Honorable Assassin (17 page)

He ran back through the trees in the
semi-darkness and jumped back into the Land Rover. A kilometer down
the road he found access and sailed back toward Brisbane and then
west from there. He spent the last few hours of the night in his
room, in Orange, cleaning his guns and smoking too much.

The constables had a wonderful time with the
scene. Homicide detectives from Brisbane were there all night. The
bodies were identified, tagged, bagged and shipped. The reporters
were not invited to the party but they were there anyway. The
morning edition read “Vigilante Sniper Kills Five North of
Brisbane”.

The truck was hauled away once the crime
scene investigators were done with it and it was unloaded at the
impound yard. The cases of uncut stones were valuable but not worth
a sniper attack. The blankets were still in good shape but the
Indian artifacts had suffered a bit from the shrapnel and the
cocaine that was hidden inside them was spilling out.

The news reported that there was a drug war
going on. They tried to downplay it and made sure they specified
that it was not in Sydney. The City Council and Lord Mayor of
Sydney were foaming at the mouths. There was no possible way they
could have a drug war erupting just as the Summer Olympics were
about to start. Everyone from the Superintendent to the
Commissioner would be released from service if they did not squash
this “foolishness.” They had one month to track down the
perpetrators and either capture or kill them. There would be no
excuses and no reprieve.

The police force went on a rampage. They
raided the coke bars, they arrested everybody who was even
suspected of dealing drugs. They rounded up every heroin addict on
the streets and threw them in jail. They arrested the homeless, the
drunken, the pot smokers and the unlicensed pimps. In short, it
became dangerous for an Australian citizen to walk the streets
after dark. The tourists were left alone if they could prove they
had entered the country recently but the residents of the city were
put on alert. If they were disruptive in the slightest way they
would suffer ninety days in jail. Nothing was going to spoil
Sydney’s shining moment. The jails were bursting with inmates and
the city began to ship them out to work farms, wholesale.

The visions the Troy Brothers had of vast
revenues pouring in from the drug trade at the games disappeared.
It was not so much the monetary damage that the affair caused as it
was the long-term damage. Supply routes were disrupted and older,
respected employees were being imprisoned. The police that had
looked the other way so often were now forced to exercise their
judicial authority. The customer base was drastically decreased as
it was increasingly arrested. The owners of the coke bars were
indicted and the extremely lucrative outlets were shut down.
Marijuana growing facilities that had been overlooked were raided
and the crops burned.

It was not just the lower level distribution
chain that suffered either. Drug sniffing dogs were brought in to
truck stops and distribution terminals. The sensitive noses of
these dogs cost the Troys more than any Irishman could have alone.
It got so bad that the truck drivers who had been smuggling illicit
loads for years started refusing the jobs. Some of them insisted on
taking vacations and some of them quit. Even legal commodities were
becoming harder and harder to get transport for.

Terry spent the next couple of weeks between
Orange and Molong, never heading toward Sydney. He had never given
a thought to the carnage he would cause within the underworld
network until it began to happen. Once the dragnet began, he sat
back and laughed. He and Ginger had many good conversations about
how to cause something to happen without doing it yourself.

Terry refused to answer his cell phone when
Victor Wellington called and did not return his calls. He made the
mistake of answering it when Henry Cuthbert called.

“Tommy, where have you been?”

“Uh, Henry. I, uh, I left the city for a
little while. Things are so bloody hot in Sydney I thought I’d just
lay low for a while.”

“No laying low. I’ve got a job for you.”

“But, Christ Almighty, there’s somebody out
there killing drivers. The Road Patrol is on us like ticks on a
dingo and I think it’s a bad move.”

“Look here, you little shit! What you think
is of no concern to me. If you don’t get your ass down to Melbourne
to pick up this load, I’ll make sure you never work again. I’ll get
five big wogs to exercise your asshole ‘til you can never walk
again. Am I making myself clear?”

