Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “Is there anythin’ you want to say to him?” Khalid asked, gesturing to the beaten man in the chair. “You don’t have very much time left.”

  Kevin was watching me. Of course I had things to say. I’d said them in those nighttime fantasies as I beat him, long, streaming descriptions of everything he had taken from me. But now as I tried to speak, my throat tightened, strangling the words. How could I say anything? How could I put what this man had done into words? Kevin was watching me, waiting for me to tell him about my pain. I’d glimpsed him at the back of the Lord Chesterton with all the strangers who had come to hear me, wanting me to lay it all out, every wound, every embarrassment, every longing ache. Kevin and I watched each other. He knew. I could see it in his eyes. He knew what he had done to me, and he wasn’t sorry. He had the look of a man surveying his creation. The master of ceremonies. Because, in the end, we were all here on this bloodied, darkened stage because of him. We were all his puppets. Well, it would stop now. I was not going to spout the lines he had written for me. I was not going to let him die in the final act and cement this cruel life, this nightmare he’d created for me.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have anything to say to him.”

  Dale was trembling with rage. He strode forward, mechanically, at Khalid’s glance and took a pistol from his hand.

  “But this can’t—” I said. I looked at Linda and Sharon for help. “This can’t go on.”

  “Ted, this is all outside your control.” Khalid put a hand up, calm. “You may not be happy about this right now, but it’s happening. This. Is. Happening. It’s going to be good for you in the future, when you think back on it. Just trust me, bro.”

  “Dale.” My voice was rising, echoing off the walls of the vast, dark space. “You can’t let this happen. This is what he wants. This is what they want. Dale? Dale! Stop! You can’t do this. Dale, you can’t!”

  I took a step toward him. No more than one. Linda’s great arm swept around my neck and tightened, dragging me back. I grabbed at the arm. Slippery fabric. Impossibly hard muscle underneath. “No! No No No!”

  Khalid was untying Kevin’s hands. The young man fell onto the floor. Dale, so much bigger now than I’d ever known him, thicker, wider, full of fire. Every muscle in the man’s neck and jaw was standing out, straining, as he kicked and stomped on the man on the ground. I tried to shake Linda off. Sank to the ground. He sank with me, putting the pressure on, cutting off my air, making my eyes pulse.

  “Please, no!” I cried. “I need him alive. I need him alive!”

  I’d come here to get back everything I had lost. I didn’t care about Kevin. I didn’t care about Khalid and his men. I had defied all the terror and all the hurt of the past year to face the man who had ruined my life, to look into his eyes and know that his nightmare, the one he deserved, was just about to begin. I’d come here to change the game. Take back control. If he died now, none of that would be possible. I’d never be completely exonerated without his confession. Kevin himself would be gone again, as swiftly as he had come, blessedly free of the judgment, the punishment, the suffering that he deserved. The justice.

  This was not justice. I did not want this.

  But I wasn’t the man with the gun. Dale Bingley was. He raised it to the face of the young man on the floor and thumbed the hammer down with a sickening click.

  “How does it feel?” Dale asked. Kevin didn’t answer. He just closed his eyes.

  Dale fired.

  * * *

  He fired a number of times. How many, I didn’t know. The gun was big, flashy. Full of kick. Linda was squeezing my neck too hard in his excitement, so that the sounds of Kevin’s death were mere thumps in my oxygen-starved head. Linda let me go and I fell on my hands and knees, gasping for air. When I looked up, Dale was pointing the barrel of the pistol at me.

  Khalid didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. Neither did his men. And I knew then, in their stillness, that it had always been about Kevin for these men. They’d wanted to vanquish a monster. To be responsible for another death. They wanted the credit. To be the ones who had given a vengeful father this brutal kindness, to be the ones that could be counted on to provide that kind of justice. Dark heroes. They didn’t care about Dale, or me. Dale’s eyes were empty, as depthless as the single black pupil of the gun. Linda had moved away from me, leaving me to Dale, if he wanted me. I exhaled my last breaths, watching, waiting for this man full of fury to unleash some more of it on me.

  He didn’t. I watched, shaking, as he let the gun lower.

