“Never leave a witness,” he muttered as he yanked open the passenger door. Inside the cab were the ruined remains of Bonner and the remaining gunman. “Sorry, mate,” he said and shot each of them once in what had been their heads. Then he moved to the back of the truck and shot each of the three men lying there, in the head. He left that gun at the scene.
He ran back through the trees in the semi-darkness and jumped back into the Land Rover. A kilometer down the road he found access and sailed back toward Brisbane and then west from there. He spent the last few hours of the night in his room, in Orange, cleaning his guns and smoking too much.
The constables had a wonderful time with the scene. Homicide detectives from Brisbane were there all night. The bodies were identified, tagged, bagged and shipped. The reporters were not invited to the party but they were there anyway. The morning edition read “Vigilante Sniper Kills Five North of Brisbane”.
The truck was hauled away once the crime scene investigators were done with it and it was unloaded at the impound yard. The cases of uncut stones were valuable but not worth a sniper attack. The blankets were still in good shape but the Indian artifacts had suffered a bit from the shrapnel and the cocaine that was hidden inside them was spilling out.
The news reported that there was a drug war going on. They tried to downplay it and made sure they specified that it was not in Sydney. The City Council and Lord Mayor of Sydney were foaming at the mouths. There was no possible way they could have a drug war erupting just as the Summer Olympics were about to start. Everyone from the Superintendent to the Commissioner would be released from service if they did not squash this “foolishness.” They had one month to track down the perpetrators and either capture or kill them. There would be no excuses and no reprieve.
The police force went on a rampage. They raided the coke bars, they arrested everybody who was even suspected of dealing drugs. They rounded up every heroin addict on the streets and threw them in jail. They arrested the homeless, the drunken, the pot smokers and the unlicensed pimps. In short, it became dangerous for an Australian citizen to walk the streets after dark. The tourists were left alone if they could prove they had entered the country recently but the residents of the city were put on alert. If they were disruptive in the slightest way they would suffer ninety days in jail. Nothing was going to spoil Sydney’s shining moment. The jails were bursting with inmates and the city began to ship them out to work farms, wholesale.
The visions the Troy Brothers had of vast revenues pouring in from the drug trade at the games disappeared. It was not so much the monetary damage that the affair caused as it was the long-term damage. Supply routes were disrupted and older, respected employees were being imprisoned. The police that had looked the other way so often were now forced to exercise their judicial authority. The customer base was drastically decreased as it was increasingly arrested. The owners of the coke bars were indicted and the extremely lucrative outlets were shut down. Marijuana growing facilities that had been overlooked were raided and the crops burned.
It was not just the lower level distribution chain that suffered either. Drug sniffing dogs were brought in to truck stops and distribution terminals. The sensitive noses of these dogs cost the Troys more than any Irishman could have alone. It got so bad that the truck drivers who had been smuggling illicit loads for years started refusing the jobs. Some of them insisted on taking vacations and some of them quit. Even legal commodities were becoming harder and harder to get transport for.
Terry spent the next couple of weeks between Orange and Molong, never heading toward Sydney. He had never given a thought to the carnage he would cause within the underworld network until it began to happen. Once the dragnet began, he sat back and laughed. He and Ginger had many good conversations about how to cause something to happen without doing it yourself.
Terry refused to answer his cell phone when Victor Wellington called and did not return his calls. He made the mistake of answering it when Henry Cuthbert called.
“Tommy, where have you been?”
“Uh, Henry. I, uh, I left the city for a little while. Things are so bloody hot in Sydney I thought I’d just lay low for a while.”
“No laying low. I’ve got a job for you.”
“But, Christ Almighty, there’s somebody out there killing drivers. The Road Patrol is on us like ticks on a dingo and I think it’s a bad move.”
“Look here, you little shit! What you think is of no concern to me. If you don’t get your ass down to Melbourne to pick up this load, I’ll make sure you never work again. I’ll get five big wogs to exercise your asshole ‘til you can never walk again. Am I making myself clear?”
“Uh, yes, uh I guess that’s clear.”
“You call me when you get to Melbourne. I’ll make this one worth your while but if you ever try to buck me again, I’ll have you killed or worse. Get going, now, and call me when you get there.”
“This looks promising, Chief Inspector Rahim.”
“What is it, Sergeant?”
“The ballistics on the rifle shells we pulled from two of those men match the rifle used in the Denman Massacre.”
“Sergeant Farrel, I wish you wouldn’t call it that. It sounds like we have wholesale slaughters here on a regular basis.”
“Sorry, Inspector. The Denman case is in a Sydney suburb, Annandale, I think. Same sort of MO. Shot the drug dealers from a distance. None of them left alive. Finished them off with a bullet to the head. Now in Sydney, that was done with a .32. Up here that was done with a .22 caliber pistol, the pistol was left on the scene. The killer used hollow points, so we don’t get a lot of ballistic evidence, but we don’t need it. He left the gun there.”
“What else did it tell us?”