“Uh, yes, uh I guess that’s clear.”

“You call me when you get to Melbourne. I’ll
make this one worth your while but if you ever try to buck me
again, I’ll have you killed or worse. Get going, now, and call me
when you get there.”

“This looks promising, Chief Inspector
Rahim.”

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“The ballistics on the rifle shells we
pulled from two of those men match the rifle used in the Denman
Massacre.”

“Sergeant Farrel, I wish you wouldn’t call
it that. It sounds like we have wholesale slaughters here on a
regular basis.”

“Sorry, Inspector. The Denman case is in a
Sydney suburb, Annandale, I think. Same sort of MO. Shot the drug
dealers from a distance. None of them left alive. Finished them off
with a bullet to the head. Now in Sydney, that was done with a .32.
Up here that was done with a .22 caliber pistol, the pistol was
left on the scene. The killer used hollow points, so we don’t get a
lot of ballistic evidence, but we don’t need it. He left the gun
there.”

“What else did it tell us?”

“Nothing much. Serial number is gone, ground
off. No prints on the gun. No unexplained prints in what is left of
the truck. Get this, this guy is prepared. Like a mechanic, a tool
for every job. He shot the radiator with .22 long rifle slugs. That
stopped the truck. He shot the men we found behind the truck with
military grade .308 slugs. He blew up the cab of the truck with
World War Two ordnance, American pineapples. Then he went in the
truck and shot each of the men in the head with hollow point .22
shells, walks behind the truck and does the same for the three men
in the back, and leaves that gun there.”

“Did he need to do that?”

“They were all dead before that point.”

“So, he’s thorough and efficient as well as
being a dead shot. Did he take any other guns with him?”

“I don’t think so. Each of the men was found
with a weapon, even the driver.”

“Then that gun is supposed to tell us
something. I want it examined with a fine-toothed comb. Now, what
about the vehicle?”

“We got plaster casts of the tire marks,
Goodyears, aftermarket. They sell them anywhere. The wheelbase
indicates it’s probably a Land Rover. We got a couple of good casts
of the killer’s boots. He was wearing rubber boots. Oh, I got an
aerial view of this.” Sergeant Farrel pulled out a one meter by
half meter overhead shot of the area. “Here is the truck, with the
car right behind it. This wooded area is where we found the
foxhole. There was no brass left at the scene, no gum wrappers, no
cigarette butts, no piss stains on the trees. He gave us
nothing.”

“Wrong. He gave us everything, we just don’t
know how to look at it to see what it really is. I want every tire
store in the State questioned. I want to find out who is driving a
Land Rover with this kind of Goodyears on it. Get me a list.”

“Inspector?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think this is the same bloke who
blew up that fish truck full of guns?”

“I’m going to reserve my judgment until all
the evidence is in.”

Two days later a witness came forth. She was
a college student who was understandably nervous about the whole
affair. She had been driving up to the truck as it exploded. She
hit her brakes and slid to a stop by the side of the road. She had
seen a tall man with a rag tied around his face, a fishing vest and
a fly fisherman’s cap on, come around the back of the truck and
shoot three times. Then he had gone into the woods. At that point
the young lady gave her car all it had and got the hell out of
there.

The police grilled their witness for a
couple of hours but she could give them no more than she had. The
police concentrated on finding anyone who had been seen wearing fly
fisherman’s gear that day but there were no leads. Nobody had seen
such a man. The witness insisted that there was no way she could
identify the man. She had not seen his face and did not know the
color of his eyes or hair.

The police were looking for a fisherman. The
Troy Brothers were looking for an Irishman.

The newspapers released the composite sketch
that their witness had pulled from her memory. It could have been a
picture of Jack the Ripper for all the good it did. The vest and
hat had come from an earlier time and there was no tracing them.
The mistake the police had made was mentioning the rubber boots.
Terry burned them in the wood stove, making sure there was nothing
left. He swapped the Land Rover for the van and stashed the Rover
away in a barn. He left it on jack stands and swapped the Goodyears
out for a set of Coopers on new Cragar steel rims.

