Argos padded over, a stick in his mouth. Julie threw it. They watched the dog go together.
‘You ever get jealous of that?’ Maggie asked.
Julie laughed. ‘Oh shit, yeah. Might be why I like dogs so much. Some clichés are bullshit, but the one about animals being good judges of character isn’t.’
‘I don’t find myself wanting to trust Jack.’
‘That doesn’t put you in a minority. I’m not pretending to know your story, but a girl your age doesn’t collect that many scars without being involved in some deeply improper shit.’
It wasn’t phrased as a question but Maggie took it as one. Eyes still on Argos’s search for the stick, she nodded.
‘Does Jack get much benefit from helping you?’ Julie asked.
‘Some.’
‘But enough to justify the lengths he’s gone to?’
‘On the surface, probably not. But I’d be stupid if I only looked on the surface.’
They continued walking in silence. Argos returned with a different stick. Maggie threw it for him.
Maggie was lying on her bed, towards the end of her book, when she heard the door, followed by Carlin’s distinctive loping steps. She listened as he moved around the kitchen, and as his steps passed again. The door creaked open, then clicked shut.
Maggie closed the book and looked at the ceiling, then the door. She got off the bed.
Carlin sat on the front steps, an open bottle of Scotch next to him. He was carving something from a chunk of wood, whistling tunelessly. Maggie looked at the sky. Grey clouds infused with a dull dusk purple that in some areas neared red. Beneath it the treetops looked ragged and black.
She sat next to Carlin. He didn’t acknowledge her. His attention was on the wood in his hands, the knife hacking away thick chips.
‘Have some, if you like.’ He nodded towards the Scotch.
Maggie didn’t take it.
‘An old dead mate of my used to rave about that stuff,’ he said. ‘Loved to tell me he’d sold his soul for it. Not sure it’s soul-worthy, but it’s pretty good.’
‘Got a lot of old dead mates?’
She caught the sideways edge of a wry grin. ‘My age and way of life? More than a few. How about yourself?’
Maggie shrugged. ‘I don’t think I have any mates. Dead or alive.’
Carlin looked at her. He went to speak but didn’t. He returned to his whittling. ‘Either sad or wise. Not sure which.’
Maggie wasn’t either. Since Ness, the only positive relationships she’d had were brief and built on deceit. Or else they were alliances of necessity, closer to comrades in the trenches than friends. Certainly not people she’d be dropping round to visit at any point. Another cost of the choices she’d made.
Carlin was focused once more on his carving. Maggie considered him, then asked, ‘Were you and my dad friends?’
Carlin stopped mid cut. ‘Yeah. At first.’
‘What was he like? Back then?’
Carlin looked at her again. ‘You really want to know?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because there’s no point to it. I tell you he was a scumbag; I’m just confirming what you already know. I tell you he was a saint; I’m complicating a perfectly accurate assessment. Either way, he did what he did and he was what he was.’
‘But was he always?’
A heavy pause. ‘No,’ Carlin said. ‘I mean, we’re not talking a complete 180 here. There were signs. He had a temper. He was ruthless. But to a lot of people, those were the things that made him a good cop. There was this sort of unspoken theory that sometimes the worst traits a person has can be leveraged into something good, that they were essentially skills needing the right outlet. It was easy to believe that that might be the case with Eric, given the rest.’
‘The rest?’ Maggie said.
‘He was resourceful. Driven. Strong sense of justice. Real skill for noticing the kinds of minor discrepancies that could break open a case. The fact that he was such a good cop is probably why people turned a blind eye to how bad he was getting.’
That was a scalding notion.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Carlin said, ‘I always thought that was bullshit. The moment even the best lawman in the world starts hurting the innocent, it doesn’t matter what he’s done before. But in the end the police force is made up of people, and people, as a rule, tend to do what’s easiest.’
He started whittling again. It looked like he was trying to make some kind of animal but it was impossible to tell which. After a few more minutes, he hefted the misshapen creature with an expression of distaste and threw it. It disappeared somewhere at the edge of the tree line. The sky had darkened, the purples descending into a deepening blue, the trees little more than a mass of shadow.
The silence contracted. A breath held before something finally unleashed.
