Dark City Blue: A Tom Bishop Rampage (14 page)

‘You can’t fuckin’ leave us here,’ the fat one cried. ‘You can’t fuckin’ do it.’

‘We’re cops.’

‘Rayburn will have your fuckin’ arses.’

They didn’t put up much of a fight, just a lot of bad noise. Now they were in the boot of their own patrol car, with their own cuffs around their wrists and their service revolvers tossed into a nearby stormwater drain. They mouthed off until Bishop gagged them and once he did, they kicked and scuffled until he slammed the boot.

Bishop turned the Holden over and pulled into the street. A few blocks later they merged with the afternoon traffic and were on the Western Ring Road.

The wind blew with a drunken violence down the street, howling and throwing up dust from where the gardens were meant to be. Some of the empty houses in the subdivision were ready to be lived in, others nothing more than wooden shells with plastic
sheets for walls.

Ellison leant forward and peered through the filthy windscreen. ‘That’s it, over there,’ she said, and pointed to a house on the right. They cruised past: no car in the driveway, no movement through the curtains. No sign of anything.

Bishop pulled into a gravel driveway a couple of wooden frames down and shut off the engine. Ellison shot him a worried look.

‘Do you think we need backup? Last time, there were three of them.’

Bishop scratched at his stubble, he could hear the fear in her voice. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said. ‘You can walk away. If it goes bad, no one will know a thing; if I come out with the cash, you can bring it in with me.’

Ellison looked out the dusty rear window at the bleakness behind. ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

The wind slapped Bishop across the face as he stepped into the street. Ellison slid next to him, unholstered her weapon, checked the chamber and let it slide back into place.

‘I’ll take the back,’ he said. ‘Give me ten minutes, then come through the front.’

She nodded and he set off down the dusty road. When he came up on the house, Bishop pulled his .45 and held it by his thigh. His boots sunk in the mud, covering them in a shitty shade of mud as he moved down the side of the house, past three larger windows and one that looked to belong to a laundry or bathroom. The second floor was laid out the same. Bishop couldn’t see much besides dark rooms and afternoon glare. Nothing in the backyard either: no dirty cops, no fifteen million. He worked his way across to the back door, pressed his ear against it.

Nothing.

Wrapping his fingers around the doorknob, he turned it, found it unlocked. Stepping inside, he closed the door behind him, the wind reduced to nothing more than muffled thumps against the windows.

The kitchen had been abandoned before the benches were in place. The walls had been painted in various shades of white, and the fixtures were cheap.

Then he heard it: a sound upstairs. A thump followed shortly by another, then another after that. Bishop readied his weapon and found his way to the staircase.

The upstairs hall ran both left and right, with the stairs placed dead centre. He turned right, in the direction of the muffled thumps. The first two rooms came up empty.

Only one room left.

Bishop took a breath, stepped through the doorway.

Empty.

No longer muffled by the walls, the blind slapped against the open window. Bishop relaxed, dropped his gaze, noticing that his footprints had followed him in. Mud tracked every step he had taken. Bishop pushed open the bathroom door with the barrel of his .45. It was just what you’d expect: a sink, shower, toilet. All of it covered in plastic.

Nobody had stepped foot in there in months.

Bishop took the stairs three steps at a time, Ellison was in the lounge room.

Sunlight poured through the lounge-room blinds, falling across her face like bars.

‘Find anything?’ she asked.

‘You’ve been set up. Nobody’s been here in months. Let’s go.’

Outside, a car pulled up. Doors opened and closed.

Gunfire blasted through the lounge-room window. The blinds danced as bullets tore through them leaving shards of light in their wake. Bishop hit the deck. They were firing off so many rounds it was difficult to tell where and how many shooters there were.

Bishop returned fire. Unloaded an entire clip randomly through the blinds and into the street.

Gunfire ceased. Clips and clanks. Reloading. He climbed to his feet and ejected the clip, slamming in another and unleashing nine tiny explosions blindly through the window. The room blew up around him with plaster slabs falling from the walls and crumbling over in puffs of dust.

Empty – he ejected the clip. Rammed in a fresh one. Nine rounds later Bishop was empty again.

Silence.

A layer of smoke hung in the air and exposed itself in the beams of light protruding from the gentle sway of the blinds. He held his breath and slid the last magazine into the weapon.

Footsteps. Car doors. Tyres on the gravel. It was all over in the space of twenty seconds.

He holstered his weapon, wiped the smoke from his eyes and when he opened them it was to the sight of Ellison face down on the floor in a pool of her own blood.

Bishop fell to his knees, put pressure on her wound and pumped her chest. He talked to her and tried to get her to wake up but there was no point. One of the first bullets to come through the window had pierced her lung and killed her not long after. Somewhere, buried deep inside him, logic had kicked in and he knew that there was no bringing her back but his heart wouldn’t accept it, so Bishop continued to pump her chest while her vacant eyes stared at the roof and tears rolled down his face.

