Shoot Through

by J. M. Green

  The news presenter called the burn-off a major fail — thousands of hectares of pasture had been burnt. Cut to a scientist: ‘Bushfire season in Victoria is much longer now.’ Images of CFA volunteers directing high-pressure hoses on walls of flame. Pictures of an untouched house in a sea of black paddocks.

  Piano music came from my handbag. I moved the taser and Colin Slade’s hand gun and took out my phone. ID: Percy.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, wearily.

  ‘Mate, you alright? On me way, nearly in your shithole town.’

  Shit, I’d forgotten Percy Brash was coming up. ‘I’m not there.’

  ‘May I ask where the fuck you are, then?’

  ‘Horsham. At the hospital. The SAS bloke is getting his broken leg seen to.’

  A change in tone for the brighter. ‘Fuck me, what happened?’

  I told him, and he sounded impressed. ‘What happens to him now?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t report it. I’m going to buy him a drink, hoping to get him to talk.’

  I heard a wheezing noise I took to be laughter. ‘You couldn’t get information out of a choir boy on truth serum. Which pub?’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe The International.’

  ‘Right.’ He hung up.

  What did that mean? I stared at the phone. It rang in my hand.

  Bunny Slipper. ‘I’ve gone over your transcript of the recording, and I’m afraid nothing directly connects Pugh to the fancy bull that’s missing. He doesn’t actually use the name of the bull. It’s vague. It would be super easy to shoot down in court. Frankly, Stella, there isn’t much there.’

  ‘They are so concerned about that recording that they killed Joe Phelan.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see why. If you have anything more, let me know.’

  ‘I’ve got more. Allyson Coleman and fifty million dollars.’

  ‘That is a name and a number. Not evidence.’

  I shifted my arse around on the hard plastic. ‘Bunny, check her out for yourself. She’s a notorious scam artist, takes investor money for risky ventures, goes bust, skips town. One journalist called her a disastrously unsuccessful nut farmer.’

  Silence at her end.

  ‘Okay, yes, I don’t have evidence. Yet. But I’m sure this thing goes deeper than one bull. Otherwise, why is Pugh so paranoid about the recording?’

  ‘This thing? What is this thing? Corruption? Theft? An actual crime? You don’t know.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I do know that BS12 are involved in the cattle trade. Athol Goldwater is a prison farm, and they test agri-tech there. Tech like that iDrover you had in your show. Cattle tags, tracking, GPS, all that. And BS12 hired a BlackTack operative to murder two people who found out what they’re up to.’

  ‘Two people? Remind me?’

  ‘Velvet Stone was killed because Joe Phelan had asked her about hacking cattle-monitoring technology.’

  ‘A pretty long bow, Stella.’ Bunny sighed. ‘What’s Pugh’s connection to Coleman?’

  ‘They own a race horse together. Allyson with a y. Look into it, Bunny, they’re both in on it. They’re all in on it together.’

  ‘You sound paranoid. But I’ll take a look.’

  I pocketed the phone and walked around the waiting room, and then out into the foyer, glancing over at the nurse behind the counter. She smiled at me and shook her head. No news yet. I went outside, did a circuit of the block, and went back to my hard chair. According to Kylie, Loretta Swindon had left the Hardy farm and was somewhere in Horsham. I rang Loretta’s number, and, to my relief, she picked up.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘A church.’

  ‘What, again? You shouldn’t have left the farm.’

  ‘I had to leave,’ Loretta said. ‘I wasn’t welcome. Your sister didn’t want to talk about cattle farming with me. Her mind’s made up. She’s got some arrangement with that bloke.’

  Shane-fucking-Farquhar. Despite my decision to stop worrying about the farm, the thought of him riled me up.

  ‘You need to talk her out of it,’ Loretta said. ‘He’s been misleading her about how great a merger will be for both farms. I tried. I told her that without the legal papers that Ben signed, she was in no position to make those kinds of deals. I think she heard me, but you have to talk her out of it. Stella, are you listening?’

  I couldn’t see why she was so upset about Kylie’s crazy plans for the farm.

