Gunshine State Read online

  The taxi exited the freeway, plunged into a warren of inner city streets, refurbished buildings, sleek new apartment blocks, rows of cafés and bars, footpaths crowded with well-dressed, well-fed people. The taxi turned into a residential street, stopped in front of a block of red brick veneer flats, ‘Ocean View Apartments’ in curved metal letters next to the entrance. A large Pacific Islander man sat on the front steps, watched Chance walk up the cracked concrete path and disappear into the building.

  Chance knocked on a door two flights up. He heard music on the other side, a sixties crooner, interspersed with moist coughing. The music stopped, the door opened. A woman in her sixties peered at him through the gap. She had sharp blue eyes, surrounded by mascara, a generous mouth caked with coral lipstick.

  ‘With you in a minute, love.’

  The door closed, more coughing, followed by the sound of the chain being taken off.

  ‘Come in, love.’

  Chance walked down a narrow hallway, brushed aside a curtain of plastic beads, stepped into a cramped living area. Weak sunlight came through the venetian blinds.

  He stood in the middle of the room, hands behind his back. The woman was draped in a white kaftan patterned with lime green tropical flowers. Years of Queensland sun had turned her face and arms to leather.

  ‘Been expecting you. Make yourself at home while I get what you came for.’

  Chance listened to her move about in the adjoining kitchen. When he was sure there was no threat, he relaxed, glanced around the room. The decor was island kitsch, oil paintings of beach sunsets, a cane table and chairs, several half-coconut ashtrays overflowing with butts encircled with the woman’s lipstick.

  On the mantelpiece, framed back and white photographs, two deep. He recognised his host in one. Her taunt body, clad in fishnet stockings and a sequined bikini, faced away from the camera, her head cocked over her shoulder, a smile and a cheeky wink for the audience.

  ‘Long time ago, love.’

  Chance looked up. The woman stood in the doorway, a manila envelope in one hand.

  ‘Not that long ago, I bet.’

  ‘You’re a dear, but no time for that now.’ She handed him the envelope. She lit up, drew in deep, coughed as she waved smoke away from her face. ‘Better check it’s all there,’ she croaked.

  Chance cleared a space on the coffee table, shook the contents of the envelope onto the glass. Car keys, driver’s license, folded bundles of cash, and a phone.

  ‘The keys are to the red Toyota Corolla outside,’ said the woman.

  He looked at the details on the driver’s license. Peter Jacobi, thirty-two. At least they’d got Chance’s age right.

  The woman leaned against the mantelpiece, tapped her cigarette into the nearest half coconut. She coughed hard, suddenly looked old and birdlike in the dim light.

  Chance held up the phone. ‘This clean?’

  ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ The woman gave him an offended look. ‘Imported from Mexico where there’s no reliable register of handsets, mobile numbers or users, and sellers are unregistered. Can’t be traced.’

  She stubbed her cigarette out, went back into the adjoining kitchen, returned with a brown paper bag. She placed it on the table in front of Chance. ‘Almost forgot, the Chinaman wanted you to have this.’

  Chance peeked into the bag and saw a silver pistol barrel.

  ‘Registration papers are there, too, love.’

  He gazed at the woman, eyebrows raised. ‘Something tells me that’s not my lunch.’

  She lit another cigarette, peered at him through the curling smoke. ‘Welcome to the gunshine state.’

  Two

  It rained the hour-long drive to Surfers Paradise. Water fell from the gunmetal sky at a forty-five degree angle with such force the windscreen wipers struggled to keep up.

  The downpour turned to mist just as Surfers materialized around him, strip malls and new housing projects replaced on all sides by high-rise hotels and apartment blocks.

  His hotel was a box-like building between a vacant lot and a double-fronted store that sold souvenirs, stuffed animals, UGG boots, and fake Aboriginal arts and crafts. Chance arrived just as a large tour bus pulled up and disgorged a line of middle-aged Asian tourists. They chatted excitedly as their female guide herded them toward the entrance.

