The sun was down but Gacy was still sweating into his synthetic shirt. He popped another button and slouched lower in his seat, feeling his age plus 10. Carrying large cameras around the streets was not kosher day or night, so he dropped his camera and lens down inside his shirt, hooking the strap over his head like a necklace. As he stepped out of the car, the camera swung beneath his baggy shirt to finish under his left arm, where he held it place with an oily bicep.
Nothing significant had happened in over an hour. No movement at the curtained top-floor bedroom window his lens was trained on, or at the front stairs to the block, or in the surrounding streets, for that matter. Time for a closer look.
As he crossed the road, down the street from the small block of units, he was just an overweight guy with bad fashion sense taking his chins out for an evening walk. Nothing to see here. Read the rest of this entry »
27 Aug, 2008
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. Read the rest of this entry »
25 Aug, 2008
I looked across at the impassive PI. “So I feel awful about the whole thing. Spicy Joe… and everything, and I’m bloody worried about Paul Honen.”
“Tell me, how well do you know this chap Honen? Even had any clashes? Would he bear a grudge?”
“Against me? Hardly. The guy’s in the team more than I am… and he asked me to mind his house - he may have already slept with my girlfriend… what else is there? I don’t really know him outside cricket anymore though. Just doing him a favour.”
“And these contracts with English county sides. Your agents would really have to negotiate them well in advance to sort out all the logistics, wouldn’t he? There’d be a lot of paperwork and legal work involved. Insurance, etc.”
I knew what he was driving at but I was temporarily distracted by the fact that he thought I had an agent. Read the rest of this entry »
22 Aug, 2008
According to the sign, along with a couple of other chi-chi businesses, Duncan J. De Walt worked from an office in a converted two-storey sandstone mansion in the Eastern Suburbs’ cash-cow central – Double Bay.
The guy had been surprisingly accommodating. I decided applying a battering ram to my comfortable two-bedroom fortified bunker could wait, since De Walt had agreed to move things around and see me as soon as I could get over there. He was presuming I wasn’t already around the corner polishing my Lambourghini with $100 notes, I noticed.
I was wondering how many clients a guy who could meet me at a moment’s notice could have, but it was obvious that De Walt was doing very nicely thank you. No Philip Marlowe-style shoebox office above a Chinese takeaway for this gumshoe.
No doubt many a rich, disgruntled socialite had trod the path under the gigantic fig trees before me, their minds humming with plans to have Watts catch hubby boning his personal trainer in order to retain their dignity and retire to the Seychelles with their personal trainer. I followed the discrete signs up a central stone staircase and along a second-floor balcony to De Walt’s quadrant, making a largely useless attempt to straighten up my stinking whites. I could actually see the cartoon stink lines radiating away from my person. Read the rest of this entry »
20 Aug, 2008
Running around in the outfield is not all glamourous grass-sliding and the surreptitious scratching of nuts - it’s fucking hard work. Having said that, it beats being spirited off the face of the Earth, which is what appeared to have happened to Paul Honen.
Queensland finally petered out late in the day with 464 runs on the board and as many litres of my sweat soaked into the SCG turf. At the change of innings I trudged off to rest my weary bones and vowed to spend the remaining 90 minutes of play making some calls and arranging a double knee transplant. There was no further news of Honen, and my talk of a rumoured secret county contract had been met with howls of laughter at lunchtime. I decided that the situation warranted me breaking that confidence, but stopped short of informing the coach of last night’s mini-staging of “Braveheart With Guns” at Honen’s place. I feigned ignorance of well, everything, which wasn’t much of a stretch. Best to distance myself from him and his no-show antics at this stage, since I was on shaky ground anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
18 Aug, 2008
At the SCG, I kept my head down and did a passable job of blending into the game day preparation, thanks mainly to a spare uniform I begged the assistant manager for. It’s marvellous what a quivering lip and a fake blub will do.
Since I was a late call-up to the team I hadn’t made much of a dent in my shirt allocation, this would be number three, which wasn’t enough to raise too many eyebrows, and I found a spare pair of pants under a bench in the locker room that fit OK.
I looked around for Honen, not sure how to tell him that his dog was dead and parts of his house resembled a crack dealer’s apartment post-turf war. Whispers that he was sick, or injured - definitely not around - were being bandied about but I was too busy scrounging up a uniform to get any kind of sensible info.
Before I knew it I was safely ensconced in the outfield, chasing more leather as the Bulls tried to match our huge first-innings score. The sun was baking. You could have cooked an egg on the Curlydome out there, even with the floppy hat, but it needed some space and processing time, so I was happy to fling the old frame around.
I thought about the day I’d made my first-grade debut. I’d carried Poppa Rigg’s bat in every kitbag that I’d owned since then. In the last two bags I’d even had a special pocket sewn in the side my bag to house it. I guess subconsciously I hoped my grandfather’s luck or talent or Test Match mettle or whatever it was would rub off on my gear. Consciously, it was my lucky charm, a cricket talisman that reminded me a talent for the game was in my blood when I felt at my most vulnerable on the park. Read the rest of this entry »
15 Aug, 2008
Squatting where I was I could only catch a glimpse of it past the couch. I left poor old Spicy to it - poor bugger - and crept into the next room, where the scene only got weirder.
Honen’s flatscreen TV lay on its side in front of the entertainment unit, cracks dividing the screen into angular fields of dead pixels. It was as if the box had taken a dive, literally cracking up after relentless bullying from that smartarse DVD player, and committed TV suicide… then bled to death? From under the panel, a black pool of fluid spread out, footprints tracking it this way and that.
It was only the congealed footprints trailing off up the hallway that dragged me out of la-la-land to figure what had actually gone down.
The fluid on the floor was either congealed blood or barbecue sauce, and I didn’t see too many sausage sizzles about the place. So in the process of hauling the gigantic TV from its perch, one of the hair bear bunch had dropped it on his foot, probably when the thing caught on its power cord. But that much blood from a crushed toe? A gunshot that had triggered my Carl Lewis out the front door 10 hours earlier…
I hauled the TV aside, dragging a furrow through the gloop and found a ragged in the centre of the dark puddle. Some of the liquid had run through the splintered boards before it set. There was also a high concentration of chunky white foreign matter embedded in the blood around the drain hole.
I shook my head. “And these little piggies went to God.” That’s what you get when you haven’t even the sense to put down your gun before operating machinery or lifting heavy objects. Read the rest of this entry »
