‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m a friend of Pat Kenneally, Doc. You remember Pat?’
He remembered all right, alarm leapt into his pale, bleary eyes and he made a movement with his hand. He changed the movement into a grab for the rum but I wasn’t fooled. I pushed the bottle out of reach and felt under the bed, and came up with a shoe box. I took my gun out and pointed it at Doc’s meaty nose.
‘Lie back. Get some rest.’
Inside the box was a notebook with Pat’s address and phone number written on the first page. The next few pages were taken up with the names and descriptions of greyhounds. Some dog owners were listed with telephone numbers and addresses. Also in the box was an array of pills and powders, a couple of hypodermics and some bottles of fluid with rubber membrane tops.
‘Nasty’, I said. ‘Poor little doggies.’
He didn’t say anything, but reached for the bottle again. There were still a couple of inches of water in the bottle and I poured enough rum into it to darken it up a bit. I handed it to him.
‘You’ll ruin your health taking it straight. Now, let’s hear about he bricks and the car and the bullets through the Frenchman’s house.’
He took a long swig of the diluted rum, swilled it around in his mouth and spat it against the wall. He followed this display of his manners with a racking cough and a long, gurgling swallow from the bottle.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’, he gasped, and then took another swallow.
I tapped the notebook. ‘What’s this-research for a book?’
‘I wanted to get Kenneally’, he said in the voice that was all he had left of his profession and self-respect, ‘but I don’t know anything about that other stuff-bricks and bullets.’
‘It’s God’s own truth, Hardy.’ The voice came from behind me; it was the voice on the phone and now I didn’t even need to turn around to know who it was. I felt something hard jab the nape of my neck. ‘Put the gun on the bed, Hardy. Do it slow.’
I did it very slowly, and then I turned. Johnny Dragovic had scarcely changed at all in the past six years since I’d seen him in court when my evidence had helped to get him eight years for armed robbery. Johnny was a tough kid from Melbourne who’d decided to take Sydney on; he knocked over a couple of bottle shops, and moved up to TAB agencies, with some success. The Board hired me and some other private men and I got lucky, heard some whispers, and we were waiting for Johnny at the right time and place. Blows were struck, and Johnny turned out to be not quite as tough as he thought. But he was tough enough, and the automatic pistol in his hand made him even tougher. I said ‘Dragovic’, stupidly.
‘That’s right’, he said. ‘Glad you remember.’
My guts were turning over and I concentrated on getting my balance right and watching him carefully, in case he gave me a chance. I didn’t think he would.
‘What’s it all about then?’ I said.
‘It’s about eight years, five at Grafton.’ The way he said it spoke volumes, he wasn’t there to thank me for rehabilitating him.
‘Put it behind you’, I said. ‘You’re not old.’
The gun didn’t move. ‘You bastard. I’ve kept going by thinking what I could do to you.’
‘Thinking like that’ll get you back there.’
‘Shut up! I was nineteen when I got to Grafton, what do you reckon that was like?’
‘Scarey’, I said. I thought that if I kept him talking something might happen, he might even talk himself out of whatever he had in mind.
‘That’s right, scarey. That’s why I got you with the bricks and fixed your bloody car-to scare you.’
‘You win. You did it, you scared me. I’m scared now.’
‘You should be. I’m going to kill you.’
‘That’s crazy’, I said desperately. ‘And not fair, I didn’t kill you.’
He laughed. ‘Sometimes, in that bloody hole, I wished you had.’
‘What about him?’ I gestured down at Doc who was listening and clutching the bottle like a crucifix.
‘He goes out too’, Dragovic said. ‘You kill him and he kills you. All in the line of duty.’
‘It stinks, Johnny, it won’t work.’
‘It fuckin’ will! I’ve planned this for a while, been watching you until the right deal came up. It’ll look like you caught up with the bloke who shot up the Frenchy’s house and you shot him and he shot you. You’ll take a while to die, though.’ He smiled and I could see how much he was enjoying it all, and how unlikely it was that he’d change his mind.
Mahony raised himself slowly on the bed and swung his legs over the side. ‘This is madness’, he said. ‘I don’t want any part of it. I’m going.’ He got off the bed and took a couple of shuffling steps towards the door before Dragovic reacted.
‘Get back here!’ he yelled. ‘Get back.’
But Mahony opened the door and had half his body outside when Dragovic shot him. He crumpled, and I moved to the left and swung a punch which took Dragovic on the nose. Blood spurted and he blundered back, but kept hold of his gun. I made a grab for mine, missed and lunged out the door, nearly tripping over Mahoney. I staggered, recovered my balance, and started to run for the trees about fifty yards away. I was halfway there when something stung my calf like ten sandfly bites; the leg lost all power and I went down, hard. Johnny Dragovic stepped clear of the doorway, carrying a rifle and started to walk towards me. I lay there in the dust watching him and watching the rifle and when he was about twenty feet away I closed my eyes. Then I heard a shot and didn’t feel anything, so I opened my eyes: the rifle was on the ground close to me and Dragovic was yelling and rolling around and a greyhound was tearing at his neck. There was blood on Dragovic’s face from my punch, and a lot more blood on his chest from the dog’s attack. He screamed, and the dog’s head came up and went down twice. I sat up and grabbed the rifle; the dog turned away from the bloody mess on the ground and sprang straight at me. I shot it in the chest and it collapsed and I shot it again in the head.
I hobbled across and bent down, but one look told me that tough Johnny Dragovic was dead. The dog had a length of chain attached to a collar trailing away in the dirt. It looked as if Dragovic had secured the dog, but not well enough. More hobbling got me over to the shack where there was more death. Mahony’s eyes stared sightlessly up at the blue sky; his mouth was open and some flies were already gathering around the dark blood that had spilled out of it.
After that it was a matter of rum and true grit. I took an enormous swig of the rum and started on the trek back to my car When I made it I was weeping with the pain and there was a saw mill operating at full blast inside my head. I got the car started and into gear somehow and kangaroo-hopped it back along the track until I reached a house. Then I leant on the horn until a woman came out, and I spoke to her and told her what to do.
Terry came to see me in hospital and Pat came and Sergeant Moles-it was like old times. The bullet had touched the bone but hadn’t messed the leg up too much. No one wept over Doc Mahony and Johnny Dragovic, although Pat said that the Doc wasn’t such a bad bloke, just greedy. Terry went off to play a tournament in Hong Kong, and one solitary night I went to the dog track and won fifty dollars on a hound named Topspin.
Escort to an easy death
The filing card pinned to my office door read ‘Cliff Hardy Investigations’, and I noticed that the finger I used to straighten it with had a dirty nail. Not very dirty, but then the card itself wasn’t very dirty and the drawing pin that held it wasn’t very bent. But not clean and not straight. These were bad times. People were losing their jobs; people and things were going missing; people were getting more and more dishonest, in big and small ways, and no-one cared. It was all bad news for me: I made a living out of tidying up problems; finding a lost wife or husband, guarding a body for a while, seeing a sum of money safely from point A to point B. Now, tidiness and safety were not expected. I was losing business, and no-one cared.