Hard Yards Read online

  About Hard Yards

  It’s September 2000, and the Olympic Games are about to descend on Sydney. The city is at fever pitch, but Barrett Pike, private investigator, couldn’t care less.

  The excitement in Barrett’s life comes via his part-time squeeze, the glamorous and successful Andrea Fox-Fearnor, and the after-dark activities of Sydney’s notorious criminals – in particular, the sartorial stand-over man, Ernesto ‘Hollywood Jack’ Tucci.

  But then a violent incident at a restaurant in which Barrett’s bull-at-the-gate treatment of an infamous piece of pond scum is witnessed results in an offer even Barrett can’t refuse – $150,000 to bodyguard Titus ‘Bunny’ Delfranco, the fastest man in the world. Sounds like easy money, but the sprinter has a million-dollar tag on his head, and an American ex-marine turned bounty hunter, Edward Hickey, is going to have Bunny running for his life. And Barrett, together with his main man, the formidable Geoff O’Mara is going to have his work cut out staying in the game – and staying alive.

  Add to this mix a shadowy team of car-bombers, an exotic beauty with gangland connections and a doomsday sect hell bent on revenge, and the result is a complex, nightmarish thriller that pushes the genre about as far as it can go this side of the apocalypse.

  Contents

  About Hard Yards

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  Epilogue

  About JR Carroll

  Also by JR Carroll

  Copyright

  1

  South-east of Denver, Colorado – July, 1999

  Aaron Van Der Traag was contentedly emptying his bladder, forming a neat circular hole in the sand, when he glanced up and spotted the police car cresting a hill and coming their way. Not smoking, no sirens or whirligigs – it was … tooling on down the road, slo-ow and easy. No big dramas. Aaron could see the driver’s elbow protruding from the window. In a short time he was able to determine from their boy scout uniforms and the cruiser’s decals that they were state troopers, not local fuzz. Hmm – that was a little more serious. He shook off the last drops, put his thing away and adjusted his clothing.

  ‘Company,’ he said to Carter, who was inside the flatbed listening to FM Country and slugging on a cold longneck of Miller’s Genuine Draft. Carter Khormitch IV skewed his neck around and took a look-see. Aaron picked up the Winchester .30–30 lever-action rifle that had been standing against the vehicle and slid it through the window to Carter, who put it up on the gun rack. Aaron had been pinging at jack rabbits, but the jack rabbits had been too alert and elusive, so he finished up blowing away a large cactus some eighty to a hundred yards off, just for something to occupy his hands. After that exertion, he’d needed to piss.

  Mid-afternoon sun blazed. Aaron rested his arms on the roof of the vehicle and watched the troopers come through the heat haze on the uneven two-lane backroad. Two of them; like peas in a fucking pod. They pulled up on the shoulder, ten yards behind Carter’s Dodge, bringing up thick swirls of dust. Fierce sunlight bounced off the windshield and chrome trim of the troopers’ car. Aaron’s arms were scorching from the Dodge’s baked roof, so he straightened up and slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. Carter had not said or done anything, except to finish off the Miller’s, stick the tip of his finger into the neck and then let the empty bottle drop to the floor.

  ‘How do,’ the driver said, grinning and hitching up his belt as he got out of the car, a pursuit Chrysler. And damned if he wasn’t a negro.

  ‘Officer,’ Aaron said lazily, laying it on. He wiped his forehead and the back of his neck with a kerchief.

  The trooper approached the driver’s window, sizing up Aaron first, then Carter. He removed his shades, hooking them in his shirt and tilting his hat back. ‘Sure is a warm one,’ he said. ‘Real humdinger. Reckon she’s a hundred-ten, hundred-fifteen in the shade right now. If you could find any.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Carter said. He was tapping on his knee in time with Charley Pride, chin dipping slightly, eyes focused straight ahead through the windshield to where the two-lane fragmented far away, through the undulating waves of shimmer.

  ‘We had a report two men in a white Dodge flatbed helped themselves to twenty dollars’ worth of gas back in Jewel, then left in a big hurry and forgot to pay for it,’ the trooper said.

  ‘Jew-el?’ Carter said, turning towards him with an unshaved, sweat-drenched, screwed-up, squinting face.

