THE GOOROO GAVE ME a dirty look as he straightened his shirt. He turned towards Cheerful, who kicked the door shut behind him with his heel.
‘Jesus, Cheerful,’ Gooroo said. ‘We’ve been mates for twenty years. You could have talked to me about this.’
Cheerful nodded four or five times, then shook his head. ‘You’ve been in this game most of your life, Gooroo. It’s all you know. You’re the smartest man I ever met. How many times I tell you that? But how much did we make today?’
Gooroo conceded the loss. ‘We got burned on the last race in Sydney. Apart from that . . .’
‘Apart from that!’ Cheerful screamed his interruption, his face reddening. ‘Apart from that, we’re fucking dinosaurs. The dinosaurs got frozen out thousands of years ago. And we are getting burned out in the last race or the first race or some race in between, every fucking week.’
I had to listen to a lecture on the plight of the small businessman, after being the bunny of a two-day murder and mayhem spree. I turned my anger on the bookie. ‘So it was you, Cheerful. What’d I ever do to you, hey? Hey, what’d I ever do to you?’ I was yelling now, too.
But Cheerful was still ranting at the Gooroo. ‘There’s TABs in every pub and club on every street corner. There’s Sky Channel coverage of every race in those pubs and clubs. There are so fucking many races for the dumb shits to bet on, they’re lining up like zombies and throwing their money across the TAB counters.
‘But not the pros. No, not the pros. They work out a race to win on. Fuck about with the TAB odds, so the horse gets out in the betting. And then back the bastard with us. Cause we are fucking dinosaurs, and it’s the pros’ destiny to make us extinct.’
Gooroo looked at Cheerful and went red himself. ‘You think I don’t know all that? But I got it under control. Jesus, Charlie, you’ve got a BMW. I’ve got a unit. I’ve got last year’s model car. Are we starving on the streets, Charlie?’
‘We would be if I wasn’t smart,’ Cheerful persisted. ‘It’s called diversification, standard business practice. That’s all. But I knew you would never understand.’
Gooroo leaned towards the other bookie. ‘What wouldn’t I understand, Cheerful?’
I had heard enough to understand. ‘Drugs,’ I told Gooroo. ‘Grass, heroin, speed, coke, and maybe new drugs we haven’t even heard of. And other diversification, too. Murder, blackmail, rigging horse races.’
Gooroo calculated. ‘You’re murdering people for weed, for powder. Is that it, Cheerful? We had a business where we sold some poor stiffs a dream for a few bucks. And you wanted to diversify into killing people for powder. For fucking powder.’
The way Cheerful moved his lips before he spoke, I knew the obligatory justification was coming. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Gooroo. We are getting some of the purest heroin ever seen in Australia. We are giving those junkies the best deal they ever had. I’ve been told.’
I had to buy in on the discussion. ‘You’ve been told,’ I repeated. ‘You’ve been told, have you, Charlie? What do you know about smack? Have you ever even seen it?’
‘I don’t have to. I’m an investor, but I’ve been told.’
‘Awlright, well, let me tell you.’
I began to move towards Evatt, but only made a few paces before the chubby man halted me by pointing the gun at my chest.
I stayed where I was, but continued to educate the man who had been told. ‘You get smackies who have been shooting up low-grade hammer, full of chalk and Buddha knows what else sort of shit. And you think you are doing them a favour by giving them top-grade stuff? Leave me alone. It was probably your A-grade heroin which was banged up the arms of those two eighteen-year-olds who overdosed under that church hall in Brisbane last Wednesday.’
‘For powder, Cheerful,’ was all the Gooroo could say. ‘You’re killing people for powder.’
I followed the Gooroo’s line. ‘You going to kill us for powder, too, Cheerful?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Evatt, wiping the sweat from his face. ‘All I was supposed to do was put up the money. I gave you up to the coppers, Hill, because you mean bugger all to me. And I am sick of Gooroo talking about you all the time. But now, I don’t know what I’m gunna do.’
For one of the leading SP bookmakers on the northern New South Wales coast, Cheerful Charlie Evatt didn’t know much. He didn’t know about kids dying of smack, about an innocent fisherman being murdered. Buddha, he didn’t even know to listen for the sound of a key turning in a steel door.
He did know that only he and Gooroo had keys to that door. But he had that wrong, too.
It was his good luck that he knew nothing about the one bullet, clean through his back and the centre of his ignorant heart that killed him.
The Gooroo and I looked at each other as Cheerful’s body slumped to the concrete floor. A second unnecessary bullet, just for luck, blew bits of his skull in our direction as he went down.
We turned towards another man, another gun in the doorway.
‘Here’s good fortune,’ I said. ‘The Federal cavalry has arrived in the nick of time.’
Jerome Bradshaw of the Federal Police moved forward to stand above the body on the floor. As they say on race days, it was all over bar the shouting. I went slowly towards the door, but Gooroo didn’t move.
Bradshaw put the gun back inside a shoulder holster but he was in no hurry to speak or follow me out.
Gooroo nodded towards our guest. ‘I am only guessing. I’ve been receiving all the info second hand,’ he said. ‘But this would have to be Bradshaw.’
I nodded to silently confirm his estimation. Con was playing it cool.
‘You and Bradshaw should be able to wind it up between yourselves,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me.’
Neither of us was getting off that lightly. I looked helplessly at Gooroo as I gave up the pretence that I was free to walk out the door. ‘You know, don’t you?’ I said.
