It’s not like Anthony ever expected any journey by car to be easy or smooth or to be undertaken in a reasonable amount of time – he had lived in Auckland long enough to get over that expectation.
Back in the 90s, when ‘let’s go and hit the slopes in Howick’ was a new and exciting joke, there had been the night that Mr Hin So, fresh off the boat, had jumped his brand-new car over the median strip and sent Anthony and his mates rapidly from the Vic Park Viaduct to Auckland Hospital.
A decade later – and how many tens of thousands more cars? – the year spent widening the Mangere Bridge on the South Western had resulted in a year of a narrowed Mangere Bridge. Sometimes it took Anthony longer to drive the fifteen kilometres home than it took him to cover the fifteen kilometres home the times he ran.
Then there had been the work at the corner of SH20 and Kirkbride – enormous excavations and constructions all done while maintaining some kind of flow of traffic to the airport. Sometimes the tail was backed up to not far from the bridge. Zero kilometres per hour.
But that Tuesday morning there was a helicopter hovering over Greenwood Road, and a fire engine and more police cars than Anthony had seen before in one place.
Greenwood Road is not Broadway. On one side, behind the wire fence, a mix of harakeke, ti and manuka, the inevitable piles of rubbish – a broken television, a tire, carpet, bottles, a cushion, random pieces of timber, lurid pink artificial flowers, junk mail, a toaster and a fan. On the other side – a green paddock with a herd of black-and-white steers and, beyond that, a line of tall pines.
And at the end of the road, preventing further access, a single policeman – and, held across his chest: the Bushmaster XM15 M4A3 Patrolman assault rifle, used by special forces in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and … on Greenwood Road.
"It seems like a shooting, mate," Sharon Davis told 1 News.
Barnaby McBryde
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