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MELBOURNE - Early each morning, the western end of Melbourne's CBD trades its red-eyed bar patrons for fresh, sober office workers.
Drunks call out to women in suits, a man urinates against a wall as the sun rises and polished shoes step around a patch of vomit.
It's an uneasy exchange, uncomfortable sometimes, but not unsafe. No one expects to be shot dead on the road.
Yesterday at 8.15am, a man left a King St nightclub and fired a gun at three people, killing one, at the corner of nearby Flinders Lane and William St.
"He just went bang, bang, bang, there was no mucking around," one witness said.
Paramedics tried to save the 43-year-old Melbourne lawyer, but by mid-morning his body lay beneath a white sheet under a sign pointing to the city's immigration museum.
The solicitor had tried to help a woman fighting with the gunman, named by police as Christopher Wayne Hudson. Police said the lawyer's last act was one of "extreme bravery".
Detective Inspector Stephen Clark said: "It really strikes at the heart of all investigators to see somebody who's going about their daily life to be killed in such a tragic way."
The woman and another man, also a passer-by, were critically wounded.
Hudson, 29, a member of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, fled along Flinders Lane and a gun was later found at a nearby building site.
A police helicopter hummed above the city and black bullet-proof vehicles drove past the top end of town with lights and sirens blaring.
At the top end of Collins St, people wondered what the excitement was all about.
"Apparently there's been a shooting, there's a gunman on the loose," one woman offered.
In Melbourne's crisp Monday morning air, with cafes busy and traffic flowing, the idea sounded impossible.
But at Barcode nightclub on King St, two uniformed officers guarded a blood-stained doorway.
The venue, surrounded by strip clubs, plugs itself as being "licensed to thrill".
Around the corner, office workers waited to cross a police line to their building at 15 William St.
In the foyer of the same building, witnesses waited to give statements. They were men in suits, with elbows on knees and hands clasped below dangling ties, staring through glass doors to the empty road.
-AAP
