Thrill City (2 page)
It was hot outside the car but not humid, and the air was sweet and smelled like pine needles and earth. A soft breeze ruffled the knee-high grass and she felt like she was actually living in one of those tourism ads on the TV, the forties-style black and white ones that made rural Victoria look like the Umbrian countryside: chock-full of lavender fields, vineyards and stone trattorias. All she needed now was for the hatchback to morph into an old Jag, and Jeremy into a spunky Italian guy with dark eyes and thick hair named Giorgio—no, wait, Paolo.
She ducked behind the first tree she came to, bunched her skirt around her hips, wiggled her knickers down to her knees and squatted, resting one hand on the rough bark to steady herself. Charlie trotted over and sniffed around her bum for a bit until she shooed him away and finally she could let go. A small fart escaped and then a fierce stream of sweet relief, shooting down on the pine needles. The force of the cascade made a small pond which quickly broke its banks and splintered into tiny, fast-moving tributaries that all seemed hell-bent on flooding her sandals so she inched her feet further apart, feeling the burn in her thighs, the hot urine scent reminding her of horses, and stables and hay. Then another odour hit her nostrils, a vaguely rotten smell, like someone had been dumping rubbish, or maybe a dead roo was lying belly-up at the side of the road. Craning her neck, she saw Charlie rooting around in a pile of old sticks and branches and she hoped he wouldn’t roll in anything nasty and stink out the Corolla. Christ, Jeremy would hit the roof.
‘Charlie. Here, boy. Come on,’ she called as she forced out the last of the pee and started bouncing on her haunches to dislodge the final drips. ‘Charlie!’
The dog backed out of the woodpile and came running towards her at speed, ears flying back, eyes shining and something clamped between his jaws, a lump of mud and shoots by the looks of things. A nest? Before she had time to get to her feet and pull her knickers up he was there, scratching her bare bum with his find, and she got a stronger whiff of the decaying garbage smell. Disgusting. What on earth did he have in his mouth?
‘Get. Go on, get.’ She tried to shoo Charlie away once more but he dropped the filthy object in her lap before leaping sideways with glee. Her skirt was stretched tight between her knees so that the object nestled there like a baby in a bassinette, and even before she was completely aware of what it was she gasped in revulsion at the leathery brown and red centre and the yellow pointy-tipped twigs sticking out the edges. A claw, she thought, and then it hit her. It wasn’t a claw but a hand, a severed, decayed hand, bones spiking from withered fingertips of shredded flesh. She screamed as she tumbled backwards onto the damp, prickly ground.
I
t was a hot November day when I first met Nick Austin. Venetian blinds slapped the glass as he pushed open my office door, strolled in and looked around the waiting room, taking in the blue Freedom Furniture couch, wilting rubber plant and faux-timber coffee table fanned with second-hand magazines. Sitting in the office proper, I saw him through the door and freaked. I’d forgotten to lock up when I came in from the shops, and clients never just fronted up. They called or emailed first, or texted if they were young and annoying.
He wasn’t young, mid forties maybe, and he was handsome in a rugged, slightly asymmetrical way. His light brown hair, longer at the front than the back, was still thick and his height—nearly six feet—helped to disguise the beginnings of middle-aged spread. He wore an expensive grey shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a jacket slung over one shoulder, and could have passed for an ageing catalogue model—or a hitman, I thought, panic prickling my bare arms. There were any number of people who’d pay good money to have me bumped off, and there I was, idiot, leaving the office unlocked so they could waltz on in. If I couldn’t get to the back door and sprint to my car, I was dead.
Then I came to my senses. Surely contract killers were only suave looking in the movies, or overseas, say Paris or Milan. The Australian version would probably show up in stubbies and a blue singlet, sporting jail tatts and supermarket thongs. Not strolling bare-faced past my security camera in the middle of the day.
The guy wasn’t acting particularly hitmannishly, once I thought about it. In fact, he was looking around in almost wide-eyed wonder, as though my waiting room was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. I’d seen similar expressions on trippers late at night at the 7-Eleven, delighted the store stocked something so hilarious as canned tongue.
‘Can I help you?’ I leaned back on my desk and crossed my arms, trying to sound stern and professional because I sure didn’t look it. I was wearing cut-off denim shorts and a ‘Damn Right I’m a Cowgirl’ t-shirt, and my long dark hair was in a ponytail, wispy bits escaping and sticking to my lip-gloss. Normally I went for a pantsuit-and-white-shirt combo at work—made me look like a plain-clothes copper and seemed to inspire respect and confidence in clients—but that day I wasn’t expecting anyone and had been washing my car out back with a bucket.
