Shane Maloney - The Brush-Off

It didn’t. Eastlake, reacting to her movement, swung the gun around. Fiona cowered back, raising the picture in front her body protectively, as if to shield herself from his sight. At exactly that moment, Eastlake fired.

An explosive crack reverberated through the confined space. The bullet punched a neat round hole straight through the front door of Our Home. Fiona Lambert staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, the painting draped over her face, covering her head. Her naked body twitched and went limp. It was stark white against the black sheets. Colour co-ordinated to the last.

Eastlake’s hand jerked at the recoil and I lunged forward. I caught him in mid-turn and the barrel of the gun twisted upwards. It went off again and blew the top off his head. Blood and brains went everywhere.

The two reports echoed in my ears. The smell of cordite filled my nostrils. Eastlake was still on his feet, the gun still in his hand. He sort of teetered. I was moving backwards, partly reeling from the scene before me, partly being dragged from behind. The gun hit the floor and Eastlake crumpled like a wet rag.

Then I was stumbling backwards down the passageway. Spider Webb was dragging me by the collar. ‘Far canal,’ he said. He didn’t hear any argument from me. Perhaps twenty seconds had elapsed since I’d entered the flat.

From the direction of the street came the wail of an approaching siren. Spider released me and ran into the living room. He looked out the window, cursed, then dashed out the front door. I drooped against the passage wall, shitless.

A low moan came wafting out of the bedroom. With my back pressed against the wall, I sidled up to the doorway and peeked around the corner. The gun came into sight, half covered by Eastlake’s inert torso. The moan happened again. It was coming from behind the painting. I stepped over Eastlake, flicked the gun away with the toe of my shoe and raised the punctured canvas.

A gory furrow started at the bridge of Fiona Lambert’s nose and ran the length of her forehead, parting her hairline. Her eyelids, caked with blood, fluttered. Her mouth goldfished. She moaned again. The bullet had only grazed her. She’d need a lot of aspirin and a very good cosmetic surgeon, but she’d live. She also had great tits. Pity she wasn’t my type.

Sliding an arm under her shoulder, I propped her limp white body upright. The shoe box lay beneath her. A hundred thousand dollars. It didn’t look like much any more. I propped Fiona up with a pillow, scooped up the box, dashed into the bathroom and dropped it into the laundry basket. ‘Noel,’ I called. ‘Come quick. She’s still alive.’

Footfalls thundered up the stairs. A small dog yapped germanically in the distance. I settled Fiona Lambert’s head in my pee-drenched lap and pressed the towel to her brow. Suddenly, the room was full of men, some of them in uniform. The one named Detective Constable Micaelis was calling Spider ‘sir’.

I sat in the living room on Fiona Lambert’s white sofa in my pissy pants and bloodied shirt and waited my turn, watching sundry coppers traipse through the front door and listening to their cryptic confabs. Apart from the odd glance, most of them paid me so little attention I might as well have been part of the furniture. A couple of classic plain-clothes types wandered in at one point and had a cursory sniff at the fittings and fixtures. ‘Now that’s what I call art,’ one of them said. He was looking at the Szabo above the mantel, young Fiona in the buff.

The real thing was in the bedroom being worked on by an ambulance crew. We’d propped her up and the bleeding had pretty well stopped by the time the paramedics arrived. She was in deep shock, they said. I wasn’t feeling too well myself.

I scrounged a coffin nail from one of the dicks and was just lighting up when Fiona was helped out the front door, held up by the armpits. They’d put a bandage around her head and got her into a bathrobe. She was almost walking, but she wasn’t talking and she didn’t look at all glamorous. Spider and Micaelis went downstairs with her, then came back inside a couple of minutes later. Micaelis did the talking.

‘How ya doing?’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll need a statement, eh? How about you accompany Detective Senior Sergeant Webb to the station, while I make sure Ms Lambert gets to the hospital, okay?’

‘Sure.’ It wasn’t like I had much choice. ‘But I need to call my son first.’ Red’s flight was at nine-twenty and it was already seven o’clock. Micaelis looked to Spider for confirmation. ‘I wouldn’t want to be done up for child neglect,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Webb.’

Spider pointed his chin towards the phone. ‘Make it quick.’

‘And I’d like to do something about this.’ I stood up and framed my crotch with open palms. ‘My thighs are starting to chafe.’ Micaelis didn’t think it necessary to refer that one up the chain of command. I smelled worse than the back of the grandstand at the Collingwood football ground. ‘Use the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Make it quick.’

Tarquin answered the phone at the Curnows’. ‘Something’s come up,’ I told Red when he eventually came on the line. ‘See if Leo can find the spare key to our place, pack your bag and wait for me. Sorry about this.’

‘No worries,’ Red said, the voice of experience. I’d been late before. We’d still managed to get to the airport on time. It was only forty-five minutes away. Thirty-five with a tail wind and a good run at the lights.

Leo came on the line and I repeated what I’d just told Red. ‘Can do,’ he said. Faye was still at work and he was feeding the kids. ‘You don’t happen to know where Faye keeps the lettuce, do you?’

I went down the hall and looked in the bedroom door. Eastlake was still on the floor. He wouldn’t have to worry about his bald patch any more. A woman cop was standing on the bed with a camera, getting an overhead shot. What with five detectives plus their reflections in the mirrored wardrobe door, it looked very crowded in there.

The bathroom was immediately opposite. Stripping off my pants and underpants, I turned on the tap and started sponging myself with one of Fiona’s fluffy towels. I could see the cops behind me in the mirror. Spider looked across and saw me standing there bare-arsed in my shirt-tails. ‘What is this?’ he said, reaching over to pull the door shut. ‘A fucking nudist colony?’

I grabbed the pink shoe box out of the laundry basket and stepped into the toilet cubicle. The box contained ten bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each about two and a half centimetres thick-an inch in the old dispensation. One thousand pictures of a man in a grey ski mask.

My jocks were in a pretty deplorable state. Pulling them back on was not a pleasant experience. I distributed the cash evenly around the waistband. It bulged a little, but at least it was dry. I sucked in my breath, buttoned up my pants and left my shirt hanging out. When I checked the result in the bathroom mirror, I looked like a candidate for Weight Watchers. This would never work.

‘Here,’ said Spider, half-opening the door. A clean shirt sailed through the air and landed at my feet. ‘Found a dozen of these in the wardrobe. The owner won’t be needing them any more.’ Spider Webb was turning out to be a real gent.

Eastlake was two sizes bigger than me. His crisp white Yves St Laurent fell like a tent over the bulge at my midriff, perfectly concealing it. That’s why the rich look so good. It’s all in the tailoring. ‘Ready,’ I told the cops, wiping my face. With my cash assets concealed and my shirt hanging out, I could have been the President of the Philippines.

A small crowd had gathered at the front of the flats, so we went out the back way. A prowl car was waiting in the access lane with a uniformed constable behind the wheel. He was eleven, maybe twelve years old.