Cross Kill

Twenty

At least half of the men milling around in Prestige Auto Auctions on Friday knew that Bax was working motor vehicle theft, so he couldn’t very well do his own bidding. He was spotting. He strolled through the place twice, glancing idly at the ranks of glossy, top of the range Hondas, BMWs, Saabs, Audis, Toyotas, for all the world as if he’d dropped in especially to be a pain in the neck to the men there who knew he was a cop.

It amused him the way four bent dealers slipped out through the side doors and another handful stopped muttering into mobile phones or to each other in the shadowy corners of the vast auction hall. It amused him to saunter past them, sharp as a tack in his iron-grey tailored suit, as out of place among the stretch jeans and blow-waved heads as a Piaget watch in a tray of Pizza Hut giveaways. The remaining men in the place were your ordinary suburban punters after a bargain and they paid Bax no attention at all. He circled the hall a third time, listened to some half-hearted bidding for a late sixties E-Type in need of a complete restoration, and went out onto the street.

Axle was waiting for him in a Japanese rustbucket. The body was canary yellow, the driver’s door white, the boot lid pale green. Not for the first time did Bax wonder how it was that a professional car thief like Axle, who specialised in lifting Porsches from South Yarra driveways in the time it took you to blow your nose, would want to drive around in a heap of shit.

He slid into the passenger seat. Axle was listening to a cassette, a world-weary American voice filling the car with a string of one-liners. Bax opened his mouth to speak but Axle chopped the air with the flat of his hand. ‘Check this.’

Bax listened. The comedian’s voice wound on, utterly tired of life: ‘I went to a restaurant, it said “breakfast any time”, so I ordered French toast in the Renaissance.’ Despite himself, Bax sniggered.

Axle shut off the tape machine. His ravaged face was pink with appreciation, his eyes moist. ‘Steve Wright. Kills me every time. Well, what you got?’

‘Lot nineteen,’ Bax said. ‘White Honda Prelude with bad rear-end damage.’ He took an envelope from his pocket and gave it to Axle. ‘There’s five grand. The car might go above five, but I very much doubt it.’

Axle tucked the envelope inside the denim jacket he wore over a black T-shirt, summer and winter. ‘No worries.’

‘Get a receipt, do all the paperwork, and arrange to have it delivered to that body shop the Mesics run in Flemington.’

Axle was surprised. ‘Not their Richmond place?’

Bax shared some of the irritation he’d been feeling lately. ‘No, fuck it all. The older brother’s back in town and he’s decided to sell the Richmond place.’

‘Huh,’ Axle said.

‘So, arrange delivery, then you and I go looking for a another white Prelude.’

‘No worries,’ Axle said, and he left Bax there. After a while, Bax turned on Axle’s sound system and heard the cassette through to the end, snuffles of laughter escaping from him every few seconds. Outside the car, a gritty wind was hassling the pedestrians and inside his head the Mesic problem and the problem of the money he owed his SP bookie were never far away, but for a time at least, the world didn’t feel such a bad place.

Forty minutes later Axle was there with the envelope. ‘Three seven fifty,’ he said.

‘Good one.’

Axle started the car. The motor backfired once, settling into a surging idle. ‘White Prelude,’ he said.

‘Car park at the Prahran market?’

Axle shook his head violently. ‘No way known. They’ve got this lookout tower, some guy on the PA spotting parking spaces for people. We’ll try Chaddie.’

The drive to Chadstone shopping centre took them thirty minutes. They searched the immense parking areas for a further ten minutes until Axle stopped the car and beamed. ‘There.’

A young woman had just locked a white Prelude and now she was snapping on stiletto heels across the asphalt toward the side entrance of Myer. Bax watched her limbs moving inside the power dresser’s pencil-line skirt and padded shoulders. He liked the way her calves flexed and he looked for the line of her knickers, an image of Stella Mesic filling his head.

‘Wakey, wakey,’ Axle said, passing a hand across Bax’s face.

