The world is anything you make it and for most of my life I have had a million things keeping me awake at night, none more so than last year, when I was shot. Being dead is hard, especially when you are not ready. My son Kirk was in place to assume the head of the family. He had an old head on young shoulders but he lacked the instinct. You need to have a feeling in your gut to so what we do. Logic and strategy will get you so far, but to win the game you need to feel the moves.

Eleven months and fifteen days ago I panicked. For the first time since Mary died, I panicked. There was so much to do. So many moves to put in place. They thought they had killed me. I thought so too. Maybe, in a way, they did.

I have sat at the head of the table, chairman of the board as they say, for most of my life and it has all been to one end. And the bullet that hit me on Beaconsfield Parade took that away. And now I am telling you how the story ends before it has really begun.

I’ve only had one solid belief in life, and that is that most people don’t know what they want. They think they do, but they don’t. So it was my job to show them. And if I used a bit of force to make my point so be it. I never killed anyone until last Thursday. And that was only because they thought I had been dead for a year. And he deserved it.

Moves had been made and time had been cut short. If Kirk was to succeed, if all of the plans I had made were to work, if my life’s work was to succeed it was now or never. He would have to be ready. Deep down, I know he will be ready, because he is my son. And if my life has taught me one lesson above all others it is that nothing is as important as family. And he is my family. All it takes is courage, fortitude and the will of a rampant bull.

10th December

260 Beaconsfield Parade had sat empty for almost one year. Ever since the shooting. Five members of the Hanoi Chiefs had calmly walked up to the front gate and unleashed a hail of bullets. Three people had died instantly. Two intended and one an innocent bystander, a tourist from the nearby docked cruise liner in Port Melbourne.

The house legally still belonged to James Stone but he was believed dead, having been shot multiple times in the attack as he left his house. James Stone had been the single-most feared underworld crime figure in Melbourne for over two decades. Not through violent means. But because of the political and economic control, he had built, he had more enemies than any other known criminal but it was understood that to move against him was suicide.

At twenty-three minutes past four on Wednesday morning, a piece of paper was nailed to the oak gate of 260 Beaconsfield Parade. The nail was a black steel carpet tack, twisted and dirty with age. One firm hit from the hammer did the job with hardly any noise. The note was handwritten with a sharpie. The script angular and controlled. English was not the author’s first language. English writers favour more cursive numerals. Few select to write numbers in italics. All the note had written on it was a series of four numbers:

95478764   98752257   0296267761   88652257

16th February

Cold tea, a stale ham sandwich and a present for a little girl were all that comforted Tom Adler as he stared at the chaos of the papers strewn across the floor in his lounge. Official police documents, photographs of people, places and vehicles. Most of the pictures of buildings were of burned out shells. There was also printed copies of websites showing police busts, reports of gang violence and violent criminal patriarchs being acquitted in court. On a notepad beside Tom on the sofa was a list of names, dates, places and question marks. A tangled mess that only he could understand, and he knew he didn’t know enough yet.

Someone had been burning down buildings known to be used as refuges of Melbourne’s criminal underworld. Tom’s life for the past two years had been taken over by trying to establish who was controlling the safe houses. He had come close, so he thought, a year before. His prime suspect had been an Italian businessman called Anthony Patullo who owned a string of Italian restaurants. Patullo had known criminal connections and had once served two years for a minor tax fraud involving one of his businesses. But when he’d been brought in for questioning he had served up solid alibis for every arson attack. Tom’s boss, Inspector Frank Ingles had apologised to Mr Patullo and ordered Tom to drop the line of enquiry when a civil suit for police misconduct had been filed by the barrister Bernard Schmid Esq. on behalf of Anthony Patullo.

Something was missing. Tom knew his gut was right. Patullo’s alibis were too good. They left no room for error. Tom couldn’t recall, for certain what time he had lunch the day before, but Schmid had tabled a diary down to the minute of Patullo’s movements that apparently proved his client could not have possibly been near any of the arson sites, let alone have the time to mastermind a criminal venture on that scale. Nobody was that precise. Especially when they had a chain of restaurants to manage.

Schmid’s filing was seeking damages of over three-quarters of a million dollars from lost business revenue, legal expenses and a loss of future earning from a damaged public appearance.

Inspector Ingles had levelled it squarely on Tom’s shoulders. Tom was on a slippery slope. He could feel his career slowly dissolving.

When Tom had been transferred to Victoria Police’s recently formed Anti-Gang Squad one of the older detectives had taken him under his wing. Sergeant Koehler had told him about the secret truth—an idea that binds everything together. Each case had one, somewhere. Once you found it the jigsaw completed itself. The difficulty was knowing when you had found the edges of the jigsaw. Without the four corners, you couldn’t begin or know where to begin.

Tom had one corner so far. Patullo. He needed to find the others while he had a career to save.