  The reception smelled of cleaning products, week-old Christmas decorations on the walls. Chance stood by a table, thumbed through a Chinese language travel brochure while he waited for the new arrivals to check in. The receptionist, a young Asian male with bad acne, informed him there was a prepaid reservation in the name of Peter Jacobi and otherwise served him with an absolute minimum of human interaction.

  His room on the fourth floor was small, the décor minimal. How many places had he stayed in like this? Life stripped down to the basics, nothing that wasn’t cheap or nailed down: a shower, TV, bed, a cupboard with an iron and a board. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ironed anything.

  Chance heard screams outside his window, pushed the heavy curtain to one side. Above the adjoining building were two tall cranes to which two heavy cords were attached. The machine hurled people high like a reverse bungee jump. The wail of its passengers filled the air, a mixture of joy and terror. He watched the contraption for a while, then showered, changed and set off toward Orchid Avenue, Surfers Paradise’s main drag, or the Glitter Strip as it was better known.

  Night fell fast as he walked and it was almost dark when he merged with the crowded footpath. Damp Christmas decorations dangled from the streetlights. Luxury boutiques and restaurants mixed with two-dollar shops, takeaways, internet cafés, and massage parlours. Traffic crawled bumper-to-bumper, cars, an amphibious truck used as a tourist bus. Chance recognised the make from his time in the army.

  Older couples and large multigenerational families from Asia, India, and Africa headed back to their hotels after dinner, giving the streets over to packs of young people. The men had an air of random aggression. The women, dressed in T-shirts, tight cut-off jeans, and high heels, hobbled behind their male peers, trying to keep up.

  He headed toward the sound of the ocean but was stopped before the beach by a wire fence with a sign announcing construction. He rolled a cigarette, smoked as he listened to the surf, the waves faintly visible in the darkness.

  He’d visited Surfers as a child, didn’t remember much except his family had stayed in a fibro house, the beach only minutes across a hot asphalt road. He wondered if the house still existed. Probably carpet-bombed with steel and concrete like the rest of Surfers by overseas investors and local businessmen keen for a fast buck. What fifty years ago had been mangrove swamps and wooden shacks was now a city of almost a million people. Despite the luxury hotels and billion-dollar marina projects, it still exuded an air of impermanence. The commerce felt temporary, everyone from somewhere else.

  Chance wandered back to the Strip to find somewhere to eat, decided on an Irish-themed tavern, found a seat at the bar, and ordered a beer and a fisherman’s basket.

  As the night wore on he found himself sandwiched between a group of middle-aged men and a table of drunk twentysomething women. The women all wore tiny red devil’s horns. A huge purple dildo sat in torn wrapping paper on their table, along with several jugs of margaritas.

  He gravitated toward the men, all contractors, one of whom had just come into money. Chance hoped to pick up some local intelligence on Surfers, maybe a lead to another job if this one didn’t pan out. All he got instead was a lot of whining about a white man’s burden of economic uncertainty, shit weather, and marriage problems. Chance paced himself, one beer to their two or three, ended up several hours later in a strip club that felt like it had been assembled from a DIY kit, chrome finishing, black leather, loud music, and watered-down drinks.

  He felt his phone vibrate in his front shirt pocket, peered at the solitary text message: Sea World underwater viewing gallery, ten a.m. tomorrow, Dormer.

 
He pocketed the phone, said his goodbyes, and made his way back to the hotel.

  THREE

  The underwater viewing gallery was packed with exhausted-looking parents and their children. Chance watched the large grey shapes and multi-coloured smaller ones glide by as he waited for Dormer to make contact.

  After a few minutes, two kids standing to his left were replaced by a man, a foot taller and several years older than Chance.

  The man stared at the passing marine life, his face lit by the dappled sunlight filtered through the water.

  ‘Show me your left hand,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the gallery.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your left hand, I want to see it.’

  Chance raised his hand. ‘Satisfied?’

  The man made a show of counting off the fingers, gave a curt nod, straightened the cuffs of his pale grey suit. ‘No hard feelings, Jacobi, just checking that I’m talking to the right person.’

  Dormer returned his gaze to the tank, just as a large shark drifted on the other side of the glass.

