GALAXY MOTEL is Book #3 in the Firefly Electrics Series. It will be released soon...

You can read the synopsis and the opening chapter below.

In Galaxy Motel:

Lennie, Joe, and their cockatoo Rawcus are haunted by underworld rumours linking them to a fortune in cash, belonging to terrorists, that fell onto a wharf during a cargo-loading accident.

When visitors carrying unusual tools, and wearing hardhats and sunglasses, knock on their front door, the trio needs to dance fast to avoid losing life or limb. They enlist the help of a blow-up doll named Mavis, a homemade electric chair, and the Galaxy Motel.

Meanwhile, their childhood friend, Pauline Gerrity, needs assistance to deal with a professional man who has a keen eye for underage girls who reside at Pauline’s refuge for abused mothers and their children. They’ve dubbed the man Mr Teflon for good reason: he’s a police force insider with a degree in psychology. Could a fantastic trip to a beach house help to rewire Mr T’s soul and make the world safer?

One thing’s for sure, Lennie, Joe, and Rawcus keep learning that the best-laid plans of cockatoos and men often go awry. Lennie is planning a seance to give the Scottish poet Robbie Burns an update on his mice angle…

CHAPTER 1 - ALIENS

THE THREE figures squeezed onto the front porch of Lennie’s terrace house didn’t look like the last of the Enoka brothers, or the men of Middle Eastern appearance he’d been expecting to arrive, unannounced at any time of the day or night, but most probably in the dark.

Sitting at his kitchen table, Lennie studied live video of the visitors on his laptop screen, captured by a mini-cam hidden inside a spider’s web that he’d spun into an upper corner of the porch using a spray can from a party shop.  

The trio’s lemon-fluoro safety vests were playing havoc with his equipment’s colour-scales, but the matching hardhats perched atop their skulls displayed a clear corporate logo: Sydney Water.

Lennie sensed the motley trio knew as much about industrial-scale plumbing as his neighbour’s one-eyed black cat, Bruce, who was deboning a rat on the step outside the open door from Lennie’s kitchen to the back garden.

The biggest hard-hatter rapped his knuckles on the front door. One of his colleagues, who was almost as skinny as the long-handled shovel he was carrying, shuffled behind him.

The third, rounder visitor, held a red, arm’s-length tube which Lennie figured might contain a rolled-up map about water pipes – or it might contain a venomous snake, a squeeze-shooter of sulphuric acid, a cyanide-salted baguette sandwich, a Molotov cocktail in a slender bottle…the list went on in Lennie’s mind, which was juggling the molecules of a joint of Mars Grass he’d smoked minutes earlier.

The biggest hardhat was carrying an official-looking black satchel tucked under an arm from which even more possibilities radiated.

“Piss off,” Lennie groaned aloud to his thoughts, which he could see breeding inside his brain faster than summer flies on outback roadkill.

“That won’t get rid of them,” said Joe.

Standing beside a kitchen bench, Joe towel-dried a floral-patterned china teapot. He was careful with the Queen of England’s Silver Jubilee commemorative tea set, which was an heirloom handed down by Lennie’s dead Aunty Doreen. He glanced at Lennie’s laptop screen.

“Do you reckon it’s them?”

Lennie rubbed his chin. “There’s a quick way to find out.”

High in a corner of the kitchen, a sulphur-crested cockatoo was riding a broomstick with an old-fashioned straw head that was secured by two ropes to ceiling hooks.

“Find out!” the bird screeched, rolling upside down on the stick before swinging by one claw with Olympian aplomb.

“That’s what I like about you, Rawcus,” Lennie replied, blinking at a flickering perception that the bird was a very small person wearing a white-feathered Mardi Gras costume. “Original thinking.”

“You can talk! You fool!” Rawcus shot back, returning to the top of the broomstick in a blur of flapping wings.

Watching Rawcus astride the stick reminded Joe of the witch in a storybook he’d been given for his adult literacy class homework and that he had read yesterday to some kids at his friend Pauline Gerrity’s refuge for women and children.

Lennie shut his laptop lid and winked at Joe. “They don’t look like tea drinkers to me. Special brew?”

Joe nodded and opened a cupboard. “Just give me a sec.”

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

“Mate,” Lennie said. “I think if we don’t Open Sesame pronto, we’ll have a terrible mess on our hands that’ll be visible from the street.”

Joe shared Lennie’s concern about the possible creation of a police-magnet if the door got busted and hell broke loose. Best to get these visitors inside. He spooned his home-blend coffee mix into a glass plunger pot and whistled a happy tune from Disney's Snow White. He used tongs to place white cubes from a jar into a sugar bowl. Joe patted his pink and blue, hibiscus-print apron. “Ready.”

