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Furn’s focus had narrowed to the width of the gun barrel he was peering down. No room for concern for Tentative’s welfare, or for that matter, the welfare of the motley young Vietnamese Australian the gun was pointed at.
‘We don’t want no trouble,’ the teenager was saying. ‘We don’t hurt customer. You pay money and go.’
‘I don’t have money,’ said Furn, struggling to keep the gun steady.
‘You leave drugs. You come back when you have money.’ He wore a gold necklace, a gold chain earring and Ray Ban sunglasses. Obviously some of his customers had been doing this thing the way it was meant to be done.
Furn shook his head. He was not surprised he had been mistaken for a drug addict. The pallid cheeks born from blood loss were not markedly dissimilar. In fact, if the side wound didn’t kill him, it could almost be considered fortuitous. No cop had ever looked this much a junkie without having to check into rehab.
The Springvale flat was unexceptional, had quite possibly been extorted from some terrorised member of the Vietnamese community. The TV was laughing with a sitcom. The evenings unconsumed pizza was still in its box on the living room table. There was an unconscious gang member on the cheap navy blue sofa, the blood streaked across his face the result of Furn removing him from the conversation. There had only been two of them. Furn must have caught them on a quiet night. But there would be others. These weren’t the kind of boys that would let a good pizza go to waste. They were leaving if for someone.
Furn risked a glance inside the Gucci travel bag he had found in the chill box of the disconnected refrigerator. His initial scepticism that something so easy to find could not be worth all that much evaporated immediately. There were enough satchels of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines to keep the gang’s customers spoilt for choice.
‘No, I don’t think I will be coming back.’ Furn pistol-whipped the young man’s lights out. It was quicker than applying restraints but with him crashing through the pizza and its coffee table it wasn’t particularly quiet.
‘You leave!’ Here was another voice telling Furn what to do. The only problem was he did not have a gun trained in that direction. It was at the door to the side. Encumbered by his gashed ribs and the crudely applied gauze holding them together, his turn resembled a Great War tank. Fortunately, the Vietnamese man he encountered there was just about of that vintage and unarmed. Bundled up in a dressing gown, his last few strands of hair sticking to his sweaty scalp, Furn had not seen such a look of consternation since the days he had not had enough money to pay the rent.
‘Some bad people are coming. My niece must call them when she hears trouble. She has called them already. You will go out the back. My mother is upstairs. I do not want her disturbed by someone getting killed.’
‘Yeah, we wouldn’t want that.’ Furn lowered his gun to the two young me he had battered. ‘Are these two roomies?’
The old man shook his head disdainfully. ‘Hurry. My niece already called.’
‘Better if she called the cops, don’t you think?’
‘Then more people like you would come here.’
Furn laughed. ‘Good point. I’ll remember to use my silencer for the sake of your poor mother.’
The elevator wouldn’t have been much better than a coffin if shooting started, so he took the stairs. The stairwell was poorly lit and slippery with grime. He had his pistol at the ready and, true to his word, when he concluded the way was clear, he reached into his pocket for his silencer. Just as he had it, however, his phone began to ring and he diverted to that. It was Rish Jones. It might have been something to do with the Sapiens but even now, with a stash of hard drugs under his arm and a kill squad on the way, he still hoped it was a social call.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘We need to talk.’ Rish’s voice was immediately all business.
‘Now?’
‘When I hang up I’m turning off the phone. Then it’ll be too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘What do you think about me?’
Furn was making quick progress out the building and was back walking along Clayton Road. The beatings he had handed out to find the Hyun Gang’s temporary residents had apparently left the local cops undisturbed. The streets were dark and deserted, the streetlights having nothing much to illuminate apart from parked cars and fire hydrants. His own parked car was at the other end of the Clayton shopping strip. With the time it was taking, however, the Hyun Gang could have called in reinforcements from a downtown Saigon traffic jam. Not that they would not need to go as far as that. Furn glanced over his shoulder just long enough to take in the two men trailing him without provoking them into immediate action. Obviously there was something holding them back. Perhaps it was the myriad of security cameras that would be wired to half the shops in the strip. But any self-respecting gangster would be carrying a baseball cap or balaclava for a moment like this. Maybe there was no reason at all, and that realisation would just as likely come with a bullet in the back.
Furn was considering the merits of an old fashioned showdown right there and then when Rish’s voice came again. ‘Don’t strain yourself thinking about it,’ she snapped.
‘What do I think of you?’ Furn hesitated. He knew the question was nothing less than a pin to a hand grenade and the only way to understand the true nature of the explosion was to pull it. ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot,’ he murmured.
Rish’s mood was not tempered. ‘That’s what a man would say to stop a conquest from slipping away. It’s possession not affection.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Furn glanced back in a fleeting attempt to mark the progress of the two Hyuns. They were getting alarmingly close but he realised that Rish was not going to let herself be put on hold while he had a shootout.