  ‘I’ll deal with that later,’ I said. ‘First, we need to get you out of this dire situation. You need food and a proper room for the night. I’ll pay.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that.’

  ‘Loretta, you can’t sleep in a church. Come on, be sensible.’

  She agreed to meet me. But she was so reluctant that I began to wonder if the pregnancy had affected her mental capacity.

  27

  COLIN SLADE, BlackTack operative and man who’d tried to kill me earlier in the day, hobbled through the swinging hospital doors. He was on crutches, with one leg in a moon boot and one knee heavily strapped. Band-Aids criss-crossed his face and forearm.

  ‘You waited,’ Colin said, amazed.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We have a lot to talk about. How about a drink?’

  We went out into the warm afternoon. It was an easy five-minute walk on flat roads to the Horsham International. For Slade, on crutches, it took twenty minutes. While I went to reception to book a room for Loretta and me, Slade went into the bar, or Baa, as it was called.

  I found him settled on a stool, staring out at the steady flow of cars, utes, and trucks on the Western Highway. Ballarat to the left of us, Adelaide to the right.

  The place was unusually quiet for a Sunday afternoon, with only two other people in the place, a grey-haired man and a younger woman. He was doing all the talking, and her only contribution seemed to be an occasional nod.

  ‘Beer?’ I asked Slade.

  ‘And a whiskey.’

  I ordered two beers, a whiskey, and some sweet-potato chips and garlic bread. Slade drank the whiskey in one shuddering gulp. I sipped my beer, and we both stared out at the street.

  ‘When do the cops show up,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t call the cops on you.’

  He let out a deep breath, picked up the beer, and drank half. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Information.’

  ‘You’ll get me killed.’

  ‘No one will know I’ve spoken to you.’

  He grimaced into his beer. ‘They’ll know.’

  ‘Colin, what are you doing here? Not you personally, I mean. BlackTack. What are you here to do, exactly?’

  ‘The syndicate hired me. Their operation had been compromised. The prisoner with the phone, the recording. It had to be shut down. It was an unacceptable risk.’

  Shut down? Quite the euphemism. ‘So you killed the prisoner?’

  ‘No.’ He looked up at me, squinting. ‘I advised against it until we had the phone. We still don’t know who did that. After he died, I was ordered to find the phone. Destroy it.’

  ‘You killed Velvet Stone. You admit that?’

  ‘Yes. She knew of the phone’s existence. I doubt she knew what was on it. But she had to be neutralised.’

  If only Bunny Slipper were here, listening to all this eye-witness evidence. Slade casually admitting to killing Velvet Stone. Perhaps he was telling the truth about not killing Joe Phelan.

  ‘That night with Velvet Stone, when you took me back to my apartment, you could have killed me, but you didn’t. Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘There was a pathetic attempt at blackmail using the recording. The syndicate believes someone working on the inside was conspiring with the prisoner. They thought you might help to uncover who it was. You gave us the phone, said you didn�
�t know what was on it. I believed you. And so did my contact. They let you have another chance of finding the infiltrator. Not anymore — now you’re a liability.’

  ‘You called me at the Woolburn Hotel. How did you know where I was?’

  ‘Went back to your apartment: old bloke with a dog out the front says you’re at your boyfriend’s. Just offered it up.’

  Brown Cardigan, for a paranoid security-conscious wimp, he sure was a blabbermouth. ‘So then what? You don’t know who my boyfriend is.’

  ‘Old bloke said he’s an artist, lives in Footscray.’

  I needed to have words with that gossipy man. ‘But you don’t know which artist.’

  ‘Bloke goes, Peter Brophy, aged forty-eight. Lives above a shop, calls his place the Narcissistic Slacker. Which is a laugh.’

  I felt a chill. ‘You spoke to him?’

  ‘My word. And he gave you up easy, too. Said you were in Woolburn with your mum.’

  I was too stunned to speak.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else for free, he’s not a well man, your artist friend.’