  Khalid and his stagehands were moving now, the time having come to close their show. Linda dragged me to my feet. Sharon took the gun carefully from Dale’s fingers, struggling to unlock his white knuckles. Khalid was strolling to the body on the floor, a cigarette packet emerging from the salmon-colored silk lining of his jacket. He tapped a cigarette loose and waved it toward me, hardly taking the time to look my way.

  “Get him outta here,” Khalid said.

  Amanda sat on a smooth decorative piece of sandstone at the front of the Songly house, one elbow on her knee, watching the red and blue lights of the five patrol cars before her going around and around. If she focused on them for a few seconds, stains of their colors remained when she looked away, zinging and swirling in the dark at the edge of the rainforest. All around her there was activity. Police walking in and out of the house, taking pictures, measurements, video of the crime scene. They came in a trail like ants, endless trips back and forth, going in with empty hands and coming out with brown paper bags of evidence. Few paid attention to her sitting there watching, an elvish statue drenched in blood. Some ambulance officers came after the first round of pickups, the transportation of Pip’s body, Bran’s body, Jay dazed and groaning on a stretcher. They crouched by Amanda, tried to fuss over her, their rubber fingers already probing. She waved them off. Rule one. No touching.

  When the early hours were approaching, and the number of people going in and out of the house had sufficiently thinned, she stood and stretched her neck. Chief Clark was just inside the doorway of the house, looking over it all, his hands hanging by his sides. Grief. The lazy, sloppy kind. Amanda saw it tugging on his features like a thick clay mask as he turned toward her.

  “I killed again,” Amanda said, gesturing halfheartedly to the spot where Bran had lain only hours earlier, gurgling out his last breaths. “Sorry.”

  “Amanda, you…” The chief’s words trailed off. He tightened his lips, sucked them in, seemed to have trouble containing them all, or finding any, Amanda didn’t know. She watched, waited. But in time the chief only sighed and walked away from her, shaking his head. Now that she was back in the house, the few officers here were glaring at her. One had tears in his eyes. She wiped her blood-stained palms on the front of her T-shirt, drew a deep breath. It seemed they all were waiting for her to say something. She hoped, when she said it, that it came out right.

  “She was a great copper,” Amanda said, raising her chin importantly. “And a great kisser.”

  They all took this in for a moment. Then, one at a time, they got back to their work. Amanda waited, but no one responded to her claim. She supposed the lack of rebuttal was a good thing. When an officer passed her, coming from the garage, she asked him politely for a plastic bag for her wet shoes down at the creek. He bumped past her without acknowledging her request, so she just went to the dead old lady’s kitchen and got one for herself.

  The bag was not for her shoes. Amanda had nine identical pairs of pink Converse shoes. The ones by the creek could wait. Instead, she took the garbage bag and wandered out the front door and around the side of the house, down the darkened passage by the bushes, past the spot where the paling was missing. She went to the darkest corner of the empty yard, far beyond the reach of cameras flashing inside the house, sparkling behind the curtains. She glanced around, and when she was sure it was safe, Amanda knelt by the fishpond.

  Bran and Jay, killers and thieves, had been stupi
d on many levels. But not seeing that the fishpond was clearly where their treasure lay was a real clanger, Amanda thought. Cash, hoarded and saved over decades, would not be concreted into a garage floor. The old man faced hefting a jackhammer up with his spindly arms and nearly giving himself a stroke just to get at it. Because what was the point of saving wads of cash like that, a childless old couple doing the grocery shopping, waiting for pension day, saving their receipts in case of misappropriation? To view, of course. To hold. To know. Because Tom Songly had been a corrupt cop. One of the biggest, the most powerful. He’d managed to scrape through the hellish consequences of the corruption inquiries of the 1970s and 1980s unscathed. He’d gotten away with it. He was not going to bury his takings. No way.

  There would be people out there, disgraced cops who had gone to prison after the inquiries, who would want their money back when they got out. And there would be rumors, of course, of his having the money that circulated among men who were not cops and who had never been. Jailhouse gossip. Old Tom Songly would have wanted the money accessible so that he could give some of it out if he was ever threatened. Pay his own ransom. Keep the hounds away from his door, if they were ever so brazen to come.