  “Bout … thirty miles back that-a-way,’ the trooper said. ‘You gen’lemen come through there?’

  ‘Us gen’lemen go through a shit-hole name of Jew-el, Aaron?’ Carter said.

  ‘Don’t recall it,’ Aaron said, scratching an armpit. ‘Nope. Guess not, officer.’

  ‘Well. You had to come past there. Believe me. Unless you two came clean out of the desert, like Moses.’

  Aaron giggled. Carter shrugged.

  ‘Tell you what. Let’s see your driver’s licence,’ the trooper said, bridling a smidgin.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Licence. If you please.’

  Carter’s tongue made a loud clicking sound, like a cork popping, against the roof of his mouth. He dug out his wallet, flipped it open and put it under the trooper’s face.

  ‘Remove it from the plastic covering if you wouldn’t mind, sir.’

  ‘Goddamned. I don’t much appreciate all this hasslin’. All for some lousy friggin’ gas we don’t know nothin’ about. Man. Free country or what.’ He extracted the laminated card and thrust it at the trooper, who examined it for what seemed to Carter a long time.

  ‘Report said, these same two men also purloined a six-pack of Miller’s Draft beer from the gas station,’ the trooper said, and Carter saw his eyes fix on the several empties on the floor. ‘I don’t suppose you gen’lemen know anything about that, either.’

  ‘You got it right, chief. Can I have that back now?’

  ‘You want to step out of the vehicle, sir?’

  Carter shook his head, laughing. ‘Sure, chief. You the boss-man. You wearin’ the badge and the big hat.’ The trooper stepped back, hand on the butt of his sidearm. Carter opened the door, then from behind him produced a blued-steel .380 Walther PPK handgun and in less than a blink slammed a round through the trooper’s left eye – wham. The impact lifted the trooper clean off his feet and pitched him onto the blacktop, the back of his skull splitting with a fearful crack when it hit the hard surface. His stiff-brimmed hat rolled away in a circle, coming to rest upside down on the opposite verge.

  ‘Well, fuck me,’ Aaron said softly.

  Carter was out of the car in an instant.

  The second trooper, who was going over a clipboard with a pencil in his hand, tried to get out of the Chrysler, but Carter was on him, firing two-handed as he closed, blasting out glass, wing mirror, pieces of metal, pieces of trooper. When he got up close he put one through his mouth: the .380 slug ripped straight through the back of his neck and blew out the rear window.

  Carter kept firing until the pin hit an empty chamber.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ Aaron said. He reached inside the Dodge, grabbed the Winchester. Working the lever, he approached the Chrysler and pumped some rounds through
the radiator grille. Steam hissed; the bonnet sprang up. Aaron then walked casually around the vehicle, firing from the hip as he walked. Steel-jacketed magnum bullets punched clean through it, whipping up dirt on the other side; they tore doors off hinges, shredded rubber, sprayed glass; lumps of foam and plastic floated up and down like feathers. Gas sprang from the tank via a fist-sized hole. The corpse inside jerked and tossed itself around in the ceaseless torrent of fire; the trunk popped, the vehicle’s sorry remains rocked and settled onto its wheel rims; all the while, spent cartridges flew up, catching the sun momentarily, coming down and ringing hollow, like coins, on the blacktop.

  Aaron stopped firing: ‘You was sayin’, officer? I don’t hear you no more. Sir.’

  He stepped back, stood alongside Carter. Aaron was way out of it: chest heaving, chap-lipped, the hot smoking rifle hanging loose in his big-veined, trembling right arm. Ejected cartridge casings littered the scene. They stared at the ex-cruiser and the ex-trooper, who was half in and half out of the cabin. Blood trailed from his hand onto the bitumen. Now and then the gutted wreck emitted a sound, as a hose burst, electrics fizzed or a fragment of glass dropped. Gas poured over the road. Neither Carter nor Aaron said anything. It was still and silent except for the soft pumping of gasoline and the echo of gunfire inside their heads.

  Carter was the first to move.

  He pulled the dead officer from the wreckage by his part-severed arm, dumped him face up on the road. He was a white man, and old enough to be Carter’s father. One dead eye stared up at him through ropes of blood and gore and exposed facial bone. Carter had never seen a person so shot up, not even in Saudi.