  ‘He has a cold,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s it,’ he said dryly. ‘He’s so thin he’s transparent, a sorry sight.’

  ‘He told you where I was?’ I asked, ignoring the awful implications of that description.

  ‘I said it was urgent, and he gave me the lot, even your car registration.’ He drank some beer.

  I sat in stunned silence. A stranger asks for your personal information and your significant other just coughs it up. It wasn’t a betrayal, per se; it was really bad judgement. I knew Brown Cardigan was a fool and a jerk, but I thought Brophy was more canny than that.

  Slade was opening up. Perhaps the beer and the whiskey had gone to his head, because he started telling me about how he’d flown in a light plane to Mildura and driven a hire car to Woolburn. He’d asked around in the pub, and a bloke told him he’d seen me getting petrol in Sea Lake.

  Tyler. He probably thought he was being helpful. That was three men who’d freely offered information about me to a BlackTack operative. What was the world coming to? And Slade said they regarded me as a liability to be neutralised. They were coming for me. I needed to know my enemy. I needed to come for them.

  ‘Tell me about the syndicate, who are they?’

  He sighed, like it was inconsequential. The topic seemed uninteresting to him.

  ‘Who’s in the syndicate? Enrique Nunzio?’

  ‘Yeah, him.’

  ‘And Pugh and Allyson Coleman?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘What about Ranik, the prison manager?’

  He shook his head and drained his glass.

  ‘Some BS12 people at the prison are not in on it?’

  ‘I suppose. Look, Hardy, it doesn’t matter. I’m already dead, we both are.’ He stared into his empty glass. Something had changed, perhaps the painkillers were wearing off. He was retreating into himself. ‘Fuck this,’ he said abruptly. ‘Call me a taxi.’

  I pulled out my phone. ‘Going to?’

  ‘Mildura airport.’

  It took a bit of convincing to get the taxi company to believe that Colin wanted to travel three hundred kilometres. But he had the dough. After many assurances that this was not a prank, I was told the driver was on his way.

  ‘What’s the plan? Back to the UK? Get a job doing something less risky, North Sea fisherman or something?’

  Dead bat, not even a smile. ‘For what it’s worth, my contact in the syndicate is Paul. No last name. Calls me Harry.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Paul in person?’

  ‘Yes, once. When I first arrived. The bar of the Darwin Hilton, a month ago.’

  ‘Darwin?’

  He nodded. ‘This assignment, the client comes from Darwin.’

  Allyson Coleman drove her Karmann Ghia around the streets of Darwin. Darwin’s a main port. Ships out of Darwin went to Egypt, Jakarta, Tripoli.

  Slade coughed loudly, finished his beer. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Wait, tell me about Paul. What’s he look like?’

  ‘Mid-forties, average height, thinning auburn hair, auburn moustache, freckled face.’

  ‘What about Nell Tuffnell?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The prison guard. You drove her car that night with Velvet Stone. And again the night you came to my flat.’

  ‘You say so. I was told to use that car, not a rental. Keep the operation untraceable.’

  We stayed silent as a woman came from the kitchen carrying a tray. She placed the chips and bread on the table without a word. I picked up a garlicky triangle.

  When she’d gone, I said, ‘What’s next? What’s the syndicate planning? Any hints?’

  ‘Hints?’ He held my gaze. ‘Take a guess. You’re still alive.’

  He gathered his crutches and, without a word, began making slow progress to the exit. The automatic door parted, but he turned and came back, dropped one of the crutches, and put out his hand. ‘Thanks for … the drink.’

  I shook his hand. ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘I mean, for everything. Considering …’

  ‘Considering you were trying to kill me? Forget it, people try that a lot.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ He tucked the crutches under his armpits.

  An uneasy feeling descended upon me.

  I took out my phone to call Brophy. Minutes passed. I stared out the window without seeing, phone at the ready in my sweaty hand. More minutes passed. I couldn’t make the call.

  A man in a blue shirt with insignia on the shoulders walked into the Baa.

  ‘Someone call a taxi to Mildura?’ he shouted.

