Quick (3 page)

Billy breaks into a jog, his eyes locked on the red truck as it continues along Collins Street. It’s in the far lane, about twenty metres ahead. He’ll wait for it to stop at the next set of lights then make his way over to the driver, flash his badge and see what’s what. As he moves closer he notices a sticker on the cab’s rear window that reads
Rentco.
It’s the name of a large truck rental company that his dad sometimes used to ferry cars and equipment to interstate races back in Billy’s motor racing days.

Why would a truck rental company put illegal tint on the windscreen? The answer is they wouldn’t. Whoever’s driving it did. And why would they do that? So they won’t be easily seen. And why don’t they want to be easily seen? Well that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? Suddenly leaving the hotcakes uneaten doesn’t feel so crazy after all. He instinctively reaches under his jacket to check his holstered Glock—and realises it’s not there because today is his day off.

Bugger.

~ * ~

‘We have company.’ Black’s eyes are locked on the right side-view mirror as he takes in a young man who moves along the footpath and follows the truck.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means there’s a guy following us down the street.’

‘Are you sure?’ Yellow turns, looks out the rear window.

‘It’s the guy in the dark denim jacket.’

Yellow nods. ‘I see him.’

‘He’s looking at us, right?’

‘Who knows? He’s wearing sunglasses.’

Black turns to Yellow: ‘We should abort.’

Yellow’s helmet shakes. ‘No can do.’

‘What if he’s a cop?’

‘Then we deal with it.’

Red points out the windscreen. ‘There it is.’

‘Okay. Here we go.’ They flip their helmet visors down as Yellow mashes the accelerator to the floor.

~ * ~

The turbo diesel barks and the truck pulls away.

‘Christ.’ Billy takes off after it. He sprints hard and instantly his lower back starts to throb from the jarring impact of his heels on the pavement. He ignores it, as he always does, and promises himself a couple of Panadeine later, which he will forget to take.

In spite of its size, the truck nimbly swerves through the traffic and Billy can’t help but think that whoever’s driving knows what he’s doing. It gains speed quickly, now half a block ahead. ‘Where the hell is it going?’ Billy cranes his neck—then sees where.

~ * ~

Yellow’s eyes don’t leave the road in front. ‘That guy still on us?’

Black glances back. ‘Yes, and now he’s running.’

Red looks through the rear window at the guy as he shrinks into the distance behind them. ‘Yeah, good luck with that, buddy!’ Red turns to Black. ‘Guess you were right about him.’

Black gets no joy from being correct. ‘I don’t feel good about this.’

‘You never feel good about anything. Now everybody hold on.’ Yellow yanks the wheel and the big rig cuts sharply across the road —

Crunch.
It clips the rear of a Mini and knocks it aside like a child’s toy, mounts the footpath and bowls over a parked Vespa motor scooter. The truck shudders to a halt, its rear wheels five metres in front of a hulking Brinks armoured car.

Yellow turns to the others. ‘You know what to do. Don’t get dead.’

Black pushes open the passenger door and leaps to the roadway, Red right behind. Pistols raised, they sprint to the rear of the truck. Black grabs two thick, metal chains coiled around the fifth wheel coupling, the flat metal circle a trailer would be hitched to. Both chains have a large hook attached to the end. Black moves to the front of the armoured car as Red covers him —

A security guard, fifty if he’s a day, steps out from the right rear of the armoured car and double-takes. He’s genuinely shocked to see the two helmeted individuals. ‘Oh crap.’ He reaches for the gun on his hip.

Red steps forward, raises the pistol. ‘Face down on the ground, hands behind your head.’

The guard doesn’t need to be asked twice. He drops to the footpath.

Black crouches, crawls under the front of the armoured car, reaches into the right wheel well and
clank
, attaches one of the hooks to the suspension’s right control arm, then slides across to the left wheel well and
clank,
attaches the second hook to the left control arm. He slithers out from beneath the vehicle and finds his feet as Red directs a second security guard to lie face down on the footpath too.

Black and Red turn to the remaining security guard. He’s a kid, can’t be more than twenty-one, who sits behind the steering wheel in the cabin. He makes sure both front doors are locked.

Red raps his pistol on the windscreen: ‘Out!’

The kid shakes his head, his expression one of petrified resolve. Red knows that firing at the bulletproof windscreen won’t do any good so there’s no use wasting time. Instead Red points at the guy, ‘You’ll want to get out soon enough.’ Red gestures to Yellow with a thumbs-up sign.

Yellow sees it through the truck’s rear window and steps on the gas. The turbo diesel barks and the prime mover surges forward. The metal chains attached to the truck’s fifth wheel uncoil.

Twang.
The chains pull tight and jolt the armoured car forward. Its handbrake is engaged so the wheels don’t turn but it’s dragged along the street anyway.

The truck’s five hundred and twenty horsepower Cummings engine strains under the load as it hauls the armoured car forward in a long, screeching, slow motion skid. Black runs to the truck’s passenger door, yanks it open and climbs in as Red vaults onto the truck’s rear section and grabs the back of the cabin for balance.

The truck picks up speed. The armoured car’s tyres grind and rip on the bitumen, trail an acrid grey smoke as it is dragged along Collins Street. Red scans the roadway, searches for the guy who was following them earlier. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of him— oh, there he is.

He sprints after them, a phone to his ear.

~ * ~

In the truck’s cabin Yellow keeps the accelerator flat to the floor, the speedometer touching fifty-five kilometres an hour. Their destination is just a short tour across town. It shouldn’t take more than three minutes to reach the large, empty garage they rented for today.

A siren echoes across the soundscape. Black looks through the windscreen and is unhappy to see blue and red flashing lights in the distance. ‘Police.’

