Terry’s pocket. He shook out a cigarette and lit it clumsily with the driving gloves still on.
Ginger said nothing to his nephew. He returned to the couch and smoked his cigar quietly, savoring the smoke and watching surreptitiously.
Terry smoked about half the cigarette and then put it out on the bound man’s forehead. The man thrashed about but could get nowhere. He was held securely.
When the tape was ripped off his face, Bradley knew better than to raise a fuss. He already counted himself among the dead unless he could pull off something miraculous.
“Peter Dingham,” Terry said, holding open the man’s wallet. “That’s not your name.”
“What is this all about? I’ve done nothing to you. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Take the money, the television, anything you want. Just take it and leave.” Bradley was trying his best to sound convincing.
“Oh, you’re wrong there. You killed a man on a boat, eight years ago. Some time later you shot my mother in front of me. I have been seeing that in my dreams for years. You murderer!” Terry punched him in the eye. “That was just the preliminary. That was as easy as you’ll ever see from me. I want to know why.”
“You’re insane. I’ve killed no one. I am a businessman. I own petrol stations, for the love of God. I don’t know you.”
“No, you wouldn’t recognize me, would you. I was only eight years old when you chased me down the stairs in Goulburn Hospital. You should have stayed. You should have made sure I was dead. You should have killed us when we slept. You didn’t and now your past has come back to haunt you.” Terry punched him again.
“Look, lad, I never saw you in my life. Please, I have money in a safe in the floor. You can take that as well, just let me go. I won’t call the coppers, I promise.”
“LIAR!” Terry’s voice broke as he yelled and he punched his captive again. “This pistol is a Glock 22, the same .40 caliber pistol you shot my mother with.”
“This is coincidence. Please, let’s be reasonable. I never even fired that gun.”
“You’ve ruined my life and killed my family. I would recognize you in the dark. If you’re a religious man, now would be the time to pray.” Terry grabbed the spark tool and lit up the acetylene and then added the oxygen slowly until he had a nice blue point inside the flame.
“Ok, ok, it was me. You don’t need that. I’ll tell you anything you want to know but you don’t need that.” Bradley knew he could not talk his way out of his predicament by denying all knowledge.
“Why did you do it?”
“If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t personal. I had nothing against your father; in fact I admired him greatly. It was simply a job and I don’t know why the job was set. I was paid to kill your father. I had to kill your mother because she was a witness. You must know your father did the same thing to many men and women. We were the same. If he had been paid, he would have killed me and anyone around me. He was very good. I never found out why they wanted him dead, just that they did.”
“You are not the same as he was. He was a good man…”
“He was a good assassin. They never caught him because he killed every man, woman and child that could identify him. I can help you. I can help you get to the men who ordered him killed.”
Terry glanced at Ginger who shook his head. Terry then took the man’s pocket knife and tried to use it left handed but could not. He put the live torch on the counter top with the flame blowing downward toward the floor. Then he cut the suit off the man in a few places where the tape allowed it to show.
“Oh, for the love of God, no! Please. I’ll tell you. Don’t use that bloody thing on me. I got my directions from Sparky Robinson.”
“Who does Sparky work for?”
“I don’t knoooooo.” The flame got closer and Bradley panicked. “Ok, Ok he works for the Troy Brothers.”
Terry glanced at his uncle again, who nodded his head this time.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Your father was the best. I didn’t want to kill him but it was the job. If I didn’t do the job, somebody would have killed me.”
“Well, somebody is going to kill you now, but you are going to suffer first.”
Terry pasted the tape back over Bradley’s mouth and touched the flame to his belly. Bradley could not scream but he did thrash about wildly. The smell of his own flesh burning filled his nostrils.
Terry backed off, revolted by the smell and the cruelty of his own actions. He pulled the tape off once more and asked, “Who did my father work for?”
Bradley spit on the floor. “Boy, you know I fucked your mother in the ass?”
“What?”
“That’s right. I fucked her in the ass and she loved it. She kept begging me for more. Every time she saw me she got down on her knees and sucked on my cock and begged me to fuck her in the ass.”
“You…”
“I’d fuck her in the ass and make her suck the shit off my…” Those were the last words Bradley ever spoke. Terry grabbed the Glock off the counter and pumped five rounds into his bound body. Then he took the knife and began to slash and stab at the corpse, swearing incoherently.
“Oh, shit,” said Ginger. “Stop that, boy. Put your cap on. Grab the torch. No, shut the bloody thing off. Leave the gun. And the knife. I got the tool box. Come on, boy. They’ll be on us now. You’ve had your revenge. Let’s go.”
“There’s money in the floor safe.”
“Forget about it. Leave your gloves on, boy. Take his keys. You drive his car, slowly, a couple of kilometers south. Then you get in the van. Go, go, go.”
The two tried to keep their faces covered as they exited the front door. The silent alarm went off, one minute later, at the security company. The telephone rang but there was no answer. The police were notified and some local constables dispatched. False alarms were common, but this one came in conjunction with a shots fired call.
Terry tried to keep the speed down but the Cadillac was quite powerful and handled much differently from what he was used to. Ginger walked calmly to the van, opened the rear doors and put the tool box in. Then he calmly reached in and grabbed a handful of intentionally dirty axle grease and wiped it on the license plate. He removed his gloves and entered the vehicle. It started quickly and he pulled out at a reasonable speed. He did nothing to generate additional interest in himself. The Cadillac was out of sight before he entered the main road, but he saw it parked in the entrance of a park. Most of the 250 kilometers of the Yarra River is dedicated to parkland. Bradley had gotten a really prime piece of property.
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