Calm and… try to breathe…

OK. At least one holding the pillow on my face, another holding my arms and… now another bear-hugging my legs at the ankles. I struggled against them momentarily, but it was no go and would only kill my oxygen off faster.  Kill - not a great word to dwell on…

I lay still for a moment and tried to suck air through the down of the pillow. Not enough flow. They’d crush my face first anyway.

I was in the shit, and I’m not talking about the shallows. Then the sound of furniture being overturned and the house being wrecked? Wha… When I wrenched my head sidewards to suck air, my ears were crushed. Turn my head back, I couldn’t breathe. Fuckaduckaduck.

Whoever was on head duty was mumbling something and upping his efforts to squash my nose into my brain cavity. I felt the guy at my ankles readjust his grip.

Now or never or into the fucking nevernever herewego… I kicked out with my right leg, partially breaking free, but the other leg was still trapped and I was gathered in before I could do any damage. Something round and hard and gun-like pressed through the centre of the pillow and into an eye socket.

I went slack to concentrate on sucking air faster. Blackness was falling while a deep voice was rumbling something on the other side of the pillow, the tone suggesting sweet nothings were not involved. If he was giving me instructions, did he realise I was more likely to spring up and tap out the opening sequence to Lord of the Dance than decipher what the fuck he was mumbling about.

Breathe. Think. 

Then: a gunshot, thud-crash, and was that a scream from somewhere? Yelling… maybe a light switched on …

The pressure on my arms lifted for a second, and I was back momentarily from the brink of a void. I swung a fist high and hard at Mumbles, and connected with something hard and hairy. There was heavy contact. Promising … and the pressure on the pillow faded.

I wouldn’t have sat up in bed faster if it’d been on fire. On the Titanic. After the iceberg.

The pillow catapulted off my face and my bare feet hit the floor pumping. The room was lit up but the dark grey haze of squashed eyeballs blocked most of my field of view. A man in leather clutched his face beside the bed and someone was grabbing at my arm, but I was already out of the blocks. My teammates often said I was quick over 10 metres. For an old fella. The blood was taking a while to find the Curlydome and my beeline for the door was more a dog’s hind leg. Into one door jamb, onto the other and…

Charging into the pendulous beergut of a troll-like tattooed figure clumping in from the hallway, baseball bat in one hand and a DVD player under the other arm. He looked as scared as I was.

Barrel man didn’t stand a chance. His eyes widened to saucers as I lifted a knee, dropped a shoulder and proceeded to establish my leg as one of his internal organs. He went down with the whuuuuuf of an inflatable clown, without popping back up for round two. The last I saw of him, he was sliding backwards along the hall, his weight gathering the hall runner behind him. Fresh air spelled an open front door and I could see it, but the receding carpet meant I was trip-running on the spot, Wile E. Coyote in boxer shorts.

Here comes the bullet in the back. Here it comes…

Bulletinthebackbulle…

The carpet gripped. I sprang forward…

tinthebackfuckinbulletinthe…

…thundered out of the front door and hurdled the front gate like Brett Lee on a hat-trick and…

here it comes ripping into my…

…disappeared into the night.

I spun around to be hit in the groin by a blur of scrabbling claws and flying gobs of saliva. Spicy Joe. Joe’s lineage was anyone’s guess but he treated every human being like they were God on earth, and therein lay his charm. He was hairy, slobbery, too energetic, and gnawed his own arm for kicks but, with the day I’d had, I needed all the lovin’ he could lay on me. We backpedalled into the living room and I plopped onto the couch, fending off the little bastard’s efforts to lick my tonsils, and read the note. 

Mate, 

            Thanks for this. Joe’s food and other stuff at the bottom of the pantry. Eat and drink whatever you like. If you need anything, just buy it and I’ll fix you up when I get back. Don’t forget the dog food coming tonight.  