It was the pain that caused him to stop. At first he couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from. Then he saw the blood on his shirt, and then he found the bullet hole in his gut.

He was driving so fast the lines on the road looked like dots. In fifteen minutes the adrenaline would wear off and the pain would kick in. An hour or so later his body would shut down and he’d pass out. A couple of hours after that he’d be dead.

Bishop pulled a phone out of Ellison’s handbag and left bloody fingerprints on the screen as he dialled. After the third ring Dennis answered. He told Bishop to piss off and hung up.

Bishop had busted him a couple of years ago for practising medicine without a licence. Now, instead of performing backyard abortions and tending to GSWs, he was running a Crime Converters in Sunshine.

He bounced the car up onto the gutter and brought it to a stop with the handbrake. He had the sweats, the shakes, his vision was blurred and his coordination gone. The bell on the shop door rang as Bishop stumbled through it. Rows of obsolete televisions lined the walls, saxophones and guitars hung from the ceiling. Dennis emerged from somewhere out the back. The hope of a customer faded from his eyes, his smile disappearing as he caught sight of Bishop.

‘I told you not to bloody come here,’ Dennis yelled with enough force to make his comb-over fall out of place.

‘I’m here now. Are you going to do what you do?’

Dennis’s gaze fell to the pool of blood that had formed by Bishop’s feet, but remained unmoved. ‘Get out of me fucking store.’

His wife, Kirsty, stepped out from the back. ‘What the fuck is all this?’

‘None of your business,’ Dennis yelled. ‘Out the back.’

‘I told you no more of this shit.’ She pointed to the blood on the floor. ‘Who’s going to clean that up?’

‘Shut up, I’ll clean it, I’ll clean it, you fucking nag.’

‘Oh, yeah, now I’m a fucking nag. I don’t hear you complaining when—’

Bishop was feeling woozy and all the yelling was giving him a headache. ‘Hey,’ he said quietly.

The pair of them turned to him as though surprised he was still there.

‘Is someone going to pull this bullet out of me, or am I going to have to die right here on your floor?’

Blood fell from the tip of Bishop’s boot and grew into a puddle on the concrete floor. It covered his sock, ran up the inside of his leg and came to a stop at the hole in his belly. It wasn’t big enough to push a finger through but was big enough to pump blood out every time his heart beat, and when it did, a new wave of crimson covered his badge. Bishop unclipped it and tried to wipe the tarnished shield clean but no matter how hard he tried it still remained stained.

Dennis moved around his dusty storeroom while he collected the tools of his trade: scalpels, needles, vials and clamps. He laid them out delicately on an old Vic Bitter serving tray, then leant down to get a closer look at the bullet hole. ‘Not so bad,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as the others.’

In comparison to the bullet scar around Bishop’s heart and the two in his back, it wasn’t. But Bishop wasn’t about to get cocky.

Dennis searched around in his little black bag of illegal medications and pulled out a vial. ‘Patched this guy up once,’ he said. ‘Got one in the gut, just like you. He lived – died three weeks later though.’

‘At least he had you to comfort him.’

‘Oh, not from the gunshot,’ Dennis said as he stuck a needle into the vial. ‘Got bricked in his sleep.’

‘Bricked?’

To make his point, Dennis pretended to have a brick in his hand and beat someone over the head with it. The re-enactment didn’t fill Bishop with confidence. ‘For the pain,’ Dennis said, stabbing Bishop in the arm with a needle. ‘All good,’ he said.

It wasn’t all good.

Bishop tried to stand but the world fell from under him.

Tom Bishop sat on the edge of the bed. He had found himself being drawn to the room more and more over the past couple of days, and when he was there he was very quiet, almost as if Alice was still asleep and he didn’t want to wake her. He did his best to keep the room exactly the way she had left it: her moisturiser on the bed stand, her book still marked with a creased page two-thirds of the way through, the indentation in the pillow. He would look over her things and, occasionally, hold one in his hand, but he always made sure that everything was put back exactly where he found it.

Time passed slowly that morning, and yet Bishop was running late. He had been sitting on the edge of the bed for the past hour; he knew that all he had to do was lean down and tie his shoelace, but there it was, untied.

Alice’s funeral was everything he’d hoped it would be. Her few loved ones had followed her to her final resting place. They had shared stories and laughed about the time she had done this or that, and her mother had even managed to keep it together.

The ceremony had been beautiful. Perfect, in its away. Or so Bishop had been told by those who attended. When the time came for him to go to his daughter’s funeral, he couldn’t even tie his own shoelace.

