Draw the Brisbane Line Read Online Free PDF

had impressed Nero when he saw it, so he asked what had inspired the tattoo.  Rudolpho said it was the artist’s idea, he needed something to cover up the massive Swastika he originally had there.  Hammo, the giant Tongan enforcer, had made him do it.
    He looked around for Blinky and Clapper.  They were somewhere else in the house.
    The air in the sparsely furnished living room was tainted by new cigarette smoke.  Nero made them smoke outside whenever they were around.  It wasn’t that he was worried about getting the deposit back on the house, but it helped to enforce some of society’s expectations on the boys.  It was like trying to train feral dogs sometimes, keeping these Rangers in his employ.
    But now there was smoking.  And those fucking bikes and gang patches.
    ‘Do you fuckwits want to get locked up?’ Nero said to the men in the room.
    ‘What?’ Rudolpho said in his thick Afrikaner tongue.  ‘For smoking in your house man?  That sounds a bit harsh.’  He looked at Nero through the barrel of the pistol before stabbing a delicate wire brush through it.
    ‘You think the cops won’t worry about the sudden reappearance of fucken Rangers in town?  Just because of a bit of fightin, bit of lootin?’
    ‘There is that, yes,’ Blinky said, stepping out from the short hallway which led to the bedrooms.  He also wore his full motorcycle leathers and Bush Ranger vest.  He moved silently despite his heavy boots, a characteristic Nero always found unsettling.  A sawn-off shotgun hung loosely in his hand.  ‘And there’s also the fact that we are Bush Rangers, not your bitches to fuck over when you feel like it.’
    ‘I can think of prettier things to fuck over than you lot,’ Nero said through a shallow smile.
    Suss stood up and wiped his greasy fingers on his jeans.  Rudolpho stepped around the kitchen bench.  The pistol was still in pieces on the counter, but a heavy leather sap now rested in his hand.
    ‘We know what you were going to do,’ Blinky said.  ‘We know all about the boom-boom.  And I think we could do a better job running that side of the business.  What do you think?’
    Fuck , was all Nero had time to think.  He reached around to grab the revolver from the back of his jeans, but before his finger could even touch it, he was hit in the back of the head by a speeding car.  That’s what it felt like.  He spun as he fell, and caught sight of a grim, angry Clapper clutching a wooden baseball bat.  He must have slipped in as Hammo was closing the door.
    That first blow was a bitch, and that was a good thing.  It meant that while he was aware of the rest of it, up to a point, the sharpness of the pain had been blunted somewhat by that first collision of wood on skull.  No, the physical pain wasn’t the worst of it.  The worst part was the eventual understanding, just before he slipped into a deep hole of unconsciousness, of what they meant to do.  They meant to step all over his core business interests, but his core business interests weren’t in Moranbah, or in Emerald, or in Rockhampton.  They were in Brisbane.
    With Lily.

Chapter 5
     
     
    Epoch took a seat right up the back of the Greyhound, deep in the unpopular toilet zone.  The smell was rank, but the position afforded him better odds of privacy than any other place on the bus.
    He pulled the shade closed.  Maybe no-one was out looking for him, but he saw no sense in taking that chance.  Blinky might not have acted on the information Epoch sent his way.  Maybe he enjoyed being screwed over.  Maybe he had done something about it though.  Maybe he confronted Nero, drew down on him like a comic book outlaw.  Maybe they were both dead, killed by each other in a straight-up gunfight.  
    Or, Blinky could have snitched, run to Nero like a whiny bitch fourth-grader to tell him what naughty Epoch had told him.
    He doubted it, but it was better to be safe than stupid.
    He was travelling light, like he always