He was good; he came up fast and threw the package at me but I was ready for that, and he missed anyway. I put a straight left on his nose and felt it give. He roared and swung wildly; I let him miss twice and then I stepped up and hooked a hard right into his mouth. The flesh split and a couple of his big, beautiful white teeth collapsed and I hit him there again. His hands went up to his face and he stepped back, then he lowered his head and charged; I stepped away and he went hard into the post which held the bin. I ripped him twice under the heart and he went down and lay still.
I was breathing hard and both hands were hurting, but it was my turn to gather guns and money. I collected the lot and picked up the plastic packet of corn flour from the roadway. Annie got out of the car and walked over to Hendrick couchant.
‘You should’ve killed him’, she said.
‘No, he should have killed me.’
The whole thing only took a couple of minutes and if any cars had passed during the action their drivers must have decided it wasn’t their scene. A car cruised up now with a genuine citizen aboard; he wound down the window and put his big, bald head out.
‘Trouble?’ he said.
I’d taken Hendrick’s ID card out of his wallet: it carried the name Hendrick Hasselt and photograph. I put my thumb over the photo and flashed the card.
‘No trouble. Making an arrest. Good of you to stop.’ I tried to look as if I always went about with three guns and thirty grand mad money on me. He didn’t like the effect but he wasn’t a fool; he nodded and drove on.
Hasselt was wearing a rather nice line in paisley ties; it looked better around his wrists and he looked better on the back seat of the car, bleeding gently over his upholstery. Sam sat in the back with him and Annie drove us to Palm Beach. We had a quiet talk on the way; as she told it, she was right in the middle between Doc and Hasselt and his colleagues. It all rang true and when I asked her how she felt about a loan and a little trip abroad she gave me the first real smile I’d seen her use.
‘Can you do that?’
‘I think so. I’ll do it for Ma mostly. You, I’m not sure about. It depends how you feel about the junk.’
‘Never again’, she said. ‘Believe me.’
I didn’t say anything-what can you say? They opened the door to Annie and we all trooped in. I used the. 45 to impress Doc and Dean, but after dumping Hasselt in a chair they didn’t need much impressing. Paul was stretched out asleep on the sofa and the little packet of heroin was nowhere to be seen.
Dean looked at Hasselt and breathed out slowly. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He got careless and he wasn’t quite as good as he thought he was. Now you just be quiet and you’ll get your gun back.’ I walked over to Doc and pushed him down into a chair, then I tickled his knee cap with the gun. ‘Tell Sam where the shit is, or you’ll never walk again.’ He told her and she brought it out.
Hasselt looked bad but he was taking an interest; one side of his face was darkening fast and he was working at a loose tooth with his tongue, maybe several teeth. I took out the plastic bag and showed it to him.
‘Can you cook?’
He shook his head.
‘Pity’, I said and dumped the cornflour in his lap, the dust flew up and he sneezed, and that caused him pain and he swore. I poured myself a small splash of Bacardi and sipped it, I could see why they drowned it with Coke.
‘Now’, I said, ‘let’s all go to the bathroom.’ I finished my drink and we all trooped into a bathroom that had white and red tiles and good-looking plumbing. I tossed the plastic belt to Doc.
‘Open it up, Doc, and pour it all into the toilet bowl.’
‘No’, he screamed. ‘That’s a hundred thousand…’
I smiled at him. ‘As Henk said to me a little while ago, there’s enough evidence here to arrange things anyway I like. If you’re found dead, Doc, clutching a hundred grand worth of heroin, no one’s going to ask too many questions. Start pouring!’
He did, and the action seemed to cause him physical pain. When the water in the bowl was clouded up with the white powder I took the belt from him and held it under a running tap.
‘Now, flush the toilet like a nice clean boy.’ He did, and a hundred thousand dollars headed for the sewer.
Back in the living room I put my. 38 handy and unloaded the. 45. I tossed the gun at Dean and told him to put it all down to experience. I took out the manila envelope and tapped it on the coffee table. Doc and Hasselt looked at it like cats eyeing a bird.
‘I was hired to look out for Annie’, I said, ‘and it turned out she needed it. Now you and you have got problems.’ I tapped the envelope again. ‘Do you know what this can buy me in Sydney in the way of people to take care of you two?’
They didn’t say anything, but they knew what I meant.
‘Right, now Annie’s going away. She might be back soon or she might not, either way it’s no concern of yours. Do you get me?’
Doc nodded, Hasselt didn’t move, it would have hurt him to nod.
‘The same goes for me. I’ll put a little of this around, and you won’t even piss without me knowing about it. If I hear that you have used my name or Annie’s in vain, someone will get a chunk of this and you’ll be missing.’
I took Annie home, and twelve days later she was off; after we worked things out with her parole officer and did an express job on her passport. I made her a small loan and paid Primo for the heroin and gave him a bit extra too. That left twenty odd thousand which I split into four lots and posted to deserving organisations. A month later I got a postcard from Annie; it had a picture of a naval gentleman on top of a high pillar; so I gathered she was in London-I couldn’t read the writing.
The Luck of Clem Carter
Clem Carter was the welterweight boxing champion of the Maroubra Police-Citizens Boy’s Club in 1955. The title didn’t mean much to most people, but it meant a hell of a lot to Clem; and it meant something to me too because I was the one he beat in the final of the tournament. He was a tough kid, Clem, working at fifteen as a brickie’s mate; and he had a couple of stadium fights in the next few years while I was finishing school and not finishing university. Then I went into the army and Clem went to gaol. He got three years for GBH and he told me later that he had so many fights inside that he had to serve the whole time.
After fighting, cars were Clem’s big thing- when he was young he stole them, later he built and raced them. I met him a few times in the early seventies when he was racing stockcars; the boxing scars on his face were overlain with the marks of racing injuries, and he was drinking heavily. But he was cheerful-he was newly married and heading up north to manage a new speedway. Then someone told me that he’d been sentenced to fifteen years for armed robbery and then he was in the news-for escaping.
I didn’t think much about it. I was working on a mildly interesting job, trying to locate a union official who’d gone missing with a certain amount of money. It was hard to tell whether or not he was more crooked than the people who wanted him. I got home late this night, tired from covering some far-flung addresses, and dry. I hadn’t had a drink all day. I edged the old Falcon into the small yard at the back of my house, got out, locked it, and felt the hard metal bite into my ear.
‘Put your gun on top of the car, Cliff.’
I did, and turned around slowly. He was always a fast mover, Clem; he slid around, grabbed the gun and dropped the length of pipe he’d been holding. He could hit too, and got mean when he was hurt, so I smiled at him.
‘Hi, Clem, get sick of the food?’
He jerked his head at the house. ‘Inside.’ He’d beaten me easily when he didn’t have a gun, and there was only a crummy electro-plated cup riding on it, so I didn’t fancy my chances now. I walked to the back door and opened it, went in, turned on lights and opened the fridge.