My PI business was in a narrow street-level shop-front that had housed a shoe store before I took over and partitioned the space with a cheap plasterboard wall. Sunlight shafted through half-open venetians, brightening up the waiting room, but the office at the back was dim. He wandered over to the doorway and peered into the gloom.
‘I’m looking for Simone Kirsch.’ His voice was deep and he was well-spoken. Educated with just a hint of ocker.
‘And now you’re looking
at
her.’ I pushed off from the desk and walked over, switching on the overheads. His eyes adjusted, pupils pinning then enlarging as he spotted my outfit. He smiled as though it confirmed something, or amused him, I wasn’t sure which. In the fluorescent light I noticed his cheeks were marred with faint, pitted acne scars—although marred was probably the wrong word. The scars added character, gave him a Richard Burton kind of vibe, and without them he would have looked handsome but bland. He stuck out his hand and I shook it.
‘I’m Nick Austin,’ he announced, as though it meant something.
It didn’t, so I just nodded. Up close my finely honed detective skills allowed me to notice something else. He held it well, but he’d been drinking. The glassy eyes and the faint reek of whiskey on his breath and in his sweat gave it away. Pretty hardcore for a summery weekday afternoon, but it explained the kind of bright-eyed way he’d been looking around.
‘I’m a writer,’ he continued when I didn’t respond. That got a reaction. I snatched my hand away.
‘Journalist?’ I’d had enough of them after all the crap I’d gone through. When would they get it into their heads I wasn’t going to do any interviews?
‘No. Crime.’
‘True crime?’ Just as bad. Journos with stamina.
‘False crime. I mean, crime fiction. I write the Zack Houston private detective books. They turned the first one into a telemovie. Aired last month? Cameron Davies played Zack.’
‘Oh yeah . . .’ I retreated behind my desk to the fake-leather recliner and gestured for Nick to sit on the blue armchair that had come as a set with the couch. ‘I mighta read the first one.’
‘
Dead Reckoning
? What’d you think?’
‘It was good. I liked the character of Zack . . .’
‘But?’
I squirmed in my seat, torn between wanting to be honest and possibly offending a potential client. ‘Well, it was a bit unrealistic . . .’
‘How so?’ He leaned forward and didn’t seem offended, just interested, so I relaxed a bit and grabbed the bottle of whiskey from my bottom drawer. What the hell, it was almost four and if it was good enough for Ernest Hemingway over there . . .
The corners of Nick’s mouth tugged up as I poured a couple of fingers each into some cheap tumblers I kept at hand. We clinked and sipped and the whiskey lit up my gullet, burning and medicinal. He finished half in one go so I topped him up, then myself. He relaxed back into his chair. That was me, always putting people at ease.
‘What did I get wrong?’ he asked.
‘Jeez, where do I start?’ I said, feeling immediately fortified by booze. ‘Like, Zack always gets a park right outside of wherever he’s going, even St Kilda or Fitzroy or the CBD. He must have a bladder of cast iron, since he never pees during surveillance—in fact, he never hangs a leak ever, despite sinking copious quantities of Coopers Pale. And the chicks . . .’ A little snort escaped my nose.
Nick frowned. ‘What
about
the chicks?’
‘They’re always throwing themselves at him.’
‘Zack’s a tough, good-looking guy.’
‘I don’t care how tough and good-looking he is, no one’s gonna be . . . you know . . . within seconds of meeting him. Girls don’t do that.’ Then I thought of my boyfriend, Sean, who was getting back from an Asia-Link police exchange in Vietnam any day. But that had been different. I’d known him for at least twenty-four hours, we’d been shot at, I’d been drunk . . .
‘You sure? What if the character was a femme fatale, trying to manipulate him ?’
‘Dude, in my experience the best way to manipulate men is to
not
root them.’
Nick laughed, clapped his hands and sat back, looking satisfied. ‘See, this is why I need to hire you. Curtis was right.’
‘Curtis Malone?’ Curtis was an acquaintance of mine, a titty-mag hack who’d gone to the dark side and started reporting crime. He’d got me fired from my last job, knocked up my best friend and was writing a book about a case I’d been involved in. He was a pest.
