Justice Machine
Copyright © Mark Furness 2020
Chapter 1 - The Dawning
FOG APPEARS UPON THE SEA, speared here and there by sunlight through gaps in the clouds. On the deck of Flamingo Sky, Joe peers into the mist through the telescopic sight of a rifle.
“Can you see him?” says Lennie, who cups a hand to an ear to amplify a faint mechanical throbbing inside the murk. “Can you hear that?”
“Jesus Christ!” yells Joe. In the crosshairs of the magnified circle, the hazy, brown hulk of a ship is growing large. Filthy smoke is spewing from its funnel.
“Let me see,” says Lennie, taking the rifle from Joe and peering into the scope. “It’s the Lord of Saigon! They’re gonna cut us in half!”
He tosses the rifle to Joe and presses the ignition button on the inboard engine, but it fails to fire, coughing instead.
“Fifteen seconds,” says Joe.
Flamingo’s engine coughs uselessly again…
Chapter 2 - Paper Rain
Ten Days Earlier…
JOE CAN’T read far beyond street signs and his dead dad’s Phantom comics. So Lennie reads for him. It started at primary school behind the scoreboard at the sports oval after classes. Today, they’re both 33 and sitting under blue sky at a table in the back garden of their terrace house, a few blocks from their old seat of learning. Joe plants a hand as wide as a dinner plate upon the front page of The Sydney Daily News and slides the newspaper across the table.
He wants to know the contents of an article so he can adjust the odds of him and Lennie being caught by any number of catchers for what they’ve just done. Joe is the primary threat calculator in their relationship because he has a knack for assessing probability as opposed to possibility, the latter being more Lennie’s turf.
Lennie glances at the front page pointers to the inside stories. “Looks like we’re on three,” he says, comforted that their news sits at an odd number. Hopefully, they won’t need his grandad’s old escape hatch today.
Joe plugs a handmade cigarette between lips as plump as hot-dogs, flicks a match and lights up. He leans back and feels the sun powering him like it does the solar panels on their roof.
Enjoy this moment, Joe tells himself because if, according to the article, the news is good for us, the day just gets better. If it’s bad? Well, why rush into that awareness on such a cracking morning? Although if the shit is about to hit the fan, it’d be handy to know when to duck. He looks at a timber paling fence behind a ramshackle rainbow of flowers in a narrow garden bed beside the back gate. When the sun’s shadow hits the pink zinnias, he’ll call time on Lennie.
Lennie sips tea from a delicate china cup, puts it back in its saucer, and resumes carving a slender stick of cedarwood with a pocket knife. The stick reminds him of his Aunty Doreen, whom doctors labelled a Polydactyl and paraded as a live exhibit at universities years ago. As a kid, Lennie thought it meant Aunty D was a dinosaur, but it turned out that she was desired because she was born with six fingers on her left hand. Her extra digit was the inspiration for the carvings he calls Lucky Jacks.
Wind swirls. Lennie slams his fist on the newspaper to stop its pages blowing away. Uh, oh. He hopes Joe didn’t notice the frustration in his slam. Lennie’s problem is that he believes in luck and the regular practice of taking action to assist it, such as carrying a Lucky Jack in his pocket, but he stuffed up this area of operations yesterday and hasn’t told Joe.
Joe shapes his lips into an O-ring to chimney smoke into the sky, careful to keep the chemical waste away from a sulphur-crested cockatoo who is standing on the table, breakfasting on dried pumpkin seeds that have been dusted with chili powder. Rawcus aims a blue-ringed, black eye at Joe and cracks a seed with a beak that can guillotine bones. “Whoop-whoop!” the bird hoots, bouncing from claw-to-claw as if dancing on hot embers.
Joe shifts his gaze from the bird and peers across the table at a creature that looks so much like a black panther it makes his skin crawl: although Lennie’s head is clean-shaven and his skin the hue of honeycomb, it is the way that Lennie is shaped and how he moves that inspires this perception in Joe, aided by Lennie’s fondness for wearing body-hugging black T-shirts and jeans. The fact that Joe is testing a new strain of home-grown marijuana they call Mars Grass helps too. He hands the reefer to the panther.
Joe pats Rawcus’s neck. Stuff the zinnia sundial, he thinks. He nods at the newspaper. “Can we get that crystal ball going?”
