by Candice Fox
Jay backed up. Amanda wriggled out of Bran’s arms and flopped onto the floor, grabbing the pistol from the pile of glass where it lay.
“Sweeney,” she said, laughing. “You’re an absolute—”
A bang. Amanda screamed. In the fraction of a second Sweeney had taken to glance to her left at the corpse in the chair by the door, Bran had grabbed his gun from the back of his jeans and shot her.
Amanda watched Sweeney fall, one hand clutching the front of her shirt.
A taxi finally came, but I had nowhere to direct it to. All I knew was that I needed to be moving, needed to know that I was in pursuit of Kevin Driscoll. It seemed as though hearing his surname increased the burning hatred twofold. He was suddenly more than a concept. A real person. I held the phone and watched people flash by the car, couples walking along the footpath, motorists in other cars. Kevin Driscoll had, for a time, had a girlfriend. He was twenty-six. He did not have a daughter, or a younger cousin, or anyone in his life that Chloe could think of who was small and blond and school-age. All she could tell me was that when they were together, he’d struck up a sort of friendship with the little girl next door in the house where they previously lived. Chloe had seen them talking over the fence. I’d tapped the address of their old house into my phone with painstaking care, Chloe on speaker, the confused rumblings of her friends or whoever was in the background of the call now and then distracting her, causing her to pull away. Chloe didn’t know where Kevin lived now. He’d unceremoniously dumped her, giving her little reason, a few months after Claire’s abduction.
Did Kevin Driscoll have a new girlfriend now? I gripped the seat belt at my chest, squeezed it until my fist shook and ached. Were Kevin Driscoll and his new girlfriend planning on getting married? Having babies? Buying a house? Kevin Driscoll had stolen my life. A ludicrous impulse I couldn’t deny kept surfacing in my mind, that when I found him, I would take my life back from him. He had it, like a talisman, a physical object. I would get it. I would steal it back. I would hurt him. I would kill him.
The taxi driver was distinctly uncomfortable at the look of me. Had been since he pulled over, got a closer look at the man at the roadside, smelled the sweat. He probably thought I was a junkie, a madman. With few words I directed him west, toward my old suburb, the sprawl of farmland and little residential settlements outside Sydney.
I could find Kevin’s new address easily enough. Now that I had his full name, I texted Frankie. I didn’t trust myself to speak, not with this kind of fury raging in my veins. She would check her police databases, come up with an address. Did I trust myself to go there and not kill Kevin Driscoll? My whole body was ticking and twitching with rage. I would at least beat him. I knew that. I would beat his brains out. There was a wild lion inside me, a furious and beaten thing, a creature reduced to its instincts only. I could see myself killing him. Smashing his face with my hands. Losing all control. I’d get the address, go there, and end him.
But as I waited for the reply from Frankie to come through, I looked at the other address, the one Chloe had given me, the rental house where she and Kevin had once lived. The image of Kevin kept flashing before my eyes, standing in the bar, holding his phone, looking at the picture of the little girl. He’d lied. She wasn’t his sister. Was she the neighbor child, the one he’d spoken to over the fence? The chances were slim. The world was full of pretty little girls, his for the taking. But she had looked so much like Claire. White-haired and slim, a perfect beauty on the edge of adolescence. His words whispered back to me as I stared at the address.
You’re a true inspiration.
I feel kind of … free.
Free to do what? Was he going to hurt a child? Was he going to hurt that child? I tried to remember the school uniform colors. The letters on the crest. It was impossible. My mind was racing, details and names and addresses crashing into one another, now and then everything being obliterated by a crashing wave of red-hot fury.
I knew I had to go to the old address, the one with the neighbor girl. As much as I wanted to go directly to Kevin’s house, to find him, to get my hands on him, I was a cop. I had once been a cop, anyway. This wasn’t about me. It had never been about me. It was about that girl in the picture, about Claire, about however many girls Kevin had hurt before, however many he might hurt in the future if I didn’t stop him now. I needed to make sure that girl was okay. A quick detour.