‘We wait till she’s inside,’ Bax said, ‘then we wait another couple of minutes in case she’s forgotten something.’

‘Fair enough.’

They saw the woman veer toward an ANZ automatic teller machine and join the queue. There were four people waiting and the line moved slowly. Both men sighed simultaneously and settled in their seats. After a while, Bax, encouraged into intimacy by their shared liking of the comedy tape, said, ‘They call you Axle because you steal cars, right?’

Axle was affronted. ‘Shit no. It’s my real name. Axel. A-x-e-l. Danish.’

Bax nodded. ‘Axel,’ he said, stressing the second syllable.

‘You got it.’

They waited, and two minutes after the woman had disappeared into Myer, Axel reached into the back seat and retrieved a black metal box fitted with switches, a dial and a telescopic aerial. He extended the aerial and tilted the box toward the woman’s car. Bax made no comment. The device was a radio scanner and he’d seen Axel use it before. According to a manufacturer’s sticker on the rear window, the woman’s Prelude had been fitted with a car alarm, and Axel was about to disarm it. His box of tricks would transmit a signal matching the signal the woman transmitted from the gadget on her keyring when she wanted to unlock the car.

Bax waited. The scanner ran through the frequencies, the numbers rapidly dissolving and reforming on the digital readout. Then it locked and Axel said, ‘Bingo.’

They wasted no time after that. Bax took Axel’s place behind the wheel of the rustbucket and watched Axel break into the Prelude. Then he drove out onto Dandenong Road, Axel following in the stolen car, and headed for Flemington.

From the outside, Mach-One Motors on Flemington Road was just another suburban lube and service garage. The paperwork listed a Charles Willis as the proprietor, but Charles Willis was a name old man Mesic had dreamed up and the petrol pumps and hydraulic hoists were a front for the real business of the place.

Bax parked, tapped the horn twice, and watched as a massive steel rolladoor cranked open at the rear of the workshop. He stood back while Axel drove in, then followed on foot, the rolladoor rattling down behind him.

He was in a space the size of a barn. Doors, motors, panels, windscreens and car compliance plates were stacked in orderly rows around the perimeter of the shed. An obstacle course of rear axles took up a quarter of the floor space; lathes, oxyacetylene cutting equipment and mechanics took up the rest. The air was smoky, oily, riven by the screaming tools and hammers. The wrecked Prelude had been delivered and already a couple of men were cutting away the damaged section. Within twenty-four hours the legitimate front half would be welded to the back half of the stolen car, giving the Mesics a Prelude worth $25 000 and untraceable parts worth several thousand dollars on top of that. Not bad for an outlay of $3750, thought Bax.

The Mesic brothers materialised from a makeshift fibro office next to a stack of bumper bars. Bax frowned. He had no wish to see Victor: he just wanted to deal with Leo. If Victor was there, it could only mean bad news. He faced the Mesics stonily as they approached him, nodding once briefly in recognition of the warning look Leo was flashing him.

Victor wasted no time. He held out his hand to Bax. ‘My brother says he gave you five thousand?’

Bax gave him the envelope. ‘Here’s your change. The deal is you give me a finder’s fee, a thousand bucks.’

The grin on Victor’s face was loaded with the little man’s cockiness and malice. ‘Maybe you should have deducted it,’ he said, pocketing the envelope.

Oh lovely, Bax thought. He said nothing.

‘Understand me, Bax. We’re winding up operations here too. You’ve pulled your last car for us.’

Bax reached out a hand. ‘Come on, Vic, give me my thousand.’

Victor Mesic stepped back daintily, as if he were dancing. ‘Uh, uh. Nope. This time you get paid when we’ve actually sold the car.’

Bax shook his head. He felt very tired. For a while then he stared at the floor, shutting out the Mesics, the sounds of tortured metal, trying to find some elusive peace at the core of himself. He didn’t know how he’d ever let himself get caught up in all this. He didn’t know how he was going to get out of it. All he did know was that time was running out and he’d have to find an unaccustomed chip of ice in his heart.