Draw the Brisbane Line Read Online Free PDF Page A

in front of him had decided to obey the traffic signs.  The car at the sign, a V8 Commodore with a custom electric blue paint job, abruptly emptied its four passengers who all stalked up to the car behind it, a mine-spec ute complete with the orange flashers on the roof.  They looked like they might all be fresh out of prison, but Nero figured they were most likely recently laid-off contractors.
    The ute shifted into reverse, but Nero was too close to allow him to manoeuvre his way out of there.  He was boxed in.  He hit the flashers and gestured frantically at Nero to move.  Nero stayed where he was and ate his sausage roll as the four men dragged the driver out, screaming blood oaths and took turns on him.  When the last of the sausage roll was licked from his fingers, Nero backed up enough to get around the ute and continued on his way.
    On the drive back to the house, he played scenarios around in his head, lining them up, measuring them, pitting them against one another.  He was trying to think how the current outbreaks of lawlessness might play into his hands.  It couldn’t, not really.  His business model was simple: keep it quiet, but if you can’t, pay someone who can.  It was a model which had kept him in profit and out of prison so far, and he saw no reason to go changing it now.
    He never gave much thought to his hired help having other ideas on the matter, not until he pulled up to the house and saw five Harleys parked up on his front lawn.
    ‘Fucking Blinky,’ he muttered, and pulled on the handbrake hard enough to make it squeal.
    He reached his right hand under the seat and felt around for the faint cut-out in the hard plastic.  He pushed it, and with a soft click, the small compartment flipped open.  He pulled free the loaded Smith & Wesson thirty-eight from under the seat.
    The Harleys shouldn’t be there.  He’d chosen the house, the neighbourhood, because it was as bland a base as he could have hoped for, a low brick house in a street of identical low brick houses, and his neighbours were mostly miners and truckers, coming and going with a monotonous regularity.  The whole point of the house was aimed at discretion, which was the opposite intent of a Harley Davidson. 
    He knew who owned the bikes because he’d watched the small gang of Bush Rangers very carefully before he approached them to offer employment opportunities.  Four Low Riders and a Fat Bob.  The Bob was Blinky’s.  They knew, they fucking knew, that being pegged as a Ranger was a guaranteed pass to prison, thanks to the VLAD legislation that just wouldn’t go away.
    Nero knew why it wouldn’t go away.  It wouldn’t go away because morons like Blinky apparently hadn’t suffered enough.
    And he never should have hired them.
    He wedged the Smith into the back of his jeans, felt it cutting into the small of his back too hard and had to shift his belt to a fresh notch.  Better.  He considered the bottle of Coke in the plastic carrier bag, thought he should maybe stick with water for a while.
    The front door was ajar, so he nudged it open with the toe of his boot.  He spotted Suss first, the skinny bugger leaning into the arm of the cheap black pleather sofa, and threw the bag of Chiko Rolls at him.
    ‘Eat up, ya fucken rake,’ he snarled.
    Suss caught the bag in the middle, and one of the rolls flipped out and rolled under the sofa.  He reached underneath, found it and started munching.  ‘Three second rule,’ he said through a mouthful of glutinous mess.
    Hammo was near the door, and he moved behind Nero to close it.  His hard boot-heels thumped into the thin utilitarian carpet like a boxer pounding a bag.  Rudolpho stood at the kitchen counter, cleaning a stripped-down pistol beneath the bleach-bright fluorescents.  He wore his Rangers vest over his bare torso, the front hanging open to expose his full-coverage Escher-esque tattoo, impossible staircases folding over one another in geometric knots.  It