Cheers

I had forgotten the dog food delivery – not to worry - it would slot into the to-do list between “guzzling beer” and “searching for porn”.

Joe followed me into the kitchen, and the full-length pantry, with giant cans of dog food and two bags of doggy biscuits jammed under the bottom shelf. As I poked around the furry fiend sat at the door, vibrating at the sight of his beloved louvred door open. Drops of drool fell from his tongue to form a slippery pool of expectation on the floor.

“Mate, hope you’re ready to make a hellava dent in this. I’ll just get my stuff first.” Joe swept to the floor with his wagging tail.

Out at the car, I grabbed my bags – one reeking cricket gear and reeking clothes, one CDs and dented trophies – and wrestled them back through the front gate. I found the largest bedroom and dumped my stuff at the foot of an impressive brass four-poster. The room was fractionally larger than the two others and next to the front door, but I still wasn’t sure it was Honen’s bedroom. There were very few personal effects in any of the rooms and not much on the bedside tables. I wondered at the practise of keeping a clean slate for the various ladyfriends. It was clearly better to hide everything away than have a picture of the wrong babe on the mantelpiece.

An hour later, I was arse-deep in hand-tooled leather and three longnecks to the good. The remnants of some kind of gourmet quiche from the fridge nestled in my lap, and Spicy Joe was staring me out, trying to Jedi mind-trick me into handing over the crusts. I’d plucked Caddyshack from the DVD library and had even managed to tame the surround sound. I recall flinching as Rodney Dangerfield’s computerised golf bag ejected his clubs past my left ear.

Everything was in order. Chevy and Danny the caddy were teaming up for the big-money matchplay, Spicy Joe’s eyes were drooping and, hopefully, Karen McDonald was wracked with guilt at her subterfuge…

I woke up with a jolt in a brass bed. It took a second to bring back where I was and how I got there, and another before I knew there was something wrong – a tremendous pressure on my face… My mind spun.

I can’t breathe. I can move my hands. Fuck, I can’t see!

Panic. Lungs burning, face crushed, then my flailing hands hit a pair of beefy forearms, lending some perspective. A pillow was being driven into my face by someone very big and fucking strong.

Back at the ranch, the ranch may as well have been a prison. Front door locked, windows bolted - it was shut up tighter than a Scotsman’s coin purse.

I bashed on the door until I set dogs barking and the curtains twitching at Mrs Cavanagh’s place. An ear to my door revealed what may have been the faintest of sounds inside, maybe the scrape of a chair - but fuck, it could have come from anywhere. I stood there for a while, unsure of what else I could do. I scouted around the back of the block, among the washing lines and rubbish bins, craning my neck to catch any signs of life up in the bedroom windows, but the windows were dark and blinds drawn. It looked like Karen had even shut the bathroom window I sneakily left ajar for emergencies. You had to go and borrow a bloody long ladder to get up to it, but it’d saved me a couple of cold nights in the car.

Eventually the acrid taint of dogshit on the wind convinced me to give it up. Short of asking my blind and deaf 80-year-old neighbour if she’d seen or heard anything (And, by the way Mrs C, mind if I doss on your couch?), there was no way to tell if Karen was in there or likely to come back. And spending the night with my feet up at Honen’s was preferable to destroying my front door or facing the old crone’s disapproving stare. She already thought I was a bit of a slacker ladies’ man. She was still the only person I’d seen look me in the eye and use the term “ne’er-do-well” in a sentence.

I slunk back to the car, dug out Honen’s details on the scrap of paper he’d given me, and grabbed my mobile. No answer, so I told his voicemail I’d be taking him up on his offer, and selected the sweet sounds of Depeche Mode to calm me on the drive over.

The address led to a surprisingly substantial Art Deco house in North Randwick, one of Sydney’s more recently gentrified Eastern Suburbs. He was renting back in ‘99, so he must have got in before the property boom, after which house prices got much shorter and ended in “m”.

