by Alan Carter
At any of those moments somebody needed to take control, calm everything down and bring it to a halt. Nobody did. Cato knew exactly the moment it all went very wrong for him. It was when Jimmy Tran lunged.
Later in the report it would say that he did so in a violent and threatening manner but Cato would remember it more as a desperate attempt to try to calm the storm and the inevitable terrible consequences. He would remember Jimmy’s hands facing downwards in what, retrospectively, was a placating manner. And it wasn’t really a lunge because somebody had barrelled into Jimmy from behind: a centre security guard wanting to be a have-a-go hero.
Jimmy cannoning into Cato’s outstretched hand and the gun going off. After the roar, a silence as Jimmy slips to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
It’s at that moment, as his brother lies bleeding on the floor of Phoenix Shopping Centre and chaos prevails, that Vincent Tran makes his getaway: melting into the crowd like a phantom.
43
A Critical Incident team had been sent from HQ: the area was locked down and taped off, witnesses were being interviewed, CCTV footage seized, all the usual procedures. The pensioner would be fine. The blood had been spectacular but the wound was shallow and, after being stitched up she was allowed home from Fremantle Hospital. Jimmy Tran was still in emergency surgery at Royal Perth. The bullet had entered low in the neck just above the collarbone. Its exit had caused the real damage: taking part of his spinal cord with it. If he survived he would probably be a quadriplegic. Cato was in deep shock. DI Hutchens was in deep damage control. His dreams of glory had turned into another bloody fiasco and the target of the botched operation, Vincent Tran, was still out there somewhere. It emerged that he’d wrestled a young man from his trail bike as it slowed in the shopping centre car park and then disappeared through a lunch-hour traffic snarl that left the cops gridlocked.
‘Dog’s breakfast doesn’t begin to describe it.’ Hutchens appeared shrunken, defeated and ten years older. If Cato had any empathy to spare he would have felt sorry for the man. Hutchens read his mind. ‘Go home, Cato. Look after yourself. There’ll be an inquiry but I’ll do what I can to keep a lid on things.’ He placed a hand on Cato’s shoulder. ‘It wasn’t your fault. The record will show that, don’t worry.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And don’t worry about Vincent, we’ll find him.’
‘Okay.’
Cato had every confidence that, in the immediate term, the DI and the HQ spin doctors would bury the shooting beneath a shitpile of hyperbole about heroic quick-thinking action, the welfare of innocent bystanders, and any other razzle-dazzle they could conjure. He had less confidence in the longer-term outcome of an internal inquiry, particularly if the hush-hush deal with the bikies unravelled. He had no confidence at all in his own ability to believe that none of it was his fault.
And he could only hope like hell that the DI was right in saying he’d find the desperate and vengeful Vincent Tran. Cato did as he was told and went home.
Late afternoon and the heat had subsided. Kids were home from school and Cato could hear the laughter, squeals and chatter coming from the park just a few doors up at the end of the street. Over the fence, Madge was barking again, fully recovered from her food-poisoning ordeal. The weariness that had descended on Cato as he left the office hadn’t translated into sleep. He tried to play the piano but the keys and pedals were coated in glue. He tried to do a crossword but it mocked him. Staring dumbly into space was all he was good for. Staring dumbly into space and seeing Jimmy Tran trying to bring calm to the chaos and taking Cato’s bullet in the neck for his trouble.
He’d had enough. He dialled a number.
‘Is that the Council Ranger? I want to report a barking dog nuisance.’
Cato gave his details and promised that he would put it all in writing, notify the offending owner, and allow an opportunity for rectification. Cato dashed off an email, printed a copy and took it next door.
‘You’re a real hater aren’t you?’ said Felix after reading it. The look was one of revulsion. Madge stood behind, head cocked inquisitively.
Cato scanned the stickers and posters in Felix’s window: against this, for that, stop the other. He prodded him in the chest. ‘And you’re a dickhead.’
‘Touch me again and I’ll have you up on an assault charge.’