The Gooroo was not keen to declare. ‘I’d only be guessing.’
The Fed walked around the room, checking out this and that.
I knew the Gooroo hated to guess. I guessed for him. ‘All I’ve been hearing about from Federal Police Officer Bradshaw is this huge paddock of North Queensland grass which is supposed to be behind this.
‘But all I keep running into is a mountain of smack. Georgio, a smackie. Billy Scharfe and Crystal Speares both users. An inoffensive bloke named Lui Sebastion starts talking smack to me in a pub and he ends up dead. Maybe you can help me out here, Bradshaw. You told me two state coppers were producing grass. I never doubted you for a moment.’
Bradshaw continued to search the room and seemed to ignore every word I said. I continued anyway. ‘I never doubted you for a moment about the involvement of state coppers, because grass is a domestic industry. Whereas smack is an import business.’
The Gooroo helped me out. ‘Balance of trade,’ he said, ‘a Federal responsibility.’
I had to give it to Bradshaw; he left his gun right in that pocket holster. He was confident he could kill Gooroo and me before we made it to the door. He stopped his survey to pay me a compliment.
‘I underestimated you, Hill. Maybe it comes from dealing with such dunces as Evatt and Georgio. I considered you would be easy to manipulate. But between you and that Irish lunatic Mooney, you have stuffed it up good and proper.’
‘Why did you kill Cheerful?’ I asked. ‘It’s an extreme way to break up a business partnership.’
‘I can’t believe how stupid that man was,’ Bradshaw confessed. ‘We asked him for a Brisbane distributor and he comes up with a playboy junkie like Georgio. Well, Georgio had to go. At least Evatt had the brains to come up with you, Hill, as the ideal killer.’
The phone rang. The Gooroo moved to answer it, but Bradshaw shook his head and Gooroo stopped in his tracks. The Fed continued his inspection.
‘Then that madman Mooney got in the road. What is with these state police? I give them an easy kill, you for Georgio, and still they are not satisfied.’
I agreed with Bradshaw’s assessment of Mooney. ‘Yair, he’s as mad as a cut snake, awlright. But was that true about him and Schmidt and the dope plantation?’
‘Only true enough to get you discredited, Hill, if you spread the story. There is a plantation, but it is not in North Queensland. Neither Mooney nor Schmidt has been to North Queensland in their lives. I was just sweetening the pot for them to take you down. Nosey Steele Hill tells the coppers he knows about the plantation in North Queensland. They realise you have nothing solid, but they do have a plantation and they decide jail is the place for you, before you do get some more information.’
I needed to fit one more piece. ‘And the nobody fisherman Luigi Sebastion? Why Sebastion?’
‘That was indiscreet. I must admit you were beginning to annoy me, Hill. That’s why I decided to run you down near Doomben racetrack. To be honest, I was even thinking about cutting our losses here and moving interstate. There are plenty of bays in Australia. Sebastion was my last card to see which way I’d go. With Sebastion dead, Mooney could have you for two kills and leave me alone.’
Relocation was a good idea for the Fed.
‘So you’re moving out, Bradshaw. Now you’ve killed Evatt, and there’s no trace to you, you’re pulling up stumps.’
‘Maybe. I killed Evatt, mainly because he told you that stupid story about Crystal Speares having AIDS, trying to throw you off the track. That’s when I realised just how dumb he really was. You always tell a story grounded in half-truths. Not a transparent lie like Evatt’s. To top it all off, I find out Speares has some tie-in with Mooney.’
I inquired about how the sexy blonde racecourse hustler finished up. ‘So what did you do with Crystal Speares?’
Bradshaw was surprised at my concern. ‘She was just a distraction. She is probably distracting someone else right now. I have more important business than Crystal Speares.’
So she was right all along. Crystal Speares was a survivor, the only one guaranteed to live. I needed to find out what Bradshaw planned for the Gooroo and me. ‘You’ve scored a respectable body count already, Bradshaw: Georgio, Sebastion, and Evatt here, not to mention at least two junkies. All in less than a week.’
Bradshaw’s face hardened and he gave a scowl, an expression I had never seen him wear before. ‘Junkies are vermin. Every one of them that dies proves the law of natural selection. Their deaths strengthen our society.’
Buddha, another speech of justification. What happened to the good old days when people stole, sold drugs and murdered for money?
I figured the Fed had already passed the death sentence on me, so little additional harm could come from adding sarcasm to my list of transgressions. ‘Sure, I should have known. How could I possibly have suspected that greed was your motivation? We only have to look at you to see you are a noble man. I’m willing to bet right here and now, if you give yourself up, you won’t be charged with any crime. You were only trying to decontaminate the gene pool. They’ll probably give you a medal, Bradshaw. What say you, Gooroo?’
The Gooroo played along as he edged towards the protection of a desk. ‘Odds on, Steele. If we were to ring the Governor-General right now, I’m sure he would strike up an Order of Australia for Bradshaw overnight.’
That’s the trouble with private school boys. They hate being ridiculed. Bradshaw backed towards a wall, snarling, and slowly reached for his gun. I went for a telephone. Not much, I know, but at least they have long cords. I dived towards a desk to my left as I threw the phone in Bradshaw’s direction. Gooroo dived behind another desk. As I hit the deck, I wished I had not misjudged the distance to land behind Cheerful’s bloodied corpse. I liked at the blood on my bandaged right hand and doubted if that would aid the healing process. I tried to make the best of a bleak situation by using the roly-poly frame as a shield.