Sucked In

P
RAISE FOR
S
HANE
M
ALONEY
A
ND
M
URRAY
W
HELAN

‘Where has Murray Whelan been all my life?'
West Australian

‘One of our best and most consistently original crime
writers. Highly recommended.'
Canberra Times

‘Maloney's ironically faceted style is elided, almost laconically; the extraneous is struck out, leaving cinematic vividness in his choice of the most significant detail, and a sense of motion and change. He also does the colloquial better than anyone in local crime fiction.' Graeme Blundell,
Weekend Australian

‘Maloney, the great exponent of the Australian crime genre, has done it again.
The Big Ask
is full of laugh-out-loud humour as well as jaw-dropping accuracy in describing Australian political life.'
marie claire

‘The great joy of Maloney is that he seems effortlessly to marry tightly constructed crime stories to great satirical vision…there's no doubting the brilliance of the writing.' Ian Rankin,
Age

‘There is only one Australian crime writer on my list this year—Shane Maloney. His satires on Australian political life are always hilarious.'
Examiner

‘Maloney is top shelf.'
Australian

‘Whelan's wry social commentaries, ironic observations and many failed attempts at getting the girl make him one of Australian crime fiction's most attractive characters, and Maloney one of the genre's most gifted writers.'
Who Weekly

‘I look forward to the next Murray Whelan book with the same anticipation of pleasure that I feel for the new Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.'
Sydney Morning Herald

‘Maloney is a literary writer who…takes characters that are stereotypes (the public servant, the minister, the arty type) and depicts them with subtlety and originality and compassionate humour. He also writes a ripping yarn.'
Eureka Street

‘To the list that contains Charles Willeford's Florida Keys, Jim Thompson's West Texas, Pete Dexter's Philadelphia, James Crumley's Montana and Carl Hiaasen's Miami, you can add Shane Maloney's Melbourne. Maloney has created a fictional city that contains the best of the real and the not quite real.'
Herald Sun

‘Maloney is a born writer…For the first time, in the vicinity of Australian crime-writing, we hear the true national voice of comic futility, a literary voice which is rich, ridiculous and tawdry, which can set itself up with a soaring rhetoric and slide on the banana skin of its own piss-elegance… Maloney is terrific.'
Age

‘A writer who seems to have been sitting on a thousand observations now unleashed.'
Sunday Age

‘The pure pleasure of Maloney's book lies in being plunged so thoroughly into the complicated byways of Australian politics…a fast-paced, fresh, unerringly funny book… Murray is a great creation, one that takes the wisecracking wise guy into a whole new realm.'
Houston Chronicle

‘Maloney has a quirky eye for descriptive details that lend frequent humor to a fascinating and adventurous plot. Highly recommended.'
Library Journal

‘A rollicking good read.'
Brisbane Sunday Mail

S
HANE
M
ALONEY'S
M
URRAY
W
HELAN NOVELS

Stiff

The Brush-Off
(winner of the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel)

Nice Try
The Big Ask

Something Fishy

sucked in

SHANE
MALONEY

TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au

Copyright © Shane Maloney 2007

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part
of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both
the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company 2007

Typeset in 12.5/16 Baskerville MT by J&M Typesetting
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Maloney, Shane.

Sucked in.

ISBN 978-1-921145-44-5 (pbk.).

I. Title.

A823.3

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ghirardelli Foundation, the Cape Liptrap Lodge for Demented Writers, the Patramani family of Episkopi, Crete and Señora Luisa Guzman of Cochabamba, Bolivia.

To my sister, who saved my life in Puno,
and my wife, who helped
.

The author of this book, its setting and characters, are entirely fictitious. There is no such place as Melbourne.
The Australian Labor Party exists only in the imagination of its members. The process by which it selects its candidates for public office is a source of ongoing bafflement.

Prelude

On a cool and overcast April afternoon, a retrenched Repco salesman
from Benalla named Geoff Lyons and his fishing mate, Craig Kitson,
drove the forty-three kilometres to Lake Nillahcootie in Geoff 's Toyota 4
Runner. When they got to the boat ramp, they sat for a minute, staring
out the windscreen.

‘Jeeze,' said Craig. ‘That was quick.'

Geoff said, ‘Told ya.'

