Hit (20 page)

It took Luther Hand little time to track down the house in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills.

He arrived wearing black from glove to boot, blending into the shadows as he moved. He was more than ready to get the assignment under way, and he had in his kill kit one additional item specific to the job.

A hatchet.

Luther did not ring the doorbell. He picked the lock and slipped inside, and within seconds he had sped up the stairs and entered the hallway. Everything was as his instructions had said: the number of steps, the layout of the building. The office of Lee Lin Tan was two doors to the left at the top of the stairs, but even before he reached it, a man appeared in the doorway before him. He had been heard.

Luther recognised the man from his driver’s licence photo. ‘Lee Lin Tan,’ Luther said.

There was recognition.

‘Are you Lee Lin Tan?’ Luther demanded again. He wanted an answer.

There was a weak nod.

Luther gripped the hatchet and swung, not quite taking Lee’s head straight off in the first blow. A spray of blood spread out across the doorway behind him, pooling and beginning to run along the paint. Lee gripped his neck as he went down, blood spilling through his fingers. It had been an effective first blow.

Good.

Luther stood over Lee Lin Tan as the man crawled pathetically along the hallway carpet, perhaps trying for the stairs and the front door, choking and gurgling on his own blood. Incredibly, he managed to lift himself up to a half-standing position against the wall, shaking with shock.

Luther swung again, this time precisely.

He took off the man’s left arm at the shoulder joint, and the dismembered arm fell to the carpet with a sickly thump. Lee’s eyes lost focus and he fell back against the corridor wall, leaving a bloody handprint and a downward streak across the wall. His head fell forwards and his last breath was expelled from his body with one final gurgle.

There was a scream.

Luther spun around in the direction of the noise, ready. He had been warned that Mrs Tan might be present.

A woman burst into the hallway. She had a shotgun in her hands and raised it unsteadily, her awkward grip on the trigger revealing her lack
of experience with the weapon. Her dark eyes drifted to the sight of her husband in bloody pieces in the hallway, and she let out an even more high-pitched scream, dropping the gun to her side, the butt slipping and hitting the carpet. Luther moved towards her and she retreated in a panicked run to the office, a ramshackle room with a desk and shelves, and a threadbare couch that looked like it had been doubling as someone’s bed. She tried to close the door before he reached it, and failed, so she backed herself into a corner by an open drawer, whimpering and crying hysterically.

She tried to hide her face under the overhang of the heavy open wooden drawer.

Luther strode forwards, pulled the drawer straight out of the cabinet and tossed it behind him with a crash, then grabbed the woman by the hair in one hand and raised her to her feet. He swung the hatchet. It took her head clean off, and her body dropped to the floor underneath it, leaving the head dangling in his hand, her tangled hair like Medusa and her serpents.

Luther dropped the head next to her body and looked around.

He squinted. The drawer he had flung across the room had been full of passports—Filipino, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian. The passports and documents were spread all around the room.

Voices.

More witnesses.

Luther left the office and made his way down the hall with the crimson-soaked hatchet in his hand, ready for a methodical search for witnesses if necessary. There were voices beyond one of the doors.

He flung it open.

Inside were women—at least a dozen of them, some wearing silk slips, some in jeans and bra tops. They huddled in fear at the sight of him filling their doorway holding the dripping hatchet. A few of the women mumbled in unfamiliar languages through hot tears, but not one of them screamed. They were too terrified.

Witnesses. A dozen of them.

He noticed there were bars on the window. The beds were few, but it was clear they had all been living together in that wretched room.

Luther stepped back into the hallway and closed the door again. As soon as he did, the voices began again, the low and quivering tones of frightened women who did not know what was going on. Still, no one screamed.

He considered his options.

These women were no threat to his client. They would not talk. And even if they did have anything to say about a man in black with a balaclava and a hatchet, they would be deported before they testified.

Luther walked back along the corridor to the office, picked up several of the passports and
returned to the door. He opened the bedroom door and left the passports in a pile.

He stepped over the body of Lee Lin Tan on the way out, and left the Surry Hills house with the front door wide open.

‘I never did ask…what’s your instrument?’

