Draw the Brisbane Line (3 page)

Epoch finished his drink and got out of there, remembering why he wanted to leave the town and the region in the first place.  What happens when you take the mines out of a mining town?  Epoch didn’t want to hang around to find out.  Just two days earlier, a fight broke out at a pub in the centre of Moranbah, and Epoch was in the middle of it having gone there to collect a package from one of his supply contacts.  He did his level best to avoid eye contact with anyone, to escape the melee without being dragged into the brawl, but he still managed to get stabbed; though fortunately for him the short blade didn’t penetrate further than the dynamite sticks he had slotted into every pocket in his jacket.  That was enough for Epoch, the whole area was quickly turning into the Wild West.  And now this, the big man Nero himself trying to recruit him from out of the blue, a literal tap on the shoulder in the pub one night … it couldn’t be a good sign.  Epoch preferred to limit his associations to those within his reach, hierarchically-speaking, or lower, because when you hung around with the bitches you were far less likely to get fucked.

He couldn’t just bail out south though, not with Nero’s offer hanging.  He might not take rejection well.  What to do?

He pulled his phone out from one of his many pockets, one not stuffed with cash or contraband, and tapped in a direct message on Twitter.  He made a lot of friends on Twitter, though never as himself, and this particular non-self happened to be a follower of, and followed by, Blinky Williams, Nero’s soon-to-be-maybe-amputated right-hand man.  Epoch thought Blinky might find it interesting that Nero was planning on a little organisational change.

YVETTE: Good morning today! I’m Yvette Winterson.

JEFF: And I’m Jeff Jones.

YVETTE: And this is Good Morning Today on this Friday the fifteenth of January.

JEFF: And it’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it Yvette?

YVETTE: It is a gorgeous morning here in Sydney. Let’s go around the grounds to see what it’s like across the country. Belinda in Melbourne.  Belinda, how is the river city this morning?

BELINDA: That would be Brisbane, Yvette. Brisbane is the river city.

YVETTE: But you do have a river too, don’t you?

BELINDA: Yes we do Yvette, but as you know, we’re typically known as the Culture Capital.

YVETTE: Of course Belinda. So how is it in the "Culture Capital" this morning?

BELINDA: Gorgeous, Yvette and Jeff, just gorgeous. And I heard those air-quotes.

JEFF: No rain forecast for you then Belinda?

BELINDA: It’s clear and dry right now Jeff, perfect weather.

JEFF: But rain later on?

BELINDA: Maybe a few showers.

JEFF: Of course. And how are things in Hobart this morning, Tim?

TIM: Fabulous Jeff. A bit of a breeze, but perfect sailing weather if you’re out on the water this morning.

JEFF: Are you going to get out there today Tim?

TIM: Maybe Jeff, maybe.

JEFF: Ha, ha. Good stuff. And how about Perth, Sallyanne? How are things in the west?

SALLYANNE: Morning Jeff, morning Yvette. Still a bit early to tell.  As I keep reminding the producer, we are two hours behind the east coast. But early indications suggest a clear, sunny day here in the western capital.

YVETTE: I’m not sure we need you Sallyanne, it’s the same story every day.

JEFF: Ha, ha. That’s right Yvette. We could just play her on a loop. Sunny, sunny, sunny…

YVETTE: Heh, good one Jeff.

JEFF: When did it last rain in Perth, Sallyanne?

SALLYANNE: I think it rained in November, Yvette.

YVETTE: And speaking as we were earlier of the river city, let’s cross over to Darren in Brisbane.

DARREN: Thanks Yvette, but we like to be known as the smart city now.

YVETTE: Really? When did that happen?

DARREN: After the last floods, Yvette. Residents aren’t in favour of drawing undue attention to an aspect of the city which habitually endangers and occasionally bankrupts its inhabitants.

YVETTE: Of course Darren, of course. So how is it this morning in the smart city?

DARREN: Bloody hot Yvette, bloody hot.

YVETTE: Lovely.  And Chloe in Canberra?

CHLOE: It’s, ah … it’s OK in Canberra, Yvette. Yeah, it’s OK.

YVETTE: Good to hear.   Now, you might have heard rumblings about our neighbours to the north.  Tensions in the nation’s capital have been high since -

PAULA: Hello, Yvette?

YVETTE: Um, hello?

PAULA: It’s Paula in Adelaide, Yvette. You forgot Adelaide.

YVETTE: Oh my goodness, you’re right! Can you believe that Jeff? I completely forgot Adelaide.

JEFF: I was just about to mention Adelaide, Yvette.

YVETTE: I’m so sorry Paula! And Adelaide! I’m so red right now.  How is it in Adelaide this morning Paula?

PAULA: [sighs] Oh, it’s raining cold hard cash here, Yvette.  The sun has turned purple and cats and dogs have started talking. 

YVETTE: Sounds lovely Paula.  Darren, while we have you there, what can you tell us about what’s happening in your corner of the country this morning?  We’ve been hearing rumours about military forces gathering off the Gulf of Carpenteria.