Cato bunched his fist and drew it back. ‘May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’
Felix stepped back sharply and trod on Madge. The Jack Russell yipped. The noise dissolved the red mist before Cato’s eyes. He turned around and went home again.
‘You haven’t heard the last of this.’ Felix’s voice had a quaver in it. Madge was yapping again.
‘Just shut up, for goodness sake.’ Cato slammed his door behind him.
Lara had heard it on the radio earlier as she was driving back from her appointment with Dr Kim. It was brief and vague: an old woman injured in a hostage situation in a southern suburbs shopping centre, a man critically injured when police opened fire, another man on the run. That man’s name was Vincent Tran. Then the weather forecast said sunny and warm.
Her session with Melanie Kim had settled into an abstract but restful search for sense and meaning in her current emotional turmoil: not unlike that painting on the counsellor’s wall, muted daubings and occasional splashes. At least it felt restful at the time. Kim instilled calm and structure on Lara’s mad world for that one hour. It was still early days but already there was the glimpse of a path back to equilibrium. Apparently some layers needed to be peeled away first: think bruised onion, said Dr Kim. Lara was tempted to dismiss it as psycho-babble. As backup she’d bought more chocolate on the way home. Mildly Dark again – she was developing a taste for it. She’d drifted through the rest of the day on autopilot – chocolate, TV, snooze, but throughout it all there was only one thing on her mind. Why were the Trans back in play? She phoned Hutchens and found him still at work even though it was just gone six. Must be a real crisis, she thought.
‘You got time to talk, boss?’
A pause: a mental clicking from one gear into another. ‘Sure, Lara, what can I do for you?’
‘I heard the news. Just wondering what happened today, what’s going on with the Trans?’
Another gear change, down. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate; you need to relax and take time out. Focus on getting yourself better again.’
She ignored him. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’
‘Leave it, Lara.’
‘The Trans have always been my case; you know that. I just need to know. Please.’
Something about the way she said it must have convinced him, maybe it was because she asked nicely. They’d had a new lead on Vincent for the nail-gun killing of Papadakis and followed it up. The operation to bring him in went skewiff and Jimmy Tran got shot by Cato. Lara had the impression there was a lot more to the tale but that’s all she was going to get for now.
‘How’s Cato?’
‘A bit like you: under the weather. Lying low at home.’
‘Poor bastard.’
‘Yeah, there’s a lot of it going around at the moment.’
‘Need me back in to help out?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going troppo watching crap telly. I need a distraction.’
A slow breath in. ‘Well, when you put it like that I suppose we could do with more help manning the phones.’
‘Give me half an hour.’ Lara closed her mobile and went and brushed the chocolate off her teeth.
Cato felt as if the fibro walls of his home were closing in on him and no matter how high he played his music, Madge’s yaps penetrated and scraped at every nerve ending. He knew it was an over-reaction. He knew this was most likely a symptom of stress. He needed to get out. Cato picked up his car keys and mobile and left.
Down the beach end of the street there was an amber halo over the Sealanes fish factory as the sun released them for another day. His old Volvo
struggled to start but after a few coughs it growled into action. A curtain twitched in Felix’s window. Cato gave it the finger. He found himself following a familiar route north, hugging the coast at Leighton and Cottesloe, the black ocean rolling in under an indigo sky. On up West Coast Highway with the tacky tower blocks of Scarborough in the distance: a reminder to those who would wish the Gold Coast upon Perth. Yes, he knew now where he was headed: maybe he’d always known.
44
In all of the double-dealing, the lies and deceits, the mistakes, the spilled blood – one thing remained clear. If Cato did nothing else, the least he could do was bring Shellie’s daughter back to her one last time. The sun was long gone when Cato pulled into the car park nearest to the spot where he’d last stood: the dumpsite for Gordy Wellard’s other murder victim, Caroline Penny. Star Swamp.
The place was deserted. No other cars. No people. Lights were on in houses but, at just gone seven-thirty, this suburban street felt like an abandoned Hollywood backlot, a ghost town.
