Way too early in the morning. Two men stand on a rooftop above an apartment above a Vietnamese restaurant, waiting for the pre-dawn light.Below them, Brunswick Street seems to hold its breath, but the snoring that [...]]]> Okay, here’s chapter one of yet another new story – as always, let me know what you think:

Way too early in the morning. Two men stand on a rooftop above an apartment above a Vietnamese restaurant, waiting for the pre-dawn light.Below them, Brunswick Street seems to hold its breath, but the snoring that can be heard from one nearby window is closer to the truth: the street merely sleeps. It’s too early for there to be trams or waste collections. It’s too early for anything but the keenest of joggers and dog walkers to be out – and Fitzroy isn’t home to them in any case. In fact, the only living beings the two men have seen for more than an hour now have been cats and possums.

Drysdale turns to McEwan and says “We’re wasting our fucking time.”
“And freezing our arses off,” agrees McEwan. But neither man leaves his post. They have a job to do.

For months now, the Brunswick Street shopping strip, from Gertrude in the south to Alexandra Avenue in the north, has been terrorized – well, if you were a sensationalist headline writer, that’s the word you’d use – by a reign of vandalism unparalleled in the history of this city in both scope and variety.

Aside from the spray-paint cans so customary of graffiti all over the world, there’s a distinctly Melbourne feel to the vandalism – but then, Melbourne’s the stencil art capital of the southern hemisphere, so that’s no surprise. Of course there are going to be stencil artists, ranging from furtive boys with simple designs they’ve cut into A4 pages up to the huge, elaborate and as-yet unfinished multi-coloured design on the wall of one of the buildings opposite the Running Dog restaurant, upon whose roof the two men stand and watch.

But there’s more. There’s posters, and stickers, and one time, the pages of that unpublished novel neatly taped, one after another, along shop fronts in careful numerical order. There was even, briefly, a massive art installation that blocked traffic for three days until it could be removed. But these are less common if more newsworthy and a bigger fucking headache for anyone stuck dealing with them.

Of course, one person’s vandalism is another’s free expression and yet another’s artistic masterpiece, so the battle lines have been drawn along the same old cultural fault lines of age, class and politics. Detectives Rufus Drysdale and Grant McEwen are studiously neutral on the subject in their conversations with each other.

The Brunswick Street Irregulars, as they have been dubbed, have become heroes to some and villains to others, but one thing that everyone has to agree on is that they’re criminals. Even if several shopkeepers have refused to press charges.

“I’m going for a smoke,” said McEwan. The two policemen were forbidden to smoke at the street end of the rooftop, in case a glowing ember alerted someone to their presence, but the back end of the roof overlooks nothing but a small balcony of the apartment beneath it. Drysdale grunted an acknowledgement, his attention still riveted to the street below. Internally, he knew full well that he was most likely in the wrong part of the street. The Irregulars had a knack for appearing where the police weren’t – it was one of the reasons they were called irregular, in fact. But the unfinished design was too obvious a provocation. They had to be planning to come back to it, sooner or later. It was worth watching, even if that did mean that other crimes took place elsewhere. There are only so many eyes in the force, after all. Better to have them where they could do some good.

At long last, light was starting to appear on the eastern horizon. Against the yellow and pink undersides of the clouds somewhere over Gippsland, Drysdale could make out the outline of Studley Park hill against the sky in the background, although it was still too dark to see much else. In a few minutes, the sun would be high enough to reach over the hilltop, and it would be light enough to see how they’d been made fools of tonight.

*   *   *

Tommy ran as fast he could along the dew-slicked cobbles of Napier Street.

He wanted to look back, but he didn’t dare. He couldn’t spare the time. His pursuer would gain on him if he slowed down to look back at them. As it was, he knew that his time was limited.

He still couldn’t believe it, the horror that he’d discovered by accident, but Tommy knew it was true. He had all the proof anyone could ever want. And as much as he didn’t know what to do about it, Tommy knew exactly who to tell. Rag would know what to do – he always did. Rag was the one who’d figured out how to find all the Irregulars and bring them together, to make them a true collective, all without tipping off the cops to what he was doing. If he couldn’t sort this out, no one could.

Tommy kept telling himself that if he could just make it to Rag’s place before it got too much lighter, he’d be okay. They’d know where Tommy was, but it would be too late to stop him then. He could get the word out to the other Irregulars. But it was getting a little brighter every second, and the early morning fog was burning off much quicker than he’d hoped it would.