The house wasn’t far from the SCG, just across the other side of Centennial Park. It occurred that I could have been here five minutes after the game had I not chosen the play a round of Storm Curly’s Citadel.

I doublechecked the number on the mailbox, locked the car and sauntered up the garden path. It was a dark brick house on a roomy quarter-acre block.

It was all sizeable front lawn bordered by underlit shrubbery against shining Federation woodwork. I pictured Paul in thongs and Stubbies proudly pushing his mower across the lawn in summer, then winced. That’s probably what happened to Pete Forrest.

I was as natural as a guy with a brick and crowbar, extricating the front door key from a gap in the brickwork where Honen said it’d be.

The door opened silently. “Hello?” No sign of Spicy Joe and Honen would have been at his mystery woman’s by now. I made a mental note to ask what this one’s name was. Time to feed the pooch, clean out the fridge and pass out on the couch in front of a movie. The least action you can have with your pants partially undone.

It was a beautifully restored place, and the more I moved around, the more I realized the bachelor in question had some hobbies that I was unaware of.

I followed the tasteful Persian rug down the 1930s-wide central hallway, pushing open doors, peering in rooms and generally mooching about. A bedroom in maroon and beige with all the Art Deco trimmings, another one in Federation green, the next themed in white, and onto a royal blue and white bathroom with leadlight windows and a claw-footed bath Cleopatra would have been proud to park herself in.

An open-plan living room and dining room, with the Great Wall of Electronics neatly packed into a monolithic entertainment unit. I skirted around a pair of leather couches to fiddle with the boys’ toys. A huge flat screen TV was the centrepiece, flanked by more components than I could name. I prodded a few buttons to no effect. I tweaked a knob, flicked a switch, then noticed a note taped under the TV.

A grenade exploded next to me, followed by the frenzied screams of a panicking crowd. There was a disc rotating somewhere and I’d somehow set the surround sound at an ear-liquifying volume. Bowel-trembling bass was travelling from the floor up my legs, about to conjure the beginnings of a conniption fit. As choppers buzzed past my left ear I spun the biggest dial there was, hit every stop button I could see and tried to control my breathing.

Then fast footsteps, and something hit me from behind.

Honen lowered his voice. “What I mean is… are you really locked out of your own place?”

“It’s all not quite as bad as it looked,” I lied.

Brave face aside, if what she said was true, I was looking down the barrel of a cheap motel or a night on my brother’s couch. The situation was certainly way past an attempt at grovelling my way back inside.

Honen lowered his voice. I could feel his moist, pube-infested cup peering at me from the bench.

“Listen, mate, I’m not yelling this from the rooftops, but I’ve gotta nip over to the UK for a few days after the game and I haven’t been able to find anyone to mind the house and look after Spicy Joe. I know it’s last-minute…”

Spicy Joe was a strange hybrid of border collie, Muppet and musk rat that I’d seen riding shotgun in Honen’s car on occasion. I actually named him, sort of. During one of my stints for the Blues, in ’99, Honen was whining that he couldn’t decide on a moniker for the new puppy, so I suggested he just name it after the first sign he saw. Cruising past a greasy spoon called Spicy Joe’s Hot Chicken, a best friend was born.

I was still working hard to tune out the horrors of the protector. “It could work. Hang on, what are you doing O/S?”

“Gotta go and check out the setup for a county stint this year.”

“You got a county contract?”

“Shit, keep it down.” He scanned the room. “I’m doing the legwork myself. Trying to phase out the agent.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to put a rocket up mine,” I said, po-faced. “Parasites, the lot of them.”

“The day I woke up and discovered I could pick up the phone the same as he could…”

“Was the day you saved 15 per cent.” We laughed and bumped knuckles, a habit we’d picked up on a development tour to the Caribbean eons ago.

“So you’re checking out your digs over there?”

“Yeah, and doing contract stuff. Because there’s no agent involved, I think they need to make sure they’re dealing with the genuine article.”

