Garry Disher - Cross Kill

The system worked like this.

While the authorities were stirring themselves every time flights from South-East Asia and South America came in, high quality Columbian cocaine was making its way by yacht and light plane to isolated beaches or abandoned airstrips in northern Australia. Here it was weighed, paid for and sent south packed in concealed compartments in dusty campervans driven by middle-aged and retired couples. These people were never pulled over, never searched. Campervans are slow, benign, innocent, and no highway cop is going to hassle elderly folk enjoying their declining years on inflation-eroded retirement packages. You’d have to be a bastard to do that.

Campervans making the Sydney run were required to branch off along Pennant Hills Road to Parramatta Road, then make for a certain twenty-four hour service station and check in for a grease and oil change. Here Outfit mechanics removed the cocaine, weighed it again, baked twenty per cent of it to make crack, cut the rest with glucose, and repackaged it. The elderly geezers were paid off and the load was sent by a Datsun utility marked ‘Spare Parts’ to the basement car park of the hotel in Kings Cross where Max Heneker stayed in a suite that was on permanent hold for the Outfit.

Max’s Thursday afternoon to Monday morning job started when he weighed the cocaine again and took it upstairs to be separated into 50, 100, 250 and 500 gram packets of cocaine and smaller quantities of crack. Crack hadn’t taken off yet, but the Outfit was confident that it soon would. Max spent most of Thursday afternoon doing this. Lester, an Outfit goon built like a bull, watched him do it. Then Lester weighed the cocaine again, just in case. Who knows, maybe Max was siphoning off the odd gram or two when Lester had his back turned. The Outfit was obsessed with being ripped off somewhere along the line. Max knew that, and made sure the buck would never stop at him. He disliked Lester. Max was small, precise, neat; he resembled an accountant. Lester liked to sprawl in a tracksuit, carelessly shaven, crushing beer cans while he watched videos of the World Cup. He also seemed to believe that soap washed away his natural oils. By midnight on Sunday the air in the suite was ripe and Max worked with a scented handkerchief in his fist.

Between about five o’clock on Thursday afternoon and late Sunday evening, Max received clients. Some were buying for themselves, but most were regulars, the street dealers, stocking up for the busy period, the weekend. The cocaine flowed out, the money flowed in. Max kept strict records, entering every transaction into a code-named document on his Toshiba laptop. At midnight on Sunday he handed over the takings and the floppy disc to Lester, who left the hotel, first handing Max four thousand dollars in an envelope. Max would go to bed then, returning to his wife and his Palm Beach house at lunchtime on Monday. More often than not, he was exhausted and went straight to bed again.

Max had scarcely got out the scales and sandwich bags that Thursday afternoon when there was a knock on the door. He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. The first clients were not expected before five. He looked across at Lester, nodded, tossed a quilt over the evidence and stepped across the thick carpet to the door.

Meanwhile Lester positioned himself with his back to the wall on the other side of the door. Max waited while Lester fastened a suppressor to an automatic pistol and squeezed the fat fingers of his left hand through a knuckleduster. Lester nodded and Max said, ‘Who is it?’

‘I need some crack,’ a voice said.

For Christ’s sake, Max thought. Tourists and respectable people stayed in this hotel from time to time. ‘Come back later,’ he said, his voice low and hoarse, his mouth pressed to the door.

‘What?’ the voice cried.

‘Come back after five,’ Max whispered.

‘Can’t bloody hear ya,’ the voice shouted. ‘Look, I got cash, look at the floor.’

Max and Lester watched as a hundred dollar note slid into view. It was snatched back again. The voice went on: ‘Give us some crack and I’ll be off.’

Max put his eye to the spyhole. He saw an untidy male wearing a black windcheater over a check flannelette shirt. The guy’s hair was a mess and he had his arm in a sling. He was waving hundred dollar notes in the air with his free hand. There was a professional-looking bandage around his head. Max had noted that it was the yuppies who used coke, the deros who used crack. So far, so good, but to double check he said, ‘Who said to come here?’

‘Stooge,’ the man said, naming a Bondi Beach street dealer who sometimes bought from Max.

Max nodded okay to Lester, unlocked the door and drew back the chain. Then he moved to the centre of the room and called, ‘The door’s unlocked.’

The man entered slowly, edgy and defeated looking. He glanced worriedly at Lester, who by now had tucked the pistol into his waistband and had his arms folded, and advanced to where Max was waiting in the centre of the room.

There was a second knock. Lester whirled around, his hand digging for the automatic. Even if the folds of his tracksuit hadn’t got in the way, he would have been too late. He didn’t see the quick, neat spin behind him. He didn’t see Max go down, disabled by a kick to the knee. He heard it, but by then it was too late, for the dero was grinding a gun into the base of his spine and a masked man was coming through the door.

What unnerved Max and Lester during the three minutes that followed was that the two men didn’t speak and they didn’t want the cocaine. The man in the mask trained a gun on them, the man with the bandaged head carried the cocaine into the bathroom and flushed it away. He seemed to smile. There was no sense of loss or regret about him.

When it was over, Max risked raising his head from the carpet. ‘Have you any idea, the faintest trace of an idea, whose toes you’re stepping on here?’

The man with the bandage looked at him appraisingly. The face was almost pleasant now, animated by intelligence and irony, the bandage rakish looking on the narrow head. Maybe he’s some kind of anti-drugs vigilante, Max thought. Someone who’d welcome the chance to have his say. ‘If you could tell us where you’re coming from,’ Max said reasonably, ‘maybe we could work something out.’

But the face grew hard by degrees, and a chill crept along Max’s spine. The voice when it came was flat and distinct. ‘Tell Kepler it could happen any time, any place.’

At least half of the men milling around in Prestige Auto Auctions on Friday knew that Bax was working motor vehicle theft, so he couldn’t very well do his own bidding. He was spotting. He strolled through the place twice, glancing idly at the ranks of glossy, top of the range Hondas, BMWs, Saabs, Audis, Toyotas, for all the world as if he’d dropped in especially to be a pain in the neck to the men there who knew he was a cop.

It amused him the way four bent dealers slipped out through the side doors and another handful stopped muttering into mobile phones or to each other in the shadowy corners of the vast auction hall. It amused him to saunter past them, sharp as a tack in his iron-grey tailored suit, as out of place among the stretch jeans and blow-waved heads as a Piaget watch in a tray of Pizza Hut giveaways. The remaining men in the place were your ordinary suburban punters after a bargain and they paid Bax no attention at all. He circled the hall a third time, listened to some half-hearted bidding for a late sixties E-Type in need of a complete restoration, and went out onto the street.

Axle was waiting for him in a Japanese rustbucket. The body was canary yellow, the driver’s door white, the boot lid pale green. Not for the first time did Bax wonder how it was that a professional car thief like Axle, who specialised in lifting Porsches from South Yarra driveways in the time it took you to blow your nose, would want to drive around in a heap of shit.