The lake, an eight by three kilometre reservoir on the Broken River
where it flows out of the High Country, was almost completely empty.

At the end of January, VicWater had commenced stabilisation work
on the weir wall, a concrete dam constructed in the 1950s. They were
sinking new reinforcement plugs, a project which involved opening the
sluices and draining the lake. Since Craig and Geoff last saw it, the
water level had dropped ninety percent. For the first time in forty years,
the course of the original river bed was visible, its meandering progress
marked by an intermittent line of truncated, long-dead trees.

The two men walked out onto the lakebed, testing the surface. The
gradient was slight and the hot summer and long dry autumn had dried
the clay pan to a firm crust. Craig said, ‘Think it'll take the Toyota?'

‘We get bogged,
'
Geoff warned, ‘you're the one walks to town.'

Closer to the trees, the clay was covered with cracks like the stained
fissures in an old teacup and the sharp edges of blackened stumps broke
the surface of the ground. When the Toyota's traction started to slip, they
got out and walked the last hundred metres, carrying their waders. Craig
took a plastic bucket, just in case they found anything worth keeping.

They had fished Lake Nillahcootie many times over the years,
although they preferred Eildon or, better still, Lake Mulwala. But
Nillahcootie was handy, only half an hour out of town and too small to
interest the watersport crowd. There was a camping ground near the
weir and holiday houses scattered along the shoreline but some weekends
they'd virtually have the place to themselves.

Mostly it was redfin and brown trout on live bait from Geoff 's
tinnie, but they'd also taken some nice rainbows on spinners from the
shore, particularly in the shaded shallows where the trees ran right down
to the water. The Murray cod that preferred the deep holes of the old
river bed had eluded them, however, and cost them some top-shelf
trolling lures on hidden snags.

So they'd come up with the idea of doing a bit of reconnaissance
while the water level was down. A better idea of the lay of the lakebed
might improve their chances when it was again hidden beneath opaque,
red-brown water.

The old riverbed was now a chain of shallow pools linked by a
feeble trickle of muddy water, its surface swarming with midges. All the
useable timber had been cleared before the dam was flooded, leaving only
dead or diseased trees. Their denuded trunks now jutted out of the
sludge, bleached and sepulchral, surrounded by fallen, half-buried logs.
The men followed the river's meandering course upstream, checking their
location against the undulating paddocks and clumps of trees that
marked the shoreline.

Oddments of litter were scattered across the lake floor, mainly old
bottles and cans. They fossicked as they went and within half an hour they'd picked up some metal lures in pretty good nick, an assortment of
wire traces and a slime covered Tarax lemonade bottle. By then, they'd
given up the idea of discovering the hiding places of the fabled cod. No
way were they going to start sloshing around in the murky black water
that now filled the riverbed.

‘Careful.' Geoff pointed to a sinuous grey shape draped over a fallen
tree-trunk. ‘Snake.'

‘You reckon?'

Whatever it was, it wasn't moving. Craig waded through the ankledeep
water and took a closer look. ‘A deadly nylon python,' he called.
One end was buried in the mud, the other disappeared into dark water
between two logs. ‘Could be an anchor rope.'

He straddled the logs and hauled. The rope offered little resistance.
It came up in a loose tangle, slimy and thick with a black mass of
rotted vegetation. Trapped within its coils was a ball of fibrous mud,
an oversized coconut.

‘Hey, check this out,' he called back to Geoff.

‘What is it?'

‘Looks like a skull.'

Geoff came closer, primed for one of Craig's lame jokes.

Craig reached down gingerly, hooked his fingers through the eye holes
and held it aloft for Geoff to see. ‘Human, I reckon.'

The bone was stained tan, the bottom jaw was missing and the
nasal socket was eaten away at the edges, but the shape of the cranium
was unmistakable.

Geoff shaded his eyes with his hand and took a long hard look.

‘Well I'll be fucked.'

I stood at the edge of the grave and sprinkled a handful of soil onto the lid of the coffin, adding it to the mound of clay and carnations. It was a classy box, rosewood with silver handles, befitting its distinguished occupant.

Charles Joseph Talbot, MHR. A cabinet minister in three successive Labor administrations, twice as Minister for Industrial Relations and, until the previous week, member for Coolaroo and manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia. A pillar of the community. An elder of the tribe.