Lennie has been scanning the news on TV, radio, and online – no alarm bells there. But the old-fashioned print version of the Daily News is promising its readers an Exclusive story about events that occurred on a city wharf yesterday, including photos. The front page beckons Lennie like the lid of Pandora’s Box and he’s in no hurry to unleash the unknown. He puffs on the reefer.
Joe cups a hand and whispers into Rawcus’s ear. The bird turns a hard eye upon Lennie.
“Get – on with it!” screeches Rawcus. “Get – on with it!”
“OK, keep your feathers on,” Lennie concedes, resting the reefer in the dark side of a black and white ashtray that is shaped into the cuddling teardrops of Yin and Yang.
He opens page three and reads aloud the headline: Terror Money Rains from Heaven.
The article describes an “incident” which occurred yesterday at dawn. It had been a glistening, but otherwise unremarkable, Monday, drying out from a rain-washed night.
*
Seconds before the incident, Lennie and Joe had been fishing off the splintery edge of a timber dock first hammered into Sydney Harbour a hundred years ago. Now the rust-eaten backwater was used mostly by foreign owners of small ships who were happy with C-grade facilities and D-grade security. Especially the latter, because it enabled customs and border patrol officers, who favoured baseball caps and dark sunglasses, to walk into the shadows trailing their open palms like relay runners waiting for baton changes of cash to keep moving.
After entering the wharf through a loose flap in a cyclone-mesh fence fastidiously maintained by locals, Lennie, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Firefly Electrics Corporation, and Joe, his sole employee, spiritual adviser, and consulting mathematician on matters such as probability, were enjoying the early light for a spot of angling using bamboo rods before heading to their first paying job of the day installing fire alarms at a nursing home.
They always used bamboo rods, in part because of their old-fashioned look and the way they softly flexed upon both cast and reel-in, but the main reason they used them was because they were made of wood.
Wood, in their experience, had special powers, like water and lightning. It was composed by Mother Nature, like flesh and bone. Wood was their sort of stuff. So much so that Lennie makes sure to touch a hand-carved Lucky Jack, or Jack for short, at least three times a day. These quick taps are low-cost insurance for their partnership against life’s risks.
Lennie keeps a range of hand-carved finger Jacks in a timber box on his bedroom dressing table like another man might collect fancy watches. The box had briefly housed his aunty’s ashes – minus her left hand which Aunty D had donated in her will to a university medical school so they could preserve it inside a block of a see-through resin. Lennie was minded to contest the will, but Joe, who was working at the time in his spiritual advisory role, suggested wooden replicas of her extra pinky might solve a lot of problems.
At the wharf around 5.30am, just before the incident, they had been dangling their lines, bare legs and feet, over the side of the wharf next to a rust-scabbed vessel named Lord of Saigon. The hoods of their sweaters were pulled over their heads against the morning chill.
The sewage pipe from the Lord had spewed a lumpy stew of unintended burley into the water. Lennie and Joe had dropped hooks into it, baited with white strips of octopus. A handful of plump pink snapper flapped about in their plastic catch bucket. Lennie looked up.
“Did God do that?” he had said, waving the tip of his rod back and forth at some peach-coloured streaks in the grey clouds above the brightening horizon.
“Which God are you thinking of?” Joe said absently, regretting his bite on Lennie’s hook as soon as the words left his lips.
“Delling,” said Lennie, eyebrows raised as if the answer was obvious. “God of Dawn, Father of Dagr by Nótt.”
Hooley dooley, Joe thought, being careful not to say a further word. Lennie’s off again with his Viking raving. Discovering his nanna’s Norwegian roots last year had sent Lennie Larson blazing a trail through the internet to flesh out the origins of his life. Trust Lennie to end up among the gods and stars. It was a cute idea, though, that the God of Dawn slept with the Goddess of Night who gave birth to a son called Day.
Joe was sure, or pretty sure, that all Gods were bullshit, even when Joe was under the influence of Mars Grass. But under his hoodie, he was wearing a favourite T-shirt given to him by an Aboriginal friend. Printed in chalky white lines on the shirt’s ochre brown front was a grasshopper-like figure drawn from the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Namarrgon, his friend said, wears stone axes on his head, and elbows and feet, which he uses to split dark clouds and make lightning that he throws from the sky, sometimes at people. He speaks with thunder and lives in a puddle when he isn’t at work. Joe tried not to do it, but Lennie’s talk of Delling had flicked a switch. Joe glanced into a pool of leftover rain at the mat of the wharf by his hip, but he couldn’t see anything that resembled Namarrgon.
