This Just In

Chapter 1 - Breaking News

2007-02-12T21:31:00.009+11:00

My great uncle Bob, long-time mayor of Upper Tilba Tilba, once said there are no surprises left after a long time in any job dealing with the public. He announced this two days before suddenly expiring of snakebite - a less than gruntled farmer protesting high local taxes sent him a death-adder in a U-post-it box. There are two points here: first - timing is everything. And second - you can tell old Bob never spent time in the state school system.

“This just in,” said Angie, my personal assistant, setting the 'phone back on its console. “There is a naked girl on the bandstand”.
Such news wouldn't raise an eyebrow if my office looked out over the stage at Sindy’s in the Cross. Or maybe the park at Tamarama beach. But in this particular case there was a certain element of the unexpected, because in fact it overlooked the assembly quadrangle of a pretty ordinary high school in the suburbs of Sydney - where I happen to have the misfortune of being one of the two deputy principals.
I got up and walked across to the window. This young woman was not quite naked. She had the most tiny of G-strings on, but the rest of her in all its glory was on full display. A pretty nice looking sweetie from this distance, about 17, tall, slim, blond hair, great tan all over.
“Nice eyes,” I said.
“I thought you’d be distracted by her other assets”.
“I’m a regular boy-scout”.
“I’m distracted.”
“Knock me down with a feather”.
Angie bats for the other team, 100%. Which breaks my heart on account I’m madly in love with her.
“That girl has one sensational body,” breathed Angie. "But she doesn’t look like one of ours." This was a bit of a relief, but not that much. She sure looked familiar.
It was pretty lucky the time was mid-lesson with no kids outside. But I could tell by the shouts, hoots and general noise level that quite a few were already checking the scene from the classroom windows.
“Angie, I’m going to see what this lady wants.”
“Crazy if you don’t.”
“ I'll buy you the latest JD Lang if you can get all the teachers who are off lessons onto the doors to the quad to keep the kids away”.
Angie looked disappointed. “Come on Pete, I should go with you. You need a woman out there.” There is nothing Angie would like more than a close-up of some gorgeous near naked young woman. Normally I don’t mind such a sight either, but this situation was a bit different. I shook my head.
“This place is starting to get to you Pete. You’re no fun anymore. I thought boy scouts are supposed to have fun”.
“When we aren’t untangling knots”.

As I walked towards the door to the quadrangle, I could hear the kids had a syncopated clapping going. Miss Suntan was doing a kind of wriggle-sway to it. I headed into the open to an instant swell of cheers, boos and hisses. There are about 25 rooms fronting the quad and around 500 of our 1200 kids were at the windows. The average teacher hasn’t got a hope in hell of sitting them down when a show like this is on. Many average teachers didn’t want to. I could see old Harry Watts peering over his student’s heads with a huge grin on his face. I swear the old bugger was salivating. I bet his pacemaker was bouncing off the redline right now. Careful Harry, you could fritz the wiring.
A small group of Year 8 grubs had just climbed out one of the ground floor rooms. Their teacher, Arty Albert was probably having a smoke in the staff toilet again, against all regulations, leaving his class unsupervised. Bad luck Albert, you miss the burlesque show.
I summonsed up the sergeant-major voice. “ Get back inside!” The kids fell over each other to comply. I have a reputation as a bit of a heavy around the place. That did not stop a renewed and louder round of boos and catcalls. The anonymity of the group makes people real brave.
As I walked towards the girl, I noticed she had new bronze streaks in her hair and a small Aquarius tattoo on her left shoulder I hadn’t seen before.
A very clear female voice in the crowd yelled “Don't hit her, Fuggly”, which broke everyone up. This referred to two things; a nasty rumour around the place that some transgressors get smacked when they displease me, plus the fact that I haven’t got the best looking head in town. As a matter of fact it falls into the category of “only his mother would love it”. ‘Fuggly’ of course is short for ‘Fucking ugly’. Kids are at the cutting edge when it comes to thinking up names.
I reached the foot of the bandstand and looked up at the girl..
She grinned. “Fuggly? Wow Pete. You sure generate a lot of respect around here”.
I ignored the comment. Never show you are riled is number one rule when dealing with junior smartarses. I stared at her left shoulder and then moved my gaze up to her beautiful baby blues. “Nice tatt, sweetheart. Who did that, one of those spaced out granola eaters down at New Age Haven?”
She rolled her eyes. “You are so phoney, Pete, with that Joe Cool routine. You are supposed to get pissed and ask me what I’m doing here”
“Okay, I’ll play along. I’m pissed. What the hell are you doing here. Why aren’t you at school?”
She smiled and tossed her long hair in that familiar way. “I’m stripping for money”.
“What does that mean? Who’s going to pay you to strip?”
“You are.”
“You’re dreaming”.
“No way. But you pay for me to keep my stuff on, not take more off”.
Jesus! A shakedown from a 16 year old Lady Godiva.
“Listen sungirl, get one thing clear. No more money from me. I can’t afford it. There is no way I’m paying out.”
“Is that a fact?” she grinned and grasped the strings of her mico bikini bottom and began to edge them even lower. The noise from the crowd swelled to a crescendo.
So what does a guy do? I had half a mind to let the little scrubber go ahead, but imagine the response. I would have half the bible-bashing parents from the Christian Coalition banging on the District Superintendent’s door howling about how their kids’ lives had been ruined forever by such a sight and screaming for my resignation. Not to mention how the school’s Moral Majority and Feministas would react. Already I was heavily into combat with the District School Superintendent and Head Office. I could not really afford any extra aggravation.
So I folded. “Relax girl, slow down.” I shot her a genuinely pissed look. “ How much do you need?”
She gave a little victory smirk. “Five hundred would be fine”.
“ Five hundred dollars?” I paused for dramatic effect and gave her the flinty eyed stare I reserve for people who need kicking into line - bad kids, debt defaulters, brawlers at night-clubs, trash talking checkout girls. “Listen to me, sweetheart. Listen real good...”
“That’s ungrammatical Pete. What were you before the big promotion to deputy principal? A metalwork teacher?”
She knew damn well my background was metalwork teaching.
Once again I ignored the provocation. “Listen to me.... Five hundred, you have to be kidding. What the hell do you need five hundred for?”
“Benny’s amp blew up last night and they have a big gig on the weekend. A scout from the record company might be coming.”
What bullshit. Benny was her braindead boyfriend. Something was always going wrong with his lousy career. Or at least attempt at a career. The day Benny and his pathetic bunch of head bangers land a recording contract is the day I make Director General of Education.
I pulled my wallet out, took out a card and a pen from my pocket and pretended to write something down, while checking how much money I had. Perhaps the kids would think I was taking her name.
“Make sure you get her address for a snog later!” came the same clear female voice from the crowd. Much hilarity.
“I only have two hundred odd”, I said after a surreptitious count.
“That’s fine for now”, the stripper replied. “You can give me the rest tomorrow afternoon. We got a lesson, remember?”
“That’s ungrammatical”.
She just smiled. So, I took out my notebook, pretended to write a bit more, tore out the page, wrapped the cash in it and handed it across.
"He's giving her his phone number!” came the loud clear voice. How did that distant girl manage to project it above all the other shouted suggestions and the general racket?
With a smirk and a flourish, little Miss Striptease grabbed a sarong lying across the bandstand railing, wrapped it quickly around her and jumped down from the bandstand. A surge of groans and boos from the onlookers broke out. She fixed me with a level stare. “Pete, you don’t pay the rest of the money tomorrow and I’ll be back here Monday”.
She then strolled across the quadrangle to more boos and jeers. As she passed out through the main entrance, she held the index finger of her right hand high in the air. Such a sweetie. You could tell she had been brought up really well.

“ Mr Andrews, Mr Andrews!” I turned and saw the school's Girls’ Supervisor, old Hating Hillary, standing close by. Hillary is the school’s busybody, convener of the Christian Coalition and a big wheel in the affiliated Moral Majority. Naturally the old bat felt she should get herself out here.” Did I see you hand that young lady some money?”
“Just the cab fare, Hillary. She isn’t exactly dressed for public transport.”
“Who is she, Mr Andrews? You seemed to be talking to her with some familiarity?”
“She’s a lapdancer from Strippergram. She thought this was the Anglican seminary - one of the student clerics is having a birthday”.
Hillary shot me a withering look.
I began the long walk back to the building entrance. With the main attraction gone, many kids had already abandoned the windows, but there were still enough to give me a rousing payout.
It was all I could do to resist raising the index finger. What a circus! But then, what was new?
............

Note that this isn't a story about teachers and schools, even though it starts and ends there. Less than 10% of the action takes place in the school. The real story starts when the bad guys appear, and it's not at the school.

Chapter 2 - Calming Consultant

2007-01-24T15:59:00.002+11:00

“Clever schools for a smart state!"
The dulcet tones and sincere visage of our beloved Premier were increasingly beaming at us from television even though the election was still 4 months away. The ads showed beautiful looking, immaculately uniformed kids in pristine high-tech classrooms being led by enthusiastic young schoolteachers straight from central casting. Perfect student behavior, one hundred percent attention and application.
As usual, reality mocked the hype. The state government was squeezing education spending as hard as most other departmental outlays. You don’t get votes by telling the electors their taxes are going to have to increase, or that state borrowing has blown out to third world proportions.
Less money meant decaying classrooms, a shortage of equipment, poor teacher salaries and so a failure to attract smart young graduates and a loss of experienced teachers to outside business, the private school sector or early retirement.
Plus no money for remedial programs and other strategies to handle the epidemic of out of control kids. Blame it on the deterioration of the family, flip television shows with trash talking rebel assholes, or too much red colouring in the New Fanta, but the fact was those lovely orderly high school classes with enthusiastic and polite students shown on the Premier’s ads were now more the exception than the rule.
And the politicians and the bureaucrats seemed incapable of taking the big steps to correct the situation. They cowered from attacks by liberal newspaper editorials about the high rate of student suspensions from schools, died anytime one of the radio shock-jocks picked up a story about some teacher getting over-enthusiastic in kicking a kid or complaining parent into line and had palpitations about the tsunami of parent/student litigation against schools and individual teachers.

Poor little Janey, humiliated in front of the class just because she said a few swear words (actually ‘fucking cunt’). But no, these were directed at the child sitting in front of her, not the teacher in the same line of siight. Then she was made to stand in isolation for an eternity outside the principal's office where her peers could see her. All those taunts and laughter. This has affected her self-esteem for life. And when the principal said such demeaning and insulting things to her, her natural response was to slap his face. And yet this poor girl, the victim here, was suspended and then expelled (because she was over 15 - younger than that, the law says she can’t be expelled, just moved to another school where she can renew the chaos). Well as the parents' lawyer I must convey this is outrageous treatment and I'm seeking an injunction and compensatory damages.

The result of all these things was a state school system on the verge of chaos. Tilting ever closer to the downward spiral of loss of control.
As I said, what a circus. And I’m a ringmaster.

Well there are actually two other ringmasters, but you didn’t see too much of them around out little outpost. The principal, poor old Kevin Biltmoor was so shot down his office door was permanently shut after 10am, while he nursed a glass or five of whisky. The kids called him No More Biltmoor - No-More for short. Kevin had been in the system over 4O years and it had worn him down, brought to a head 5 years ago by a troubled kid suiciding in his office when he left to sort out another problem. Kevin got drunk with me at an end of year staff function a while back. “If only I hadn’t stopped to yarn with the groundsman.” he said as tears rolled down his face.
The other assistant deputy principal, Monica Zellwinger was one of those young ambitious go-getters who’s career plan involves spending as little time in the school as possible and maximum time at education conferences and seminars where she could give ground breaking addresses on the Behavioral Learning Paradigm and suck up madly to school inspectors, the District Superintendent and head office bureaucrats. Exotic Angie’s personal-assistant work was actually shared between myself, No-More and Monica, but Monica with all her reports, addresses, submissions for promotions and more took about three quarters of Angie’s time. As usual, Monica was out of the school on one of her self serving projects. Which was a real bastard right now, because whenever a school is disrupted by something out of the ordinary like this little flesh show, it takes a long time and all the muscle you can muster to get it back into line.
Any teacher will tell you that something as simple as a rainy or windy day will have the kids swinging from the overhead lights. Chuck in a more unusual activity like say a fire drill and chaos reigns for the rest of the day. We always do our yearly fire drill last teaching period, timed to finish just before the dismissal bell. I remember some arsehole once decided to liven one up by throwing a lighted match into some cardboard and paper textbook cartons left temporarily under the stairs after unpacking. Chaos supreme.

But hell, a near naked girl on the bandstand was unique. The place was in an uproar. So instead of heading for my office after the departure of the sun queen, I did a tour of the corridors. There were kids hanging out of doors and a deafening hubbub came from the rooms. Time for sergeant major again: “Move back inside!” I roared. “ Shut the noise! Get back to work!"
Most of the kids scuttled. A few cool ones took their time. “Too slow, Banisich! See you in my office after school!”
“Can’t, I gotta catch a bus”.
“Get on your mobile now and tell your parents to pick you up around 4”. Nearly every kid carries a mobile. If so, they never pretend to not have one. They know I will telephone for them on my mobile. My calls to parents are notorious.
“That’s gay sir!” Right now, everything bad was gay in kid-speak.

My mega volume tough talk had settled the racket to normal levels except in Art room 3.
Before I could reach it a call came in on my mobile. “Mr Andrews, Mr. Peter Andrews? This is Traci. I work for Silver Tree Finance.”
Traci had one of those sultry, sexy voices you hear on 1800 talk-dirty lines. Which is probably what she worked most of the time, knowing the guy who owned Silver Tree Finance.
“ That must be real nice for you Traci. I hope they have a good Health Plan.”
“ Mr Andrews, we notice you have missed several repayments on your account.”
I have some pretty expensive hobbies. Silver Tree Finance was a rather shady loan operation I had borrowed a substantial sum from a few months back. I was a bit behind in the payments. “Are you sure about that Traci? Maybe your computer is malfunctioning.”
“Mr Andrews, our computers never malfunction.”
That would be a first.
“Then it must be my financial consultant.” Nobody has an accountant these days. They have all metamorphosed into financial consultants. And instead of driving sensible Holdens and Fords they all cruise around in black Beemers and wear Versace. “I heard a rumour she’s run off to Port Douglas with Bernie Madoff's lifestyle guru. Maybe it’s true, which means she’s not scheduling any of my usual repayments.”
“Mr Andrews, I’m trying to be serious here. I would appreciate it if you would try to be serious too.”
“I am being serious. Next thing those bastards from The Home Leisure Depot will be around wanting to repossess Inflatable Ingrid and my life-size Barbie
replica.”
“Listen fuckwit!” Wow! Traci didn’t exactly have a high threshold of tolerance for idiots. “You get $2540 down here by 4pm tomorrow, plus an extra $500 late payment fee, or I’ll send two of our arrears consultants around to break your face!”
And she slammed down the phone. Well, I thought, metaphorically dusting my hands off, I sure straightened her out.

On to Art Room 3. At first I thought Arty Albert must still be puffing in the dunny, but there he was, up the front, abstractly drawing something on a sheet of paper, probably more of those scantily dressed nymphets a la Norman Lindsay. Arty Albert was a bit of a worry. I was always fielding complaints from the Moral Majority about Albert’s sketches. But Albert only had a few years to retirement. Hang in there Albert, don’t blow it.
Meanwhile his year 8 class rioted. I stuck my ugly face hard up against the glass panel in the door and glared. This has a scary effect. My head is big and raw boned, a bit too long for its width, with a large aquiline nose that was crooked at birth, piercing eyes and a slanted mouth. Some bastard had bitten off half my left ear in a football game in my teens, long before Mike Tyson ever thought of such a nifty move. People mustn’t like me, because a construction worker had got me a beauty across the face with shortened piece of scaffolding a half dozen years back, which knocked out an eye tooth and its front neighbour, smashed my already crooked nose further to the side and opened up my top lip, eyebrow and forehead, leaving a heavy duty scar from lip to hairline as a legacy. A head like mine tended to scare the hell out of a lot of kids, and I enhance the effect by shaving pm instead of am, so having a permanent stubble which contrasted somewhat with my longish black hair which I wear swept back and gathered in a short poneytail. Listen, when all those longhaired bastards were trooping around last century, I had a crew cut. Now that head stubble is almost universal if a guy isn’t bald, I wear mine longer. I also leave my teeth-bridge out most times. Besides Fuggly, the kids call me Pirate Pete and Gaptooth.
The first of Albert’s kids saw me and sat down real fast, nudging their friends. This had a rippling effect so that within a half minute all was quiet and in order except for one fat girl who was industriously loading a paintbrush with a huge glob of purple acrylic, preparatory to flicking it across the classroom at some poor sucker. A blob of purple sliding down the side of the door glass suggested she’d been busy. I tapped loudly on the glass door. The fat girl swung her head and nearly wet herself. I beckoned her outside.
“Bad move that paintbrush, Rebecca. Do you have a mobile?”
“Oh sir, that’s so completely gay!”
When she finished the call, I sent her back inside. Old Albert was still working on the sketch. He had not noticed a thing. I must admit another problem with the education system; too much deadwood in the teaching staff. The Teachers’ Union was super intransigent when it came to getting rid of problem teachers, which is probably just as well.

Otherwise I would have gone years ago.

Chapter 3 - Bad Deputy

2007-01-17T00:33:00.004+11:00

“Mr Andrews, wait up please!” A very clear and rather familiar voice sounded behind me as I headed up the stairs to continue my calming consultancy onto the second floor. I propped on the middle landing while a tall, lithe girl with a face on the plain side of pretty and lovely long black hair caught up to me. Her school uniform was immaculate, just like in the Premier’s ads. She moved up the stairs in a sort of graceful glide and stood in front of me in an upright almost artistic stance, something rare in school kids, even as old as this one who had to be final year or possibly Year 11. Maybe she was a dancer or gymnast. I suddenly twigged; this was one of the lead actors in this year’s school production, AMERICAN BEAUTY. I had taught her in a few relief lessons when we couldn’t find substitute teachers. I struggled to remember her name. Sandy something.
Yeah, Sandy Tavernese. She had a beautiful voice for the stage. So clear even the suckers right down the back of the school auditorium could hear her against the roar of the cooling system.
“What do you want Sandy?”.
“Ms. Kristalou sent me sir”.
“What’s the problem?”
She gave a little embarrassed shuffle and the hint of a smile: “I’ve been a bad girl sir”.
“You’re in Year 12, right?” She nodded. “So how has a Year 12 girl been bad?”
Thing is, Year 12 ladies give the least trouble of any group in the school. Most are 17 or 18, some older, and as a group are about 3 years more mature than the guys in the form. Most have been working part-time jobs since their mid-teens and many have boyfriends in their 20s. In our type of school only about two thirds of the girls who started in Year 7 make it through the final year. The trouble-makers have been thrown out or have voluntarily departed as soon as it was legal to go, the academically challenged have dropped out, quite a few others find jobs after the Year 10 School Certificate, and some become “homemakers”. Year 12 girls who go right through consider themselves a little bit special.
So how had Sandra Tavernese been a bad girl?
“Ms. Kristalou came into the senior’s locker room and sprung me shouting comments out the window.”
“When was this?’
“When that strange girl was doing her act.”
“What sort of comments, Sandy”.
“Ah.... things about phone numbers, addresses, you know, just silly stuff”.
“I don’t suppose the name Fuggly was mentioned”.
Sandy looked at her shoes and shuffled a bit more. She seemed genuinely embarrassed. But I seemed to remember she was a hell of a good actor, not just a great voice: “Well yes sir, that name might have been mentioned.”.
Good on Pene Kristalou. Sounds like she heard the heckler and went looking for the source. I made a mental note to shift Pene off girls’ toilet duty when I updated the playground-duty roster.
I stood and gave Sandy the flinty eyed stare, but she was still peering at her shoes: “Look at me Sandy. Look at me”. Sandy lifted her gaze and looked me straight in the eyes. She had an angelic but contrite look on her face.
“What have you got to say?” I continued.
“John Travolta, sir”.
“John Travolta? What do you mean John Travolta?”
“Straight out of GET SHORTY”.
“What is straight out of GET SHORTY?’”
“Those lines, sir”.
“Which lines?” I fully knew which lines. This girl was taking the piss out of me.
“’Look at me, whoever. LOOK at me’. John Travolta’s character, Chili Palmer, the lead in GET SHORTY was always saying that when he wanted to kick someone’s ars..ar.. ah, posterior, sir ”.
She then gave me a smile. It was a ripper, a two thousand watt dazzler which lit up her whole face into an infectious grin. It altered her appearance and made her look so appealing, almost beautiful.
Pow, she nailed me! I was a sucker for American crime movies. Well more American crime novels to be accurate , particularly ones by Elmore Leonard. I gave a little snort. I hoped it sounded like displeasure and not the fact I was trying to choke back a laugh: “Sandy, you are not trying to be a smart ar...ah...Martha, by any chance? I mean, the way I see it, you are already in deep trouble”.
She gave a short little giggle, which was immediately replaced by the serious honest-girl look. I got the feeling this lady was more than very good, acting wise. “I’m sorry sir. I can’t help myself. It’s a performer’s curse. Whenever I see an audience I have to perform. I truly apologize for the smart comments. I’m working up a stand-up act for the Comedy Club next term break, and I have to polish my ad-libs. You know what those audiences are like. If I don’t have good putdowns for the hecklers it’s instant death down there”.
"Comedy Club? - you’re scamming me, right?”
“Oh no sir, I’ve already done a week down in the Blue Room at the Pussy Pit.”
Pussy Pit? Jesus! The Pussy Pit was a dyke hangout in town. Angie and her friends often went there. Apart from the usual bar and disco plus those back rooms where all sorts of wild things went down, they had a Blue Room where artistic stuff like plays, serious lesbian musicians and female comedians did their thing.
“What are you doing in the Pussy Pit, Sandy? Are you eighteen yet?”
“Well almost sir. But I have fake ID, not that it matters, all sorts of underage girls get in there. Some of those lesbians are seriously into underage girls.”
I paused to take all this in. I had to be a bit careful here. I wasn’t too sure of this girl’s sexuality and the age of consent for females in this state was 16, so warning her to be careful in a place like that was skating on thin ice.
“If you don’t believe me sir, I can bring in the fliers from my Blue Room gig. It was my first paying performance and I kept everything related to it”.
I shook my head: “That‘s real interesting Sandy. I think you better tag along while I work out what to do about your little brain explosion”
She gave me another two thousand watt dazzler: “Oh great sir, maybe I’ll pick up some snappy dialogue! You always were funny when you put down the bad kids in those relief classes”.
I gave her the flinty eyed stare and she snapped back to angelic contrition. What a pro. I was beginning to really like this girl. She had heaps of spunk and spark.

We did a cruise along the top corridor and with the usual bit of arse kicking the place settled back towards normality. As we turned the corner into block C, my mobile rang. Back in the dark ages, the school administration and teachers on playground duty had used walkie-talkies to communicate trouble. If five Hells Angels jump the fence and start selling dope to the Year 7 sports class, the lone PE teacher wants help in a big way. Same for the petite student teacher when two 190cm Year 10 brutes start to brawl on the handball courts. These days, the compact mobile phone is much easier to carry and more flexible than 2 way radios. Teachers in the classroom could contact me directly, just like this call from Miss Evenly, one of the English teachers: “Mr Andrews, I have Philip Bently here. He just struck one of the other boys in class and refuses to leave the room.”
Talking about 190cm Year 10 brutes, Philip Bently is a perfect copy of the blueprint. One of the grunts on the school rugby league team, an oversized sneering, lying, bullying braggart. He was always creating maximum chaos and had been suspended twice this year alone. Big deal: a kid is suspended and gets to roam the streets and make trouble just like in the school holidays. Or he stays home, watches daytime TV and pornographic videos while smoking big sister’s dope and drinking dad’s booze, usually with a posse of friends who truant school. Some punishment. Yet, short of the very difficult transfer to another school and the almost impossible expulsion from the state system, it is our big weapon.
Bently was sprawled across his chair at the back of the room, one leg draped across the desk when I looked through the door pane. Sally Evenly was trying to teach up front, but every time she said something, Bently would loudly announce, “Bullshit!”
I slowly opened the door and stared at him for a while. Things got really quiet.
“Did Miss Evenly tell you to leave the room?” I asked in a very calm voice.
“You know she did,” he sneered. “She told you on her cheap Nokia.”
A couple of kids in the class sniggered.
“So why are you still here?”
“Because I want to be. Nobody can make me leave. It’s a free world.”
I made my voice quieter, so that everyone had to strain to hear: “I’m only going to tell you this once. Get yourself out of the room and down to my office.”
He gave a sneering smile: “Or what? What are you gunna do? I aint worried about you, Andrews. You think you are such a tough guy, but you’d last about 2 minutes on the field. Even the halfback could roll you.”
A few more sniggers from the class.
“Ms. Evenly, where is the boy who was hit?”
“Down in the sick bay, Mr Andrews. Thomas Mackie. I think his nose is broken.”
“Ms Evenly, I want you to take the class down to the quadrangle.” Big creeps like this thrive on an audience. With a chorus of groans and disappointed comments at being cut from the entertainment, and a scrape of desks and chairs, the class moved out. Sandy turned to leave.
“I want you to stay here Sandy and watch carefully.” No way was I going to risk being the only one in the room with this bastard. I needed a witness, and one who could write up a good statement.
So what is the next step when a kid refuses an order like this? My routine is to call the parents, get them down here and they tell the gorilla what to do. Parents hate that, and usually give the kid hell. If the kid still refuses to move, the teaching guidelines say call the cops. Two problems here, Bently’s parents had a history of non co-operation and the local cops did not want to get involved in what they termed internal school disputes. Sure, a kid had been assaulted, but the cops reckoned this was really something we should handle. They had enough on their hands without doing our jobs for us. Professional pride had me agreeing with them. Plus the whole thing takes so long. This arsehole could tie up the classroom for most of the rest of the day and rooming is so tight for many of our teaching periods that there are no backup classrooms. Some kids want to learn; they are relying on good exam marks for jobs, university entrance, bursaries. They shouldn’t be sitting in the quadrangle.
I walked up the back of the room and stood very close to the desk. Bently still had his feet draped on it. “Last time we suspended you, your parents refused to come into school to pick you up. Is that still the case?”
“You know it is, Gaptooth. My dad told you never to call. They got real jobs. They can’t afford to be rousted from their shop to talk to fucking losers like you.”
I bent over so my face was only a few inches from his. I dropped my voice to little more than a whisper. Sandy up the front would have a hard time hearing the next bit: “Are you still seeing Susan Pellow?” Susan Pellow was a Year 9 football groupie. I had seen them hanging around hand in hand, real lovey-dovey.
Bently’s lip curled. “What if I am?”
“Well, you’re not the only one. Coach James over at City High said their whole team reamed her last week after training.”
Bently snarled and came up out of the seat swinging. I swayed to the side and brought a nice little uppercut from about floor level straight into his gut and right up under his rib-cage. It knocked every ounce of wind out of him. He let out a terrible sound and crashed arse first to the floor, knocking his desk and chair flying. He sat and choked, gasped and gulped like a space-walker out of oxygen.
I raised my voice a little so Sandy could hear: “Now here’s what we are going to do. When you can walk, we are going to go down to my office. You will ring your parents and tell them maybe you need a doctor. If they won’t come in, I am going to take you to their business or your home, whichever they say. And if you swing at me again or give me any other grief, I am taking you down the police station and having you charged with assault. Is that clear?”
All the fight was gone. He nodded weakly and then proceeded to lose his lunch.
“Oh yuck you fucking loser, that is so gross!” said Sandy.
"Sandy! Proper language please!"
The look on her face said OOPS! "I'm sorry sir. You are absolutely right". She turned back to Bently: "Abomination, you fucking reprobate, that is so beyond the pale!"
Ambushed in ad-lib alley.

Chapter 4 - Parent Counselling 101

2007-01-10T10:47:00.001+11:00

Around 5pm I decided to wrap things up. The rest of the day had been pretty routine once Bently’s mother had taken him away. I told her she either lined up a new school or I would press charges both on my own behalf and for the kid with the busted nose. I thought maybe Bently would get a bit of fire back in him once he got his wind back, but he was completely docile. The sight of him staggering across the quadrangle in front of his classmates, holding his gut and with vomit down the front of his shirt must have been a complete loss of face.

Sandy brought her written witness statement around just after classes finished at 3. “It isn’t complete sir, I didn’t quite catch what you said to him when you went up the back of the room.”
“I gave him one more chance to leave, Sandy.”
“Gee sir, I thought I heard the words ream and, uh, team.” And she shot me one of those clear eyed innocent gazes.
“Well yes, I mentioned something like it would seem he would be off the team to play City High if he didn’t leave the room. Just write something like that.”
She gave a sweet little smile: “Well yes sir, I did hear something like that.”
She was back within fifteen minutes with the statement all typed up on a word processor down in the computer room. “Ah sir, what did you decide about my bad girl act?”
“What I decided was that maybe you could do your comedy routine at the Christian Coalition meeting this Tuesday night. They need someone to do the entertainment spot because Singing Brother Joe and his holey guitar can’t make it.”
“Yeah, he probably got defrocked for playing with the alterboys.” She gave a little giggle, which turned into a deep, full blooded throaty chortle. Actually, it came more from the belly than the throat. It was a ripper. I had heard some other woman do this laugh and it was so infectious that despite my best efforts I gave a couple of snorts and a smile.
The Chistian Coalition was the school’s religious club, made up of about 30 kids who met every Friday lunchtime under the patronage of Hating Hilary. Most of their parents and 3 of the local religious ministers also held meetings on the first Tuesday evening of each month in the school hall. Many of the same parents, plus a few non religious wowsers were part of a similar group called the Moral Majority, which was always giving us grief about sex in texts, unsuitable videos, immodest school uniforms and the rest.
“Seriously sir, I don’t think the Pussy Pit routine would go down too well with the God-Squad. Those people are pretty uptight and there is some pretty raunchy language and stuff in there.”
“What do you have in your Blue Room routine?”
“Oh, I run a line on how I lost my cherr.....ah .... you know, my virginity to some hopeless bloke and then I do a putdown on the write-off guys I met with after that. The lesbians love it, anything that makes men look sexually incompetent. I throw in a lot of stuff about small wieners and even smaller duration. You know, all that male put-down kind of stuff.”
Well I walked into that one. It was not such a good idea talking with a female student about losing her virginity, no matter how jokey-jokey the atmosphere. "Always be in control of the discussion" is one of the first management rules about dealing with underlings sprouted by those Dale Carnegie type books. I wasn’t too sure who was controlling this discussion right now.
“Mixed audiences are different sir. I can’t get away with that kind of stuff in a place like the Comedy Club”, Sandy continued.” I can throw in a bit of the old routine, but the males in the audience won’t like the full thing.” She paused and gave me a level eyed gaze. “ My mum says men can’t handle being made fun of. What do you think, sir?”
Nicely done Sandy. If she wasn’t fully in control, she was maneuvering pretty cleverly. I had the distinct impression I was being screwed over big time. Without any kisses. I pretended to give her question some consideration: “I’m not too sure what I think, Sandy. But you’re probably right about the Christian Coalition. Those people have been in a bad mood ever since I removed the Goth Club’s ban on signing up juniors.”
“Was that a black-ban, sir?”
“Jeez Sandy, I hope your Comedy Club stuff is better than that.”
“ Well thanks sir, you are a real prince”.
“ My pleasure. Listen, I hear Mr Jordan is short of helpers during recesses to sell tickets to the school disco Monday night. I think a fitting punishment may be for you to go along and offer a hand.”
She shot me the two thousand watter. “That is way cool sir. See my mum was wrong, men can take a joke.” And then she did the little giggle into that wonderful deep chortle again.
“Mini Driver.”
“Pardon sir?”
“Mini Driver. That’s who I first heard do that laugh.”
“Well yes sir, it is so unique When I first heard it I said ‘How does she do that?” I just had to develop it. It took me so much practice but it was worth it. When my jokes aren’t going over too well I rip out a Mini and the audience can’t help but join in.”
I smiled and pointed to the door.
As she headed out she turned: “Mr Andrews, if you don’t mind me asking, how come you know about the Pussy Pit?”
“I had a crush on one of those big Samoan door-nazis down there. But it never came to anything, she didn’t seem interested.”
“Yeah, I figured it was something like that.”
Sandy flashed the two thousand watter, ripped out a Mini and gave a little wave as she disappeared down the corridor.