Another drink from the beer bottle drained the last dregs. Tom slumped back into the sofa that came with the room. It was covered in the detritus of all those destitute souls that had rented the room before him. He faced another night alone in the Merriule Guest House. Another sleepless night fighting to stop his mind running at a thousand miles an hour. He had just finished his last beer and couldn’t summon the energy top walk to the bottle shop for another six-pack.

The occupant in the next room was having a loud argument with himself again. Tom had only been a resident of the guest house for seven weeks. His marriage had finally crumbled to dust. Lisa, his now estranged wife asked him to move out. He figured after a few weeks he would be back in the family home but seven weeks on he was slowly growing used to life in the seedy world of cheap single-bed rooms to let.

He took a long drink from the beer in his hand. The Merriule had cable television but it Tom always hated the mind-numbing TV shows and chose, instead, to watch movies on his laptop. People had tried to get him into TV shows. Binge watching. But that needed a time commitment that he just couldn’t give himself. Moves were like one-night stands. Exciting for a couple of hours and forgotten quickly the next morning.

Tom had never had a one-night stand.

He’d give anything to go back to Sunbury in the 1990’s and start again so his marriage would survive.

Forty-one years old and obese if you believe in the Body Mass Index. Shirts never fitted him right. He ended up looking like a gorilla in a tuxedo—arms too long, belly too big and hunched over trying to not look the world in the eye. If he wasn’t in the Victoria Police he would have become and one-man vigilante group. Deep inside he felt like the world promised him happiness with one hand while it sucker punched him with the other and he wanted revenge.

The building manager of the Merriule Guest House had warned him about his neighbour who liked to be called Imlach. He looked to be in his late fifties but could have been fifteen years younger.

The story Tom had been told was that Gregory Dunn, also known as Imlach, had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia most of his life. He’d served time for involuntary manslaughter by unlawful and dangerous act in a secure psychiatric hospital in Fairfield. During an episode, he had started a fight when a good Samaritan chased him down for stealing a woman’s handbag. He claimed the woman told him she was scared of her faux red snakeskin handbag. So, he grabbed it and ran. In the melee that ensued, he pushed his confronter into the path of an oncoming truck. The man was killed instantly. It was all in the past according to the psychiatrist that helped Imlach get released. He had to check into the police station each Friday lunch for the next three years. The system called it social rehabilitation. Tom called it a headache.

Three weeks earlier Tom had got out of bed after a deep sleep following a long shift to find Imlach cooking breakfast in his kitchenette.

Tom locked the door to his apartment to be safe. He wedged the handle with a chair to be double sure Imlach wouldn’t get in again. Someone walked past his door. The footsteps were carefully placed, not the typical half-scurried half-dragged shuffle that most Merriule tenants seemed to share in common. Tom listened in silence. They stopped. He could almost feel whoever it was right through the thin door. He slowed his breathing down. Silence filled the air. His heart thudded. Adrenaline secreted into his veins. And Tom waited. No sound came through the door but Pau could feel the presence. Someone was there listening back. Someone who was unfamiliar with the Merriule.

Tom heard the faintest sound of nylon against cotton. The sound a lightweight jacket makes when the wearer’s arms pull it tight across their back. The person was either reaching for something or crouching down.

Time seemed to ebb slower. Tom edged his ear to the door, trying to hear more. He made sure to make no sound. Then he heard it. The unmistakable sound of the sole of a shoe repositioning on the hallway floorboards. Tom’s force issued weapon was back at the station. If it came to it, he would have to handle the intruder the old-fashioned way. Aggression and strength.

Tom knew the nuances of the door which allowed him to quietly move the chair away, pivoting his body without moving his feet. He unlocked the door and stepped back to prepare his stance making sure he was in the best position for confronting the prowler when they opened the door.

The light coming under the door shifted. Something was being pushed under. Pau watched as an old photograph was pushed under. He stared at the door for a minute that felt like ten but everything was silent.

Yanking the door open in a flurry of sound and bluster Tom stepped onto the hallway. It was empty. The only thing to be heard was Imlach still having the argument with himself in his room.

Tom stepped back inside and picked up the photo. It was old. Nearly twenty years old.

He recognised himself immediately, then the car before he realised who the other two young men were. A cold shiver tore down his spine. He remembered the photo being taken. The nineteen-year-old on his left was Andrew Johnson. On Tom’s right was David Knowles. Johnno and Knowlsey. The three had been inseparable until Johnno was killed and Knowlsey got eighteen years. From what Tom knew, David had died inside of an overdose halfway through his sentence.

Tom had spent most of his adult life trying to keep his past dead and buried with Johnno and Knowlsey. Someone had uncovered it. What little family Tom had didn’t even know of the part of his life that included Johnno and Knowlsey.

On the back of the photo, someone had recently written an inscription. The gloss of the ink stood out against the dirt embedded in the grain of the photo over time. The inscription said:

PAYBACK TIME TOM