  So the garage floor was out. The idiots had been through the walls, the roof, under the house, under the tiles, under and over and through every surface of the old couple’s possessions. But Songly would never have hidden the money inside the house. A search warrant by local cops wanting to try their luck with a shakedown would turn up the money too quickly. Tom’s hiding place needed to be not the second, or third, or fourth place they looked, but the very last. A place so obscure that it would take time to think of. Too much time for a quick smash-and-flip search.

  It also had to be somewhere Victoria would never find it, not with her obsessive cleaning, her restless retired boredom driving her in ever-spiraling circles around the house with her mop and broom and brushes. It was never going to be hidden at the back of a cupboard she might clear out, behind a loose panel she might discover. The house was out.

  Amanda could see old Tom Songly out here in the yard with his garden spade and sun hat, now and then peeking over his shoulder into the living room where Victoria sat watching her shows. The garden. His domain. Amanda could see him wiping the soil from the spade, leaning over the pond carefully, dipping the spade into the water between the lily pads, fishing around between the fishes, until he found the edge of something. She imagined him lifting the iron grille, the stones that held it down at the bottom of the fish pond sliding way. Tom Songly seeing the edge of the clear plastic wrapping down there in the water, spotted with bright green algae. And between the algae, beyond the plastic, the patterns and textures of hundred-dollar bills.

  Amanda didn’t use a spade. She reached into the water as she had at the creek behind the Barking Frog and, in the dark, carefully prized up the slippery grille. Bubbles rose to the surface, disturbing a goldfish darting from one side of the pond to the other, slithering, slick, past her naked arm.

  “Watch it, fishy.” She smiled.

  The first package, when it came up, was as big as a loaf of bread. She shook it a little, making raindrops for the fish, then put the brick of wrapped cash into the garbage bag beside her. When she’d prized the second money loaf up, the level of water in the pond had dropped significantly. She replaced the grille, and the stones, and folded the disturbed lily pads back onto the surface.

  Amanda picked up the bag and tied a knot in the end. Bran and Jay. They’d been so close. Just not close enough.

  “Idiots,” she said.

  Amanda hefted the bag over her shoulder and walked down the side of the house, into the dark.

  EPILOGUE

  The property was vast but barren, a bald patch in the otherwise lush farmland of Taree, near the Queensland border. A few years of camp fires just off the back porch, cattle wandering here and there across the dirt, and the regular crisscross of trucks and cars had deadened anything green that might have braved the immediate surrounds of the small house. Where there might have been flowers in ancient wood-lined beds along the side of the building, there were discarded beer bottles, an old tire, a milk crate full of rusting engine parts. I glanced over at the phone on the passenger seat of my car, checked the address I had been given was exactly right, before creeping steadily to a halt beside a corrugated iron carport.

  The morning sun was making the iron tick. I got out, and immediately a cloud of wriggling, writhing chocolate-colored bodies swirled around my legs. Border collies, six of them, barking, snuffling my shoes. He’d been expecting me, had calmed the dogs as my car breached the distant front fence. Had held them back only long enough for me to get out, at which point the dogs came rushing, sniffing, barking. He was standing at the edge of the porch wearing flip-flops, black and white. His toes were dry and cracking, his face broad beneath a faded cap.

  “Ted, eh?” He jutted his chin at me as he came down the steps. I smiled, offered my hand, braced for recognition of my face. There was none.

  “That’s me,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me, Al.”

  “No problem, mate.” He scratched his chest. He was ruddy faced and sunburned, what looked like a homemade haircut hidden beneath the cap. “Bit of a weird story, I gotta tell ya. I half decided you were havin’ me on.”

  “Nope,” I said. “God’s honest truth.”

  “Right.” Al slapped away the nose of a border collie who was snuffling at his crotch. “Well, she’s round ’ere, mate. Wouldn’t expect her to greet you at the car, that’s for sure. She’s a lazy bitch, I’ll give her that.”

  He led, and I followed, up onto the porch, where the shade was a relief. There was a small plastic child-safety gate to keep the border collies off the stairs. A coffee table made from old pallets sat before mismatched cane lounges sunken with the shape of bodies now gone. At the very end of the porch, lying on its side on a hair-covered blanket, was a pure white dog.

