Muttering, ‘Keep your shirt on,’ Wyatt got into the driver’s seat of the Volvo. He ground the starter. The engine caught. He crunched the gear lever into first and pulled away from the kerb, the engine howling. He steered along the centre of the road, loudly, inexpertly, like a drunk, and all the while he was thinking that if there was trouble in the Mesic camp he should hit them as soon as possible.
Two
They stood there silently, watching Leo Mesic send the Volvo away. They saw him stand by the gates until it was out of sight, then labour up the gravel driveway toward them. Bax waited tensely. He’d noticed the Volvo on the other side of the street when he’d parked the Capri earlier, but hadn’t thought to check it out, and that was the kind of mistake he couldn’t afford to make. If the dogs from Internal Affairs were snooping around him, he was finished as a copper. ‘Who was it?’ he said.
Leo was red faced, breathing audibly. ‘Either a drunk or some geezer playing drunk. Ten to one he was playing drunk.’
Stella Mesic said bitterly, ‘It’s started. The hyenas and the vultures are moving in on us.’
Bax watched as she touched her hair, her breasts, ran her hand down the front of her binding skirt. She was Leo’s wife and she was the hot core of Bax’s erotic imagination. He wondered how calculated it was, all that narcissistic touching. He wondered if Leo ever noticed it. And he wondered if the big man ever thought twice about the fact that Bax was there when he came home sometimes, like today. ‘We’ll do some damage control, Stel,’ he said.
He smiled as he said it. He could feel his tension draining away. It made sense that the Mesics were the target, not him. It made sense that hyenas and vultures would start sniffing around now that the old man was dead and the Mesic empire was up for grabs.
Then the third member of the family spoke. Victor Mesic was quivering inside his fancy suit. ‘You still here, Bax? You’ve been paid off. Get on your bike.’
Bax wanted to smack the overdressed little prick in the mouth. ‘Shut up, Vic’
Victor fronted up to him. ‘I come home from the States and find the organisation splintering, guys going solo, the firm disappearing down the gurgler, and you three nerds talk damage control!’ He smacked his forehead with his open palm, an American gesture that Bax assumed he’d picked up along with his accent.
Victor’s voice began to rise. ‘Forget about damage control. I told you, we’re moving out of the car rackets, out of Mickey Mouse crap.’ He lifted a hand. ‘So long, Bax, we don’t need a cop on the payroll anymore.’
Bax looked at the ugly twin houses, the struggling shrubs and lawns, and thought about the five hundred bucks a week he’d become accustomed to. He turned back to Victor. ‘You want my advice? Stay with what the firm has always done best. You’re treading on dangerous toes, the direction you’re headed.’
‘What would you know?’
Bax knew. He glanced at Stella and Leo and wondered if they would give in to this creep. Victor Mesic had been in the States for the past three years, shipping stolen Mustangs, Thunderbirds, Cadillacs and other classics to Melbourne. More recently though, he’d put in some time with mob connections in Las Vegas, and he’d come back for his father’s funeral full of big talk about the future of the Mesic family.
Stella Mesic moved in then. She touched her brother-in-law’s arm. ‘Listen to him, Vic’
Bax liked watching her in action. She could run hot and cold, she had her husband bluffed, and he waited to see how Victor would take it.
Victor Mesic jerked back as though he’d been scorched. ‘I don’t listen to cops on the take. Piss off, Bax. Do your exams, make senior sergeant, get yourself a legitimate pay rise. Things are going to change around here.’
Bax stared at him. Old fears began to creep inside his skull, his stomach. He had coke and gambling habits worth more than five hundred dollars a week and he also had an Inspector who expected him to clean up the stolen car rackets now that the Mesics were in tatters after the old man’s death. The way Bax saw it, if he helped Leo and Stella regroup, not only was his five hundred bucks secure, so was his power base. They would continue to feed him the names of small-time operators, bent panelbeaters and car thieves, and that would be enough to keep the Inspector off his back. It had been ticking over like that for five years now, since old man Mesic had recruited him, and he didn’t want to give any of it away. He couldn’t afford to. There was money in stolen cars, stolen parts. But if Victor tried to move the family’s operations into casinos and poker machines, not only would Bax be left out in the cold, the Mesics wouldn’t last six months. Law enforcement was going to be tough for a start, briefed to keep the new Melbourne casinos clean, the Mesics would go broke making the changeover, and Victor’s Las Vegas wiseguy mates would rake off all the profits.
‘Your father would turn in his grave,’ Bax said.
‘My father was out of date.’
Leo had been standing apart from this, the younger brother trying to find an edge. Now he had one. ‘What do you mean, out of date? Who built all this up? Who groomed you, sent you to the States?’ Old grievances worked on his face. ‘Me, I’m just a manager or something, I do all the hard work and I get fuck-all for it.’
‘I’ll make us rich, Leo,’ Victor said.
Bax watched the brothers argue. According to Stella, the old man’s will was complicated, more or less giving financial control to Victor, the favoured son. Now Victor was talking asset-stripping so he could raise some big money, the sort of up-front money demanded by his Las Vegas connections before they’d let him invest in the casinos and gambling clubs now opening in Melbourne. Leo and Stella had been fighting with him about it. Everybody knew, and it made the family look vulnerable. The word on the street was that they were finished. If rival operators didn’t walk in and take them over first, they’d tear themselves apart. Already someone had torched one of their crash repairers and one of their car yard managers had been pistol-whipped. Stella complained that she and Leo were scared to go out half the time.
‘Car stealing?’ Victor was saying. ‘Strictly smalltime.’
A point-scoring expression settled over Leo’s heavy face. ‘We don’t steal-we deal. There’s nothing smalltime about that.’
Victor chopped the air with the flat of his hand. ‘That’s ratshit and you know it.’
Bax let them argue. They’d forgotten he was there. It was an old fight, and he had a stake in it, but he’d have to find some other way to assert himself.
He looked past the two brothers at Stella. She stopped smoothing her thighs long enough to shrug a little and smile. It was her way of saying she wanted him and it had better be soon.
Three
Wary now after his encounter with the big man outside the Mesic compound, Wyatt dumped the Volvo in Collins Street. He tucked the keys under the front seat and phoned the rental company with a story about a blocked fuel line. Then he walked to a disposals store in Elizabeth Street, stripped off his whisky-sodden clothes and walked out wearing cheap gaberdine trousers and a navy pullover that had set him back forty dollars. Stuffing the unwanted clothing into a rubbish bin, he made his way to a taxi rank outside the State Library. ‘Airport,’ he said, climbing into the first cab.
He settled back. The next ninety minutes would be tedious. It wasn’t likely that the Mesics had the kind of reach that would find him easily, but one of the Mesics had seen his face, and that was enough. Caution and concealment were in the air that Wyatt breathed.
He got out at the international terminal, walked through to Ansett, and caught the Skybus back into the city. There were taxis in Spencer Street but he walked past them and made his way to the Victoria Market where he flagged down a cruising Silver Top. ‘Box Hill,’ he said.
The driver had an oiled rocker’s haircut and a face creased from years of glare, smoke and Elvis Presley dreams. He frowned, tapped the wheel, thinking through his route. ‘Whereabouts in Box Hill?’