Yellow nods. ‘I have it under control.’

‘I told you I had a bad feeling about this.’

‘Reminding me of that doesn’t help.’

Black glances at the speedometer. ‘We won’t outrun them doing fifty-five.’

‘Really? Thanks for stating the obvious. I would never have worked that out on my own.’

Yellow and Black see the Commodore police cruiser swerve through the traffic towards them. It’s only a few seconds away.

Black’s voice vibrates with concern: ‘What are we going to do?’

‘You’re going to stop whining and I’m going to do
this
.’ Yellow pulls on the steering wheel.

~ * ~

The truck tips into a sharp turn and its left front wheel lifts off the roadway.

‘Jeeze!’ Behind the cabin Red realises they’re pulling a giant U-turn and holds on tight. The armoured car is yanked into the U-turn as well and momentarily mounts the footpath —

Crunch.
It obliterates a post box then is hauled back across the roadway in a giant, screeching arc, tyres burning from unrelenting friction —

Boom.
The right side front wheel gives up the ghost and detonates in a spray of flaming rubber —

Boom.
The right side rear tyre blows next and the metal wheel rims dig into the road. The armoured car flips over and hangs in the air for an impossibly long moment —

Slam.
It thumps onto its right side and the windscreen pops out.

The truck finishes its U-turn and drives along the opposite side of the road. Red watches the police cruiser roar straight towards them as the armoured car swings around to complete its U-turn —

Wham.
It spanks the side of the cruiser and knocks it across the road —

Smash.
The cruiser is launched through the window of a Priceline pharmacy and comes to a dead stop, lights still flashing, siren still blaring.

~ * ~

Yellow watches it in the side-view mirror then turns to Black with a grin. ‘Told you I had it under control.’ Yellow floors the accelerator and the truck picks up speed. ‘That’s more like it. That thing’s easier to tow when it’s on its side.’ The truck touches sixty-five, then seventy kilometres an hour. ‘Okay, we can’t make it to location A so we head for location B.’

Black nods, realises that making the U-turn has changed their plans. Unfortunately location B is a lot further away.

~ * ~

Billy stops running as the truck heads back towards him on the opposite side of the road. It still tows the armoured car, which is now on its side and spraying the street with a shower of orange sparks. He had called for backup. Unfortunately the police cruiser that arrived had just been hurled through a shop window.

There’s movement in the armoured car’s cabin. Billy’s eyes flick to a terrified security guard who climbs out through the hole where the windscreen used to be.

‘What the hell?’ Billy needs to help that guy. He turns, scans his surroundings—and twenty metres up the street sees a way he can do it.

~ * ~

Red watches the security guard clamber onto the side of the armoured car. Why’s he doing that? Surely it’s safer
inside
the cabin.

Bet he wishes he got out when he had the chance.

Vroom.
A black flash swerves across the roadway and speeds towards the armoured car.

Is that a Vespa? Yes, it’s a black Vespa, the same one the truck knocked over earlier, and it’s being ridden by that guy who was following them earlier.

~ * ~

The odd thing about Billy’s Bathurst near-death accident at Bathurst is that he didn’t lose his mojo afterwards. In fact the
opposite
happened. He now has
too much
mojo. Instead of realising that life is a precious blessing that must be treasured, he went the other way and now thinks nothing can kill him, or at least it would take a lot more than rolling a car eighteen times at two hundred kilometres an hour. That’s why he’s so good at his job. He is, by any real measure, fearless.

Which is why he gives the Vespa full throttle and swerves through traffic towards the armoured car. The scooter’s little engine sounds like a sewing machine on crack but hopefully has enough power for what he’s about to do. It had been knocked over by the truck but was still in working condition and only took a moment to hot-wire.

Vroom.
Billy swerves around a Corolla, then a Hyundai, and homes in on the armoured car. The sound of it scraping across the bitumen sets his teeth on edge.

Clang.
The truck clips a vehicle —

‘Christ!’ A Subaru spins towards him. He works the Vespa’s handle bars and swerves around the wreck. ‘That was close —’

Bam.
A tyre bounces through the wall of sparks and clips Billy’s shoulder.

Ahhh.
It doesn’t hit him that hard, but it’s hard enough to make the Vespa wobble. Violently. It’s called a tank-slapper in the bike-riding world and it’s a bastard to recover from. The scooter bucks and weaves like an unbroken stallion, tries to turf him off. He holds on tight, works the brakes, wipes off some pace and recovers his balance.

‘Man!’ Instead of being chastened by the experience it only
confirms
that he’s hard to kill. He watches the armoured car drift left across the roadway, picks his moment, guns the bike down its right side and ploughs through the wall of sparks. He can feel the pricks of heat on his face and hands as he searches for the security guard —

There.
He’s balanced on the side of the bonnet and clutches the windscreen’s frame with an expression of abject terror. It would appear that the full extent of his plan was to climb out onto the bonnet. Now that he’s there he doesn’t seem to know what to do next.

Billy pulls up beside him and shouts over the roaring wind and the scraping metal. ‘Get on!’

The security guard looks from where he’s crouched on the bonnet, to the scooter, which is a metre away, then back to the bonnet. He shakes his head.

Billy can’t believe it. ‘Are you kidding me? Get on!’

‘I can’t.’

‘What do you mean you can’t? It’s a whole lot better down here than up there.’

‘I’m scared.’

~ * ~

From the rear of the truck Red watches the security guard and the guy on the Vespa have what appears to be an argument.

What the hell could they fighting about?

Then the penny drops. The security guard doesn’t want to get off the truck. First he didn’t want to get out of the truck and now he doesn’t want to get onto the bike. ‘What a dickhead.’ Red really wants him to get off. It’ll save them the trouble of dealing with him later.