I got the after-school detention class settled in room one and did the paperwork on Bently at the teacher’s table. I let all but three of detainees leave at 4pm - these three had talked, so they stayed another half hour. The school was deserted when I moved back to my office. Even the cleaners had finished. I was working on the supervision timetable for the swimming carnival when the outside line rang.
“Jack Sharp High School,” I said. Jack Sharp was a former Minister for Education. He was a ex-wharfie union official who worked his way up through Labor Party politics to the big job. Jack Sharp could not deliver a 30 second speech without making 31 grammatical and syntax errors. Teachers called him Not-Too-Sharp.
“This is Edith Pope,” said an indignant voice. Jesus, just what I didn’t need right now! Edith Pope was one of the Moral Majority parents. She was always on the phone whining about something or nothing. Get her going and she never stopped. “I am completely disgusted about that obscene display my son told me occurred in your playground today! A naked girl! How outrageous and offensive that our children are subjected to such an ordeal! I feel there have to be steps taken to stamp out such outrageous behavior! Why were the police not called? My son tells me the girl simply walked out of the school! What sort of standard of behavior does this give to young people? The school disco is Monday night; are we going to have a repeat of those skimpy revealing outfits I observed when I helped on the drink stall last time? One girl had a tiny halter top and a skirt slung so low I feared I would see her bottom cleavage! This is not acceptable at all! And the swimming carnival is to be conducted soon. I suggest the school institutes the old rule I had as a girl, any bikini wearer has to have a covering T-shit. Not one that goes transparent when wet!.........” And on she went .... moan moan, whinge whinge, carp carp. I call the Moral Majority the Moaning Minority . I waited for her to run out of steam, but she kept the harangue going….
“Excuse me madam,” I broke in, using my best Prince Charles voice. “Do you know to whom you are speaking?”
“Well no, I don’t,” she replied, somewhat miffed.
“So why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
I slammed down the phone, bundled up my work and shot out the door.

Chapter 5 - Meet the Law

2007-01-07T15:22:00.001+11:00

“This is a great old car, Pete, but maybe a bit noisy, you think?”
I shot Angie a grin, shifted up a gear to cut the bellow of the twin exhausts a bit, and headed on down Anzac Parade. It was 7.45 on a Friday evening. Sydney was moving into weekend mode. Cars and 4wds, many with surfboards, bike-racks or camping trailers were already moving out to the motels, holiday houses and camp grounds along the coast. Late workers were heading their weary way home but uplifted within by the thought of a weekend of freedom. Earlier departees from the offices, feeling nicely mellow after the ritual Friday night drinks were also heading for home or to the next port of call, mostly tucked into cabs or with a non-drinking dedicated driver in this age of harsh penalties for booze-driving. And people were already heading out for dinner or early Friday night entertainment. Or like us, for more work.

Angie wasn’t wrong about the great old car. The truth is that I am in love with my car even more than I adore Angie. It is a near replica of the 1965 Touring Car Championship winner. Back then, a racer called Norm Beechey got sick of those wickedly fast Jaguar MK11s constantly winning races, and imported a Chevrolet Impala with the biggest 409 cubic inch motor and 4 speed manual gearbox. This weapon had been cleaning up in American Nascar stock car racing and with a few modifications from Norm, proceeded to do the same here. Those Jags didn’t see which way it went.
I was into both historic car racing and the street machine scene. I couldn’t think of any vehicle which could combine the two better. So I found myself an Impala. I cheated a bit and got the far sleeker 2 door coupe version, which was within the regulations, found a 409 motor and a lot of the other special and rare gear, mainly in America and mostly over the net, and gradually built up a copy of old Stormin’ Norman’s beautiful machine. It was painted dark blue just like most of Norm’s racers and had a few of the defunct Neptune Oil’s stickers and some Goodyear decals behind the front wheel arches, like the original. And this was my street car, this great long hunkered down monster with big fat wheels, enormous tyres and two grumbling pipes sticking out from under the side just behind the doors. It was a knockout and attracted attention everywhere. And unlike just about every other car I drool over, you never saw another of these coming the other way. And could this baby haul. It could spin its wheels going into third gear and get sideways turning out of any intersection with just a whiff of throttle. I never spin wheels or get sideways on public streets. Any fool knows the car can do it, so why bother?
I shot another look at Angie. We were on our way back to school the same night of Master Bently’s unfortunate demise, for the opening of the new library and computer block. It was hard not to glance at Angie: she was one great looking woman.

Angela Vung Truy was born in Vietnam 29 years ago and came to Australia as a baby with her single mother via a refugee boat and camps in eastern Malaysia. By her appearance her father must have been African-American. Things were very tough in Vietnam after the war for the products of such a relationship and for their mothers, hence the refugee boat. Angie had an exotic mixture of Asian and African features and was way taller than the average Vietnamese girl at something like 185cm or six-one. Maybe dad was a basketballer before he got called up. Her legs were impossibly long, her skin almost midnight black, the rest of her body just perfect and she had very short hair, almost a buzz cut, which emphasised her longish neck and the proud way she held her stunningly exotic head. Tonight she was heading off to party after the library opening and was dressed in a little grey silk shift, toeless silver strappy sandals with two inch heels, and had a simple silver chain around her throat with matching pendant earrings. She was reclined back in her seat with her head against the backrest, eyes closed. Her right leg was hooked up over the midsection of the protective roll cage, which had her dress way up past the high cut panty line. Jesus! I got so distracted I gave a bit too much throttle away from a set of lights and chirped the back tyres.
A blue light started flashing in the rear-view, and a siren gave a short blip. Cars like mine are real cop magnets. The wallopers are always waiting to pounce on something stupid, but that little chirp of tyres? I swung out of the traffic into the next side street and rolled to a stop.
“Get out of the car,” came an amplified voice. “Turn around, put your hands on the roof, legs stretched wide.”
How completely boring. I’d done this little charade before, so I stood there with hands in my pockets, watching the two cops haul themselves out of their patrol car. A striking lady cop a good 5 centimeters over my 183 strode across, gave me a smirk and stepped behind Angie who, good girl that she was, had adopted the required position. Placing her hands on Angie’s shoulders, the pigette began to frisk her down. It was a very thorough frisk, down over Angies back and bum, sliding down her lovely long legs to those anklestraps, up again on the insides to way into paradise territory, up over her hips and flat stomach to her lovely breasts. She spun Angie around, and planted a passionate kiss on her lips. Angie responded and they proceeded to eat each others’ face.
“Hey Pete, that looks like fun,” said the short fat male cop, who was leaning on the bonnet of the cruiser. “What say we pile in the backseat of that jalopy of yours and have a little smooch?”
“I’m not too sure Igor. I don’t think I know you that well. Maybe we should just hold hands.”
Welcome to Debbie and Igor Dillinger, the two best known and most feared cops in NSW.

This was because cousins Debbie and Igor kept shooting bad guys. They were pretty effective too, because they kept shooting them dead.

Chapter 6 - Fatal Misdemeaners

2007-01-03T19:17:00.000+11:00

In a police force where most cops go their whole careers without popping anyone, the Dillinger Gang, as the popular press dubbed them, had cancelled the contracts of four bad guys in a little over a month. The tabloid press loved them, the editorial writers and bleeding heart columnists of the serious press were aghast, the public was similarly polarised although heavily in the favor of our two expert marksmen, and they were heroes in the force, particularly with the Police Commissioner.

The first few years of the new millennium had been bad news for the NSW Police Department. A number of cops were gunned down in separate incidents. A Highway Patrol rookie had climbed out of his chaser to be met with a hail of gunshot from the vehicle he had just pulled over. Shortly after two cops were blown away by a shotgun blast through an unopened door they had knocked on in answer to a domestic dispute. The next night, another cop was confronted a young punk running out of a Wendy’s in the city, the night takings in one hand and a 357 Magnum in the other. “Drop the gun!” screamed the cop. The punk hesitated, jerked the gun up and shot the cop dead. Add to this a spate of drive-by pot-shots at inner western suburbs police stations by death-or-glory ethnic gangs, and the whole force felt under siege.

Shortly after this, Sidewalk Eddie Murchurson decided to rob a building society in Maroubra Heights. Sidewalk Eddie was a member of Da Boyz , a pack of homeboys based on the public housing projects a couple of miles from the beach in that suburb. He had been in constant trouble with the law ever since his first bust for indecent exposure at the age of 13 - fast Eddie liked to flash his dick at 18 year old girls from St Mary’s convent. This was followed by several shoplifiting charges, a break and enter, demanding money with menace and two aggravated assault arrests. On top of all the trips to the station in relation to these, Eddie was constantly being hauled in for questioning every time someone in the district flashed his weenie.
People often confused Da Boyz with The Maroubra Boys , a rather more loosely based bunch of surfers who hung around the beach area. Both groups were in fact mortal enemies and often had fights and skirmishes which, combined with the predilection many members of each gang had to theft, assault, riotous behavior and drug and alcoholic abuse, drew them to the attention of the local cops. The Maroubra Boys or 'Bra Boys for short, made headlines when about 30 of them beat the shit out of 10 drunk off-duty cops in a local club. The surfers were celebrating a birthday and got a bit noisy. The cops told them to keep it down a bit, which was a big mistake - no handfull of boozed-out fat cops was going to tell the Bra Boys what to do. One-on-one, a bunch of mainly overweight cops would have a hard time handling a group of superfit surfers, but this was more like one on three. The cops got the hell kicked out of them. Debbie and Igor Dillinger were stationed at Maroubra but were not in the club that night. Which is lucky for the surfers, because otherwise a few of them may have been blown away.

Sidewalk Eddie was a bit of a legend to his homeboy mates because he liked to do things differently. Like, the last time he flashed his dick at the convent girls, he stuck it through a cardboard cutout of Michael Jackson’s head with a hole where that bad excuse for a nose should be. This cracked the girls up so much it took them an hour to ring it in to the cops. Most of the girls reckoned it was a big improvement on Thriller’s snoz.
So when doing-it-different Eddie ran out of the building society, his backpack full of money and waving a 38, he made his escape by skateboard. The road down through the Junction from Maroubra Heights is pretty steep, and good old Eddie was approaching warp speed by the time he hit the shopping area. He was doing real well - a swerve here, a turn there as he zapped through the traffic. He even got a bit fancy and banged a few cut-backs off the curbs and got some air over the speed humps.
Things changed a bit when a beer truck pulled out of the Maroubra Cellar’s loading dock. Sidewalk did an emergency avoidance, lost control for a bit and shot straight through the door of the beer garden, which was packed full of lunchtime drinkers downing burgers from the snack bar while they watched SWORDFISH on the big-screen video. Sidewalk got it back together inside and was weaving through the tables like a member of the Global Skateboards stunt team until Halle Berry up on the screen flashed her boobies at Hugh Jackman which so distracted our skater desperado that he crashed headlong into the tables down the front.
“Great entrance, Sidewalk,” said an appreciative female voice after all the dust, crashing plates and beer glasses settled a bit “But you need heaps more work on your stops.” Sidewalk looked up from the floor into the barrels of two Glock Police Specials held by Debbie and Igor Dillinger, who had been happily munching some quick lunchtime eats at one of those front tables.
Sidewalk still had a tight hold on the 38. “Drop the fucking gun, Sidewalk,” chimed in Igor. “You move it a millimeter and you are dead.” So of course Sidewalk moved it a millimeter. And ended up dead.
The investigation revealed that Debbie and Igor got off 9 shots between them. Only 3 hit Mr Stupid, but one of them went right through the cortex of his brain. A whole bunch of cops bagged the Dillinger Gang’s marksmanship, but more thoughtful people reckoned they were pretty darned good hitting a target that small.
When the TV, press and shock jock radio talkback hosts finally quietened down, cousins Debbie and Igor were celebrities. The new police commissioner, appointed from within the force as a no-nonsense get the job done manager to replace a disastrous experiment with a slick talking ineffective outsider, was delighted. His cops had been on the receiving end too much of late. He rewarded the Dillingers by issuing them with prototypes of a fast draw holster the cops were considering. The only blot on the whole issue was the rather poor strike rate of the Dillingers’ shooting so he instructed them to spend the next week at the police range with expert individual instruction. When they finished they were deadly shots.

This was proved a few weeks later. As Debbie and Igor walked out of the local station house to begin an evening shift, a big black stolen Landcruiser did a drive-by and popped a half dozen caps at the building. No-one was hit, although the station parakeet had his feathers parted by a richochet off the juke box. The shooters weren’t that lucky. Those quick draw holsters worked a charm because the Dillingers had their Glocks out and put 18 shots between them into the fleeing 4wd. 10 went through the back window and 8 into the lower tailgate, because bad guys are known to duck down when the rear glass begins to fly.
When the Dillingers caught up to the Landcruiser, which had done a head-on into a power pole, two guys in the back were dead and both occupants up front had gunshot wounds. The crash into the pole didn’t exactly do them a lot of good either, and one of them expired next day.
The big surprise was the identity of the goons. Debbie and Igor thought Da Boyz were doing a payback in memory of Sidewalk Eddie, but when they opened the doors, here were all these shot up surfer dudes. The 'Bra Boys were stirring things up again.
Round 2 to the cops in a very big way.
The media went ballistic. Headlines like:
Dillinger Gang Strikes Again!
Surfer Hoods Take Ultimate Wipeout!
Bra Boys Fatal Drop-In on Dillingers!
and Deadshot Dillingers Drill Drive-by Deadbeats!!
screamed from news stands and nightly TV newscasts. The bleeding-hearts columnists and commentators moaned about police brutality and summary executions. Responsible editorial writers referred to lack of care and the dangers of knee jerk police response. Most of the public loved it. The commissioner was ecstatic, so much so that he issued the Dillingers with one of the new Remington pump action shotguns the department was thinking of adopting for normal patrol duties. Because these riot guns were only used by the Special Response anti terrorist squad up to now, he sent Debbie and Igor away to do the full Special Response training course.
When they came out the were among the most dangerous cops in the force.

I just hoped I wouldn’t be near when they blew their next bad guys up.

Chapter 7 - Peer Bonding

2007-01-02T21:58:00.001+11:00

The new library was packed with the usual suspects, plus some extras. We had teachers, departmental bigwigs, members of the P&C and other parents, the school student leaders and some immaculately uniformed year 10 girls being organised by Angie and the domestic science teachers to pass around eats and other goodies. The extras were mainly the press - a TV camera crew with a well known reporter from the nightly news and current affairs show in heavy makeup, plus a few print journalists. Normally a little show like this would be of no interest to them, but the Minister for Education was coming to open the extensions, and right now the minister was big news. To put it more accurately, right now the minister was in deep shit. An investigation by the Corruption Commission had uncovered big time handouts from building firms to Education Department officials in relation to granting of new contracts. The rumor was the handouts went right to the top.
"Petey! Petey you old stand-over merchant, how you doing?"
I turned to the source of the shout, a small pugnacious looking barrel of a man who was standing next to No More Biltmore. He gave a wave, said something to the boss, and trotted across to give me a hearty slap on the back. “Christ Pete, you look better every time I see you! Still doing that triathlon stuff and hitting the gym, uh? Hey, wish I had the time.”
“Hi Bazza, how’s the building industry?”
Bazza Payne was the guy who built our new extensions. An inside job really, because Bazza was also one of our parents. He’s had four kids through the school, with the youngest currently in final year. As a builder, Bazza was pretty big time in the city. He specialised in new apartment blocks and some retail outlets. Our extensions were the first school work he’d done as far as I knew. A lot of his normal stuff was built on spec but some he kept for himself, making Bazza a pretty big time landlord.
As a parent, Bazza was a winner. All his kids were polite A-grade students and talented in sports, music, acting etc. Probably a lot of the kudos here should go to Edie, Bazza’s long-time wife. Edie was that old style of Aussie woman - no shit, all calm action and efficient family management.
As a husband Bazza was also pretty special. He sidelined in running night clubs, strip joints and bars, in making porno videos and being a financial backer of new legitimate movie and recording industry talent, and yet, despite all the gorgeous and go-getting women in these industries, I had never seen him pay special attention to anyone but Edie. Sure, there were always really great babes around Bazza and his entourage, but there was never one hanging off him.
As a person, Bazza was polarising. Many people could not stand his brashness, loud mouth and aggressive determination to win at any cost. They reckon Bazza had the typical small man’s disease and was a top pain in the bum. Me, I really liked the man. Bazza was a straight shooter who got things done. And I enjoyed his smartarse loudmouth routine - it was usually directed at the right people.
“The building industry, Pete is real great. All those suckers wanting to buy investment apartments are just wading in with their dollars, making guys like me rich. Interest rates are inching up, that guy at the Reserve Bank says property prices are gunna tank, and they still keep on buying. Hey Monica! Nice skirt! "
Our second deputy principal had just walked in, looking a million dollars. Plenty of big-wigs were here to impress, so naturally Monica was here too. She turned towards us with a half scowl on her face, which instantly changed to a nice smile and a little wave. Bazza Payne was a big wheel on our P&C.
“Christ Pete, that Monica is one little cutie. You doing anything about her? Crazy if you don’t.”
“Nah Bazza, she’s never at school long enough to get a conversation going.”
“Sure, I know the type. Christ, look at how she’s moved in on Bill Casey. Sucking up to the District Superintendent, now that’s a better career move than kicking smokers out of the girls’ dunny.”
“Monica hasn’t been near the girls’ dunny in her whole teaching career. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure she’s been near a classroom.”
“I tell you Pete, people like Monica are going places fast. Before you know it she’s gunna be the Director General of Education and she’ll be handing you a transfer to Broken Hill.” It was no secret that things were a bit strained between Monica and me.
Bazza was peering towards the doorway. “Hey, check out the Minister. Christ, a Labor Party hack, no brains, no talent, serves his time as a party yes-man, gets elected to a no-effort seat, kisses the Premier’s bum and winds up calling all the shots in Education”
John Hefforn, M.P had just entered the room. He was instantly besieged by the press, which he studiously ignored. One of his minders was telling them firmly that the minister had nothing further to say at this point; that it would be improper to comment while the Corruption Commission was still engaged in its investigation. The entourage moved across to District Superintendent Bill Casey who introduced a gushing Monica.
“That little trio was made for each other - Arse Lickers Incorporated”, grunted Bazza. “Say Pete, I want you to do a job for me.” I often did jobs for Bazza. As a matter of fact, for quite extended times over the past 10 years I had worked nearly as many hours for him as for the Education Department. “Old Mazzy is having a bit of trouble with one of her tenants, the bastard is 5 weeks behind in his rent. Angie! Angie baby, I got you a contract! We gunna make a video! You're gunna be a star!” Angie was gliding across the room with a tray of jam pikelets. She didn’t even glance this way, but I noticed an index finger subtly extend itself above the edge of the tray. Bazza turned back to me. “Christ, can you imagine Angie in a video? Those lesbians make great videos!” He gazed off into the distance with an absent smille on his face as he pictured Angie in action. He snapped back to the present. “Anyway, I want you to take Mazzy across to this creep’s place and have a talk to him.”
Mazzy was Marilyn, Bazza’s mum. She lived in my apartment building, two floors up. The building was one of Bazza’s, stuck high on the ridge at Potts Point, one of those modern glass and balcony jobs with panoramic city and harbour views from all rooms plus a fantastic rooftop pool and sundeck. Three minutes walk got you to the restaurants and clubs of the Cross and the city was another three by subway. Bazza offered me a special deal on the purchase of a one bedroom unit, which was still above what I could really afford. But I jumped at it. That apartment in that location was a dream.
The minister moved across the room, working the crowd, TV cameras in tow. I noticed Monica had taken over the introductions.
“Minister, meet the most important person here, the person who built this beautiful building, Barry Payne. Barry is also one of our most active PandC members.” Hefforn pumped Bazza’s hand, gripping his forearm with the other hand like some Hollywood star playing the politician. “A pleasure to meet you Barry.”
“Mr Minister, the pleasure is mine!!!” replied Bazza in his normal loud way. “You don’t know how long I been waiting to ask you what favors I got to do to get priority on that new contract I just put in for the extensions at the primary school!!!” Everyone froze, there was an intake of breath and the Minister's minders looked like they were about to kill Bazza. The current affairs reporter’s mouth was agape like she couldn’t believe all her Christmases had come at once. The Minister looked at Bazza blankly for about half a second and then rolled back his head and let out a great guffaw, which was quickly taken up by his minders, the Superintendent and of course Monica.
“You’re a real card, Barry. How about you take me on a tour of this great facility you built for us?”
Well bless my soul. And here is me thinking the minister is a dumb time-serving party hack. Well he sure could do a neat little side-step in a crisis.
“Before you move on Minister,” Monica chimed in. “I would like you to meet our second deputy principal, Peter Andrews.”
The minister fixed me with a stare. “ Ah yes, a face to the report,” he said. “I was reading your file this morning.” And with that he turned, threw his arm across Bazza’s shoulders and walked on.
Jesus! I collared the District Superintendent before he joined them. “What is this shit, Bill? Who’s been crying to Head Office? Why is that lightweight reading my file?”

Chapter 8 - More Peer Bonding

2007-01-01T14:19:00.003+11:00

He gave me his usual frank, sincere, Honest Abe look. Bill Casey is everything Monica Zellwinger wants to be. He is a tall poppy in the NSW educational system and is moving at Mach2 towards the top. At a slim 185cm, with a boyish face countered by perfectly cut prematurely grey hair, a winning smile, a voice that conveyed friendliness, authority and sincerity all at once, Bill had everything to get there. Everyone liked him. Bill was deputy principal at my school back when I was a mere Head Teacher Manual Arts. He was an excellent classroom teacher and a scrupulously fair disciplinarian, so the kids liked him. The staff loved his brilliant administrative skills, his affable nature, how he could kick hard-case kids into line and smooch intransigent parents and the way he gave maximum support to his teachers. And naturally the big wigs in Education adored him, promoting him quickly to headmaster of a neighboring school and then a few years later to District Superintendent. As I said, everyone liked Bill. That included my wife, Susan. She liked him so much she moved in with him and married him a short time after - as soon as she could divorce me.
“It coud be that the Minister got one of the phone calls I received this afternoon,” said Bill in the usual smooth voice. When I said nothing he continued. “It might have been the one from a Mrs Pope who told me she got some unsolicited sexual advice from an unknown person when she rang your school. You didn’t happen to be working back around five this afternoon by any chance?"
“Come on Bill, you know I’m too lazy to work back. I always beat the kids out the gate.”
“Or perhaps he got the call from Mr George Bently, claiming that you had deliberately enraged his son to the point where the boy lost his temper, whereby you assaulted him.”
“That’s crap Bill, the kid took a swing at me, read the report tomorrow. Angie sent the statement to Area Office, check what it says.”
“Yes, Ms. Vung Truy.” Bill shot a look over to where Angie was chatting with a group of senior girls. "It’s remarkable how loyal a back-stop she is for you. Like the time you both claimed that parent..ah .. Folkstone.. got so upset in your office that he pushed her out of the way to get at you, and she, in fear of further attack, flattened him. And note, flattened him to the point where he ended up with a broken jaw and two broken arms.”
In the personal-security and events-calming industry it was considered just punishment for a real bastard if he ended up eating his dinner through a straw or unable to wipe his own bum. Folkestone got the double whammy. But I didn’t think this little snippet of information would go over too well with Bill. “So the guy hit the stretch-rack on the way down and then smacked his face against the beer keg.” I paused, but it was impossible to get Bill to bite. “But Jesus, Bill, how many times have we been through this? It’s completely true about Angie. She has a double dan over fourteen black belts in one of those chop-socky Asian martial arts routines. Angie can kick the shit out of anyone. Look at her - would you mess with that lady?”
Angie was leaning over the arrivals desk, checking something a pretty senior girl was showing her in a book. This exposed a magnificent stretch of long and leanly muscled leg plus a peep at her upper breasts. I knew Bill wanted to give a smartarse answer about messing with her, but he was way too cool for that.
“I’ve known you for a long time Pete, and I never thought you’d hide behind the skirts of a woman.”
“That’s bullshit Bill.”
“No Pete, time is running out on your cowboy routine. The Director General asked me for your file and she’s passed it up to the Minister - someone has been making official complaints further up the tree than me. Now this Bently parent is yelling legal action and demanding that his son be readmitted to the school. You know all litigation goes straight through to Head Office, so the Minister will end up seeing that too.”
“Listen Bill, don’t go limp on me here, not on this Bently readmission and not on any crap from Head Office or the Minister. You always prided yourself in supporting your teachers.”
“Any suggestions on what I should tell them?”
“ Tell them how Sharp High’s results in the standard reference tests have improved since someone has decided to kick a bit of order into the joint to improve the learning environment. Tell them how student-on-student assaults and all those other things we have to notify under Critical Incident rules are way down, how staff stress leave and resignations have dropped, how we don’t get any incursions from deadbeat outsiders since that drug-selling goon was found behind the PE shed all smashed up with a no-trespass sign around his neck.”
Bill turned to leave. “Pete, I can’t protect anyone who steps over the line as far as you. And keep this in mind,” he glanced across to where Monica Zellwinger was gushing away with the Minister and Bazza. “ There are other people at your school who are doing outstanding work and should be given some credit for the undoubted improvements you have outlined.”
Bill was another who knew Monica and I didn’t get on.
And off he strode. Well, at least he didn’t bring up the junior couple having a very energetic workout of the reproductive kind behind the D-block stairwell who got a water bomb dropped on them from high above. The fact it had "from Pirate with love" textrad on the enclosing plastic shopping-bag didn't prove a thing.

I stood up the back and seethed about the file while the Minister did his opening speech. Monica sidled up. We are talking about one very attractive woman here, early 30s, striking, great body, a sort of three-quarter sized Uma Thurman. Monica knows how to jerk my strings really well: “Hello Pete, I hear you did your Jackie Chan routine again today, and another one bit the dust.”
“Well bless me, Monica, I wanted to pass the problem on to the deputy in charge of Year 10.” Monica and I shared out the form-year supervision - I took Year7, she 8, me 9 etc. “But she wasn’t in the school as usual. Oh yeah, I also did the swimming carnival and school disco supervision rosters you promised would be on the notice board by close of lessons today.”
Monica gave me one of her get fucked smiles. “You are such a prince Pete.”
“Ah, I shouldn’t complain.” I said."You didn’t do anything.”
I wasn’t sure whether she let that one go because it was so lame, or didn’t get it because it was so lame.
“Talking of princes, I hear you had a near naked Cinderella on the bandstand today, and according to Hillary you did the big Prince Charming rescue with a monetary handout.”
“She needed fifty cents for an upgrade to a Whopper.” Kids were always scrounging money from teachers for the school canteen, where the home-made hamburger “Whoppers” were a legend.
“ Who was the girl? Hillary said you were swapping insults like best buddies.”
“That was my Aunt Florence, she looks real young for her age. When she gets into the claret her dementia kicks in and she thinks she’s back in the chorus line at the Tivoli.”
“Yes, I can believe your family is heavily demented.”
We watched the current affairs reporter interviewing Bazza across the room. “I’m surprised those TV people didn’t interview you about teacher brutality, Pete. From what the Minister said, your notoriety is starting to spread.” She gave a smirk. “But then, those TV shows are pretty fussy on appearance, and, as the saying goes, you have a great face for radio.”
“And you have a great arse,” I said. “For kicking.”
I copped another get fucked smile as she walked away.
“Hey Monica, I’ll come around to your place later.”
“In your dreams,” she replied.

Chapter 9 - Meet the Bad Guys

2006-12-25T15:42:00.001+11:00

By 10.30 the show had well and truly finished and there was only a handful of staff and kids left in the library to clean up. Naturally Monica had disappeared as soon as the Minister and Superintendent departed and old No-More had shot home to attack his bottle of Dewar’s. One of Angie’s dyke-on-bike girlfriends resplendent in shiny leathers called around to collect her, which caused a minor sensation among the kids as they roared off to some hellhole on a big Harley.
Angie is not monogamous. In fact she is a regular slut when it comes to sleeping around. Besides the biker and killer cop Debbie Dillinger, Angie had at least 3 other girls she currently spent time with, and these were replaced and renewed pretty regularly. The fact was, Angie hit on any woman who was attractive, and being so gorgeous herself, a lot of them responded. Even straight ones.
Like Debbie Dillinger was straight before she met Angie. I know, because I was going out with her. Good-old Pete was the one who introduced them and within a week it was good-bye Pete.
Actually Debbie really kicked on after she and Angie started to swing. When I first met her in a singles bar in town she was a big gangly pleasant looking slightly overweight babe who was a bit self conscious about her height, heft and lack of style. Which is probably the only way a bloke like me had any chance with her. But she started to hit the gym with Angie, lost about 10 kilos, got a real nice $80 hairstyle from Freddie the Faggot, Oxford Street’s hair legend to the lesbians, and started to wear the really great clothes that made so many of those lipstick lesbians look irresistible. So hey, big improvement for Debbie, who am I to complain?
Debbie wasn’t the first girl Angie poached from me. A nice little 20 year old student teacher seemed flattered that the big experienced deputy was showing so much interest in her. I asked her to an end of term bash in the function room at one of the local clubs and walked into an adjacent and supposedly closed spa area late in the night to find Angie and her locked in a naked and very passionate embrace in the pool.
Ah well, lose one, lose a few.

I had just finished setting the library’s security code when two rather colourful looking individuals walked in. One guy was in his 30s; skinny, average height, acne scarred face. He wore heeled Cuban boots, tight black jeans, an almost three-quarter length black western gambler’s jacket covering a white frilly necked shirt with one of those shoe-string ties, all topped with dark greasy hair slicked back into a small ponytail just like mine. His pal was 190 cm slob who must have been way over 120 kilos in a rumpled dirty business suit nicely set off by a purple open necked shirt and dirty white joggers. This guy was pushing 45, hadn’t shaved for 4 days and looked like half his dinner was smeared across his jacket.
“Mr. Andrews,” said the gambler. “We need to talk.”
These two did not look like parents. They were even too rough to be staff inspectors from the Board of Studies.
“So blab away,” I replied.
“I’m Mr Alvaro and this is my associate, Mr Linders.”
The big guy stepped across and shook my hand. Just like The Minister, he too used his other hand to brace the arm, but braced it behind my elbow instead of high on the forearm. He had a good grip and kept it applied as the gambler continued.
“We work for Silver Tree Finance, chasing delinquent accounts. We believe you got a call from Traci in our office about your arrears,” Alvaro continued.
As he said this, the slob tightened his grip further and hey, this guy had some power there. A lot of people, particularly the superfit who spend so much of their time keeping trim, taut and terrific, make the mistake of thinking really big slobs are weak bastards. Hell, slobs in the debt collection game are often ex-rugby league players or boxers and most of them have still got muscle under that flab - what they lack is endurance.

