Signal Loss (Hal Challis Investigation, Band 7) - Hardcover

Buch 7 von 7: A Hal Challis Investigation

Disher, Garry

 
9781616958596: Signal Loss (Hal Challis Investigation, Band 7)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1616958596 ISBN 13: 9781616958596
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The Ned Kelly Award–winning master of Australian noir shows us the darker side of the Peninsula. A major meth-related crime confounds Inspector Hal Challis, while Sergeant Ellen Destry hunts down an elusive serial rapist.

A pair of hit men have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a meth lab and two burned bodies in a Mercedes. As Inspector Hal Challis of the Crime Investigation Unit struggles to link these events to major meth suppliers flooding the Peninsula with drugs, he also finds himself spending valuable time fending off jurisdictional challenges from Melbourne’s Major Drug Investigative Division. Meanwhile, Sgt. Ellen Destry, of CIU’s sex crimes unit, is hunting for a serial rapist who is extremely adept at not leaving clues. A tense, human, and at times darkly funny entry into Disher’s celebrated Ned Kelly Award–winning series.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Garry Disher has published over fifty books in a range of genres, including crime, children’s books, and Australian history. His Hal Challis and Wyatt crime series are also published by Soho Crime. He lives on the Mornington Peninsula, southeast of Melbourne.

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1

Lovelock and Pym. They sounded like some kind of show-business duo—magicians, maybe; folk singers.
     In fact they worked for Hector Kaye, who used to run with the Finks out of Kings Cross. That was before he set up as a legitimate businessman and started importing crystal meth from China. They didn’t come cheap, Lovelock and Pym. Kaye paid them well and he’d bought them each a house and a car in the past year.
     Their next project was to knock off a guy named Owen Valentine down in Victoria. Fifty grand plus a thousand a day each for expenses. Four days minimum, two days on the road from Sydney, two days back. The coast route, not the Hume: fewer cops. There was no reason why they couldn’t fly down on fake IDs, they had plenty to choose from, but neither of them had ever seen the south coast. They’d be renting a Mercedes with one of the fake IDs, a big sedan with room in the boot for a body.
     That was the basic set-up. Now Hector moved on to the finer detail: “Grab this Valentine prick as soon as his girlfriend and kids have left the house, pack up his clothes and toiletries and shit so it looks like he’s done a runner, whack him, disappear the body.”
     The three of them were on Hector’s deck overlooking Double Bay, sitting around a glass and stainless steel outdoor setting, sipping margaritas. Lovelock, a literal-minded man who despised fag drinks like margaritas, said, “Whack him at his house, or take him somewhere first?”
      “Not at his fucking house, genius. He’s done a runner, right? No blood.”
      “Then disappear him,” Lovelock repeated flatly.
      “Bury him,” Kaye specified. “Deep. You’ll need a shovel.”
     Lovelock had never been to Victoria. “Where?”
      “Here,” said Kaye, tapping a map. He had the long, clean forefingers of a businessman. No grease, scars or swollen knuckles. Only with his sleeves rolled back you could see a scroll of black ink: Respect Few, Fear None.
     Lovelock and Pym studied the map dubiously. It was a bad fax, or more likely a scan, showing a twenty-kilometer-square detail of the Mornington Peninsula south-east of Melbourne. Kaye had used pink highlighter to mark a coastal town, Moonta, and an inland track named Lintermans Lane.
      “Grab the guy in Moonta, bury him in Lintermans Lane. Got it,” said Lovelock.
     Meanwhile Pym was examining the other paperwork on the table: head-and-shoulders shots of their victim, typed information, a mobile number. A slight, nervy man who liked to query and quibble, he stared at Kaye. “You’re sending us to the dark side of the moon, boss.”
      “It’s not the fucking Simpson Desert, it’s an hour from Melbourne,” said Kaye. “If you don’t want the job, I’ll send someone else.”
      “Can’t you use a local guy?”
      “It’s a favor for a local guy, all right? He doesn’t want anything to come back on him. You go in, do it, get out. Jesus, you’re getting paid enough.”
     Sea birds wheeled above the water, blindingly blue under the early summer sun. A solitary cloud above. Pym ignored all that. Curious to know how far he could push, he said, “What’s your cut?”
      “The satisfaction of doing a favor for an associate,” Kaye snarled, “all right?”
     Pym saluted him. “You’re the boss.”
      “That I am.”
 
 
So Lovelock and Pym took the coast road, the ocean only occasionally visible. Stopped Wednesday night at Bega, where they fitted the Mercedes with plates from a Victorian car, and then down through Gippsland to the tip of Westernport Bay. After ascertaining that Moonta was no more than a bunch of beach houses with a single shop, they drove another ten minutes to the town of Waterloo, which had a motel. Pym went for a run as soon as they checked in, then drove to the Bunnings on the edge of town and bought a shovel and tarp. Paid cash, the visor of his John Deere cap low on his brow. Lovelock stayed in, sinking a six-pack of Victoria Bitter as he watched the T20 game on Fox. Over dinner—chicken salad for Pym, meat-lovers pizza for Lovelock—they studied the paperwork again.
     Lovelock chewed, swallowed, burped. “Guy looks like a meth head.”
     Pym nodded. In photographs, Owen Valentine had a narrow, bruised, hunted-looking face under a firebreak haircut, his parted dry lips revealing mossy teeth.
     Lovelock snatched another bite and ruminated. “You ever ask yourself what we’re doing?”
     Christ, thought Pym, hating it when Lovelock got philosophical. “No.”
     Lovelock waved his pizza slice, tumbling a lump of greyish meat onto the nasty bedspread. “I mean, all we ever do is what we’re told. You ever thought of going independent?”
      “No,” Pym said, without much hope it would shut Lovelock up.
      “Okay, so ask yourself: here’s a meth head, and we’re getting fifty grand to waste him. Makes you think, right? All that money?”
      “Think what?”
      “Whatever this Valentine character did to piss off Hector’s mate, it must have been big. I mean, fifty grand.”
      “So?”
      “So he knows something, stole a shitload of drugs, something.”
      “So?”
      “So yeah, we top him, bury him. But why not ask a few questions first?” Lovelock said, getting out his cigarettes.
     Pym made him take his filthy habit outside, Pym who didn’t touch steroids, ice, nicotine, alcohol. He was a killer these days, but quite a bit of the old Pym lingered from before. Clean, straight. Good job as an aide to a Liberal Party MP, before a small misstep in the form of a Facebook post. A few frank thoughts on immigrants and Muslims that prompted a swift change of careers.
     He made Lovelock take his filthy habit outside, but still kissed him goodnight.
 
 
On Friday morning—after Pym’s run and Lovelock’s sleep-in—they drove back up to Moonta. Through farmland that backed onto the mudflats and mangroves, along small, tight roads to the little township. It was no more than a collection of short, sandy streets settled with beach houses of various kinds, some costly, others renovated cottages, with a few wood and plaster kit homes of the kind pictured in brochures with names like “The Inlander” or “The Californian.”
     The house where Owen Valentine lived with his girlfriend and their kids was a shabby fibro structure set amid ti trees on a narrow dirt track unobservantly named Banksia Court. Pulling the Mercedes under a nearby tree, Lovelock and Pym watched and waited, and presently a...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1616958596
ISBN 13 
9781616958596
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
345
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Softcover