Cheaters

by JR Carroll

  But right now he wasn’t feeling any pain. Right now he was thinking about Selena, running the highlights of their encounter that afternoon through his mind. Sitting on his knees he was again feeling her tight white buns after binding her wrists with the stockings. Now he was vigorously massaging the twin cheeks, massaging and parting them, lifting her, giving her a couple of friendly little slaps on the thigh just to get her attention, make her squeal …

  Damn. Gerald got up and turned off the TV, which he was now watching without seeing anything. He rubbed his face, blinked a few times, straightened himself out. She was a real turn-on, all right, that wicked little creature. Fucking law student, if you don’t mind. He pulled out his wallet and checked the contents: hundred and twenty bucks. That wasn’t going to last long. He would definitely decamp tomorrow, give Morg a bell and see if he couldn’t squeeze some folding stuff out of him. Failing that, shit … Well, it was a big enough town, and where there was a will, there was a way. Plenty of banks, building societies, TABs, all that good gear …

  18

  No-one could ever accuse Mike Buckland of being the soul of discretion or tact, which was surprising given the sensitive nature of his job. Nor was he known for his humility. In fact he was the opposite: the kind of guy who was very much in love with his mirror-image, and who revelled in the sound of his own richly textured voice resonating over everyone else’s. When he spoke, which was often, he always gave it the high production values of an important keynote speech. Workplaces everywhere have a Mike Buckland: loud, intensely physical in his interactions, ego-driven, unable to be shut out; a striver for effect, a perpetual interrupter of conversations; the man whose sentences invariably begin with the word ‘I’, and end with ‘me’. He was also utterly impervious to insult or criticism, preferring instead to laugh off any suggestion that he may not be the best team leader or field operator in the entire police force, that he could not do the commissioner’s job better than the commissioner, on a break; that he may be slightly less attractive to females than Mel Gibson or, at the very least, Bruce Willis. Certainly he could match Willis in the hair department. Mike had a full set of extremely white, extremely even teeth, which had cost him thousands of dollars, and his deep brown eyes shimmered with moisture when he broke into a smile, or laughed – as if he had just had the pleasure of meeting himself for the first time. Mike liked to smile; he liked to tell off jokes that no-one much laughed at, except himself and his little band of mates; he liked to clap his hands with a bang like a paper bag exploding behind people’s backs, making them jump out of their skin; to have the last word in any argument and to score points by marking them in the air with his finger. And he was fond of sliding a hand over his mouth and describing to one of his cronies in vivid detail what he had in mind for that cute little number bending over across the room.

  At present Mike was in his regular pub on a Thursday evening with a good mate, discussing what he fancied doing between the sheets, step by step, with Michelle Fleming, whom he described as his ‘pigeon’, meaning his undercover operative. Mike always referred to people as his staff, never just fellow officers or colleagues. He was convinced he would put her straight through the ceiling and into orbit, thereby ruining her for everyone else – if she would only let him. By Christ she was a horny little item, but a cock-teaser and a bit of a ball-breaker. ‘Miss Deepfreeze,’ he sometimes called her. ‘But when the ice cracks, watch out. I reckon she’d go mad.’ Mike confessed that he thought a great deal about Michelle every time he served it up to his wife. That was his usual expression: ‘served it up to’; that, or ‘gave the ferret a run’, or ‘slipped her a firm piece of meat’.

  ‘Michelle Fleming,’ the other half of the conversation, Alex Grimke, said. ‘Wasn’t she a lap dancer or something?’

  ‘Exactly right, mate,’ Mike said. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself – a lap dancer or something. They reckon she goes off like a Catherine Wheel on cracker night – phfffft.’ He whirled a finger around. ‘You know, sometimes when she wears that leather jacket I swear she’s got nothing on under it. Makes you wonder if she bothers with knickers under those black jeans, doesn’t it. I’d sure like to see that.’

  ‘Like Sharon Stone in that movie.’