“Mate,” said Joe, with a view to earthing the flesh-and-bone electrician sitting beside him. “Is that a fish on your line?”
As Lennie reeled in his fishless hook to re-bait, he and Joe yawned and paid little attention to the Lord of Saigon or a four-wheeled crane on the wharf going rhythmically about its business lifting bales of paper from the long back tray of a parked truck.
Nor did they pay attention to two weather-beaten CCTV cameras fixed to poles on the wharf. The manmade eyes were focused on two other men who were wearing green fluoro vests and yellow hard hats, sharing duties to hook a chain from the nose of the crane onto the bales and give a thumbs-up to the driver before the loads were hoisted into the air, swung across the gunnels of the Lord, and lowered into its bowels. Lights blinked, bells beeped. Seagulls squawked angrily at the meanness of Lennie and Joe, who shooed them away from their bucket of fish.
“Beautiful spot, this,” said Joe. “We’re blessed.”
“You sound like Father Francesco,” said Lennie, a bitter taste burning his tongue as he uttered the priest’s name.
“Sorry,” said Joe, looking down through the green water at thick flaps of waving brown kelp. He would have sworn Father Francesco’s face had drifted behind the weeds, but he said nothing.
A terrible mechanical screech tore the air.
“Fuck me drunk,” cried Lennie as a refrigerator-sized bale wrapped in black plastic tumbled from a snapped steel rope on the nose of the crane.
Lennie and Joe were only a few metres from the bale’s point of impact on the concrete wharf. The bale ended its three-storey fall with a thunderous thump and hiss of air, spewing a multi-coloured load that they thought, at first, was coloured feathers erupting from the bodies of some terribly compressed, smuggled parrots. Then people ran and yelled and stuffed their pockets with the flittering stuff.
Lennie had reached instinctively for the Jack inside the pocket of his shorts but failed to find it. His finger found a hole instead. The discovery of this non-existence made him shiver.
He had overridden the weird feeling, refusing to let it erode the opportunity that was coming into focus around their heads. But as he jumped to his feet, he knew something had twisted irreversibly in their sliver of time and space.
“Move, matey, move,” urged Lennie. “And tie ya hoodie down.”
They grabbed as much as they could, stuffing most of it into a super-tough plastic garbage bag inside which they had carried their breakfast of bacon and egg sandwiches wrapped in foil, bananas, and shortbread finger biscuits. The rest of the flittering stuff they had crammed up their jumpers and T-shirts, down their underpants, and into their hastily emptied fish bucket. Looking like poorly-constructed Michelin men, they scarpered back through the flap in the cyclone-mesh fence, trying not to get torn on a dangling sign that said: 24-Hour Video Surveillance.
CHAPTER 3 – TRIXIE TALAVEDA
IN THE BACK GARDEN of their house, Lennie reads aloud from the Daily News:
“Exclusive: A plot to secretly ship $30 million from Australia to fund an international network of Islamic State terrorists came unstuck yesterday when a crane driver dropped a bale of waste paper onto a Sydney wharf.
“The bale was filled with close to $1 million in cash, mostly Australian dollars but including Euros, British pounds, and US notes.
“A search of the remaining 29 bales at the wharf, some already loaded on the ship and others still on the delivery truck, revealed that each bale had been packed inside with used bank bills.”
“Crikey,” says Joe, rubbing the ruddy stubble on his chin. “That crane driver’s slip-up has put a swerve on a lot of lives.”
Lennie nods and ploughs on:
“The bales, being loaded on a vessel named Lord of Saigon, were described in the ship’s log as waste newspaper destined for recycling in a factory near the Port of Iskenderun in southern Turkey, near the border with Syria.
“A navigation chart on the vessel showed a route with stop-offs in Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. These are all countries where IS has active cells that have survived the devastation of the extremist group in Iraq and Syria.
“A government official, who did not want to be named, said Western intelligence agencies believed the money was destined to be dropped in batches to IS agents in these countries.
“The official said the money was believed to be the proceeds of an IS-related drug syndicate which supplies the Australian market with heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines-based substances, including ecstasy and ice, as well as muscle-building steroids for the gymnasium black market.
