Chopper Unchopped (100 page)

As I turned, I thought I noticed her grab Charlie’s gun out of his belt. I walked fast towards the door. I didn’t hear the shot until after a red hot poker and a sledge hammer hit me in the back. They used to joke that you don’t hear the bang until after the slug’s gone through because the slugs travelling faster than the speed of sound. Now I knew it wasn’t a joke, it was true.

I stepped out of the pub and tried to walk a few steps more, but I couldn’t feel my body any more. I’d gone numb from the neck down. I could hear screams and men yelling and more screams and John Rowles singing that damn song.

‘Kerry, Kerry,’ I said.

I thought I was going to fall forward, but I went backwards and this is where the story started …

JUST me and the princess of evil dancing in my brain. I don’t think my dream princess will be with me for long, them and the horses they rode in on. Ha ha ha.

That’s what the tattooed lady said. I reckon my little dancing queen will be joining me for real very soon, dreaming her own dreams. I wonder if she’ll dream of me.

So long Kerry, I wonder if she’ll ever remember my right name? Oh, yeah. About names. I haven’t told mine. Dead men don’t have names.

FATTY Phillips was living with his prostitute junkie girlfriend in a house in Forrest Street, Collingwood. Her name was Cathryn Brady, nicknamed ‘Cathryn the Great’ because of her big tits, and she worked in a massage parlour in North Carlton owned by Alphonse Corsetti’s right hand man and bodyguard, Gaetano Rocca.

Mickey made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. A belt in the mouth and the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun up her bum and she soon agreed to betray Fatty. It was Cathryn who took Fatty to meet a friend of hers at an address in Hodgkinson Street, Clifton Hill, a 20-minute walk from Forrest Street.

Fatty and Cathryn walked into the hallway, after being shown into the house by an old dockie named Tex Lawson. Cathryn kissed the old man with a warm ‘Hello Tex, this is Neville Phillips, my boyfriend.’

Fatty got a shock when Cathryn introduced him as ‘Neville’, and an even bigger one when Tex Lawson put his hand out to shake hands and said ‘How ya going, Fatty?’ But nothing like the shock he was going to get.

By the time they reached the lounge room Fatty had a feeling that all was not well. Especially when his old friends walked into the room from different directions: Mickey Van Gogh and Raychell Brown from the kitchen, and the Pepper twins and Lord Byron from the bedroom.

Mickey got straight to the point. ‘How’s David Spencer going?’ he asked.

Fatty’s faint heart sank into his arse.

It started to rain outside, and all was quiet except for the drum of raindrops on the tin roof. Just rain, no wind. It was a strange sort of night, rain with no wind. Fatty knew that Mickey loved to work on a rainy night. It didn’t make him feel any better.

‘Take ya pants off and bend over, Fatty.’

Fatty protested weakly, but Mickey ordered the others to strip him and hold him and bend him over. Then Mickey took out his old sawn-off .410 shotgun and began to cover the barrel with vaseline. Raychell giggled and wiggled her arse and bent down and said to Fatty: ‘I’ve had this before, sweetie, but I don’t think you’re going to like it. Ha ha ha.’

Mickey pushed the gun barrel so deep that his fist and the trigger guard hit the outside of Fatty’s arse.

Then he started asking questions. ‘Now, tell us what’s going on, Fatty. Or I’ll pull the bloody trigger.’

Mickey told the others to let go of Fatty. He pushed him face down on the floor. Fatty stopped blubbering long enough to spit the whole story out in no time flat. David Spencer, Alphonse Corsetti, Billy Wooden and the plan to put an undercover cop into the gang, using Fatty as a smother. At the end of the confession there was a problem. What to do with Fatty. The others looked at Mickey, wondering what he’d do.

‘Easy,’ he said, answering the unspoken question.

Then pulled the trigger.

The exploding shotgun cartridge was muffled deep inside Fatty’s bowel. It was the best silencer in the world. A point which fascinated Mickey.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I never knew that. Hey Cath, get over here.’

‘What do you mean, Mickey?’ whimpered Cathryn the Great.

He smiled at her, but there was nothing funny about the look in his eyes. ‘Why,’ he said in mock surprise, ‘ya don’t reckon you’re getting out alive, do you?’

THEY buried the bodies in the backyard of Tex Lawson’s house. After the others had shovelled the dirt in over a couple of bags of lime Tex had thoughtfully provided – mainly from force of habit – Mickey stood in the rain. He turned his face to the sky, as if the rain would wash away his sins.

Leon and Deon didn’t think much of being ordered to dig the grave in the pouring rain, but Mickey was the general of this army of nutters. Suddenly, Raychell was standing beside Mickey, holding her face up in the rain.

She knew what he was going to say. She’s heard it before. ‘I love the rain,’ he said.