  ‘Better than Sharon Stone. Michelle was put on earth to fuck men, mate. End of story. She was a gift from God. Sharon Stone? Tell you what, if Sharon Stone came into this bar, naked, and got down on her knees and begged me to give her one, I’d tell her to fuck off. I’d throw the bitch out of the pub.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Nope, no bullshit. I don’t like her. I wouldn’t have her. She just doesn’t do it for me. Or put it this way, mate: if I did, under extreme sufferance – like, you know, she’s got a gun on me – I’d be shutting my eyes and thinking about Michelle Fleming all the time.’

  ‘You’re really fixed on that piece, mate.’

  ‘I get to see her a bit. Not as much as I’d like to, however. Tell you who else I wouldn’t mind screwing: that bird in Leaving Las Vegas, whatever her name was. Did you see that?’

  ‘Nope. About the drunk guy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Nicolas Cage. But that bird in it, the hooker, she is something else, mate. Sensational tits. Hornbag face. In fact she even looks a bit like Michelle. Maybe that’s why I fancy her so much.’

  ‘Michelle, or the one in the movie?’

  ‘Michelle.’

  ‘Is anyone fucking her?’

  ‘I think so. I think she’s got a regular boyfriend.’

  ‘That’s bad luck. Maybe you should find out who he is and get rid of him.’

  ‘I’d like to.’ Mike swallowed his drink, remembering something Michelle had told him.

  ‘Al,’ he said. ‘Just on a slightly more serious note for a minute, do you know anyone called … what was it … Lewis Kenny.’

  ‘Crim?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Alex, who had worked in the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and was familiar with most of the bigger names on file, thought about it, rubbing his fleshy face. ‘No, that name doesn’t flick any switches. Why?’

  Mike gave him a shortened version of Michelle’s story, emphasising the boyfriend as the source, explaining how he was keen to go to homicide – maybe he had already.

  ‘It’s not much,’ Alex said.

  ‘I know,’ Mike said. ‘But you never know – the presence of smoke usually means there’s a flame somewhere. She was convinced – or the boyfriend was. Enough to ask me to find out what I could about this Kenny character. If anyone’d know him, you would.’

  Alex wrote the name down on the back of a business card. ‘I’ll check him out in the morning. This boyfriend – has he got a name, or a contact number?’

  ‘No,’ Mike said. ‘She wasn’t saying, the secretive little swine. God, I love her butt.’

  When he was in his car, Alex made a call on his mobile.

  ‘Yep,’ a man answered from another mobile. There were pub noises in the background.

  ‘Mate,’ Alex said. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  ‘We need to meet. Where are you?’

  The man told him the name of the pub – it wasn’t far. ‘See you there in fifteen,’ Alex said, and switched off.

  He spent an hour and a half in a Kensington hotel with Keith Morgan, explaining what had transpired. If this kid went to homicide and dropped the name Lewis Kenny, they both had cause to be concerned: one thing was bound to lead to another. Casino security cameras could pinpoint Keith and Kamp standing over the girl. It wouldn’t look good – next thing you know, Alex could be pulled in too. Keith was close to panicking: one stint in the nick was more than enough for him. Alex left with a message: get onto it. Fix it. Find out who this young bloke is. Shouldn’t be too hard if he’s fucking Michelle. Find out where she lives, put a watch on the house, or maybe Kamp knows him – that was a distinct possibility, since the young bloke knew who he was, or thought he did. Check that
with Kamp. He was hardly out the door when Keith Morgan was already getting busy making calls. Fuck Gerald Kamp. Golden fucking Condor – fucking bull in a china shop was more like it. Now Keith was going to have to pick up the pieces. The first person he dialled was Sigmund Barry. That conversation was short, to the point. With his blood pressure rising he then called Frank Gordon, who was not there, but he managed to get onto Ricky Panazza instead. Those two would also be in the camera footage. The man he really needed to speak with, Gerald Kamp, was at present uncontactable by phone – he must have been saving his battery. Keith sat there staring at the mobile, drumming his fingers on the bar, thinking, thinking – and the phone rang, startling him. It was Kamp on the line.