“The Turkish paper factory was linked to a Russian military arms maker suspected of supplying weapons to IS in Syria – as well as the regime of Syrian dictator, Basher al-Assad, including banned chemical warfare agents that he has used on his citizens.”
“Hang on,” says Joe. “So these Ruskies are playing both sides of the fence?”
Lennie nods. “That’s the military-industrial complex for you the world over.”
Joe, who is curious about what Lennie means but is not in the mood for a half-day lecture, says. “Can you climb off that high horse of yours?”
Lennie huffs smoke. “Arms manufacturers like to make sure both sides in a war are equally tooled up.”
“So it’s a fairness thing, yeah?”
Lennie nods. “Otherwise, the fight won’t last past a couple of rounds.”
“OK, I think I get it,” says Joe. “If it’s a first-round knockout, everyone wants their money back. But if the punch-up goes fifteen rounds, the promoters make a killing.”
“Something like that,” says Lennie, who is side-tracked by a whiff in the air: he could swear Aunty D’s lavender perfume is floating into his nostrils. He is annoyed that he finds himself pondering a ghost. Then again, he’s pretty sure it will pass. He doesn’t believe the doctors’ claims that he suffers psychosis from time to time and, therefore, should not smoke dope, nor take other perception-altering substances, unless of course, it’s the medicos factory-made gear called anti-depressants. Still, despite this confidence in his mental faculties, Lennie reaches across the table and touches Joe’s arm to make sure his friend’s body is not an apparition. He returns to the news.
“OK, here’s our bit.”
“Police are searching for two fishermen who escaped with an estimated $500,000. Anyone with information should phone Crime Stoppers.”
“Sneaky fuckers!” Joe blurts. “We only got a bit over two hundred K!”
Lennie shakes his head. “Coppers must have put their hands in the honey pot, and now they’re trying to stick it on these mystery fishermen.”
Lennie shows Joe a series of colour photos that accompany the story. The grainy pictures have been reproduced from the wharf’s half-knackered CCTV cameras and are spread across the page. They show two murky figures lugging a bulging plastic bag and a bucket. Their faces are well-hidden inside the hoisted hoods of their black pullovers. They are wearing short, grey pants and flip-flops on their feet.
Joe stands and steps to a hip-high steel drum from which smoke is rising. He stirs the burning contents with a broom handle, which flames from the tip when he pulls it out. Inside the drum are four roasting hoodies. They’d burned their fishing clothes yesterday, but upon a second wave of analysis, they had decided to burn every hoodie in the house.
“Our chances of capture?” says Joe, using the flames coming off the broom handle to light a fresh joint which he’s plucked from a bowl of pre-rolled Mars Grass on the table. “Mm…after seeing those pictures?” He taps his forehead: “I calculate sweet FA.”
Lennie wants to agree with Joe about sweet fuck all, but Joe still doesn’t know the Jack was missing from Lennie’s pocket on the wharf.
Joe says, “No need to pull down the growing room.”
Lennie gulps and looks up at the back wall of their terrace and the drawn blinds on the window of the spare bedroom upstairs. Lennie, as an electrician, and Joe as a skilled gardener, can rig things such as solar-powered, hydroponic growing rooms with the same ease that Lennie’s Aunty D could bake strawberry-jam sponge cakes. Jesus, thinks Lennie, I could use a slice right now. Too bad Aunty D is dead.
“You’re leaking again,” says Lennie, taking the remains of the joint offered by Joe. “Do you want a bandage?”
Lennie is gazing at a gash on Joe’s right palm that opened while the big feller was stacking squares of rust-crusted steel building mesh against a fence by the back gate to the lane. Joe’s blood is on the mesh which is secretly destined for a seabed, and Lennie wonders if a person’s DNA can survive immersion in saltwater to the point of being detectable by police forensics.
“She’ll be right,” says Joe, who presses his cut against the white singlet stretched over his freckled weightlifter’s chest. He’s more disturbed by a piercing burn on the side of his skull. Joe plunges the fingers of his un-cut hand into his knotted mop of red hair, digging a thumb into his scalp behind an ear to grind some tangled muscle fibre. The tension always pings in that spot, reminding him of his old headmaster’s knuckles rapping on his skull. “Anybody home?” Mr Darian used to say, answering before Joe could reply, “No. Empty as outer space!”
Lennie cocks an ear. “Hear that?”
The wail of distant sirens wafts over the back fence. The chuff-chuff of a helicopter breaks in. Lennie, Joe, and Rawcus look up as the furious beast floats into view.
