here then some reading might fill in the time
Part 5:
“They looked like front rowers, the guy with the beard, mate, he had biceps like my thighs”
There'd been an incident in the car park, after some words with two big guys with tatts one of the young tradies, a plumber, had left and then crashed into half a dozen other cars. The coppers were there, he was under the limit but he was lying in a foetal crouch coughing uncontrollably and the cops too were coughing, his ute ,with the drivers door open, was skewed into the side of a white van.
“So, I have it that you guys tipped some of that ground pepper there into the vents in his ute, is that right?”
“hey, we didn't break into his car, the windows were open, we didn't have to, we didn't actually TOUCH the car at all, did we Macca?, dumb prick, if we didn't need a laugh we would have given him a belting, but that wouldn't be fair would it?...and we're all about fairness, aren't we Robert?”
Robert nodded enthusiastically, “Absolutely Robert, that's us, nothing but fair”
“So you two are working on the freeway bypass are ya?”
“That's right sergeant, Roberts Earthmoving, get it?”
The cop gave a warm inclusive smile, “yeah, because you're both called Robert....”
The truth was they made him feel very uneasy, their confidence didn't necessarily inspire the same in others, the young bloke lying on the ground out in the car park was obviously not a good reader of people, and he'd come a cropper.
“So, I'm not a lawyer but I'm not sure there's much you can charge us with is there pal?”
The policeman, looked back out the window, “Probably not but you won't make a lot of friends around here with stunts like that”......
The Roberts, Paterson and MacDonald couldn't have cared less. They'd met in the boys home, Patto was smart and Macca was fast, and they were both strong. In their minds they were superheroes, they helped themselves to life and they figured the whole “take from the rich and give to the poor” involved too much adverse attention so they took from the bad, and gave to themselves.
They went from avenging their own perceived wrongs to those on other boys in the home, they stood over wardens, they exacted bizarre and long-winded retributions on bullies, they shook down anyone who had a secret.
The army had served them well but it hadn't been what they were looking for, they'd joined straight from the boys home in Goulburn. Full of anger when they joined, a righteous anger that sent them looking for people to break, like they'd been broken. Not just anyone, but those who looked for prey. They liked hurting people, that was true but where was the fun in hurting the innocent or the weak. It wasn't long before they realised that they were fighting other people's fights and politics wasn't for them. From there they'd gone into security, high end security, international stuff, rich people like big good looking men to stand around them when they feel threatened, but the ******** factor was too high and they didn't like the limelight, not at all. So they went home, to live the quiet life.
Stand-over wasn't generally regarded as a noble pursuit but they executed it with a strange moral code that satisfied their appetite for mayhem, soothed their life long need for revenge against an unspecified careless and opportunistic foe and made them money, lots of money. The bottom line was that crooks don't go to the police.
They specialized in finding people with lucrative lurks and squeezing them. South East Asia was their playground, Bali, Bangkok, Hanoi, they'd find a mule or a courier or better still a supplier and upset the cart just when the buy was happening. Their skills in IT and counter-surveillance meant they'd find upper level contacts back in Australia and make it their business to drop in.
“Hi, we're the Roberts, we're not sure you know us but we thought you might want this back”,
they'd hand-over a photo of the friend/bagman/operations manager holding a phone up with their bosses number and the barrel of something against their head, they never needed to add,
“We're the guys who took your money”
Their general air of confident menace meant no-one ever went after them, they'd been shot at sure, by strangers and fools but anyone who'd dealt with them closely stayed away from them, and didn't go to the police.
Then they packed it up and cashed out. They'd moved seamlessly back into civvy-street by working for an old friend from the army in excavating, they worked hard, they payed tax.
“We'll buy the business” they said when he told them his wife wanted to move back to Tasmania to look after her mother, “how much?'
“Holland offered me one point two”
They gave him an apartment in Docklands, 10 thousand BHP shares and half a million in cash. He stared at the money,
“what am I going to do with that?”
“What?, do you think it's stolen?
The Roberts laughed,
“Bernie, it isn't stolen. A very important man gave us that in exchange for his clean reputation, and he paid the tax on it for us, it's as clean as clean can be, go to Tassie, you're off the hook”.
They bought new machines, they busied themselves with the crooked affairs of their competitors and suddenly the tenders started flowing in.
The bypass job was good, they'd picked up culvert work and redressing jobs but this was a strange little town and they'd been ****ed with, someone had ratted their site office and stolen valuable stuff but also some computers that they didn't want lying around. The young tradie was a smartarse, he was on the gear and when stuff goes missing those guys are a good place to start looking, but he was a dill, not an old crook and somewhere round here, like everywhere, there'd be a fence and that piqued their interest.
“Small world”...it was the sergeant from the night before, out of uniform. They'd been talking to the bearded bear about his 47 Knucklehead and the copper was sitting next to him on a Norton, grinning. The sun was shining and a row of bikes stood on the grass, families walking past the smell of food and the sound of animals in the air.
“Yeah, we've got a few bikes, I'm looking for one of those” he said as he squatted next to the Harley
”but prices have gone a bit silly, you can buy two new ones for the money you need for a 47 in good nick”
“you blokes locals?”
“Yeah, I've got a bike shop, called Rusted On in the main street”
“Ah that's you”
“What about you blokes?”
Macca pointed at the policeman, “he'll tell you”
“This is Robert and Robert, they're working on the bypass, they like spicy food shall we say”
Norm, the bear, nodded in mock understanding and ever so slightly raised his eyebrows.
“The sergeant here has us down as bad guys, but trust me, we're the good guys” said Patto as he met eyes with a bystander who, for him, was listening a little too closely.