I rubbed my bonce and mulled it over. “It’d give me time to source a pest fumigator and a battering ram,” I grinned.

“Two birds. One stone. And I wouldn’t mind getting in a last couple of nights with my lady before I go, so you could have my place to yourself tonight and tomorrow night, if you need it. I leave straight after the game on Sunday.”

“Sounds great.”

“I’m getting some dog food delivered tonight too. You and Joe will be set.”

I lowered my voice further still. “Mate, what’s management saying about this? You can’t just piss off, surely? We might have the final next weekend.”

He took me aside. “I’ll be back in time. They know about it, but we don’t want the press to get wind of it. Not good for team unity they reckon. So what do you say?”

“If I can’t bash my door down tonight, I might just give you a call.”

The rest of the day’s play passed without incident, which was just as well because I was just about ready to expire, especially after being banished to the outfield to chase leather all afternoon. Pity that, at this rate, I’d be doing the evening’s  passing out in a park somewhere.

The game had turned into a bat-fest, us declaring with 600-odd on the board and the Queenslanders well on their way to a squillion of their own.

After the game, I kept my head down in the locker room and skulked off for a shower, hiding under the hot water until my head looked like a walnut. By the time I emerged the place had cleared out a bit and there was no sign of Kat, which was the idea. Probably off doing the post-match media guff – something I’d always been barred from.

Across the room, I nodded at my mate Paul Honen, who was chilling out, gently picking at a big toenail the colour of bitumen. A talented left-arm medium-pacer, he was of a similar size and vintage to me, but had been a fixture in the Blues team for an age, even threatening a national call-up with good hit-outs in various Australia A sides. We’d met at Sydney Uni when he’d been a player from the Glen McGrath school of batting, and I’d offered to work with him on his skills with the willow.

From the ages of 17 to 21 it seemed like all we did was chase skirt, squander precious university resources – the Vice-Chancellor’s words, not mine – and play cricket. For our clubs, for the university, for fun in general. Faced with a lack of any other real skills, apart from the ability to fit a fist in our mouths after half a dozen pre-mixed margaritas, we decided to try our luck as professional sportsmen.

The irony was, my coaching ended up being successful enough to see Honen leave me in his cricketing wake as he rose through the ranks, and we seemed to lose contact outside my stints in the state side.

We’d still been tight when, at age 24, most of the follicles at the front of my pate decided to pogo out of my skull and set off in search of greener pastures in the shower plughole. He hadn’t been the one to coin my chortlicious nickname, but he made sure it stuck.

In fact, as I sat there vigorously toweling my man-parts, I realised we hadn’t spoken much for nearly five years. But good on him. It was fair to say he was always a bit more driven, and a lot more ruthless than I was, so good luck to him.

When he’d finished examining his fetid foot he came over, kitbag in one hand, Hector protector in the other, towel round the middle. He dropped Hector and held out his hand.

“Curly. Nice innings for an old fella. We haven’t had a proper catch-up up since you’ve been back.”

There was no option but to shake. “Er… Yeah, cheers, mate. Nice to middle a few. A bit unlucky, I thought.” I ran the hand across my own towel.

“Doesn’t matter, mate. The final beckons.” He was cheery, but seemed to be skirting around something, looking for an approach. I left the air dead. I suspected I knew what was coming, and wasn’t about to help him fill it with the point.

“Mate, that hoo-ha with your missus at lunch… Maybe we can help each other out.”

At lunch, I was putting a brave face on things. At the long players’ table in the Members’ dining room there were two topics of conversation: the likely brevity of “Shattered” Simpson’s cricket career, and my freak dismissal. I was in no mood to contribute to either.

Instead, I sat inhaling tuna and salad sarnies among the other grazers and concentrating on putting a half-century gloss on my 39 my sheer cheery force of will.

