Weirdly enough, his people seemed to refer to their boss simply as Mr T, which made Honen expect a spot of Chinese tea with a big black guy dripping in gold. No other details were forthcoming, of course, but there was no way he’d be showing his face anyway.

The sumtotal of their communication had been three emails to a Hotmail address that read like someone had punched a keyboard. The bikies had trusted him with the email address so he could contact the buyers and set up the meets himself. It was another layer of insulation in case the authorities came sniffing around, they’d trusted he wouldn’t fuck them over because they knew where he lived. The last employers he would ever have clearly were gullible pricks.

This time he’d set up the meeting in a French restaurant in central Hong Kong. Café Des Artistes was on the ground floor of the incongruous California Tower in the central Hong Kong district of Lan Kwai Fong. The weather was fine and warm and the restaurant’s bank of large windows had been opened to create a terrace for viewing the street. As Honen walked past the restaurant’s scripted sign, he scanned the street, looking for - anything dodgy. Lookouts, traps, large men with facial scars flipping coins on street corners… There was nothing, but since this was only his fifth time doing this, it was little wonder he’d seen nothing. It was 9.58am.

Inside, the place was more a restaurant than café - the walls popped with impressionist colours and were lit like artworks themselves. Breakfasters sat at their white linen islands, leaning into tall wicker chairs enjoying expensive breakfasts or French coffees. All seemed to be otherwise engaged… ah, the trio in the back corner.

Honen was wearing sunglasses, but it was bright enough for them to not look unusual. He blended right in in the back corner, with the two suits who looked like trainee sumos - both in designer shades - but not the oriental woman sipping tea between them. She looked dressed for the races and wore a white floral print dress with a wide-brimmed hat, pinned at an angle. They all could have all been Chinese, or Korean, maybe Japanese at a pinch. Hello - the Eurotrash guy sitting alone a few tables away looked like he was in on this too. He was slimmer than most of the help he’d seen before but had locked onto him quickly.

The rose between the thorns took another sip of her latte as Honen approached. They all seemed to keep their hands in their laps a lot.”I’m looking for my cousin Bart,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

I sat looking past Gacy at the house. The car’s motor was off, cooling, the ticking somehow amplifying the silence. Gacy had flicked me a fake ID and looked ready to take the lead. Just as well, really. Resplendent in fake beard, glasses and a baseball cap, I wasn’t feeling overly sociable anyway.

Weirdly enough, he was chipper. “Well, up and at ‘em,” he said, climbing out.

“Where is everyone?” I said, following suit and checking that all five doors were locked.

“Maybe they’re inside practising their bikie handshake… hey, you want to leave it unlocked. We may need to leave in a hurry. I wouldn’t think anyone’ll steal it in case it belongs to one of them.”

Fuck it. Rookie mistake.

I popped the locks and we strolled up the driveway, bold as brass - for all the world like any other rundown family brick-and-tile, except for a few high-end bikes on what was once lawn.

Someone must have been watching, because just before we were there the front door opened suddenly, which made my back door almost do the same. I only just caught it in time. Read the rest of this entry »

For safety’s sake, we swapped cars in a wafer-thin alley behind an Indian takeaway off Alison Road. I left mine with two wheels on the footpath, locked it and spent a few minutes shovelling a drift of rancid Macca’s packaging from Gacy’s Camira into a nearby bin.

Soon after easing down into the seat, I realised it still stank like an infested greasetrap in there. When I wound the window down I tried to do it politely. 

Ten minutes later Gacy was still a mute lump, his swollen hands clutching the wheel.

I spotted his wedding ring.

“How long you been married?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“Kids?”

“Yeah, one of each.”

“What do they think of this kind of work you do? The surveillance and badguy stuff?”

“Mate, it’s all legal and it pays the bills.”

There was an edge to his voice, so I cut the smalltalk and let some dead air go by until I saw we were headed for - you guessed it - the gold arches drive-through.