DARREN: Yes Yvette, Twitter has been buzzing over the last twelve hours or so with reports of both Indonesian and US warships moving very close to Australian waters.  So far the Australian Defence Force has denied knowledge of any foreign threats, but Yvette, we’ve seen an increased step-up in both Australian and US military presence in Queensland over the past two days.  There were joint exercises planned with the two forces, but that wasn’t for another two weeks.

YVETTE: That’s very troubling Darren.  Let’s take a look at the Samsung Twitter board.

Dean Bossman
@deebo27

Yanks pouring into Townsville by the planeload #invasionOz

Nth Territorial
@NTfishy

Been ordered to clear out of the gulf.  HMAS Toowoomba in da house #invasionOz

Omnikunt
@deep69

Ozzie, US forces give the nod, it’s a setback for your country #invasionOz

JEFF: Certainly some troubling details coming in there.  Could any of this be coming from Wikileaks?

YVETTE: That’s certainly possible Jeff.  And what can we make of the report of HMAS Toowoomba taking up a position in the Gulf of Carpentaria?

JEFF: Well, I’m no military strategist, Yvette, but that sounds like a defensive position to me.

YVETTE: Me too, Jeff, me too.  We’ll of course bring you any new updates as soon as we get them.  We’ll be back after the break with Michael Billington on the growing superannuation crisis facing the country, and then we’ll be joined by a special guest, tennis legend Dave Holden!  You’re watching Good Morning Today!

A fight broke out in the petrol station while Nero was waiting in line.  One minute he was in the middle of a longish queue, everyone lined up to pay for their petrol and snacks, and the next, someone takes offence to a gloating comment from this gen-y dickhead about how he’s been able to renegotiate his rent down by over a half, with all the miners pulling out of the area.  This grey-haired guy in his mid-fifties in a heavily faded orange high-vis shirt just snapped and punched the guy in the back of the head.

Nero had his eye on a sausage roll in the heated display, so when the fight started spreading and infecting every pissed-off bogan in the place — and that included the manager — Nero casually threw his legs over the counter and helped himself.  He filled a plastic bag with the sausage roll, two emaciated dim sims, a bottle of Coke and three packs of unfiltered Camels.  He noticed the stack of Chiko rolls in the display, five or six of them, and decided to liberate them as well.  One of the boys liked them, Hammo or Suss.  He dropped them into a second plastic bag.

‘Oi!’ a guy shouted at him, stepping around the counter and pulling his arm back to telegraph a punch.

Oi? It wasn’t enough that he was dressed in bright orange high-vis gear, he needed to attract more attention to himself?  Nero’s hands were momentarily full, so he drove the heel of his right boot hard into the inside of Oi’s right knee.  He went down with a more high-pitched and distressed ‘Oi!’  Nero took a step back and followed up with his left boot, driving its steel reinforced toe into into Oi’s head.

‘Gah,’ Oi squeaked, and crumpled to the floor.

No-one else gave him any trouble on the way out.  He could tell some of them recognised him, and that recognition was wordlessly transmitted to the others via some collective consciousness.  Call it survival.

As Nero drove back to the house, munching on the sausage roll with his free hand, he saw similar fights and straight-up criminal break-ins springing up every couple of blocks.  He was surprised by how quickly it was all breaking down, this manufactured outback civilisation, but he saw the sense in it.   With the latest coal mine shutdown, a lot of the guys in town had nowhere else to go.  A lot of them had relocated all the way up to Rockie or Mackay just for the mines.  What could they do now that no-one was hiring?  Go robbing.

Nero slowed his car as he came to a stop sign.  He normally wouldn’t have bothered, it was such a quiet intersection with a clear view in all directions for at least fifty metres, but the two cars in front of him had decided to obey the traffic signs.  The car at the sign, a V8 Commodore with a custom electric blue paint job, abruptly emptied its four passengers who all stalked up to the car behind it, a mine-spec ute complete with the orange flashers on the roof.  They looked like they might all be fresh out of prison, but Nero figured they were most likely recently laid-off contractors.

The ute shifted into reverse, but Nero was too close to allow him to manoeuvre his way out of there.  He was boxed in.  He hit the flashers and gestured frantically at Nero to move.  Nero stayed where he was and ate his sausage roll as the four men dragged the driver out, screaming blood oaths and took turns on him.  When the last of the sausage roll was licked from his fingers, Nero backed up enough to get around the ute and continued on his way.

On the drive back to the house, he played scenarios around in his head, lining them up, measuring them, pitting them against one another.  He was trying to think how the current outbreaks of lawlessness might play into his hands.  It couldn’t, not really.  His business model was simple: keep it quiet, but if you can’t, pay someone who can.  It was a model which had kept him in profit and out of prison so far, and he saw no reason to go changing it now.

He never gave much thought to his hired help having other ideas on the matter, not until he pulled up to the house and saw five Harleys parked up on his front lawn.

