Gunshine State Page 10

  After dinner Kate and Chance watched TV, went for walks around the park, or sat in front of the cabin, enjoyed the late summer evenings, the balmy air, alive with insects. One night, they broke Dao Ming’s strict instructions, drove an hour to Canberra, Australia’s ‘Bush Capital,’ ate overpriced restaurant food and drank beer in a student bar that smelled like a toilet.

  Neither of them had talked much about what had happened in Surfers, what would happen next, but a vague awareness that their time here was coming to an end had taken root in his mind the previous night. They’d been watching TV after dinner when a segment came on recapping the events in Surfers Paradise. Stock footage of the officious female cop in charge of the investigation, Gao’s hotel, a cop lifting blue- and white-chequered crime scene tape to allow a body to be wheeled out on a gurney from Curry’s house. It cut to a female reporter talking to the camera about the lack of progress, pressure on the Surfers Paradise police to come up with answers, questions of their competence, thinly veiled innuendo about their possible involvement.

  He and Kate watched in silence, unsure of what to say. He’d gone to bed half expecting the police to come crashing through the door at any moment, weapons drawn, slam him to the floor while they cuffed him.

  Chance watched a flock of white cockatoos explode from a nearby gum, screech across the sky.

  The lack of progress in the investigation made no sense. The female cop in charge of the case was no mug, he could tell that much from the footage of her press conference. The police would almost certainly have the gun, his prints all over it. From there, it should not have taken much to crack his false identity. His face should be all over the media, but there was nothing.

  He was roused from these thoughts by the creak of the front screen door. He saw the curve of Kate’s outline against the sun.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hey yourself.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ She passed him a mug, steam rising from it, perched herself on the front step.

  ‘Better each day.’

  Chance lit a rollie, dropped the match into the tin can they used as an ashtray, offered the tobacco pouch to Kate.

  ‘Who would have thought we’d have a circus on our doorstep,’ she said as she took the pack.

  Chance sipped the coffee, dragged on his cigarette to remove the bitter taste. They only had instant, which Kate always made too strong for his liking.

  She looked up from rolling her cigarette. ‘How’s the coffee?’

  ‘Is that what you call it?’ Chance made an exaggerated grimace. ‘For a second I thought I was back in Afghanistan, captured by the Taliban, and they were forcing me to drink this as some sort of torture.’

  ‘Very funny.’ Kate lit the smoke. ‘So, you’re not going to report me to Dao Ming for heading into town to get the CD player?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks, she scares me.’

  ‘She’s a piece of work, that’s for sure.’

  Kate picked a strand of tobacco off her lip. ‘How’d you hook up with her and her old man, anyway?’

  ‘By accident, like most things in my life.’

  Chance spared her the details, another job that had gone sour, bullshit over money and personalities.

  ‘How much longer do you figure we’ll be able to stay here?’ Kate looked away as she spoke, tried to feign disinterest. Chance felt apprehension nibble at the edge of her voice.

  ‘The police, Gao’s people, they’ll be looking for us. We’ll need to move soon.’

  ‘Will Long help us? Can you trust him?’

  ‘He’ll help as long as it suits him, which it does at the moment because he knows if we get caught, we’ll lead the police to him. But there’s a limit to his generosity.’

  ‘What are you going to do when you leave? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to ride on your coattails,’ she added when he didn’t answer immediately. ‘I’m just being nosy.’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Strange, I thought someone in your line of business would always have a contingency plan in place for when things go wrong.’

  ‘My line of business?’

  ‘Come on, you know what I mean.’

  ‘You’re wrong about me, I’m not the world’s biggest planner.’ Chance pulled at the stub of the missing finger.

  ‘Does that make you angry?’

  ‘You going to psychoanalyse me now?’

  ‘I don’t have to. Playing with your missing finger, I’ve figured out it’s your tell, what you do when you’re angry.’

  ‘Do I? I never thought about it like that.’ Chance looked at the missing digit. ‘Maybe I’ll try my luck in the opal fields to the northwest. Supposed to be the real outback. You?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to spend more time in Asia. Maybe I’ll take that fake ID your mate Long is fixing for me, head to Korea or Japan. I’ve heard there’s good money working as a hostess.’

  They were both silent, aware the conversation was edging them into unfamiliar territory.

  ‘Listen to me. I’ve slept with men for money, lived with a drug dealer, then a couple of retired gangsters. Now I’m looking at a lifetime of running because of what happened a couple of weeks ago. Do you honestly think I give a shit what’s happened in your past?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Chance.

  A lot of people spent their lives navigating the line between right and wrong, the life they lived and the life they wanted to live. Chance just accepted things, seldom questioned where they led him. This life, being paid to steal, sometimes to drive people who stole, it was just something he’d drifted into, like joining the army. His whole life had been a series of decisions made without regard for what came next and where it landed him.

  Chance had left the army after Afghanistan, drifted. There was nothing fucked up or post-traumatic about it. His old life was just a skin he’d shed. When he tried to put it back on after returning, it wouldn’t fit.