Showing the compassion of a Nazi brownshirt, Jimmy Maher was sashaying down the memory lane of freak dismissals, arriving at the MCG in 1982/83 for the Fourth Ashes Test. You remember: Thommo edged one to Chris Tavare who parried it to fellow slipper Geoff Miller, breaking a 70-run last-wicket stand to win the Test by four runs. Someone else brought up Mark Taylor’s “Moscow circus” catch on his back right here against the Windies in ‘96.

I kept my head down and jaw working.

Then the chat stopped abruptly; I glanced up to see all eyes on me.

I re-fixed my grin, until I worked out the focus of attention was behind me.

Karen. In the Members’ Bar. In the Members’ Pavilion. At the SCG. In a skimpy summer dress, caught between presenting her best side to the assembled talent and boring her dead stare into me.

My eyes were drawn down her bare legs to the duffel bag beside them, glands squirting electricity.

“Kaz… what’s… How did you get in?”

“I got the security man at the back entrance to run an errand for me.”

The poor bastard. Whatever this scene was, odds-on it wouldn’t end well. The guy may as well trot off all the way to the dole office.

A clock ticked. Two rows of staring cows chewed their cud around me. Askew on my chair, my grin was starting to hurt. “So. We’ll be getting back out there soon.”

Jimmy Maher piped up again, nodding at the clock. “Another 20 minutes, Curls.”

“Cheers, mate. What are you, the talking clock?”

I turned back to the wolf in girlfriend clothing. “So, how are… things?”

Karen flashed her vacuous smile. “I just came to return the rest of your stuff.” She unzipped the bag at her feet and shook the contents into the carpet – jocks, toiletries, a few trophies, and it looked like my entire top shelf of ’80s albums - CD and rare vinyl.

She flung the bag aside with a flourish and stabbing a toe at the shiny pile – Did she even remember to flex her calf for the boys? Good God – and added, “I knew you’d be suffering without your decade of drivel. When you can move on with your life, let me know. Since you’re moving out, I’ve already changed the locks.”

Delivered like a Bold and the Beautiful bit player.

I looked at the pile, nearly hysterical. “First off, there is no Supertramp or Dexys Midnight Runners here. And by the way, I own the fucking unit!”

The chewing stopped. Behind the wide mahogany bar, a glass shattered; in front of it I thought I heard a distinguished-looking member lose a small fart of shock.

All I could do was sit there, white with rage, and suck it up. In a room full of blokes, misty eyes, glossy lips and a smattering of wounded indignance was all she needed.

Gacy was sitting in his 1989 Holden Camira, deleting old pictures off his camera and wondering if digital SLRs needed servicing. He was a painfully lackadaisical man, but camera maintenance equipment was one of the few things he wouldn’t let slide. A man who made the bulk of his money snapping intimate “caught-in-the-act” moments couldn’t afford his shutter to freeze, or his autofocus to jam when Mrs Someone was paying to find out if Mr Someone was fucking Miss Someone-Else on their lunch break from Some Dull Desk Job Pty Ltd. Consequently, the contents of the padded backpack lying on the passenger seat was worth more than the car he sat in, with his furniture thrown in. It was grubby work but as Gacy was find of saying “grubby equals money”. Truth be told, he liked the work, and didn’t want to do anything else. 
He was parked four doors down from a nondescript brick townhouse in one of Clovelly’s less glamorous streets. A nice area, but yellow brick eighties architecture ruled here, with no multi-million dollar makeovers likely this many streets back from the beach. Gacy had been there for 20 minutes and his belly was starting to complain. He balanced his cigarette on the burn-scarred centre console and grabbed a Mars Bar, sliding lower in his seat to tear into it. He checked his watch and ate, careful to keep the chocolate off the cavities in his teeth. He made a mental note to ignore the pain and start brushing again. Maybe tomorrow.

As he tossed the wrapper into the drift of fast food detritus in the passenger-side footwell, he caught movement in his side mirror and instinctively reached for the Nikon.