The city centre was only about fifteen minutes from the Elwood apartment, and the trip seemed to go by too quickly for Mak, who was enjoying the former coffin-maker’s intriguing company. They had driven most of the way caught up in small talk about Bogey’s experiences in Drayson’s band.

‘Guitar,’ Bogey replied, his eyes on the road.

My God, he is Elvis
, Mak thought. She smiled mischievously, and he turned in her direction in time to catch her expression.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing.’

The streets were quiet as they cruised through the central business district of Melbourne, a concrete jungle of metal and glass where the buildings were tall and modern, and the streets were nearly empty at this late hour. The suits that crowded the footpaths during the weekdays had dispersed to their various suburbs to rest in
closets for the weekend, starched and pressed for their Monday meetings.

‘No, really,’ Bogey said. ‘What is it? What’s that look?’

Mak couldn’t help it. She kept grinning. ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,’ she ventured, ‘but when I first saw you I figured you as an Elvis man. I should have guessed that you played guitar. I can just picture you on stage with a guitar strap around your neck, swivelling your pelvis.’

Bogey huffed a little laugh. Thankfully he didn’t seem offended by the comparison. ‘You take me as an Elvis man, do you?’

She nodded. ‘Well, they do say Elvis is king.’

‘Elvis
is
king,’ he agreed. ‘Do you imagine me in one of those white satin jumpsuits with the big collar?’

‘Oh, no, no.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m thinking of his black-suit-and-skinny-tie phase. Young Elvis,’ she assured him.

‘But I can’t sing. I listen more to the Sex Pistols, Spiderbait or The White Stripes.’

‘If Elvis were alive I’m sure he would be listening to The White Stripes, too,’ Mak said.

He pulled up at a red light. ‘You’re in Melbourne for a job?’ he asked, and turned to her while he waited for the light to change. He had that pleasing face, but she could see his punk influence too. He might be more Sex Pistols than ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, but she still thought he looked like an Elvis man. Maybe a punk Elvis?

She looked away. ‘Um…yeah, I’m working, but visiting Loulou mostly,’ she answered, wanting to evade the details of her work. ‘We’re good friends. Pretty inseparable most of the time. I moved to Australia only a year or so ago and I still don’t know that many people,’ she admitted. She hoped her comment didn’t make her sound lonely. ‘Still, I’ve been here longer than in most cities I’ve lived in.’

Bogey nodded in response, then turned right down a main street and drove a few blocks. They passed the Supreme Court and the Magistrates’ Courts. ‘It sounds like you’ve travelled a lot.’

‘Yeah,’ Mak agreed. ‘I’ve become so used to it over the years that I don’t even notice any more. The other day I realised that since I have been an adult I had never actually lived in any country for longer than twelve months. This has literally been my longest stay anywhere.’ Mak realised she was telling him her life history for some reason, and thought she really should switch the subject. ‘So how did you get a name like Bogey? Is that Bogey as in an evil or mischievous spirit, or the number of strokes a player is likely to need to finish a golf hole?’

He glanced at her with a raised a eyebrow, and Mak recalled, too late, that not everyone liked to read the dictionary for kicks.

‘It’s no golf reference. It’s because my name is Humphrey. Humphrey Mortimer.’ He said the name quietly, and rather quickly, she thought.

‘Ah, Humphrey. Actually, Humphrey Mortimer is not such a bad name,’ she said, trying to reassure him. ‘It couldn’t be any worse than mine, surely—“Makedde Vanderwall” is a mouthful! Humphrey suited Mr Bogart just fine. You know, my
opa
looked exactly like Humphrey Bogart. In all my old black-and-white photos of him, he’s the spitting image…’

‘Yeah?’

They had reached Lonsdale Street.

Well, that’s it.

Mak looked out the window at the grand neon signage of Thunderball Gentlemen’s Club. The entrance to the club opened brazenly and incongruously onto a street almost entirely inhabited by barristers’ chambers, just as Maroon had said. Both the Magistrates’ and Supreme courts were a stone’s throw up the road. It seemed an odd location for a club of its kind. She could guess that more than a couple of the Melbourne legal fraternity would be on a first-name basis with the staff inside. Perhaps that had come in handy from time to time for the owner.