  ‘Mate,’ Kamp said. ‘I was just talking to Sigmund. There’s a certain party giving us flak. We gotta have a meeting. Your place. Tomorrow night.’

  Keith Morgan’s house in the paddocks of Harkaway – what he liked to call his ‘manor’ – was an impressive chunk of real estate that could be sighted from a distance. It wasn’t hilly country, but Keith’s place was built on the only one in the area – called Nob’s Butt by locals – giving it a 360-degree panoramic aspect. In fact it was an ugly, jarring type of structure, built during the seventies for a magnate in the luxury motor trade, Anders Larssen, who was killed when his Porsche Targa met a fuel tanker head-on at 190 kilometres an hour. Larssen had a lot of money but no taste. The residence was a sprawling, two-storey mess of western red cedar, blue-stone and glass that looked less like someone’s home than a complex consisting of a series of angular, ad hoc extensions in different styles tacked onto each other. Keith liked it, however. It made him feel like a Scottish lord from ancient times surveying his fiefdom. To enhance this idea he had a mounted telescope in his first-floor, cantilevered den, which he used to inspect vehicles approaching via the 500-metre-long cypress-lined driveway. He didn’t like surprise visitors, especially at night, when all you could see were high-beam headlights coming at you. The telescope idea he got from a movie in which this Mr Big, who lived in an impregnable fortress in the desert somewhere, used a high-tech one to pinpoint the good guys coming to get him from miles off, so his henchmen in a space-age chopper could blow them away with Exocet missiles.

  Harkaway was an isolated location – really just green fields, some sheep and cows, a grid of unsealed roads and the occasional property – but it suited Keith. He had a wife of many years and four children, three of whom attended an exclusive private school in the Yarra Valley, while the youngest was still at home with her mother. Keith considered himself a devoted family man who was determined to give his kids every advantage he had lacked at their age. He liked to see them running around playing with the Weimaraners on their acreage, getting good, clean air into their lungs instead of the smog, car exhaust and toxic industrial fumes you got in the big smoke. He maintained a smart pad in town for entertaining girlfriends, which his wife knew about but didn’t mind as long as he kept his shenanigans separate. She had little to complain about: Keith was an unstinting provider. Where the money came from she wasn’t exactly sure – all she knew was there was an unending supply of it. As far as the tax commissioner was concerned, he was a financier and investor, and he had a tax agent and a legit business structure to prove it.

  Every time Keith saw in the papers that the police were losing the drug war because of insufficient resources he felt heartened, because that meant he was winning it. Drugs had made him disgustingly rich in a short time, and now he had it all: money in the bank, investment properties, a respectable share portfolio, a stake in a gold mine, overseas bank accounts, the Jag Sovereign, the Jeep Cherokee and the new Volvo wagon for his wife. He even counted senior, well-placed police among his friends. Keith Morgan had come a long way since his days as a typewriter salesman and petty thief back in New Zealand. He did not think of himself as a predator or a parasite feeding from the sea of human wreckage, but as an astute businessman who was meeting a perceived need in the marketplace. It was just economics, and if he wasn’t doing it someone else would be. He was a service provider, just like a doctor. Junkies, juicers and street stiffs he regarded as low-life scum, expendable waste in a go-ahead world, and the dealers who flogged his product day and night in the city and in suburban shopping malls were only slightly better. They were nearly all teenagers, many Asian, and as often as not they finished up being users themselves. It was such a royal pain in the bum for Keith, because when they became hooked they would use his product instead of selling it, which was unacceptable. It was theft. Once you let scumbags rip you off in business, there was no end to it. It was hardly world’s best practice.