A shining new European stationwagon cruised by and edged into a spot on front of the house in question. Almost before the car had stopped, two of the car’s four doors swung open and a child spilled out each side. Gacy heard a sliver of radio pop before the engine died and the driver climbed out – a slightly built 40-something in jeans and a T-shirt. She yelled instructions at the fleeing children and managed to stop the elder of the kids, a boy who would have been 12, in a dirt-streaked striped uniform, ball under one arm. As the Yanks would say, a true “soccer mom”. 

Gacy managed to freeze her, fingers through hair, mouth open, a look of weary accomplishment. The photograph get special treatment on his wall.
The boy turned on a heel and slouched back through the shot to the car, grabbing a bag that would have held muddy boots to match the muddy knees, then raced back to the front door. Forty metres away, the camera’s motor drive purred as his father took an extra shot of his own name marqueed across the boy’s back.

The electronic pen scribbles across the TV screen.

Now. Keep in mind the Bulls’ Chris Simpson has his eyes on the ball at this point. Clearly even if he manages to catch the ball – here – he’ll have to step on the boundary rope – here – to do so. Now if we shuttle forward: he doesn’t pull out… look at how he’s still making very good ground and … he’s at full tilt and twisting to his right, his eyes have never left the ball… he sticks out his hands, opens his mouth and…

I’m still mid-pitch, bat wilting, as the ball sticks. Simpson is a hero, but a hero that’s out of control. I get up on my toes to watch as he sums up the situation and flings the ball back over his head just before he treads on the squishy boundary rope. Now, do I watch the ball or Simpson?

I watch the kid turn his ankle and skid on the side of his foot, sliding in the splits position, headed straight for a knee-liquefying collision with the fence. The crowd holds its breath.

Simpson doesn’t disappoint.

To avoid shattering his ankle in the boundary gutter he leaps, but that only means the advertising hoarding catches him across the shins and helicopters him into the crowd.

Next time you’re having one of those spirited conversations down the pub over a coldie or seven, and someone questions the commitment of the modern sportsperson, how they’re just grasping prima donnas chasing their next six-figure contract, two words: Chris Simpson. I guarantee every male shifts in his seat, winces and changes the subject.

The rest doesn’t bear thinking about: Clinton Perron sprints in from mid-on, dives for Simpson’s over-head throw and collects it inches from the grass. The crowd applauds. Celebrations begin, blah, blah, etc.

If the replays were tedious at home, try being out in the middle. We must have stood around for 10 minutes watching replays on the big screen, unsure whether Simpson got rid of the ball in time or Perron got his paws under it before it touched turf. And was the whole farrago even legal anyway?

Eventually the stretcher left and red light came on - the third umpire, match referee, Pope, and Chancellor of the Exchequer all in agreement that I was a dead duck.

By that time we’d all gone over to tut and say nice things while the unconscious Simpson was scraped onto a stretcher.

And all the while I’m thinking, Thirty-nine is a solid effort, right?

Adrenaline does a lot to speed up the reflexes, as does a cricket ball at the windpipe.

Noffke’s bouncer was nearly on me before I swivelled and threw a pull shot at it, eyes heroically squeezed shut and braced for pain.

Somehow the explosion and grey-out of a helmet impact was replaced by a crisp “thock”, so I opened my eyes and took a second to focus on the ball sailing up and away, with mid-on turning to chase. A good thing it made the boundary, because I’d forgotten to run.

I didn’t want Noffke to see me panting like a dog, so I kept my head down and tamped at the wicket a bit, adding a head wobble as an afterthought. Easy-peasy.

Next ball: same again, shorter, faster. Nothing for it but to drop the hands and collapse like an ironing board. My only option since I hadn’t got my breath back yet.

And so it went. The bowlers’ plan was either to kill me or get me out hooking. It seemed I had a reputation? Moi?