I scanned the street directory for the address in Mount Annan, and Gacy’s mood improved markedly with a mouth full of food substitute. The further west we got the more my mouth ran. Read the rest of this entry »

Waking up in a hotel room is usually a bittersweet experience. On the plus side, you can dance about and floss your bum with a towel should the mood take you, and you are ensconced in the perfect venue for illicit hotel room sex. On the minus side, a fleabitten $80 room is rarely enough of an inducement to lure anyone you would want to have sex with. Even illicit hotel room sex. Ah, such are the contradictions of the human experience.

I’d picked the Winning Post Motel, one of the well-worn establishments near Randwick Racecourse in which those in the racing fraternity still looking for their first Golden Slipper choose to stay. Being early in the week, the place was deadsville, but I was still woken in the pre-dawn by the clip-clopping of hooves on concrete. With my head and gut churning, further sleep wasn’t possible, so I lay there listening to the squeaky voices of the small horsey people outside and waited for dawn to break. Read the rest of this entry »

“I think it just might be him, Sarge. Hard to recognize hiding under the young lady’s skirt. Yes, I think so.”

I extracted myself from that steamy netherworld and stood, trying to look learned and in control. Luckily I have no crazy hair to smooth down.

“And yes, he’s bothering me. He’s a maniac. I think I need protection …” The sluice gates were opening, and the waterworks were underway. Love-15 to Karen. “I just… want to be… left… alone.” They should have seen her spreadeagled last night. Any more of this and the daytime Emmys were in danger.

Sergeant Bilko flipped through his little notebook and suddenly we were in a bad cop drama.

“Ashley Lawrence Gibson – that’s you isn’t it.”

“At your service, your excellence. Not a cricket fan?”

He wasn’t a fan of any sort, by the looks. “If you could stop manhandling the young lady for a minute… I’m Detective Sergeant Kessler and this is Detective McMurray. We’re from Rose Bay police.” Read the rest of this entry »

Finally something had gone right. Smooth as silk. Untouched, unseen.
Once safely ensconced in the clubhouse, and allowing a few window peeks to the road out front, Dimmick cracked a rare smile, shook a couple of hands. “All right, boys. That’s what I’m talking about. You keep it simple, you come out fine. Chaste but not chased. You fucking think - that’s the key.” Some in the room thought they knew what he was on about.
There’d been no hint of trouble, but they’d still been told to split up and change cars. Tom Crombie now had the unpleasant little task of ducking out in the morning to pick up the van. But who gave a fuck now they were back safe, right? Safe and not in jail yet. Ten hours or so and Tom reckoned he’d probably have stopped hyperventilating, so it was all good. The pain in his chest was fading, so he tried to join in the communal backslapping without clutching his chest.
As crew members on one of the few jobs that had gone to plan, Period and Bones were busy lapping up their privileged status, but were at pains to enjoy it separately until the beers and chemicals kicked in. It was noted that Bones skulked off to shoot up at some point, which really toned down the hostility. Read the rest of this entry »

After a couple of quiet ones I quickly realised that going shouts with Gacy would leave me one liver short of a picnic, so I switched to softies early on. With one of us substantially more fortified than the other, we’d loosened up a bit, picked my bottom lip off the floor and decided to continue the bikie doorknock that De Walt had alluded to, given that my buddy-pal Honen was either O.S. or in hiding, and therefore of little use. Without him the hairy bikies were the common link between me, my two bags of gear, and a bullet in the frontal lobe.

The trick was going to be how to find anything out without getting my arse shot off. We’d decided to sleep on it, but I got the feeling Gacy would be giving his bed the swerve for more pub-based lubrication. It was his life.

I dropped him off in Randwick and wasn’t home in Rozelle until nearly ten. I stopped in at the local Thai takeaway for a pad thai and was looking forward to shovelling it into my gaping maw in the comfort of a hot bath. Who knew that rubbing shoulders with alcoholics, bikies naked gigolos and other unmentionables who want you dead would make you appreciate the simple things – like eating sleeping, breathing, living. It was a shame, then, that I was still without the simplest necessity of all: a secure place to live.