Silver Tree Finance was an outfit that used to be run by a friend of Bazza Payne, an old guy called Barney Hollinger. He was a pretty sweet old guy for a loan-shark. I used to collect the occasional debt for him when his enforcers were really busy: “I don’t want any first time defaulters hurt, Pete, just put a scare into them.”
Some bad luck a while back saw me getting a substantial loan off Barney. It started in an historic car race out at Oran Park Raceway when a mad Japanese bastard called Takeshi Koizumi made a typically kamikaze overtaking move down the outside into a corner, locked up his brakes of his ratty Datsun tarmac-rally racer and got very sideways. Which caused complete chaos in the following pack. My beautiful 409 Impala ended up with a Porche Speedster spearing into the passenger side door and a great big ‘68 Mustang stuffed into the trunk. With my metalworking background I’m pretty handy straightening out dings and I’m not too bad with a spray gun, but this was heavy duty structural damage way beyond my capabilities. Costing megga-bucks.
The very next race after the repairs, I missed a gear-shift, hit about 15000 rpm on the old 409 and blew it to shrapnel. The rebuild was a bastard. 409s are a bit rare these days and so too are the really good bits to make big horsepower. My engine building mate Steve explained that we could go low bucks with second grade stuff or spend big, have an engine that was durable and one that made bulk horsepower.
More horsepower than before, and maybe enough to get far enough out front of those pesky Porsche 911s on the straights that they couldn’t catch me under brakes for the corners. Those big old 60s Yank tanks did not have particularly brilliant brakes even in modified racing trim and the rules of historic racing limit rebuilds to roughly the technology available at the time the cars were racing.
Well to any racer there was no decision to make - when it comes to horsepower the rule is: if a bit’s good a lot’s better. The only trouble was that the mortgage payments on my flash apartment plus monthly contributions to my daughter’s upkeep were taking most of my salary and supplementary earnings. The banks were not interested in extending their exposure, considering me at their prudency limit, so I tied up a loan with Barney, at a discounted interest rate because of my occasional collection services for him. This was sweet until Barney decided to retire and sold his loan book to East Australian Credit Corporation.
E.A.C.C. was owned by an up and coming hood called Donny Manem. Donny was one of our growing band of ethnic criminals, one of the young Lebanese guys who has started their careers in the south-west suburbs with car stealing, petty drug pushing and standover routines. But Donny was smarter, more ruthless and more ambitious than his mates and less than 10 years later had expanded both his territory - he was now operating in the city and inner suburbs as well as his home suburbs - and his activities. He was a major loan shark, a fairly big mover in illicit drugs, owned a whole bunch of stip-clubs and brothels and ran a protection racket on many others.

The first thing E.A.C.C. did when it took over from Barney was to phone and tell me the concessional interest rate was finished. This was from sweet Traci in the office, with her low sexy talkline voice - never mind that she was probably 45 and as ugly as a hat full of hemorrhoids . I pointed out that I had a signed contract that was legally enforceable and so EACC could go jump. Traci said the firm would send one of its loan consultants around to see me. I gave the name of my solicitor and told her to send the consultant there.
I must have won that little bullshit exchange, because I heard no more from them. At least not on that little issue.
A while later I had another disaster. I was out on a training ride on my triathlon bike and got engaged in a downhill race with a dude on one of those gorgeous Ducati 991 sports motorcycles. Don’t laugh - this was through a really tricky set of downhill corners in the Royal National Park. The Ducati rider couldn’t use his wicked acceleration and I could take advantage of the better maneuverability of the skinny tri-bike through the nasty super steep switchbacks and hairpins. In the tightest section I was doing real well for a short while. Then we hit a little straight and the Ducati shot past like a rocket, so a few second later at the next hairpin I delayed my braking to the last fraction and had just inched ahead when I hit a wet patch on the road. Down I went, off my bike, sliding on my ass across the road and over the steep embankment into the top of big gum-tree. I tumbled halfway to the ground, smacking smaller branches and swallowing leaves as I went. It was like that time Homer Simpson fell over Snake Canyon: Ouch, ouch, wow, jeez, yelp, agh, aaaah, ouch!!! I finished wedged into the fork of two big branches like a battered and bruised Johnny Appleseed.
It took about 10 minutes to climb down and then painfully haul myself up the bank, where a horrible sight met me. My beautiful two and a half grand Cannondale had slid along the road into a roadside rock bank, bounced back and was run over by a huge Pioneer tourist couch coming the other way. It was a write-off and there was a big district tri race coming up a week later where I had a chance of a trophy in my age division.
So with the expense of buying a new bike, I kinda got in arrears a little with my loan repayments. To the tune of about two and a half grand.

“Mr Andrews, you have not complied with the payment reminder Traci conveyed to you this afternoon.,” said the gambler, shooting the cuffs of his frilly shirt.
“I’ve had a busy day, Mr Alvaro. On top of which, my millionaire aunt is in St. Moritz for the ski season and I can’t reach her for a loan.”
“Yes, now I remember, our Traci mentioned that you were a bit of a spray mouth smartfart.”
The Slob increased the pressure of his handshake further and stepped a bit closer. I know this move - the next part is a sudden forward jerk of the elbow being braced by the his other hand. If this move didn’t break my arm or dislocate the elbow, it would still cause a hell of a lot of damage. I wasn’t sure if these guys really intended that or if they were just trying to put a scare into me. I mean, busting some guy’s arm in the middle of a school library where half a dozen witnesses were now giving the scene their undivided attention seemed pretty dumb to me. But these goons did not exactly look like Mensa candidates. Why take the risk?
So I stepped even closer to The Slob and brought my head forward into a beautiful Liverpool kiss that caught the him smack on the nose. As he clutched his face I followed up with a nice knee lift to his groin. He gurgled and sank to the floor. I turned to The Gambler and smacked a really short right fair between his eyes. He sat on the floor too. Normally this would be the perfect opportunity for a few of those round leg karate type kicks to loosen a tooth or five, but I didn’t want to set a bad example to the two or three kids still in the hall. Which was pretty good self control in my humble opinion, seeing that sweet little punch had popped the usual knuckle on my right hand and it hurt like hell. Memo to Pirate: develop a left hand eye bulger.
Instead I stepped hard on The Slob’s right hand which was supporting his considerable weight on the floor.
“Listen to me.” I said quietly. “ Listen real good. Tell Traci I will resume normal repayments when I can afford it. Tell her to forget about the penalty payments. And if I ever see you two clowns again I’m going to get very angry. Which means I’ll do a lot of damage.”
I strode across and picked up a broom to finish the clean-up. Gambler and The Slob were staggering for the door when I returned. Someone who knows what he is doing can create some heavy duty mayhem with a broom handle.
“Mr Andrews, Mr Andrews.” I turned to see Hateful Hillary. “Who were those two men? You seemed to be very forthright with them.”
“They were collectors for the priesthood paedophilia defence fund. Those guys are very aggressive, wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Hillary did a surprising thing. She shot me a cheesy. It was a perfect copy of Monica Zellwinger’s get-fucked smile.
Hey, nice one Hillary, there’s hope for you yet.

Chapter 10 - Vibrator Mechanic

2006-12-23T22:33:00.000+11:00

I parked the big 409 in my space in the security garage and went up to the apartment. Potts Point itself was undergoing some pretty radical changes. Once a collection of 20s and 30s style art deco apartment blocks and tourist hotels built in the 60s and 70s, it was rapidly being transformed. The older and daggier of the art deco places were being bulldozed for buildings like mine, but more often, the hotels were being converted into residential units as tourists by-passed them for the big new hotels down in the city built for the Olympic Games. Some people moaned about the changes, saying the place was losing its character, but in fact it was improving. The new residents were more discriminating and vocal than ephemeral tourists and they lobbied council and state authorities for improvements. One result was that you could walk from the subway station in the Cross with much fewer hassles from club spruikers, drunks, pushers and other trouble-makers. It also meant that the area was developing a better range of services - instead of shops selling tacky koalas made in Taiwan to Bert from Bremen and Takesi from Tokyo, there were 24 hour groceries, a new dry cleaner, a medical co-op and so on. And a lot of the beautiful old apartments were still standing and would be in 30 years time. They had so much class no developer could afford to buy and bulldoze them.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat out on the balcony. Late Friday night Sydney looked pretty good; the lights of the office buildings in the city, the floodlit coathanger and opera house, the warships and cranes down at Garden island, plus a few boats moving about the harbour. There was the muted hum of traffic down on the streets, the occasional wail of a distant siren, and the tinkle of glass and soft conversation from a nearby balcony.
My mobile phone rang: “ Pete’s Pleasure Palace.”
“ That will be the day,” said Angie. “ Listen Pete, I need a favour.”
“ Cool Angie, I knew you’d turn hasbian if I waited long enough.” A hasbian is a lesbian gone straight. “ I’m heavily booked tonight, but I should be able to fit you in for a workout around 2am.”
“ Cut the crap Pete, this is a bit serious. Sally got herself beat up by a couple of homophobe deadshits tonight, and I’m with her at the hospital.”
Sally was the dyke biker.
“ Jesus! Is she okay?”
“ Her face doesn’t look too nice, I think they are x-raying for a broken eye socket.”
“ Not those footballing creeps?”
“ I didn’t see them, Pete, but I doubt it, We were at Sistergram in North Sydney, a bit out of those fuckers’ orbit. Sally went outside to check the Harley, and got jumped.”
A feature of dyke hangouts is that often lesbian-hating men hang around outside, verbally and sometimes physically abusing the women. Many dyke places employ really heavy-duty lesbian door nazis to cut this, but the guys then stand back a bit and follow the women to where they feel safe to do their cowardly shit. Angie herself had been beaten up quite badly by 5 first grade Sydney rugby footballers not 6 months before. These were high profile sporting stars you see on TV all the time. Big heroes. Angie had a disagreement with a couple of them previously, so they decided to get some buddies and teach her a lesson. She was lucky, they could have done a lot more damage except that a mousy and extremely brave little lesbian leaving the venue intervened with her very illegal but very effective capsicum spray, plus some heavy duty screaming which brought the distant Samoan dyke bouncers running.
“ Listen Pete, I could be here at the hospital all night, and there is a job I need to get done. I want you to go down to the Tanning Tub and pick up a package from the manager. Her name is Magda. Then you take it down to the Quay Panorama apartments, number 302, and give the package to a woman down there, Carol. She will give you another package, and I want you to keep it for me until I see you tomorrow. I’m going to ring these people and tell them to expect you.”
“ Jeez, what is this, pass the parcel?”
“ Both parcels are very valuable, so don’t lose either, and don’t let any low-life take them off you.”

The Tanning Tub is a lesbian leather joint up on Oxford St. Parking up there is a bastard on Friday nights so I jumped into a cab for the short journey. The door bitches, all decked out like Sally the biker was earlier, sneered at me as I approached.
“ No dicks allowed in here,” said the first, a scruffy looking blonde with huge ripped biceps and a nose ring.
The Sydney gay and lesbian club scene is interesting in its diversity. Some places encourage both homo and hetero customers and are roaringly successful because the homo/lesbian scene contains some very glamorous people and venues and the straights love to be associated with glamorous people and venues. Others clubs prefer only lesbians and gays, others lesbians or gays. But no way can they legally enforce their preferences, the anti-discrimination people soon saw to that. Nevertheless, if a place doesn’t want a certain type of customer, it can make things pretty uncomfortable, starting with the door nazis.
“ Magda is expecting me.”
“ Is that so?”
“ Sure, I’m her tantric massage facilitator.”
“ Well isn’t that fascinating? Look here, I got one of these massage facilitators.” She unhooked a huge black billy-club the shape of a dildo from her belt and waved it around. “ It sends sisters to heaven and makes homophobes see stars.”
“ Yeah, but I bet it can’t facilitate a session of autoerotic asphyxiation.”
“ We sisters aint interested in choking the monkey.” She got on the intercom. “ There’s a real scary looking dick here. Says he’s Magda’s vibrator mechanic. Looks more like a Freddy Kruger victim.” There was a garbled reply. She looked at me. “ You get sent by an Asian lady?”
“ My friend Angie.”
“ You are a friend of Angie?” She rolled her eyes. “I thought Angela had taste. Okay, Magda’s office is on the far side, green door. And good luck, the patrons don’t like dicks.”
She wasn’t wrong there. The Tanning Tub was a compact downstairs basement probably licensed for 100 people but now holding around 300. The ratio was about 4 to 1 leather ladies to lipstick lovelies. The joint was decorated in a combination of S+M and biker-girl themes and I felt as out of place as a bootscooter at a Chemical Brothers concert. It was a real feat just to move across the floor space and as I went I got a stream of abuse and comments. Some of the bigger ladies didn’t want to move to give me passage. Heavy metal music was blasting and there were 3 carousels spread around the room, each with a nude girl writhing and swaying to the beat. I made it to the green door and bashed loudly. It was opened by a clone of the door bitch.
“ Are you Pete?”
“ Nah, I’m Billy Graham’s ghost doing field work.”
“ Angie said you were a smartarse.”
Did she? Well fuck her.
I wish.
The blonde bruiser moved aside and I stepped into the room. There were 3 other women. Two were very nice looking young ladies, one a Nordic type in leather, and the other either black American or aboriginal in a long slinky evening dress. The third woman was obviously Magda, the boss, about 45, tough looking like she was once a door bitch but now going to fat. She was dressed in a two piece business suit and had her hair in a spinsterish bun, all of which looked fairly bizarre in these surroundings.
“ So my good man, how do I know you are Pete?” she said in a very refined British voice, all Sloan Ranger like Princess Di’s mum.
“ No doubt Angie described me.”
“ She said you were very ugly. But that does not mean a thing, all men are ugly.”
“God,” I muttered as I dug my driving licence out and flashed it.
“ Leave Her out of this.”
“ So how do we know you aren’t some sort of cop,” asked the black girl. “Rousted Angie, learnt about us an’ now you got a wire shoved up your ass?”
Cop? What the hell is this?
“ I say we make this boy do a strip, check him out real good for recordin’ devices.” If she was aboriginal she was doing a pretty good job of imitating a black southern momma.... “Reeee core din dee vi cez"...."ass"... She had her hair done in those thousands of tiny braids which are supposed to reflect west African origins. The other women grinned like demons at this suggestion. They were having a fine old time taking the piss out of the straight.
“ Sure princess,” I said. “ I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”
Big mistake.
“ Do it Aimy, commanded Magda.
The black girl dropped the straps of her gown down over her shoulders and shimmied it to the floor. She was completely naked under it. And completely stunning as she did a little pirouette and bow.
The other women gave a round of applause and turned to sneer at me.
“ No way,” I said. “ You ladies seem to be enjoying your alternative lifestyle of choice. I don’t want to be responsible for turning you straight by flashing my world shaking equipment.”
“ Only time your equipment gets flashed and shaken is when you stand at the trough with all the little boys,” said the Nordic princess.
“ Selma,” said Magda, looking at ripped biceps. “ Rip his clothes off.”
She had to be kidding - I’m a bit self conscious about some rather longitudinally challenged parts of my anotomy. “ Whoa! Hey come on ladies, I’m Angie’s friend. Really. Ask me anything about her.”
“ Anything?” said the black girl as she climbed back into her gown. “ Okay, where is Angie’s tattoo and what is it?”
“ It’s a little white and gold butterfly and it’s alongside her brazilian.”
“ How the fuck do you know that?”
“ I’m the guy who went and got her that time those footballers kicked hell out of her. I brought her to my place and cleaned her up, including throwing her in the tub.”
“ What the hell you lookin’ at her brazilian? You a pervert or something?”
“ I’m a lepidoptist”
“ What’s that?”
“ That’s a nothing,” said Magda. “ What Mr Pete is trying to say is lepidopterist. That’s a butterfly enthusiast. Good grief my man!” She directed a frown at me." Angie said you were a teacher at the place where she works. What do you teach, metalwork?”
I bit my tongue.
“ A butterfly enthusiast?” said black beauty. “ That’s not very funny Mr Pete.”
“ It would have been even less funny,” said Magda. “ If we had to undergo the ordeal of having to watch Mr Pete do a wee willie flash and cavity probe.”
Jesus, how many insults do I have to take? The wee willie thing and that crack about being a metalwork teacher really rankled. And all I am doing is helping out a friend. Remind me to kick her arse when I see her.
Or maybe spank it.
I wish.
Magda handed me a package about the size of a kilo of rice from the desk. “ Take care Mr Pete, that is very valuable.”
Yeah, and maybe very illegal too by the sounds of it. Or perhaps that bit about cops was part of their piss-take too.
“ Hey sweetie,” I said to the black girl as I was about to close the door.
“ I’m Aimy thank you, Mr Pete.”
“ Hey Aimeeeee, how come you know about Angie’s tattoo?”
“ Well sheet, don’t every good lookin’ girl in town know? That Angie is a tramp, she hits on everyone.”
And aint that the truth.

I walked back into the main salon. A chorus of hisses and boos started up. As I maneuvered my way across the floor I noticed the closest nude girl on the carousel was down on all fours wiggling her butt in time to the music. To stir things up a bit I lingered alongside her carousel and waited for it to turn until she was arse-on to me. I then ogled at a perfect tunnel shot, as they call it in the trade. Clang! A Bundy can bounced off the pillar alongside me, and the boos and yells increased. I looked around and noticed a huge bull dyke heading my way, ploughing across the crowd like a battleship through a flotilla of dinghies. No way was I going to tangle with someone like that. It’s undignified trading punches with a broad, particularly when there is a good chance the broad will splat you, so I beat it to the door.
“ Hey, what’s the hurry Mr Massage?” said Nose-Ring at the door.
“ I just got texted by Anne Heche down at the Hilton. She’s a much better tipper than you guys.”
....

Chapter 11 - Courier

2006-12-20T15:25:00.000+11:00

Quay Panorama Apartments down on the eastern side of Circular Quay are some of the most prestigious in Sydney. Only very high rollers live there. I announced myself to the concierge at the desk, and he called up to get the okay from apartment 302. I caught the lift , walked down the swish corridor just about up to my knees in plush carpet and knocked on the door. It was opened by a breathtakingly cute 13 year old girl in 50s style baby-doll pyjamas. When I got inside, there were 2 other sweet girls, identical age, identical clothing, lounging around the room. Pretty special room too.
It was huge, maybe 20m by 15, with full length glass down the far side which opened up to a panoramic close-up of Circular Quay. The city skyscrapers framed one side and the harbour bridge the other. A big, sleek ocean liner, lit up like a Christmas tree was parked side-on 400 m across the water at the Overseas Terminal. The interior of the room was nearly as eye-catching. It was done up like an old 50s luxury hotel suite - suede look walls, velvet curtains and hangings, heavy duty timber and leather furniture. On the walls were hundreds of framed photographs of of movie, stage and TV personalities, mainly Australian and dating from way back to the present.
“ Ah, so this is Peter, friend of the beautiful Angela. I must say Peter, you do fit Angela’s description.”
Having already been dumped on by Magda and her buddies re my description, I was not interested in following this up. I was interested in the speaker though. She looked to be mid to late 70s, although it was hard to judge accurately because her face had more than lifts than Sydney Tower and probably a dozen botox sessions. She was wearing one of those glamorous multi-layer chiffon gown-housecoat things that rich old babes often don indoors to disguise the cumulative effect of too many good meals and much too much booze. This was Carol Leonard, a big star in all areas of local entertainment over the past 50 years or more. You name it, Carol Leonard had done it. She could act, dance, sing, even tell a good joke - she was one of those entertainment institutions. Even now at 75+ she had a permanent part as the interfering grandmother in one of the big soapies, and still showed up in off season plays and pantomimes.
Whether all this success had been enough to enable her to purchase this joint was another thing. These apartments are some of the most expensive in the land, regularly fetching over the 5 million mark. Maybe she had good investment consultants. Or maybe one of her many past husbands had been a captain of industry or tycoon’s son. One thing was for sure, if there was any husband around right now he was pretty tolerant, because it looked like old Carol was in full lesbian ‘auntie’ mode, and these 3 sweet little girls were her ‘nieces’.
“ You have my package. Excellent.”
She took the package from me, and started to open it. “Take no offence, Peter, but I do like to ensure the contents are as ordered. I trust Angela implicitly, but I am not so sure about the original suppliers.”
Inside the package were many hundreds of blue tablets. I edged a bit closer - they had Pfizer stamped into them. Jesus, what is this, some illicit Viagra smuggling ring? And what the hell do lesbians want with pecker-packers? Maybe Carol Leaonard’s many older male contacts in the entertainment area were a big market. A hell of a lot of them have young girls with loong legs and short skirts hanging around them. The old farts probably need a bit of chemical enhancement for their casting couch routines. Cut-rate chemical enhancement by the look of things.
“ You don’t happen to have any erectile dysfunction, Peter? I can do you an excellent price on a few of these little rockets.”
“ No thanks ma’am. My love life is very satisfactory.” Which is the biggest lie of all time. I was in love with 2 women I couldn’t have, I had not been on a date in months and hadn’t been with a woman for weeks. I was getting so desperate I had even briefly flirted today with a 17 year old plain faced, long legged, black haired schoolgirl apprentice-comedian.
“ That’s so good to hear.” She handed me a smaller package. “ Be careful Peter, there is quite a lot of money there.”
One of the 13 year olds showed me to the door.
“ I hope Auntie Carol looks after you sweeties okay.”
“ Heaps good, scarface.” Innocent eyes looked at me from her 13 year old angelic face. “ It sure beats getting chased around my old bedroom in Bidwell by one of mum’s boyfriends and four of his mates with their dicks in their hands.”

That straightened me out real well.

Chapter 12 - Joy Ride

2006-12-16T20:46:00.000+11:00

As I stepped from the lift in the lobby I noticed a young slightly ethnic looking guy standing by the concierge’s desk. He seemed kind of out of place, dressed pretty well, but the tight jeans, very short leather jacket, ponce-hair and ear rings put him more western suburbs flash than Sydney-central fashionista. He handed a package to the concierge who handed an envelope back. This guy did not look like your average general-products courier. How many people were delivering contraband to this joint?
I followed at a distance as he swaggered outside. He crossed the deserted promenade and leaned up against the side of an immaculate ‘99 Nissan Skyline GTR coupe parked in a no-standing zone by the sea wall. The Skyline was one of those grey-import R34 twin turbo babies, painted midnight black with the obligatory smoked windows. This one was even lower than normal and had a really mean set of 20 inch chromed mags, an aftermarket rear spoiler so high it was a threat to powerlines plus chromed exhaust pipes about as wide as a BHP smokestack. For a while the guy talked on his mobile and a short time after a big green Audi 8 cruised down the road and stopped alongside. Mr. Swagger bent down and talked briefly to the driver, got something out of the Skyline and passed it across, pocketing a handful of something in return. Bingo! A man with some illegal money. This looked like a neat way to finance my debt to EACC.
I crossed to the footpath along the seawall and walked towards the Nissan. Mr. Swagger was just finishing another mobile call as I approached.
“ Hey nice car,” I said. “ I don’t suppose you are interested in selling?”
He turned towards me, just in time to catch a smack to the jaw followed by the same uppercut which had taken the wind out of Bentley earlier in the day. Yips!! I'd popped that knuckle again - memo to Pete: do a google for a memory upgrade. As he slumped down the side of the car, I grabbed him by his leather jacket and hauled him up, quickly emptying his pockets of contents. The envelope from the concierge contained about $800, he had six fifties from the Audi in his pocket and about two hundred in his wallet - bummer, I was hoping for lots more. He also had a particularly nasty 15cm flick-knife, a set of keys for the Nissan, a second set of keys, a second mobile, some foil packets which no doubt contained dope of some sort and a set of knuckledusters. Knuckledusters! - now that’s something you don’t see too often. I let him slump back down to the pavement, pocketed the cash and then and threw the wallet and the rest of his stuff except for the car keys into the harbour.
I opened the Nissan and checked the glovebox and under the seats. Bingo #2! Under the passenger seat was a white bag containing more of the foils and a stack of cash - easily a couple of grand. I pulled the lever for the trunk and checked this area too, but there was nothing of interest, except for 2 metal baseball bats and the spare tyre which was the latest Pirelli Asymetrix 5000 worth $450 just by itself. These drug bastards sure don’t hesitate to spend big money.
By this time Mr. Swagger had got a bit of his breath back and started to concentrate on what was happening around him. “ You are fucking dead bro’. You are deadset fucking dead.” He hauled himself up and leaned shakily against the side of the Nissan. “ You don’t have no idea who my boss is. He is gonna cut your balls out, bro’.”
I took the cash out of the white bag, pocketed it and threw the bag into the harbour. Mr. Swagger gave a cry of outrage, which turned to panic as I grabbed him by the lapels, swung him across the pavement and over the sea wall. I waited for him to break the surface and show he could swim or at least stay afloat and then hopped into the Nissan and fired those twin turbos up. Beats catching a taxi anytime.

I’m a car nut. I’m not like some people who are only into one category or even make of car - I like them all. True, big Yank tanks from the 50s and 60s are my favourites but anything else with a bit of character floats my boat. Flash European cars like Beemers and Mercs? Yes please, I’d love one. Even more so Porsches, Ferraris and similar exotics. Late model Aussie sporty sedans and utes like SSs and XR8s always catch my eye. I am rapt about hot rods and street machines - to me these are pop art and the guys who do them up are as expressive as Whittley or any of those other big art names. Ditto the Jap rice rockets - those highly modified Honda Civics, Mitsubishi Colts, Toyota Corollas and the like. The thumpa thumpa of the sub-woffas in these things could get annoying, but I got a kick checking them out and figuring what had been done to them. As for Japanese mega-horsepower grey imports, well they were sensational. Particularly E-seris Skyline GTRs. An earlier model had won the Touring Car Championship back in the ’90s - it was the spiritual successor to my 409.
I gunned the Skyline along Macquarie St, took the entrance ramp to the harbour tunnel and blew through the electronic toll gates. I didn’t see any flash of cameras, so maybe this baby had an E-toll attachment. I then nailed the throttle. The twin turbos cut in an unleashed an impressive surge of acceleration. Hell this baby felt like it had as much mumbo as my Impala - maybe it was set up with one of those trick computer chips that increase turbo boost - but the traction with 4 wheel drive was much better. I kept the throttle buried for a top speed banzai run.
When the harbour tunnel first opened lots of guys in really fast cars made post-midnight runs to see if they could set a new unofficial record. Bullshit flies about this, but some guy is rumoured to have wound his Porsche Turbo up to 285 kph. And then a hero on a Kawasaki Kyabussa bike reportedly went a few clicks faster. The cops responded by heavily patrolling the section, but if it came to a chase their pursuit cars were hopelessly outclassed. So naturally a whole bunch of speed cameras along with mega warning signs got strung up. This settled things down somewhat, except for the occasional rip-off merchant in a hot car. Hell, what do I care if Mr. Swagger the dope runner gets a thousand dollar ticket?
Speed built up quickly to about 220, but the Skyline began moving around a bit. It felt nervous in the steering and I had to stay real alert to keep it online. This is the thing about top speed runs. Most cars are okay to around the 200 mark, but after that a lot of the more prosaic types get a bit squirrelly. Frankly I was disappointed in this Skyline because it was engineered to go way faster. But that’s the trouble with modified cars - once you start mucking around with ride heights, wheel sizes, front to rear rake, aftermarket spoilers and all that crap, things can get out of sync and work against you. It took a long time and mega adjustments with alignment settings and suspension bushes before my Impala was anything like stable at very high speeds. This baby needed the same attention.
At 250 I was closing quickly on a taxi and felt real uncomfortable about squeezing by in the other lane, so I hit the anchors hard. Jeez, lovely brakes, so much better than my racer! I plodded along at 60 while the taxi opened a gap and then did another burst of that incredible acceleration up to about 200. By this time we were heading up the Warringah Expressway in North Sydney, so I took the overpass at Falcon St and shot down the entrance ramp on the other side for a tunnel re-run back into the city. This time I had a clearer go and had the Skyline wound up to 250 again and gaining. The compressed vision in the tunnel seemed to suggest twice that speed and amplified the shriek of the turbos off the walls. Jeez, this thing was really nervous now, taking most of the 2 lanes. 260, 265, much more slowly now as it struggled to push all that air aside towards 270. But hell, by this stage the car was doing the 4 wheel equivalent to a bike tank-slapper, dancing almost uncontrollably all over the place, real white knuckle stuff. So I wisely got out of the throttle. All the same, nearly 270 was the fastest I’ve been on a public road. As a matter of fact it was the fastest I’ve been anywhere. None of the tracks I race at have straights long enough to wind the 409 up to those speeds, even if I fitted the right axle ratio. Probably just as well.
I took the William St exit, found a parking gap up near the Cross and curbed the Skyline. As an afterthought I grabbed the handbook out of the glovebox to see if it had anything about ownership. There was a sticker for All Nippon Imports inside the front cover, showing the car had been sold 3 months earlier to Manem Enterprises. Bingo #3. I had just stolen one of Donny Manem’s cars, not to mention several thousand dollars of his. Which I was going to use to pay off a debt I owed to him!! Hey not bad, not bad at all.
I left the keys in the Skyline with the driver’s window down - it would last about 2 minutes with all the low-life joyriders who hung around this area. I set off on the 5 minute walk home.

At well past midnight the Cross was still busy. The strip-club barkers were doing their thing, the occasional working girl hung in doorways trying to look sexy, there were lots of tourists mixed with the usual Friday night local revelers, a few derros and druggy low-lifes, a couple of cops on foot patrol - the usual thing.
As I turned down into Maclaey St the Skyline GTR came screeching around the slight bend at warp speed plus 50, went into a wild slide and side-swiped a telegraph pole on the other side of the road, ripping off the complete right back wheel and suspension assembly. The guy driving slammed it into gear, hit about 14000 rpm against the rev limiter and dropped the clutch, but that baby wasn’t too drivable and spun itself in a wide sweep front-on into a big council metal dumpster on the opposite side of the road. The airbags went off with a pop. Two back-to-front baseball-cappers jumped out shaking their heads from the blast of the bags and surveyed the damage. The Skyline was all stove in at the front, with the wheels splayed out like Peewee Herman’s ears. There was a shout from up the road - it was the two beat cops. The punks took off into a side street with the cops close behind.

I hoped the cops caught them. I can’t stand car thieves.

Chaper 13 - True Lurv

2006-12-15T21:14:00.000+11:00

Further down the street I caught up to a guy around my age with two gorgeous young things on each arm. How do these blokes do it? One of the girls broke away and did a whirl around one of the streetside lamp stanchions. She had a lovely flimsy summery dress on, great long legs with strappy sandals, one of those honey brown tans people die for and long blonde hair way past her bum. A shoulder strap slipped down, no big deal, no peep show, but she was so lovely. ZING! - I got an instant hit of testosterone. It had been a hell of a day for zings. Angie draped out in the Impala on the way to the library block opening - ZIING!! When I first crossed the floor at the Tanning Tub and saw those naked girls dancing on the carousels - ZIIING!!! A few minutes later when Aimeeee dropped that slinky gown to the floor - ZIIIING!!!! And then when I scoped out that truly excellent tunnel shot - ZIIIIING!!!!! Ah hell, a guy was going to have to do something about it.