  ‘I tried to go back to the way things were after the army, but they just didn’t work out,’ said Chance slowly. ‘I was working in a nightclub when I made a decision to get involved in something, a robbery. It ended very badly.’ Chance held the stump of the missing finger up for effect.

  Her eyes on his, she reached out, wrapped her big fingers around it. Chance was taken aback by the gesture.

  ‘Tell me the story,’ she said.

  ‘I busted a guy called Noonan for selling speed to a couple of underage girls in a club I was bouncing. I was about to throw him out when he started going on about a sweet little score he was hatching to knock over an ecstacy lab that was cooking a batch to sell at a dance party in the city the coming weekend.

  ‘I needed the money, a circuit breaker to get me out of Melbourne and started somewhere else. Noonan needed backup. ‘A piece of piss,’ he told me. ‘Just stand there and look scary; I’ll do the rest.’’

  EIGHT

  Chance and Noonan entered the drug lab through the back. The two cooks inside made no effort to resist, just looked up from their chemistry equipment and smiled.

  ‘Old man Aydin is going to be mighty pissed at you two,’ the taller of them said.

  Chance recognised the name from stories in the city’s tabloid newspaper. Aydin, Turkish for ‘enlightened,’ not a term anyone would have ever used to describe one of Melbourne’s most feared drug dealers and his extended family of pit-bull sons.

  Chance shot Noonan a what the fuck look.

  ‘Don’t tell me you two brain surgeons don’t even know whose lab you’re ripping off?’ the tall one added with a laugh, at which point Noonan shot him twice in the chest. He would have shot the other man had Chance not restrained him.

  After that their only option was to grab the drugs and get as far away as possible.

  Noonan had been driving. He’d taken one hand off the steering wheel to reach for the mobile phone, ringing in his jeans pocket, took his eyes off the road just as they were about to take a
corner, lost control, and their car swerved and shot over the side into a ravine.

  When Chance opened his eyes the world was upside down and Noonan headfirst through the windscreen. He felt like he was floating but there was no water, only a blast of cold wind from the hole in the windscreen.

  Chance released his seat belt, opened the passenger’s door and crawled into the freezing embrace of the snow. He pulled Noonan’s body from the overturned vehicle, laid it on the snow, grimaced as he felt for a pulse and found nothing.

  He stood and took in his surroundings. At least half an hour had elapsed since they passed the last green pre-fab buildings in Marysville, erected to replace those devastated by the bush fire that had ripped through the town several years earlier. A blanket of snow covered the slope on either side. Blackened tree trunks protruded like gnarled hands trying to claw their way out from underneath.

  It would be dark soon. He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie. Good clothes for knocking off an ecstasy lab, not for spending a night in freezing weather. The deceptively deep snow had already soaked through his sneakers. Chance felt a slight numbness he knew would eventually lead to hypothermia.

  He removed Noonan’s boots. Size ten, at a guess, one size smaller than Chance wore, but they’d do.

  ‘Sorry, mate, I need these more than you,’ he said as he unthreaded the laces. He eased the polar fleece jacket from the corpse, wiping it against the snow to remove the worst of the blood, found a thick roll of money in one of the pockets. Noonan must have swiped it during the robbery when Chance wasn’t looking. The drugs had been in the back seat of the car. He went back to look for them, saw the plastic bag had come undone, tiny multi coloured pellets spread all over the inside roof of the upturned car.

  It was almost dark by the time Chance reached the road. He walked down the middle of the two lanes, unsure which direction he was headed, hoping to Christ to see headlights in the distance.

  The cold was becoming unbearable, and Chance was on the verge of surrendering to the urge to lie down, give up, when out of the corner of his eye he caught a pinprick of yellow several hundred metres to his right. He ran toward it, almost colliding with an iron gate. It was padlocked. He clambered over it and walked briskly down a track recently cleared of snow.

  The house was old, a bushfire survivor. Soft light glowed in the windows, smoke curled from the chimney. Chance crouched next to a woodpile and scoped the area. There was no sign of any dog and the carport was empty. He fingered the 9mm Beretta in his belt, thought better of it. He put the gun under the domed lid of a nearby barbecue half submerged in snow, stepped onto the porch and knocked.

  He was about to knock again, when the door swung open to reveal a woman. She gazed at him impassively.

  ‘Please, I don’t mean you any harm,’ Chance stammered. ‘I’ve been in an accident. I just need something to eat and a place to stay tonight. I promise I won’t be any trouble and I’ll be gone in the morning,’ he continued in the face of her silence. ‘I have money.’ He fumbled for the cash. ‘I can pay you.’

  She stepped aside, nodded to him to enter. Chance walked past her to the far end of the room where a large open fire crackled. He sank to his knees in front of it and stretched his hands toward the flames until the heat started to hurt.

  He showered and changed into fresh clothes the woman had placed on the bathroom floor for him, grey tracksuit pants and a faded Harley Davidson T-shirt.

  Chance stood in the kitchen doorway, drying his short black hair with a towel slung around his neck, and watched the woman stir something on the stove, her back to him. She was as tall as Chance, with a slim, almost boyish figure under her tight blue jeans and black turtleneck sweater.

  ‘Thanks.’ Chance kept rubbing his hair with the towel.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me stay.’