  She lifted her head, got to her feet as we approached. She was fat. Sadly fat, the sagging belly and thick neck of an unhappy creature who gorges on whatever passes beneath her nose. The dog had a cheerful face, though. Pointed at the nose, broad at the forehead, a mingling of perhaps dozens of breeds. I smiled at the triangular ears pricked, sharp, like two cupped hands.

  “So this is her, huh?” I said. The white dog didn’t come to me, which I thought was odd, given the doggy smile about her lips. But as I crouched, hands out, in greeting, she took a couple of steps forward and I noticed the limp. The right front paw. The one that had been broken when she arrived at the RSPCA in Yagoona. I pretended the limp was a shock. “Oh dear. What’s that all about?”

  “Yeah, she’s had it since we got her,” Al said. “These fucking rescue dogs, mate. You never know what you’re getting. It’s a lucky dip.”

  “Is it permanent?”

  “Aw, look, I wouldn’t spend the money finding out, you know what I mean?” He gestured to the dog. “When we got her, the RSPCA said she had recently recovered from a break. Needed rehab. Told us how, and all. I tried to tell her, Renni, my girlfriend at the time. Tried to talk her out of it. A rescue dog with a medical problem? You fuckin’ serious? But no, no, no. She wanted her own dog. Had to be a tragedy, something she could feel good about.”

  “Right,” I said. I smoothed the white dog’s cheek and neck. She wagged her tail.

  “I breed the collies, you see,” Al continued. “Those beautiful, intelligent things you saw back there at the car. The pups are two K each. When I was with Renni, we had seven bitches and seven sires and we were two weeks off having a new litter of six or more. Nope, wasn’t enough for her! Can you believe it?”

  I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

  “She wanted something special. Heaven help me. She goes and brings back this bag of problems.” Al gestured to the dog. “Jay-sus. Honestly. Women.”

  “Yup.”

  “So anyway, tell us more about the crime, mate.” Al slappe
d my chest. “You said on the phone it was an abduction? Down in Sydney, was it?”

  “Look, it’s not something I can really go that deep into.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s a complex investigation.”

  “Uh-huh.” Al nodded vigorously, looked back at the animal at our feet. She was sitting looking up at me, the cupped ears swiveling, listening, failing to understand. “Nah, I get it. I get it, mate. Look, I’m happy to help. Anything you want to know about her, I’ll tell you. There’s not much to say, really. She’s a piece of shit mongrel with a gimpy leg. When my girlfriend left, she didn’t even take it with her. Thing doesn’t even catch a ball. Were you gonna take pictures of her, or…? You never really said on the phone what you wanted.”

  I hadn’t known exactly what I wanted when I’d called a day earlier from my hotel room in Sydney. It had been a struggle to get the information out of the RSPCA, without police credentials, on exactly where the dog had gone after she was dumped at the gates by Kevin on that day. I’d held the receiver, winced at the silence on the other end of the line, wondering if the administrator was about to tell me the dog had been humanely euthanized.

  The white dog had been on my mind for a while. In the week since it had all come to an end, as I sat alone in my room drinking Wild Turkey and watching the traffic on the street below, she had returned again and again to my mind. I’d been almost too afraid to make the call.

  Leaving Sydney, driving northwest along the inland highway, I still hadn’t known what I wanted. But now I knew. Standing with Al the border collie breeder on his battered, sun-dried porch, looking down at the white dog, I knew.

  I reached into my back pocket and drew out my wallet.

  * * *

  Rumbling along the highway, my window down, air shuddering in and out of the vehicle. The white dog sat upright on the passenger seat, mouth open and tongue foaming, panting as she watched the road ahead, that bad paw slightly raised, all her weight leaning on the good one. I let the phone in the center console play what it wanted through the radio, a wandering streaming channel, hits from the 1980s. The musty, acrid smell of unwashed dog was strangely nice. I crossed over to the coast road just to draw out the journey with her. I think she might have liked to stick her head out the open window beside her, but her balance wasn’t good.