Read Online Quota by Jock Serong - Free Book Online

other drinkers were eyeing him now. The bartender flipped the draft tap and swung a pot glass beneath, watching him too. Charlie took his wallet out and began pulling it open in various directions in a vain search for cash.
    â€˜Not to worry,’ said the barman. ‘I’ll open a tab. We got eftpos.’ He went to the sink and brought back a clean dishcloth, rinsed it under the tap and placed it on the bar in front of him.
    â€˜You might wanna…’ he pointed vaguely at the blood.
    Charlie took the cloth and started wiping in an arc around his jaw and across his nose. Neither of them spoke.
    The bartender picked up the remote and flipped to the news. The regional weather girl, so pregnant that her belly obscured the whole of Gippsland, said the rain had three more days to run. Charlie raised the pot glass and drained it; stared back at the bartender, who picked up the pot glass without further prompting and began to refill it. There was silence for a moment as the beer swirled in over the foam tracks of the first pot. He spoke in a quiet, slow rumble.
    â€˜See it’s Friday night and it’s pissing down out there. You walk in alone, wearin a business shirt looks like a Swans jumper, all that blood and shit round your neck. You’ve even got smudges on yer cuffs where you wiped yer brow…’
    â€˜I hit a kangaroo.’ Charlie raised his eyes and looked straight at the big man, searching his face.
    The bartender passed a look over the blood-spattered shirt. ‘Not an axe murderer, then.’ He placed the pot in front of Charlie, froth spilling over one edge and forming a pool on the bar towel. ‘But you got that bag at your feet and every time someone’s moved, you’ve checked it like there’s a bomb in there. The clothes are very Melbourne—well, apart from the blood—and you got indoors skin. Indoors hands too. College hair. Youngish, but you weren’t a footy player. And you speak…very…carefully.’
    He moved in towards Charlie, grabbing the beer taps for emphasis. ‘So you’d be the guy the cops were sending about the Lanegan boy.’ He grinned and moved off down the bar towards the till where he busied himself changing a receipt roll. ‘How’d I do?’
    Charlie swallowed deeply and put the empty pot on the towel again. ‘My name’s Charlie.’
    â€˜Good,’ said the bartender, taking the pot to the taps once again.
    â€˜And you are?’
    â€˜I are Les.’ He proffered his hand and Charlie shook it. By now the old blokes along the bar had given up pretending they weren’t listening. They watched Charlie without any self-consciousness as he lifted the new beer and took a chunk out of it.
    â€˜Leshter,’ called a little man in a beanie. He had no teeth, and his bristly white stubble was stained to sepia under his nose. Les ambled over and the old man prodded his glass with an index finger. Les attended to the refill as the drinker poked coins out of a pile towards him. ‘He here ’bout the Murchishon thingy?’ he croaked, apparently happier to direct the question to the bartender than to Charlie himself.
    â€˜Yep, I think he is,’ said Les.
    â€˜ Haph! ’ barked the old man. Charlie couldn’t pick it for scorn or phlegm, but the small eyes under the beanie were firmly fixed on him now. The knotty index finger came up off the bar towel and was pointed directly at him, the eyes sighting him along the knuckles.
    â€˜Doan you go believing anything that Lanegan cunt tells ya, lad. I tell you now…’ he swept the finger along the bar as though gathering consensus from unseen allies, ‘he’s a lyin dog. An’ whatever he tells ya, it’s all fuggin malarkey. Ya fuggin come ere an ya… ya come ere thinkin we’ll juss be sayin “oh hello missa policeman, can we help ya wiff sommen?” an’ all the silly ol country