Read Online The Courier's New Bicycle by Kim Westwood - Free Book Online Page A

clearly mutual.
    I push back in my seat to unbend my too-long legs and place my feet on the dash beside Donald. Anwar fishes in a duffle bag and passes me his thermos. Hot chocolate. I’m grateful — and mildly guilty that I hadn’t organised anything to share with him for the long haul.
    â€˜Moon’s close to full,’ he observes.
    â€˜All trades tonight,’ I agree.
    With no artificial light of any sort, Fishermans Bend is a preferred location to barter contraband. In moonlight it also becomes a playground for the drag racers, who command the wide empty streets with their illegal souped-up rides, racing each other without lights on. I think of Ferguson’s paint factory, and wonder if its upstairs office will be visited tonight.
    After several minutes, no movement in the shadows opposite, Anwar puts on his overcoat and I pocket my canof mace. We lock the van and walk carefully over to the EHg building. Behind us, choppy planes of ink-black water shine like freshly poured tar, and waves slop under the lone wooden pier, nudging at its mooring bollards. A regular ferry service used to stop here, and in happier times there’d be a row of hopefuls casting their lines into the not-so-clean waters of the bay. Unfortunately, the seafood caught in the Yarra Basin lost its appeal once it was discovered that the mercury levels in the fish had reached percentages high enough for folk to start filling their own thermometers.
    Anwar leads and I follow, our torch beams flicking across the broken architecture. I’m glad not to be searching here alone.
    We enter the rear of the building, passing glass-divided labs with aisles of benchtops and shattered sinks, then the powder-preparation rooms, their ransacked containment cabinets all doors open. Beyond that is office space, the equipment long gone and nothing of interest.
    It’s the same at NatureCure, so we move on to BioSyn. There we find three people sprawled semicomatose in a corner and rudely give ourselves permission to rifle through their stash. But it’s not any stuff marked with EHg’s logo, just some brandless feel-good-then-die crap laced with God-knows-what gut-rotting, brain-sizzling impurities. We hand it back and leave them moaning incoherencies in their grotty corner.
    On our return recce of Barrow Road and the business parks behind it, we stop several times to peer throughwindows and try locked doors, and once to investigate a movement between buildings that turns out to be two people grinding their pelvises into each other against a wall. We even swing by the paint factory, shining a light on its front entrance to check for the flag — not up. There’s nothing anywhere to suggest the presence of a packaging operation or distribution site.
    Our last stop is the Ponds on Reserve Road. Several vehicles are already in the picnic parking area, none of them what you’d call flash, so ours fits right in. I grab a blanket from the back of the van. Not exactly the height of sartorial elegance, but who cares on a park bench? Time to sit and see what’s on offer.
    The moon rides the zenith, and the place fills with flitting shadows. Night creatures — some animal, some not — move between the windbreaks and flurry disconcertingly in the sedges. Forget the wildlife; the cruisers and bruisers are here for sex and kit, both willing to trade what they have for the other. I grip Anwar’s arm unashamedly and pray that no one comes at us with a knife.
    Across the next bum-freezing hour we get a number of propositions — a few drug-related, a few carnal, and a few quite difficult to picture — but no offers of EHg-labelled kit. We return to the van then head up Reserve Road to the T-intersection with Barrow, swinging right into the driveway of Enzo’s Auto Wreckers.
    The sign is a gleeful mechanic wielding a giant hammer above a ramshackle car. It hangs precariously by one corner.Behind it is a workshop