“Nothing much. Serial number is gone, ground off. No prints on the gun. No unexplained prints in what is left of the truck. Get this, this guy is prepared. Like a mechanic, a tool for every job. He shot the radiator with .22 long rifle slugs. That stopped the truck. He shot the men we found behind the truck with military grade .308 slugs. He blew up the cab of the truck with World War Two ordnance, American pineapples. Then he went in the truck and shot each of the men in the head with hollow point .22 shells, walks behind the truck and does the same for the three men in the back, and leaves that gun there.”
“Did he need to do that?”
“They were all dead before that point.”
“So, he’s thorough and efficient as well as being a dead shot. Did he take any other guns with him?”
“I don’t think so. Each of the men was found with a weapon, even the driver.”
“Then that gun is supposed to tell us something. I want it examined with a fine-toothed comb. Now, what about the vehicle?”
“We got plaster casts of the tire marks, Goodyears, aftermarket. They sell them anywhere. The wheelbase indicates it’s probably a Land Rover. We got a couple of good casts of the killer’s boots. He was wearing rubber boots. Oh, I got an aerial view of this.” Sergeant Farrel pulled out a one meter by half meter overhead shot of the area. “Here is the truck, with the car right behind it. This wooded area is where we found the foxhole. There was no brass left at the scene, no gum wrappers, no cigarette butts, no piss stains on the trees. He gave us nothing.”
“Wrong. He gave us everything, we just don’t know how to look at it to see what it really is. I want every tire store in the State questioned. I want to find out who is driving a Land Rover with this kind of Goodyears on it. Get me a list.”
“Inspector?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think this is the same bloke who blew up that fish truck full of guns?”
“I’m going to reserve my judgment until all the evidence is in.”
Two days later a witness came forth. She was a college student who was understandably nervous about the whole affair. She had been driving up to the truck as it exploded. She hit her brakes and slid to a stop by the side of the road. She had seen a tall man with a
rag tied around his face, a fishing vest and a fly fisherman’s cap on, come around the back of the truck and shoot three times. Then he had gone into the woods. At that point the young lady gave her car all it had and got the hell out of there.
The police grilled their witness for a couple of hours but she could give them no more than she had. The police concentrated on finding anyone who had been seen wearing fly fisherman’s gear that day but there were no leads. Nobody had seen such a man. The witness insisted that there was no way she could identify the man. She had not seen his face and did not know the color of his eyes or hair.
The police were looking for a fisherman. The Troy Brothers were looking for an Irishman.
The newspapers released the composite sketch that their witness had pulled from her memory. It could have been a picture of Jack the Ripper for all the good it did. The vest and hat had come from an earlier time and there was no tracing them. The mistake the police had made was mentioning the rubber boots. Terry burned them in the wood stove, making sure there was nothing left. He swapped the Land Rover for the van and stashed the Rover away in a barn. He left it on jack stands and swapped the Goodyears out for a set of Coopers on new Cragar steel rims.
When he got cajoled into making a run from Melbourne he stayed on the straight and narrow: no drinking, no drugs, no women, no speeding. He took the back roads and drove carefully. Starting out at three in the morning let him arrive about three in the afternoon. He was surprised by the bonus he received and did not even know what he was carrying. He didn’t care. If he was to continue doing what he was doing he would need to be in Henry Cuthbert’s good graces. Victor Wellington was aggravated at him for not calling in, but he put it off by telling him he got no service outside the city. Victor had trouble like that as well so he let it slide but there was something in his eyes that Terry did not like. He also did not like the fact that his associates had seen the van. It would be useless after that day. The van mysteriously caught on fire that night and Terry authorized the compensation check for Thompson Barber a week later. Needless to say his insurance rates didn’t go up.
~~~
Chapter Eight: The Specialist
“Good morning, Brother.”
“Good morning, Abel. Are we still going to the warehouse this morning?”
“Unless there is a change in plan.”
“No, no change in plan. The flight will arrive at 9:14. That means we will be waiting for about an hour before the specialist gets there.”
“Abel, I know I agreed to this yesterday but I’m still unsure about it. Bringing in new people is always a risk and this one isn’t even from the country. How is he supposed to find what we can’t, if he doesn’t even know the lay of the land?”
“Relax, Adam. You know the procedure and this one comes very highly recommended. Royal Scots Dragoons, action in the Middle East, ruthless and deadly. They say he’s worth every penny. If he does not produce, we do not pay. The down payment is negligible. Let’s face it, if he can get rid of the Irishman, he’ll be worth every penny and more and if he can’t, then we don’t pay. He goes by different names but I have it on good authority that his given name is Gordon MacMaster.”
The limousine crawled through town and out to a warehouse on Elizabeth Street in the Lakemba district. An inside loading dock served as a parking spot for the limo and the office was bulletproof. The phone lines were swept for bugs on a regular basis and a log kept of the activity. There was a computer with internet access in the office but neither of the brothers had bothered learning how to use it. They paid subordinates to do that sort of thing.
Inside, the warehouse was relatively secure. The employees went through a different kind of pre-employment screening than most companies. It was important they were able to forget things very easily.
