The Big Whatever Read Online Free Page B

followed. Then I stopped. “Wait a sec.”
    Cathy was standing with the screen door pushed half open behind her. She tilted her head, waiting.
    Now this Drew character was – had been – an unloved piece of work: he’d been disowned by his rich family, who were no doubt a pack of cunts but maybe had a point in this case, because the guy was without scruples of any kind.
    Being of the moneyed class however, he was also a member of the yachting fraternity. And that corpse lying there, bleeding now, was super tanned, the hair sun-bleached. So Sherlock Mel gerried: he was just back from a voyage – he’d brought the hash in. And was suddenly convinced: there was more stuff here, dope, who knows what.
    To Cathy I said, “We’re not finished here. Keep your wits about you.”
    Next to the chair Drew had recently vacated was an overnight bag. I peeked inside. A couple of plastic shopping bags. Smaller bags inside them. A lot more . . .
    I closed it up, slung it over my shoulder. “All right, Cath. Off we fuck.”
    We couldn’t go back to the Castle, obviously, because Dutch Harry would have wanted some dope or his money back. Even with the .38, neither of us was too keen on another showdown right then. But we couldn’t exactly hang around either.
    The Joker was closed that night, so we drove to the back entrance, took Drew’s overnight bag inside and checked our booty.
    Three more blocks of hash and what looked like a hundred or so tabs of acid. Also a sandwich bag of double-O caps, with sparkly white powder in them that we judged to be cocaine. Now this may sound strange to you youngsters, but back in 1969 – not so long ago, but in some ways another fucking epoch – people weren’t so interested in powder drugs, especially coke. A touch of heroin laced on a joint for special occasions, okay. But powders generally? Nah, not really.
    There was one more sandwich bag with a dozen buddhasticks in it. And at the very bottom a bottle of mandies – that’s Mandrax to you sticklers for accuracy, or what the R&R blokes called Quaaludes. I dropped a mandy to ease the jingle-jangle. All grist for the mill.
    We had a drink, then decided to drive to Melbourne, five hundred miles away. Right then. Fuck it. Why not? It seemed like the idea just kind of materialised naturally, on its own. When I thought back, of course it had come from Cathy. Anyway, sights were set on Melbourne, cool sister city of the south. But first we needed to get shit sorted out.
    I lugged my Hammond into the station wagon – I’d chopped the thing down years before, best thing I ever did. It was still a bastard to move, but I could do it on my own with a dolly, and the thing was worth the hassle – it was my meal ticket. I took some bread from the safe – Sorry again, Johnny, but I was more than slightly CRAZY by that stage – and grabbed a change of clothes (I kept stage gear there), then we split. We stopped by Cathy’s pad, the Koala Motor Inn near Taylor Square, cleared out her stuff, topped up on purple hearts . . . and we HIT THE ROAD .
    The wee small hours. We were on the Hume Highway eighty miles out of Sydney.
    It was too bad about the dead guy back at Bondi Junction. Don’t get me wrong, my friends, I believe in the sacred law of karma and I wholly and unreservedly subscribe to the principles of peace and non-violence. But it was hard to think anybody in the world would really miss Drew. Maybe in some crazy way, Cathy had played her part in the cosmic drama by shooting him, just as I was playing mine by driving us to Melbourne with my Hammond B3 loaded in the back, those bags of dope hidden about the car, and a couple of fat money rolls in my pocket. Theologians and philosophers among you can go figure that one out.
    In truth, I felt much worse about Johnny, about leaving him stuck in the middle of it all. Before we’d left the kitchenback there, Cathy had