Around 2am I pulled the Impala into the curb and shut down the engine. This was one of those rather nice streets in Glebe that has had the hell gentrified out of it over the past 15 years. All tarted up terraces and duplexes, good cars parked out the front, close to town, a pretty sweet place to live if you have a reasonable income.
I swung the wrought iron gate open and took the short walk to the front door of a duplex and hit the bell. After a while, an internal light went on which was then blocked from the peep-hole as someone inside checked me out. The door opened halfway and Monica Zellwinger stood there, blinking sleepily, in a neat little summer nightie. “What the hell do you want?”
“You.”
“Well bad luck, buster. I’ve got someone with me.”
Monica can come across with some good bullshit education-wise, but she was a lousy liar. “That someone’s going to have to move over and give us some room,” I said, sweeping her up, kicking the door shut and heading for the bedroom. I threw her on the bed and ripped off her night gear despite her curses and struggling. She lay back on the bed, breathing hard and glared at me while I got naked.
The next few minutes were like fighting a hellcat. She was all nails, teeth and fists as I struggled to have my filthy way with her. When I finished I felt like I’d just been 2 rounds with a Tasmanian Devil.
She was wasn’t exactly whelmed by my expertise. “That’s it? That’s all? Jesus, Andrews, you really are pathetic. Back when I took this up, my 14 year old neighbour could go longer than that.”
“He probably didn’t get too overexcited about 9 year olds.”
“I get totally unexcited about 9 second wonders.”
“I couldn’t concentrate. I was trying to figure out where that guy you mentioned is hiding.”
“It wasn’t a guy. It was Angie.”
“You wish.”
“You mean you wish. A 3 way work-out including Angie would be all your fantasies come true. I see you sweating over her all the time, you sad loser. But face it Andrews, you haven’t got a chance in hell. Give her up as a lost cause.” She turned on her side and gave me one of her superior smirks. “Even if supergirl was straight, she wouldn’t have anything to do with you. For a start she’d want someone who was better than two minutes, max. And a big strapping girl like her would definitely demand a bit more in the equipment line.”
I gave her my very best snake-eyed look. I’m very sensitive about my longitudinally challenged equipment. Well, it’s a bit circumferentially challenge too. Naturally the snakey look just encouraged her. “It’s like that old joke: how does a girl know Pete’s in love? He taps her on the shoulder and says ‘I’m in, luv’.”
Just to show her she wasn’t getting under my skin, I rolled her onto her stomach and gave her a really sharp whack on her lovely bum. She gave a shrill yell and kicked back, catching me in the jaw. We struggled and fought for a while and would you believe it? I started to make some more wood. Jeez, I’m beginning to seriously worry about myself - getting turned on beating up a woman. Well, getting half killed by a woman was closer to the truth. I managed to get her face-down again, held her with one hand, grabbed a set of handcuffs from the bedside drawer with the other (handcuffs! - a bit of a twisted sister is our Monica) and cuffed her wrists to the iron bedstead above her head. She writhed and struggled like crazy, so I sat on her until she tired. When she got a bit more docile, I pulled her long blond hair up over her head and piled it on the pillow, exposing the lovely nape of her neck, which allowed me to plant my tongue in the silky down just below her hairline and trace it slowly down between her shoulders blades, across her middle and lower back and onwards to paradise.
5 minutes of that and Monica was a quivering wreck . I then had my dirty way with her again; this this time for at least an extra minute. What a champion - if I keep improving at this rate Bazza is going to offer me a contract on the remake of DEBBIE DOES DUBBO.
As the piece de resistance, I rolled her onto her back, leaned over her gasping body and planted a big wet pash on her lips.
“Oh shit! You bastard! That was awful! I’ve told you a dozen times Andrews, don’t ever kiss me!”

Chapter 14 - Riding In Cars With Girls

2006-12-13T16:04:00.000+11:00

Gunning that Skyline through the tunnel at 265 plus was a pretty white knuckle exercise, but easy-street compared to the trip with Mazzy next morning. Mazzy was a really radical driver. Speed wasn’t her problem, driving to Mazzy’s Rules rather than the road code was. She would stop at a give way sign, let one car through, shout “My turn!” and gun it. Omigod, great when an 22 wheel Peterbuilt is bearing down on us! At traffic lights she had this idea that you could always turn left against a red light, forget the bit about “only when posted and after stopping” and don’t worry if there is not really a gap. Any bastard left a quarter gap and she’d scream out the window “ You snooze, you lose!” and lay rubber. No surprises that her big old Mercedes had more battle scars than my racer wore after a hard season.
Actually that old Mercedes was some car. In ‘67 the Germans decided they needed a local version of the big Yank muscle cars like my 409 so they took the giant 6.3 litre V8 engine out of the huge Grosser limo and jammed it under the hood of the mid-size 300 sedan. Mazzy’s husband had bought this one new in ‘68 and Mazzy still owned it. I had first option if she ever wanted to sell the thing - with a few modifications it would make a hell of a street machine.
“ Bazza want’s to buy me one of those cute little Mercedes convertibles - can you imagine that Petey - me in one of those Double Bay botox-beauty’s cars?”
“ No Mazzy, someone like you needs something a bit solid around you.” And I wasn’t kidding.
“ You are not wrong Petey, they don’t make cars like they use to. Or birds like me!” And she let out this terrible cackle which had people on the foot path looking around for the banshee.
“ You snooze, you lose!” screamed Mazzy as she executed a nice little lane change. The cut-off cabby blasted his horn. At the next traffic light she gave him a full volume summary of his parents’ marital status. No prize for guessing where Bazza got his raucous mouth.
“ Listen Petey, you are a schooly, I bet you can write a good letter. I mean, you aren’t a woodwork teacher are you?”
“ Jeez, Mazzy, do I look that dumb?.”
“ Excellent, so you can write one for me to those discrimination people in the government. Me and Ethie Timmins went on the Probus Club’s bus trip into town. We were supposed to visit some flower show in the lower Town Hall but we sneaked away and went into that all male revue down lower George Street, you know Long John’s down there? Anyway there is a group of young girls having the big hens’ night and when the best looking bloke up on the stage is right down to this tiny g-string the bride-to-be gets out of her seat, goes down the front, holds out a twenty and when the hunk comes over, instead of tucking it into his g-string she dives her hand down the front, grabs the snake and won’t let go! So for about 5 minutes he’s swaying around with a big grin, she’s got a firm hold and squealing her head off. I reckon that old snake grew a full hand span right there. I said to Ethie, if a twenty can get that, what will a hundred do? So when the bride finally lets go I walk down to the stage waving the hundred but that big sissy does a panic and runs off!
Now Petey that is downright age discrimination. If it’s okay for some young hotty it’s gotta be okay for everyone don’t you reckon? Instead they threw me and Ethie out, can you imagine? And they wouldn’t give us a refund!”
“ No problems Mazzy, I’ll write up something tonight. Every woman has equal snake-rights irrespective of age, race or religion.”
She let out another banshee cackle. “ Let’s do it Petey, just for the hell. Maybe you could go down and deliver a copy to that stripper bloke, have a whisper in his ear about showing respect to oldies.”
Mazzy knew I was a bit of an expert of whispering in people’s ears. Her husband Maurice when alive was also builder, nowhere near the scale of Bazza but pretty big, and now Mazzy lived fairly comfortably off the rents of a half dozen or so apartments in the eastern suburbs. She preferred to deal directly with her tenants rather than pay an agent 7%, so when a tenant got in arrears some of Bazza’s muscle might be called into help.

I started to work for Bazza about 8 years before. One night he called to pick up one of his kids early from a school disco just when I was dealing with a couple of local hoods who were insisting on hanging around outside and making a nuisance of themselves. School discos are a magnet for all the neighbourhood deadbeats, attracted by all those innocent and not so innocent young ladies all dressed up and pretty in their finery. I had to smack these two a few times to get their co-operation which must have made an impression on Bazza. “ Pete, I could give you some lucrative part-time work. I got plenty of blokes who can handle troublemakers, but I need a few who can string more than two words together as well.”
With my car racing expenses plus the gap in my life with the departure of my wife and kid I took up his offer, working on the doors at various club venues, chasing up rent arrears and evicting bad tenants, being a ‘personal security facilitator’ for second rate stars in Bazza’s recording industry, TV production and porn video activities and last but most tricky, acting as occasional strike-breaker in the apartment building trade.
It was in this last area that I got my face remodeled with the scaffolding. A group of renegade building labourers was standing over developers. These guys would start off a concrete pour and then demand an outrageous increase in pay to finish the job. It was hard for the developer to refuse with a street full of concete trucks and pumping gear already ordered plus the mega-cost of tearing up the partly laid concrete and starting from scratch again - structural concrete is tricky stuff. Bazza warned the union that this little trick was not on for his project. The union said it had no control over this particular branch. So when the labourers stopped the pour and started to leave the site, a group of 10 or so of Bazza’s best bouncers and debt collectors was waiting. We won that particular battle, but I lost a skirmish big-time when I was a bit slow in ducking a length of pipe.
But okay, every job has it’s downside. The thing is, this particular job could earn me in a few hours a full day’s deputy principal’s pay.

Mazzy executed a really wild and illegal U-turn at a traffic light. Horns blared. “ Stone the crows Petey, this place is noisier than a traffic jam in downtown Saigon.”
Mazzy was an inveterate backpacker. You name a place in Asia-Pacific, she had been there since old Morrie had died. She travelled solo and budget. I remember her training for a trip to Nepal - walking up and down Macleay Street and then doing the stairwells in our building - only a few floors to start - the full deal at the end. Mazzy was the fittest 80 year old I knew.
“ All this noise reminds me of my last trip to ‘Nam,” said Mazzy. “ Crazy place, Saigon. But real nice up country. Did I tell you about Ban Dan Mai?”
“ Tell me about Ban Dan Mai, Mazzy.”
“ Okay, Ban Dan Mai is a lovely fishing village a short distance down the east coast from Nha Trang. I got a super cheap beachside bungalow from Madam Phan Noc, all thatched sides, tin roof and a great veranda where I could check out the beach and wildlife - monkeys, these long-tailed possums, birds galore. Plus there was a posse of mind blowing Israeli young blokes, you know, holidaying straight out of the army, all trim, taut, terrific, tanned and toned.”
“Sounds like a single girl’s paradise.”
“ You are not wrong there Petey, all these great young hunks in those little Euro swimmer-shorts playing volleyball on the beach. They would call out “Hey Auntie Mazzy. Maybe you come down here and keep score. Okay?” Whooo-hooo! Was life sweeet or what?
Only one problem with that place. I was lying in bed first night when some banging started up on the tin roof of the bungalow. Dang animals. I got the broom handle and gave the roof a few whacks, but that made no difference at all. So I climbed onto the veranda of the next bungalow which was slightly higher, and here was this solitary monkey on my roof. And I swear it was doing practice routines for the next World Volleyball Cup. It had this conch nut or something and it kept hurling the thing half way across the roof. Mind you, maybe the monkey wasn’t into volleyball - I’d spent the afternoon smoking with the Israeli hunks. It was very good stuff. By the end of the session we were cooking our dinner on the Planet Moog.
Which reminds me Petey, open up the glovebox, I got a toke in there. We can fire it up and get in the mood for this visit.”
I hauled a spliff about the size of an Exocet rocket out of the glovebox, lit it up and took a drag. Wow! Instant rush! I took a few more and handed it across to Mazzy. “ Far out Mazzy, where did you get this stuff? It’s got a real kick.”
“ You know old Charley Staples up in the penthouse unit? He’s got a great big solarium on his northern side, grows these prize winning roses. Well that aint the only thing he grows. You have no idea how great this stuff is for burying the old arthritis pains.”
Jesus, enough of this stuff and some bastard could hack your arm off, you would not feel a thing. “ Gee Mazzy, this stuff is supercharged. You sure he doesn’t spice it up with a bit of rocket fuel?”
“ Wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Charley used to be chief chemist up at Roche. Go into his spare bathroom and there are all these beakers and tubing and empty Sudafed packets. Hell Petey, Charlie brings a whole load of weed or pills down to the Probus Club meetings. Makes for some pretty mellow or upbeat times, depending on what’s on offer.”
Who said growing old had to be a bummer?
“ Anyway, where was I?” she asked.
“ Monkeys playing volleyball on the roof.”
“ Yep. Next night was the same with interest. Harry the hurler had invited his friends around. There must have been 20 of them up there blocking and spiking. I was totally bent again but no way was I getting much sleep. So, on the third night I was weaving home from another smoke session when I saw this monstrous firecracker on sale in a fishing supply shop. About 3 times the size of the ones we had as kids, with a heavy duty wick which looked like it could burn underwater. Just the thing to spook those critters. So I paid a fortune for one. Funny place to be selling fireworks though, along with the gaffs, nets, boat parts and stuff.”
I started to grin. I could see what was coming.
“So when the roof-racket started around mid-night, I went outside, lit the fuse and lobbed the big bastard up onto the roof. Fact is Petey, I haven’t seen a better explosion since corporal Fergy got bored and fired a flare into that US ammo dump outside Inchon way back in the 50s.” Mazzy had been a nurse with the AIF in Korea. On the wall in her unit is a photograph of her in uniform arm in arm with two handsome diggers. She was a real looker in her 20s, I bet she drove those soldiers crazy. “ I tell you Pete, there was a huge fireball and next minute I’m sitting on my bum on the beach 30 feet away. Whoa!’, I thought as bits of timber, thatch, glass and roof showered down. ‘This should give Madam Ngoc’s insurance assessor a good workout.’
The explosion had singed the eyebrows clear off my face, broke every window in the village and caused 43 thousand coconuts in the surrounding plantation to fall down early. A couple of shell-shocked old timers thought the Yanks were back with a vengeance so they grabbed their black pajamas, AK47s and tunnelling shovels and headed for the hills. All the village dogs took off for Cambodia and haven’t been seen since. Neither have the monkeys. I figure they are somewhere out around Alpha Centauri about now.”
Mazzy let out another banshee cackle. I joined in. That toke sure had me in a good mood. Of course what had happened is that Mazzy had mistaken some fishing dynamite for a firecracker. It’s a popular way of fishing in SE Asia - light the waterproof fuse, throw the explosive in the water and wait for the stunned fish to float to the surface. Doesn’t do the coral a whole lot of good mind you, which is a bummer for places also relying on snorkelling mad tourists.
“ Hey, did the locals think it was as funny as we do?”
“ Well yes and no. The villagers went ape, but all the people in the jail called me Grandma Dynamite and fell about laughing. I personally think the Vietnamese have an overdeveloped sense of humour. Sure, it was a bit of a smile, but not that funny. I was dying to see how much they giggled if I could convince the Israeli volleyball team to lob a few of those firecrackers on the jail roof.”
“ So what happened?”
“ Oh, the usual Asia thing. I got this local lawyer bloke, and he spread a few bribes around and next thing I’m on the bus to Hanoi. That’s what I like about Asia, you can always cut a win-win deal. Not like this place. Hell, when Maurice was building we could get anything past the local council with a few slings to aldermen and the town planners. Try something like that these days and the Corruption Commission is breathing down your neck.”
“ Yeah, although I saw Bazza schmoosing with the Minister for Education last night.”
“ Yep, that Bazza knows how to persuade, no doubt about it.”

We were stopped at a traffic light. I took another drag on the joint and handed it back to Mazzy. The day was turning out way cool. There was a knocking sound on the window behind me. I turned to see Alvaro the Gambler, the collection agent for Silver Tree Finance stopped beside us in an old green Toyota. He had reached out the window with what looked to be a crowbar or pipe and tapped against our window. Alvaro did not look too handsome. Both eyes were black and he had a strip of sticking plaster spread across his nose area. The Slob was sitting next to him and had an identical appearance, right down to the sticking plaster over the flattened nose. We burst out laughing. Those guys sure looked comical.
Mazzy gunned the Mercedes away from the lights. “ What’s that fella doing banging on my car, Petey.?”
I looked across at Alvaro who was close by in the inside lane. It wasn’t a piece of pipe, it was the barrel of what looked to be a rifle. He actually reached out as we moved along and bashed my window with the thing. A gun! Jeez, I hate guns.
“ Dang it, Petey, that fella has a shooter! Who does he think he is?” Mazzy gave a great wrench on the wheel and the big old Mercedes lurched across and hit Alvaro’s Toyota smack in the door. The Toyota veered to the left, brakes locked, front wheels understeering like crazy, and buried itself front first into a big old solid wooden telegraph pole. Cerrrr-unch!
“ Hot damn Petey, did you see that? How sweet was that? Those jokers will think twice next time about who they wave guns at!”

Somehow we both thought this was hilarious and burst out laughing again.

Chapter 15 - Repo Man

2006-12-12T21:46:00.000+11:00

Mazzy parked the Mercedes outside a 3 story block of 1960s style units in Randwick and we went to the front door and up the stairs. She took them like Sherpa Tenzing on speed.
“ Hey young lady, you been training for Nepal again?”
“ Off to Peru next month, how cool is that?”
I banged on the door and it was opened by this overweight guy looked to be in his mid 30s, dressed in white pressed trousers, a white striped black shirt with red bowtie nicely set off by a set of vermilion braces. His face had a close resemblance to TV/movie goof-off Mr Bean. The impact of that spliff was still way strong because his appearance cracked us up. He stared at both of us with a bewildered bug eyed look.
“ Mr. Winger,” I said when I recovered. “ I’m Mr Smith and I’m in the personal security industry. I’m here to save you lots of money. And perhaps I can help prevent some personal injury.”
Winger bugged at me and then Mazzy. “ Personal security, say what’s that? Hey I know, you are some kind of insurance agent, right, no thanks I have plenty of insurance, a bloke at work's wife is in insurance, she gets me really good rates”. All said in one of those Brit been-gone-from-home-a-long-time accents.
He began to close the door. I stuck my foot in the jam and whipped out a big glossy print from a bound folder and held it up for him to see. “ I’m sorry, you misunderstand me Mr Winger, this is what I am going to ensure does not happen to you.” The print showed a guy lying on the floor behind a very smashed up door. The guy looked very smashed up too. A couple of tough looking heavies, all dressed in black, with Express Pest Removers written in big yellow letters on their spray jackets were also in the picture, one holding a very big sledge hammer, the other a nasty looking riot stick which looked like it had just been introduced to the person on the floor.
“ Whoa!” said Winger. “ What happened to that bloke, I mean he doesn’t look too healthy, I mean he looks downright bad.”
“ What happened to that bloke is he forgot to pay his rent, which meant that these men and four of their pals came around and threw him and all of his stuff out of his unit. He was thrown down the stairs, but his stuff went out the window - and this guy lived on the 2nd floor. So his stuff ended up even more beat up than him. Maybe we should come in and show you a few more pictures.” I pushed past the big jerk and walked into the living room. It was done out really nicely with the latest from Ikea and all of this slim-line home theatre electronic gear including the big plasma screen and surround-sound speakers. “ Nice stuff Mr. Winger. Do you lease it or is it yours?” Some of these fly-by-night guys never own anything. That way their creditors can’t take goods in lieu of payment. They move into a flat, pay 4 week's rent in advance and that’s it, nothing more. It takes months to evict them through the Tenancy Tribunal and even if the landlord gets a court order to seize and sell possessions, often these shysters don’t own anything substantial. As said, they lease. Chase them further and they declare bankruptcy - some of these guys are serial bankrupts.
“ Hey no, like it’s mine, well partly mine, well the bank has a bill of sale to cover the loan, you know how that stuff works.”
I sat down on the lowline sofa. Mazzy and Winger took the chairs opposite. I handed over a shot of the full team of pest removers. The rest of the guys had baseball bats. There were also several shots of lots of smashed up furniture lying around a paved courtyard. I pulled out another shot of an even more beat up looking guy. “ This person started to object to his stuff going out the window, so he went out the window too. He was real lucky - he lived on the first floor.”
The pictures were Kim Hulbert’s idea. Kim was Bazza’s head of security - he had been in the business 40 years and knew all the moves. Kim did not believe in getting heavy if you could persuade people to cooperate, by say simply showing them a few pictures. The black outfits with Express Pest Removal lettering was his too - he had picked this idea up from some movie or book.
“ Wow this is some heavy scene, but hey, I get it, this is really a standover routine you’re pulling here, that bloke in the back of the photo there looks just like you, Mr Smith and I remember your lady friend here, she is the one who showed me this place when I was searching for a unit, right? Say, I got it all worked out now.”
This guy was such a classic Mazzy and I lost it again. Winger bugged at us. “ Hey, are you dudes okay, like you seem a little ploughed, like maybe you had a big pit-stop in the beer garden on the way over.”
“ My lady friend,” I wheezed. “ Is Mrs Payne. She’s the co-owner of this unit. MrsPayne is genuinely concerned with your welfare because she knows her partner in this place is a particularly violent man, and she knows he has run out of patience with the fact you are some 6 weeks in arrears with the rent.” Fictitious nasty partners were sometimes as useful as real ones.
“ 6 weeks, whoa, I didn’t know it was 6 weeks! Well I met this girl when I was working in Singapore, she is a lovely Thai girl dances in a club on Northbridge Road, she came from a little village way up near the Burmese border, and her dad needs the pickup truck fixed to take the stuff to market and her mum has to get an operation on her hip and so I’ve been helping her send some money home, she’s such a nice girl, she says maybe I can go visit them over Easter. So like I got a bit behind in the rent, but sure I should catch up soon, I haven’t had a letter from her for at least a week so maybe they don’t need much more help.”
Don’t bet on that, you poor schmuck, the water buffalo is sure to need to go to the vet anytime soon. Sounds like this guy has had a few nights of passion with Miss Thailand, then the girl ‘goes home’ and so do regular cheques from him for the rest of his life. Or until he’s broke. I know heaps about Thai girls because Soonay, my cute personal tour guide on my annual trips to Bangkok, is always phoning me for a cash advance: “Peetaa!!! Where you been hansunman? I no hear from you so long, I miss you big time!!” Soonay is a totally excellent tour guide and is truly skilled in getting personal.
“ What work do you do Mr Winger?”
“ I’m in IT, cutting edge, real propeller head stuff, very interesting, totally simulating people.”
Yeah, real worldly too.
“ Here’s the deal Mr Winger. You owe $1850 in rent plus a $185 recovery fee - let’s round it down to a neat two thousand. Now, I can take two grand’s worth of your electronic gear, remembering it is not worth a quarter its original cost on the second-hand market. Or we can go down to the nearest teller machine and you can withdraw the money, give it to Mrs Payne and be well ahead. The alternative is that this little team in the photograph will probably be here probably within a half hour. And World Outlaws Wresting Federation is on TV right now - the team get real mean if they miss that.”
“ Hey WOWF is my favourite show! Look, I got the DVDR recording it, how cool is that? Like, two thousand dollars, yeah, I can cover that, I was expecting to send a cheque pretty soon, looks like Moo will have to wait when she writes.”
As we turned to leave for the ATM a husky female voice said “Dicky, where are you going baby? You promised to come back to bed after you did the shopping.” A sleepy-eyed redhead in her early 20s, with one of those flawed-beauty faces like Kate Hudson, all tousle haired and wrapped in a sheet, was leaning against what I supposed was the open bedroom door.
“It’s okay Tawney, I’m just going to pop down to the teller machine with these people. Be back soon.”
Crazy if he doesn’t.
“Hell Dicky, how many girlfriends are you running?” I said outside in the hall. “You got one in every port?”
“ Wow no, Tawney isn’t my girlfriend, just my flat-mate, she’s a fashion-design student up at East Sydney Tech I met, hasn’t got much money so I let her stay here free, really nice girl, very affectionate.”
Jeez, here I’m thinking Winger is a bit of an innocent and yet he’s tuned himself a very nice non-girlfriend/live-in fuck-buddy.
" Seems like you got yourself a sweet deal for a flatmate, young fella", said Mazzie. " But what's really important; can she clean and cook?"
“ Like a dream.”

Ten minutes later we were barreling down the road in Winger’s neat little Honda Prelude coupe, a real hairdresser’s car, a bit of a surprise considering his studmeister status. We had to slow right down where an old Toyota had slammed into a power pole. A traffic patrol cop was diverting traffic around it. His pursuit car, an ambulance and one of those police rescue vans were parked alongside the wreck, blocking one lane. A big cop in the distinctive Police Rescue overalls had one of those metal cutting things out and was hacking into the driver’s door. It looked like Alvaro and The Slob were trapped inside.
“ Whoa, check that out,” said Winger. “ Booze or drugs, you can bet anything on it, too many people driving around completely blitzed, causing these accidents, wow unreal.”
Mazzy and I lost it again.

Chapter16 - Riding in Cars With Really Young Girls

2006-12-11T15:26:00.000+11:00

Katie was waiting at the set-down area of the Bondi Junction bus-rail interchange. My heart gave a lurch every time I saw my daughter - she was the spitting image of her mother at the same age. She was wearing a baggy Stussy T-shirt and form fitting distressed denim jeans over a pair of Dunlop Volley tennis shoes - this season’s in-footwear. Everything old is new again - where were you in ‘82? She had an armful of packages, no doubt from shopping in the city on the way here from Susan and Bill Casey’s comfortable place across the harbour in Waverton.
We fixed the learner plates onto the Impala and headed out onto the street. Katie banged the big 4 speed into second, hit the blinkers and turned up the hill towards the beach. She had a shiny chromium stud sticking out of her face just below her bottom lip. I hadn’t seen it before. Why such a pretty girl needed to distract attention from her natural assets, beats me.
“Nice face art, sweetheart. Who did that, one of those feral new-agers slumming it down from Byron Bay?”
“And how are you today Pete? Running the same old CD?”
Ever since Susan and Katie moved out I’ve been Pete. Katie was only 6 years old at the time and was a bit confused about what she should call Casey. “Bill” was a bit familiar thought Susan, so why not dad? Katie always called me daddy, but to avoid confusion it was suggested I be called Pete. Katie loved the grown up idea of using my first name and so Pete is what it was from then.
Katie edged the big racer through the heavy traffic on Bondi Road. This car was no easy thing to drive - with its heavy duty racing clutch and brakes, the old indestructible Saginaw gearbox (dubbed Rock Crusher because changing gears involves about the same effort) and temperamental big-cam low-end power delivery, it was more like a truck than a car. Mind you, a 250kmh truck. About the only reasonably easy thing was the steering. I’d left the original power steering connected, otherwise with the huge wheels and tyres and the super quick racing steering rack you would need Charles Atlas biceps to turn the steering wheel at low speeds. And yet tricky to drive though it was, Katie handled it like a pro.
She was intent on taking the licence test in a manual gearbox vehicle. In this state new licencees who test in an automatic are not allowed to drive a manual for the first year. And there are bragging rights with kids who hold a manual licence. Both Susan and Bill’s cars are autos so once or twice a week since she first got her L plates on her 16th birthday Katie came for a lesson with me. Susan wasn’t passing the buck, because almost daily she had Katie out and about around the north shore in her neat little Audi3 for extra roadcraft practice.
I didn’t mind my instruction chores because every week I got to see my girl, instead of the sporadic visits which were the norm since she had hit her teens and developed outside interests. I was determined to do a good job, even to the extent of booking the skid pan at Oran Park Raceway for a few sessions to learn slide corrections and braking in slippery conditions. And Katie was a natural - I got a great charge seeing her twirling that wheel into opposite lock to straighten out a fishtailing slide and developing expert emergency stops without locking wheels. We even spent a few hours on the go-cart track, and hey, I’m no Michael Schumacher-super-driver admittedly, but she was damn near as fast as me after a while. And twice as crazy.

We cruised down Campbell parade at the beach looking for a gap to practise some parallel parking. Katie spotted one between between a really gorgeous Porsche Boxter and a 530 Beemer parked outside one of those trendy sidewalk cafes. As Katie backed and filed the big Chevy I checked the fashionistas sitting around these neat little tables at the restaurant, dressed in outrageoulsy expensive casual-sporting gear and sipping their ten dollar lattes. A sensational blonde in the long haired Elle McPherson style was sitting with this dweeby young guy at one of the front tables. I stuck my ugly pirate head out the side window and gave her a gap-tooth smile and a little wink. She stared at me and then gave me a smile - it was one of those damned get fucked smiles. Jeesus! What is going on? Has Monica Zellwinger set up a dedicated get-fucked-smile web site with how-to instructions and this year’s target - good old Pirate Pete? Then the blonde did the old Sharon Stone uncross the legs routine - except she was wearing nickers, and very nice thank you. Hell, that’s the second time in less than 18 hours I’d drooled over nickers - I must be becoming some sort of underwear pervert. I’d probably be out raiding female clothes lines anytime soon.
And then, I’m damned if the little dweeb with the blonde didn’t get up and walk across to the curb - not some black-belted vertically challenged tough guy protecting the honour of his girl, surely? This shrimp was all of 160cm and 50 kilos, with the immaculate Tommy Hellflinger warm-up suit, latest Outreach joggers, the hundred dollar razored layer haircut with the zillion bucks Von Zipper sunnies parked on top. Probably a 22 year old options trader with Goldman Sachs on 180 grand, plus bonuses. But when he reached the curb, he put a protective arm on the black Boxter and watched Katie do her thing with a worried look on his face. As we pulled away I gave him a little grin, glanced at the Porsche and stuck my thumb up in appreciation. Poor bugger, if that was my beautiful car, I would have done the exactly the same thing.

Katie turned off Campbell Parade into the beach promenade. It was a little past 2pm, nearly all the parking spots were taken and the beach was crowded. We cruised slowly along the promenade and practised a few angle parking maneuvers. I scoped out the scene - newly arrived family groups unloading equipment and heading for he sand, salt and sun blasted surfers standing around and jawing after a good wave session, Eurospunk backpacker babes and their guys in their slightly funny leisure wear, crazed skaters banging and turning off the curbs and railings, and all the pretty local girls walking along in their skimpy summer gear. A group of 20s something Eastern Suburbs Jewish Princesses, all dark ponytails and flawless skin jumped into an Audi TT convertible and cruised off. One of those boot-camp personal trainers with a string of puffing fat yuppies in camo-fatigues jogged up the promenade. About half a dozen surfer-groupies down on the grassed area above the sand at the southern end were sunbathing topless. Katie caught me sleazing away at them.
“Far out Pete, you are so totally pathetic. Those girls are about my age!”
“Yeah, I notice quite a few 16 year olds flashing their boobs lately.”
“ Don't change the subject, you are seriously hopeless. Bill said he saw you with a 19 year old student teacher at some school function.”
“ Bill’s full of bullshit, she was 20.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. You still seeing her?”
“ Nah, she ran off with a pretty face.” And aint that the truth.
“ So what can you expect? That’s what you get for hitting on someone half your age. When are you going to get some sense and hike yourself down to the desperate and dateless divorcees dance at the local RSL and hook up with a nice 35 year old?”
“ No chance. All those ladies are holding out for Mr. Right, someone making 90 large who can finance their poker machine and ciggy habits.”
“ As if. Get real Pete, you need someone closer your age. The rate you are going, you will be turning into a chickenhawk anytime soon. You’ll be racing off all those little girls at your school, get yourself sacked for running a posse of cheerleaders.”
“ No way. I couldn’t afford to keep them in weed, speed and Vodka cruisers.”
“ Loser. Face it, you always did fancy really young girls. Mum was way younger than me when you first started hanging off her.”