Queensland tried some things – pulling a young off-spinner out of their bag of tricks and crowding the bat to build pressure, but there’s nothing I love more than a pristine outfield unsullied by lurking fieldsmen. I was in my element.

Before I could take stock I was on 39 and 10 minutes away from lunchtime pats on the back. Si Katich was piling them on at the other end, and was looking pleased, cautioning me to shut up shop, ready for lunch.

But then I got another short, straight one and my eyes lit up.

I got inside it and threw the bat again. I’d hook the thing into a meat pie somewhere in the O’Reilly Stand and by the time we had the ball back the umps would have signalled lunch.

The contact felt good, if a little top-edgy, and I leaned back, watching it fly away through the blue, dragging the faces in the crowd with it. Maybe I’d have a meat pie for lunch. 

It wasn’t until I’d trotted a couple of steps, with my bat still over my shoulder in follow-through mode that it occurred it might not have the legs. The bat wilted in my hands as the pill fell out of the stratosphere, tracking straight for the boundary rope.

“Curly! Run! We’ve gotta cross.”

I barely noticed Kat in my face, nearly tangoing with me in the crease. My eyes were fixed on the point where the ball, charging Bull and boundary rope would converge. It’d make it. No. Yeah…

Then 9000-odd fans witnessed something that had the umpires, match referee and commentary team all scrambling for reference books and on-screen marker pens.

Freeze it… there.

George Dimmick wasn’t hard to find - up the back, sunnies on his head, nursing a beer. His was the only table that wasn’t overrun, possibly because he was a bearded, mulleted, leather-clad six-and-a-half-foot ape covered in tatts in a beer garden rammed with Euro surf-slackers.

Across the road from one of the most pristine city beaches in the world, the Coogee Bay Hotel is backpacker central for 10 months of the year, and Tom Crombie was not in a beachy mood. The former nurse sat down, sweating in his leathers. “OK, let’s get this done.”

“Thomas, Thomas. Relax. Grab a beer.”

“Mate, it took me over an hour to get here and I’ve got to be back at work at two. You know - on the other side of fucking town.” He shook his head, glaring at the tanned backpackers lolling around, pouring beer into themselves and trying to ask each other for sex in new and interesting ways. He glared at the sun, the noise, the serene seagulls drifting overhead. 

Dimmick leaned forward, voice a low rumble. “Get a fucken’ beer. It looks suss otherwise.”

“Fucking Poms.” Crombie’s voice had risen to a whine. He flapped some cool air into his jacket, got up and shouldered his way through a sea of golden brown twentysomethings, who scratched their bare bellies and barely rocked out of the way. 

In 10 minutes he was back with two brimming plastic schooners. Dimmick nodded approval and slid his full cup into his empty.

Crombie sat and peeled off his damp jacket, paunch settling. His mood had lifted slightly. “Hey, didn’t Neddy Smith kill someone out the front of this place in the eighties?”

“Fucked if I know. He was a softcock anyway. In bed with the cops, wasn’t he?”

Crombie dropped his wallet into his own lap, plucked out a small blue Flash card and discretely slid it across the table under a coaster. There was no talking to the bloke. “So anyway, here are those pics. I still don’t know why I can’t just email ‘em. This cloak and dagger shit…”

“I’m gonna go to the library and use their email account, am I? Where any 12-year-old could figure out how to trace it.”

“It’s one thing to be careful, but they’re only pictures of … people.”

“Yeah, un-breathing ones. The less records the better, in case the shit hits the shingles.”

“So I’ve gotta ride 30 kays out here …”

“Yeah, well, I was in the fuckin’ area.” Dimmick sucked down half his beer. That rumble again. “You reckon you’ve got an easier way to make a grand, good luck to you. Nice day for a ride anyway, even on that Triumph shitbox of yours.” He threw a McDonald’s bag across the table. Crombie peeked inside at the wad of notes, but left them there.

“Mmmm. Looks delicious.”