Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

I walked back to St Peters Street the most direct way, cleaned up, changed my clothes and came down after checking that there hadn’t been any calls. The rain had stopped, the air was moist and clean-tasting and all the city’s photochemical sludge was running down the gutters to the sea. I got the Falcon out of the tatooist’s backyard and took off going south-east. The VW picked me up and stayed with me through Taylor Square, Moore Park and Kensington. He was doing it quite nicely, like a pacer, one out and one back, and then letting me get away a little. I cruised past the University and took the turn to Maroubra.

The used car yards cuddled up against each other on both sides of the road over a short stretch of ugly Australia. I made a late turn left, a quick one right and pulled up under a heavily over-growing row of plane trees the council pruners must have missed. I pulled the Smith amp; Wesson out of its clip under the dashboard and jumped out of the car onto the road. The Volkswagen came round the corner and I faced it fifty yards ahead with the gun up. I counted on the element of surprise to bring the car to a stop but I was wrong. The driver slowed a fraction, then accelerated and came straight on like the Light Brigade. I swore, jumped aside, hit the Falcon hip and thigh and dropped the gun. The little red car roared to the end of the street, brakes screaming, then it slewed around in a full turn taking some of the sidewalk to do it, and came belting back towards me. Dead end street. That gave me a chance to reverse the roles. I picked up the gun as the VW passed me and had my car turning before its tail whipped around out of what had been a quiet little street twenty seconds ago.

The Volkswagen was new and the Falcon was old, but the horsepower was all on my side. I had the car in sight as it turned onto the highway and kept with it through thick and thin. The traffic thinned as we got into Maroubra and I moved up closer. The driver appeared to be small with frizzy dark hair and I saw the flash of light on wrap-around sunglasses on one of the turns. From his driving I assumed that he was worried, it was jerky and he wasn’t timing things well.

We moved on down towards the beach and then turned right up a steep hill flanked by tall apartment blocks with names like “Nevada” and “San Bernadino”.

I crowded the VW near the crown of the hill opposite “Reno”, but the driver found a little more speed and went into a cheeky slalom down the other side. I took evasive action, conscious of my lack of insurance, but I was hard on its twin exhausts when we turned into a long, flat run parallel to the beach. A mistake, I’d surfed along this beach for ten years and knew its geography like the back of my hand. It was deserted now, dark clouds were boiling up out over the sea and the road was slick with oily rainbow patches showing between the puddles.

I closed up behind the VW, timed the move and brought my black paintwork up alongside the red. I pulled my door handle down and held the door ajar. I blared my horn and gave the little car a quick flick with the door. It slewed away and shot through the only gap available — into a fenced parking lot which reached down to a toilet block and changing sheds on the beachfront. The VW driver struggled for control and then had to pull up within twenty yards. He made it, just. I ran in after it and brought the Falcon skidding in on an angle that closed off all exits.

I killed the engine, grabbed the. 38 and moved around my car. The other driver was sitting quietly, hands on the wheel, crying softly and shaking. The frizzy hair was short and black as pitch, the thin shoulders in the dark T-shirt were heaving and her face when she turned it up to me was dark as chocolate and beautiful as a rose. I put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. The flesh under my hand was soft and the bone felt like a fine steel rod.

“Take it easy,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you. Calm down and tell me why you were following me.”

She kept on shaking and sobbing and she dropped her head, the crisp hair curled on the nape of her neck like black metal filings. I wanted to touch them and moved my hand up.

“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” Her voice was lilting with an accent, not American. I stepped back and rubbed my tired face with the hand holding the gun. She jack-knifed from the car and sprinted for the beach bent low and balanced, legs pumping. I yelled and brought the gun up but she was too fast. She rounded the changing shed and was into the scrub before I’d taken a step. I lumbered after her but the day had taken its toll; there was no one in sight on the sodden beach and the flickers in the scrub a hundred yards away could easily have been branches in the wind.

I gave the car a quick once-over. It was a recent model which had been well kept. The clean vinyl and interior paintwork probably carried hundreds of fingerprints but I couldn’t see any point in collecting them. There was a service book in the glove box and a street directory in the driver’s side pocket. A folded copy of The News lay on the back seat open at the international news page. There was a pair of pliers and a roll of insulating tape in the passenger side door pocket; no cigarette butts, no night club matches, no soil obviously from the lower eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range. For no special reason I wiped off places I’d touched in the car and wrote down the licence number. There were no keys in the ignition. That could mean one of two things — the car was stolen or the crying had been an act put on after she’d had the presence of mind to take the keys out of the lock. I pulled the bonnet release, yanked back the cardboard housing and looked in at the panel — nothing across the ignition terminals. Fooled again, Hardy.

It was after six and a warm drizzle had settled in when I got back into my car and started the motor. The Falcon protested the change in the weather by coughing and it flooded before I got it running reasonably. I swung her around, pulled out of the parking lot and took the road back to town. I stopped at a hamburger place and picked up one with all the trimmings. I got a six-pack of beer from a pub full of used car salesmen working on late afternoon marks and tired-looking men putting off going home to their wives.

I ate the hamburger and swigged the beer as I drove. The traffic was light and I made good time to Longueville. Lights were on in the front rooms and the colour TV sets were semaphoring comforting messages to each other across the deep gardens and quiet, damp streets. I parked about a hundred yards from the entrance to the clinic on the opposite side of the road, and focused my night glasses on the relevant point. I could see cars approaching and turning into the reception booth from the other direction and I had a good view of the ones that passed me to get there. I figured I had about an hour at most before someone inside might tally up comments about the tone of the street and come out to investigate.

So I gave myself an hour with the thought that I might sneak an extra fifteen minutes if nothing happened. I was pretty sure something would happen — enough shit had been hitting the fan over the last twenty-four hours or so to produce some reaction in this area. I risked a cigarette or two, drank the beer, now heating up a bit but not too bad, and waited. The first car came about ten minutes after I arrived. It was a Rover, nice car.

The street light caught its number plate nicely as it made a purring turn to the reception booth. I had the glasses on it and wrote the number down. I was too far away to be sure, but I thought there was a driver in front and one passenger behind. Fifteen minutes later a car came up from behind, moving fast. I hunched down in the seat but it roared past. I sat up and then went down again as another car came from the same direction. A light coloured Fairlane swished past me and took the turn, too fast and not quite steady, into the clinic. The light didn’t hit this one as well as before, but he had to back out and take another run at the drive so I got the number with no trouble.