Nomatter, halfway up the stairs to Chez Curly I’d decided I’d barricade the shattered door and cop a blissful 12 hours in the cot.

An odd clang caught my ear - like the doors Maxwell Smart catches his nose in at the end credits of Get Smart. I looked up to see Karen flouncing down the stairs toward me.

She froze. I calmly dropped my bag of steaming thai, shrieked and herded her back up to the top.

“Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! What is this? I can’t believe you’d have the balls to show your face around here, after your legs-akimbo work yesterday. Just jumped off someone else in there, have you?” Read the rest of this entry »

Other cops in suits had started to drift in and fill the desks in the long dees’ room. Fishbowl offices were built down one side of the space, and Kessler and McMurray took the opportunity to grab their files and coffee and settle into the meeting room in the middle.
After a few minutes of greeting and seating, Kessler stood and took centre stage. 
After talk of ram-raids and chop-shops and various B&Es, he started to lay out the details of the De Walt shooting thus far. Two-shot execution-style murder; likely gang or organised crime related: given nothing had been staged to look like suicide it was likely someone was sending a message to someone. Two pages of the notebook on the PI’s desk had been removed, but it remained to be seen whether any impressions could be lifted off the uppermost page.  De Walt’s phone records were still to come through, someone had the rest of his diary, the secretary was cooperating, they still had the tip-off tape, a set of muddy footprints that weren’t De Walt’s, prints everywhere except on the pistol discarded under the desk - one mother of a mess.  Read the rest of this entry »

As always, Kessler walked into the room to find his partner at her desk.  He’d sometimes wondered if she slept. He often wondered who she slept with.

Paula McMurray had seen her partner coming and used her peripheral vision to watch the old fella dump files, phone and dinner on his desk. He looked tired as usual; pretty understandable, given he an his wife had just taken in his newborn grandchild by a daughter that was well off the rails and rarely mentioned. McMurray wondered if Sue Kessler’s ambition extended to merely taking on an even dozen.

As he did every day, Kessler put down his drink and crossed off the day on his calendar with a red marker. The combined wisdom of the station had decided that this was his way of counting down to retirement. A few in the detective division knew that he was already eligible for his pension, though only the senior “D” himself knew it was his way of thumbing his nose at the dangers of the job.

That done, Kessler was ready for another night shift. “Any crime scene stuff back from the De Walt thing, Paula?”

“The pics are here, and the lab’s been told to put a rush on the analysis.”

“That’ll have it back by Christmas then.” Read the rest of this entry »

We parked the EH in an alley and made a beeline for the bar. I was still shaking like a leaf and Gacy was doing the same, his red nose practically flashing “beer o’clock”. On the way over I’d filled my fragrant new mate in on the events of the past few days, and he’d told be a bit about his experience in the field of freelance skulduggery. He had a pretty useful sneaking around skill set, but clearly also a raging addiction to alcohol. He spent the whole drive licking his lips and insisting we head to The Courthouse at Taylor Square - an early-opening dive at the top of Oxford Street - and there’d been no talking him around. Whatever.
Inside, the usual winos and reprobates were cheek-by-jowl with groups of office workers slumming it and looking like they had a big headstart on us.
I thought a quick shot of whisky might calm us down, so I got four. We elbowed in on the edge of a table in the murky fumes, threw one down and palmed one.
I was still alive. I had a drink. Things could be a lot worse.  
Then, out of nowhere: “I saw you on Sports Tonight a few weeks ago, you know.”
“John, I’m glad you’re up to speed with my media commitments, but we just met this arvo, and since then I’ve seen two naked people - one of which I punched out, and a dead body with his head all over a wall.”
Gacy made the “busty” sign. “Yeah. Your ex was fairly easy on the eye. Thought I was going to have a heartie.” Read the rest of this entry »