He had spotted the surveillance cameras on his first visit to the Don. On the front entrance, over the elevator door in the lobby, one in the elevator, and a pan-and-tilt on the landing of the Don’s floor. There were no monitors in reception, so he figured that they were probably somewhere on the Don’s floor. He also figured that, unless Jerry Springer was on, Liberty and Stratosphere were not the kind of guys who could be relied upon to sit watching a TV screen all day, which meant at least one extra person to contend with at any given time.
There was a uniformed security man at the elevator door, and Baby Joe noticed that nonresidents and strangers were directed to the reception desk and that the receptionist always made a call before they were allowed into the elevator, and another, from a different phone, after they were in. Including those two, that was a minimum of five targets, not counting the man himself. He had not seen any other people when he had been there before, but presumably somebody had been watching the Don while Liberty and Stratosphere had been frolicking with him in the car park. That would be an unknown factor when he made his move, but from his observations the Don didn’t like to have any more people around than necessary, and his visitors usually didn’t stay very long.
Allowing for two other people, for caution’s sake, that was seven to one. Long odds at these stakes. Maybe he would get the chance to bring them down a bit beforehand, if it worked out. The reception guy and the uniform wouldn’t be a problem except on the way down, unless he was in there a long time, in which case it probably wouldn’t matter anyway and he would be beyond caring…but he would have to figure a way to stop the reception guy from calling in reinforcements.
He had noticed that Liberty, who had met him in the lobby, had punched in a code that allowed the elevator to go to the Don’s floor. He had not seen a metal detector, and his car keys had not sent any bells ringing, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. There was a security gate at the garage, which required a resident’s passkey to open it, and he reasoned that if there were an elevator that went directly to the apartments from the garage it would be similarly protected, and likewise the fire stairs. He had considered ringing the management company, posing as a prospective occupant and asking for information, but figured that maybe the Don owned the building and did not want to risk him being tipped off that someone was sniffing around.
Baby Joe knew it was going to be tight. The only chance he had was to hit the Don’s floor running and get the first shots off before anyone realized what was going down and prepared a civic reception for him, complete with a twenty-one-gun salute. He had taken down Liberty and Stratosphere before, but they had not been prepared then, and just because they couldn’t fight didn’t mean they couldn’t shoot. He was going to need the code. Whoever was in the elevator was under the eye of the camera, which precluded getting in with one of the Don’s people and either muscling the code out of him or forcing the guy to take him up. He needed to get through the door, past reception, and into the elevator without being made, ride it as far as it would go, and punch in the code at the last minute. He presumed that there would be some kind of signal that went off inside once the code was entered. Once he was in he would have to take it one play at a time, but at least he remembered the layout of the apartment. Not knowing the configuration of the opposing team made it difficult to plan a strategy, so his basic game plan was just to shoot everybody he saw and keep shooting them until they stopped trying to shoot him.
His new baldheaded biker look had been enough for him to move around town incognito and to stake out the Don’s building but he doubted it would stand close scrutiny, and anyway he looked weird enough in himself to attract attention. Besides which, it made his balls itch like hell. He would need something better. Dressing as a woman would be best, but no amount of pancake and mascara could make his weathered mug look like anything but the wrong side of a Kronk gym speed bag, and people were liable to take notice of a dame who looked like she could skin a buffalo with a potato peeler. Where the fuck was Crispin when you needed him?
On the morning of the seventh day Baby Joe drove back to his suite at eight o’clock, and drank coffee and read the Revue Journal until nine-thirty. Then he called Stephane’s Theatrical Makeup and Costumes and spoke for ten minutes to the person that answered. After he hung up he took a long, hot shower to wash away the discomfort of the night, put the Glock under his pillow, and went to sleep.
The heat turned the end of the airstrip into a simmering mirage, and Helmut Snurge could not make out the tin roof and white walls of the “airport building” until he had almost taxied the Cessna Stationair up to it. He killed the engine, removed the headset from his slick head, and turned around to his lone passenger.
“Welcome to Blue Billabong, and thank you for flying with Luftkrank.”
