Thrill City by Leigh Redhead

again.’
    ‘Mmm-hmm,’ Isabella murmured as Victoria swanned off.
    Curtis’ phone emitted a jangly version of the Mission Impossible theme, and he pulled it from his back pocket. ‘Malone,’ he said. ‘Speak.’
    It was another thing he did that irritated the hell out of me, and I wondered how a sophisticated woman like Desiree could stick him. Chloe I could understand. She could be almost as annoying as he was.
    ‘Hey, Andi, what’s happening?’ Curtis said.
    Andi was a friend from my childhood, now a journalism student. Three months earlier she’d gone missing; her disappearance was the case that had led to my mum getting shot. Andi hadn’t gotten off lightly either: she’d nearly died, and had to have the lower half of her right leg amputated. She’d sold her story, not for money but for an opportunity to work on the newspaper who’d published it, and was now actually working as a journo while she finished her degree.
    Curtis turned away from me and Desiree, dug his notebook out of his shirt pocket and started scribbling on it. ‘Uh-huh. Yep. No kidding? Shit yeah, I’d be into it. Now? Pick you up in twenty.’
    ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
    ‘A body’s been found just outside of Daylesford. Word on the street is it’s Lachlan Elliot.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Investment banker who disappeared eighteen months ago. Toorak guy. Had links to bikies and organised crime.’
    I vaguely remembered seeing the story in the papers and on the news. There’d been rumours he owed money and had faked his own disappearance.
    ‘It’s gonna be a big one, so me and Andi are teaming up. Malone and Fowler. Has a ring to it, don’tcha reckon? Andrew Rule and John Silvester have had it too good for too damn long. They better get wise there’s a new true-crime team in town.’
    Chloe was lurking behind a pile of books, pretending not to listen, and Curtis did a hair flick to cover his glance back to check she was there.
    ‘Hey, babe,’ he told Desiree. ‘Gotta blow this popsicle stand.’
    She slid her arm around his waist and they performed an ostentatious kiss with rather a bit too much porn-star tongue. Curtis smacked his new girlfriend on the arse, slid on a pair of those mirrored sunnies favoured by American highway patrolmen, and swaggered off into the day.
    I’d had enough of the freak fest and went to find Chloe so we could go home. She was flipping through a book, but when she saw me she hurriedly stuffed it back onto a shelf. I could have sworn it had Sex Secrets of a Thousand Dollar an Hour Callgirl in the title.

chapter seven
    T he next morning I woke with a start, heart beating fast, and it was a few seconds before I realised why. Shit. It was Sunday, November the eighth; Alex was getting married and Sean was arriving back from Vietnam. He was going straight to Alex’s from the airport so I wouldn’t see him until late that night, but I still had a lot to do before then. Hair cut and dyed, nails painted, eyebrows shaped, solarium, Brazilian. Amazing how feral you could turn when no one was getting up close and personal.
    I had a couple of hours to kill before my first appointment, so I got up and drank a plungerful of coffee, pulled on terry-towelling short-shorts and a faded Mickey Mouse t-shirt, threaded the house key into the laces of my ancient, worn-out runners, and headed out for a jog. The path beside the canal ran all the way to the ocean, behind houses where flowering vines curled around fences and indolent cats snoozed in the sun.
    As I ran I thought about the debacle at the festival the day before. It was funny, I’d always thought strippers were the most fucked-up profession, but those writers were sure giving them a run for their money. Perhaps they spent too much time ferreting away in their garrets, living inside their own heads, slowly going mad. It was supposed to be healthy to engage in artistic pursuits, but honestly, sitting on my arse all day writing stories about characters who