I gave the driver the address Chloe had given me. Every stoplight was an agony. Frankie wasn’t responding. Kelly called. I rejected it, wiped the sweat off my phone onto my jeans.
When the taxi turned into Kevin’s old street, I spied patrol cars. Two of them, parked haphazardly in a V-shape on the front lawn of a small house, blocking the footpath. My heart twisted. I had been right. My instincts, whatever it was that made him keep coming back into my mind, standing there staring at the picture. He had come here. Before I knew anything about what was happening at the house, I knew, in my soul, that he had come here.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I beat on the back of the driver’s chair, threw notes at him as he ground to a halt. I got out and sprinted down the street. It felt good to be running, not sitting idly waiting for the horror to unfold before me. Already, neighbors were coming out of their houses, stopping on the corners, pointing. I turned the corner of the picket fence, ran up the stairs and through the open front door.
There was a woman talking frantically somewhere up ahead inside the house, the huge leathery presence of cops in the small kitchen. I stumbled down the hall, searing with dread, past photographs on the walls of the girl from the picture. The very same girl. Penny. White hair. Big eyes. Penny was Claire. I could see it now. The waiflike figure hanging upside down from monkey bars, pirouetting on a big empty beach. The cops in the kitchen twigged to my presence immediately. I was met at the doorway to the kitchen with an open palm, some young beat cop with his other hand on his gun.
“Whoa whoa whoa! Stop right there!”
“Is she okay?” I kept coming, forced the cop to back up. I saw him unclip the buckle on the gun. “Is the girl okay?”
Four cops, all on high alert. Shouting. I looked into the kitchen. There at the table, a woman sitting with the girl, Penny, in her lap. The girl was curled against her chest, red-faced, wailing, the uncomposed, growly crying of a child. The mother looked as though she’d been doing some wailing of her own. She hardly noticed my presence. Her words were rushing together, panicked.
“… said he just wanted to talk to her. He kept saying it. That he just wanted to talk. He shoved the door open. I was screaming. No one would come!”
“Where did he go?” I gripped the frame of the door to stop myself from rushing forward and grabbing the woman by her shoulders. “Kevin Driscoll—where did he go?”
The mother looked at me. She knew the name. Kevin.
“Conkaffey.” One of the street cops had clued onto me now, recognized my face. “Jesus fuck! What are you doing here? Get out! Get him the fuck out!”
“That’s Ted Conkaffey!” someone gasped.
“Is this the guy? Is that the guy who came here?”
Two hands pushing me out, one hand grabbing the shoulder of my shirt, trying to drag me back. The mother protested, bewildered. I wasn’t the guy who had attacked her, barged into her house, tried to talk to her child. I was let go, pushed down the hall, trying to listen to her words over the snaps and barks of the cops manhandling me.
“… some big Middle Eastern guys…” the mother said.
I planted my feet, straining to listen.
“… just grabbed him and hauled him out. I don’t know where they went…”
“Oh god,” I whispered. I recalled the look that Linda and Sharon had exchanged as I stood outside the car, when I had spoken Kevin Driscoll’s name. They’d been waiting to hear it. A name was all they needed. They’d got here before me, before the cops, right on Kevin’s tail. Khalid Farah was a powerful man. Far more powerful than the police. Withi
n seconds of knowing Kevin’s full name, Khalid probably had some dodgy contact or other punch the name into a system, track his phone. Khalid could find people. No one escaped him. He made a living from it.
That’s why they had left me. Linda and Sharon. They’d abandoned me at the roadside because they knew, as Khalid knew, that I’d never sanction it, never allow them to abduct Kevin Driscoll right off the street the way the young man had done to Claire Bingley. That’s why Khalid had put his men onto me. For my protection, yes. But because they knew—knew in their bones—that I’d find him. That I was always going to find him. And Khalid wanted Kevin. He’d told me himself at the airport that first day. He wanted that man. He wanted to be the one responsible for putting him down, for taking another predator off the streets.
The moment I mentioned Kevin’s full name, Linda and Sharon had what they’d been waiting for. And now Khalid and his men had beaten me to my quarry.