At least he could now see Rag’s place in front of him. Only another few houses to run past now – maybe 30 metres. He was going to make it!

The first shot sparked off the stones next to his left foot. He stumbled, but caught himself and kept running.

He barely heard the next shot before he felt the horrible burning impact of it in the middle of his back. As he fell to the ground, Tommy’s last thoughts were not of Rag, nor of his killer. His dying thought was that he would never finish the stencil design he’d been putting on the front of the old Punter’s Club.

*   *   *

“Did you hear that?” said McEwen. Drysdale was about to reply when they both heard the second shot.
“Which directi0n?” asked Drysdale.
“Towards Smith, probably over Johnston. Beyond that, you got me,” replied McEwen. He radioed the news in, while Drysdale descended to street level to start the car.

*   *   *

Rag awoke from his sleep with the clear sense that something was wrong, but no idea what. It wasn’t until he heard the second gun shot that he realized that the first shot must have been what had awoken him. A split-second later, he heard the cry, and the uncomfortable thudding of a body falling down in a way it was never meant to.

He sat up and swung his feet onto the floor, looking for his clothes, heedless of the effect his sudden movements had on the mattress. Sally rolled over into the gap he’d left in the bed, and woke up almost as fast as he had.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Gunshots, outside,” Rag said, pulling on his shoes and looking for his coat. Sally reached for the cordless.
“Police?” she asked.
“Call ‘em,” said Rag with a nod.
“Ambulance?”
“I think so, but I’m going down to check.”
“Yell back,” she said, dialing emergency. He nodded. “And be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” he said as he left the bedroom. She watched him go, and couldn’t help but smile.
“You’re never careful, love,” she said softly.
“Pardon?” said the voice on the phone.

*   *   *

McEwen got the word just as Drysdale was crossing Napier. The emergency call was relayed to them over the car’s radio, Drysdale hit the anchors and pulled a fast u-turn. The car rocked on its axles, but all four wheels stayed in touch with the road. He steered it around the corner more carefully, and they made their way to the location they’d been given.

*   *   *

When Rag raced out the door, it didn’t take long to see where to go. There was blood splattered all over the windows of one of the cars parked just a few metres down the street. He could see the back of a head poking above the front of one car, and for a second he hoped that meant they weren’t too badly hurt. But when he looked around the car, he saw that the head belonged to a young woman who knelt by Tommy’s body. And Rag knew right then that Tommy was dead. You didn’t walk away from a bullet hole placed neatly between your shoulder blades.

He turned and called back through the open door: “Sally – Ambulance. But they don’t need to hurry.” Then, more quietly, he added, “Fuck.” The girl looked up at him, and he saw that she was crying. It was only then that Rag realized that tears were falling from his own eyes.
“He’s dead, isn’t he,” said the girl. It was phrased like a question, but it had the finality of a statement.
“Yeah, he is,” said Rag, sinking to his knees on the other side of Tommy’s corpse from the girl.
“Did you know him?” she asked, but Rag’s answer was lost in the scream of brakes as a non-descript car with a flashing blue light sitting on its dashboard pulled up.

*   *   *

McEwen was out of the car practically before it stopped, pulling his gun and covering the three people in front of it.
“Okay, hands up people,” he said with a calm he didn’t entirely feel. The man and woman stood up and stepped away from the body, reaching for the sky. Another woman ran up with a phone in her hand, took one look at the body, and threw herself into the arms of the man, weeping.

The man gave McEwen a look that was equal parts pleading and sheepishness, and lowered his arms to put them around the woman at McEwen’s reluctant nod. Drysdale stepped up next to his partner.
“Who wants to talk first?” he asked. The weeping woman turned angrily to face them, waving the phone at them.
“I called you,” she spat.

Chapter Two

The business of giving a statement was always a lengthy one in Rag’s experience, especially when the cops had nothing to go on.

When [...]]]> Here’s a much belated addition to that first chapter I put up here some weeks back – I’ll try to keep them coming a little more frequently.

Chapter Two

The business of giving a statement was always a lengthy one in Rag’s experience, especially when the cops had nothing to go on.

When they had you, they knew it and you knew it, and the whole statement thing was pretty much a formality. When you were clearly an innocent witness, it was usually even simpler – not to mention that the cop taking your words down would be a lot nicer to you about it. But when they didn’t know what to do next, they just tried to keep you talking, hoping you’d say something – anything – that would give them something to work with.