Lennie went to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on his face, deliberately leaving a few tell-tale droplets on his freshly shaven skull. He stepped from the kitchen into the sitting room where he glanced in a wall mirror and hand-brushed his tight black T-shirt and skinny jeans before hoofing barefoot along the hallway to the door. He opened it and grinned wet-browed at the visitors. “Sorry, I was in the shower. Can I help you?”

The chunky leader was wearing wraparound sunglasses; a blue teardrop was tattooed under one of his eye sockets. He said, “We’re from Sydney Water, sir. I’m afraid there’s a blockage in the sewers that run through the back of this group of houses. We need to investigate.”

“Now?” said Lennie, trying to disguise his dislike of people who faked tears.

“Yes, sir. There are several houses downhill from you where the toilets are blocked and overflowing. If yours are not already, you will be next.”

“Shit,” said Lennie.  

Mr Teardrop grunted and impatiently switched his satchel from hand to hand. 

This was a humourless character on a humourless mission, concluded Lennie. But what was the mission? “So you’d like to take your team through to our back garden, and do some digging by the look of it?”

“If it’s not inconvenient.”

Lennie tried to fathom hardhat’s accent. It didn’t sound foreign or have a Middle Eastern flavour. It was more Aussie-outback, Pommy-heritage, white farm-boy. Maybe they really were from Sydney Water. “Come in.”

As the leader stepped to the same foot-level with Lennie inside the doorway, Lennie looked up and noted that this bloke was as big as Joe, which was pretty big, so he would be hard to put down if hand-to-hand combat erupted. Lennie reminded himself where his brass knuckleduster was located.

The sun-burned shovel-carrier was about Lennie's height and wiry. The words love and hope were tattooed under his major knuckles. He had the poise of a stick-fighter from the Billy Tang Martial Arts Academy up the street. Lennie gave himself a better than even chance there.

The tube carrier’s body looked remarkably like a basketball that had four, raw beef sausages plugged into it. The appendages were trying to pass themselves off as arms and legs. Lennie conceded that the strange limbs, and the likeness of her head to a sweet potato, were probably exacerbated by the Mars Grass. There was a faint line of dark fuzz on the skin above her red-lipsticked top lip, which was part of a quite voluptuous pair, Lennie had to acknowledge, edible even, like two boiled cocktail franks squeezed together. He felt hungry and fought the urge to take a bite.

The visitors kept their sunglasses and hardhats on as they politely brushed their boots on the doormat, and stepped inside. Lennie closed the door behind them, feeling uneasy about the fact these plumbers wanted to protect their skulls inside the house. And their work boots were far too clean. It was as if these characters were so confident, or stupid, or disrespectful of their targets, that they couldn’t be bothered applying some mud as a disguise. That sort of stuff was Camouflage 101, for fuck’s sake.

“Ah,” Lennie silently told himself, “don’t be paranoid, maybe they’re just spick and span types.”  

“Gidday,” said Joe. The tangled mop of his red hair brushed the top of the door arch as he stepped from the kitchen into the sitting room to greet his guests. With five people inside it, the living space felt as crowded as a peak hour bus and smelled like pea and ham soup. Joe noticed sweat dripping from the biggest hardhat’s brow, and it was a cool day, so he shot a wink at Lennie.

“The garden’s out there through the kitchen,” said Lennie, waving a hand into the adjoining room like a wanky waiter directing customers to a table. "Just step around the cat. He's blind in one eye and as deaf as a doornail, so there's no point trying to talk to him."

The visitors shuffled into the kitchen – skinny carrying his shovel; ball-girl her long red tube; and big hardhat his shifty leather satchel.

“Giss a kiss, love!” demanded Rawcus, rocking on his broomstick before tumbling over to swing by one claw and poke out his pink tongue.

Big hardhat and his female sidekick ducked from the shock of threatened sexual assault and turned towards the source. The shovel carrier was slow off the mark, as if he was hard of hearing, eventually following his companion’s gazes and poking the shovel at Rawcus like a medieval lance.

“Easy, mate,” Joe growled at the shovel man. “You’re not that good looking.”

With Lennie and Joe in the living room and the front door shut, and with all three hardhats in the kitchen, the biggest hardhat reached into his satchel – and whipped out a pistol.

He pointed the gun in the direction of Lennie and Joe, swinging its nose from man-to-man.

“Alright, cunts,” he growled. “Let’s stop fucking around. We want the money. Now!”

Lennie and Joe sighed and looked at each other like joggers after a marathon who thought they'd finished only to be told there was more to go.

“What money?” said Lennie, wondering if these visitors knew what was under the floor in their garden shed. 

“Don’t fuck with me, son.” Big hardhat aimed at Lennie’s chest. “We know all about the wharf.”

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