‘Fucking Blinky,’ he muttered, and pulled on the handbrake hard enough to make it squeal.

He reached his right hand under the seat and felt around for the faint cut-out in the hard plastic.  He pushed it, and with a soft click, the small compartment flipped open.  He pulled free the loaded Smith & Wesson thirty-eight from under the seat.

The Harleys shouldn’t be there.  He’d chosen the house, the neighbourhood, because it was as bland a base as he could have hoped for, a low brick house in a street of identical low brick houses, and his neighbours were mostly miners and truckers, coming and going with a monotonous regularity.  The whole point of the house was aimed at discretion, which was the opposite intent of a Harley Davidson. 

He knew who owned the bikes because he’d watched the small gang of Bush Rangers very carefully before he approached them to offer employment opportunities.  Four Low Riders and a Fat Bob.  The Bob was Blinky’s.  They knew, they fucking knew, that being pegged as a Ranger was a guaranteed pass to prison, thanks to the VLAD legislation that just wouldn’t go away.

Nero knew why it wouldn’t go away.  It wouldn’t go away because morons like Blinky apparently hadn’t suffered enough.

And he never should have hired them.

He wedged the Smith into the back of his jeans, felt it cutting into the small of his back too hard and had to shift his belt to a fresh notch.  Better.  He considered the bottle of Coke in the plastic carrier bag, thought he should maybe stick with water for a while.

The front door was ajar, so he nudged it open with the toe of his boot.  He spotted Suss first, the skinny bugger leaning into the arm of the cheap black pleather sofa, and threw the bag of Chiko Rolls at him.

‘Eat up, ya fucken rake,’ he snarled.

Suss caught the bag in the middle, and one of the rolls flipped out and rolled under the sofa.  He reached underneath, found it and started munching.  ‘Three second rule,’ he said through a mouthful of glutinous mess.

Hammo was near the door, and he moved behind Nero to close it.  His hard boot-heels thumped into the thin utilitarian carpet like a boxer pounding a bag.  Rudolpho stood at the kitchen counter, cleaning a stripped-down pistol beneath the bleach-bright fluorescents.  He wore his Rangers vest over his bare torso, the front hanging open to expose his full-coverage Escher-esque tattoo, impossible staircases folding over one another in geometric knots.  It had impressed Nero when he saw it, so he asked what had inspired the tattoo.  Rudolpho said it was the artist’s idea, he needed something to cover up the massive Swastika he originally had there.  Hammo, the giant Tongan enforcer, had made him do it.

He looked around for Blinky and Clapper.  They were somewhere else in the house.

The air in the sparsely furnished living room was tainted by new cigarette smoke.  Nero made them smoke outside whenever they were around.  It wasn’t that he was worried about getting the deposit back on the house, but it helped to enforce some of society’s expectations on the boys.  It was like trying to train feral dogs sometimes, keeping these Rangers in his employ.

But now there was smoking.  And those fucking bikes and gang patches.

‘Do you fuckwits want to get locked up?’ Nero said to the men in the room.

‘What?’ Rudolpho said in his thick Afrikaner tongue.  ‘For smoking in your house man?  That sounds a bit harsh.’  He looked at Nero through the barrel of the pistol before stabbing a delicate wire brush through it.

‘You think the cops won’t worry about the sudden reappearance of fucken Rangers in town?  Just because of a bit of fightin, bit of lootin?’

‘There is that, yes,’ Blinky said, stepping out from the short hallway which led to the bedrooms.  He also wore his full motorcycle leathers and Bush Ranger vest.  He moved silently despite his heavy boots, a characteristic Nero always found unsettling.  A sawn-off shotgun hung loosely in his hand.  ‘And there’s also the fact that we are Bush Rangers, not your bitches to fuck over when you feel like it.’

‘I can think of prettier things to fuck over than you lot,’ Nero said through a shallow smile.

Suss stood up and wiped his greasy fingers on his jeans.  Rudolpho stepped around the kitchen bench.  The pistol was still in pieces on the counter, but a heavy leather sap now rested in his hand.

‘We know what you were going to do,’ Blinky said.  ‘We know all about the boom-boom.  And I think we could do a better job running that side of the business.  What do you think?’

Fuck
, was all Nero had time to think.  He reached around to grab the revolver from the back of his jeans, but before his finger could even touch it, he was hit in the back of the head by a speeding car.  That’s what it felt like.  He spun as he fell, and caught sight of a grim, angry Clapper clutching a wooden baseball bat.  He must have slipped in as Hammo was closing the door.

That first blow was a bitch, and that was a good thing.  It meant that while he was aware of the rest of it, up to a point, the sharpness of the pain had been blunted somewhat by that first collision of wood on skull.  No, the physical pain wasn’t the worst of it.  The worst part was the eventual understanding, just before he slipped into a deep hole of unconsciousness, of what they meant to do.  They meant to step all over his core business interests, but his core business interests weren’t in Moranbah, or in Emerald, or in Rockhampton.  They were in Brisbane.

With Lily.