He’d repeated his story a number of times, despite a fair amount of hassling about his record. It was a colourful one – Rag would be the first to admit that – but he’d never even been sought in connection with a violent crime, let alone any of the work he’d done with the Irregulars. In fact, it was amusing that the cops didn’t even have Rag down as a known alias, just his actual name.

There should be nothing to tie this to the Irregulars. Sure, he, Sally and Tommy were all members, but the cops didn’t know that. Tommy hadn’t been doing anything tonight, so there shouldn’t be anything linking him either.

So sooner or later, the cops would have to let them go. Long experience had made both Sally and he deft hands at the art of giving matching statements, although it was relatively unusual for the statements to be true. The phone records bore them out too, as did the complete absence of any weapon.

In the meantime, Rag just sat in his uncomfortable chair and thought about Tommy.

Tommy…

Tommy was like a younger brother to Rag, although Sally liked to describe him as being both the child and pet they’d never had. He was just a kid, still wet behind the ears in many ways. He was a little naïve and a lot nice, and that was just fine with Rag.

But not so fine with someone else, apparently.

Jesus, who’d even want to hurt Tommy, let alone kill him?

Surely it was a case of wrong place, wrong time? Just plain old bad luck – fatally bad, but still, just luck. Surely.

Rag didn’t believe in violence. Oh, he accepted the reality of it, but it was like the Bible – sure, the thing existed, but that didn’t mean it had the answers. So when he promised himself that he’d do everything he could to catch Tommy’s killer, it wasn’t about finding the bastard and delivering a punitive beating (or worse). It meant, as strange as it sounded for a man who was one of Melbourne’s most notorious (if least dangerous) criminal masterminds, helping the police in any way he could.

* * *

“What have we got?” asked McEwen with a sigh. It had already been a long cold night, and it showed no signs of getting any shorter. Nor any warmer.
“Victim’s name is Thomas Richard Harrison, aged 22, of Northcote,” Drysdale began.
“If he lives in Northcote, what was he doing in Fitzroy at this time of morning?” McEwen objected.
“Two of the witnesses claimed he was a friend, and speculated that he might be on his way to see them.”
“Leave that for when we get to their statements.”
“Two shots fired – everyone agrees on that except for one of the witnesses who was asleep. But we’ve got emergency calls from up and down the street that all agree on that point.”
“Only two?”
“Yeah. So I’m leaning towards this being deliberate. Harrison wasn’t just unlucky, someone wanted him dead in particular.”
“Okay,” said McEwen. “Why?”
“Well,” said Drysdale, drawing out the syllable and enjoying doing so, “there was nothing remarkable in his pockets except for a Dictaphone.”
“What’s one of those?” McEwen asked.
“A kind of tape recorder,” replied his partner. “Interestingly, it was open, as if a tape had just been removed from it.”
“We would have noticed that, surely, when we patted them down for weapons?” asked McEwen. Drysdale shook his head.
“Not these tapes. Small enough to fit into an empty matchbox.”
“So you’re saying someone took it?”
“One of the witnesses – the first two, presumably.”
“Or it was just empty.”
“It was warm to the touch.”
“So it had just been used,” said McEwen, “and it’s useless without a tape”
“Exactly.”
“Then who has it?”
“I don’t know. We can ask them to submit to searches, but at this point, we can’t compel them. They’re only witnesses.”
“Alright. What else?” asked McEwen. Drysdale smiled.
“You’re gonna love this bit. Harrison’s clothes have a variety of paint stains on them, especially around the cuffs of his shirt and jacket.”
“He might be one of them.”
“Better than that. If these other two were friends of his who think it’s nothing out of the ordinary for him to visit them at first light, they might be in on it too.”
“A break.”
“Yup.”