‘Catlett and I have been having a frank discussion,’ Rish continued. ‘He says he is ready to put his philandering days behind him and make a serious commitment. Although I’ve never believed him in the past, a man does deserve to be believed at least once. Perhaps, today is the day.’
Furn felt a wave of anger. Catlett had been happily ignoring Rish until he realised Furn was interested in her and then he had become the two hundred centre metre blocker he was on the basketball court. ‘And I have already failed that test?’ he muttered.
‘Maybe. We had a plan for dinner tonight. You forgot, didn’t you?’
Furn swore under his breath. ‘Sorry, I got caught up in things.’
‘You’re out on a job while Catlett came home after training and cooked me an omolette. Do you see the trouble you’re in?’
The feisty, intelligent voice was releasing a torrent of vivid memories: tastes, smells, sensations that the sediment of time had not even begun to cover.
‘Yeah, I’m getting an idea,’ Furn murmured.
‘If I could turn off a feeling like a tap we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but it’s not that easy. So here’s your chance. If you want me you’d better start talking.’
Furn tried again to spot his two pursuers. He was crossing the tracks of the Pakenham Line and if the two men had narrowed their distance, it would put them in the open. It would be the moment to shoot or be shot. He worked his gun to the very lip of his pocket.
‘I hate to say this, but now really isn’t the best time,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is,’ replied Rish, ‘because if you hang up on me now, I’m going to do things to Clancy that are going to make your head spin.’
Furn slung the narcotics bag up onto his shoulder. Although the handles were too narrow for it to be comfortable, at least it provided his gun and phone with a hand each.
‘I’m not planning to hang up,’ he said, ‘I’m not even going to place you on hold, but I am about to be in a gunfight.’
The boom-gates started to drop and the Hyun Gang made their move. A burst of gunfire erupted from the nearby train station pedestrian overpass. Furn would have been a lot more conte
nt if they had attempted to knife him: bullets flying around a town centre was collateral damage just waiting to happen. He dropped to his stomach on the tracks. Bullets clanged off the boom-gate and rails. Meanwhile, an oncoming train was alerting to its presence with urgent vibrations shooting up the track. It was the city-bound train and Furn slithered away as the bullets continued to fly. Suddenly the vibrations seemed to leap up and grasp him to the core. He made a desperate, reflexive dive back onto the city-bound track, just evading the large black sports utility tearing for him. The utility’s lights were off, but the train lights were blaring upon him, and its wheels were screaming in his ears with the hideous screech of metal upon metal. Furn checked his roll and threw himself back away, eluding certain death by a sliver. He pinned himself to a barbed wire trampoline of a fence, positioning the narcotics as a feeble, makeshift buttress as the train roared by.
The Hyun Gang would be regrouping on the other side, preparing to reclaim them. Only seconds before the train was passed and he would be facing them. There were no ready gaps in the fence and not enough time to create one. He levelled his gun at the goods laden carriages, readying for the moment they were gone. His hand was perfectly steady and he told himself that shakiness had been trained out of it, lived out of it, too. But then he realised the hand that was holding the phone was empty. He quickly glanced down around his feet for any sign of it. He was still looking when the train shot away, and he dropped to his knee, ready for the firestorm to begin. What greeted him, however, was silence and the perplexing sight of the sports utility crashed into a concrete post and riddled with bullets. Blood was spattered on the windshield and a head was lolled forward on the dashboard. While previously Furn had been forcing himself to stay still, now it was setting in like rigamortis. He had a feeling the two gang members on the overpass were also dead, for the exquisite grouping of bullets in the windshield was the mark of a crack shot. Furn could assume the shooter was on his side, but it would make for a very quick death if he were wrong. He remained flat on his stomach as he pondered the predicament. He noticed his phone then, smashed up on the tracks. He crawled over it and snatched it up: the screen was cracked and the line was dead. Furn put it into a pocket and to stop himself thinking about Catlett and his eggs he picked himself up and bounded over the fence. He walked away quickly, not wanting to abandon a crime scene, but knowing at least he wasn’t the one who had created it. He doubted this was Johnny Condrey, either. This was a whole different league. Faceless players on unsavoury missions. Furn would just have to accept there were those with vested interests in keeping him alive, and not necessarily for reasons he would approve of - reasons lost within the murky depths of the Red Line Files. If his guardian angel carried a sniper’s rifle, he would just have to put it down to life in the Rogue Intercept Police.
He doubled back on a hurried walk to his car and immediately went to the two way radio. The voice at the other end was accompanied by the distinctive hum of helicopter engine.
‘Furn?’ Rick Lawton said.
‘Pick me up at the Police Academy in twenty minutes,’ Furn replied.
‘No can do. I’m on a job. Someone’s blown up a warehouse in Essendon.’
‘Forget that. Trust me, the suspects have already fled. Anyway, this has priority.’
There was a pause. ‘Landing at the academy in the middle of the night, you’ve got to have clearance for that.’
‘Why do you think I’m in the RIP?’ said Furn. ‘Nothing gets clearer than that. Ten minutes. I’ll be waiting.’
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