Honorable Assassin (15 page)

“We’ve had this conversation.”

“Well then, we need to look some other way.
It’s not worth a row with you, and I need you for this. Let’s drive
off.”

“All right. We’re being watched now. They
marked us. We need to try a different club. Let’s try something off
a ways.”

They knew Liverpool would be a wash as soon
as they saw Cowpasture Road. They got a laugh from it and headed
downtown to the Annandale area instead. This was a hotbed of
activity. Scantily clad women and well-dressed men partook of a
variety of illegal substances openly. The clubs were hopping.

The ruse was simple. Terry pretended to be
very drunk. He saw the man with the diamond rings, the one people
deferred to. He stumbled into the man on the way to the bathroom
and dropped a very large bag of cocaine on the floor as he did. The
man said nothing, just pocketed his incredible good fortune. It
worked smoothly and Terry stumbled out the door unidentified and
unnoticed. There was no need to make friends and no reason to
blend.

The heavily stoned victim did not notice
that he was followed when he left the club 20 minutes later. He
went home to secure his prize. When he woke in the morning, he did
not see the fire safe, which had been cut through the back, sitting
in his back yard.

Mark Valentine had been at Victor’s the
night before. He found a message on his answering machine when he
arrived home. It told him that “the Irishman” had stolen Demetrius’
“item” and sold it to the man at this address. Mark made some calls
and arranged to have a crew meet him in the morning.

Four men got out of the 1987 Lincoln Town
Car in front of the house on Denman Avenue. It was very early in
the morning and three of the four men were hung over to some
degree. The fourth man did not drink; he got his pleasure from less
socially acceptable means.

Two men went to the front door and two moved
to the back. The doorbell worked and was quite loud, bringing to
owner of the house to the front door. The two men in front pushed
their way in and knocked the owner to the floor. The back door was
opened and the two men from the back yard pointed out, as they
entered, that there was a safe in the back yard with a hole cut in
the back.

The man who was not hung over was then
employed in his favorite form of recreation: torture and
mutilation.

Two blocks down the street Terry Kingston
wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was not the temperature that
caused him to perspire. He had seen the men enter the house and he
had developed a pain in his stomach. He had not considered that
there might be innocent victims in the house that would suffer the
wrath of Mark Valentine. The intended victim had been alone in the
club. It was not until after he returned to his home that the
question of collateral damage had reared its ugly head. He might
well have a wife and children in there that would not survive the
interrogation.

It was too late to change the plan now, and
it was too late to walk away. The dice had been rolled.

Inside, the victim was already in horrible
shape. Valentine had instructed his mechanic to “soften him up” and
that man had gone to work ruthlessly. The other three were in the
kitchen having breakfast. There was nobody else in the house. They
could not have known but their target’s wife had taken the children
and left three months earlier because of domestic violence
issues.

Mark Valentine pulled his gloves back on
after breakfast, and instructed a man to clean all the prints up.
The owner of the house looked like he had been softened up the way
a cube steak is softened up. He was babbling uncontrollably,
pleading for his life. The story that he stuck to until the bitter
end, was that he had picked up what someone else had dropped. He
had not known the man and did not know where the safe came from. He
disavowed all knowledge of “The Irishman.” Of course, his breakfast
guests did not believe him. Once they determined they could not get
the correct information from him, he became a liability and his
throat was cut. He bled to death in his own living room, secured to
a chair with baling wire.

Terry’s hands were sweating as he saw the
door begin to open. He was sitting on a wooden box between the
front seats of the van. It gave him the correct height to rest the
barrel of the Mauser on the lip of the window. The SP66 fired a
.308 round, held one in the chamber and three in the magazine. The
scope had already been sighted in. The van was parked close to the
corner with clear access right across the front lawn of the corner
house.

Terry wiped his right hand on his denim work
pants. There was a ringing in his ears and he worked his jaw to
equalize the pressure. Unbidden the old tune came into his head.
“Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree.” The men had reached the
street. “Merry, merry king of the bush is he.” The Mauser barked
and one man dropped. “Rack, rack, sight. Laugh.” The Mauser barked
again and second man dropped as those remaining headed for cover
behind the Lincoln. “Laugh kookaburra, laugh kookaburra, gay your
life must be.” The third shell smashed through the Lincoln’s
radiator, destroyed the cooling fan and cracked the water pump.

Terry set the rifle in the back of the van
and started the engine. The two remaining gangsters had opened fire
with their pistols but they did not know what they were shooting at
so the neighbor’s automobiles suffered some broken glass and bullet
holes, but the van was not struck. Looking over the rim of the
window, Terry saw his uncle coming up behind the two men, with a
shotgun. One of them turned around but never got off a shot. Ginger
tore him in half with buckshot and then shot Mark Valentine. He had
tried to shoot Valentine in the arm and leave the man alive but the
buckshot was too efficient at that range. The man was dead before
he hit the ground.

As Terry drove up to the carnage he saw his
uncle pull a .32 revolver and systematically shoot each corpse in
the head. It was a vision he never forgot. It was not so much the
fact that he did it; it was the cold and machinelike efficiency
with which he did it.

Ginger got in the van and the two drove off
without a word. Ginger was reloading his pistol and Terry was
humming the kookaburra song. The petrol tank was full and the pair
did not need to stop until they got to Orange where they swapped
out the van for the Holden and went to breakfast at a local diner.
In the diner they acted as normal as could be possible. After
breakfast they sat on a railing by the road and smoked. Terry was
curious how his uncle could be so calm.

“It’s not that I’m calm. I just look calm.
Most of what you see is what you want to see. You look calm as a
clam and that’s what you want everyone else to see.”

“I’m shaking inside, like I had an electric
wire running through my chest and somebody is turning on the power
from time to time.”