  ‘Guess I’ll just … purloin this here piece,’ he said, extracting the officer’s Colt revolver and pushing it down the front of his jeans. ‘Leave his ass out here for the buzzards to pick over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aaron said, and wiped his chin. He was still having a big reality-check problem. Carter said, ‘Hey. Take a look at that other one, Aaron. Make sure he ain’t gonna put in no report. Get with it, now.’

  Aaron, coming to, examined the first officer. There were flies in his eye wound. Blood, dark and thick as molasses, pooled under his head. Standing the rifle against the Dodge, Aaron unclipped the man’s holster strap and lifted the Colt. He felt an overwhelming urge to pump some rounds into the corpse. From the neck down, the trooper’s body was in perfect shape, which seemed wrong to Aaron. He stood over it and let rip, using his left hand as a shield against back-spatter.

  ‘All done?’ Carter said.

  ‘All done.’ He shook loose the six spent cartridges over the corpse.

  Carter gazed upon the carnage Aaron had inflicted, placing his hand on his friend’s shoulder. The reek of spilt blood, gasoline and gunsmoke enveloped the two men. Their eyes met, mouths half-curled in grins. Each seemed to be searching for something – recognition, affirmation, some sign – in the face of the other. Carter and Aaron had gone to school together; they had enlisted in the Marines on the same morning. They had witnessed the conflagration of Desert Storm and Desert Shield as raw, wide-eyed twenty-year-olds. And now at last in blood their two destinies were irreversibly enfolded.

  ‘You cool, Aaron?’ Carter said.

  ‘Cool? Oh, yeah, man. You too?’

  Carter said, ‘Man. I am flyin’.’

  They tossed a lighted match into the escaping fuel, whooped and vamoosed out of there.

  2

  Sydney, Australia – September, 2000

  ‘On top of my fondness for their … what’s the word … incomparable cuisine, I find I have a bit of a weak spot for the lithe young Asian female,’ Geoff ‘Tex’ O’Mara said, and filled his mouth with steaming chicken, cashew and basil curry.

  Barrett put down his chopsticks. ‘You can’t mean little Katya.’

  ‘I can. I do. You have a problem with little Katya?’

  ‘Do I have a problem? Christ. Get some help, mate.’

  ‘You don’t find Katya attractive?’

  ‘You are truly a shocking person, Geoff. By “weak spot” I take it you mean you paw the ground and drool like a starved mastiff every time the poor creature has the misfortune to appear in your sights.’ He was wolfing into a plate of green tiger prawns done in ‘special’ pimento sauce, with a hint of lime and ginger. He liked his food raging hot, and this was a genuine, top-of-the-range scorcher. When the pimentos, the ‘little red demons’, touched the tip of his tongue, flames roared in his mouth, large sweat beads exploded from his brow and upper lip and his eyes and nose streamed. For Barrett, eating Thai or Indian always had to be a chastening affair, a to-the-death struggle between man and the hottest of spices. To this day he had never lost a bout, not even against Raymond Malabar’s ultra-volcanic Number 10 Vindaloo curry, which Raymond only served to known, proven customers who were prepared to sign a waiver indemnifying him against litigation. That famous eatery, Malabar’s Cave, was only a few blocks from where Barrett sat now, panting furiously and wiping his face, suspended in a state of near-sexual rapture.

  Barrett reached for the jug of iced water and topped up both their glasses. ‘Jesus, mate, Katya’s a bit green, even for you. She wouldn’t be nineteen yet – and she looks about fifteen. You know what you are? You’re a dirty old man. A fucking predator. There it is – it’s out. Sorry, but someone’s got to tell you. One of these days you’ll be picked up hanging around primary schools with your fly open.’ He was aware Geoff had a crass streak about a yard-and-a-half wide, but since he was also capable of using words like ‘incomparable’ when describing Thai cuisine, there had to be some chance for him.

  Geoff shrugged it off. ‘She’s legal. Anyhow it doesn’t matter a rat’s how young they are,’ he said, lifting his bowl and scooping the food in with the chopsticks as if he had a train to catch, now. ‘You’ve got to get them then, right on the cusp, mate, because they age into hags overnight. There is a brief but crucial moment in the lives of Asian girls, when everything is in the balance. Then … That’s it. It’s gone forever.’