  ‘Ever wondered why the sharks in this tank don’t eat each other?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They only target the unhealthy ones. Sharks can tell, apparently, when one of their kind moves slower than usual or makes erratic movements. They’ll go for the kill. It eradicates the weak, keeps the rest of the school healthy. A bit like humans, wouldn’t you say?

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Not that there’s anything unhealthy looking about you.’ Dormer flashed him a sideways look, returned his gaze to the tank. ‘I hear you’re a veteran, Jacobi.’

  Chance tensed, unsure what information the Chinaman had passed on.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘East Timor for a couple of years, followed by a stint in Afghanistan.’

  ‘Doing what, might I ask?’

  ‘Driving trucks.’

  ‘A truck driver? A cabin-dwelling creature, rarely seen, known for high speed, capacity to slack off and love of a cold beer.’

  Chance took no offense, was more interested in what the statement betrayed about Dormer, his inside knowledge of the army.

  ‘Where’d you serve?’

  ‘Infantry. Iraq and Afghanistan, then I made a horizontal career move into the private sector.’ Dormer reached into his jacket pocket, took out a slip of paper and handed it to Chance. ‘We can swap war stories another time. Be at that address at seven sharp tonight, we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘The ticket to this place cost me nearly a hundred dollars,’ said Chance. ‘I thought I’d get a bit more information for my money?’

  ‘You’ll get more. Tonight.’

  Chance watched Dormer disappear into the crowd, returned his attention to the sharks.

  The Strip was packed with families and backpackers taking advantage of the break in the weather. A sprinkling of hard-core drinkers sat in the receding shadow in front of bars and cafés, nursing their first beer of the day or the final one of the night before.

  On a whim, Chance paused at the entrance to a seedy arcade, a survivor of the city’s relentless war against its past, stepped into the dimly lit interior: A kebab shop, a massage parlour that looked like it sold everything but, two cheap Asian restaurants, vacant shopfronts.

  Chance entered one of the restaurants, ordered beef rendang and coconut rice. He ate half the oily, tasteless meal, left the restaurant, found a surf shop, and bought a pair of board shorts. He retrieved his car from the hotel’s underground car park, drove down the Gold Coast Highway to Burleigh Heads.

  Chance knew his unease was just part and parcel of the usual pre-job jitters, that he had no choice but to play along and wait until tonight when he’d find out more. In the distance the skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise were silhouettes shrouded in sea spray. He dived into the water and let the surf pound the morning’s events out of his mind.

  FOUR

  The house was hidden behind a high brick wall on a winding residential street twenty minutes’ drive inland from Surfers.

  Chance stood in the indigo twilight, pressed a buzzer. The gate slid open to reveal a red brick hacienda-style residence, metal bars on the windows.

  The man who opened the front door had an aging bruiser’s body, faded blue tattoos on his heavily tanned forearms, a generous head of grey hair, cut Rockabilly-style, mutton-chop side burns. He held a can of beer in his free hand, radiated the same air of unfocused aggression as the young men Chance had seen the previous evening on the Glitter Strip.

  Chance followed him through a kitchen into a dining room. Full-length-glass double doors revealed a patio with a large hooded barbecue and a set of wrought iron table and chairs. Beyond the patio he could see one of the many manufactured waterways that snaked through suburban Gold Coast, a ribbon of liquid tar in the fading light.

  The man kept going to the very back of the house, stopped at a doorway, motioned Chance inside, followed, and took up a position next to a life-size porcelain statue of a greyhound.

  White shagpile carpet, wood-panelled walls, framed photographs vying for space with Australian rules football memorabilia and framed newspaper cuttings, a large flat-screen TV showing motor racing, the volume on mute.

  Dormer, dressed in the same suit he’d worn that morning, sat on one of several black leather couches arranged around a glass-topped coffee table.

  Next to him was a woman with straight shoulder-length hair, bone-white skin, an aquiline face with a large nose, and brown eyes surrounded by dark circles. A nametag, pinned to the front of her white shirt, read: Sophia. As she acknowledged Chance, she raised a cigarette to her lips, drew on it hard, exhaled the same way. Some people made smoking look pleasurable.