“Get the fuck out, pervert piece of shit!” The cop behind me shoved me hard in the shoulders. I staggered out of the house, stood on the lawn as they berated me. My whole body was cold. I still had my phone in my hand, gripped in my fist like a weapon. The cops wanted to know where I had come from. Why I was here. How I knew the child and her mother. I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak. I wandered away from them, ignoring their threats, a big crow avoiding swooping myna birds. The neighbors were staring, murmuring to one another. A woman leaned over her front fence and asked me what was going on, no idea, it seemed, who I was. I looked at her like she was an alien thing, incapable of putting it all into words.
I walked along the footpath in no direction at all, mere meters, before I stopped at the sight of a set of keys shining in the last of the day’s sun. I crouched shakily and took up the keys. I knew without any kind of clue that they had been dropped by Kevin as he was wrestled toward a big black Escalade by Linda and Sharon. I knew this, saw it before my eyes, as though it was being shown to me by a divine force. When I turned, I saw the car the keys belonged to. A dark gray Commodore, parked adjacent to the keys. I walked toward the car, Kevin’s car, and opened the front door. Got in. I don’t know why I did these things. I was operating now on pure automation, my brain filled with thunder and noise.
There was a thin journal and a pen on the front passenger seat. I looked at the book. Didn’t touch it. Gripped the steering wheel and breathed in the smell of him.
My phone, in my lap, rang with an unknown number. I knew who it was before I accepted the call.
“Conkaffey,” Khalid said. “I’m goin’ to give you an address.”
It was faster than she thought possible. Like the crashing of a wave, energy surging upward, tipping, falling uncontrollably. Amanda lifted the gun, turned, scraped her knees on the floor, actioned the weapon as her eyes met Bran’s. He was shocked by what he’d done. The weak one finally having the strength to do what was necessary. His mouth was open, hanging. Amanda fired twice, hit him somewhere in the mid-section, shoving him backward into the kitchen bench, the wall beside it. He slid down. Jay grabbed at her. She butted him hard with the gun, slammed his head with suddenly frantic movements, the uncoordinated fending-off of a wild cat.
Maybe she screamed. Amanda didn’t know. At the edges of her vision she saw something she hadn’t seen in decades. The bare dirt at the rim of a small clearing in the rainforest, the gaping mouth of an open car. For a second, she was back there, back at the site of her first murder. She felt once again the transition from human to animal fighting to survive.
And then it was gone. Jay had slumped against her legs, Bran doubled over by the kitchen, gripping at his stomach, groaning. Amanda went there, took his gun, thought about finishing him off. But the visions were gone now. She was here, in the old lady’s house, one man unconscious, one man dying, two guns in her hands.
She went to Pip. The brand-new detective was lying on her back on the grass, her feet hanging over the edge of the glass door into the living room. Amanda crawled to her side, dropped the guns, put a hand on her partner’s blood-soaked hands, the warm, slick fingers covering the hole in her chest.
“Jeepers,” Amanda said. “This isn’t good.”
“No,” Pip panted. “It’s not.”
The women held the bullet wound together, their hands becoming soaked, rising and falling with Pip’s rapid breaths.
“I guess this is—” Pip’s voice caught over blood in her throat. “My … my penance.”
“Yeah.” Amanda nodded. “I guess so, huh? You didn’t get to choose yours, either.”
Somewhere in the distance, the sound of a siren was beginning to grow. Amanda couldn’t tell how far away help was. One ear was blocked with blood. Sweeney must have called for backup before she burst in. Amanda was aware that an older cop, a harder cop, would have waited until her colleagues arrived before trying to tackle the situation herself, even if she heard her friend’s anguished cries from inside the house. But not Sweeney. It was because of Amanda that Pip was dying. For once, there were no words.
“I should have…” Pip said. Unconsciousness was already pulling at her. She refocused on Amanda, squeezed the other woman’s fingers. “I should have acted, but I didn’t.”
“Oh Jesus,” Amanda sighed. She grabbed Pip’s face and bent her lips to the dying officer’s. The kiss was hard. Hot, filled with pain. All the pain Amanda had seen in Sweeney’s face as the cop stood beside her that night behind the Barking Frog, obviously fighting with her own heart. It seemed to last a lifetime, but it ended, Amanda pulling away fast.