Maggie didn’t look at Carlin. She waited.
And finally, he started to speak.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Taking the money had been Harrison’s idea, but Jack would be lying if he tried to claim they’d put up much of a fight. Early in their careers, stuck doing boring shit with a pay cheque that meant you really had to believe in being a cop to stick it out, they were all looking for ways to make ends meet. And that night, moving through the slightly smoky, chemical-stinking halls of an abandoned drug den, they’d found it.
At that point, the bust was about the most exciting thing they’d ever been part of, or at least it had seemed to be until they’d arrived, guns drawn and blood hot, to find no-one was left. Even when the three rookies were sent to clear upstairs, it was hard to pretend they’d find any real surprises. Until Harrison, floppy-haired and wide-eyed, had stuck his head out of a room and beckoned the others in.
‘Fucking hell,’ he’d said, nodding to the bagged-up stacks of cash sitting at the bottom of an old wardrobe. ‘Anybody would think drug dealers made good money or something.’
After going through the academy with Harrison, Jack was used to his little funnies. But there was something different about this. Something clenched in his voice.
Eric knelt and picked up one of the bundles from the open bag. His angular, handsome face was almost always set in an expression of focused seriousness, but at that moment Jack could have sworn there was a hint of wistfulness in his eyes. ‘Gotta be twenty grand here. At least.’
A burst of rough laughter from downstairs. They hadn’t found anything either. Hearts were slowing with a mix of relief and disappointment. Jack, for his part, wasn’t sure which he felt.
Harrison glanced at the door, then back to the cash. Jack watched him. Harrison met his gaze. Lifted an eyebrow. A silent question.
‘Are you an idiot?’ Jack asked.
Eric glanced up at them. Saw the look on Harrison’s face. ‘It’s evidence.’ He was trying to sound firm. He looked at the money again.
‘You kidding me?’ Harrison said. ‘This whole house is fucking evidence. You think this cash is gonna be the difference between closing the case and not? Nah. If somebody else doesn’t pocket it, it’ll be tested for the fingerprints that they’ve already found on every other surface in the place then stuck away in some evidence locker and forgotten about. And when rent rolls around again or that pretty lady of yours,’ he nodded to Eric, ‘starts pestering you about the biggest ring in the shop, you’re gonna be kicking yourself that you didn’t take a gift from the universe when it practically fell into your lap.’
‘This is a gift from a pack of drug dealers,’ Jack said.
Harrison shrugged. ‘A gift all the same.’
A yell from downstairs, tinted with amusement. ‘All clear up there, boys?’
‘All clear!’ Eric turned the bundle over in his hand.
‘Come on.’ Harrison gave him a shove. ‘We could have been killed tonight. Live a little’ He winked at Jack.
Jack looked over his shoulder but nobody was coming up the stairs. He knew this was one of those
moments the old cops always spoke about, the ones that would make or break the kind of lawman you wanted to be. But Harrison had a point. Money was tight. And twenty grand split three ways was hardly a fucking heist. In the grand scheme of things, it was the bonus they never received from their actual employers.
‘Magnus,’ Eric said.
‘Huh?’ Harrison looked impatient.
Eric lifted the side of the bag. The name was written across it in black marker. ‘Who’s Magnus?’
‘Right now,’ Harrison said, ‘he’s my best mate. Now, we doing this or not?’
The older cops downstairs didn’t notice their slightly thicker pockets. A couple of them, bored, had already headed outside and lit their smokes, complaining about wasted time and unnecessary paperwork. Jack had been jumpy, feeling the heat of a non-existent spotlight. He was sure they’d missed something glaring and obvious, something that would give them away. But nobody even brought up the idea that money might have been left behind. Everyone knew that even in a hurry, fleeing dealers wouldn’t leave without it.
It didn’t occur to Jack that the fact that they had was strange. Not straight away. Not soon enough.
The end of the week meant hitting the pub. Jack got there a bit late, stuck behind writing up some domestic disturbance. By the time he got there, most everyone was already pissed, the air thick with smoke. He saw Harrison in the centre of the room, regaling a bunch of the other guys with a story about a dickhead junkie who’d thought he was a knight. Harrison was laughing and miming the attempted use of a plunger as a sword and his own exaggerated dodging as he tried to get the cuffs on. The whole clump of them were erupting in bursts of raucous laughter.