Well maybe not way younger, but that was pretty close to the truth. Big bad Pete, the 24 year old school teacher, moved in on Susan when she was barely past her 16th birthday. Mind you, she wasn’t a pupil at my school, and taking out pupils from other schools was not a potentially sackable offence as it is in this day of hyper sensitivity to child protection and the moral duty of teachers blah blah. But Susan was awfully young and naive. Which was all part of the plan - I figured the only way I was going to get myself a gorgeous girl was to get one very young and inexperienced with guys.
To say I was a failure with women when I was young was maybe a bit too strong. I never failed that much because I was way too scared to make the big moves. This started with the very first girl I had a real crush on, Jade Palmer, back when I was 14. I thought Jade was so nice, and she didn’t seem to mind my company, but everytime I tried to kiss her or even hold her hand she’d reject me, which broke my heart. Eventually I asked why and she said, “ Gee Pete, you are a really nice guy, but you have zero sex appeal.”
And to rub this in, probably unintentionally because Jade wasn’t a bitch, she went out with one of my surfing friends soon after. The rumour was they got right down to the total business, not just this holding hands, kissing bullshit..
Well that zero sex appeal thing is not the best news a shy and pretty sensitive young guy in those impressionable formative years wants to hear. Especially if he is already aware that he aint no oil painting on account of the only dances he gets at the school social are the progressive barn dances. So I kinda pulled my head in girl-wise, the fear of rejection and humiliation always making me pull back when I thought of asking a girl out, or of making a move on one if some friends arranged a double date or something similar. And this was in the crazy 70s and 80s when everyone was screwing their brains out like tomorrow was never going to come. And I couldn’t even get me a girlfriend.
So I flung myself into a range of subliminal activities. I was always okay at sport so I hit the pool, track and later the triathlon circuit. I got right into surfing and rugby. I guess there was the feeling that maybe girls would be impressed by sporting prowess. Well the teeny Hollywood movies have babes draped all over the jocks, but it never worked for me. The other side of this is the idea that if I can’t match guys in the girl-winning stakes, I can do better than most of them in sports. This is probably why I got into boxing, karate and other self defence shit. And maybe why I had a go at some dangerous activities like motorcycle and then car racing, climbing, free fall parachuting and hang gliding. It also probably accounts for the fact that I don’t mind breaking a few guys’ heads when they act like arseholes.
But all this stuff still didn’t substitute for my lack of a girl. So I hatched me a plan. A guy in my staffroom called Harry Roberts was always saying how easy really young girls were to con. Harry had a never ending string of them, including some from our own school, which finally caught up to him in a big way when all the bad-teacher investigations started after the Scott Royal Commission on paedophile cover-ups. My plan was dead simple - find me an attractive young thing from outside my school, who would be flattered by the attention of an older, educated guy and would think his very ordinary conversation and ho-hum banter pretty sophisticated compared to the usual self centred, puerile nonsense that the typical 16-17 year old guy came out with.
When I laid eyes on gorgeous Susan Hanlecker, who had come with her big sister to a triathlon club try-out for newbies, I spun into action and it worked a charm. She thought I was a fair bit more interesting than the kids in her group. And me, from that very first day, when we sat for hours and talked and laughed, I was totally smitten. Any lovely girl who showed interest in me was fantastic and deserved my total attention and commitment. I fell in love instantly, and 18 years later, I still am.
So we quickly became an item and after nearly a year, when I had plenty of time to notice how other guys tried to come on to her, I thought, no way am I going to lose something this precious to some better looking smooth talking bastard. So I proposed to her just past her 17th birthday and had her pregnant before her 18th.
Marriage was pretty sweet. We never fought or hardly even disagreed, my career was doing okay if not brilliant and Susan was making good progress as a junior office manager at a coupon-clipping outfit (aka investment bank) . We had a nice old house I was slowly doing up in a friendly multi-ethnic Auburn neighbourhood and Katie was the sweetest little thing any dad could ever wish for. And then ten years ago I came home late from work and the house was empty. There was a note on the table.

Dear Pete, I feel so awful telling you this, but I have found someone new. Katie and I have moved to Bill Casey’s place.
Please try to understand that it is not because of any thing you have done. You were my first real boyfriend and first lover and have given me so much, but I feel I must be allowed to grow in my life, to experience more, to feel more fulfilled. Bill makes me feel so special and I am afraid I have fallen completely in love with him. I know how hard it must be for you to accept this. You will always have a special part in my heart.
Love, Susan.

Chapter17 - Bondi Beach Mayhem

2006-12-10T13:57:00.000+11:00

I was devastated. I never saw it coming, but hell, it did make perfect sense. Susan’s only experience with guys had been me. And every woman who looked at Bill was enraptured and I guess Susan was no exception when I introduced her to our new young deputy principal at a staff social function. Not only was he a good looking bastard, Bill had that rare knack of giving anyone he was talking to that steady gaze showing total and undivided interest and attention. Friendly charm oozed from him. This was to anyone he met - imagine how he could turn it on with a woman he fancied, such as my beautiful 24 year old wife. He was a brilliant conversationalist and raconteur, had a wide range of interesting and in some cases quite high profile friends and lived in his parents’ huge old waterview unit on the north shore while they lazed in idyllic early retirement in their beachfront holiday shack at 1770 up in Queensland. And no risk, Bill was going big places fast.
So yeah, Susan would definitely grow with Bill compared to good old boring Pete the plodder. I could see the reasonableness of this, but nevertheless something in my heart broke that night. And all this time later, it still isn't right.

I looked across as my daughter eased the big Chevy away from another angle-parking place: “ Katie, how are you and mum and Bill getting on these days?”
“ Why do you ask?
“ Well sweetheart, you do seem to be doing a few wild things lately. Like I’m just wondering if you are doing the boring 16 year-old rebellion thing.”
I regretted my flippant wise-arse mouth instantly. Katie jammed on the brakes so that the car screeched to a halt, to the consternation of a following group of fluero track-suited losers from Lakemba who were doing an in-line parade lap of the promenade in their tricked up, slammed, rammed and ramped rice rockets with the big sub-woffas. Katie turned to me with a furious look. “Well fuck you Pete with your condescending shit!” Hondas, Mazdas and Subarus dived and screeched around us. “ I’ll tell you this straight. Mum and I aren’t talking and Bill shits me so much I could spit in his face!!!”
Stone the crows, glad I asked! Katie and Susan have always been so close. They would often go out together, always share secrets and swap clothes. Ever since Katie was 13 people have thought Susan was her big sister, they hung out together so much, looked so alike and dressed so similarly. And Bill was an instant hero to Katie when they moved. As I’ve already said, this guy was dynamite with kids, and like anything else he took on, Bill would make sure he did the parenting thing as good as the very best. Katie and my relationship had always had an edge since she’d hit her teens and realised what a hard-arsed cynical bastard I was. She reminded me too much of myself in the way she liked to pay me out, and I couldn’t resist responding. So a lot of our conversation had an adversarial bite to it. But I was dismayed to learn of the big blow-out with Susan and Bill.
“ Hell Katie, your mum and Bill have done a pretty good job with you.”
“ Bullshit! They still think I’m their little girl. They want to put limits on what I do, who I see, where I go, what hypocritical bastards - when mum was my age she was madly screwing a 24 year old sleaze, staying over at his flat and going on 6 week surfing jaunts with him to Sumatra or Sumbawa!”
“ Hey, what’s this 24 year old sleaze bit? I was 25 by then.” Never let a tired routine go unrepeated.
Katie gave me a poisonous look. The Lakemba losers had pulled their crates over to the side of Promenade and were leaning out the windows shouting abuse and giving the bird. A big coach full of Japanese tourists, heading for the obligatory toe-dip into the water down by the flags, was jammed behind us flashing its headlights. It gave a blast of its airhorns. Katie banged the Impala into gear, hit the gas and dropped the clutch. We went wheelspinning down the promenade, scattering the loser’s rice rockets again as they were pulling back onto the driveway. A few of them gassed it to chase, but a second later Katie slowed, ripped some extreme right-lock on the steering, declutched and hit the brakes for a mini-second to unsettle the car, and as the tail began to slide around, yanked the handbrake on hard to keep it going. Then when just as we did a full 180, she dropped the clutch and gunned it so that we were heading back the way we came. Which is one-way! Holey shit! That old Impala cut through those rice rockets like a tiger shark going through a school of sardines. Mazdas, Hondas and Subarus were diving off left and right like the All-Nippon Stunt Team at the Fukuwoka Spring Fair.
The tourist bus which had been slow off the mark was smoking its front tyres under brakes as we bore down at about 90kph, but Katie did a perfect repeat of the 180 and we fishtailed away back in the correct direction, once again scattering the Lakemba hoons. Crikey!!! I hung on for grim death and cursed myself for showing her how to do these bootleg turns when we had those skidpan sessions. Old moonshine runners down in North Carolina in the 50s and 60s used to employ bootleg turns to shake off the federal revenue boys perusing them. Some of these moonshiners like Junior Roberts and Curtis Turner became the first NASCAR stars when stock car racing started up in earnest. Well I thought showing Katie how-to was a good exercise in car control. Stupid me, I didn’t anticipate this.
We shot past a cop cruiser parked on the promenade. The cops were probably perving at all the gorgeous topless babes down on the beach. Almost instantly a siren blipped and as I looked back a blue flashing light started up. Katie slowed and pulled into the side.
The cruiser pulled in behind. All the Lakemba louts screeched up to watch the show.
“Get out of the car,” came an amplified female voice. “Stand with your hands on the roof of your vehicle, legs apart.”
Katie looked mortified. It was probably the first time the law had spoken to her in anger. She climbed out, adopted the required position and looked like she wanted to die. Debbie Dillinger got out of the cruiser and sauntered up to the Impala, giving me a smirk and a wink as she passed. The Lakemba guys cheered and jeered until Ivan grabbed his defect book and jogged towards them. None of those cars meet the traffic act - they are too low, the wheels are too big, their exhausts and stereos too loud. The boys jumped in their vehicles and screeched off giving us another round of jeers and fingers out the window.
Ms. Dillinger stood behind Katie, put her hands on Katie’s shoulders and preceded to frisk her. Slowly down her back, over her bum, down the back of her legs and then around to the inside and upwards ....
“Don’t you dare!” I said.

Chapter 18 - Bag Man

2006-12-05T12:30:00.000+11:00

After dropping Katie back at the rail interchange I went back to my unit, got my sportspbag out of the boot and went up to the 10th floor pool. I did 50 laps of the 20 metre training section, followd by 20 minutes on the exercise cycles in the adjoining gym, 10 on the kick-bag, showered and then headed up to my unit. I opened a beer using the handy built in spike on the catapult frame out on the deck and checked my text messages - brng pckage to tt 8pm angie - wow, just what I wanted, another trip to leather central. Ah well, if I didn’t get flattened by some bull-dyke I get might get lucky and cop another tunnel shot.
Katie worried me. I hated talking to Susan, it brought back too many things I didn’t want to think about, but I dialed her number. “ Pete here Susan,” I said when she answered. “ Look, how are things with Katie? She seems pretty skittish right now.”
There was a silence for a while. A silence from Susan means something she would prefer not to talk about: “ I guess you should have been told before now Pete, Katie moved out a fortnight ago after a big row. She has been living with her boyfriend Benny. The school rang yesterday, she has only attended 2 days in the fortnight.”
That threw me for a second or two. “ Hell, this is more serious than I thought. I mean Katie told me about disagreements over Benny and stuff like that, but I didn’t realise she had left home.”
Susan sighed. “ Please don’t be judgmental Pete, Bill and I have been doing the best job we can, but it just hasn’t seemed to work. I don’t know what to do.”
“ Don’t beat yourself up, Susan.” I didn’t have to tell her how many good parents I’ve had in my office mystified as to why their kid has gone off the rails. “Look, I’ll find out where Benny's band is playing tonight and go have a talk to the lovebirds.”
“ Pete, thanks. But please, don’t punch anyone out.”
I dialed Larry Ferguson, Bazza’s talent scout. “ Larry, Pete Andrews here.”
“ Petey, how are you. Not looking for another date with one of those dancers up at Eve's?”
“ Stone the crows Larry, that Christine is way above my league, $350 a night! That’s a once a year birthday treat.”
Larry chuckled. “ Petey, that was mates’ rates discount city, it’s $500 for anyone else. So what can I do for you?”
“ There’s a band called Orchid’s Cloud. I was wondering where they are playing tonight.”
“ Just a minute, I’ll check my gig guide.” Larry has one of those Nokias with blue-tooth access to PC pages and all that bullshit. “Yeah, over at the Newtown Alms pub, support act to Gracious Souls. Say Petey, why are you so interested in a pub band?”
“ I heard they were okay and I thought I might check them out, get into your business, put them on a contract, collect my 40%. I’m sick of doing real work for a living.”
Larry gave a chuckle. “ Pete you are much too honest for this business. Stick to breaking heads. But it’s funny about that band, one of my stringers mentioned them the other day.”
Yeah, something along the lines of one band to avoid, I bet.

I paid off the cabby and walked across to the door of the Tanning Tub. The same tough blonde with the bulging biceps was on the door. “Well well, the tickler technician is back. I have a big message from mumma-boss - send Angie’s friend right in. You know the way.”
The dance floor was even more packed tonight. I noticed the same nude girl on the carousel was performing handstands with splits - Jesus! I had a bugger of a time getting across to the Green Door. I bashed on it and it was opened by Aimeee, tonight is a lovely strapless white gown which set off here flawless ebony skin. Magda was behind her desk unchanged in appearance from last night. Angie was doing biker-moll with a pair of tight denim jeans, a cut off lacey black top and heavy duty black biker boots.
“ Pete, Aimy here was telling me you are an expert on butterfly tatts,” said Angie.
“ Okay, I peeked. So sue me.”
“ Ah, Pete is my favourite sleaze ladies. So sweetheart, do you have the package?”
I handed it across. Angie opened it, counted off about two grand in crisp hundreds and handed it to Magda.
“ Good business darling,” said Magda.
“ Anytime Magda,” replied Angie. “ Just let me know when the next shipment comes in and I’ll send the butterfly man here around to pick it up.”
“ Speaking of which,” said Magda, tilting her head towards the security monitor that showed the dance area outside, “ I doubt Mr Pete will find any butterflies tattooed on carousel dancers’ perineums, so perhaps he could make a more dignified exit tonight and not start another small riot.”
I could think of a thousand smart answers to that, but I’m cool. I held the door for Angie, gave Magda and Aimeeeee a sweet smile and pushed my way out into the room. I swear an extra hundred ladies had arrived in the few minutes I’d been inside. The dance floor was packed with swaying females. The naked girl on the carousel had a big black cylindrical thing in her hand and was threatening to do unmentionables with it to the delighted anticipation of the crowd near her. I was determined to be cool in Angie’s presence and not look at the performance. Well okay, I had a bit of a peek. About every two seconds. We gave up trying to force our way across the dance floor and took a detour through the crowded tables on the far side of the room. I got far fewer hostile looks and comments than last night, no doubt because of the gorgeous creature tagging along with me. Angie is pretty well known in the scene. We were held up by a jam of bodies near the side bar and as I glanced to the back of the room I noticed a card game in operation attended by 4 very tough looking babes and one Sandy Tavernese, schoolgirl comedian, all done out in shiny black leather. Sandy was looking this way and waggling her fingers at me. I gave her a smile and a wave and followed Angie out the door.
“ Go easy on your man-slave Angie, you got him running everywhere and he don’t look like he’s got too much stamina,” said ripped biceps.
I tried to give her a get-fucked smile but I think it turned out more like a shit-eater’s grimace.
“ Hey Mr Andrews, wait up a bit, please!”
We turned and saw Sandy hurrying towards us. The narrow legged leather pants, two inch heeled boots and tightly fitting jacket made her look very tall and slim. She had her long black hair tied back in a very simple ponytail and was wearing no makeup. I noticed she was not moving quite as gracefully as usual. Actually she looked like she was slightly plowed.
“ And how are you tonight Sandy?”
“ Ah well sir, I’ve been a bad girl again.”
“ Why doesn’t this surprise me? Just what have you done this time?”
“ Well, I got involved in a game of blackjack with those movers in there. I was actually doing quite well on account of the fact that I can count cards, but then I got a little uncoordinated, like mainly because those cheating floozies were piling the booze into me. So basically, I lost all my money.”
“ Are you really a card counter?”
“ Well sure, I’m pretty good. Look, anyone who can learn a 5000 word script in a day or so can learn how to remember which cards are falling. But that little trick don’t work too good once I get wasted. And shit sir, I am truly wasted.” And she swayed a bit and gave out a little giggle. “The point is, those ladies cleaned me right out, a whole fifty dollars, and I was wondering if you could lend me the train fare home?”
“ You’re one of the seniors from school,” said Angie.
“ Yeah, I’m Sandy, Miss Vung Thuy. Say, you look really great.” Sandy eyed Angie up and down. Angie eyed Sandy up and down.
“ You don’t look too bad yourself Sandy, and please, call me Angie.” Alarm bells, baby - Angie was going into one of her crack-on routines. “ Trust me, you aren’t in too good shape to be riding trains this time of night. I think you better come with us. Pete is giving me a lift home after we do another errand, I’m sure he would be pleased to take you too.”
So Pete is giving lifts home? Maybe that crack by the door bitch about man-slave wasn’t too far off the truth. “ What’s this other errand Angie?”
“ I have to go to T and D’s and drop off another payment.”
T and D's is a night club over in the Cross. We walked up Oxford until we found a passing cab and headed across town.
“ This is way cool, I didn’t know you two were an item,” said Sandy, looking back from the front seat at Angie and me.
“ Pete and I are just very good friends, as they say,” said Angie. “Pete loves girls and so do I, so it is a friendship only. But I assume from the fact you were in the club that you like girls too?”
“ Yes please,” said Angie. “ Oh sure, I like guys as well. I mean, swing both ways, twice the action, right?”
“ Well, if that floats your boat, sure.”
Sandy looked at me. “ Gee sir, for a deputy principal you sure show up in unexpected places.”
“ For a sweet 17 year old who should be studying for her upcoming exams, you don’t do badly in the unexpected stakes yourself, Sandy.”
“ Say Angie, you can take the schoolteacher out of the school, but you can’t take the schoolteacher out of the man.” She gave another giggle which Angie joined in.
“ Keep this up sweeties and you will be walking home.”
Jeez I’m a tough guy.
..........

GO TO CHAPTER 19 HERE

Chapter 19 - Tough Girl

2006-10-29T15:15:00.001+11:00

T and D’s is a night-club and bar at the top of Williams Street in the Cross. The theme is Western Cowboy, with lots of swinging doors, wooden barstools, wanted posters on the walls and the staff done up in western gear. Few customers worry about following this trend, with a mixture of Beautiful Young Things, older tourists, visiting businessmen out on the town, some local guys on the prowl and people from the suburbs on their big night out. No way is this place dive-city, yet all sorts of deals go down in the washrooms and there are some upstairs rooms where decidedly unusual things happen.
The young guy on the door all resplendent in chaps, hide fringed shirt and big white hat let Angie and me past, but when Sandy tried to enter he held up his hand. “ Sorry ma’am, do you have some sort of proof of age?”
Sandy whipped out a rather battered looking university student ID card. “ I’m sorry ma’am, this is definitely a forgery. You will have to stay outside.”
Sandy checked him out. She gave a bit of a giggle and swayed slightly. “ Well, Roy Rogers, fuck you. And fuck the horse you rode in on too.”
“ Behave yourself Sandy,” said Angie. “ Look cowboy, this young lady is my niece, we will only be inside for a short time while I conduct some business. I don’t want to leave her out here where she might wander off and get into trouble.”
“ I’m sorry ma’am, I believe she is also intoxicated. I can’t allow her inside in that state.”
“ Listen, I’ll vouch for her good behavior inside,” I said. “ And the only thing she will drink is Coke. Maybe you should send a message through to the bar.”
He checked us out for a long moment. “ Well okay, it’s against my better judgment, and I’ll hold you to your promise about the Coke.”
“ Hey Roy, did you hear about the gay cowboy, rode into town and shot up the sheriff?” said Sandy as we filed past the doorman.
“ Behave yourself Sandy,” he said.
This place was almost as packed as the Tanning Tub. After a brief search Angie found the person she wanted and had a brief conversation. I was returning from the wc when I spotted a tall guy in an immaculate suit with razor cut grey hair who, even with his back to me, looked very familiar. He was talking to two people I definitely knew, a great looking girl named Marlene Johannson who was a bit player in Bazza’s wilder video productions and a big guy named Emilio Zabloc. Emilio was a part time barman in one of Bazza’s clubs. He had just pocketed a wad of money handed to him by grey-hair and Marlene held a digital camera/printer dock combo and what looked like a bunch of photographs. I made a beeline for them. Marlene saw me coming and took off towards the door. Zabloc paused, turned to see what had spooked Marlene and gave a start when he saw me, by which time I had reached him. “What a surprise Emilio,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you and Marlene are still running that boring suck and snap scam. I thought Bazza warned you off that six months ago.”
“ What is this shit? Are you turning moral or something, Andrews? What the fuck is it to you what we do?”
“ Normally I wouldn’t give a stuff, but Bill here is a very good friend of mine.” District Superintendent Bill Casey looked decidedly uncomfortable. He had been caught upstairs in one of those dodgy rooms with his dick in Marlene’s mouth and good old Zabloc hiding behind the curtains or similar, firing off a barrage of happy snaps. I held out my hand to Zabloc. He passed over the money, at least five hundred dollars, which I handed to Bill. I didn’t expect any crap from Zabloc. He was a big guy and had tried to work on some of Bazza’s eviction and security teams but he just couldn’t cut the really rough stuff. I handed him my mobile. “ Get onto Marlene and tell her if she isn’t back here with those photos and the camera and dock within 10 minutes I’m going to smack her so hard she won’t make a video for a month on account of the bruises on her bum.”
Sandy had watched this with some interest and Angie had arrived. She grinned at Zabloc. “ So the candid camera team is working again. You are such a loser Emilio.”
Zabloc looked like he was going to say something stupid in reply but he thought better of it.
“ We’ll be at the bar Zabloc. Bring Marlene over when she arrives.”

The place was standing room only but as we approached the bar I saw two girls stand up, shoot filthy looks and a mouthful of invective at a couple of smirking older guys sitting next to them and stalk away. Some older creeps know they have no chance of landing any of these young lovelies, but they get their kicks hanging around places like J and D’s making obscene propositions and suggestions to the sweeties. Angie and Sandy squeezed into the vacated seats while Bill and I stood behind. Bill hadn’t said a word.
A couple of young guys in their 20s, actually done up semi-cowboy style in jeans and western style shirts were sitting on the other side of us. “ Hiya cute leather babe,” said the one next to Sandy in an American accent, probably a backpacker doing the town. “I love your slinky black outfit. How about you come outside and check my Harley, maybe go for a ride?”
Sandy turned and checked the two smiling guys. “Listen Rowdy, I have a better idea,” she replied in a perfect American accent. “Why don’t y’all go jump on your Harley and fuck in the general direction of off?”
The boys thought this was immensely funny and chuckled and grinned like maniacs.
“ Behave yourself Sandy”, I said.
“ Yes, behave yourself Sandy,” said Bill. Hey good for you Bill, back into teacher mode.
The two Yanks thought this was even better, and hooted and guffawed.
“ I’ll buy you a drink, Sandy,” said the first guy.
“ She’s only allowed Coke and ice,” I said with a malicious grin. A nice get-back for the Fuggly stuff.
This cracked them right up. Sandy gave me a nice little get-fucked smile. Jesus, not another web site viewer!
I turned back to check Zabloc on the other side of the room just in time to see the older guy next to Angie lean close and say something to her. Angie’s elbow shot out and hit him flush in the face. Down he went off the bar stool in a crash of glass, ashtrays and furniture.
Casey and Sandy spun around to check what the racket was. The American guys had seen the action and had a look of disbelief on their faces.
“ You fucking bitch!” said the second older guy. “I saw that sneak shot. Charlie didn’t even see it coming. What a cunt!”
This second guy didn’t see the perfect face slap coming. It was a ripper and just about took his head off. He gave it a shake and launched an overhead punch at Angie. She easily slipped to the side to avoid it, and as the creep’s momentum carried him downward she smacked a nice karate blow to the back of his head, followed by a beautiful knee lift under his chin as he too headed for the floor.
Crikey, it’s really nice watching Angie in action. Soon after she had started working at the school she had mentioned doing some taekwondo when she was a kid. So I invited her along to the gym where I did some instructing in karate and self defence training. Angie with her strength and aggressive nastiness was a natural. She learned everything so quickly and was prepared to put in the hours of training needed to hone the skills and high level of fitness required. Soon she was much more effective than me and was instructing as well. She also took on some security work, often for Bazza, sometimes freelancing for herself.
I surveyed the scene. The barman was peering over the counter at the wreckage. The first creep was out cold and the second was laying on the floor moaning and spitting out a tooth or three. Bill Casey couldn’t believe his eyes, the Yanks seemed suitably impressed and Sandy looked immensely entertained. She turned and gave the Yanks a perfect copy of Chili Palmer’s narrow eyed stare. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at me. If you good ol' boys give me any more crap, I’ll have my friend Angie deal with you.”
The first Yank gave a look of panic and formed his arms into the shape of the cross, like in warding off vampires. “Wow, break out the garlic!” That cracked him and his mate up again.
“ Behave yourself Sandy,” I said.
“ Yeah, behave yourself Sandy,” said Angie.
Sandy broke out into a little giggle which developed onto one of her Minnie Driver belly laughs. What a ripper. That just about finished the Yanks off and got me going too.
A new figure arrived at the scene. It was the young bouncer guy from the door.
“ Excuse me ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his eyes sweeping the carnage. “I don’t like to interrupt the festivities, but I just got a call from my boss. He saw what went down,” nodding towards a small security camera mounted above the bar, “ and he instructed me to ask you to please vacate the premises.”
Hey this was pretty neat. How many guys had Angie and I chucked out of places like this? And now we were being shown the door.
“ The thing is,” continued the bouncer. “I just saw you in action ma’am, and I’m mighty impressed. I’m really not too sure I would be able to throw you out if you fail to cooperate. And that could lead to very serious consequences.”
“ Like what?” said Angie, sounding pretty mean.
He took out his wallet and withdrew two pictures of a pretty girl in her early 20s holding a really cute kid of about 3. “This is my wife and my little boy, and if you look behind you can see our brand new house. We just moved in, and the mortgage and other costs are pretty heavy but we are managing to scrape by. The thing is I’m on probation with this job, and if I fail to carry it out to the boss’s satisfaction, I’ll get sacked and things will be pretty tough meeting all those expense we have.”
Well stuff me, a variation of the photo-sell routine. I wonder if this guy had ever worked with Kim Hulbert.
“ So ladies,” he smiled at Angie and Sandy. “My family and I would be much obliged if you and I could link arms and walk right out of here. With your two gentlemen friends coming along of course.”
I looked across at Angie. She was checking the bouncer out with a slight smile which only went as far as her lips. I did not know how this would go down. Angie did not like any man telling her what she should do. She was proud. And intensely competitive when it came to biff.
Sandy broke the stalemate. “ This is way cool Angie, like the sheriff asks so nicely, how could any girl resist?”
Angie considered it. “Well yes, you do have a lot of style Roy.”
She held out her arm to him, and off we strolled towards the door, the bouncer in front with a girl on each arm, Bill and I following. The two Yanks started a round of applause which was taken up by a lot of the nearby crowd. I signaled Zabloc to follow.
“ Get Marlene on the ‘phone, tell her we are going to Jim’s Diner.”

Chapter 20 - Even Tougher Girl

2006-10-28T21:50:00.000+10:00

Jim’s Diner is a short distance down the side street from T and D’s. Diner it aint - I think it served its last meal a good 20 years ago. It’s a considerably down-market bar, attracting a motley collection of dealers, off duty working girls, club workers taking a break and general riffraff. But it had the advantage of being close, not packed and not giving a damn about underage leather-babes. There were no bouncers on the door, just a mean looking bartender, all sinew, lean muscle and stringy tendons, with one of those barbed wire tattoos circling his right bicep. In my experience, guys like this are much more dangerous than big muscled up Tongans and ex football players. We filed in and took a table near the back. Bill went over to the bar and brought back a round of drinks. Sandy looked real pissed at her Coke. Five minutes later, Marlene showed up.
“ Hey Marlene, your are looking great,” I said. “What do you have for us?” Marlene gave me a look that could kill and handed over a half dozen photos.
Angie leaned across and checked them out. “Way to go, Bill, heavy stuff! You getting in touch with your kinky side?” The photos were a whole lot more than the suck and snap variety. I wondered if Bill ever did this stuff with Susan. Hell, I never did. Sandy leaned across to cop a look but I turned them face down to the table.
“ Give me the camera and dock,” Marlene handed them across. I took out the memory card and gave it to Bill. Marlene knew better than to hold back any prints or substitute cards, but to ensure no-one else stumbled across any internal memory, I smashed the camera and then the dock against the corner of the table and handed them to Bill as well.
“ Fuck you Pete, who the hell do you think you are!” snarled Marlene.
“ No fuck you, Marlene.” I was talking very softly, like I do when I am annoyed at some kid. Iceman Pete - it’s hard to break some habits. “If a guy wants to play bad-boy and act out some fantasies, you should take his two hundred bucks and be happy, instead of getting greedy with this slimy scam. Now piss off both of you before I lose my patience.”
Marlene looked like she wanted to go on with it, but Zabloc grabbed her by the elbows and hauled her out of her seat. She shot me a withering look as she left. Ah well, that’s one of Bazza’s good time girls I’d have to cross off my list.
Unnoticed, Sandy had leaned across and grabbed the photos. “Oh yuck! How gross is this? God, men are hopeless!”

As we levered the shots back from Sandy, a big ethnic looking guy sat down in the seat vacated by Marlene. He was late 20s, dressed western-suburbs flash like my drug dealing friend of last night. He had an extraordinary hairdo. The back of his head was completely bald, yet the front and most of the top was quite long and heaped up bouffant style. What is it with all these fuck-wit haircuts? That soccer guy Ronaldo has a lot to answer for.
“ Who invited you?” said Angie.
“ Stay out of this, bitch. I want to talk to Andrews here.”
I could almost see the instant smoke coming out of Angie’s ears. I gave her a little shake of my head and looked at the newcomer. “Who the hell are you?”
“ I’m Spiran Mantouv, you probably heard of me.”
I screwed up my face like I was thinking real hard. “Yeah, I think I have. You’re the chicken-hawk kiddie chaser they arrested for hanging around the Play School production studios.”
He stared at me. “Don’t give me any shit, Andrews. You are in real deep as it is.” He brushed back the lapel of his leather jacket to flash a big nickel plated 45 in a shoulder holster. A gun! A fucking huge gun! Hell, I hate guns! “I’m Donny Manem’s head of security and Donny is very pissed off with you. He don’t like anyone who steals six grand from one of his product couriers.”
"Who told you that story?”
“ Don’t act innocent with me you dumb bastard. You then throw the courier in the fucking harbour, steal one of Donny’s cars and leave it looking like Di and Dodi’s Mercedes after the big fucking accident, and how stupid is this, the very next morning you are on the TV news at some school opening or something. Our courier says: fuck me, there’s that bastard knocked me over last night.”
Jesus, don’t these television shows do any editing? I mean, who wants my ugly mug on TV?
“ So I do a bit of checking around with contacts I got and up comes your name. And when I tell Donny, he says, hey that Andrews guy, he’s the one beat the shit out of two of our debt recovery agents Friday night and rammed their car into a power pole and put them in the hospital next day. I mean, how fucking stupid are you? You must be a metalwork teacher at that fucking school you teach at, you dumb schmuck.”
“ Is this guy real?” said Angie. “Listen Spirooo, turn down the dumb schmuck routine, or you could end up in the harbour.”
“ I said shut the fuck up, bitch! You got bad hearing or something?”
Angie looked at me. “Do you want to listen to this guy some more?”
I held up my hand. “Just a minute, Angie. So what’s the deal, Sporan?”
“ Normally there would be no deal, shit for brains. You would be history by now. But Donny is an associate of Bazza Payne in some enterprises, and we did a bit of checking as to how you do some work for him, so out of respect to Mr Payne we are gonna give you a break. You ante up the full value of the money owed to Silver Tree Finance including the default loading, plus six thousand eight hundred and a grand’s interest from the courier rip-off, plus another forty two grand for the car and you can stay breathing.”
No way would Bazza have anything to do with Manem’s illegal activities. Maybe Manem was trying to launder some of his money by investing in Bazza’s legitimate businesses.
Mantouv’s mobile went off. The Theme From Rocky, what else? “Yo Habib, how you been bro, how they hangin man? ...... You jivin me man!!......You don’t say, that is totally insane man!!!....” Old Spiran had been watching too many gansta rap video clips. He was talking so loud, Habib out there in Greenacre would have heard him without the phone.
“ Put the phone away, Spittoon” said Angie.
“ Huh?”
“ I said put the fucking phone away.”
“ Huh?”
Angie stood, reached across the table, grabbed Mantouv by his long forelocks and smashed his face into the table. Wham! It would have knocked most people into tomorrow, but he must have had a real tough skull because he was still with us. So she repeated the exercise a half dozen times.Wham, wham, wham ...... Then as he swayed and gripped the table groggily to stop falling, she launched a lightning backhand round-leg sweep which smacked a heavy duty biker boot cleanly on the side of his head, knocking him sideways off the seat and into a pile of chairs at the next table. Definitely a jaw breaker there, enough to knock him into next week, forget about tomorrow. He was out cold. Angie reached down, pulled open his jacket and grabbed the big 45 out of the holster. The mean bartender, who was halfway across the bar with a baseball bat, saw the gun and paused. Angie reached into the inside breast pocket of Mantouv’s jacket and extracted his wallet. She took a couple of hundreds out of it, waved them at the barkeep and placed them under the ashtray on the table.
We all stood up. Sandy picked Mantouv’s mobile up off the floor. “Hello sir, are you still connected?” she said in a nasal New York Bronx accent like Fran Drescher in reruns of The Nanny. “I’m afraid your other party seems to have .... dropped out. Thank you for using Optus.” She dropped the phone onto the table and we walked across the now silent room and trooped out.