‘Well, um…I’ll get out here. Thanks for the lift,’ she said, regretting the end of their little journey together.

Bogey pulled the car into one of the available spots on the street and shut off the engine. Mak opened her door, panicking inside.
Why is the engine off? What is he doing?

‘You’re going into the club, right?’ he asked her.

Mak nodded, not looking in his direction. She gathered her purse as casually as she could and turned to say goodbye. When she looked at him their eyes locked again like they had in Drayson’s apartment, only this time she could see that he was concerned.

He broke their gaze and looked down at the steering wheel. ‘It worries me a bit that you are going in there alone.’

Mak felt a rush of relief that his turning off the car had to do with her getting a lecture on safety, and not a pressured sexual proposition of any kind—not that this guy seemed the type. She laughed. Any hormonally influenced thoughts had no doubt been entirely in
her
head.

‘I’ve been a lot of places,’ Mak said. ‘A strip joint doesn’t worry me, honestly.’

A stranger like this could not guess what she had gone through in her life. Walking into a men’s club would surely be the least of her horrors.

‘I am an investigator. This sort of thing is what I do, and I do it alone.’

Well, that was embellishing it a bit—she was only a fledgling PI and she had never actually been into a proper strip club before, let alone on her own. But he didn’t need to know that. His being worried was silly, regardless.

‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to wait outside with the car in case you have some trouble.’

Mak didn’t have a response ready: she had not seen this coming. ‘You want to wait outside until I’m done?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You would do that?’

‘I’ll be parked right here,’ Bogey insisted.

‘No, no…that’s crazy. I’ll be a while, and you have your project to start on tomorrow—the staining you haven’t started yet, remember?’

‘I know.’ But he seemed to be immovable in his desire to see that she was safe. ‘I’m just not comfortable leaving you in this area when you are alone and you have no car.’

Mak sat glued to the passenger seat, the door open and one foot on the kerb, considering his words. She was at an impasse. She hadn’t planned on letting anyone but Marian Wendell in on her little mission. And she certainly didn’t need a babysitter, day or night, café or strip bar. If she didn’t like Bogey, she would have blown him off already, but he seemed sincere. And perhaps he could be helpful? A young woman in a gentlemen’s club alone might become a target for the other patrons, or even a threat to some of the girls working there. Having a man with her might help her to blend in.

‘Well,’ she said, somewhat reluctantly. ‘I don’t need a babysitter. I want you to know that. But, if you’re going to insist on waiting here anyway, you might as well come in for a drink.’

She ignored the voice in her head that told
her she might also be asking him inside for the wrong reasons.

Despite living much of her life near Vancouver, a city with one of the most thriving strip scenes in North America, Makedde Vanderwall had little experience with gentlemen’s clubs. She’d partied in some gay clubs in New York and been subjected to the usual buffed-up male strippers in requisite construction-worker costume, swinging their hammers, so to speak, and she’d seen half-naked burlesque performers at some extravagant parties. But despite the passing fad of going to strip joints en masse with the girls, a proper gentlemen’s club was something Mak had only seen in movies. She certainly would not have imagined that the first time she found herself purposefully walking into a ‘girlie bar’, she would be doing it in Australia, as a private investigator, flanked by a coffin-maker she’d only met that night, and there to try to solve a complete stranger’s murder.

Life is strange…

Mak approached the front door of Thunderball with her punk Elvis next to her, his hands in his pockets. An entirely expressionless security guard in a dark suit stood at the front door of the club and watched their approach. ‘Good evening,’ he mumbled. He must have been satisfied with
the look of them, because without another word he pushed aside a heavy wooden door so they could enter.

The lighting was low inside, and Mak could hear pulsing music from upstairs. Just inside the door was a coat-check area with a cashier.

‘Forty dollars each,’ the woman at the register said with an insincere smile.

Bogey automatically dug into his jeans to get his wallet, but Mak stopped him with a firm hand. She paid up with a couple of fifties, waited for a receipt, and soon they ascended a staircase together into the club, where the music grew louder, and the light grew dimmer.

‘This is on my client’s tab,’ Mak told him in a loud whisper so she could be heard over the music.

