stowed the step ladder in the back of the Cobra, which somehow I’d parked in the brick carport at the side without smashing it. The ladder didn’t fold up as neatly as Mauricio. It stuck straight into the air like some mediaeval torture rack. There was no way we could carry the thing and put the canopy up. I didn’t really feel like uncocooned driving. But there again, maybe the wind in my face would be good for the hangover. Share looked at me with undisguised mistrust.
“Sure you are up to driving?”
“No,” I said.
“Give me the keys.”
I handed them over meekly.
§
For a while Share drove in silence. She was heading East. I fumbled in the glove box and found a pair of shades and put them on. They cut down the glare a bit, but did nothing for the headache. I decided to take my mind off my condition with some polite conversation.
“So what line of work are you in, Share,” I said. Jesus, I must have quizzed her on all this last night over ten kinds of lamb.
“Christ, Tom, you’ve got a memory like a sieve. Alzheimer’s already? Or did they smack you around the head a bit too much in prison?”
Fuck, she knew that as well. “Disgraceful, I know. I put it down to the vodka.”
She shot me a tired look, reconciled to my inadequacies. “Investment advice. Risk assessment. Risk management. Financial services. Import/export. That sort of thing.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said, and my eyes drifted away to the passing street life.
“Somebody’s got to do it.”
“Big firm?”
“Big enough. Just me.”
“A one woman outfit?”
“Exactly.”
“Saving on the secretarial side of things. I do it myself.”
“Christ no, I’ve got secretaries. Two of them.”
“A three woman outfit, then.”
“I don’t think Wozza and Muttonhead would like to hear that.”
“Wozza?” I said. “Wozza O’Toole? Muttonhead Lamb?” “Those are my men.”
“They’re your secretaries?”
“You got problems with that?”
“I...um...I had occasion to meet Mr. O’Toole once.”
“Yeah, he told me: Remand yard, Pentridge, 1993.”
Pentridge. Good god, that brought back memories, and a hundred years of scuttlebutt traded by old crims. The great gray terrible walls, topped with barbed wire, guard towers with guns at each corner. Jika-Jika, the dreadful hell hole for the worst of men. Gardens where bodies were buried in shallow graves, they said. The place had been closed for years. And now some hungry bastards had reopened it as a district of expensive homes. A veritable walled and gated community, Pentridge Village, not five miles from Vinnie’s shop. Lovely view of the Coburg Lake, now they’d removed the razor wire. Fuck, nothing was beyond parody in this day and age.
“Why are you smiling? Fond memories of your cell in Pentridge?”
“No. Thinking of Wozza as a secretary, that’d make anyone smile. Bloke couldn’t write his name. Couldn’t add two and two.”
Share shrugged. “The education system had totally failed him. He was a lost cause from day one at kindergarten.”
“So, how come...?”
“You’ve got to do something inside, you should know that. Might as well do a bit of Adult Literacy. Get yourself a cushy billet in the prison library, read a few books. Matriculate. Enroll in a TAFE. Get yourself a degree. It impresses the bejesus out of the parole board.”
“A degree? Wozza?”
“Bachelor of Information Technology.”
“Fuck me, all I did in Seattle was lift weights.”
“Wozza won’t talk down to you, Tom. He’s an egalitarian sort—wears his distinction lightly.”
“What about Muttonhead?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me
Muttonhead is now a doctor of semiotics.”
“No, Mutton’s more your action type.”
“Standover man?” Mutt was about three feet tall.
“Don’t be unkind. Somebody’s got to hold the ladder.”
“What ladder?”
“The one behind your head.”
“Mutton’s going to be at the track?”
“Wozza too. We do these sorts of things as a team.”
“Look,” I said. “Just what sort of ham-hocked nag do you have on the card?”
Share Lesser gave me a bland look. “Who’s talking about horses?”
“I thought we were going to some country race meeting.”
“After a fashion, but it’s private. And the sheikh’s not interested in horses.”
“What sheikh?”
“Abdul bin Sahal al Din.”
I was getting fed up. “I think you’d better explain things, Share. This is starting to look like false pretenses. This is starting to look like kidnapping, and in my own car at that.”
“All will be revealed, Tom. And I wouldn’t fuss about the car after what your oaf did to mine last night.”
I looked sideways at Share. She was driving with considerable aplomb—that’s the only word to describe it. If there was an opening in the traffic, she’d switched lanes and taken advantage almost before the guy in the other lane blinked. Quite often the guy in the other lane registered his displeasure with his horn. Share ignored them all. I did too. I decided against pursuing the matter of the race meeting. Just go with the flow. Even if the flow took us straight into the dubious company of Wozza O’Toole and Muttonhead Lamb.
Share was right. I’d met Wozza and Mutton years ago in Pentridge. We’d all been on remand. Me on a charge of grievous bodily harm against my father-in-law, and the other two on a bog-standard bank hold-up: stockings, sawn-offs, plastic shopping bag for the contents of the till, hotwired getaway car and a wheelman who drove straight through a set of red lights and was sideswiped by a mob of hoons in a lowered Customline. The hoons piled out of the wreck brimming with righteous road rage, and were settling to the task of beating the shit out of Wozza, Mutton and the hapless wheelman when they discovered the plastic bag. By the time the cops