* * *

Drysdale took a long pull from his coffee cup. It tasted like crap, but after a night on that rooftop, he was drinking it more for the heat than anything else. Even the caffeine was a secondary consideration.
“Now,” he said, “the witnesses.”
“Yeah?” prompted McEwen.
“Okay, the happy couple are Gareth Andrew Rogers and Sally Heloise McShane. Unmarried, but lived together for about five years now. We’ve seen them both before, but never been able to pin much on them. They’ve both proved themselves to be useful witnesses in the past with various stuff.”
“Such as?”
“Uh, smack dealers and thugs, generally.”
“So, reasonably solid citizens, just with a different sense of what’s legal?”
“Something like that.”
“Does this mean we have to worry about them going vigilante?” For all that they’d been partners for nearly a decade now, Drysdale still didn’t understand his partner’s obsession with vigilantes. There hadn’t been one in Melbourne since they were both constables more than two decades ago, years before they’d even met, let alone partnered. But he let it pass.
“They’re neither of them violent, as far as we can tell. Gazza here once let a man beat the crap out of him before staggering into the station and swearing out a complaint against him – I’d say they have the strength of their convictions.”
“Well, that’s something. Are they likely to muddy the waters for us any other way?”
“Regarding the Irregulars stuff? Yeah, I think they’d both lie without hesitation to protect their own interests.”
“How well?” asked McEwen. Drysdale grimaced.
“Probably well enough to get away if all we have is circumstantial evidence. We’d need something physical to tie them to.”
“We need that tape.”
“Well, it couldn’t hurt. It might turn out to be irrelevant, though.”
“What else do we have to go on?”
“The other witness, Peta Elizabeth Henderson.”
“Tell me.”
“23 years old, studying journalism at RMIT. Lives a couple of blocks away, and claims she was on her way to the convenience store on Brunswick and Johnston when she heard the shots.”
“We think she has the tape?”
“We don’t know. Her or Rogers, unless the site investigation turns it up.”

* * *

Sally wiped her eyes. Again. It was annoying how hard it was to stop crying. When they’d been down at the station, she’d held it in. But now there was nothing to fight against, no point of force to oppose. It was like being in a tug of war when the other side suddenly lets go of the rope. The tears flowed, and promised more to come in the days after.

There would time enough for tears. It was hard to stop, but she did it. Willpower. It was the thing that had attracted Rag to her in the first place, for all that it was now also his major source of stress in their relationship. She focused it now.

There was work to be done.

Tommy Harrison would not be forgotten soon or easily. Sally would see to that. Every single Brunswick Street Irregular would be out tonight, doing their own thing in memory of their fallen comrade.

Some morning very soon would see the biggest effort yet from the Irregulars. She’d make sure of it.

Be interested to hear what [...]]]> So here’s a short story I wrote recently that didn’t quite come together for me. It also takes place in a new setting, Hell, which is separate from either the Lokiverse or Teleran, but of course, is linked to them both (in some way I haven’t quite figured out yet).

Be interested to hear what you think of it, folks.

The worst thing about Hell is how they let you leave it.

Temporarily, or course. There’s no permanent reprieve from damnation. In fact, there’s no reprieve at all. They let you leave, every so often – but only in order to increase your damnation.

Some of us, anyway. Hell is very big on the whole poetic justice thing, and those of us whose great sin in life was never stopping to help some poor tourist with directions have a special place in the great scheme of really horrible things.

We get sent back to Earth every so often, with no other human company, but with precisely 666 young demons on their first trip to see how the living half lives. It’s our allotted task to take them around and show them the sights. They’re supposed to learn from it, and I suppose maybe the last 66 or so of them actually do each time. A bit, anyway. The tour ends when the last one of them gets discorporated and automagically whisked back to Hell.

Enterprising members of this fraternity of which I am a member – and I say fraternity advisedly, since we are probably 98% of the male persuasion – have found the limits of this. There’s the unlucky slob who took a tour to New Orleans exactly one day before Katrina hit, and at the other end, the cunning bastard who’d taken a tour to the Burning Man festival back in 2003 and still wasn’t back in Hell.

Me, I like to take them to Manhattan. Herding 666 demons down Broadway is surprisingly easy. It’s kind of like herding 666 primary school aged kittens on speed down Broadway, only without the meth. But no one looks out of place in Manhattan. (I’ve heard this said about Burning Man too, but trust me, no one normal-looking belongs there. Manhattan is different.)

Besides, I had a plan.

For my last several visits now – about three years, given how irregularly there are 666 demons ready for the tour, and how many of us there are sentenced to this particular torture at any given time – I’d been laying plans. Each time, I’d managed to smuggle a note to a still-living friend, and each time, I’d gotten my replies. Contacts had been made, arrangements solidified, and a plan agreed upon. And this tour was going to be the one.

Of course, I had to move slowly, at least to begin with. It began with a call I made from phone booth. That was all it took to set it in motion. Then all I had to do was wait and whittle.

So I spent a long afternoon waiting for the first hundred or so demons to get hit by cars. A few more were convinced to try launching themselves off the balcony after the musical was finished. About half of them were persuaded that swimming was a good idea – there’s no water in Hell, only steam and ice, each of them about 200 degrees away from being water – and that the East River was a fine place to try it.