Raychell knew the answer to that one. ‘So do I,’ she said. Then Mickey took her in his arms like some old time movie star he’d seen at the pictures somewhere, and the big girl began to cry. Natural-born killers, the most sentimental people in the world.

Sick pair of bastards, thought old Tex Lawson as he watched it all from his kitchen window. But for five grand cash they could bury the Queen of England in his backyard, for all he cared. He glanced through the kitchen door at Lord Byron in the lounge room cleaning up the blood.

‘Why is it that it is that I get all the dirty jobs?’ Byron was muttering to himself in that bloody silly sing-song voice.

AS far as Mickey Van Gogh was concerned, that fat dago Alphonse had been putting too many holes in his manners and had to be taught a lesson.

‘The quickest way to teach these wogs a lesson,’ said Mickey to the rest of the Collingwood crew, as they all sat around the kitchen of Chicka Charlie Doodarr’s house in Newstead Street, South Caulfield, ‘is to put their friggin’ mothers in bloody wheelchairs.’

Chicka Charlie badly wanted a war with Alphonse. The drug and gambling and prostitution empire that Corsetti controlled could all be his. This pack of psychos from Collingwood was simply a means to an end.

Mickey was still talking.

‘All we do is shotgun the dog’s mother in the base of the spine, that should do the trick. Are ya with us, Chicka? We’ll fix Alphonse and Gaetano Rocca. You and your crew can handle Billy Wooden and his lot.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Mickey continued. ‘You can have the lot, Charlie. If it’s not in Collingwood I’m not interested – Collingwood’s all that counts to me.’

‘Yeah’ said Lord Byron, ‘anyone who don’t come from Collingwood is a bloody shirt lifter as far as we’re concerned.’

Raychell laughed and patted Charlie on the shoulder. ‘Except for you, Chicka. You’re okay. Ha ha.’

The following day, after seeing Chicka Charlie, Raychell was getting dressed to go out. Black stiletto high heels and a black micro-mini stretch skirt that barely covered her arse, with a black stretch boob tube top. The whole thing was so tight it looked like it was spray painted on. Then she loaded up her jewellery, about 40 solid gold chains around her neck and about a dozen gold chains around each wrist plus gold and diamond rings on every finger of both hands, and a flash watch and earrings. All worth a mint, if you could have added up what the original owners had paid for it. Mickey tended to buy at a discount, from receivers who paid junkie thieves a fraction of value.

Depending on who was doing the adding up, Mickey wore about $60,000 worth of solid gold and diamond jewellery. And what Mickey did Raychell did. Today she and Mickey were off to the tattooist. Mickey wanted to get a full-length spider web tattoo from his left shoulder fully covering his left arm and left hand and fingers. His whole left arm fully covered in a spider’s web. He’d always been artistic.

Raychell was going to copy cat her beloved boyfriend and get exactly the same left arm full-length spider’s web tattoo. She’d always been an original thinker. God, they would look a sexy pair when this was all done, she thought.

The big bleached blonde put on her cherry red lipstick, turned around and walked out. As she did she called over her shoulder: ‘Vacuum the bloody flat, Byron, you little shit.’

‘Why don’t you do it yourself, sis? Why me all the time?’

‘Listen, little brother. You vacuum the flat and big sister looks out for you. That’s the deal, okay?’ she gritted, slamming the door behind her.

‘Hell,’ thought Byron. ‘I’m the man and she treats me like a bloody housewife. As soon as I get a girlfriend of my own, I’ll toss the slut out the bloody window.’ He didn’t mean it. In any case, he was too lazy to even try getting a girlfriend.

EVERY Thursday at 7 am Alphonse Corsetti’s mother left her home in Lee Street, Carlton, to go shopping at the Victoria Market. Gaetano Rocca always rode along with her in the car. Alphonse insisted his mother have protection. Mamma Corsetti loved to drive her son’s big Fairlane 500, even though she’d never had a licence. But there wouldn’t be much driving done this morning.

As she started up the engine two men, identical twins, stepped up from behind the Fairlane. You could tell they were twins because they had matching shotguns and balaclavas. Gaetano Rocca didn’t know what hit him. The shotgun blast blew most of his skull and brain through the windscreen of the car. Mamma Corsetti got out of the car screaming, and began to run down the road, but a second blast almost cut her in half from her hips down to the back of her knees. She lay face down in the street screaming. Alphonse came running out the front door, gun in hand, to find his mother crippled and half-dead in the street, and his best mate missing from the neck up.

It was war.

Billy Wooden had a jumping jack land-mine planted in the driveway of his Mill Park home. It was so loud it took half a dozen windows out in Telopea Crescent. It also chopped Billy into a dozen different bits and pieces.

Skinny McBain had both his eyes popped out with a tea spoon after they shot him outside the Primrose Hotel in Fitzroy. McBain was Wooden’s bodyguard and second-in-command.