‘Yeah. We were just having lunch at the Stokehouse with our mutual publisher and a couple of other writers from Wet Ink Press. I mentioned I wanted to introduce a female PI in my next Zack book and he suggested I talk to you.’
‘So that’s why you’re here, to speak with me?’
‘More than that. I’d like to spend a bit of time with you, maybe tag along on a couple of jobs, really get an understanding of what it’s like, being a woman
and
a private detective.’
‘I’d imagine it’s much like being a man, only we have to stick a funnel into the juice bottle before we piss in it. Look, I’m happy to answer a few questions but I don’t want any more publicity and I usually work on my own.’
‘You don’t have to worry about being identified and the thing is, I don’t have any specific questions to ask. I just wanted to soak up the atmosphere, see how you go about things. It’s the little details that add veracity. Like the whiskey bottle. I wouldn’t have expected that from a female PI.’
‘What
did
you expect?’
‘In my rough draft I have her drinking green tea.’
I stuck my fingers in my mouth and pretended to gag.
‘You have to admit, the whiskey’s a bit of a cliché. Along with the chrome desk fan.’ He nodded in its direction. Cheeky bastard.
‘I’d pay you for your time,’ he went on.
‘Yeah?’ I tried not to look too interested, but the truth was I was desperate for money. I’d gone into the red to get myself started and the paying jobs were only just starting to dribble in. I wasted a lot of time talking to window shoppers and freaks who’d seen me in the paper, knew I’d worked as a stripper and wanted to gawk or, worse, ask me on a date. I had debts coming out my arse and the combined rent on my office and one-bedroom flat in Elwood was nearly five hundred bucks a week.
‘Yeah. I’m pretty flush after the TV adaptation. I’ll pay your going rate just to be able to ride around with you. Say, a couple of days, sixteen hours or so? You’ll be doubling your money for the same amount of work. What
is
your hourly rate?’
I brief ly considered lying, but it was advertised on my website and in my newspaper ads. ‘Fifty.’
‘That’s ridiculously cheap.’
I shrugged. He was right, but being a relatively inexperienced one-woman operation who’d gotten herself very publicly in trouble more than once, it was the only way I could get work. It was my unique point of difference, to use small-business parlance.
‘The only stuff I have coming up is pretty boring,’ I said. ‘There’s a WorkCover job, following some guy who reckons he’s got a crook back.’
‘Sounds great. When’s it start?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Count me in.’
‘I’ll need the money upfront.’ Sixteen hours was eight hundred bucks and I was determined to get paid before he sobered up.
‘I don’t actually have any cash on me.’ He patted his pockets.
‘I have EFTPOS.’ I waved towards the card-swipe machine with a gameshow-model flourish. ‘Credit, cheque or savings?’
N
ick showed up at six the next morning looking relatively chipper and I wondered if he’d quit drinking and crashed out early, or woken up and consumed a heart-starter.
The job, though boring, was a great success. Tooling around in my work car, an innocuous nineties-model white Ford Laser, we tracked the target from his home in East St Kilda to a lumberyard in Moorabbin and eventually to a house site in Carrum where I got plenty of photos and video of him lugging timber, bending, stretching and even clambering about on a roof with the agility of a spider monkey. He knocked off at three, drove to an industrial area in Cheltenham and parked around the back of what looked like an old factory. We stayed on the street.
‘More building stuff?’ Nick squinted and scrutinised the facade.
‘Brothel.’
His eyes opened wide. ‘How do you know?’
‘No name on the building, street number so big it’s probably visible from space, windows blacked out.’ I’d spent a lot of time skulking around knocking shops on a case six months before.
Nick pointed to a smaller sign underneath the bright yellow numbers.
‘
Rear Entrance
. That a pun?’
‘Unintentional. I’ve got more than enough here to keep the insurers happy. Want to knock off and go to the pub?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
The Balaclava Hotel sat half a block down from my office and was one of the last watering holes left in the area that actually looked like a pub. The place was the size of a large lounge room, crammed with chipped tables and covered with well-worn carpet patterned in hieroglyphs of orange, brown and green. The bar in the back left-hand corner was just a metre and a half across and completely devoid of mirrors or fancy downlights. The only adornments on the beige walls were an old footy tipping chart and two posters, one for Fosters and the other advertising Carlton Draught. Half the patrons were over sixty and wheeling vinyl shopping trolleys. The other half sported faded tattoos on their arms, necks and, in one case, shaven scalp.