  Right now Keith was peering through his telescope with a large glass of Macallan in his hand. A vehicle was coming down the drive and, as he watched, the driver flashed his headlights several times. Keith smiled: this was a standard signal that friendlies were on the way. When the car drew closer to the floodlit entertainment and barbecue area below, he recognised the gleaming red Mercedes 380 SL sports job that belonged to Sigmund Barry. It was about twenty years old and in mint condition. The car stopped, the handbrake was applied, then Sigmund emerged from the driver’s seat and waved cheerily up at the silhouetted, backlit figure of Keith. Keith waved back with the Macallan glass. Then Victor Wineglass got out from the passenger side, looking every inch the dandy as usual. Victor had style, you had to give it to him. He had the style and Sigmund had the brains, the smarts, and connections where they counted. Keith himself was the linchpin in the arrangement: the guy who made it all happen on the streets, where money was made hand over fist through his extensive networks of mid and low-level dealers. In this high-risk industry, Keith was more exposed than the other major players, because he had large amounts of product in his possession longer than anyone else and, being a hands-on manager, he was working with it on a day-to-day basis. If anyone was going to get nailed it would be Keith, not Sigmund or Victor. If the time ever came, that pair would be ex-country post-haste, for destinations unknown …

  He opened the glass doors and let his visitors in. Hands were shaken, then the three men, each with a generous pour of the Macallan in his hand, sat in comfortable, overstuffed seats around the den, or what Keith referred to as his ‘observation deck’. He was feeling pleased with himself at present, because Sigmund, who normally had to be crowbarred out of his Flinders Lane apartment, had honoured him with a visit – he had travelled all the way to Harkaway, for Christ’s sake. Keith knew the stakes were high, that all Sigmund’s organisation and careful planning were about to reach fruition. He was excited, but also nervous, even more jittery than usual.

  ‘Interesting house, Keith,’ Sigmund was saying, observing the vaulted ceiling, the smoked lighting effect gained from suspended hurricane lamps, the earthy colours, the lack of art on the walls. ‘Very … rustic.’ There was a richly stocked bar on one side with a large wooden sign saying ULURU – PLACE OF ABORIGINAL SIGNIFICANCE bolted to the wall behind it, and cans of exotic beers lined up on a shelf.

  ‘It’ll do me,’ Keith said. ‘I feel free out here. I always reckon the best view of the city is looking backwards, when you’re fucking off from it.’ He got up and looked through the window at the blackness, in the depths of which distant suburban lights twinkled, then drew the curtains.

  Sigmund drank some Macallan appreciatively, then said, ‘Wouldn’t do me, I’m afraid. Give me the filthy metropolis every time. I think I’d get agoraphobia if I had to survive in these parts. It’s a bit like the Yorkshire moors, don’t you think? Only flatter.’

  ‘I’ve never been to the Yorkshire moors,’ Keith said. He sat down, crossed his legs. Immediately one of his feet began twitching, vibrating as fast as a rattler’s tail. ‘I’ve never got beyond Australia. Don’t see the need. Everything you want’s here. Best little country in the world.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ Sigmund said, looking from Keith’s trembling foot to the Uluru sign. ‘Everything you want is almost here.’

>   ‘Ah,’ Keith said. He sat up straight, aware that his nervousness was creating a distraction. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Within the week,’ Sigmund said, ‘A nice new Mercedes station wagon will arrive at Botany Bay. It will then go through customs –’

  ‘So that’s under control? The customs part?’

  ‘Absolutely. You don’t imagine I’d take a punt on that, do you?’

  ‘Just checking, mate, just checking.’

  ‘Then our man will drive it here, to your place. Into the wilds of Harkaway, away from prying eyes.’

  ‘Who’s the driver?’ Keith said.

  ‘A chappie I know. Very reliable, don’t worry.’

  ‘Does he know what he’s got on board?’

  ‘He knows enough. No more than that. He knows not to have a prang, or to get nicked by the filth for speeding.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He will be in touch with you by mobile phone during his journey, to keep you up to date regarding his estimated time of arrival. Just so you’re at home when he arrives.’

  ‘I’ll be here, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’ll give him your number, if that’s all right.’

  Keith shrugged. ‘Of course.’ Keith entrusted few people with his mobile number. It was, in effect, a separate line for drug dealing – and a tax deduction.

  ‘When it arrives you relieve it of its contents and … get on with business.’ Sigmund fluttered a hand faggishly, as if that despicable side of it were none of his concern.