Abel laid out the figures the accountant had cooked up for him. The numbers inflated the sales and revenue of a number of concerns to account for the influx of dirty money. Of course, with the increase in revenue, one must have an increase in output as well. To increase sales one must increase expenditure and delivery. That was where things could get treacherous in the laundry chain.
If a company wants to do business it needs to make sure the books look right. Raw materials in, must equal finished goods out, to a certain extent. The warehouse on Elizabeth Street held a lot of finished goods that had been purchased, paid for, and reported as sold. Much of this material could not have been sold: squirt guns with no cap for the fill hole, glow in the dark hula hoops, action figures from movies that bombed at the box office, plastic cactuses and stuffed two-headed sheep. They sold a truckload of singing plastic fish to themselves at least once a year. The cost for these things was negligible though they paid full price on the books.
Adam often groused about what he thought was an overly complicated system but Abel was in charge of the figures and insisted that it had worked thus far, why would it require a change? Buying their own merchandise from themselves with drug money had made them very rich and respectable in the legitimate businesses arena. From time to time the goods were shipped overseas and sold again under a new set of production numbers and the companies recouped most of their investment cleanly. At least on the books. The raw materials were sold to themselves again and their partners in crime got their cut. All their partners had to do was inflate their production and shipping numbers to match the repeat deliveries and make sure they pay taxes on it. The taxes were, after all, what the government was really concerned about and with this system, they got their cut too.
Adam and Abel finished their business with the accountant and shooed him out the door. The next order of business was waiting in the employee lounge, drinking machine coffee out of a paper cup. The warehouse manager pointed out the door to the office and the specialist filled the doorway entering it.
Some men can walk into a room unnoticed. They can walk through a crowd without being seen. The specialist was no such man. He was about 194 centimeters tall with flaming red hair and beard. He had shoulders like an ox and hands like sledgehammers. His thick brogue gave him away as a Scotsman, though Adam and Abel couldn’t have told Scot from Irishman.
“Call me Glasgow,” rumbled from his chest.
“So, mate, where you from?” Terry asked casually. He already knew where the man was from and he had a good idea why he was here.
“Glasgow.”
“Glasgow. Is that in Queensland?”
“No. Scotland.”
“Oh. You’re in town for the Olympics, then?”
“Something like that. I’m a photographer.”
“It’ll be a while before there’s anything to photograph.”
“Oh, there’s always something to photograph in a city like Sydney.”
It was still early for the drinking crowd so the place was relatively empty. Terry had taken a stool at the bar and was nursing a beer. He had seen this big Scotsman informally interviewing another wheelman, in a different tavern but had not been seen, himself. The photographer disguise was a handy one, considering that the Olympic Games would be bringing in trainloads of them from overseas. It gave the newcomer a good excuse to be carrying around telephoto lenses and long distance viewing equipment. It did not explain the bulge under the man’s jacket however. Photographers seldom carried guns.
“Are you planning on doing any wildlife photos while yer here?”
“I hadn’t planned on it. There’s plenty of photos of kangaroos and koala bears out there. No money in it, unless the Smithsonian or Geographic contracts you for it.”
“I could show you some spots outside the city where you could get some shots of native life but we’d need to take a plane out there. It’s too far to drive.”
“No, I don’t think so. Like I said, that’s not in my contract. I’m looking for shots of Sydney night life right now. I need to get a feel for what goes on in the city.”
“Well, enjoy yourself. This area is not so slanted toward young women and dancing. We do
more billiards and head knocking around here.”
“That can make for a good study as well.”
Terry finished his beer and said his goodbyes. He might be wrong about the photographer but he saw no reason to be too accessible. On the street he walked to a different bar, watching carefully to see if anyone was following him. Nobody did. The bar he walked to was more of a lower-class establishment, where men were engaged in proving that they were tough. The air was heavy with macho.
After Kingston had sat for a couple more beers, he saw four large and outwardly pugnacious men enter the bar. He had seen a couple of them before but did not remember where. It was not long before the hackles on his neck rose. There was going to be trouble with these men.
While his instincts had worked in predicting the fight, Terry was too late to avoid it because it was clear they had targeted him for their abuse. Whenever possible, Terry avoided confrontation because he did not want to call attention to himself but in this case it was not an option. They had him surrounded and he was alone. He had no mates with him. The situation called for him to strike first or take a beating. His only other option was to pull a pistol and that was to be avoided at all costs. He almost never took out a gun unless he intended to shoot something.
If Terry had more experience and savvy, he would have known he was being set up. Three men surrounded him and one stood by the door. As it was, he only knew he needed to diffuse the situation or suffer the consequences.
“Gentlemen, let me call a shout and we’ll all get pissed,” Terry said in an attempt to avoid what he saw coming.
“I won’t be schooling with a poofter the likes of you,” one man replied.
“Oh, well then, perhaps I can…” The sentence was never finished verbally. A large, round, glass ashtray sat on the counter and Terry butted his cigarette in it before smashing that man in the face with it. The man went down and did not get back up.
Honorable Assassin Page 13