Wayne Crabbeleft the club about 1 a.m. and let himself into his half of the townhouse in Leichhardt. He couldn't wait to spend some time with the files he'd just traded. The boy in the last one looked about six. He slid his hand up the wall to flick on the light switch.
'Fuck.' A frenetic blur in the doorway near him. A punch slammed into his gut. He felt slow, strangely disconnected from everything.
Wayne's hand missed the light switch again as he slipped on something wet on the floor. What the fuck was going on here? Suddenly he was looking up. Someone's shoe filled the right of his peripheral vision. He felt, rather than saw, a person standing over him, everything blurry.
'Let me get up. I'll get money for you,' he said.
Wayne Crabbe screamed for the first time since he was ten when a boot kicked in most of his front teeth. Punches rained down into his body and he curled, like a slug doused in lemon juice.
Fuck, he thought, trying to stand, slipping again in the wet stuff.
'Stop,' he managed around broken teeth, and heard his attacker laughing, or maybe crying.
The blows continued onto his back, neck. He felt the weight behind them, but little pain. He raised a hand limply to try to defend himself, and felt a knife slice through the web of his thumb. When blood rushed up from his stomach and filled his lungs, mouth and nose, it occurred to him that he was being stabbed, not punched.
This wasn't how tonight was supposed to go, he thought, as he drowned in his own blood in the front hall.