Chapter 21 - Rock Groupie

2006-10-27T13:38:00.000+10:00

“ I should hang with you guys more often, this is way more interesting than card counting,” said Sandy as we marched up through the Cross towards my place. “ That was seriously awesome Angie, you must teach me some of that kung fu stuff, it would go down a treat on any drunk tries to wreck my stand-up routine.”
“ Ask Pete, he taught me everything I know.”
“ Say Pete, could you do that?”
“ Maybe when you graduate, Sandy.”
I looked at Bill. He was very quiet. Fair enough, Bill had been on a steep learning curve tonight. I would have given a million bucks to know what he was thinking, and another million to give him a lecture. But no way, a lecture was exactly what Bill would be expecting. And he was smart enough to work out the debts and lessons. Including, I hoped, never to again put himself in a situation that could maybe impact on Susan and Katie in some way.

We reached my building on Macleay, went down to the garage and piled into the Impala. Bill had his department-issue Statesman in a parking station in Chinatown. After dropping him off we headed for the Newtown Alms over in, would you believe, Newtown. I wasn’t too sure what time this place closed down and I didn’t want to miss Katie. When we arrived things were pretty quiet. Somehow I don’t think Orchid’s Cloud or Gracious Soul are big name attractions. There wasn’t even a guy on the door at this late hour. The lounge area had a reasonable crowd when we trooped in but the stage, packed with speakers and amps was empty of people. We went back-stage and the small space was crowded with mussos and hangers-on. Over in the corner, I could see Katie. She was lying on an old sofa, legs stretched out over the end, her head resting on the chest of a young guy I knew was Benny the boyfriend. Katie’s eyes were closed and she had a slight smile on her lips. Benny was gently stroking her hair. Crikey, just the way they were hit me really strong - these two meant something to each other.
“ Yo, wassup Mr Andrews!” said Benny when he saw me. “ Hey, that was really neat sending that dude around, you know. I mean thanks, that was way cool.”All this was delivered in a perfect Australian accent. The only time I had heard this guy speak before was when Katie had dragged me along to see his band and meet him when she was 14. Back then his accent was that phoney English cockney crap half these guys carry on with, just like Elvis Costello or some other last-century has-been.
“ What dude was that?”
“ Some dude called Larry Ferguson. He tells us he is some big time agent-producer. That didn’t impress Katie too much, she’s been in a snit ever since that driving lesson. Like, where did you guys go, dodging missiles in downtown Baghdag or something? She goes: ‘Like, excuse me? Big time agent? With that gansta suit and the matching waistcoat? Yeah right, as if!’”
Katie sat up. “ Say Pete, isn’t it a bit past your bedtime?” My daughter looked a million bucks in a very short white linen skirt with ragged hem, a little chic close-fitting top kind of like a sports bra, covered by a short open denim jacket showing plenty of midriff. She had high heeled sandals with anklet things made of the same white linen as the skirt, which somehow made her long legs seem even longer. She wore a thin choker also in the white linen. The whole effect was kind of teen-hooker meets chic valleygirl, but classy too. “That Ferguson dandy told us he was a friend of yours. I told him on appearances that was way possible, he sure looked like some has-been from the 70s. I said the way he dresses he probably produces elevator music and Johny O’Keefe reissues.”
“ See that mark on Katie’s neck?” said Benny. “That wasn’t made by the choker she’s wearing, that’s where I tried to strangle her. Anyway, Mr Ferguson wasn’t fazed one bit. Said Katie was just like her dad. He had us sign an option.”
“ Yeah, I can imagine, one of Pete’s friends has us sign an option, we’ll probably walk into David Jones and hear the band doing Julie Anthony covers,” said Katie.
Far out, Larry really thought I was serious. This band must have improved a hell of a lot since I saw them two years back. “So what’s the deal?”
“ Well, like nothing definite yet,” said Katie. “But he reckons he can get us regular pub work, no problem. And he says he’s prepared to finance some studio time for us, cut a demo and get it out to the stations. Anyway, I’m not holding my breath. But at least someone showed up, that so called agent who promised Benny hasn’t been seen.” She looked at Angie and Sandy. I introduced them.
“ So at last I meet Pete’s daughter,” said Angie. “Actually, you remind me of someone I saw just yesterday, Katie.” Angie was giving Katie her full attention and charm. She had that intense, smouldering look in her eyes. Instant alarm bells. “I don’t suppose you do any outdoor exotic dancing?”
Katie smiled. “Only when I’m desperate.”
I checked Sandy out, just as she glanced my way. She made here eyes go real wide for a moment and then shot me a little grin.

We stood around and made small talk for a while. I wasn’t too sure how to approach the subject of getting Katie back home with all these people around. The crowd backstage thinned as Gracious Soul set up for their next bracket. The other guys in Benny’s band had already packed most of the equipment in the van, so Benny, Sandy and I helped them with the last of the stuff and waved them off. When we got backstage again, the music had restarted.
“ How good are Gracious Soul?” asked Sandy.
“ Pretty sweet, got great stage presentation,” said Benny. “Come and check them out.”
I tagged along and while Sandy scoped the band I took Benny aside and explained how Susan, Bill and I wanted Katie back at her home and going to school. “It’s like this, Benny. That agent guy Ferguson is a personal friend and he owes me some big favours. I say to him Benny aint worth the worry, then Larry won’t do anything for the band, no matter how good he thinks you are. I know that sounds like blackmail, but Katie’s mother is pretty worried about the whole thing. And so am I.”
“ Well shit, Mr Andrews, I can see where you are coming from. But you know how Katie is. She’s totally her own person, anyone puts pressure on her, tries to tell her what to do, she gets way stubborn, you know, and she goes and does exactly the opposite. So she isn’t gonna listen to anything I say anyhow.” Yeah, well he had something there, but at least he was in the picture.

After a couple of numbers we walked backstage again, and there on the couch was Angie and my darling daughter, locked in a passionate embrace and exchanging the most tender smooches since Kissing Jessica Stein. Stone the crows!! How many of my girls does Angie hit on? Like it’s bad enough with the ones I’m carting out, but my own daughter? Angie is such a tramp, a serial rake. I know she can’t keep her hands off any pretty thing but I’m sure there’s an added edge when she hits on my ladies. She likes to shit-stir me completely. I was so thrown I was literally lost for words. Sandy had that little smile on her face which I was rapidly coming familiar with and poor old Benny was bug-eyed. “Wow, hey this is way weird man! Shit, I mean no way, what is this Katie?”
“ Relax Benny,” said Katie, breaking away from Angie. “I was just exploring a new side of my personality.”
“ No, no way Katie. Wow, this has blown me away totally, you know. I think you better go with your dad tonight. I gotta think this thing over, this has totally stressed me out.”
To this day I haven’t worked out if poor old Benny was as freaked as he was making out or whether he was a quick thinking opportunist who grabbed this as the perfect answer to my demands. Maybe a bit of both. But it didn’t throw Katie one bit.
“ Cool Benny. Look, you’ll get over it.”
“ Ah, fuck me Katie. Like, you just met this babe.”
“ Listen, you’re still my guy and we’ll talk tomorrow about it. But okay, I don’t mind going with Angie right now,” she gave Angie an adoring grin, “ And I guess good old Pete can tag along, seeing as how he is the driver.”
“ Well stuff you Katie.” I’d found my voice. “ You don’t look like you’ve been drinking, you can drive.” Pubs usually supply lots of free beer for the band. I had no illusions about my sweet 16 year old daughter drinking if she felt like it.
“ I haven’t been drinking Pete, but those Gracious Soul people sure had some funny cigarettes.”
Jesus, what a combination - runaway rock groupie, apprentice lesbian and budding dope fiend to boot.

When we reached the Impala, Katie went to climb into the back seat. “You sit up front Katie, no way are you sitting in the back with Angie. And something tells me you won’t be much safer with Sandy.”
“ Oh please Pete,” said Sandy “I want to sit in front with you. Older men really turn me on. We could all go for a park-and-pash out on Padstow point.”
“ Get in the back Sandy. You too Angie. And behave, both of you.”
There was a lot of giggling and then swearing as they negotiated the roll cage tubing into the rear.
“ Hel-LO-O, this is like a bondage dungeon back here!” complained Sandy. No doubt she was an expert. I fired up the 409 and swung out onto the road.
There was some shuffling from the rear.
“ Oh Angie,” sighed Sandy.
“ Oh Sandy,” gushed Angie.
“ Oooooh Angeeeeeee!”
“ Oooooh Saaandeeee!”
“ Oh oh oh oh oooooooooooooooh!!!!!!”
“ Mmmnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!”
I looked in the rear vision mirror. Both ladies were far apart, leaning back in their seats smirking madly at me. Sandy started a Mini Driver chortle, joined by giggles from Angie and Katie.

My trouble is I have too many lesbians in my life.

Chapter 22 -The Bad Guys are Back

2006-10-26T15:57:00.000+10:00

I hit the brakes hard and knocked the Impala back through third gear and then to second. The silver Porsche 911 skated past under brakes and dived for the apex of the corner. Crikey, those old Porches have such good brakes compared to the Impala! I tucked in behind as the Porche danced and jigged in the corner - those older 911s sure are snaky bastards - and then groaned with frustration as its superior traction at the start of the next straight opened a 4-car gap on me. The Impala has so much power you can’t give it full throttle exiting slow or medium corners - you just waste time with wheelspin. Those neat little Porsches, with all that weight over the back wheels, can lay down all their power immediately.
Welcome to a the Historic Racers’ test day at Oran Park. On the second Sunday morning of each month the club has the circuit booked. It gives us a chance to get out on the track and fine tune our cars, see evidence of modifications and for a lot of us, just to have a fang. Because there is no racing, we require much less in the way of flag marshalling, safety cars, ambulances etc. so it only costs each participant $85, compared to $150 for race days each 3rd Sunday of alternate months. When I say no racing, I mean in the formal sense. Plenty of impromptu match races like this one with the 911 take place.
Slowly the superior power of the Impala hauled the Porsche in, but the straight wasn’t long enough to get past and the gap widened again under brakes for the next corner. I left my braking so late I was a bit hot coming into the apex, got out of shape, overcorrected and did a nice little spin into the infield, creating a huge cloud of dust which made vision impossible for a short time. I powered back onto the track and caught up with the Porsche which had slowed to allow this, and we continued our duel for another 5 laps. By then my brakes were so hot they were virtually non existent, so I peeled off the track, bumped through to the rear of the pit paddock where I had my trailer and shade shelter set up, and switched off.

Historic car racing brings a real mixture of people and machines together. From backyard mechanics who had restored some ratty old clubman racer at a total cost of a few grand to big time collectors with million dollar plus Ferrari, Maserati and Lotus sports racing and Formula One cars. Alongside my pit area was Takeshi Koizumi, the kamikaze Jap in his tatty Datsun tarmac rally racer. That thing, with spares, cost Tacho three and a half thousand. Up the front of the pits I could see a huge motorhome with SPARGO RACING logos on the side. Parked alongside was the most immaculate ‘63 Ferrari 250 GTO sports racer. One of these had recently sold at auction for two million five. Vince Spargo was some big wheel in the smallgoods industry, a multi-millionaire. He was one of several filthy rich guys who raced megabuck historical cars here. I admired these guys - most rich collectors lock their cars up in garages and museums and hardly anyone gets to even see them, and yet Vince and his buddies are out here screaming around the track, doing what these cars were built for, risking mega bucks damage, having a personal ball and giving spectators a thrill visually and aurally. Jeez, you should hear some of those Italian V12s or the old Formula One Cosworth V8s in full song. Ecstasy for petrolheads.

“ Herro Peter!” shouted Takeshi Koizumi from the adjacent paddock site. “ How you doin’ with that great big mother Imparra? Why don’t you get tiny car like Datsun rarry rocket, prenty good brakes, prenty cheap parts.”
I looked across at the kamikaze kid. Takeshi is the son of a super wealthy Japanese banker. At least dad used to be super rich, wealthy enough to send young Tacho to study engineering in Australia, set him up in a penthouse suite in one of those nice new unit blocks near UTS and finance his historic car racing, at first in an incredibly nice ‘66 Shelby GT350 Mustang. Then the Japanese bubble economy popped, and although dad wasn’t wiped out, Tacho’s lifestyle took a downgrade to a one bedroom unit in the same building and the substitution of an old Datsun 510 tarmac rally racer for the Shelby. Tacho’s reduced circumstances didn’t faze him one bit. He still threw wild parties every second week or so, except now the guests were expected to supply their own food and grog. He still had great women hanging off him and kept up his pursuit of new skills and experiences.
Tacho was a believer in giving everything a go. When there was cash to burn he did hang gliding, parachuting, scuba diving and heaps more. Since the dough got short he hit on a scheme of swapping hot laps around a race circuit for lessons in whatever new field caught his fancy. So no surprise when I glanced across to see a rather nice looking woman with a bow, a quiver of arrows and a big target board standing with Tacho. Whenever he could manage it, the expert or teacher in his new interest was a nice babe, all the easier to crack onto afterwards.
Only problem was that Tacho was a one man walking disaster. I have already told you about his kamikaze driving on the track. This guy is so bad, other racers have unsuccessfully petitioned the club to set up a special rally car class to keep Tacho and his Datsun away from most of us. The three other drivers of historic rally cars were not that keen on the idea, for some reason. But Tacho was just a dangerous away from the track. He used to fang around the pit paddock on a giant Honda dirt bike. At about 300kph. Several near misses saw heaps of complaints go to the club management committee which somehow didn’t consider the matter worthy of investigation. Until Tacho ran over and aced the Chihuahua owned by the club president’s mistress. The big Honda got banned.
Tacho decided he wanted to learn barefoot water skiing. Which accounts for the permanent limp his instructress now has after Tacho steered the ski boat too close to the oyster leases on George’s River while she was doing a demonstration run.
I’ll leave it to your imagination to consider the consequences when he did some kite-surfing lessons at Palm Beach. When a kite surfer takes off over the top of a swell, he is supposed to do a few aerial loops or other stunts and come down again. But not Tacho, he liked it up there, so he stayed up there. The kite surfer is supposed to stay over the ocean. But hey, not Tacho. I don’t know what the world record is for staying aloft, but Tacho surely beat it that day. Some big-mover glitterati from the northern beaches social set were having a very flash, very exclusive outdoor wedding reception on the old Palm Beach seaplane pier when Tacho decided to drop in. Literally. Right onto the bridal table. Right onto the fifteen hundred dollar, five layer cake complete with icing from Duce of Newport. Well Tacho started there, but the wind kind of dragged him along through half the rest of the tables. Made the TV news.
“ Hey Peter, we rearn bow and arrow routine. You give Kerry few raps, she give you resson.” I wondered if Kerry was Kerry or Kelly.
“ Bewdy Tacho, but no thanks, gotta change these wheels.” I gave them a wave as they grabbed the archery gear and headed for the paddock behind the pits. Jesus, Tacho with a bow and arrow - I wanted to be well clear of that.

I grabbed the equipment from the trailer, jacked the back of the Impala up and swapped the racing wheels and tyres for my street wheels. At $240 a shot, my soft compound Goodyear Blue Streak racing tyres are not for the road. I was just about to start on the front when a I heard the sound of bicycle tyres on the earth behind me. I swung around and it wasn’t a bicycle, it was a wheelchair and seated in this chair was Alvaro, the debt collector from Silver Tree Finance. He looked even worse than the last time I saw him. Besides the black eyes and plastered nose he now had a neck brace, a huge cut with about 500 stitches in his chin, and his left leg in some sort of splint sticking straight out in front of the chair. From beneath a travel rug in his lap he produced a similar gun to yesterday’s which he pointed straight at me. I noticed its stock was cut off, just like the ones bank hold-up guys use. Jeez, I hate guns!
The Slob was standing behind the wheelchair, obviously the pusher. But only one-handed because the other arm was in a heavy duty sling. He had the top of his head heavily bandaged, and limped badly when he moved the wheelchair closer to me.
“ Stone the crows, you guys look like you been in a train wreck,” I said. “Maybe you should give up this debt collecting racket and get a safer job. I hear the army has new openings for bomb disposal trainees.”
“ Very fucking funny Andrews,” grated Alvaro through wired teeth. That must have been some bang on his chin - not only did he have the mega-stitched cut, but also an obviously busted jaw. He probably kissed the steering wheel, easy enough to do when you have a normal seat belt, even clinched tightly. Which I bet this guy did not. “When we finish with you, smartarse, you are gunna look worse than some bomb accident.”
He motioned to me to get moving in the direction of the trees immediately behind my section of the pit paddock. As we entered the bush I searched for a chance to bolt but Alvaro kept the sawn-off trained on me. Just inside the treeline was a small cleared section.
“ This should do real good Andrews,” said Alvaro. Time for action, I thought, no way was I going to just sit here and get blasted by these clowns.
Zeeeeeee-unck! Alvaro gave a start and dropped the gun into his lap. His eyes bugged as he dropped his head to stare at the 25cm of the rear end of a dayglow yellow target arrow sticking out of his chest. The Slob’s eyes widened in disbelief and he spun the chair around to check it out more closely. I could see the head of the arrow protruding from the rear of the fabric wheelchair backrest.
“ Aieeee, I pretty bad shot,” Tacho’s distant voice said excitedly. “Never mind Kerry, I do much better this one!”
Zeeeeeee-unck! Jesus, another incoming! I gotta hand it to Tacho, he is a total screwup, but hey, he’s a consistent screwup. This second shot had a virtually identical trajectory to the first, because it went straight into the top of The Slob’s skull as he leaned over to grab Alvaro’s gun. Wow, a shot like that is guaranteed to clear the synapses. Totally. The Slob collapsed onto Alvaro and both of them, along with the wheelchair, toppled over.
“ Aieeee, maybe third time rucky!” shouted Tacho. Hell, this place was a genuine health hazard. I beat it real quick.

“Sensation at Oran Park this morning, when two men were found shot dead with arrows in what appears to be a target practice session gone wrong. Bystanders report that one of the victims was armed with a rifle. A police spokesman said investigations are continuing.”
I clicked off the radio and rolled down the ramp into the parking area of my unit block. It was three fifteen. I hadn’t even bothered to change the front wheels at the circuit - I threw the equipment in the trailer, connected it to the Impala and bumped across the paddock to the exit just as the police cars and an ambulance came in. No way was I hanging around to answer any questions.

Chapter 23 - Chop-Sockie Rock Princess

2006-10-25T11:46:00.001+10:00

I clicked my mobile on. There was a text message to ring Bazza. "Pete baby!" Bazza yelled down the phone. “You got time to do a job for me this evening? I got a party on out here on the Bay, was going to invite you anyway on account of someone is coming you’d be interested in. But good old Ironglove Ingles just rang in sick, all bullshit, he’s got some little cutie lined up for an afternoon of sin. So I need someone to do security at the party. And before that, someone to go roust that prime arsehole Warren Jackson from his place up on Goulburn Street, sober him up, get him out here on account of the fact the main sponsor of The Buzz is coming along and we need Mr fucking Jackson and his charming personality on hand to create the right impression and help get this bastard signed up again for another season.”
“ Jesus, Bazza, I thought you just plied those sponsors with strippers, booze and drugs and forged their signatures from their driver’s licences when they passed out.”
“ Worked a charm in the old days, baby. But these new big wheels demand more personal attention. Makes them feel real big time celebrities when the stars of their shows are hanging around them, paying them some attention, cracking a few jokes, slapping them on the back.”
Warren Jackson is one of those wise-cracking panellists on The Buzz, one of the many talk shows that each TV network has sprung on us. Jackson is a comedian who thinks quickly on his feet and can be relied on to say something funny and hit a guest with amusing and often irreverent questions. Why all these shows are so popular escapes me; like there are only so many celebrities and issues in a place like Australia and certainly not enough to go around four near identical programs. So the shows are often scratching to come up with someone or something fresh. It has even reached the point where panellists from one show are appearing as guests on another, yet the public laps up all their repetitive crap.
“ The thing is Petey, Jackson is an unreliable juicer and a pussyhound. He likes young girls in particular, that’s already got him some grief and is gonna ruin him some day. And on the set he’s an absolute creep, grabs every female bum walks past, argues with the production crew and plays the prima-donna with the other panellists. Most of who make him look like amateur-hour when it comes to laughs and craftsmanship. So don’t take any shit from him. He gives you trouble tell him I’m gunna rip his contract into a million pieces if he don’t show with you at my place at precisely 6pm. And if he hits you with that crap ‘the show needs me more than I need the show’ tell him that if he don’t impress that bloody sponsor, there aint gunna be the budget for any fucking show and he’s gunna be back doing stand-up at the Comedy Club.”

Jackson had a 14th floor unit in one of those new developments on Goulburn Street in the city. The door was opened to a blast of dance music. A very attractive Thai katoey, a boy-girl, in a tiny bikini top showing great boobs and a long sarong split up the side to show equally sensational legs was holding the door. “Oooh,” she lisped. “ A friggin’ pirate. Won’ you come in scarface?”
In the living room was an assortment of characters straight out of a pink fantasy. Another striking katoey was writhing to the music in room central. A couple of teenage toy-boy types were entangled on the sofa and two tough looking leather bikers were drinking VB from 750ml bottles over near the balcony. Jackson walked in from the kitchen, swigging straight out of bottle of Dom champagne. He had two muscled body building types on each arm. Well stuff me, for a pussyhound, our Warren sure was showing some versatility.
“ Don’t tell me,” he said. “ You're the minder from Barry Payne. Well piss off, tough guy. I have better things to do.”
I walked across to the sound system and pulled the plug.
“ Hey, what the fuck are you doing, fuckhead?” said one of the bikers.
“ Party’s over sweethearts, uncle Warren is wanted elsewhere.”
“ The fuck it is,” said the biker.
I walked across and kicked him in the balls. As he doubled up I gave him a goodnight smack on the back of his head. I turned to his friend, but he backed away real quick. I checked the musclemen out, but those guys usually aren’t too keen on getting any scrapes or bruises on those sculpted bods they worked so hard to get. Same for the katoeys. “I love tough guys,” lisped the door-opener. “You an’ me jus’ gotta get together some day, pirate.”
“ In your dreams, cutie,” I said as I held the door open for them. “Even if I was keen, I'd need to get the donkey implant. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t touch the sides.

I deposited Jackson at the front door of Bazza’s joint down on the river at Canada Bay. He went straight into A-list mode (this guy is close to relegation to D-list). “Eddie baby!” he cried, seeing one of Sydney’s shock jock radio bores. “Long time no see!”
I like Bazza’s parties. Jackson and the shock jock notwithstanding, there are always lots of interesting and beautiful people on hand. Bazza invites from right across his spectrum of businesses, so we might have a big steel-formwork contractor rubbing shoulders with rock stars, movie producers, soap actors and what-have-you. Because he turns on a good do, plenty of glamorati from elsewhere accept his invitations too. I could see several big time journalists, a few well known models, quite a few of those famous for being famous types you see in the gossip mags, and a scattering of sporting stars. One of the more photogenic gold medal winning swimmers from the last Games was there with a big time footballer on her arm. I noticed with some annoyance that this was one of the guys who'd beat up on Angie. The night could become interesting. My job is to wear the black suit, sunglasses and shirt plus black bow-tie and stand around looking tough and efficient. Bazza liked his security to be seen, and it wasn’t all show. Sometimes guests got plastered and started to fight or play up. It was much more dignified having a discrete yet forceful security person handle things than having other guests or the host trying to sort it out. Not bad work for two hundred and fifty a night.
People were spread around Bazza’s huge dining room-living area and out onto the big patio overlooking the lawns down to the river. They were dressed pm chic-casual. As usual the women looked sensational in their flimsy summer stuff. Lots of punters wonder who wears that way-out revealing gear you see on the television news getting sashayed down the catwalk during Fashion Week. The answer was right here - there was more leg, torso and boob on show here than at a Darlinghurst Art School figure drawing class. The estranged 25 year old wife of a young Sydney pharmaceutical mogul was more out of than in a great little Tsusabi number just to my right. The gold-medal swimmer was showing enough flesh to qualify for a part in one of Bazza’s riskier films. Yet paradoxically, one of the genuine porn stars, Whispy Cantour, sitting over talking to the pianist who was tinkling out Night and Day and other standards, was nicely covered in a very stylish full length shift showing not a hint of cleavage or upper leg. This modesty went real well with her angelic, innocent face. She kinda looked like Natalie Imbrulga’s cute younger sister, although if you ever caught Whispy’s videos, that idea went right out the window. It was instant ZING! material.

Talking of ZING!, who should walk in but Angie and Debbie Dillinger. Angie used to do security with me at Bazza’s parties, but one night cute Mr Jackson turned arsehole as per usual and started a fight with a TV publicists. When Angie grabbed him he made a racist remark so she flattened him, much to the entertainment of everyone else. From then on Bazza thought it a bit risky to employ Angie as party bouncer, but often invited her as a guest instead. And after Debbie had entered Angie’s orbit, she got invited too. Since Debbie started popping bad dudes she was a considered a celebrity. Done up like now in gear to match any of the other women here, she looked absolutely fabulous. As did Angie.
“ ANGIE, DEBBIE, HOW THE HELL ARE YOU?” Bazza was in his usual form, bellowing across the room. “WATCH OUT FOLKS, DO ANYTHING WRONG AND YOU’LL EITHER GET STOMPED OR SHOT DEAD!” The two beauties gave him a cheesy. I turned to look at Jackson - his mouth was turned down at the corners. I couldn’t see the footballer. Maybe he was outside.
Larry Ferguson, Bazza’s talent scout, worked his way across the room. “ Pete my friend, how is my favourite bruiser?”
“ Hi Larry.”
“ Say, take a look who just arrived.” I looked across at the door and my heart gave a lurch. Katie and Susan had just entered. Katie looked two million bucks. She was wearing one of those flimsy diaphonous numbers which would have been called a petticoat a while back, just above knee length and dark grey in colour, plus matching heeled sandals, once again with ankle staps. Susan was dressed much more conservatively in a nice little black cocktail shift, with her blond hair worn up. Katie looked young, healthy, pretty. Susan looked beautiful.
“ Nice little move that, saying you were interested in the band. Listen Pete, if you wanted me to audition your girl, why didn’t you just say so?”
I turned to look at Larry. “You are a step ahead of me here, Larry.”
“ Yeah, sure. After you rang yesterday, I thought I might go see what all the interest in Orchid’s Cloud is about. So I went down and had a look. Petey, that band is no great shakes, but your little girl has the voice of an angel. Pitch perfect. Great timing. Sure, she’s got a bit of an attitude, but tame that and with her looks and that voice she could go a long way.”
“ Katie sings with the band?” Katie had a really nice voice when she was a little kid. I had no idea how good.
It was Larry’s turn to check me out. “You don’t know? She does about half the numbers. The other guy is so-so, but the crowd love her.”
“ You’re kidding me.”
“ Sure I am, that’s why I took an option on the band and went over and talked to Katie and her mum this morning. Look, the band can do alright on the pub circuit with or without Katie, but she could be much bigger. The public loves all these gorgeous young things with angel voices. Look at how Kylie, Danii, Natalie and Delta have gone. Katie can outsing most of them so who says she can’t do as well?”
I shook my head to clear it. “Susan is going with this?”
“ Absolutely, why not? Listen, see that girl with them?” There was a nice looking woman about 30 introducing Katie to Bazza and another woman. “That’s Cindy, one of our publicists. She’ll spread the word about Katie, get people interested. That woman with Bazza is Layne Maybry, who’s a sub-editor of the local edition of Rolling Stone. We sent her a late invite to the party this morning. And look across there.” I followed his eyes to the bar, where an old guy about 60 done all in black was propped up with a half bottle of JD. This guy had been wearing all black since the 60s, long before it became fashionable - Manny Smith, an institution in the rock industry. He’s had rock segments on today-shows, newspaper and magazine columns and radio spots for the past 40 years. Manny knew everyone and could open doors real fast. “Old Manny will be next on the list, and he’ll go berserk over Katie. Manny loves young girls.”
“ I bet he does. Which is why Susan is riding shotgun?”
“ Sure. Look, if people see a young girl doing this by herself they think - and pardon me Pete - ‘who’s cock is she sucking?’”
“ So now they say ‘who’s cock are they sucking?’”
Larry gave a chuckle. “That’s what I like about you Pete, not a cynical thought in your head. You always were a sweetheart.” He gave me a grin and walked off towards Manny. As if by coincidence, Bazza, the girls and the publicists also headed that way. Hell, it was great watching pros earning their 25% or whatever.

I heard a familiar voice to my left and turned to see Mr John Hefforn MP, Minister for Education, walking towards me with an efficient looking woman I recognised as one of Bazza’s construction-logistics consultants. Crikey, no doubt Hefforn was Bazza’s new best friend - and fast-line to school construction contracts. Hefforn was almost past when he caught sight of me. He propped. “Mr Peter Andrews, how interesting.” He gave me a wintry smile. “You seem to be the name on everybody’s lips. Just this morning at the opening of Closley Place Infants School, Bill Casey was singing your praises, telling me about performance improvements since you became deputy principal. And our host Bazza Payne positively loves you - he tells me your school would not function without you. I say to myself, how is it these intelligent people have positive hard-ons for this Andrews person - there must be more than meets the eye. And perhaps more than meets the departmental file.” He passed his eye over my black suited security outfit. “And when I see one of my deputy principals decked out like that, I think, yes, maybe there is far more than meets the eye.”
And he walked off.
I never drink on the job, but I grabbed a glass of Johnny Walker off a passing waiter. Stuff me, things were getting real interesting.