Cato stepped out of the car and peered into the dark shadows of the bushland. He took a torch from the boot and looked once again up and down the street. Early evening and quiet as the grave. Was it just such a time that Wellard had brought Caroline Penny here? Cato tried to imagine himself into Wellard’s way of seeing the world. It wasn’t easy, there was no way he was as twisted as that evil fucker. But he could try.
He went back to the boot once more. There was a roll of black bin liners from times gone past when he took an interest in his domestic affairs. He tore one off, flicked it open with a snap of air, and began packing whatever he could find into it. Jake’s deflated soccer ball and the boots which were now too small for him: a towel, musty and mouldy from a long-ago beach trip: his perished snorkelling fins: the car jack and tyre lever plus assorted tools. An umbrella. There wasn’t much else. He looked around him. A low wall with some loose bricks where a car had scraped it in passing. He kicked a few free and put them into the bin liner too. Now it was splitting from the sharp edges so he snapped off a couple more bags and put the original one and contents inside those for reinforcement. It still wasn’t anywhere near as heavy as a body but at least it was a weighty and awkward encumbrance. So, if he had a mind to, where would he bury it?
Lara was on phone duty and it suited her just fine. The dobbings had spiked after the evening news, with reported sightings of Vincent Tran all over the metro area and as far south as Albany and as far north as Kununurra. That narrowed it down to half a continent. The photograph and physical description had been taken as just a loose guide by most callers: Vincent was variously reported as being ‘among a group of other Middle Eastern men hanging around outside Kewdale Mosque and looking suspicious’ or ‘loitering at Thornlie railway station with a group of other Aboriginal youths’. Lara listened patiently as a woman with an English accent recalled the man sitting next to her on the bus home to Mount Hawthorn.
‘He were moving his hands around in his pocket. Not in a nice way like, you know what I mean?’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘Aye, he were a bloody filthy old bugger.’
Lara fed through the least bizarre sightings: the ones where the subject was at least male, Asian, and the right age range.
As the phone traffic slowed, she filled her time by logging in to the official history of the Trans. She’d already been through this when she and Colin Graham were lining them up for the murder of Santo Rosetti. The leaky boat from Vietnam in the early 80s; the Malaysian detention centre; the petty crime and teenage street gang in Balga in the late 90s; the ascent to leadership and the criminal big time during the noughties. Big brother Jimmy took up most of the file space: he was the leader, he was the one who’d made all the moves with Vincent tagging along behind as a faithful lieutenant and occasional enforcer. That must have been when Vinnie had developed a taste for it: his sadism evolving from a business necessity into an intrinsic pleasure.
Both Jimmy and Vincent had the usual drugs, assault, affray and weapons charges that gangsters collect on their way up the food chain. For both brothers these charges had dropped off in the last few years as they got smarter and others did the shit work for them. The most recent charge that stuck was an assault just over two years ago. Somebody had looked at Vincent the wrong way at a Sunday afternoon session in a Cottesloe pub and had ended up blinded in one eye and needing surgery to reconstruct the shattered cheekbone and torn flesh. Vincent had served nine months for that.
Lara thought about Vincent and the violence he was clearly capable of, yet how his presence barely registered in the shadow of big brother Jimmy. There was no brooding menace, no simmering cauldron of rage; Vincent just wasn’t there. Jimmy’s shadow: it was a good place to hide. The phone rang again.
‘You after that Chinese bloke on the telly?’
‘Vietnamese, yes. Something to report, sir?’
‘Yeah, I’m watching him now. He’s just parked up beside Star Swamp and he’s obviously up to no good.’