  A second woman and an older man stood around a bar at the far end of the room. The woman looked at him from underneath a jagged fringe of blonde hair. A slim body accentuated by her choice of clothes: cut-off jeans, a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt and old cowboy boots.

  The man had a nuggetty build, similar to Chance’s, a generous head of silver hair, and blue eyes that flanked a cauliflower nose covered in tiny strands of red.

  The man grinned, stepped out from behind the bar, gave Chance a double-pump handshake. A big man, at ease with the space he took up.

  ‘Welcome to Surfers, Peter. My name is Dennis Curry. Good to have you on board. Can I get you a cold beverage?’

  ‘Not for me, Mister Curry.’

  ‘Mister Curry was my father, old bastard that he was. Call me Dennis.’ He glanced in Dormer’s direction. ‘You’ve met Frank. The miscreant next to the greyhound is my flatmate, Mal Kerrigan.’

  Mal raised his beer can in sullen acknowledgement.

  ‘As for the females, the Mediterranean beauty on the couch is Sophia Lekakis. The lady propping up the bar with me is Amber.’ Amber flashed a quick smile, her eyes lingering on him as if they were sharing a secret. ‘Everyone else right for a drink?’ Curry looked around the room with the air of a best man at a Bucks party. Getting no takers, he clapped his hands together. ‘Right, let’s get started.’

  Curry steered Chance toward the leather couches. Everyone sat except Mal, who maintained his stance next to the greyhound.

  Dormer reached for a manila folder on top of a pile of magazines on the coffee table, slid out an A4 colour photograph, handed it to Chance. It showed an Asian man leaning against the bonnet of what looked like a brand-new Dodge Charger.

  ‘Meet Frederick Gao, Freddie to his friends, thirty years of age, son of prominent Filipino tycoon, Lucio Gao. Old man Gao is one of those hard-arsed self-made men, arrived a penniless migrant from mainland China just after World War Two, got where he is now through hard work and making himself useful to a certain Filipino dictator. In return for services rendered, said dictator gave Gao a large chunk of the country’s north to run fairly much as he pleases.’

  Chance studied the photograph. Freddie had straight dark hair, a large girlish looking mouth, surround
ed by traces of baby fat. Chance tried to picture his old man, imagined a scrawny old Asian guy, his demeanour half patrician Chinese, half street hustler. Much like the man he’d reluctantly gone back to work for and who’d recommended him for this job.

  ‘Nice car,’ said Chance, handing the picture back. His knowledge of the Philippines was limited to the time he’d briefly dated the Filipina singer of a house band in Perth. Her name was Joy, an apt moniker.

  ‘He has a hanger-sized garage full of them at home,’ said Amber. ‘Christ knows where he drives them, given the traffic in Manila.’

  Her voice had a dry, throaty timbre, at odds with her youthful face, small pointed nose, and large, round blue eyes. Chance noticed her hands. They looked large and powerful, out of proportion to the rest of her body.

  ‘Old man Gao probably bought him his own stretch of highway,’ said Curry over his half-raised glass.

  ‘Gao junior hasn’t inherited his father’s work ethic, smarts, or obsession with being an upstanding and patriotic member of the overseas Chinese community,’ said Dormer. ‘In fact he’s a complete fuck up, no interest in the family business, kept on a short leash, and a very generous allowance.’

  ‘Freddie only has eyes for three things: cars, gambling, and women,’ Curry continued. ‘He has a particular fondness for blondes.’

  The old man leered at Amber as the innuendo sunk in. No one else spoke. She sipped her drink, unperturbed at being the centre of attention.

  ‘In America the mecca for high rollers like Gao is Vegas,’ said Dormer. ‘In Asia it’s Macau. In Australia it’s Melbourne’s Crown Casino, in particular their Aussie Millions Poker Tournament in a week’s time. They have a whole department dedicated to identifying and tracking whales like Gao, knowing what they like, wooing them out here to play.