The next move was Alphonse himself. Dead or alive? That was the question. Dead, he would make a good lesson. But alive and in a wheelchair, like his mother, he would make a living example to every Mafia dago in Melbourne to stay so far out of Collingwood they wouldn’t even be game to see the Magpies play the Brisbane Bears in Brisbane.

‘Wheelchair the fat dog,’ said Mickey.

But first there was a wedding to plan. Miss Raychell Brown had agreed to become Mrs Raychell Van Gogh. Wogs and wheelchair appointments could wait. It was party time.

MICKEY was listening hard to the voice on the telephone. ‘When crims go to war 1000 men don’t die – 10 might die, but another 1000 stand in fear,’ it said.

‘Kill one, scare the shit out of 1000. The dago’s taking his mother back to Italy when she gets out of hospital, so he won’t move against you till he returns. Until then you can rest easy. But he has an uncle in Thomastown you have to watch.

‘Deano Corsetti, he’s not only Alphonse Corsetti’s uncle, but he was very close to Billy Wooden and he knows it wasn’t Chicka who did Leo the Lout. He knows it was you, and if he knows then David Spencer will find out.

‘But forget Spencer, he ran for cover when Rocket Rod Kelly heard the internal security office was starting to investigate him.

‘So don’t get in a sweat for now. Listen Mickey, I heard you and Raychell was getting married. Congratulations. Who’s going to visit me now?’

It was Ripper Reeves talking. He enjoyed his once a week phone call to Mickey Van Gogh, but he enjoyed his once a month visit from Raychell a lot more. It got a bit lonely in H Division Pentridge.

‘No problem,’ said Mickey, ‘Raychell will be out to see you on the weekend brother, okay?’ But in the meantime can you do me a favour because I think Deano Corsetti might be coming your way.’

Ripper Reeves laughed. ‘Okay, mate. No problem. Give Raychell a kiss from me. See ya.’

Mickey hung up.

‘Hey Raychell, I know we are getting married Sunday afternoon, but do you reckon you could pop out and see Ripper Saturday morning?’

‘Do I have to?’ moaned Raychell with a pout.

‘Yeah baby. He’s a good bloke and a good friend and he’s one bloke I really have to keep on side. So come on, be a good girl.’

Raychell smiled and hugged Mickey.

‘Okay Mickey, but I’m only doing it for you.’

Raychell thought to herself that it would be good to see Roy Reeves one last time. She liked visiting the old gangster: he always called her ‘his little caballero’ and he had such funny stories to tell, and he also had the biggest eight-day clock she had ever seen in her life. Nothing else even touched the sides, but old Ripper could make her eyes water. If Mickey had Ripper’s wedding tackle, she’d be a very happy girl.

Visit Roy Reeves, bloody oath she would. She’d pretend to be doing Mickey a favour, but the truth was she’d visit Ripper Reeves with or without Mickey’s permission. She loved Mickey, he owned her head and her heart, but old Roy Reeves had something about him. He was her friend, a real true friend, her special friend and in her own way she loved him, too … and that donkey dick made her go weak in the knees – or between them, anyway. She was pleased as punch that Mickey needed her to visit Roy Reeves once a month. Mickey was so good to her.

Raychell’s thoughts were interrupted by Leon Pepper. ‘We’re going to toss the bridesmaids up at the wedding reception,’ he said to her. She must have looked a bit sour about this, because he added, ‘C’mon Raych, it’s a Collingwood custom.’

‘Oh yeah,’ snapped Raychell. ‘I’ve never heard of it. There will be 120 people at the reception, 80 men and three friggin’ bridesmaids – the answer is no.’

‘Then can we toss ’em up at the bucks’ night?’ asked Leon.

‘What bucks’ night?’ asked Raychell.

‘The one we are giving for Mickey. It’s a tradition. Every bloke has a bucks’ night.’

‘Listen,’ said Deon, ‘we either toss ’em at the bucks’ turn or the reception or I’m gonna shoot the slags.’

Raychell thought for a moment. ‘How many will be at the bucks’ night?’ she asked.

‘About 60,’ said Deon.

‘That’s 20 men to a girl’ said Raychell.

She thought some more.

MELISSA and Tiffany Warren, like Amber Morgan, had been professional strippers and part-time call girls since leaving school. None of them exactly went shy at the sight of the odd eight day standing to attention – but inviting the poor buggers to be bridesmaids at her wedding and then telling them they had to jump start 60 men at the bucks’ night was a tiny bit more than most bridesmaids were expected to do, even in the interests of a successful social event. Then again, she thought to herself with a sly smile, a gram of pure speed up their noses and a grand each in their purses should take the edge off things.

‘Okay,’ Raychell said, ‘you can have them for the bucks’ night. Where and what time?’

‘Tex Lawson’s place, 8 pm,’ said Leon.

‘Shit,’ said Raychell, ‘I hope you’re not going to take them into the back yard. I need them for the wedding.’