  He was certainly a fast eater: more your industrial-strength food disposal machine than a gourmande or epicurean. Geoff had never been guilty of taking a step back from the chaff bag, and neither was he discriminating: you could place a large bowl of steaming elephant shit in front of him and he’d probably get most of it down before noticing something was off.

  Quantity-wise, no-one matched Tex O’Mara at the food table, although Barrett had drunk him under it a couple of times. He had been with Geoff once, at the Inter-Continental Hotel, when he had ordered three main courses, all in advance, because he had missed lunch and was so crazed with hunger he was ready to eat the quarry tiles off the floor. That’s how he got: venomous beyond recall, almost deranged, embarrassing and bloody dangerous to be with. ‘I am so fucking starving,’ he’d screamed, slamming the flat of his hand on the table, knocking stuff over and yelling for waiters. He could hurl chairs through windows if he wasn’t served chop-chop.

  ‘Katya is beautiful,’ Barrett said, looking over Geoff’s shoulder at the young, black-haired waitress, who was also the restaurateur’s daughter. She was slender, even slight; shy, easily embarrassed, and when she caught Barrett staring at her she blushed and lowered her long-lashed eyes. ‘Far too beautiful for you. Too human for you. I wish you wouldn’t violate her with your dirty mind.’

  ‘My dirty mind? Ease up. Christ, a bloke is entitled to his dreams, no matter how old he is. Empty dreams, mate, that’s all they are. Empty dreams in a goddamned empty city. Where’s the harm in that?’ He ate some more, then: ‘Tell me. Do you think she’s a virgin?’

  Barrett said, ‘I would say so. Definitely. Her old man keeps an eagle eye on her, and if he’s not there, big brother is. And big brother’s a karate black belt, something-or-other dan. I’ve seen him break twenty-six bricks with his fucking elbow.’

  Geoff sighed. ‘Some undeserving bastard is going to deflower her one day soon. What a crying shame.’

  �
��What, that it won’t be you?’

  ‘Yeah – yeah.’ He looked up sharply, defiantly, a hurt frown bringing a mass of creases to one side of his fleshy brow. You’d have thought he was serious.

  ‘It’ll be a nice bloke from the university, probably.’ Barrett knew she was doing science at one of the universities – second or third year? He wasn’t sure. At his age, on the wrong side of fifty, it was so easy to lose track of time: you had to automatically add some to get in the right ballpark. He had no idea if Katya was a virgin, either, but for Geoff’s sake he was prepared to have an opinion on the matter.

  Geoff said: ‘An egghead, I’ll bet. Some tofu-eating, yoga-practising new-age goddamned pencil-dick with wire specs and a filthy rich daddy in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Tex,’ Barrett said, ‘stop doing this to yourself. You’re so ancient, so past it, she wouldn’t even think you had a dick, pencil or otherwise – if she spent a second thinking about you at all, which I very much doubt. You are not there.’

  ‘I don’t know why you have to be so negative, Barrett,’ Geoff said, and Barrett watched him lift a large portion of chicken, rice and cashews into the gaping maw of his mouth – not a pretty sight. Geoff pointed his chopsticks at him and hurriedly digested the food, apparently anxious to add an important point. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I haven’t seen my dick for quite some time’ – he crunched the scales at around 115 kilograms, with a proportionately outsized gut – ‘but I have heard good reports.’

  Barrett laughed so hard he had to turn away and cover his mouth with a napkin to stop himself spraying rice and bits of prawn.

  Barrett had known Geoff O’Mara for around five years – virtually since his arrival in Emerald City. They had worked together in a security firm, Barrett had left and Geoff had branched out on his own some time after that. They had a bit in common: both were ex-cops with a reputation for rule-bending and crime-fighting over and above the call of duty, both were squeezed from the job as a result, and both – Barrett more so than Geoff – had experienced a rough passage since. Barrett considered Geoff to be his main man these days, which didn’t necessarily mean a lot due to the fact that all his old friendships and associations had been left behind, south of the Murray River. It was all old stuff, old baggage, and Barrett was happy to lose it all and start over. At the time of his move he didn’t think it would be permanent – Sydney didn’t strike him as a permanent kind of town – but he had somehow managed to stick around and give it a try or two.