Cato slung the bin bag over his shoulder and set off through the dark bushland like one of Snow White’s more sinister dwarves: the eighth one, Creepy. With the torch in his free hand, he headed for where he thought Caroline Penny’s dumpsite was. When he was here last time, in broad daylight, he’d estimated it was about thirty metres from the car parking bays to the grave. There was a fork in the path just two metres ahead. Cato cursed the fact that on that previous visit he’d neglected to trace the route from the car bays to the grave more diligently. He panned the torch beam, searching for a familiar feature in the dense bush. A breeze rustled the gum trees, creaks and other strange noises emanated from the darkness. Lost already. What the hell was he doing here anyway, what was all this meant to prove?
Cato turned back to face the direction he’d come from and tried to get a reverse fix on where he needed to go. When he’d last stood at the dumpsite and looked towards the car bays he’d been aware of something in his left field of vision. Then he remembered: a mobile phone tower on a hill behind the houses. He could see it now. Readjusting his bearings, it was clear that he should take the right fork in the path. He took it, the lumpy contents of the bin bag clunking and clinking and digging into his back. Cato Kwong – the Method Detective. This was bullshit: he’d be better off using a water-diviner and ouija board. The load wasn’t that heavy but he was sick of the constant poking from the sharp protuberances so he put it down for a moment. He estimated he was now between fifteen and twenty metres in from the car bays and at least ten away from Caroline Penny’s grave.
Standing still once again, surrounded by the dark bush and the whisperings and rustlings of the breeze, something tugged at the edges of his memory. Something he’d read in the files and background notes. Cato flicked the torch off in the hope that the meditative darkness might help him concentrate. He cricked his neck and eased his shoulders as the blackness settled around him. Cato braced himself to reassume his burden and it came back into focus: the missing memory. Then he heard a footscrape and the ratchet of a shotgun and saw the blinding light.
‘Good question,’ said Cato when the TRG man had given him back his ID and asked him what the fuck he was doing there.
‘So answer it.’
Cato was facedown with his right nostril pressed into the sandy soil, a knee in his back, his wrists cuffed behind him, and a Glock in his ear. ‘Call DI Hutchens at Fremantle.’
‘We did, he told us to ask you what the fuck you’re doing here and to not let you go until you tell us.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘We’ve got all night and you’re not going anywhere.’
So Cato told him.
‘Yeah, the DI said you were fucking weird.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘Sure.’ The TRG man summoned a colleague. ‘Help Santa put the presents back in his sack and escort him to his sleigh.’
45
Friday, February 19th.
Lara had
signed off from her phone-manning duties by about ten-thirty the previous night and headed home with a guilty giggle after she’d heard what happened to Cato. Well he was Asian, within Vincent Tran’s age range give or take ten years, and he was acting suspiciously. Poor bugger, he really did have a bad day. All in all, the non-taxing phone duties and the jokes at Cato’s expense seemed to have done more for her wellbeing than half-a-dozen therapy sessions and a shipload of chocolate. A good night’s sleep had helped too. That was the story so far today anyway.
She’d agreed to go into the office again for another round of low intensity phone-manning and file-shuffling. She was actually looking forward to it and wondered whether she’d ever get back to being a proper cop or whether she should just quit and get a job in an office or a call centre. Today, neither prospect worried her.
Vincent Tran remained on the loose and, according to the Crimestoppers hotline, he was here, there, and everywhere. Lara scanned the log of reports. Mistaken identity, grudge calls, time wasted: from Mirrabooka to Mandurah and Swanbourne to Swan Hill, all points north, south, east and west of the metro area had produced nothing. DI Hutchens crossed her line of vision.
‘Any progress, boss?’
‘Nah. You up for another day of this?’
‘Sure. I’ll keep you posted if I’m heading for a meltdown.’
‘That’d be good. Got enough spot fires to put out already.’
‘Perils of leadership.’ Lara scanned the office partitions and the array of heads poking just above them. ‘No sign of Cato?’
‘Santa Kwong’s got an appointment with the Inquisition today, the Tran shooting.’
‘Lucky boy. Where do you want me today, boss?’
‘Phones have quietened down, maybe trawl the files yet again, see if anything gels.’ Hutchens continued on his way, voice trailing over his shoulder. ‘Any chance of a coffee?’