“Shit!” says Lennie, snatching off the table the bowl of joints and plunging it under his chair.
Rawcus shuffles close to Joe, who pats the bird’s sulphur crest reassuringly, and grabs the flapping newspaper with his spare hand.
The blue and white chopper hovers and tilts its nose down, dropping low enough for the ground dwellers to see the pilot’s face, most of it hidden behind fly-eyed aviation glasses.
Autumn leaves on Joe’s delicate Japanese maple tear off in the maelstrom. Squinting through the yellow and bronze confetti, Joe doesn’t need a uni degree to recognize the word Police emblazoned on the fuselage. Lennie darts into the nearby garden shed.
“Faark,” Joe hisses. Are the coppers smashing our front door in, he wonders, while we sit here like dopy ducks?
The chopper swings its scorpion tail, keeping its nose in one spot.
Inside Joe’s skull, thoughts spray as hot and bright as sparks from a metal grinder. He gives the pilot a thumbs-up as if he’s impressed by his high-flying act. Joe thinks: it’s never a good idea to run from a snarling dog; I’ll do a test before we dive down the escape hatch and draw a posse by acting guilty.
The chances of the pilot being a long-distance lip reader with the smarts of a bush turkey are pretty slim, Joe figures. But what the hell. He stands and points north, stabbing with his index finger and mouthing into the mechanical din: “They went that way!”
The chopper swings away in the opposite direction to Joe’s pointer. Sirens howl.
The chopper boomerangs back.
Rawcus, his sulphur crest rising and falling, cries, “Fuck off! Fuck off!”
The windstorm from the helicopter’s blades rips the newspaper from Joe’s distracted grip. Pages fly, sucked up and tossed in all directions. Rawcus cries his orders. In the chaos, Joe loses clear sight of the sky. Rawcus’s cries become louder. Pages rain upon the garden.
Lennie emerges from the shed, batting away floating sheets of newsprint. Rawcus’s eyes are as wide as coat buttons.
Joe coaxes Rawcus onto his arm and calls to Lennie, “Let’s hit the tunnel!”
Joe moves towards the shed, heading for a trapdoor in the floor and a steel rung ladder built by Lennie’s granddad that descends into the labyrinth of a forgotten coal mine that fed boilers in steam-driven local factories a century ago. In the corner of his eye, Joe sees a dark object sailing over the back fence.
Thud! A black backpack slides to a halt on the brick paving in front of Lennie and Joe.
“This is weird,” says Lennie. “First the wharf rains money on us, now this?”
Joe nods at the motionless UFO. “Could be a setup by the bent cops. Should we toss it back?”
Lennie taps the Jack he’s been carving.
The backpack is followed over the fence by a wild-eyed, shirtless young man who is stringy as sinew and pale as boiled pork atop his filthy blue jeans. He bounces to his feet and stares with black eyes at his involuntary hosts. Outside in the lane, voices shout, sirens whoop. Blue and red lights bounce off a lamppost and reflect into the garden.
Two coppers, pointing pistols and wearing flack-jackets, rise as if on stilts behind the usually head-high fence, and aim at the kid’s back.
Joe glances at Lennie. “Horse patrol?”
A copper yells at the kid, “Get on the ground! Face down!”
The kid keeps his back to the cops and stands tall. His eyes flick from Lennie’s eyes to Joe’s eyes, going like windscreen wipers with pink balls plugged on the tips. His eyes stop.
Lennie sighs. He’s seen that look before. The kid’s not too worried about being turned into Swiss Cheese by a hail of lead. “Don’t do it,” Lennie says.
“Why the fuck not?” says the kid, his chest rising and falling.
“See that bird,” says Lennie, nodding at Rawcus perched on Joe’s arm. “He’ll be traumatised for life if he watches you go down in a blaze of madness.”
Crash! The timber gate flies open. A copper clutching a battering ram charges into the garden.
“Uh, oh! Uh, oh!” cries Rawcus.
Lennie, looking through the busted gate, sees the nose of a parked police paddy wagon. The blue-shirted gunmen behind the fence must be standing on its roof.
In the garden, the copper tosses the battering ram and draws a Taser from his utility belt. He yells at the kid, “Drop, son – or you’ll get 50,000 volts up your arse!”
Rawcus bobs and screeches, “Up your arse! Up your arse!”