  ‘He’s out the front,’ I said. ‘The bloke on crutches.’

  ‘No one’s there. No crutches.’

  ‘Maybe he flagged down a passing cab,’ I said.

  ‘Knew it was a prank,’ he said and marched out.

  Colin Slade was no longer my concern. The syndicate, the new threat to my life, none of it mattered. Brophy was all I could think about. But I couldn’t talk to him. I put my phone away, noting a change in my mood. Dark thoughts and a sense of impending failure, of inevitable shitty arguments, of a return to loneliness. Familiar, business-as-usual, dreadful loneliness.

  I blinked back tears and finished the garlic bread.

  28

  IT HAD already gone four, and Brash still hadn’t arrived. I decided to leave the International and find something to distract me from the ache in my heart. If the so-called syndicate’s latest hired killer was on their way, I had most of the day to walk around in relative safety before they showed.

  The air smelled of smoke, distant sirens sounded as I walked along Firebrace Street. A window display of handbags in the shape of different citrus fruit caught my eye. The grapefruit one was open and showed its many zips and interior pockets. A good choice for someone who carried lots of things that needed to be concealed. Taser, Jericho, etc. There was even a place for my speed-dealer sunglasses. The thing was the size of a basketball, however, and somewhat unwieldy. I turned away and went along McLachlan Street, where I faced a public library building.

  The long empty afternoon stretched out ahead of me. What to do before it was time to meet Loretta? Obeying an impulse, I went in, acquired yet another library card, and logged onto a computer.

  I concocted a complicated search for ‘racehorse’ and ‘owners’ and ‘syndicate’ and ‘Pugh’ and ‘Coleman’, not expecting much. After a bit of eyestrain, and pointless scrolling of dead-end hits, I found a media piece on a three-year-old filly named Sister Smug. She was a middle-distance galloper with a mixed record. On this occasion she’d won the Wodonga Cup, and there was a picture of the owners. The caption read: Marcus Pugh, Allyson Coleman, and the others in the syndicate celebrate
Sister Smug’s hard-fought win in Wodonga. I recognised Pugh. The tall blonde woman in an expensive-looking powder-blue frock with matching hat I assumed was Coleman. Nunzio was there, hiding behind dark sunglasses and a straw boater. And one other man was celebrating with them. He was holding up a champagne flute and seemed overjoyed. He had a freckled complexion and thinning red hair.

  Pugh, Nunzio, and Coleman. And a man who matched Colin Slade’s description of his contact, the man he called Paul.

  Pugh had asked me to find an employee who seemed to be making money on the side. The syndicate was looking for an infiltrator, someone who had made a sloppy attempt at blackmail, someone on the inside who knew about the recording. Velvet Stone had said that someone had called her to set up the initial meeting with Joe Phelan at the market. Joe had needed an insider to make that contact for him.

  Nell Tuffnell liked cruises and paid cash for a new car. Not on a prison officer’s salary, she didn’t. Where was the money coming from?

  She wasn’t in the photo. Was she in the syndicate? Slade had used her car. Perhaps it was a request from Nunzio, Lend us your car, we’ll pay you. She may have been an unwitting associate of the syndicate.

  What I needed, what would finally convince Bunny to take it further, was those invoices in Nunzio’s office. How hard would it be to break into a prison?

  I still had time before I was due to meet Loretta, so I did a few idle searches on the live-cattle trade. Export numbers out of Australia were dizzying. Destinations were as far flung as Libya and Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Japan, but the majority were shipped to Indonesia. Most of the ten million head of cattle currently grazing in Queensland would be exported, already slaughtered as pre-packaged meat or alive. Ditto the two-point-two million that roamed the Northern Territory.

  There were several organisations that facilitated the smooth delivery of live cattle from farm to overseas abattoir. Some were privately run, some were membership-based not-for-profit organisations. They all claimed to work with stakeholders. They all expressed concern with animal wellbeing. They all offered support with supply-chain efficiency and access to key markets. Some offered technical support, and had a hand in research and development. I picked one at random, jotted down a name and number, and logged off.