by Ben Sanders
Sean doesn’t like the wife. She swears a lot. She doesn’t have a job. She has a yen for daytime TV. She ignores Sean when he’s around her, and criticises him when she thinks he can’t hear. Her favourite rhetoric, laden with contempt: ‘Why would you want to look after a kid that’s not even yours? He never says anything. I don’t even know if he can speak. He’s probably retarded or something. Why would you even want to look after a kid like that?’
Sean doesn’t know the answer to that last question. He doesn’t know why Derren would want to look after him. He also doesn’t know why the wife’s wellbeing worries him. Certainly, there’s no reciprocal concern. Regardless, he’s upstairs in his bedroom so he can hear what’s happening and make sure everything turns out okay. He doesn’t even know what they’re arguing about. He thinks maybe they don’t either. But this is the third night of shouting. The second night the wife’s been driven to tears and retreated to the bedroom. Derren isn’t one to offer any slack, though: he follows her in and slams the door and stays on the front foot. He cracks a fist on something hard to emphasise his position on the matter at hand.
Sean sits on his bed and listens. There’s a pattern to the conflict. Snivelling mumbles followed by shouts, in quick, predictable rhythm. He hugs his knees and looks out his window. The house is a big old weatherboard place on a rectangular lot. A wooden fence borders the back yard. Derren keeps things air-force neat: the lawn’s mowed in precise alternating bands. All yard clutter is contained in a shed in the back corner. The bench and barbell Derren uses every day from six-thirty p.m. to seven prior to his run has been stowed indoors. The only sign anything was ever there is two parallel indentations stamped in the grass. Derren takes care to put the bench in a slightly different position every day, so the lawn has a chance to recover.
The view from Sean’s window is a grid of side-by-side boundary fences, none of the yards as tidy as Derren’s, none of the indoor conversations as heated. Next door, a guy’s dumping a plastic bin liner in a metal trash can, ignorant of the nearby conflict. Sean wonders whether people really are clueless to others’ lives. Maybe the bin liner man is only pretending to know nothing of nearby troubles. Derren makes a hell of a racket, and the guy has actually visited a couple of times. He’s sat in the kitchen with Derren and drunk beer, legs stretched and crossed beneath the table, Lion Red perched atop his gut, laughing with the sudden harshness pull-tabs make when you rip them back suddenly. Sean knows the bin liner man likes to complain about his wife. He doubts Derren cares what the bin liner man does to his own wife, and in this respect it’s probably a two-way street. Beer and bloke-chat have forged the bond. Derren will get a free ride from the bin liner man.
Sean gets off the bed and steps to the door. Acoustics are better here. The wife’s tears have ceased. Her volume’s built. Derren’s has, too. Everything overlaps: verbal white noise. Sean’s worried. He knows when Derren gets wound up he can hit people. Sean found out the hard way when Derren found him snooping in his cupboard. Sean hadn’t found much. Some shoe boxes and some clothes, a light blue uniform on a hanger at one end. He’d thought Derren had been outside, mowing the lawn. He hadn’t noticed the motor stop. He hadn’t noticed Derren come up the stairs either. Derren grabbed him from behind by the neck, and he got a jolt that stole his breath. And Derren spun him round and got him face to face, and Sean could smell the rank, hot sweat on him, and see the dust and grime trapped in the perspiration on his neck. And Derren was so pissed off his lips curled inwards on his teeth, mouth just a tight horizontal gash. He pulled Sean close and whispered, ‘If I catch you in here again, you are going to be so sorry.’ His voice whistled softly on the S’s. And then he’d spun Sean round by the collar of his shirt and shoved him out through the door and gut-punched him hard enough to leave him breathless and aching. Then he’d dropped down on his haunches beside him and run a big palm over his chin stubble, said that if Sean ever breathed a word that he’d been hit, Derren was going to use the mower to chop off his little finger. So Sean swore it would be their little secret. And when Carole, the foster lady, came by to check up on him, he stayed true to his word.