The kid grins at the bird. He drops to his knees then goes belly down on the paving. The cop with the Taser rushes in and falls with a knee on the kid’s neck.
Lennie says cooly to the copper, “You don’t want to end up in there, mate.”
“Where?”
Lennie nods at the front page of the Daily News that’s flapping against a flower bed.
The copper harrumphs, lifts his knee and stands, keeping his Taser aimed at the kid. A colleague jumps off the roof of the paddy wagon and lopes through the gate to handcuff the villain.
“Do you keep that bird in a cage?” the kid says to his hosts as he’s hauled off the ground by his captors.
“We’ve taken the door off,” says Lennie. “Gives him choices. Think about it, hey?”
The Taser cop, who’s built like a greyhound, saunters over to the drum in which Joe’s hoodies are smouldering and sniffs the fumes. “Who burns stuff in their garden these days?”
“Just getting rid of some rubbish, aren’t we Joe?”
Joe nods.
The copper looks at the squares of steel mesh leaned against a fence. “What’s that for?”
“Oh,” says Lennie. “My mate here’s a sculptor, aren’t you Joe? It’s still at the concept stage.”
“What’s the concept?”
“Top secret,” says Lennie. “You know what artists are like.”
“Wankers, most of em,” says the copper.
Joe grins. Rawcus slants an ear at the copper.
“Your talking bird,” says the officer. “Does he just copy, or can he do his own stuff?”
“Bit of both,” says Lennie. “He’s been on TV.”
“Anything I’d know?”
“Bird seed ads. But he got the sack.”
“Why’s that?”
“Abusive language.”
The copper chuckles. “How long will he live?”
“His mum fell off the perch at eighty-three.”
The officer writes Lennie’s and Joe’s names in his notebook and heads for the smashed gateway exit. He looks down at a fallen newssheet and puts his boot on the edge of the photo of the mystery fishermen from the wharf.
“Lucky pricks,” says the copper. “Scooped up half a million bucks. I bet they think they won the bloody lottery.”
“Do you reckon they’ll get caught?” says Lennie.
“Probably. There’s a special taskforce set up to investigate that whole shit fight. State police, Feds, anti-terrorism.”
“Sounds formidable,” says Lennie, who’s buoyed by the information. “Do you think they’ll suffer from too-many-cooks syndrome?”
“What?”
A police siren goes whoop-whoop. “Got to go,” says the copper, who picks the kid’s backpack off the pavement. “We might be back to get a witness statement. Sorry about the gate. If you want compo, come down to the station and fill in a report.”
“No big deal,” says Lennie. “We’re happy to assist the State.”
Joe looks at his feet and massages his aching eyeballs. He wants to say, “Shut the fuck up, Lennie, and get this plod off the premises”.
“That’s very citizenly of you,” says the copper, who turns to leave.
“What did he do, that kid?” says Lennie.
“Junkie. Robbed a chemist. Grabbed some cash and a few boxes of opiates. Worth a fair bit on the black market, I’d say.”
Lennie nods. “Sooner that bag is locked up in the police station safe, the better, hey. Wouldn’t want it getting lost along the way.”
Joe eyes Lennie to tone down the smartarse act.
The copper eyes Lennie. “Have I met you before? You look familiar.”
“No officer. I think I just have one of those common faces.”
The policeman turns and grinds a boot on the fishermen’s photos.
As the police wagon rumbles away, Joe says, “Will you ever learn not to pull a tiger by the tail?”
Lennie grins. “Let’s put the gate back.”
“Why do you think that kid picked our joint?” says Joe.
Lennie points at the roof of the shed. Bruce, their neighbour’s one-eyed, deaf, black cat lies purring on the sun-drenched, rippled-iron roof. “We’re a magnet for a certain type of character.”
Joe nods at the shed. “You’re grandad’s tunnel. Did you get that trapdoor open?”
“Are you kidding? The bloody things rusted tight as a priest's wallet.”
Rawcus flaps from Joe’s arm and flys onto the roof to join Bruce. They look down upon the humans. Rawcus slants his head as if thinking. “Wankers!” he cries. “Most of em!”
*
With the gate resurrected with new bolts, Joe steps across the garden to inhale the calming, sweet perfume of white jasmine vines that are blooming on one of the paling fences that square him and Lennie and shade them from nosy neighbours.
Lennie checks the time on his phone. “We’re running behind schedule. Let’s do that test run now.”