‘Oh, okay,’ he said.

At the top of the stairs the club opened up into a sprawling space of several bars and performance areas in different sections. Directly in front of them was a billiard table where a group of men were playing a game with scantily clad girls draped over them, giggling and posing as if they were trapped in the foreplay scenes of a bad porn film—‘
Ooooh, can I help you with your stick?
’ Beyond the divider of some gold-painted Roman pillars there was a larger room with a number of round bar tables and a big stage with the expected pole, presently unoccupied. To the right the club opened up even further, with a
cocktail bar and several smaller stages where girls in bikinis, frilly underwear and skin-tight lycra micro-dresses swayed and arched for the enjoyment of watching men. A girl performing in hotpants bent straight over and flashed a good part of a fully waxed crotch.

Mak blinked.

It’s like something in the movies
, Mak thought, only none of the dancers were fully nude. For the moment, anyway. She had expected to see an orgy of naked flesh sliding up and down greased poles, vaginas unleashed in all directions as men bayed and howled like dogs. She was mildly relieved at the reality.

‘Let’s get a drink,’ she suggested to Bogey, and led him to the right. They sidled up to one of the main bars and took position on a couple of stools. Mak swivelled around to face him. ‘What do you want?’ she offered.

‘What are you having?’

It didn’t look like the sort of place that would do a satisfying mojito.

‘Vodka, lime and soda,’ she said.

Bogey flagged down some service while Mak observed the establishment from her barstool vantage point. There were women everywhere, almost outnumbering the men, but Mak was quite possibly the only female there who wasn’t working at the place. A few patrons looked in Mak’s direction and appraised her openly before refocusing their attention on the undulating
performers. Already she was starting to think that having Bogey with her was of some genuine value. He was helping her to blend in, and was quite possibly preventing her from being propositioned as well. She was certain that she could manage fine without him, but clearly his presence was going to make her job easier.

An impossibly large-breasted, bleached blonde bartender appeared, drawing Mak’s eyes to the bar once again. She wore an over-strained gingham tie top that could have been made from a cocktail napkin, and looked to be a few days out of high school.

‘What can I getcha?’ the bartender asked, smiling brightly with a full set of braces.

Oh dear.

Bogey smoothly gave the scantily clad young woman Mak’s order of vodka, lime and soda, and asked for a bottle of the Japanese beer Asahi for himself. They didn’t have it. ‘Heineken?’ They didn’t have that one either. ‘A bottle of Crown?’ he asked. She plonked one on the bar and popped the top. Bogey didn’t touch it, evidently waiting for Mak to get her drink before he started his beer. If he had ogled the girl’s breasts while he ordered, Mak somehow hadn’t noticed it. And she
had
been watching.

Impressive.

Mak had to admit that Bogey wasn’t really eyeballing the visions of fake-tanned flesh surrounding them, much less howling for them to
‘take it all off’. And the women really
were
surrounding them—on the many performance stages, walking past slowly in lingerie, leaning wantonly on pillars in mesh slips and pouring beers wearing improbable tops. It was a visual feast of toned flesh and Worst Dressed List–worthy outfits such as Mak had never seen. Bogey was probably being polite for Mak’s sake. His discipline might change after a few beers, she guessed.

Bending over the bar and with breasts jiggling, the bartender presented Mak’s drink and Bogey paid for it before Mak could stop him.

‘You remember what I said about the client?’ Mak reminded him.

‘Your tab covers drinks?’

‘Everything,’ she replied, and took a sip through her straw.

It wasn’t the best drink she’d ever tasted. They had some good vodkas displayed along the bar, but she was guessing that none of those had been used to make her drink.

‘It must be nice that you can drink on the job and get paid for it,’ Bogey commented.

‘That’s one of the perks of being a
private
detective and not a public one,’ Mak explained. ‘The cops have so much regulation. Rank. Superiors. Inspectors watching their every move. Every step they make has to be taken thinking that it might be investigated in court and ripped to pieces by a defence barrister. Whereas with me…well, so long as I don’t break the law too badly, I
can do just about anything to get the job done. And there’s no law against drinking on the job, either. In fact, there’s a rather illustrious history of partnership between investigators and their booze.’