surrounding the disappearance of Lyle Orlik. The facts of the matter are, first and foremost, Teddy Kallas had Lyle Orlik killed because he was in love with my mum. My mum does not love Teddy Kallas but she did love Lyle Orlik, a good and decent man who just happened to be a peddler of smack. It took me some time to come to terms with the realities of Lyle’s fate but I now accept he was most likely severed limb from limb by a man named Iwan Krol, the psychopathic muscle of Tytus Broz, whose artificial limb factory in Moorooka, south Brisbane, is a front for a vast heroin trafficking empire spread across south-east Queensland.
In the event I am found splattered across the Sandgate Station railway line, please direct all subsequent questions as to why, as well as all bills for any clean-up costs, to Teddy Kallas of Wacol, south-west Brisbane.
For the record, I am not, nor ever was, special. I thought for a while there that August and I really were special. I thought for a while there I really was hearing those voices down the line on Lyle’s mysterious red phone. But I realise now we are not special. I realise Mrs Birkbeck is right. The human mind will convince us of anything in the name of survival. Trauma wears many masks. I have worn mine. But no more. Teddy Kallas is right. My brother and I were never special. We were just fuckin’ crazy.
A knuckle knocks on my bedroom door.
‘Go away, August,’ I say. ‘I’m on a roll here.’
I wait for the door to open despite my request. It doesn’t. But a copy of today’s Courier-Mail slides into the room beneath the door.
The paper is open at a ‘Special Investigation’ in the middle feature pages of the paper: ‘SUBURBAN WARFARE – ASIAN HEROIN GANG WARS ERUPT IN THE STREETS OF BRISBANE’.
It’s a sweeping investigation into the violence between Darra’s 5T and BTK gangs and the widespread trafficking of Golden Triangle heroin across south-east Queensland. It’s a well-researched and well-written piece speaking of suspected anonymous Brisbane drug kingpins and Vietnamese drug families posing as humble and hardworking restaurateurs while expanding million-dollar drug networks north from Melbourne and Sydney. The journalist has quoted an ex-drug enforcement police officer who has complained of corrupt politicians and police heads ‘turning a blind eye for too long’ to the spread of heroin out of the outer western Brisbane suburbs. The police informant speaks of widespread suspicions among officers that several prominent Brisbane businessmen have made their fortunes ‘secretly riding the golden dragon of the illicit Asian drug scene’.
‘They’re out there walking among us,’ the informant says. ‘So-called upstanding members of Brisbane society getting away with murder.’
I search for the journalist’s byline. I lie back on my bed and I write the journalist’s name in the air with my middle finger that sits beside the lucky finger with the lucky freckle I lost to an upstanding member of Brisbane society currently getting away with murder. Her name looks beautiful up there in the invisible air.
Caitlyn Spies.
Boy Digs Deep
I first see the man in the yellow two-door Ford Mustang when I’m sitting on the seats outside the Sandgate train station eating a sausage roll with sauce for lunch. He pulls up in the space in the car park reserved for buses and he stares out his window at me. Mid-forties, maybe. He looks big from here, tall and muscular in the cramped car seat. He has black hair and a black moustache. Black eyes watching me. We make eye contact but I turn away awkwardly just when I think he might have nodded at me. He pulls away from the bus stop and parks his car in the station’s car park. He hops out of his car. My train to Central arrives and I dump the last bite of sausage roll in the bin and pace quickly up to the top end of the station platform.
I disembark at Bowen Hills train station, skip down a side street to the large red brick building with the fancy letters spelling The Courier-Mail on a sign attached to its front wall. It took me three months to summon up the plums to come here. This is where the paper is put together. This is where Caitlyn Spies works. She made it. She made it all the way from the South-West Star to where she belongs. Part of the paper’s crime-writing team, probably the team’s brightest shining