“Fuck off, you kraut ponce. Luft Wank, more like. Ya call that a fucking landing?”
“What do you expect, with your fat arse in the back? The aircraft is not designed for it.”
Amid further pleasantries, Stavros and Helmut crossed the scorching bare earth to the dilapidated shed that served as departure lounge, arrivals hall, and baggage claim at Blue Billabong Airport. Helmut was a small, dapper German with a penchant for French cologne, who kept his white uniform immaculately turned out even in the heat and dust of the outback, his short hair greased back and his pencil mustache neatly trimmed beneath his prominent nose. Helmut was pilot, chief engineer, booking agent, and mechanic of Luftkrank, not to mention barnstormer, crop sprayer, search and rescue, flying doctor, and general lifeline to the remote community of Blue Billabong. It was he who had brought Asia, Crispin, Mary Rose, Bjørn Eggen, and Wally up from Cairns, and he was just returning from taking Stavros on a dawn mercy mission, Mercy being a full-breasted and liberal-minded young woman who plied her trade in an establishment in Numbat Flats, the nearest town to Blue Billabong.
In the shade, in a chair tilted back against the wall, sat a fat aboriginal in a pair of shorts and an open shirt with all the buttons missing. He was surrounded by crushed and empty beer cans and next to him was an ice box, into which he reached as the pair approached.
“Ev you blokes got anythin to declare?” he asked, cracking the tin.
“Yeah,” replied Stavros, “yer mother’s got a fat arse and she smells like a dingo.”
“And your sister is a lousy fuck,” added Helmut.
“I wouldn’t be talkin like thet to the bloke ’oose got the beers, if I was you two bludgers.”
“Ah, good on ya, Bruce,” said Stavros, pulling out two cans and handing one to Helmut. “What the fuck are you doin here, anyway?”
“I’m waitin’ for Kylie Minogue to land in a parachute and give us a fucken blow job, ya plonker. I’m waitin for you two wankers, whadya fucken think?”
“Why?”
“Wal sent me. Says I was to bring you straight to the bar, soon as you landed.”
“Did ’e say what for?”
“Na, mate, but ’e dint look too fucken ’eppy.”
“Right then, let’s be ’avin yer.”
Bruce and Stavros each took one end of the cool box and carried it to the dusty pickup parked behind the shed, where all three of them squeezed into the front seat and set off along the flat red road, leaving a long cloud of dust hanging in the still air.
Norm was not by nature a talkative bloke, and under normal circumstances did not open his mouth from one day to the next. Of course, having two electrodes attached to your testicles and your bare feet in a zinc bucket full of ice water were not normal circumstances. If Norm had watched more Humphrey Bogart movies, or read more Raymond Chandler, he would have known that two strangers approaching you for a light in a darkened street normally precedes receiving a heavy concussive blow behind the ear with a lead sap. But since Norm had been remiss in his reading habits, this is exactly what had happened to him and after being rendered unconscious he had been bundled into the obligatory waiting car and driven to a gated mansion in a pa
rt of town he was not familiar with.
When he was awakened by a cascade of freezing water he found himself naked and tied to a steel chair with his feet in a bucket, looking at a man with an enormously long mustache and a long braid hanging from the back of an otherwise shaven head. The man sat in a wheelchair with a saline drip in his arm, the bag being suspended from a frame that stood next to the chair, and both his legs were heavily bandaged. Standing around him was a group of men who looked like pirates. Two were dark-skinned, and one of these had only one eye and the other a prosthetic arm. Of the others, one was very fat and one very tall and slender, with a badly scarred face, and the other stood at a peculiar angle and supported himself on a cane. There was another man, younger, with a ponytail, who didn’t seem part of the group and who sported two impressive black eyes. Also in the room were four Vietnamese who were naked to the waist, and who were very still. One of them stepped up and filled the bucket that his feet were in with ice water.