Sean remembers it. He remembers Carole, who he quite liked, and he remembers wanting to explain himself to Derren at the time he’d been caught. But innocent curiosity hadn’t seemed much of an excuse to defuse that kind of outrage. He imagines the wife is probably experiencing much the same issue right now. He hears a slap and a thud and the wife’s crying again. Their bedroom door has come off the latch, open about two inches, a thin band of lamplight escaping, but the thought of sneaking a peep makes his bladder feel limp.
He could use the phone. The only telephone is in Derren’s study, but Sean knows how to use it. It’s a rotary dial, big as a cinderblock, colour of old bone. He knows 111 is about the quickest number you could hope to dial. He thinks that’s why 111 was chosen to report emergencies because it’s quick to ring on that sort of phone. A neat consolation prize in the sort of situation that would justify dialling it.
He hears the slap-thud again. He makes up his mind. Derren’s study is at the end of the corridor. He’ll have to pass the bedroom to get there. The phone’s on a desk. He can picture it sitting there, a gleaming and untended portal to a place where people are calm and caring. It’s a quick sprint down a short corridor. It’s a dash across a small room. It’s a scramble across a desk. It’s seconds’ worth of finger work. Nothing.
Do it.
He runs. He passes Derren’s bedroom door. He senses his own shadow blot the stripe of light across the carpet. He’s in the study. He’s at the desk. The handset’s heavier than it looks. He cranks the dial, and it purrs back home. He turns it a second time.
The handset clatters on the desktop as he’s grabbed from behind. He’s lifted and dropped from a great height. The weightless rush of momentary freefall, before he strikes the ground with a crash, and the impact leaves him motionless. He sees Derren step across him, weird and gangly from this low angle, and reach across the desk. He dabs the cradle a couple of times before replacing the handset. He doesn’t say anything. He reaches down and grips Sean by the ankle and pulls him out of the room, and Sean knows he’s in trouble.
TWELVE
TUESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY, 6.18 A.M.
Hale had ignored advice and left the gun loaded, propped against the wall beside the headboard. Rowe’s evening visit had put him on edge. He wanted backup close by.
He showered and dressed and went through to the living room. The ceiling fan was still spinning from the day before. Outside on the deck a pigeon toddled, then rose in a snapping flurry. About him the detritus of a lonely evening: a single unwashed plate, an inside-out Economist. A congregation of empty beer bottles atop a side table. The cardboard LP sleeve of Patti Smith’s Horses.
He sat down on the couch. Alan Rowe’s file awaited him, fat and well thumbed. Charlotte Rowe’s pulped face greeted him at page one. He slipped it free and left it face down on the seat beside him. He flicked through. Paperclipped news articles gave general detail: January third, two armed men robbed an amateur South Auckland cage fighting ring. The club was in a boxing gym off Everitt Road, Otara. Ten dollar entry, the ticket office a caravan parked beside the front door.
The area was low socioeconomic. Crime stats flourished and wealth didn’t. Cage fight fans were secured by word-of-mouth advertising: a promise of cheap liquor and edge-of-seat entertainment. The main event was scheduled for eight p.m. Doors opened at quarter to, closed at eight sharp. Total turnout was two hundred-plus. The ticket caravan was still on the premises at eight twenty-five when two men wearing balaclavas and carrying cut-down shotguns arrived.
Hale document-skimmed: attending officers’ incident forms, CIB progress reports. Blurred photocopies and hieroglyphic cop scrawl. The two guys had axed the lock of the caravan door to gain access and forced the man and woman inside to the ground. Takings for the night were secured inside a floor-bolted office safe. Punches were thrown until the cor
rect code was ascertained. The safe held an estimated twenty-two hundred dollars. The two men bagged it. They were on the way out the door when the woman got brave and made a lunge for one of the guns. A brief scuffle ensued. A shotgun round was discharged through the roof of the caravan before a blow to the back of the head from the axe handle put her back on the floor.
But firearm action drew a crowd. A gym side door broke and seeped onlookers. Matter of seconds, and a throng of forty people choked the parking lot between the caravan and the road. A second shotgun round from the door of the caravan thinned things out. People scattered for cover. A red ’92 Ford Falcon parked kerbside served as a getaway vehicle. The two guys bludgeoned an escape path across the parking lot towards it: the axe, a hammer, chopped-down shotgun stocks to keep onlookers at bay.