Joe checks that his cut hand has stopped bleeding and turns to the inflictor of his wound: the set of six, window-sized squares of steel mesh leaning against the back fence, each one made from the pre-welded rods builders use to reinforce concrete floors.
He opens the flaps of a cardboard box that is sitting beside the mesh, reaches in, and breaks from their plastic packages eight heavy-duty padlocks. Joe hates plastic, but he is yet to find an item in a hardware store that isn’t wrapped in the crap. He uses the padlocks to join the corners of the squares.
Lennie steps into the garden shed. He emerges carrying an iPad and sits back at the round table.
“Next to a pyramid,” Lennie observes, looking up from flicking through pages on his e-reader, “my favourite shape is a cube. And yours will flat-pack. Fabulous work, cobber.”
Joe is into ball shapes and circles. But round things aren’t suited to this particular job. He smiles, shaking his head. Why doesn’t Lennie just say what the steel thing is? A cage.
Lennie turns back to reading an article from the internet about what happens when you mix household bleach and rubbing alcohol. It says the resulting gas can ruin your kidneys and liver. It can kill. It is called chloroform. Lennie already knows that. He is just checking the mixing ratios. He decides to run a test and steps back into the shed, returning with a green plastic bottle of isopropyl alcohol, a blue plastic bottle of bleach, a measuring cup, and a glass into which he mixes a shot of the requisite chemicals. He takes a sniff. “Whoa!”
The gas doesn’t knock him out, but closing his eyes does draw a ghostly lump tumbling out of the night-time region in his skull. The face of his ex-parole officer, Trixie Talaveda, bumps around like a deflating party balloon, farting with a raspy voice. Trixie is a childless, single woman about five decades old who has described Lennie’s and Joe’s relationship as one of “dysfunctional co-dependency” that needs to be dismantled.
The term means bugger all to Lennie and Joe, who simply regard themselves as two sides of the same coin – and have ignored her advice. But Trixie gate-crashes Lennie’s mind from time to time as unpredictably as her knocks on their real front door.
“It’s unhealthy to view the world through the eyes of another,” Trixie said when she first visited their home and discovered that Lennie read aloud to his housemate. “It’s dealing in second-hand reality,” she had croaked, flicking cigarette ash into her unfinished cup of tea. “You boys need to let go of each other and see your separate ways.”
In the garden, Lennie manages to burst Trixie’s balloon by squeezing the Jack he has just carved. He forces his thoughts to turn left and reasons, silently, that because the vast majority of the dodgy cash at the wharf was quickly recovered by the authorities, the main weight of the investigation by that special taskfore – at least officially – will be leaned against finding the source of the moolah and probing its links to IS and the Russian arms maker, rather than hunting two fishermen who exploited a lucky break. But he knows people of some kind will come after their part of the windfall in time. He just doesn’t know who, how, or when.
“OK,” says Lennie. “Now that we know your cube’s a goer, let’s hit the road to the cemetery, and plant some seeds of retribution along the way.”
“Retri-what?” says Joe.
“We’re gonna give those shifty shits from the wharf a taste of their own medicine.”
Joe nods. “Nice. I’ll grab the keys to the Firefly.”
Lennie is determined that despite the virtually limitless possibilities that fly from their current situation, which have been amplified by his failure to touch a Jack on the wharf yesterday, the normal rhythm of their lives must be maintained. Action must always trump contemplation, despite the pleasure he derives from the latter, especially over a few beers while sailing their little yacht, Flamingo Sky.
“I’ll cut the flowers,” says Joe, who notices the tiny white petals of the jasmine vines on the fence are smiling at him with cute little faces. Other beauties smile at him too: beds of red and orange poppies, golden daisies, purple dianthus, and the tall-stemmed, pink zinnias. It’s a miracle the cops and the kid didn’t harm them, but now Joe has to. He uses a pair of large dressmaking scissors to cut the flowers. “Sorry. Good cause,” he says to each flower as he goes.
Joe ties the flowers in two bundles using purple and yellow gift-wrapping ribbons recycled from Rawcus’s recent twenty-fifth birthday present.