Norm began to get the impression that he was in deep shit, an impression that was confirmed when another of the Asians clipped an electrode onto each of his balls, a process which was, in itself, so painful that the electric current which followed seemed almost gratuitous. When the rhinoceros had climbed off his chest, the industrial battery acid was removed from his veins, and the magnesium flares removed from his orifices, the one in the wheelchair spoke.
“You want babies better you speak, chop chop.”
“What do you want? Why the fuck are you doing this to me? This is a mistake. You got the wrong bloke.”
“No mistake. You take man on boat. Man look like black man, Vietnamese man, same same.”
“Yeah. Shit, yeah. But I swear I didn’t…”
“Never mind. Where he go?”
“Sydney.”
“Have big gold Buddha with?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I sneaked it through customs for him.”
“Where he now?”
“I don’t know, he, aaaaaaiiieeeeeeeeeh.”
When the anaconda slid from his chest and the scorpions stopped stinging his pecker, Norm said, “No. Please, no more, for Christ’s sake. I’m telling you everything. He stayed with me for a coupla days. He said he was going to Cairns. There were others on the boat. A fat poofter and a sheila, two old fogies, a man and a woman, and an old boong.”
“Also one man look same like these. Strong man. No so young, no too old?”
“No, nobody like that.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You see black suitcase?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. The bloke brought it round to my place, the day before he went to Cairns. He left it.”
“You still have?”
“Yeah, but there was nothing inside. Only newspapers, aaaaaiiiiieeeyaa.”
When the electric eel had crawled out from his lungs, and the jellyfish removed from his glans, Norm soldiered on, “I swear to God. I looked as soon as he left. Just papers. I remember ’im swearing ’is ’ead off the day ’e brought it. I’m telling you the truth. That’s all I know, the bloke gave me a thousand bucks to ’elp ’im out. Please, mate, don’t ’urt me no more. Let me go, I ain’t done nuthin.”
Norm dropped his head onto his chest, and began to sob.
Long Suc turned to the men standing around him. “What you think?”
Dugong Heartache answered. “I think he’s on the level. If he had the loot, why would he have come back to this shithole?”
“But if case go Australia, dollars go Australia, I think.”
“It’s possible.”
“So what you do?”
Dugong addressed Booby Flowers. “What do you say, Rocky?”
Booby was a changed man, all the wind taken from his sails by the roughing up, the incidents he had witnessed, and his conversation with the Don, not to mention his personal stereo having been trashed when that guy pistol-whipped him. He didn’t understand how he could be held even partially responsible for something that was patently not his fault, but it seemed to him that the Don’s words had implied negligence on his part. That was as worrying as it was unfair, since it also implied that he was destined to be providing sustenance for the denizens of the South China Sea shortly, if the situation wasn’t rescued. The arrival of this crew of outlandish brigands had not done much to ease his mind, especially as they all looked at him the way a well-fed lioness looks at a zebra. Interested, but not hungry. Yet. When he answered Dugong Heartache, it was in the manner of a small boy addressing a gang of big kids who he fears are going to steal his pocket money.
“Well, it certainly sounds like the stuff has gone south. And probably the money, too. The stuff he’d have trouble getting out of the country by air, so it’s probably still there. The money…who knows?”
“What about the shamus? This one says he wasn’t on the boat.”
“Could be anywhere, but if we find him my guess is we find the money.”
“Looks like we go to the land down under, then, ladies.”
Chapter 23.
While the aforementioned conversation was taking place, some of the money in question was actually traveling at thirty kilometers an hour, bouncing along a rutted dirt road, wrapped in plastic bags and secreted in the side panels and spare wheels of a Volkswagon Combi. Monsoon was driving with excessive caution because of the value of his cargo, which—in addition to what he thought amounted to approximately nine and a half million dollars—included one recently-dissected Machine Gun Jelly Buddha packed in cardboard boxes, and two unconscious geriatrics, carefully bound and gagged and placed side by side on a mattress in the back.