  ‘It is not a problem.’

  Her accent sounded Eastern European, exactly where Chance couldn’t tell and didn’t suppose it mattered.

  Chance leaned against a bench, looked sideways at her. The woman had a narrow face and large brown eyes accentuated by the whiteness of her skin. She had a crooked mouth that sat in a slight pout when closed. Her shoulder-length, jet-black hair was unkempt, the fringe falling over her eyebrows. There was a small tattoo of a black star on her neck.

  ‘If you’re not going to tell me where you’re from, at least tell me your name,’

  ‘Irina.’

  ‘Irina, I’m Gary. Do you live here by yourself?’

  ‘No.’ Her attention remained focused on a saucepan of food on the stove. ‘With my husband, Rocky.’

  Chance hadn’t noticed any sign of a male presence in the bathroom or the rest of the house. Come to think of it, the place was empty of the usual tell-tale signs of co-habitation; no photos on the wall, none of the shit couples amassed in the course of their lives. It suddenly occurred to him he’d seen no telephone or computer, either.

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘Rocky works as a security guard in the city during the week, comes home on weekends.’

  ‘You must get lonely during the week,’ said Chance.

  She shrugged, her gaze fixed on the pot on the stove.

  ‘Do you have friends, people who visit?’

  ‘Rocky doesn’t like visitors.’

  ‘People you go and see?’

  ‘Rocky doesn’t like me leaving the house.’

  ‘I see. What else doesn’t Rocky like?’

  ‘People who ask too many questions.’ She inclined her head in his direction and gave him a thin smile to take the edge of her statement. ‘Now go and sit in front of the fire. The food will be ready soon.’

  They ate in silence. After she’d cleared the dishes, she led him to a single mattress in an empty room at the back of the house. He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

  Chance was awakened by a hard poke in his side. Irina stood in the corner, a pink terry cloth dressing gown wrapped around her, a look of panic on her face. A narrow-faced slim woman in a tight blue uniform stood above him, nudged his stomach with her booted foot.

  Chance saw the small truncheon she held in one hand. With a fluid movement she raised it and brought it down, sent him crashing back into darkness.

  He came to facedown on cold, hard tiles. The bathroom. His head throbbed. He attempted to get up but one of his ankles was cuffed to the metal pipe connected to the old-fashioned cistern.

  The slim woman sat on the edge of the bath, smoking. Irina sat at her feet, a purple bruise on the right side of her face, a dark ring around one of her eyes.

  The woman dropped what was left of the cigarette on the floor and ground it under her boot as she looked at Chance.

  ‘Where’d you put the ecstacy?’

  The woman’s gaze remained fixed on Chance as she produced an asthma inhaler and sucked deeply.

  ‘What ecstacy?’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me.’ She ran a hand across her short brown hair. ‘I hate people lying to me. Makes me very cranky. Irina tells me you turned up covered in blood, said something about being in an accident. Meanwhile, I hear on my scanner the cops found a wrecked car several kilometres down the road from here. Said vehicle matches the description of one last seen leaving the scene of a drug heist in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne yesterday afternoon. Two people were seen driving away in the car, but the cops only found one body.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Chance.

  ‘Okay, okay, have it your way.’ She shook her head, stood up and left the room.

  ‘What the fuck is happening?’ whispered Chance.

  ‘Rocky came home early in the morning, saying something about having a fight with the people she usually stays with in Melbourne,’ Irina said moving closer to him.

  ‘That’s Rocky? How the fuck did you get mixed up with her?’

  ‘I am illegal in your country. Rocky says she will report
me to immigration if I try and escape. I am a prisoner in this house.’

  ‘I don’t have the drugs. It’s the truth, I left them back at the car.’

  Irina shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter, she will kill you anyway.’

  Chance thought for a moment. ‘My gun. It’s underneath the barbecue out front. You have to go and get it.’

  Before she could answer, Rocky returned, carrying a heavy gunmetal toolbox, and placed it on the floor in front of Chance. She clattered around in the box for a moment, held up a large pair of wire cutters for him to see. Then, with surprising strength, she grabbed Chance’s hand, splayed his fingers out and rested a little finger between the cutter’s blades.

  ‘This is how it’s going to work. I’ll ask you nicely once more, and if you don’t answer, I’ll cut this little finger off. Then I’ll start on the others, working all the way down to your dick, comprehendo?’

  Irina spoke rapidly, English interspersed with a language Chance couldn’t understand. ‘Rochelle, dorogay—darling, please he never did anything, I swear it.’

  ‘Shut up with the mongrel yapping of yours, woman,’ Rocky responded, still holding Chance’s finger in the cutters. ‘Go and get something to clean the bathroom. This is going to get messy. Okay, hot shot.’ Rocky looked at Chance, the cutters poised. ‘Where are the drugs?’

  ‘Rocky, please, come on, mate, there’s no need for this. Surely we can negotiate something—’

  Chance screamed, nearly passing out as he watched his blood gush from the severed joint of his little finger.

  Rocky took a hit on her inhaler.

  ‘I’m afraid the time for negotiating is over, sunshine,’ she said, moving the blades to the next finger.