Plus there was the usual attrition from demons getting caught picking pockets, shoplifting or assorted other petty crimes. Most inexperienced demons, when caught doing something that the laws of the living frown upon, will panic and voluntarily discorporate. The ones who don’t invariably fail to survive long in a holding cell. I believe the record is 8 hours, but apparently that was a slow night.

The rest of the day, I just tried to keep them too busy to think much. I kept them out of libraries, galleries and museums, and instead took them to one department store after another. For hours. Until every last one of them was laden down with sample bags and plastered with “Hello my name is” stickers. It slowed them down, and it distracted them. Hell is conspicuously lacking in certain kinds of variety – colors and scents being two notable examples – and I’ve always found that playing human eye for the demon guy (or whatever) will keep them busy for hours. Plus, not a few of them will choose to discorporate after blinding themselves with perfume or hair spray.

In any case, by nightfall, I was down to about 80 demons. These ones were smarter than their more easily departed brethren, sistren and genders-you’d-rather-not-know-about-ren. They were the ones who were able to master their pride enough to ask me questions, like “what’s this gnawing sensation in my belly?” and “you only cross when the light’s green, yeah?” I would, under normal circumstances, have been rejoicing in their intelligence. After all, the longer they stayed, the longer I stayed. But not this time, and not this way.

As we had arranged, I killed some time in a Starbucks, watching from the windows for my friend across the street to signal me. And before too long, it came – the guy in the “The End is Nigh” sandwich board threw his board into the trash. It was time.

I had managed to lose a handful more in Starbucks. Demons have no universal physical characteristics, which means there’s always a few to whom caffeine is either poisonous or just too great a stress on their metabolisms. But I probably still had more than seventy demons following me when we crossed the street to Union Square.

Demons being demons, they had all been pleading with me all day to take them to Ground Zero. But none of them knew a direct route there, so when I suggested we take the subway, no one objected. It was one more part of the New York experience that they had yet to sample.

Now, there’s a rumour that in the seventies and eighties, Hell actually outsourced part of its punitive transit system to the New York subway authorities. I’ve never been able to find out whether it was true or not, but as someone who lived in New York in those years, it’s always felt true to me. I was counting on that. I hoped that standing on a subway platform might feel familiar enough to get demons to let down their guard. At least a little.

The platform was crowded, and the demons needed no encouragement to push as close to the edge of it as possible. They wanted to hear and see the next one before anyone else, to feel the wind of an oncoming train. What they felt instead, each and every one of them, was a sensation of pressure in the area roughly equivalent to what we humans would call a back, a brief sense of vertigo, and finally, the lightning burn sensation of hitting the third rail. This is because my friends, and some of their friends, and some random dudes they met on the way here

Oh, wait, did I say every one? I meant every one but the one that I grabbed hold of. The one that my friends and I took prisoner. The one who now lives in a cell in my house, and has not, in five years, recognized that he is a prisoner. Nor will he ever, I hope, so long as we keep the dvds, console games and junk food coming, although what with how hard I have to work to keep him supplied, I sometimes wonder is this is not Hell after all.

We got it, we got it, we GOT IT!

I’m pleased to announce that the Kliest-Hargraeves Consortium has been awarded a prestigious new contract today. We’re going to be doing the Dristeen Ducal Line project! This is [...]]]> From: Hailey Vincent To: Company Address Book Date: 1, 12:00 Subject: We Got It!

We got it!

We got it, we got it, we GOT IT!

I’m pleased to announce that the Kliest-Hargraeves Consortium has been awarded a prestigious new contract today. We’re going to be doing the Dristeen Ducal Line project! This is worth billions and billions, and the lion’s share of it is going to be ours.

For those of you who haven’t been following the news: Dristeen is a relatively new planet, out towards the spinwise edge of our galactic arm. The people there recently decided that democracy wasn’t working out for them, and have chosen, in a planet-wide plebiscite, to be ruled by a genetically perfect line of Dukes, who we are going to design and create for them.

I hope you can see why I’m so excited about this – my team and I have spent months working on getting this job for us, and at times, it looked like we’d wasted all that effort. I confess, until last night, I was still worrying that those assholes from Blue Sun would snake it out from under us, but in the end, we were just too good for them.

So, three cheers for us, and a big thank you to all the members of the sales team and everyone else who’s consulted for us in putting together the funkspek. Look for the formal announcement and the signed off version of the funkspek sometime tomorrow.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take some of that holiday leave I’ve been building up in the three years we’ve been putting this together.

Seeya,
Hails.