Susan looked across and caught me eye. She broke away from the group and worked her way through the crowd. “Hello Pete.”
Whenever I run into her my chest gets tight and I feel like if I don’t play the wiseguy I’ll start stammering and carrying on and make a fool of myself. “Susie sweetheart!. I hear you’re planning to ditch Bill and move back in with me.”
Susan always ignores my shit. “Listen, I can’t thank you enough for getting Katie back home.”
“ All part of Pete’s excellent dad’s service. You should see what else I can do for mums.” Susan was looking across at Katie, Manny, Bazza and the group. “So how do you sit with this rock and roll contract thing?” I said.
Susan gave a sigh. “We were losing her, we had to give a bit. The way I see it we can let her do her thing and still have some input.” There was a peal of laughter from Katie’s group. Agent Larry had just introduced her to a well loved morning TV anchor. “That Larry Ferguson person seems genuine and I know Bazza is your friend. It seems to me everything these people do is very professional. They are pushing the nice girl from next door rather than the chick from hell. The are insisting she finishes school and live at home, which is a big improvement on the last couple of weeks.”
“ Yeah, well bringing up daughters is never plain sailing. Katie hasn’t been too bad compared to a lot of other kids.”
We stood in silence and digested this thought.
“ Speaking of other kids, I’ve got some good news Pete. I found out this week that Bill and I are expecting.”
Hell, it was like I’d been pole-axed! This really threw me, probably because secretly I’d always harboured the smallest hope that some day Susan would come back. Fat chance, yeah, but now, with blood ties to Bill, that small hope disintegrated.
“ Wow, congratulations Susan,” I said somewhat sickly. When I thought about it I was actually surprised they had waited so long. Maybe big handsome Bill has some problems in the fertility department. Yeah, yeah, I know - we guys are hopeless in grasping for any consolation in one-upmanship.
We made uncomfortable smalltalk about when the baby was due, desired sex, any names yet - the usual boring stuff . Across the room, Katie had moved on and bumped into Angie and Debbie. Katie threw her hands around Angie and gave her a big hug and cute kiss on the lips and then followed with Debbie.
“ Now that makes me really nervous Pete, Katie with your very pink friend Angie and her girlfriend Deborah Dillinger. Did I tell you how those two strut around the dressing room at the gym completely naked and flashing all to the other girls?”
“ Jeez Susan, could you smuggle me in in your gym bag?” It was no coincidence that Susan used the same gym as Angie. I had used it for over 20 years, Susan started when she married me. And I took Angie along when she got interested in fitness.
“ Forget the gym Pete, just don’t tell me my daughter is turning lesbian.”
“ I wouldn’t worry Susan. She’s a big girl now, she’ll make sensible choices.”
We were silent for a while as Susan thought about this. “How does Katie know Angie and Debbie?”
“ We ran into Debbie during the driving lesson yesterday. They hit it off right away.”
“ Which is supposed to mean what?”
“ Relax Susan.”
“ So what about Angela, how did Katie meet Miss Kungfu?”
“ Angie was with me last night when I went to collect Katie.”
Susan looked at me with interest. “You hang socially with Angela? Does she swing both ways?”
“ I wish.”
She gave me a sad smile as she left. “Poor Pete.”
I grabbed another scotch from a passing tray. At this rate I’d have to catch a taxi home.

Edie Payne cruised across. Edie must be late 40s, with a well worn face showing a combination of smile and worry lines. Life early on with Bazza had real stresses. Things were stretched financially as Bazza tried to break into successful property developing. Plus personal life was pretty tough when he was puting in 20 hour days, not an easy environment for marital bliss. But Edie had stuck in there, helped on the administrative side of the business and had brought up four well developed kids to boot. I felt really good that she and Bazza had made such a success of things. Now she could easily afford the cosmetic surgery and botox that seemed de-rigueur with Sydney’s wealthy middle aged women, but Edie was not that type. She wore a straight floorlength black skirt and a simple short sleeve grey top. Her hair was cut just above the shoulder, its natural brown showing a few greying streaks. She looked at me and smiled. “Drinking on duty Peter? I guess you deserve to celebrate your daughter’s new career. She’s very pretty. How come a bruiser like you ends up with such a pretty daughter?”
“ The looks comes from her mum’s side.”
“ Yes, I have met your ex before at Bill Casey’s place. She is very beautiful.”
We stood and watched while Katie introduced Angie and Debbie to Manny Smith.
“ That’s not a bad idea of Katie's, Peter, letting Manny know Angie is a friend. That bloke can be useful, but he is a bit of a worry with young girls. Actually, he is a bit of a worry with all girls.”
“ I thought the word was Manny is gay.”
“ Manny is ambidextrous. But getting back to Katie, Barry says she is genuinely talented. I’d say a bit of stagecraft coaching, some dance lessons and the right song selection things could go really well.”
“ Sure Edie, but for how long? I kind of worry about all those pretty young things who are one-hit wonders and never seen after.”
“ Well yes, that can happen if they don’t have good backup. But Peter, the public are real sponges when it comes to magazine articles and other press snippets about young entertainers. And Bazza’s people give excellent backup. It’s routine to book intelligent young beauties like Katie onto TV talk shows and the like. I understand Katie is not short in the IQ area.”
“ Yeah, she gets that from my side.”
Edie smiled. “ I also hear that instead of childhood dancing and acting lessons like Kylie and her clones, Katie has an excellent grounding on the piano. The cabaret scene has very few young singer-pianists. This could be the way to go later, Peter. They make excellent money. The cabaret scene is very big in the States.”
Even at five years of age, Katie was taking piano lessons. I know Susan and Bill had insisted she continue. How many thousands of young kids go this route? It’s a real Australian middle class thing - ferry the kids to music/dance/piano/whatever lessons. And here it seems it might be paying off.

We were distracted by some raised voices over towards the balcony. Warren Jackson had got himself into an argument with an older fat guy who looked like he was going to flatten the little jerk. I was just moving towards them when the fat guy’s girlfriend or wife pulled him away, leaving Jackson with a self satisfied smirk. I don’t know where the sponsor was, but I got the feeling he wasn’t being too impressed.
“ Creeps like that are one downside of getting involved in the industry,” observed Edie. “That man is a complete arsehole and an utter sleaze. He’s a loudmouth, argumentive boozer and he’s got a real weakness for vulnerable young girls. Last month he had his hands all over this really sweet 17 year old trainee makeup girl over at the studios. The poor child didn’t know what to do. She turned to head out the door and the little shit calls to her and he’s got his dick out and he asks her to blow him.”
“ Sweet guy.”
“ So what are these girls expected to do, just ignore it and get on with the job? Well when Bazza heard he didn’t ignore it. He sent young Tony Vasilou from the door at Showgirls around to see Jackson, Tony said he was the girl’s boyfriend and worked Jackson’s ribs and testicles over really well. Bazza said just don’t mark his face to spoil the TV.”
I laughed. “ Jeez Edie, I love Bazza. That has made my night.”
“ Between you and me Peter, Jackson is on his last legs with Bazza. Cutting him loose will maybe cost us several grand in agent fees, but will be worth it double over.”
Another louder burst of conversation came from our left. A group of very stylish young women including the ex-wife of the pill king were doing the air kisses - how are you dahling!- type thing.
“ See that anorexic blonde in the group?”, said Edie.
“ Which one, natural boobs, plastic boobs or adam’s apple?”
“ Plastic boobs. That is Willow Small, gossip columnist for the Herald. All those eastern suburbs Fashionable Young Things with her are heavy duty snowqueens, and Willow must keep up you know, which gives her a two hundred dollar a day habit. Willow is not the most popular journalist around. She did a story on one of our soap stars which was full of quotes and admissions, yet Willow had never even interviewed her. The good news is Willow is in such a desperate need for cash that a handout from our publicist is sure to generate some column inches for your Katie.”
Bazza had moved on and joined minister Hefforn who was talking to Whispy Cantour.
“ Bazza and the Minister are getting on like a house on fire,” I said.
“ Certainly. Bazza was saying how these government contracts were so much more relaxing than speculative apartment building. I think he is keen on doing a few more schools. He had the Minister out on our cruiser at Coal and Candle Creek today. They were up on the fly bridge drinking beer and shooting the breeze. Whispy was down on the bow working on her all-over tan. The Minister was suitably taken. Speaking of which I would not be a bit surprised if the Minister was taken home tonight. By Whispy.”
“ Stuff the Minister, Edie. Get Bazza to arrange for Whispy to take me home.”
“ That is maybe not such a good idea Peter. The rumour is that Whispy has a one-way mirror system to her bedroom. From what I hear there are some great underground videos doing the circuit.”
I laughed. I could see that one way or the other Bazza was definitely going to be doing more school building projects.

When Edie moved on I walked out onto the balcony and had a talk with Karen Sylvester, who was my female counterpart at this party. Naturally Bazza liked his lady security types at his parties to be glamorous - Karen was a body double and stunt worker on Bazza’s films. She was also very capable in the friendly enforcement department. I once did a job with Karen providing personal security for a group of second rate soap stars on a pub promotional trip. A drunk Hells Angel type and his bikie moll created a ruckus by flashing their bare arses at the stars. Karen had the bikie guy out through the window before he could even zip his pants. I was having a real problem with the biker moll. Don’t laugh, I got distracted. She had a sensational arse. So Karen took over and had her out the window too. The bikers suffered more injury to their prides than persons. The window was open and it was on the ground floor.
There was a commotion inside. We hurried in and looked across to the an area near the portable bar. Jesus! Katie had Warren Jackson in a choke hold. There was a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth to suggest he has already been bitch slapped. Jackson was not travelling too well - lack of oxygen was making him do what I’ve heard called “the chicken dance” - his arms and legs were kind of flopping all over the place. I strode across. “Hey Katie, maybe it’s best if you drop him.”
“ Okay Pete, I’ll drop him!” Katie was really pissed. “This creep asked if I would give him some head, so I’ll do that too!” And she delivered the Andrews trademark headbutt - kneelift combo. Risky business, head butts, do it wrong and you can knock yourself silly. And mess your own face up. But Katie timed it perfectly. Don’t be surprised about another chop-sockie queen in my orbit: right from the time she was 11 I could see Katie was developing into the sort of young lady who would be a hassled by a certain type of guy. So I spent a lot of our weekend time training her up on self defence routines. Katie was a natural - I think there is something in the Andrews genetic make-up which predisposes us to biff and a certain level of nastiness.
Jackson was curled up in a foetal ball on the floor shielding his face and lower gut. Angie and Debbie arrived on the scene. Angie had that feral fury on her face which usually precedes her stomping some lowlife bastard to pulp. Oh please don’t Angie - if I have to intervene there was a good chance I’d end up getting stomped. Debbie solved the problem. That great big Amazonian beauty bent down, hauled the diminutive Jackson up into the fireman’s carry, walked across the floor to the balcony and dropped him over the low railing into the garden below. There was a burst of applause from the crowd. These entertainment people love a good show.

15 minutes later, I was in a lower bathroom finishing patching Jackson’s face. Tomorrow he would look just like Alvaro and the Slob had yesterday - swollen nose, two very black eyes. No makeup artist would be able to disguise that in tomorrow night’s taping of The Buzz. The bathroom door opened. Bazza stood there for a while. He was carrying a legal-looking document which he held up for Jackson to see. Bazza then proceeded to rip it into a thousand pieces. He walked out and closed the door.

“ Are you security?” I had just finished loading Jackson into a cab and turned to see the gold medal swimmer looking at me anxiously.
“ Sure, how can I help you?’
“ My boyfriend’s got trouble.”
“ What sort of trouble?”
“ I hadn’t seen him in 15 minutes and now he’s stuck in the bathroom, he doesn’t look real great.”
We walked inside and up the stairs to one of the upper bathrooms. The ex-wife of the pharmo tycoon had a string of white powder lined across the bench. She ignored us as we pushed past. There in the ensuite toilet was the slumped form of the big hero first-grade footballer. He was unconscious, bleeding badly from a gash on the head, and had two broken arms judging on the way they were hanging at weird angles.
But hey, he was real lucky. I couldn’t see any 45 caliber gunshot wounds. Angie still had Mantouv’s cannon.

Chapter 24 - Showdown At The Jack Sharp Corral

2006-10-25T10:27:00.000+10:00

It was kind of deja-vu next morning when Angie threw the Sydney Herald on my desk, open at the City Extra page. The leading headline was:

JACKSON‘S LANDING.
City Extra’s spy at developer-entertainment guru Bazza Payne and wife Edie’s get-together at their swish Canada Bay residence last night reports a double crash-landing for motormouth TV talkfest panellist Warren Jackson. The first was delivered on the dancefloor by way of a very neat choke-hold,/head-butt,/knee-lift 3-step from 16 year old aspiring songstress Katie Andrews after Jackson whispered some risqué sweet nothings in her young ear. We then saw glamorous cop about town Deadshot Debbie Dillinger step in and clear the area by shoulder-carrying Jackson’s inert form to the balcony and dropping him into the swimming pool below. There is no truth in the rumour that the flying funnyman narrowly missed skinnydipping video star Whispy Cantour.
Rough justice for Mr Jackson? Maybe so, maybe not. He can cosole himself with the fact that at least the Maroubra Marauder did not shoot him.

Pretty accurate for Willow Small - just a touch or two of journalistic licence. Below the print was a great photograph of Katie and Debbie arm in arm in their lovely party gear. They looked sensational.
“ Wow, doesn’t Debbie look great,” I said. I don’t think the public had ever seen any other shot of Debbie than the no-makeup, ponytail, cop-uniform mode.
“ Katie looks pretty good too.” Angie paused and looked steadily at me. “Gee Pete, are you starting to mellow? No lectures? I felt sure you would want to warn me off Katie.”
“ Listen Angie, I’m a realist. Any warning I give would just encourage you. Besides which, Katie makes the decisions, not me. So I’m not going to worry myself about you and Katie, what we need to talk about is those Viagra pills. Jesus, you don’t need to get involved in the stolen drugs scene.”
“ Not stolen, counterfeit. But genuine working counterfeit, not placebo crap.”
I rolled my eyes. “ Still illegal enough to get you a nice old bust.”
“ Oh, come on Pete, some of that enforcement stuff you get up to for Bazza is way beyond legal. Don’t get too moral with me, next thing you’ll be giving me some grief about those sweet little 13 year olds at Carol Leonard’s. Like, those girls are runaways, Carol finds them hanging around the ‘Cross. They end up a whole lot safer in her luxury condo at the Quay Apartments than winding up in some Chinatown brothel with their knees up around their ears.”
“ Sure, one of them straightened me out on that real well.”
“ Well bless me, Pete, I truly believe you are mellowing in your old age. I expected a lot more grief from you when we finally got around to having this talk.”
“ Only thing Angie, I don’t want Katie falling for someone and then getting her heart broken.”
“ Listen Pete, I don’t like guys much, but I do like you. Katie won’t get her heart broken.”
There was a rap on my door. Sandy put her head inside. “ Hey Angie. Hey Mr. Andrews. Sir, the message said you wanted me to sign the final copies of my statement about your beating that Bentley kid up last Friday.” Angie smiled at Sandy and waggled her fingers at me as she walked out.
“ I’d prefer we keep calling it self defence, Sandy, not beating him up.”
“ Oh sure sir, I just slipped up a bit there.”
I passed the papers over and indicated where to sign.
“ Is it okay if we have a little talk off the record sir?’
I smiled. “ What do you have in mind?”
“ Well, first of all Pete, I’d like to apologize.”
“ In respect to what?”
“ Being such an insensitive loudmouth last Friday when Katie was on the bandstand. Really Pete, if I’d know she was your daughter, I’d have shut my mouth.”
“ Sure, but you didn’t know she was my daughter, so there is no need to apologize.”
“ Hey great! Does this mean I don’t have to help with the disco tickets anymore?”
“ Nice try Sandy. That’s a different issue, you know the routine, showing respect to staff members yada yada.”
Sandy grinned. “ You’re a hard man, sir.”
“ Anything else, Sandy?”
“ Well sure sir, I had a really great time Saturday night. I was kind of hoping you’d grant me two favours.”
“ Like what?”
“ Well, like I said before, I would really like to learn some of that kung-fu stuff. I mean, if I could end up half as good as Angie it would be so choice. I’m really serious about your giving me some lessons”
“ Its a month until your final exams, Sandy, probably not a good time to get distracted with a new interest. Let’s wait until post HSC and then I’ll give you some intensive one on one training and maybe you could do some general classes down at my gym.”
“ Sounds pretty good to me.”
“ So what’s the second favour.”
Sandy fixed me with a very serious look. “Well Pete, I wasn’t kidding about liking older guys. I was kinda hoping that after I graduate you might let me ask you out.”
“ You think that’s a good idea, Sandy?”
“ I think it’s an excellent idea.”
Well hell, I kind of liked the idea too. Here was this girl, not beautiful, not even pretty, but she’s got something really going for her. She’s only a year older than my own daughter, but I’m really attracted to her. Jeez, good old Pedophile-Pete. But hey, what am I saying? By graduation she will be two years past legal age, and having left school, past being a moral hazard too. Or at least I could rationalize it that way. The truth was, I was probably repeating my Susan routine - get a really young thing that is not too experienced in the ways of the wicked world. But what the hell. “ Okay, let’s put it this way Sandy. If you still feel the same in two month’s time after the exams, I can’t see any problem in you asking.”
Sandy leaned close and whispered a promise in my ear which just about curled my hair.
“ Stone the crows Sandy!”
“ Insurance Pete, I’ve seen the kind of girls who mix in your circle. Maybe I need a little something to keep you interested for two months.”
More like Sandy gets a charge out of playing bad-girl.
Before I could think of a smart answer, a male voice started yelling and cursing in the vestibule outside my office. I crossed to the door and there was Folksone, the parent Angie beat hell out of last term. He had Tara, our oldest office lady, bailed up with one of those semi-automatic assault rifles. Jesus! I hate guns! I’m always waiting for some kid to do a Columbine High, every teacher’s unspoken nightmare, and here we had a parent waving a gun about!
He swung the rifle towards me. “Where’s that slant-eyed, slope-faced bitch, Andrews!”
Which is exactly what he called her last term, which got the crap kicked out of him. That bullshit about him pushing Angie out of the way to get to me was just to jolly the Superintendent - Angie really lost it when she copped those racist taunts and kicked the daylights out of Folkstone, hence the broken arms and busted jaw. She’s got a real nasty streak, that girl.
“I’m right here, arseshole!” Angie sounded really annoyed. She was behind the counter of the administrative ladies’ office and she had that huge nickel plated 45 cannon pointed at Folkstone. Crikey! I noticed she was using the classic two handed professional shooting stance - it looked like Debbie Dillinger had been giving lessons. “Drop that fucking gun, dickhead, or I’ll blow your brains out.”
Poor old Tara couldn’t handle it and fainted right out. The other office ladies had eyes the size of saucers. Even without the gun, the shock of Angie in full hell-bitch mode was new to them and a bit too much. I noticed the principal’s office door slowly open behind Folkstone. No-More Biltmore looked out, took in the scene with widening eyes and quickly shut the door again. Three tough year 10 guys waiting to see me about making threats to the school janitor were hiding behind the fish tank.
Angie and Folkstone glared at each other, guns levelled in a classic Mexican stand-off . There was pure murder in his eyes and hatred in Angie’s. The principal’s door opened again. No-More shuffled across behind Folkstone and smashed a bottle of Dewars over the back of his head. Folkstone hit the floor in a heap. No-More leaned back against the fish tank. He looked terrible, distraught, like he was about to burst into tears.
“ Gosh, Boss, are you all right?”
“ Christ no,” he said quietly. “That bottle was almost full.”

Chapter 25 - Business As Usual - aka School Daze

2006-10-24T21:43:00.002+10:00

Once the cops had carted Folkstone away and taken our statements, things got back to normal. Well, normal for Jack Sharp High School. I suspended the three year ten standover merchants for threatening to punch the school janitor’s lights out, mentioned to Wanda Lakewski that three parents had complained that super short miniskirts were not real appropriate for a 45 year old maths teacher who likes to sit on the teacher’s table when talking to the class: “So what do you think, Pete? Too short? Hey this is short!” said Wanda, hauling her skirt up to crotch level. Wanda works out and has real good legs for a 45 year old. “Yeah, Wanda, well you know what parents are like, I have to pass the complaint on. Maybe it’s those sheer lace panties.”..... and interviewed a bitch from Year 8 about her refusal to hand over a mobile ‘phone to the classroom teacher after she had been repeatedly told to stop text-messaging.
“ He can’t take my property!”
“ You can’t use the phone in class.”
“ He still can’t take my property!”
“ No, but I can. Hand it over.”
“ You can’t take my property!”
“ Listen Ashley, you either give me the ‘phone or I’m going to ring your parents and get them up here. And they can give me the phone, or they can take you home on a 4 day suspension.”
“ You can’t suspend me for not giving you my property!”
“ Use the phone right now. Ring your parents and get them up here.”
“ You can’t make me ring my parents!”
I reached for my desk phone. “What’s your number?”
“ I don’t have to give you my number!”
I dialled through to the office. “Listen Angie, could you get me the phone number for Ashley Jones? Yeah A..S..H..L..E...Y.”
“ My name isn’t spelt like that!” Looking at me like I’m a fuckwit who should know the spelling of every designer-name in the school.
“ How do you spell it?”
“ I don’t have to tell you how to spell my name!”
“ Try A..S..H..L..E..I..G..H Angie.... Okay - L..Y. ...... Nope? L..E..E?.......What? Oh, L..I..I! Gosh, how silly of me.”
What is it with all these idiot parents and their made-up names and made-up spellings? Jeez, how about names like Taylan, Jaidyee, Brayden, Kya, Rileah or spellings like Bilynda, Ceiarn, Keiryn or one of the all time greats, Chan (pronounced Shawn! And I’m not telling you if that is a boy or girl). Poor kids gotta go around all their lives repeating their names or correcting the spelling. No wonder some of them end up dickheads like Ashlii. I reckon if there is any chance the name can be spelled wrong, the brain-dead parents should pick another. It is a pet hate of mine, well known to the rest of the staff.
Ashlii folded before I rang her parents. Pocketing the ‘phone, I placed her on afternoon detention for a week.
“ You can’t do that!” she said as I dismissed her.
I called her back: “ Ashliiiiiiiiii, I hear one more peep out of you and I’m going to make it two weeks detention. Now go away.” It was an effort, but she didn’t say another word as she marched out. Although I’m sure someone went “Peep!” down the corridor about 20 seconds later.
“ Pete, is that gorgeous Katie Andrews in the newspaper really your Katie?” Monica Zellwinger stuck her pretty head into my office. She had a mischievous smile on her face. Monica’s office is adjacent to mine and it’s real easy to overhear some of the more animated discussions next door. “Angie says she is, but I thought your daughter’s name was spelled with an ..E..Y. Or is it K..A..T..I? Or C..A..T..E..Y. Christ Pete, why are you giving me that get-fucked look?”

Next was a crisis in the school hall where the Year 11 kids were sitting their English Exam. Or supposed to, except two exam set-up staff were absent, which required both Monica and me to cover them. And worse: the guy who was supposed to set the paper had left all the question sheets at home, plus the computer disk they were printed from. He was on the way back to his flat in distant Sutherland to retrieve the papers with instructions to telephone me the first question so the kids could at least start. The school has a neat mobile-phone/school hall-PA interface rigged up by Marie Askew, Head-Teacher Science, who is one of those electronic nerds can do anything. This allows the kids to hear a telephoned speech by old Jack Sharp from his nursing home up the North Coast each Annual Prize Day. The speeches would be totally boring except the staff run a book on how many grammar mistakes the old duffer will make in the 2 minutes before we pull the plug.
The phone rang, the kids grabbed their pens and Monica hit the button: "Peetaa!!! Where you been for so long, my hansunman? I miss you big time!!” said a cute Asian female voice. I could hear the cacophony of the Ballistic Banana club in the background. “You no been to Bangkok since before my birthday, thank you for card with ten bucks. Crikey mate, I really clean out jewelry store with that one, no worries, bewdy, she'll be right….” Sometimes I get the impression every woman in my life loves to pay out on me. At least she’d forgotten 'jeez' and 'stone the crows'. The exam kids were looking WTF?? at each other and Monica was smirking like she just won Lotto. I gave here the theatrical “cut” sign and she shot me a get-fucked grin. “…Stone the crows, lightning lover, listen up. I learn great new trick from visiting American sailors. Jeez, those black guys sure big dudes. Really BIG dudes. I show you trick next trip to Bangkok, I take your little pink pop-gun and…..” Monica hit end-call. The kids were cracking up, staff members were smirking and Monica looked like she’d won Super-Lotto.

Thankfully the exam was still in progress at recess, so news of that little disaster had not spread when I had a meeting with the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition - topic, dress standards at tonight’s school social.
“I think I speak for everyone here when I say we should insist on no bare midriffs,” sniffed Hating Hillary, girl’s supervisor and Christian Coalition convener . The two student reps from the Social Committee rolled their eyes.
“ Come on Mrs Staples,” I said. “It’s the new millennium, not 1957. Bare midriffs are part of the scene. We can’t ban them, we just have to set some limits.”
“ Well, I suggest no more than 5 centimetres of flesh on show.”
The kids rolled their eyes further back.
“ Five centimetres?” I said. “You have made real progress here, we have caught up to 1964.”
“ Mr. Andrews, I see no reason for sarcasm,” said my old ‘phone pal Edith Pope from the Moaning Minority. “We have to set definitive limits. Young people must be given firm parameters. Otherwise some of those girls are going to be showing their plumber’s cleavages. The boys too.”
If the kids’ eyes rolled back any further we would be seeing optic nerves.
“ With all due respect Mrs. Pope, as soon as I announce no plumber’s cleavages, some of the kids will take it as a challenge and that’s exactly what we’ll see. And others will take that as the standard and wear their gear way lower than they normally would.” I looked at both of them. “I’m going to give a general warning, no centimeter limits or plumber’s cleavage mentioned.” There was a lot of moaning and general argument, but what I like about being deputy principal in a place where the boss is locked in his office with a bottle and the other deputy spends most of her time out of the school, is that I get to call the final shots. Stick that up your patooties, wowsers.

So there I was at the end of the lunchbreak in front of an assembly of a thousand kids. After the usual no booze, no cigs, no dope, no outsiders, no-one allowed to leave early unless with a parent, no freak-dancing etc etc, I got onto the dress standard. “ .... and decent footwear. That definitely does not include thongs or other flip flop sandals. Definitely no short shorts. And sorry if you just spent up big on Calvin Klein underwear, but I’m not interested in seeing it displayed above your jeans or skirts.” A low murmur of discontent. “Speaking of jeans and skirts, all you low-rider people are going to have to remember where you are, at a school social, not Bondi Beach....”
“ THAT MEANS NO BUM CRACKS!” said a very penetrating and clear female voice from somewhere up the back where the senior kids were standing. The assembly cracked up.
“ Well thank you for your input, Miss Tavernese. Perhaps you could see me in my office at the end of the assembly.” I waited for complete quiet, which came pretty quickly. Once you can put a name on an interjector, kids lose some nerve. “As far as tops are concerned, the same general rule applies. Keep it modest, not like you are auditioning for Survivor or Model Quest.”
I dismissed the assembly and caught Sandy’s eye. She walked over with a contrite look on her face. “What can I say sir? The devil made me do it.”
The devil made me feel like kicking her arse. “Listen Sandy, I’ll cut a deal with you. You have a month to go here, if you can possibly shut your mouth in public places for the duration of that time, I’ll ask you out after graduation.”
“ How about you take me to the Year 12 formal?”
“ No way, I said after you graduate.”
Sandy smiled. “That’s really a tough punishment sir.”
“ No Sandy, your punishment is that you are going to help set the hall up for the disco tonight.”
“ Wow sir, you are hard. Can I go now please? I have a Chemistry experiment.”
I waved her away. Sandy turned back after a few steps. “I must be honest with you Pete, I was going to help with the hall anyway.”
“ Beat it Sandy.”
That put me in a good mood, so I cruised over to the boys’ toilet. Above the closed door of a stall a column of cigarette smoke curled to the roof. By volume there had to be three guys puffing away in there. I opened the cleaner’s closet, grabbed the bucket of water I keep there, closed the closet, checked outside to make sure no kid was about to walk in and then upended the bucket over the toilet door. “FUCKING HELL!!!”, “SHIT!!!!” and other expletives expleted as I bolted out the door.

Chapter 26 - Shot, Bashed and Browbeat

2006-10-22T15:38:00.000+10:00

About a half hour later, Angie stuck her head into my office. “Pete, I need a lift to the bank. I’m finishing an hour early on flexitime and Debbie is meeting me there. You can bring the banking books back to school if that‘s okay.”
At the end of each day, schools need to bank the day’s receipts. It’s surprising how much money comes in if a few big school excursions with bus fares and entry money are coming up. Add this to the normal canteen income and you can total four or five grand. With the school disco ticket money we easily had that much today. Two years back a school office-lady doing the banking had been bailed-up and relieved of the dough by some drug crazed desperate, so Education Department guidelines now said that two staff members must do the banking, one a male where possible. Provided I wasn’t tied up with something I welcomed the chance to get out of the school.

The shopping center was the usual mid afternoon chaos when we got there and I had to drive a half block past the ANZ to find a park. As we walked towards the bank, Donny Manem and his pal Mantouv appeared in front of us. The creeps must have followed us from school. Manem had a revolver so big Wyatt Earp would be jealous and Mantouv seemed to have replaced his nickel plated 45 howitzer with a clone. Both were pointed at us. Jesus, I hate guns! I was doing security at a club a few years back when two guys started arguing. Next thing one of them pulled a big handgun and started blazing. Hell, most people have no idea what sort of damage a big caliber gun can do at close range. That place looked like a war zone 30 seconds later.
“ Get in the fucking alley,” sneered Manem, pointing to a laneway off the main street. I had seen Manem a few times before, big-noting himself at clubs when I did security, always with a bunch of his ethnic buddies and a bevy of babes, more often skippies than daughters of imports. He was always flashing lots of money around. No more than 30, he was distinguished by another of those fuckwit hairdos - totally bald except for a little pony tail low at the back. His head looked like a cannon ball with a rat’s tail. I wasn’t all that whelmed with the idea of moving into the laneway, particularly when I noticed the Dillingers' big police cruiser slide into the no-parking spot outside the bank. Please glance down here Debbie or Igor.
“ What the hell do you want, Manem?” I said, stalling for time.
“ You heard me, in the alley. Or I’ll do you right here.”
I stepped back and pretended to half trip, hoping it would attract attention. Behind Manem and Mantouv I saw the cruiser’s passenger door open and Debbie jump out with the Glock in her hand. A second later Ivan appeared with that fabulous Remington pump-action riot gun. Angie and I slowly backed towards the alley.
“ You’re in deep shit Manem,” said Angie. “You just don’t know it yet.”
Manem laughed.
“ Hey Spiros," she continued. "What happened to your face? Some girl beat you up?” Mantouv looked like he’d collided with the Sunlander Express.
“ Shut-up bitch!” he snarled. “Donny, I want to do her. It’s gonna give me heaps good pleasure.” He looked back at Angie. “So where’s my fucking gun, bitch?”
“ Right here in this bank bag, loser.” Which was complete bullshit, the cops had taken it when they carted Folkstone away that morning. “You reckon you can take it from me, soft cock?”
“ No one calls me soft cock, bitch!”
“ I’m calling both of you soft cocks,” said Angie. “You are real big men with guns, but complete girls without them. No-cocks rather than softcocks.”
“ Freeze, no-cocks! You don’t and you are fucking dead!” Debbie was standing directly behind them, Glock pointed at the back of Mantouv’s head. Ivan had the Remington trained on Manem.
Now you aren’t going to find this hard to believe, I mean why should these guys take the word of some female they have never heard before about ending up dead? So they didn’t freeze, they swung around towards Debbie and Ivan. Well, they started to swing around. And they ended up dead. Real quick.