The beating started long before Bishop knew anything about it, and whoever was behind it knew how to dish one out. His bottom lip stung, his eyes were swollen. He had a couple of loose teeth and there was a stabbing pain in his gut. A blow to the side of his head knocked him back to reality.

At first, everything was in fragments:

The pool of blood by his feet.

The stitches in his gut.

A figure hunched over him, badge on his belt. Blood on his knuckles.

Bishop’s vision cleared: it was Cooper. Then he copped another blow. A right cross.

He coughed blood.

‘He’s awake,’ Cooper mumbled.

He stepped out of the light to reveal Rayburn leaning against a bench, looking bored. ‘Not so smart now, are you?’

Warren, beside him, let out a laugh – sounded like a mule.

‘Feeling a little foolish actually,’ Bishop said.

Cooper mustn’t have liked the tone in his voice, because he planted a nice uppercut into his ribs. Bishop heard at least one snap.

He was tied to a wooden chair, his arms and legs taped to its arms and legs. He flexed his muscles, trying to test his bonds without being too obvious about it: things looked bleak.

‘There’s only ten grand here,’ Dennis said from a corner of the room.

Rayburn pulled the last of his cigarette into his lungs and flicked the butt. ‘You’ll get the rest.’

Cooper’s foot found it’s way to Bishop’s stomach. He held it there and, after a little pressure, the wound busted a stitch and blood spattered onto his shoe.

The pain made Bishop nauseated.

‘What the hell did you fix him for?’ Cooper asked.

Dennis looked up from counting his money. ‘How am I meant to know? He’s a cop. What if I let him die and you want him alive, huh?’

Cooper shrugged and let up on putting his foot through Bishop’s gut. ‘Making him dead again is no big deal.’

The door opened. Kirsty poked her head through. ‘I can’t run this shop all by me fuckin’ self now can I?’

‘Get the fuck out of here,’ Dennis yelled.

‘Wankers,’ she muttered under her breath and disappeared again.

Dennis shoved the cash into his pocket. ‘I better go.’

‘Yeah,’ Cooper said. ‘Go shut that cunt up.’

Dennis was halfway through the door when he stopped and looked back. He thought about having a go but after half a glance at the men in front of him, the thought didn’t last and he slammed the door behind him.

Rayburn paced under the fluorescent light; it sucked the colour from his skin and made his eyes look black. ‘You’re not easy to kill.’

‘I’ll work on that.’

Cooper came at Bishop with a right cross. His head snapped back. His mouth filled with blood, he leant forward and spat. A tooth bounced along the concrete floor.

Bishop smiled.

‘You got something to say?’

Bishop’s eyes meet his. ‘You really think this ends here? By the time this thing is over, I’m tipping some of you aren’t going to make it through this ordeal in one piece.’

The three of them swapped a glance as if the unarmed, half-beaten old man taped to a chair was something to worry about.

‘Just out of curiosity,’ Rayburn asked, ‘How am I going to die?’

‘Unpleasantly.’

‘We’re just going to put one in your face, nice and simple like. Won’t even make it look like an accident,
this time
,’ he said.

Bishop felt sick.

‘Look at his face, fuckin’ look at it,’ Cooper said and slapped his hands together.

‘Always thought you were better than everyone,’ Rayburn said and eyed Bishop’s broken body up and down. ‘Pity.’ Then lit a cigarette, pulled back and let the smoke dribble from his nostrils. “The Oak Park Apartments. Judge Jenkins. You remember being warned off it?’

Cooper flexed his knuckles, almost all of them cracked. ‘You should have fuckin’ listened,’ he said.

‘You fucked with a lot of pay cheques, hurling Jenkins in.’

‘Too clean for a bribe …’

‘… And too fucking stupid to listen.’

‘Shame about the girl,’ Rayburn said. He leant down to Bishop’s level, spoke quietly. ‘You thought the roads were slippery. Pregnant girl in labour behind the wheel of a car. One thing leads to another, car slides off the road and knocks into a half-dozen trees.’ He stood up and squashed the cigarette under his foot. ‘Nice story if you’re dumb cunt enough to believe it. Who lets a nine-month pregnant bitch drive?’

‘And why was she driving
your
car?’

Bishop gripped the arms of the wooden chair. Splinters dug under his nails but he didn’t care.

He’d got her killed.

Warren’s telephone rang and he took it over in the far corner. Then he turned to Rayburn. ‘We gotta roll.’

Rayburn put on his suit jacket. ‘Do him quick,’ he told Cooper. ‘Take him to the dog food factory and meet us at the place.’ He cast a parting glance at Bishop. ‘It was always going to end like this.’

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ Bishop said.

‘Fuckin’ doubt it.’

Warren followed, closing the door behind them. Leaving Bishop alone with Cooper.