The first emergency calls came in at twenty-nine minutes to nine. Collateral damage totalled the man and woman in the caravan, plus five people caught in the exit panic as the two guys fled across the parking lot. Seven people. A four ambulance roll-out, a frantic police Armed Offenders Squad dispatch.
The Falcon had long since disappeared by the time the first sirens were audible. Paramedics gave on-site aid. Among the victims: a young woman, presumably Charlotte Rowe, left unconscious from hammer-inflicted head injuries.
Hale browsed. The assumption was that the break-in was linked to the bank and armoured van robberies the previous year. He checked the back half of the file. October eight, two masked men with shotguns had robbed the Mangere branch of the Auckland Savings and Loan. They hit just after nine a.m., four tellers on just-filled cash drawers, three customers. They went in heavy: shoving, screaming, shotguns to shoulder. They put the customers on the floor and promised fatalities if demands weren’t met. The bank staff paid up tout de suite: two minutes, and almost thirty-eight and a half thousand dollars. Twelve hundred from the teller drawer floats, a little over thirty-seven thousand from the safe. It could have ended cleanly: forty grand profit and no injuries, but they shot a teller. Her name was Janee Tyler. Fifty-six years old, a bank employee for the past seven. The security glass above her counter wasn’t bulletproof. She took most of a shell’s worth of buckshot to the chest. She died within seconds, just as the heist team departed in a gold Ford Laser.
The 16 November robbery had occurred on the Mount Wellington Highway, eleven a.m. An Armourguard security van was stopped at a traffic light. A white Toyota Land Cruiser SUV that had been tailing it since Ellerslie pulled out and blocked the road ahead. Two masked men packing sawn-off shotguns got out and commanded the driver of the van and the front seat passenger to remain in their seats and keep their hands on the dash. They used a circular saw to cut the lock on the van’s side door, and transferred cash bags from the rear load space to the back of the SUV. They gunned all four of the van’s tyres, then escaped southbound. Crime scene photographs of buckshot-scarred tarseal were attached. Sixteen thousand, eight hundred dollars of unmarked non-consecutive bills, gone.
Hale checked the reports. They’d picked a good location. It was a straight, flat section of highway. The driver of the Toyota had an uninterrupted view southbound. The guy guarding the officers in the van would have had a clear line of sight northbound. A two-minute robbery, an easy five-minute run down to State Highway 1, heading away from police deployments out of Panmure and Mount Wellington stations.
All three getaway cars had been found abandoned and torched on rural roads south of Auckland. Heat-stripped to the panelling, windows blown, wheels sunk in claggy whorls of rubber residue. The grand scorecard: one death, seven serious assaults, three burned-out stolen cars, nearly sixty thousand dollars AWOL. Arrests pending.
He got up and set the stereo going: another rendition of Horses. He gathered the beer bottles together on the plate and washed everything in the sink and sat down in the living room again with the file. The Rowe girl’s headshot was still face down on the armrest. He pinched a corner and raised it high, held it to the light from the ranch slider, like X-ray inspection. She must have been pretty. Bad luck has no qualms about where it lands.
His cellphone was on the side table beside the couch. He put the photograph down and called a detective he knew at Manukau CIB.
‘Pollard.’
‘It’s John Hale.’
‘Hale. Jesus, how are you?’
‘Moderate.’
‘You’re early. Haven’t even got my toast in.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Nah. I’m messing with you. I’m straight cereal these days.’
‘What do you know about these robberies?’
A yawn. ‘Which ones?’
‘October eight, November sixteen, the fight club.’
‘Oh. The big three.’
‘Yeah, the big three.’
Pollard said, ‘Screwy jobs. I haven’t been in the middle of them for a while.’
‘I’ll pick your brain anyway.’
‘Yeah. Go on.’
Hale said, ‘How did they link them?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How did you conclude it was the same guys on all three?’
‘I didn’t conclude anything. Someone else did.’
‘And what was the logic?’
‘I don’t know. MOs are similar. Two or three guys, shotguns, balaclavas, no mucking about.’
‘That’s a bit of a loose connection.’