When he got cajoled into making a run from
Melbourne he stayed on the straight and narrow: no drinking, no
drugs, no women, no speeding. He took the back roads and drove
carefully. Starting out at three in the morning let him arrive
about three in the afternoon. He was surprised by the bonus he
received and did not even know what he was carrying. He didn’t
care. If he was to continue doing what he was doing he would need
to be in Henry Cuthbert’s good graces. Victor Wellington was
aggravated at him for not calling in, but he put it off by telling
him he got no service outside the city. Victor had trouble like
that as well so he let it slide but there was something in his eyes
that Terry did not like. He also did not like the fact that his
associates had seen the van. It would be useless after that day.
The van mysteriously caught on fire that night and Terry authorized
the compensation check for Thompson Barber a week later. Needless
to say his insurance rates didn’t go up.

~~~

Chapter Eight: The Specialist

“Good morning, Brother.”

“Good morning, Abel. Are we still going to
the warehouse this morning?”

“Unless there is a change in plan.”

“No, no change in plan. The flight will
arrive at 9:14. That means we will be waiting for about an hour
before the specialist gets there.”

“Abel, I know I agreed to this yesterday but
I’m still unsure about it. Bringing in new people is always a risk
and this one isn’t even from the country. How is he supposed to
find what we can’t, if he doesn’t even know the lay of the
land?”

“Relax, Adam. You know the procedure and
this one comes very highly recommended. Royal Scots Dragoons,
action in the Middle East, ruthless and deadly. They say he’s worth
every penny. If he does not produce, we do not pay. The down
payment is negligible. Let’s face it, if he can get rid of the
Irishman, he’ll be worth every penny and more and if he can’t, then
we don’t pay. He goes by different names but I have it on good
authority that his given name is Gordon MacMaster.”

The limousine crawled through town and out
to a warehouse on Elizabeth Street in the Lakemba district. An
inside loading dock served as a parking spot for the limo and the
office was bulletproof. The phone lines were swept for bugs on a
regular basis and a log kept of the activity. There was a computer
with internet access in the office but neither of the brothers had
bothered learning how to use it. They paid subordinates to do that
sort of thing.

Inside, the warehouse was relatively secure.
The employees went through a different kind of pre-employment
screening than most companies. It was important they were able to
forget things very easily.

Abel laid out the figures the accountant had
cooked up for him. The numbers inflated the sales and revenue of a
number of concerns to account for the influx of dirty money. Of
course, with the increase in revenue, one must have an increase in
output as well. To increase sales one must increase expenditure and
delivery. That was where things could get treacherous in the
laundry chain.

If a company wants to do business it needs
to make sure the books look right. Raw materials in, must equal
finished goods out, to a certain extent. The warehouse on Elizabeth
Street held a lot of finished goods that had been purchased, paid
for, and reported as sold. Much of this material could not have
been sold: squirt guns with no cap for the fill hole, glow in the
dark hula hoops, action figures from movies that bombed at the box
office, plastic cactuses and stuffed two-headed sheep. They sold a
truckload of singing plastic fish to themselves at least once a
year. The cost for these things was negligible though they paid
full price on the books.

Adam often groused about what he thought was
an overly complicated system but Abel was in charge of the figures
and insisted that it had worked thus far, why would it require a
change? Buying their own merchandise from themselves with drug
money had made them very rich and respectable in the legitimate
businesses arena. From time to time the goods were shipped overseas
and sold again under a new set of production numbers and the
companies recouped most of their investment cleanly. At least on
the books. The raw materials were sold to themselves again and
their partners in crime got their cut. All their partners had to do
was inflate their production and shipping numbers to match the
repeat deliveries and make sure they pay taxes on it. The taxes
were, after all, what the government was really concerned about and
with this system, they got their cut too.