Joe gave Rawcus a mirror on his special day, so the bird has company of his own kind, after a fashion, as he bobs about in his cage, which has its door removed in case Rawcus wants to step out on the town. Sometimes Rawcus is gone over the back fence and into the sky, for days on end, to heaven knows where. Joe knows some of the neighbourhood cats have an eye for Rawcus too. The bird is good pals with their neighbour’s cat, Bruce. But others want to turn him into dinner. Joe recently took to the vet a tabby that had a white cockatoo feather in its mouth and a severed foot on the end of a leg. He takes comfort that, unlike him and Lennie, Rawcus also has the power of flight at his wingtips if needed in an emergency.
This morning, Rawcus rides, with the pomp of a Roman emperor, on Joe’s shoulder from the front door of the house into the street. They all climb into a white work van. Signwriting on both sides of the long, tall vehicle reads Firefly Electrics. The capitals F and E are painted red and black and shaped like lightning bolts.
Lennie sits in the front passenger seat, placing the flowers beside him. Joe sits behind the steering wheel because he’s a cooler driver than Lennie and almost never draws the attention of the traffic police. Rawcus perches on a wooden rod fixed between the headrests of the front seats so that he can see out the windows. The van takes off. Rawcus swings backward headfirst, clinging to the rod like a gymnast past his prime. The bird flaps back up in a blur of white feathers, unleashing a blast of fowl language. When Joe brakes at a stop sign, Rawcus plunges forwards headfirst. Joe takes every opportunity to send Rawcus into a spin. It keeps the little feller fit. The bird sidesteps the workout by hopping onto Joe’s shoulder and clamping his beak on Joe’s hair whenever gravity demands it, occasionally adding an earlobe to the mix, which has the side-effect of smoothing Joe’s braking and acceleration.
The trio sails across the city, heading west to the Pinegrove Memorial Park at Blacktown Cemetery.
At a set of traffic lights, Joe is first in line to cross the intersection. When the signals turn from red to green, a motorist accelerates from the inside lane and nearly clips Joe’s front bumper in his desperation to get ahead of their van. Joe doesn’t blink. Lennie winds down his window.
“Fucking tool!” Lennie screams, sticking his arm out and thrusting his middle finger at the offender’s car.
“Try counting to nine, mate,” advises Joe, knowing it’s a waste of time suggesting even numbers like ten to Lennie.
Lennie counts to three, for the sake of economy, and pulls his hand back into the van.
“Faarking tool!” Rawcus screeches, looking at Lennie.
Lennie looks at Rawcus. “How about some original thought, mate?”
Rawcus raises his beak imperiously, as if such an idea is ridiculous, and turns to face the road ahead, tightening his claw-grip on Joe’s shoulder.
Lennie looks at the flowers on the seat beside him. Tools, he thinks. The dressmaking scissors that Joe had used to cut the flowers had belonged to Aunty D. She had taught Lennie that words were tools too, just like her scissors, and the pliers with which he now cuts electric cables. He’s spent a lot of years collecting a kit of words and the ideas they make. He finds reading as much fun as going to a hardware store, and he loves hardware stores. Bookshops, as far as Lennie can tell, are just hardware stores full of words. And how good are e-books, he thinks? If he wanted to, he could carry a thousand novels in his pocket on his phone. How to use words is a trick, though, the same as any tool. A string of words can be as dangerous as a chainsaw in the wrong hands. Their friend Pauline Gerrity, at her refuge for abused women and kids, is always stitching up those sorts of wounds.
Rawcus winks slowly at Lennie.
Lennie winks back. “Don’t you try that hypnotism shit on me,” he says, watching his arm lift and extend outside the open window. His hand flattens and flys like a bird’s wing, rising and falling. His thoughts fly too…he’s in the beer garden of the Rose & Thistle Hotel, aged thirteen, sitting at a table drinking raspberry soda and snacking on potato chips, adrift inside the smog of one of Aunty D’s cigarettes. Baby-faced Rawcus is standing on the table, chanting “three fives arr fif-teen…four fives arr twen-tee”. Aunty D is clasping a glass of beer and leading the multiplication table chorus. She drains her glass and turns to the newspaper’s puzzle page to build Lennie’s vocab using the crossword.
Joe slows for another red light. Lennie’s arm loses altitude, a tear drips from an eye, and visions of the man who drove Aunty D to her grave pile into his head like a football team of clones, pushing the old woman out of play. “Tick-tock,” Lennie whispers, recalling the sheets of steel-mesh that are leaning against the back fence at home, and the pile of padlocks beside them. “Tick-tock, Michael O’Hay.”
***