“You’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. What do you
say we get a dog? You know, a guard dog? Today.”

“Yep. That’s a good idea. A puppy, so we can
train it?”

“No. We go to the pound and get the meanest,
nastiest, snarling piece of junkyard monster in the place. Muzzle
him and take him home with us. I don’t care if he hates me, as long
as he hates everybody else as well.”

Terry stopped in at the office for a few
minutes, just to check on things and access the news. The police
were counting the slaughter on Denman Avenue as a drug deal gone
wrong. They had no suspects.

The pound at Orange did not have what they
were looking for, and Clergate did not have a pound but they found
what they needed in Mullion Creek. Mullion Creek had a lot of
horses, and dogs that chased horses were usually shot on sight.
This dog actually liked horses, however, it hated people. It had
been dropped off by someone, or had escaped and migrated to this
area. When Ginger asked about a dog pound he was told there was
none, but if he could capture the mastiff running around with the
horses, he could have it. They would have shot the dog if it chased
the horses but it did not. It actually seemed to think its job was
to guard the horses. It was half the size of a horse anyway. The
rancher would have kept it but for the fact that it wouldn’t allow
anyone near the herd.

The capture was not difficult but
restraining the animal was. It weighed almost two hundred pounds
and when roped it hauled two grown men around as if it was trained
to pull a trailer. It took half the day and five pounds of beef to
calm the animal down. Terry immediately named the dog Hercules and
spent a couple of hours bonding with it. He needed to punch it in
the head half a dozen times to get its attention and half a dozen
more to get its respect. Later he complained that he had almost
broken his hand bonding with the creature.

Hercules turned out to be not only massive
but intelligent as well. After a couple of days he became the
guardian of the farm. He accepted Jerry Cuthbert Junior without
question since the younger man spent so much time on the farm. He
was not fond of Jerry Senior, but begrudgingly allowed him access.
Anyone else pulling in the driveway would be best advised to remain
in their vehicle until they had been cleared. He was no sheep dog
in that he would not herd them. He did, however, protect them.
Ginger took a shine to the massive beast and it fell in love with
him the way Pincher never had.

~~~

Chapter Seven: Twist the Knife

Demetrius Marlowe had managed to come up
with the money he owed his underworld associates by selling stock
holdings and some property he owned. The fact that his immediate
contacts had been killed did not relieve him of the debt. He was
left out of the business after that and was immensely relieved. It
was not long after that he hired a manager to run his businesses
and he moved to New Zealand.

The Troy Brothers offered a very large
bounty on the head of “The Irishman.” It yielded no verifiable
results since no one had heard of this phantom gangster.

The Kingston Agency continued to be run
efficiently and effectively. Its owner would appear from time to
time to use the computers and check the books but he seldom had any
issues with the staff. His employees had been in their positions so
long that some of them were nearing retirement age.

In the year 2000, just after the entire
world breathed a collective sigh of relief that the “Y2K” problem
had not created global anarchy, the Irishman problem emerged
again.

Terry kept his room in Orange as his primary
residence. He also rented an apartment on Henley Road in the
Homebush area of Sydney under the name Thompson Barber. He paid six
months in advance so there was no question or contact from the
landlord. The Homebush area is just south of the railroad tracks
and Henley road is only two and a half blocks from Centenary Drive,
which crosses the tracks. Just over the tracks, Centenary Drive
merges with Route 4 giving quick and easy access to the outer loop
of expressways. Homebush is home to the workers in the industrial
area on the other side of the tracks as well; middle-class factory
workers, hard drinking but honest and dependable. Most of all, they
minded their own business. For anyone who asked, Terry worked a
third shift job in Auburn: just far enough away so nobody would
expect to recognize him, just near enough to allay suspicions about
the commute, night shift so he could go about his business during
underworld business hours.

Under the nickname Tommy, Terry infiltrated
the lower echelon of the drug world. He bought drugs and used drugs
and sold occasionally. He transported drugs up and down the coast
and got a good reputation as a wheelman and a cool head under fire.
And he waited.

Once the drug addicts trusted him, as much
as a drug addict can trust anyone in the seedy world of rip-offs
and judicial sting operations, Terry began to make small moves. He
already understood the motivations but was shocked at the amount of
money there was to be made. He was not in it for the money,
although he did make some along the way, he was there for real
opportunity. It was not long in coming.

One of the things Terry learned from the
first “Irishman” incident was that killing mob members did little,
but upset the hornet’s nest. Within a day Mark Valentine and Bruno
had been replaced. Valentine’s spot was taken by Henry Cuthbert and
Bruno was replaced by Victor Wellington. The only way to really
upset the apple cart was to hit them in the pocket.

The 1968 Holden Monaro was a great way to
start conversations. It could hold its own against the newer
vehicles and was an endless source of conversation. Terry drove it
when and where it would be seen but he did not rely on it for
business. It was, after all, over 30 years old and garnered too
much notice on the street. Terry kept it in a rented garage space
and drove a Land Rover for business. It had more cargo space and,
while it was not generally an urban vehicle, there were a
sufficient number of them around that his did not evoke
comment.

In June of 2000 Terry Kingston managed to
wrangle an introduction to Victor Wellington. Victor was a bit of
an odd duck. He dealt drugs but did not partake in them. He drank
to excess but only on Saturdays. He visited the ladies of the night
but only liked oriental women. He was short for an enforcer but
nobody to underestimate. He carried an expandable baton with a lead
ball on the end and was highly proficient with it. He also carried
a pistol but was not known to pull it out except in the most dire
of circumstances; he preferred the baton.

Victor agreed to meet “Tommy” because he had
heard good things about his driving abilities and he was in need of
several good wheelmen. The job was not drugs, this time, but guns.
Terry told Victor he had no problem with that and Victor said they
might be in touch.