“ Symmetry,” said the rather nice blonde paramedic with the pointy bazookas.
“ What do you mean, symmetry?” I asked.
“ You might end up with a matching scar on the right side of your forehead. That would make you look very dashing.”
Sure it would. It’d just reinforce the impression I’d been head-smacked by a bus. I was sitting in the doorway of a shop near the alley while she put a patch on my head. A stray pellet from Ivan’s shotgun had grazed my forehead.
Chaos reigned. There were cop cars, ambulances and even a fire truck parked all over the street. What idiot called the fire brigade? Shoppers and office workers were standing behind the police-scene tape craning their necks to see what was going on. All these guys and babes in uniform were running around the place looking important. The coroner’s wagon was parked further up near the bank and two guys were loading a body-bag laden stretcher into the back. Another bagged stretcher was sitting on the road behind the van, waiting its turn.
“ Sensational events in Fivedock this afternoon,” I turned and standing inside the tape was Katia Mantera, National Telecaster’s top outside news reporter, facing a guy with camera and another with a boom mike. Talking about sensational, Katia was one outstanding babe - petite and supremely shapely, with a shock of tousled red hair and an absolutely beautiful face. Her voice had the modulated high-class mid-Pacific tone you hear from these TV people, no Aussie strine here, baby. She was rumoured to be the plaything of Australia’s top media billionaire, an 80 year old bully who built his fortune on the old boy network and political patronage. “Once again Sydney’s outlaw element has come out on the wrong side of a confrontation with those police sharpshooters, Debbie and Ivan Dillinger. According to eyewitness reports, the two deadshot cops surprised an attempted armed holdup outside this local bank by none other than up and coming western suburbs crime czar Donny Manem and an associate. In the exchange of gunfire which followed, both perpetrators were shot dead. One of the two targets of the holdup” - the camera swung across and pointed at me - “was treated for a gunshot wound to the head......”
“ Would you kindly piss off with that fucking camera?” I snarled. Maybe I was a bit light-headed after the pellet graze. Or maybe I was suffering from Sandy’s problem, the devil made me do it. What the hell, I heard around the industry that this little girl was a real fiery bitch, always losing her temper with waiters and staff in bars, clubs and restaurants, probably bullshit because people are always making up stories like that about big movers. Whatever, I thought I’d rattle her cage a bit.
“ Oh fucking great! Fucking wonderful! You really blew that you shithead, now I’m gonna hafta dub over that. What a fucking creep! What the fuck’s wrong with you, dickhead, you got some warrant out on you or something, don't want your ugly face on TV? Hiding from some abandoned lady and kids? Fucking loser!” All this was delivered in a perfect western suburbs strine-whine, rising inflection and all. Wow, I got the girl back to her roots.
“ You were shooting my left profile, I don’t like my left profile,” I said.
“ Very fucking funny, blowhard. What the hell is wrong with you? What’s up your arse?”
“ I can tell you one thing darling,” I said. “ There aint no ancient TV billionaire up my arse.”
She stepped up to me and I gave her an angelic smile from my seat on the step, gap tooth and all. She grabbed a metal clipboard off the paramedic’s trolley and clocked me a beaut backhand across the skull. Clungggg! It knocked me clean onto my back. The cute paramedic stepped across to shield me, but the crazed TV vixen pushed her aside and gave me another wallop just as I was sitting up again. Clangggg!! Angie who'd moved our way when the yelling started, grabbed her in a sort of close clinch. “Whoa, sweetheart!”
Mantera struggled in Angie’s arms, but no way was Angie letting go, she was enjoying this way too much. After a while Mantera calmed down. “You must forgive my colleague, Miss Mantera,” Angie breathed. “I think the shock of the wound is affecting his judgement.” She gave Mantera a dazzling smile. “I also think he’s sulking about that extra graze on his face and how he won’t get an audition for HUNK QUEST.”
“ With a fucking head like that, the bastard oughta audition for FRIGHT NIGHT”
“ Ar, get stuffed!” I said.
“ Nah scarface, you get fucked!”
All this time, the cameraman and soundman were beamed in on us. They must have some great unused footage back at the station. It probably gets dragged out at the end of year party.
“ Listen,” Angie said, still clutching the gorgeous Katia tightly and having the time of her life. “Let me make it up by giving you an exclusive victim’s account interview when I finish with the police.” She gave Mantera that penetrating gaze she bunged on whenever she was piling on the Angie charm. Mantera gazed back at Angie and gave a little toss of the head.
“ Well sure, just keep that fucking loser out of it.”
Angie steered the firebrand away towards where Debbie was speaking to one of the local cops. The cute paramedic started to put another patch on my head where the metal clipboard had opened it up: "One thing I like in a man is a smooth talker." she said as she dabbed iodine on the wound with way excessive pressure.
Ivan walked over. “ Jesus Pete, you sure know how to wind those nice looking ladies up. For a minute there I thought I might have to cuff one of you to quieten things down.”
“ You can cuff me to her any day.”
“ What, and watch you get battered to death?”
“ Hell, I’d take my chances, I love feisty babes who look as good as that. But if it came to the worst, what a way to go.”
“ Yeah well that’s what I don’t understand. Why give these gorgeous broads such a bad time? How you ever gunna score if you carry on like that.”
“ Come on Ivan, mortals like us don’t score with heartbreakers like that.”
“ Nah Pete, you gunna have to change your approach, no future in stirring up cuties for the hell of it.”
Angie put it a bit more succinctly when she cruised over ten minutes later.
“ Nice one Pete.”
“ What?”
“ Real nice.”
“ What???”
“ You know what. Winding up Katia.”
“ Oh, Katia?” First names already. “Listen kid, I did it for you, so you could get your mauly mitts around her.”
“ Bullshit Pete. The sad fact is you did it for the exact same reason those two creeps at J and D’s whisper obscenities to young girls there. You know guys like you will never get anywhere with sensational things like Katia, so you take the piss out of them instead.”
Well that’s pretty much what I’d just told Ivan. But no way was I goning to admit it to Angie. “Come on.”
“ No face it Pete, how many ladies have you browned off lately? Like Magda and Aimee and just about all the staff and customers at the Tanning Tub, Carol Leonard.....”
“ Give me a break, I was perfectly polite to Carol Leonard.”
“ Yeah, well she got real pissed when one of her little girls said you referred to her as Auntie Carol. And Marnie hates your guts....” I gave Angie a look. “Plus you never have a civil word for Monica Zellwinger...” I gave Angie another look. “And your own daughter thinks you are a complete hardarse, which I personally think is a tragedy. Face it Pete, you have a real bad attitude. You are going have to stop sulking about your marriage bust-up. That was 10 years ago.”
Jesus, this was giving me something to think about, but once again no way was I going to admit it. As some famous person once said: denial aint just a river in Africa. “Got any more amateur psychoanalysis Angie? ”
“ Just advice. Stop being such a cynical and aggressive bastard when it comes to women. About the only female you have clicked with lately is sweet Sandy Tavernese, and Pete, she is risky business in the position you are in. And way too young, even if you weren’t in that position.”
“ Don’t give me the too young routine, Angie. You are just upset that for the first time ever in one of our little competitions for girls, I have more chance than you.”
“ Are you serious?”
“ Sure I’m serious.”
Angie didn’t say another word. She just gave me a grin and walked back across to where Katia was interviewing a police spokesperson.

Chapter 27 - Q&A

2006-10-21T15:13:00.002+10:00

Around 7pm I was doing paperwork in my office. In a half hour I would have to go help supervise the school disco. I'd helped set the hall up after classes and it was not worth the haul home and back after that, so I used the time to clear some administrative stuff. I heard footsteps in the vestibule outside. Detective Bruce Minestre stuck his head in the door to my office: “Mind if I come in?”
Minestre was the cop who took over from the uniformed guys who answered the call after No-More brained Folkstone this morning. He was in his mid 30s and looked like one of those new-age TV cops, expensive suit, modern slightly spiked hairdo. But he talked just like one of those old time hard-case detectives, been on the job a hundred years and seen everything. He'd spent half the day taking statements from Angie, the Boss, me and everyone else on the scene. He took that back to the local cop shop to work on, and barely an hour later got called down to head up the investigation of the big exit of Manem and Spittoon. I’d already spent another hour answering questions on that one, plus writing up one more statement.
“ Nice office,” said Minestre as he took a seat, laying his notebook on the table. “I really like the medieval stretch rack.”
“ Yeah, I used to be a 4 foot midget and the kids didn’t take me seriously.”
“ Does the basketball coach ever borrow it?”
“ All the time when he was into kink. But then his wife left him for a gerbil breeder.”
“ Are you married, Andrews?”
“ No, my wife left me for a gerbil.”
“ Um, refresh me on gerbils.”
“ A gerbil is a kind of good-looking big rat.”
“ Okay, I think I get the picture.”
We thought about that for a while. Ministre screwed up his face. “This case has got some tricky stuff.” I looked at him but kept quiet. “ Like I got this computer at the station, so I feed in a whole shitload of names and hit search to see what comes out. And a whole shitload comes out. A lot of it about you.”
I kept looking at him.
“ Like when I fed your name in it whirred and buzzed and clicked like it was having a fucking mental collapse. I was expecting tilt to flash up on the screen. About a dozen hits came up.”
I kept looking at him.
“ Like there is a complaint from some bloke was down at Susie’s Strip Bar a while back. He said this doorman, Peter H Andrews - what’s the H for?”
“ Horace.”
“ Cute. Yeah well this bloke gets the shit kicked out of him by one P. Horace Andrews.”
“ Did you finish the report?”
“ My lips get tired when I read too much, but yeah, I finished. Sure, he deserved it. It did say something about this creep jumping up on the stage and having an indecent hold on one of the girls, which he wouldn’t release. So okay, then there’s another report about some builder’s labourer falling off the first floor of a site when you were around. And then some parent called Folstone ends up with 2 broken arms and a busted jaw after an interview in your office. Oh yeah, that report mentioned Ms Vung Truy too.”
“ Some people tend to lead eventful lives.”
“ Eventful? Stuff me Andrews, the computer also says you also just happened to be around when two small time hoods get skewered by some Jap maniac out at Oran Raceway Sunday morning - one witness says she saw these characters hanging around your pit area a short time before.”
“ Maybe they were old racing-car nuts.”
“ Sure they were. And then today one of our bigger up and coming gangsters Donny Manem and his main standover man take a short cut to Lucifer while pointing guns at you and your girlfriend.” He gazed at me for a while. “Not to mention just this morning another complaint gets filed about you beating up some kid right here in the school last Friday.”
Jesus, that arsehole Bently’s parents had whined to the cops! Instant minister notification! But no worries, my mate Superintendent Bill Casey would look after that one for me.
“ I mean what the fuck do we have here Andrews, some deputy principal that not only seems to be a school enforcer, club enforcer and construction site enforcer, but he also just happens to be around when all these fucking hoods are getting dusted.”
“ It's a dangerous world out there.”
“ Listen up, I live in this area, down on the Bay...”
“ Nice location. Costs a bomb down there.” The drawing area of the school stretches from Paramatta Road down to the river. It takes in everything from Department of Housing apartments and cheap ethnic areas to very big-money properties with million dollar water views. Our kids show a likewise mix of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, although 90% of the sons and daughters from the flash areas attended private schools, and good for them. If I had that kind of money, no way would my kid go to a state school. Minestre knows I’m thinking there must have been bulk bribes and payoffs to afford a house down in swank alley.
“ Yeah, I inherited it from my dad when he went to Jesus.”
“ Was your dad a cop?” Dad probably took all the bribes and payoffs.
“ Yeah. What did your dad do?”
“ He was a gynaecologist.” He looked at me. “ Don’t say it.” I said. The standard response to ‘he was a gynaecologist’ is ‘that’s a zunt of a job’. Except the z has a cedilla, pardon my French.
“ All the same,” he said. “A job like that would limit your options. I mean, you wouldn’t get much of a rush out of beaver magazines.”
“I hear most gynos are tit men.”
“ Makes sense to me”
“ Except for my old man. He was into earlobes.”
He looked at me. “Yeah?”
“ Yeah. Maybe his girlfriends liked to hear him coming.”
“ Hell Andrews, that’s pretty lame.”
And it was complete bullshit too. My old man was an electrical technician for South West Electricity. Until the great power surge of ‘71. Poor old dad was standing the designated safe distance from a transformer when the surge hit and caused a huge arc to shoot across and fry him. It got me on TV. This Day Wrapped Up showed all these bastards whining about how the surge had blown up their TVs, fridges and Big Boy #9s. And yet, suggested the anchorman, if you think you are unlucky, check this out. There is mum and 5 year old me crying over the coffin down at Budget Burials. It probably got a big response with the viewers - they’re thinking, shit, that woman has enough problems with losing her husband, but imagine having to bring up that fucking ugly kid.
But face it, the gyno bullshit was way more interesting.
“ So where were we?” asked Minestre.
“ You were telling me about living down on the Bay.”
“ Sure, well the point is, my kid, first born, is coming to this school next year. But I’m not so sure. According to my computer he’s got a good chance of being a victim of teacher rage. Specifically, deputy principal rage. And I run an even bigger risk if I come up to complain. Odds on I’ll get beat up. Unless I hire that TV babe Katia Manterra for protection.” He stopped and grinned at me for a while. “Plus my kid could get caught in the crossfire between some armed parent, the office lady, the Lebanese mafia doing a payback in Manem’s memory, the Dillingers and some crazy Jap thinks he’s Geronimo.”
“ Well, this place sometimes gets lively. The Premier does want some rigour back in education.”
“ Yeah, it’s pretty fucking rigorous alright. Go to school and move right along to hospital. And if you’re real unlucky, you could end up in the morgue. With rigor mortis.”
“ Well it’s a bit of a stiff deal, but them’s the breaks.”
“ Breaks? You mean that parent Folkstone’s arms and face?”
I shrugged.
“Anyway, besides the computer stuff, another interesting thing came up. That chromed 45 we took off Ms Vung Truy this morning after that parent nut did a postalworker at your office, her statement says she found that on a rubbish tip. She thought it was one of those replicas.”
“ The Taiwanese are turning out dynamite replicas these days.”
“ Sure, they are so realistic they fire real bullets. Hey, what a great story, found it on a rubbish dump. But wait a bit, it gets even better. Any gun involved in any offence gets taken down the lab and test fired, so I get a call this afternoon from the chief technician down there. He tells me a bullet from this gun was used to send a smalltime drug pusher called Hussein Allambra to hell about two months ago. Apparently the word is that Allambra was in debt big time to Donny Manem. What do you think of that?”
He looked at me. I looked at him.
“ So this is real interesting.” he continued. “Maybe your Ms Vung Truy is a contract killer working for Donny the hood, dusting guys owe him money. And hey, what a coincidence, she just happens to be holding the moneybag when said Donny shows up to steal it. Maybe some kind of inside job here, Angela tipped off Manem? Except the Dillingers spoil everything when they show up too and ice Manem and his goon. So what have we got? Sweet little Angela, contract killer and larceny expert.”
“ Doesn’t sound like the Angie I know.”
“ Hell, the more I hear about this can of words, the more I think it’s quite possible. But then, I’m sitting by my computer nutting all this out, and the Dillingers themselves stick their heads around my door and say, ‘hey Bruce you look after sweet Angela and Petey because them and us are all such a great bunch of pals.’” He shook his head. “ Wow, another little twist - the killer cops know the potential targets of the robbery, you are all great pals. The Dillingers just happened to be around, miles from their own patrol area, when Donny and his buddy decide to do a small time armed robbery. And small time robbery don’t make much sense in itself seeing it’s so chickenshit compared to what those bastards rake in with their main rackets.”
“ Maybe the donut stores were sold out down at Maroubra.”
He worked on this apparent non-sequitur for a while.
“ Anyway, something else real interesting happened. A colleague of mine, works in the drug squad, he’s got this snitch, this fucking informer ratting to him all the time, always bringing him real good shit on all these bad bastards in the trade. The snitch is listening to the radio this afternoon and here’s this big newsbreak about Donny and Spiran Mantouv getting their brains spread all around Fivedock shopping centre. The snitch thinks there may be some brownie points on information about Mantouv, so he rings my pal. Apparently the snitch was in Jim’s Diner Saturday night.”
He looked at me. I looked at him.
“ And the snitch says good old Spiran Mantouv comes in and sits down at a table with some people. All of a sudden, all hell breaks loose, specifically this gorgeous big black babe is breaking Mantouv’s teeth by banging his head into the table. Which goes down real well with all those low life guttersnipes hanging around in there, big tough Spiran, top enforcer for the Lebanese drug mafia, getting his face flattened by some cutie. So then what happens is next thing she takes this huge fucking chrome plated 45 off of him.”
“ Good story.”
“ Yeah, I thought it was so good I called this snitch. And he gave me a description that fits Ms Angela Vung Truy to a tee. Not too many other women look like her. So I then ask him about other people in the group at Jim’s and stuff me, one fits your description real well too. And your description is even more unique, what with that scar, the nose and all.”
“ Once again, what can I say.”
“ So I have a bright idea. I feed in Ms Vung Truy’s description into the computer to see if there are any unknowns on her. Did the same for you. Well nothing came up on you , you are known for all your shit, but I got a great hit when I fed in a description of a six foot, short haired black skinned beauty who’s a cross between Lucy Liu and Naomi Campbell.”
“ Not the mystery woman Prime Minister Holt was flirting with the day he disappeared?”
“ What I got was a match with an unknown, who according to one witness walked out of that alley where Joel Smithers, the first grade footballer was found half dead, crap kicked out of him, late Grand Final night. The timing was just about right for when the assault took place. That guy was so badly beaten he’ll never play big-time football again.”
“ From what I hear, his big mouth and nasty ways had him condemned to an early retirement anyway.”
Once again he shook his head. “ We are getting off the track. So let’s sum up today- the killer cops know you, the potential targets of the robbery. You apparently know at least one of the robbers, and that robber’s gun was used by one of you in a stand off with some berserk parent. And the same gun was used a month earlier to ice some low life punk.”
“ Well it all makes sense to me.”
“ Sure it makes sense, it’s easy. The gun was Spiran Mantouv’s. He killed the punk. The snitch is right about what happened in the Jim’s Diner.”
I nodded.
“ So why the fuck did your sweetheart say she found the gun?” Minestre was genuinely pissed. “Christ, Andrews, we get so much grief from on-high about unsolved crime, particularly murders. All those big time commanders at headquarters sitting on their fat bums demanding one hundred percent clear-up rates, only thing they ever cleared up in their whole careers was all the surplus cash from illegal bookies and pimps. And some bullshit story from your beautiful friend about finding a gun on a tip is still holding us up.”
“ You talked to Angie?”
“ When I rang her home address just before I came up here they said she is over at some local hall with the school’s senior girls’ gymnasts. She’s probably showing them how to remodel some guy’s face against the side of a vaulting horse.”
More likely checking the feminine form, knowing Angie.
“ Well what say I have a talk to Angie, we write up a statement about Jim’s Diner and the gun and bring it down the station tomorrow, and maybe clear up any other details?”
“ I dunno. By tomorrow there will probably be another ten corpses the way you maniacs operate.”
“ Well, anything’s possible when the Dillingers are around.”
“ From what I’ve seen, anything’s possible when Angela Vung Truy and Pete Andrews are around. Besides which, we still haven’t cleared up what the dispute in Jim’s Diner was about.”
“ Old Spiran and his boss were in arrears with their Cronulla Cops fanclub dues. Angela collects for the club.”
“ More likely the other way round, you guys owed Donny Manem the loan shark big time. Did I tell you the computer also mentioned that those two dopes who got themselves arrow-drilled were debt collectors for Donny Manem?”
“ Stone the crows, what a coincidence.”
“ Or maybe the truth is you and that one-woman wrecking ball are connected with the dope industry. Having some kind of turf war with Donny’s outfit. I would get really unhappy about something like that. I would be really fucking upset if that was the case.”
“ Come on detective, your snitch would have known the answer to that. Don’t be so pissed. Your two cases are solved. You not only put Donny’s holdup to bed, you have that earlier Allambra murder wrapped up.”
“ I’m not pissed about the cases anymore. I’m pissed about how much the private school is gunna cost me.”
“ Private school?”
“ The one for my kid. No way is he coming here.”

Chapter 28 - Full Of It.

2006-10-20T22:08:00.001+10:00

I was a bit late reaching the hall, and when I walked into the foyer area a heated argument was going on. Hating Hillary had two of the nicest kids in the school bailed up, Simon Andretti, the boys’ School Captain and his girlfriend Brae Somerland from Year 11. I could immediately see what the problem was. Brae is one of the most attractive girls in the school, a kind of Anna Kournikova clone, but better, if you can believe that. Tonight Brae was wearing a close copy of those Katoey outfits of yesterday PM - a bright yellow and white Hawaiian print sarong and a bikini top. If the sarong rode any lower this girl would get arrested. Okay, there was no plumber’s cleavage showing, but there were two very lovely dimples above the swell of her buttocks and the sarong was hooked so low in front it would make Hugh Hefner nervous. Plus the contrasting white bikini top was tiny, showing acres of very tanned breasts.
Jeez. She looked stunning.
Jeez. She looked trouble.
“ Mr Andrews,” sniffed Hillary when she saw me. “This is completely unacceptable. It was made very clear to the student body that dress like this was not to be worn. This young lady must go home and change.”
Oh hell, why me? I took a deep breath. “Gee Brae, I’m afraid Mrs Staples is right. I mean I did say tops had to be a reasonable size, no Bondi Beach stuff.”
“ Mr Andrews, I was on excursion all day with the volleyball team. I missed your assembly.”
“ Well I’m sorry you missed the announcement ....” Why didn’t her boyfriend mention it when he arrived to pick her up? Probably blown away with how hot she looked. “... but I’m afraid your outfit doesn’t meet the standards. We can’t let you in. You have to go home and change”
“ Sir, my mother will go spastic if I go home and change. She approved of how I looked tonight. She will take this as an insult to her standards.”
“ Well I’m real sorry if your mum is going to be offended, Brae. But you still have to change.”
“ Come on sir,” said boyfriend Simon quite aggressively. “ This is really stupid, Brae isn’t showing anything you don’t see everyday on the streets. I think you guys should go get a life.”
I had never heard this kid say anything impolite in his six years at the school. That’s a problem with disputes like this. Some nice kid gets caught up in it, defends the honour of his girl, says a few things he normally wouldn’t and winds up in a whole lot of shit.
“ Take it easy, Simon, this can be worked out.”
“ Well frankly sir, I don’t feel like taking it easy. It’s like saying my girl’s dressed like a tart, and I don’t like that.”
Pene Kristalou, who had been standing to the side stepped across. “Look, maybe I can help. Brae, I’ve got a docked denim jacket in my car, comes down about mid way between bust and navel. It will be a nice contrast to the sarong. Let’s say you put that on, make you legal. I’m sure Mr Andrews won’t object to that.”
“ The sarong is still too low riding,” sniffed Hillary.
Compromise needed. “No, Mrs Staples, I’m going to use the Tavernese standard here. No rear cleavage is showing so I’ll accept the sarong. Brae, why don’t you go with Ms Kristalou and get the jacket.”
Hillary gave me a baleful stare.
I took Simon aside when the girls left. “Christ Simon, do me a favour. If that sarong starts to move south when you are dancing, hook it up please.”
Simon smiled. “Thanks sir.”
“ Don’t thank me Simon, thank Ms Kristalou.”
God bless Pene Kristalou. Hard working, a good teacher, gets along well with most kids, always pitching in for these non-paid extra curricula things that most teachers have learned are not worth the trouble. Pene is late 20s, short, dumpy and plain, but hell, I should get real and ask her out, she’s a nice person. That’s the trouble with me, I want to hang around with Miss Australia. Well that’s not correct, what I want is a female version of me, good fit body, don’t care about the head. Oh yeah, and maybe not quite as old as me. But finding someone like that was no easy thing. There were a couple of nice 30 plus women in my triathlon club who fit the bill, but they were married and no way was I moving in there. Anyhow, Pene would do alright. The Greek community would line her up with some nice Greek-boy doctor or someone similar anytime soon.

The disco was the usual thing; Year 7 boys playing slides and catch-me on the floor; kids insisting on “freaking” despite a longstanding ban on that style of standup “dry-job” dancing; a nice little bitchfight between two senior girls over some dopey boy; a foul-mouth DJ who took exception to me telling him if he said fuck or any derivation of fuck one more time I would shove his microphone so far up his bum his audience would hear real shit; the ejection of an outsider who had got in with a ticket purchased by some student friends - unfortunately a forced ejection because he didn’t want to leave; a carload of young local hoods arriving in the parking area which required my helping the two outside security guards provided free by Bazza to turn them away; loads of apprentice heartbreakers who decided to give Brae Somerville a contest in the low riding stakes plus some in short-short miniskirts who were wearing thong-bikini panties (yikes, didn't think about that one on assembly!) and about which I left to Hillary to get all upset; and the usual results of kids either getting tanked-up before they arrived or smuggling in booze or worse stuff - a need to call three separate parents in to take their out-of-it offspring home. And naturally the parents thought it was my fault their kids were blitzed out of their minds. As I worked around the hall, kids were commenting on this afternoon’s hold-up. They all seemed greatly amused.
“ Hey sir, I saw you on the TV news!”
“ Wicked, Mr Andrews, you were really great! Wham!”
“ Yo sir, how’s your head?”
This last kid made a backhand sweeping motion as he said it. I was beginning to think maybe some TV footage had not been held back for the end of year studio party, but that didn’t make too much sense because a crazed Katia certainly wouldn’t look too hot assaulting a wounded hold-up victim on national TV. But hey, those TV people can do some pretty selective editing to twist the facts. “Listen Pene, you didn’t happen to catch the hold-up on the news tonight by any chance? I missed it.”
“ You didn’t see it, Pete? That was very sensational stuff. All the channels had details of the hold-up and those two bad blokes getting killed, but some passer-by with a camera also caught the TV lady going ballistic and trying to take your head off with the metal clipboard, so the rest of the channels also spliced that in and were making an even bigger deal of it. You know how bitchy those channels are, it was even replayed on This 24 Hours. The camera also had a directional mike, so they had your nice friendly conversation, with about one thousand bleeps. I’d say the only one that came out of it looking a winner was Angie. Say Pete, how’s your head?”
Crikey, no way will I live this one down over at the karate club.

By 10:30 all the kids were gone and I was mopping up vomit in the boys’ toilet, another consequence of illicit student drinking. Cleanup after one of these shows is a real bummer, but there is no way it can be left to the school cleaners next morning. Those poor ladies are on contract and are so squeezed for time that classrooms only get a thorough cleaning every second or third day. As usual, most of tonight’s cleanup work was being done by the handful of teachers present. Nearly all the kids on the school social committee had disappeared, going home with boyfriend/ girlfriends or on to the after-disco party was way more important than cleaning up. I was a little disappointed Sandy was not pitching in, but I hadn’t seen her since just after the disco started. At least she had helped set the place up as promised. Angie’s lack of presence surprised me. She usually loved checking the scene with all these sweet gorgeous young things dressed or undressed to the nines, but after a short appearance early on I hadn’t spotted her either. Monica Zellwinger had also shown her face for 10 minutes at the start - just enough time to be noticed by parents dropping children off. Typical.
I had just finished with the mop when a big guy, late 20s, immaculately dressed in a very expensive suite, walked into the toilet. He checked my plastered head. “You’re Andrews.”
“ I already know that.”
“ You seem to have an attitude problem, Andrews.” This guy had me beat. Too young and the wrong approach to be a parent. Pretty tough looking but too well dressed and the wrong ethnicity to be a Manem associate. “As a matter of fact Andrews, my employer is very upset about your attitude, particularly in respect to the way you talk to young women.”
“ Is that so? Don’t tell me you work for Gloria Steinham?”
“ Let’s not worry about who I work for Andrews. Let’s just say my employer asked me to chastise you for your attitude, maybe persuade you that it was not such a good idea.” And he gave a nasty smile and strolled towards me.

I had just finished padlocking the hall door when an old LTD cruised into the parking area. The driver’s door swung open and the mean looking barman from Jim’s Diner, all sinew, lean muscle and stringy tendons, barbed wire tatt encircling the biceps, climbed out. I gave an inward groan. Hell, who sent this guy - the Manem gang, Katia Mantera’s fan club or Jim’s Diner’s landlord looking for a bigger payout for the damage to the bar? Pene Kristalou gave a little squeal and ran over and wrapped her arms around him. They swapped a kiss, climbed into the Ford and rumbled off. Far out, that guy certainly aint no Greek-boy doctor.
As I walked over to the car park, Hating Hillary was driving out. She stopped alongside me and rolled down the window. “Mr. Andrews, who was that big well-dressed young man who stumbled out of the hall a short time back? There seemed to be something wrong with his arms, they were hanging rather unnaturally.”
“ He’s one of those kiddie-kissers, hangs around school toilet areas. I thought he should be shown the error of his ways.”
Hillary gave me a perfect get-fucked smile. “Mr Andrews, as the children would say, you are completely full of it.”
Well, I think she said “it.”

Twenty minutes later I pulled the big Impala into the curb and shut down the engine. The street was very quiet but a light was still on in the duplex. I swung the wrought iron gate open, walked the short distance to the door and hit the bell. After the usual peephole thing, the front door swung open and Monica Zellwinger stood there wrapped in a long bathrobe.
“What do you want?”
“You.”
“Well bad luck buster, I’ve got someone with me.”
“Bullshit.”
I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. For once she didn’t bite, scratch or struggle. An exotic Asian-African face with extremely short hair grinned at me from the bed. The sheet was pulled up to her chin with one hand and she waggled her fingers at me with the other. There was another feminine shape next to her, completely covered by the sheet except for a strand of long black hair draped over the pillow.
Jesus!
I dropped Monica on the bed and beat it.
Now I won’t swear to this, but as I closed the front door I’m pretty sure I heard the beginnings of a Mini Driver chortle.

..........................THE END........................

BREAKING NEWS :
Almost complete, “THIS JUST OUT”, tezza’s latest opus and the sequel to “This Just In”, where New South Wale’s newly-appointed Director-General of Education, Bill Casey, gets in touch with his pink side. Naturally this makes him the target of blackmail from an assorted bunch of really bad bastards, which warrants the assistance of Angie, Pete and the Dillinger Gang.
Will Pete win back Susan? Or take up with professional card-counter and part-time comedian/actor Sandy Tavernese? Or find true lurv with the 48 year old sexy-voice from Silver Tree Finance’s talk-line?
Can Katie Andrews be the next Kylie Minogue, or will she beat up too many recording industry sleaze-bags?
Will Angie really turn hasbian?
Does newly-appointed District Superintendent of Schools Monica Zellwinger bust Pete back to school janitor?
Will the John Hefforn MP/Whispy Cantour video make #1 on YouTube?
Can Takeshi single-handedly decapitate the vengeful remnants of the Lebanese Mafia + the ’Bra Boys + Sidewalk Eddie’s homeboy mates, in a stunt-helicopter flying lesson gone horribly wrong? Or will the Dillingers beat him to them?
All this and more - coming soon to a monitor near you.