Lugarno Read Online Free

machine carried less weight. ‘I’m trying for tone,’ I said. ‘Svelte, you know?’
    â€˜Forget svelte. White men don’t get svelte.’
    Just then Detective Sergeant Peter Lo walked into the gym as I was hoping he would. Peter is Balinese, married to an Australian, and the name he goes by is only an approximation of his real name. He wouldn’t have made it into the New South Wales police force a few years back because he stands only about 155 centimetres. But, sign of the times, the cops dropped the height requirement in deference to the changed ethnic mix of the Australian population. In Lo they got a man as smart as a whip packed into a muscular body.
    â€˜Now there’s a man who works out,’ Wes said.
    I nodded and set about doing my insignificant thing on the pec deck. Wes wandered away and I completed my workout, ending with a longer warm down than usual. I kept an eye on Lo. As I finished stretching he was doing concentrated curls using a weight I would have had trouble getting off the floor with both hands. His brown bicep bulged and the veins stood out like blue ropes. He did fifteen, slowly, in a perfect rhythm with each hand, before fastidiously wiping the grip down and restoring the weight to the rack.He saw me watching and walked over. Lo was broad across the shoulders and chest and thick through. He wasn’t strictly speaking a bodybuilder, but his arms couldn’t hang straight by his sides because of his muscularity and the development made him look shorter than he was.
    He flashed a whiter-than-white smile and pushed back his damp hair. ‘Hey, Cliff, done enough?’
    â€˜Not according to Wes, but all I can manage. Can I have a word with you when you’ve finished your Schwarzenegger act?’
    â€˜Sure. I’ll just do a bit of pressing and warm down. We’ll have a coffee down the street.’
    â€˜Does Arnold drink coffee?’
    â€˜He smokes cigars so I bet he does.’
    I didn’t want to see him bench pressing. He practically needed to put every weight in the place on the bar. I showered and waited for him in the Bar Napoli a few doors from the gym. The pace of gentrification seems to have stepped up in Leichhardt over the past few years as if it’s in competition with somewhere else and afraid of being left behind. The Italian flavour is still there but it’s being added to by other cultures. The package is wrapped up nicely in bricked footpaths and newly planted trees and fancy civic signs. You can buy just about anything you fancy eating or drinking or wearing, but you’ll pay for it.
    The kind of workout I do isn’t very tiring, but it gives me a hell of an appetite and I have to remind myself not to undo all the good work. Lo rolled in and sat down and we ordered blackcoffee and raisin toast, no butter. We talked gym talk until the food came and then we concentrated on that.
    â€˜So,’ Lo said. ‘What can public law enforcement do for the private sector?’
    I finished my coffee and signalled to Paolo for a refill. ‘That’s funny. I’ve never thought of myself as being in law enforcement. More like … problem solving.’
    Lo laughed. ‘Me, too.’
    â€˜I’m interested in finding out about the drug scene in a certain part of Sydney.’
    â€˜What part?’
    â€˜Down along the Georges River—Peakhurst, Lugarno, down there.’
    â€˜At a guess, zilch, but it sounds like you know something I don’t.’
    I gave him a heavily edited version of the story. He listened while sipping his second cup of coffee. Mine was getting cold while I talked. Lo nodded several times, which only meant that he was attending, not that he believed me. I finished and drank the lukewarm coffee. ‘If your client had information about illegal activity he’d be in breach of the law in using it for his own purposes. So would you.’
    â€˜Come on,