‘Maybe. It’s the sort of crime where if you’re getting three of them in three months it’s going to be the same people. I don’t know. There’s some other stuff too. Apparently, a couple of bars have been hit, but it was clean in and out. No real details. Talk to Sean D about it.’
‘I have. Sean D doesn’t know anything about bars being hit.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he didn’t mention anything.’
‘Oh. Shit.’ Pollard spoke through another yawn: ‘The intel sharing’s been shitty. We’ve had some stuff that hasn’t even been forwarded to the task force because nobody thought to pass it on. Fucking useless. I’ve given up on it. I’m slowly but surely backing out.’
Hale didn’t answer.
Pollard said, ‘Lot of blood and trouble for not a lot of money, you know what I mean? Not that more money would justify it. I don’t know. What’s your interest in it?’
‘Someone wants me to do some digging.’
Pollard laughed. ‘Good luck with that. Hey, I heard Sean D shot a guy.’
‘He did.’
‘Sean all right?’
Hale thought about it. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Mmm. Yeah, I need to give him a ring. Hey, you got time for a story?’
‘Not really.’
‘It’s quick.’
‘Right. Go on then.’
‘You’ll love this. Arrested this guy day before yesterday, Class A drug possession, fairly unpleasant sort of bloke. Anyway, he reckoned his favourite activity was to smoke speed and then hop on a bus, get off at a random stop, and then try to sense where murders had happened. Apparently, the speed gives him psychic powers or something, I don’t know. He reckoned he wasn’t having a lot of success so the other day, before he went out on one of his sessions, he Googled this murder out in Henderson. Some guy called Brent had been axed, something like that. So he smokes his speed, hops on the bus, gets off out in Henderson, and he’s wandering round calling “Brent, Brent, what happened, Brent?” And he’s getting absolutely nowhere, no answer from the ghost of Brent. So he goes home, can’t understand why he’s made no progress, fires up Google again, and this is classic, he finds, oh shit, it’s not Brent it’s Bret.’
‘You’re killing me.’
‘I know, right?’
Hale ended the call, then dialled Rowe’s landline.
‘Rowe residence.’
Not Alan: probably Beck stuck on morning duty.
Hale said, ‘Morning, Wayne.’
‘Is that Hale?’
‘It is.’
‘Mr Rowe isn’t u
p yet.’
‘Wake him for me.’
Beck put him on hold. The dial tone claimed the line for a moment, and then Rowe picked up. ‘It’s not even seven o’clock,’ he said.
‘My apologies.’
‘I hope you’re not calling to back out on me.’
‘I’m calling to tell you I’ll take the work.’
Rowe paused. An alarm chirruped and then cut out. ‘You said you’d call today.’
‘I did. This is the call.’
‘All right. Well, thank you.’
Hale didn’t answer. He picked up the photograph again and looked at it.
Rowe said, ‘What’s that you’ve got on in the background?’
‘Patti Smith.’
‘In person or CD?’
‘Vinyl.’ He set the photograph down. ‘I’m sorry about your daughter.’
‘You told me that already.’
‘I only just had a proper look at the photograph.’
Rowe went quiet. ‘You ever had something like that happen to someone you know?’
‘No. But I can understand what it’s like.’
‘Yeah.’ He paused, and Hale caught his breath on the line: soft aborted syllables, like he was struggling to phrase something. He cleared his throat. ‘I’ll take your word for it. You going to check out this guy Earle?’
The name came up blank for a moment, before he recalled Rowe’s claim from that night: inmate Leland Earle, questioned for robbery leads.
‘You still there?’ Rowe said.
‘Where are they keeping him?’ Hale said.
‘Mount Eden Prison.’
Hale didn’t reply.
‘Can you get to him?’ Rowe said.
‘Maybe … I’ll see.’
‘I appreciate it.’
‘Yeah. I’ll be in touch.’
THIRTEEN
TUESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY, 7.13 A.M.
Devereaux woke to bad news: a voicemail message, with Lloyd Bowen’s name attached. The timestamp showed the call had come in at 4.37 a.m. Nothing at that hour was ever going to be cheery. He almost couldn’t bring himself to check it. Something foreboding in that neat glowing text. He could guess the gist of what lay in store.