Dimmick paid his more reliable members a wage to mix drugs. It wasn’t a ton of cash, but it meant that they could leave their jobs and devote more of their time to the Riders, and less to the outside world. The president fostered this commitment/indoctrination with regular piss-ups, bong nights, trips, strippers, free pros and whatever else he could dream up to keep everyone happy. The house was always well stocked with food, although he could never seem to keep enough piss in the place to keep everyone drunk, now that the bedrooms were full every night.

The daily speed production shift started at dusk, all concerned agreeing that it was safer to cook at night - the temperatures being cooler and their comings and goings less visible. The club’s backyard was big enough to be considered a small paddock, but not so huge that the shed was out of sight of the neighbours on either side. But Dimmick wasn’t about to give his neighbours any reason to complain, and tried to cultivate cordial relations with them. The noise of the bikes was the only thing they had to complain about and, by the looks of them, they had their own reasons not to start a dialogue with the cops.

By three o’clock, about 10 Riders were at the house, many folded into the two non-Squid couches working on the next carton of VB while fighting over one of three video game consoles, a few out the back tinkering with their bikes on the weed-strewn pavers behind the house. A couple had even stopped what they were doing and blithered out to the shed to check on the night’s production like they were supposed to.

Dimmick had buttonholed Bones, his chief toady. Of all his clubbies he probably hated Bones most of all, but he was a good little chemist.

Bones scratched at his little junkie arm. “Everything went real smooth. I reckon we’ve busted our record.”

Dimmick clapped him on the back. “That’s what I want to hear. You done the measures? Checked the temps?”

“Yeah - but I know you like to check…”

“Good. Fuckwit here has fucked himself, so we all have a larger cross to bear.” 

The President thought Squid was a weak shit before he shot himself in the foot, but he was one of the few others in the club, other than their Pres who had ever shot a firearm in anger. Look at his down there, shivering like a dog. Now he’d shot two people. As long as he didn’t croak, he could lie on the sofa until he grew roots.

“Squid, how goes it?”

Squid managed a croak and a weak smile.

“Hurts, eh? That’s good. That’ll remind you to focus on one thing at a time, eh?”

Dimmick got the requisite sniggers from the rest of the room.

“Crumbles taking care of you?”

A blink and a grunt this time.

“OK then. Try to eat something, or have a beer if you can get one off this lot.”

He went out the back to meet Bones, waiting as impatiently as a puppy.

They spent the next half hour in the shed checking production, and at the kitchen table going through the proceeds from the Randwick job with Period, the resident numbers man.

The cluster-fuck in Randwick meant that, not only didn’t they get paid for the main job, they had to choose between finishing cleaning the place out or disposing of a corpse that had just bled out all over the scene. Squid had won out, but fuck it had been a close thing. It occurred to Wilson the next day that if today’s compulsory DNA sampling was around when the guy was inside, it would have been a different story. There was no cleaning that mess up. Squid would have had to fertilise a state forest somewhere.

According to Period, after they’d offloaded the stereo shit and the meager collection of DVDs, CDs and records they’d stolen, they were only up about two grand.

Dimmick pounded the table. “Dumb cunts! That’s not petrol money.” As the non-soldiers quietly sloped off somewhere, the president quietly tallied the value of the stuff they left behind – hundreds of DVDs, more electronics… at least 10 grand in the living room alone.

“And add to that the 20 thou that ran out the front fucking door while Squid was busy shooting his cock off in the next room.”

He tried to rub away a bad case of eyestrain growing into something more. He glared at the deadheads around the table. “Stay with me on this. These guys who gave us the 20 grand to get this guy - these Italianos? They do this shit in their sleep. They could rub all off us out tomorrow - but they paid us so they could get alibis sorted. Now they’ve gotta do all that again, and we’ve gotta chase our 20 grand rabbit. Or they chase us.”