Nick Loukakis did not recognise the ring tone pulsing out from the car boot as Tupac Shakur’s “Thugs Get Lonely Too”. But even in the dim torchlight, clothes stretched taut by the body beginning to bloat and slow-moving maggots covering the temple in a twisting Turk’s-head knot, he knew who the putrid corpse had once been. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty at night and everything felt too late.
Earlier in the evening, after talking to his sons, he had gone out for a drive. Every station on the car radio seemed full of the terrorist scare. There were other recurrent items—some deaths of old people blamed on the heatwave; a fresh outbreak of race rioting in the southwest suburbs between white supremacists and Lebanese gangs. But mostly it was about the terrorist threat: where they might strike—the airport, train stations, beaches, the Bridge or the centre of the city—and how they were going to do it. There was a strong sentiment playing out over several stations that it would be a dirty nuclear bomb that would cover the centre of Sydney in radioactive fallout. He switched to a music channel and pondered the tv news report he had seen a few hours before.
It was only then that he had seen the faces of the terrorists—until then he hadn’t really taken much notice of the terrorist scare. But he knew straight away who they were. He was Tariq al-Hakim, a mule Nick Loukakis had tracked for a few weeks the year before, hoping he might lead them to Lee Moon’s syndicate. Instead, all they came up with was a small-time dealer called Frank Moretti, who seemed to run a few different rackets, but none so stupidly that there was ever enough to nail him.
She, on the other hand, he knew as one of Wilder’s friends, Gina Davies, a pole dancer. He had even once given her a lift back from Wilder’s to her home.
At first he had been shocked—not that both a suspect and a friend of a friend might be terrorists, but that he hadn’t twigged to it. He felt dumb as shit. How the hell hadn’t he worked it out himself? He knew Tariq al-Hakim had been to both Pakistan and Malaysia several times, but he had always thought it was simply in order to bring back drugs. No doubt ASIO and the Feds and everyone else knew a whole lot more than a lowly drug squad detective sergeant could be expected to know, but he was amazed he hadn’t picked up on any of it, and pissed off that no one had told him.
Nick Loukakis drove a long way away from Panania, but the night traffic was light and he made it to Darlinghurst in half an hour. He was retreating, as he always retreated, into his work.
He parked half a block away from the Doll’s apartment building, then sat in his car for a while, engine idling, air con running, mind racing.
“Interface with the cosmos,” said the car radio. “Nokia. Not a phone. A revolution.”
Nick Loukakis switched the engine off, and got out of his Ford Territory. He wandered around the building in which the Doll lived. He was remembering when he’d first met her, how ordinary she had seemed to him, when walking past an alley he caught the odour of something very bad. His instinct in this, as it was whenever anything stank, was to seek to discover the cause of the stench.
But now, staring at Tariq al-Hakim’s corpse, thinking back on what he knew about Gina Davies and all that he knew about Tariq al-Hakim, it didn’t add up. It just didn’t add up.
He would need to call homicide. But he wouldn’t tell them everything. Not yet. First, he would drop in on Frank Moretti, about whom he knew one other odd fact that now seemed strangely significant: once a week Gina Davies used to go to his home and strip for him.