“Happy now?” she asked.
Amanda thought she saw a flicker of a smile cross Sweeney’s lips before her head fell back against the grass.
It was raining. A light misting rain, the same that had been falling on that day as I stood before her at the roadside, the little girl whose life was about to be ruined, along with mine. Of course. I drove Kevin Driscoll’s car through the streets, hardly able to follow the directions my phone whispered to me through my clattering thoughts. I took wrong turns, sped to the end of blocks, my teeth gritted, cursing myself. The horizon was pink, then red, then black, and soon enough it became speared with the aerials and chimneys of ancient factories and warehouses. I slowed down, rolled over gravel and glass, between wire fences pushed open into the dust. There was a light on, finally, gold glimmers around a slice of corrugated iron. I turned and stopped at the sight of my own car. The car I had left at my house in Cairns.
There was only one man who could have taken it and driven it here.
My email, open on my other laptop, the one in my kitchen where I had left the vengeful father. He would have contacted Khalid through my account. Together, the two of them colluding, knowing I was coming here. Knowing I would lead them right to their victim.
I walked unevenly from Kevin Driscoll’s vehicle, leaving the door open, the interior lights on. I went back, wiped my fingerprints from the gear stick, door handle, the steering wheel and keys, then stood dumbly, trying to think what to do. How to stop it all unfolding. But I was an actor on a stage, unable to do anything but follow the script. I went to my car and looked it over, ran my hand over the hood, as though to affirm it was really there and not a prop. Out of the darkness beside me, Linda emerged from stage left. I heard his heavy, nasal breathing before I saw him.
“When you’re ready, bro,” he said.
When you’re ready. Like an usher seeing a gentleman to his seat in a crowded theater, his voice quiet to avoid upsetting the patrons already seated. It was all so organized, so routine. But this is what they did, after all, these people. Khalid’s men. What I was about to see, to experience, was his everyday work. A little evening production pieced together carefully, a pet project.
Linda pushed open the door, led me forward. They were all there. Sharon watching, his arms folded, impatient to continue into the next act. Khalid standing off to the side, a supervisor, production manager. His suit almost luminescent in the glow of a hastily acquired lamp.
Dale Bingley was standing with his bloody, grazed fists clenched, watching me enter. And there, among them all, was Kevin Driscoll, the young man I’d spoken to what felt like minutes earlier at the Lord Chesterton Hotel.
He was sitting lopsided in a plastic chair. He had been beaten badly. The smooth, handsome face I’d barely taken in before was now bloodied, swollen, the mouth gaping and running with blood. One eye looked me over from head to toe. I watched as a flash of recognition caught his damaged features. An almost friendly look, the glance of a wounded fellow soldier. We’re in this together, brother.
“Did you call the police?” Khalid asked me. I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. He knew that, while I’d never have wanted to be a part of this, a sick curiosity about their plans had drawn me here. I wanted to see. I needed to see my revenge fantasy playing out, even if it was only for a moment of delicious real life. How many times had I imagined this as I lay awake in my prison cell? In my empty house, away from my family? Claire’s true attacker bound. Beaten. Pleading with me as I did whatever the illusion required to get me to sleep that night, made him pay for what he had done to me, to Claire, to all of us.
Now that I was here, now that I was seeing it, smelling it, the blood on the dusty warehouse floor, I’d had enough. A moment was all it took. Only minutes earlier I’d felt the certain and crushing desire to beat Kevin Driscoll to death with my bare hands, a magnetic pull toward his house promising me how good and natural it would feel to kill him. A perfect crime. But now that he was before me, bound and bloodied, that hot fury was nowhere to be seen. I was empty, shivering.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s over now. This has to stop.”
Sharon sniggered. Khalid’s smile was thin, the cheerless leer of a snake.
“We can’t do this. I’m calling the police now.” I took my phone from my pocket. No sooner had it met the air than Linda had it from me, and was pushing the power button, switching it off, sliding it inside his coat.