Once again, Monsoon was amazed at yet another dramatic change in fortune in a series of twists and turns of Byzantine complexity, a story that had had more ups and downs than a Norfolk whore’s drawers on a Saturday night with the Pacific fleet at anchor in the roads. Taking it from the very beginning it had been an incredible set of reversals and windfalls, culminating in him having all the beans, baby. Monsoon Parker was headed, via a meticulously plotted route of back roads and isolated tracks, across an entire continent to Sydney, Australia, to begin a life of fabulous wealth and unprecedented decadence, of unlimited beaver and booze for the rest of his natural, up to his little multiracial eyeballs in snatch and scotch.
And all due—apart from an occasional miracle of Golgotha proportions—to his own natural genius, the undeniable talent that had only been waiting for the right moment to mature and blossom and buy him a one-way ticket to Filthystinkingrichesville. And to think, when this dance began he had been worried about being able to pay that wop cocksucker a lousy grand, plus vig. He figured the journey would take him the best part of a month, but having been one second from eternity being thirty days from paradise didn’t seem like such a bum deal. He was going to enjoy every turn of the wheels.
How many ifs make a multimillionaire? If he hadn’t borrowed the grand from the Don, and if O’Neal hadn’t missed the free throw, he wouldn’t have been desperate enough to start looking in the case and find the MGJ. If the Don hadn’t tried to muscle in on his play, he wouldn’t have been here, holding the green. If Frankie Merang hadn’t tried to give the Don the high, hard one, it wouldn’t have panned out and he wouldn’t be chauffeuring a Combi full of untold riches across the outback. If the Mick gumshoe had not horned in, he would be history; and if the Paddy doofus had not then, in a feat of barely credible hubris, gone back to the states to face almost certain annihilation, it would not have been so easy to get the famous folding stuff away from the rest of these suckers. If that little prick with the ponytail had not wanted another snuff pic for his collection, he would be in that big sports book in the sky instead of on the road to Millionaire’s Row.
There was only one way to look at it. It was just something that was meant to be, and it was as simple as that. Of course, it had not been a cakewalk. There had been many tight moments and some disappointments, too, along the way. Like, for instance, the disa
ppointment of finding out that, after he had gone to the trouble of sucker-punching the little fag room service guy at the old man’s hotel and used his passkey to get into the room and rob the suitcase, it had been full of newspapers.
But this is where his resourcefulness and instincts had paid off. He could have let it go at that and been satisfied with the MGJ. But he figured that, since it was unlikely that the Don would try to get away with such a corny dime-novel stunt, the old man must have pulled the old switcheroony himself later on. Which meant they either suspected him, or that there was some double-dealing going on among that crew; but it also meant that the cash was still around, unless of course it was the Mick who had thrown them all a serious curve, hence his disappearance. Anyway, it would be worth a trip north to find out.
After giving his last grand from the money that the Don had given back to him to Norm, when he had landed in Sydney, all he had had in his pocket was chump change. Except for millions of dollars worth of drugs, of course. Taking a piece that was easy to detach, which turned out to be Buddha’s celestial hooter, he had set about doing a little retail business in Sydney and had immediately lucked out again. He discovered that Sydney was another fruit can, the Aussie equivalent of San Francisco, and tapping into the gay scene he had soon gotten a small bushfire going—not to mention one small, unexplained explosion in a Bondi hotel room. The gay grapevine bore him such fruit with the fruits that he very quickly had enough dough to charter a plane to fly him and his stash to Cairns, and to buy the Combi when he got there. Not only that, but he had established a rabid and starving market to come back to, which would be made even better by cutting off the supply for a while and leaving the fags gagging for it.
When he had gotten to the Big Blue Billabong Hotel he had been pleasantly surprised to find everybody except the old broad completely shitfaced, and it had been a thing of simplicity to slip a mickey into her tea. With all of them out of their trees—or in Wally’s case, in a tree—or else out for the count, he had been free to scout around in peace and it hadn’t taken him long to find the cash, all neatly wrapped in plastic and shoved under the floorboards in the old man’s cabin where the simple old bastard had hidden it. The old duffer should really start reading a better class of comic. He had checked a couple of the packages this time, just to make sure.
Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1) Page 39
