the right thing to do...

If the hooker had looked dead when we first picked her up at ‘Les Girls’, she looked even deader now.
‘Did you kill her, Brain ?’
‘No, she took another shot of smack a while back and then she just collapsed. She’s been like that for a few minutes. Check her pulse. Is she dead ?’


I leaned over the unconscious girl and placed a finger on her carotid artery. She had no pulse whatsoever, although I’ve since learned that the carotid artery is apparently in a different position to where I was pressing, so that may have explained it. Nevertheless, at around 2am I pronounced her dead, which did not suit ‘The Brain’ at all…
‘She can’t be fucking dead.’
‘Well she is…so what are we going to do about it ?’
‘No, no, no…she can’t be. Get a mirror and hold it in front of her mouth…see if she’s breathing at all.’
Now that was a surprisingly good idea from ‘The Brain’, so off I went in search of a suitable mirror. All of them were either attached to walls or simply too large to be practical but eventually I found a shaving mirror in ‘Scary Bob’s’ bathroom, which I unscrewed from its extension arm and brought back into the lounge room. I held the shaving mirror in front of the girl’s face while ‘The Brain’ supported her head gently.
‘Breathe you cunt, breathe,’ begged ‘The Brain’.
There was nothing; no respiratory vapour condensing on the mirror at all. This chick was as dead as she appeared according to our thorough medical examination. Of course, in our diagnostic haste, we had failed to consider that shaving mirrors were specifically designed not to fog up…but that fact wouldn’t occur to me until a few hours later.
‘She’s toast, Brain. We have to call the cops and report this.’
I may not have been a brilliant doctor but as a Year 3 student of the law, I was fairly sure about the correct procedure for dealing with corpses.
‘No way, no cops…’
‘Are you fucking kidding me, Brain. We haven’t done anything wrong yet. The silly cunt O/D’d…it’s not a crime unless we fail to report it.’
‘I don’t give a shit about the cops but if we call them, then they’ll call ‘Scary Bob’ and he’ll know we were here and then we’ll all wish we had OD’d.’
‘So, what do you suggest ?’
‘We have to get rid of the body.’
‘What ? Who the fuck are you…Ted Bundy ? How do we just get rid of a body ?’
‘We can tie her up, weight her down with rocks or something and throw her in the river…’
Conveniently, the house had frontage on The Lane Cove River, with a private jetty and a small dinghy for getting out to ‘Scary Bob’s’ large cruiser, which was normally moored a hundred metres away.
‘Are you completely insane, Brain…I’m not dumping this body in a river. We didn’t kill her; we’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘OK fine but when ‘Scary Bob’ is called by the cops, while he’s on holiday with ‘Snap’…and has to come racing back to Sydney to sort this out…and he asks me who else was here…I’m going to say ‘Fingers’.’
‘Right…you go find some rope. I’ll be in the garden looking for rocks…’

To be continued…