THE STRANGER ON THE BUS

 

                                           Episode 6      

                                  The Final Invasion

 

   Get it straight: in this town nobody gets by with a little help from his friends.

   Sure, you can go to the parties, you can hang out at the bars and maybe even find yourself some dame to spill your guts to when the city gets too much to take. But the bottom line, when everything's said and done, is that you're out there on your own, with nothing except a fast wit and a crumpled pack of cigarettes between you and oblivion.

   That sort of thing didn't keep me awake at night anymore. I was used to it. I'd been living on the edge too long.

   There weren't too many things that scared Nick Shaw.

   But now I was shaking like a hosed-down tomcat in a draught. And it had nothing to do with cigarettes and booze, either. In the last four days, I'd seen more blood than a Red Cross bank, more needles than a dress factory and more suspicious circumstances than a knife in the back. The pieces of the puzzle had been running through my mind like trapped cockroaches, and I didn't like the way they were coming together.

   A gumshoe isn't always right, but he leapns to recognise the warning signs. And I could see a real ugly pattern emerging.

   Try this one for size...

   Warning One: the Underworld's like a fungus. Stinking. Consuming. Growing. Every city is its garden, and as the city grows, so does its fungus.

   Now according to those cockamamy maps they stick in the windows of U.T.A. buses, Sydney is a city of nine sections. Section 1: the Central Business District: here lies the root of the criminal fungus. Sections 2, 3 and 4: the Eastern Suburbs, the South: they went under years ago. Sections 5, 6, 8 and 9: the West: even here the lowlife had their claws entrenched.

   Today, at last, the final invasion had begun. On Section 7. The North Shore. The silvertails. Us. It was no wonder the kids had been dropping like Morteined mosquitoes.

   My gut had been right all along. My old acquaintances from "The Grocery Store" hadn't suddenly come clean. They were simply moving uptown, to where the kids could afford their expensive and dangerous goods.

   Putting it simply, the Underworld was expanding operations into suburbia.

   Warning Two: In the city, the pushers could distribute their "groceries" by train and by ferry to the parties, the milk bars and street corners. In suburbia, they were stuck with one mode: the buses. Or more specifically, our bus: the 730 from Seaforth.

   Slashed seats were the clue that had been staring me in the face. People hadn't been cutting that padding open for fun. They'd been helping themselves to the "free samples" the Underworld had planted for them. The first dose was always free. Once they were hooked, they'd be paying through the nose.

   So the stuff was moving out to the suburbs- no doubt from the depot via the seats of the 730 bus.

   Just one question-mark remained. When?

   And unless I'd misread the tone of my Wednesday morning death threat something awful, the big invasion was happening sometime soon. Real soon. As in tomorrow: Friday morning: in time for Saturday night's parties.

   That was my theory. It had to be right.

   If it wasn't, I wouldn't be around long enough to get weepy about it.

 

                   *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        * 

 

Here I was, then, on the Thursday afternoon 710, rolling up to the Battle Boulevarde bus stand. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be getting off at this stop today. My destination had suddenly moved to the depot.

   The bus rattled into the kerb. The back doors hissed open. My case went out. I didn't. The doors shut again, and the driver swung his 'empty' bus round the hairpin, up the Boulevarde and onto the main road.

   Empty, that was, save for one crouching passenger.

   A man on his way to the heart of the mystery.

   A man in whose tar-stained fingers lay the fate of Sydney suburbia.

   A man called Nick Shaw...