He found Eric over at the bar, nursing a pot of beer as he watched Harrison. Jack joined him without a word and lit a smoke. Eric raised his glass but didn’t drink. He didn’t look at Jack as he asked, ‘Thoughts?’
Jack didn’t bother to play dumb. Nobody was listening to them. ‘I reckon somebody should get Harry’s wallet before he fucking tells everyone.’
‘He’s already bought a round for the sergeants. Little suck-up.’
Harrison Cooper liked being liked. And he was good at it, too. Jack, for his part, had never had that talent. He’d also never cared.
‘Reckon we were right?’ Eric asked.
He wasn’t asking to assuage some internal uncertainty. Eric wasn’t uncertain about very much; once a decision was made, it was made. He genuinely wanted to know Jack’s opinion.
‘I reckon,’ Jack said slowly, ‘that there isn’t a man in this room who wouldn’t have done the same thing, given the chance.’
Eric smiled. ‘Doesn’t answer my question, mate.’
Jack took a drag of his smoke. ‘Ask me in ten years.’
As it turned out, they didn’t have to wait that long. That night all three of them individually arrived home to find a letter addressed to them. Each had the same message. A time, a place, and the word Magnus.
That they had to go to the meeting was clear. In stolen moments between shifts they would talk, not wanting to discuss anything on the phone.
‘Someone fucking saw us,’ Harrison, pacing, said.
‘Like who?’ The only hint that anything was bothering Eric was a slightly deeper furrow to his brow. ‘Everyone else was downstairs and there were no windows in that room.’
Jack, for his part, immediately concluded that the money had been planted. Nothing else made sense. But by who, and why?
As the days crept towards the demanded meeting, he found it harder to sleep. His palms were sweaty, his heart rate high. The fear became anger that he wanted to direct at Harrison, but in the end, he’d had a chance to refuse and hadn’t taken it. He even considered going to the boss and explaining everything, but given that whoever they were meeting had not only known that somebody had taken the money but known who, he couldn’t be sure who else might be watching.
The address should have been a giveaway. The Pit: a bikie bar on the outskirts of the city, sitting squat and square in the middle of a concrete lot, providing a 360-degree view of anyone undesirable approaching. Early on they’d heard stories from cops that if anybody wanted to cripple half of crime in Melbourne, all they’d have to do was burn down The Pit. Which made Jack wonder at times why nobody ever had.
When he arrived at the bar, it was immediately evident that arson might have been the best thing for it. The floor was sticky, a stench of beer and petrol hung in the air, and only half of the dangling lightbulbs were working. Harrison and Eric were already in a corner booth, pretending to talk but scanning the room intermittently. The bar was otherwise unoccupied – but then it was 10 am. Jack, glad of the gun in the back of his jeans, joined them but didn’t speak. He couldn’t muster much more than a nod.
Right on time, the door opened and a man strode in. He was tall but thin. His black hair hung around a long face that looked accustomed to smiling. He wore the leather cut of the Scorpions bikie gang, and on his chest a patch bore the word President.
‘Rook,’ Eric had muttered.
None of them had met him before, but they knew him by reputation. He was charismatic, well liked, and recently elected after the death of their previous president. Also, much to a lot of cops’ irritation, clever enough to avoid getting caught out on anything actionable. If it wasn’t for the fact that they obviously weren’t, Rook Gately might have been able to convince the world that the Scorpions were a legitimate organisation of motorbike enthusiasts.
‘Gentlemen.’ Rook met them all with a round of handshakes. His voice was deep. ‘Drinks are on me. What are we having?’
None of them replied. Rook called for a bottle of vodka and a glass for everyone. He sat next to Harrison, across from Jack, and asked them how they were finding the job as the bottle arrived. Harrison was the only one to reply.
‘Now, boys.’ Rook poured out a double shot in each of the glasses and slid them around. ‘I’m not going to waste anyone’s time here. You got my gift.’
‘Your gift?’ Eric’s voice was low, tight.
‘I’ve got a friend in admin at the station,’ Rook said. ‘He passed along the crime-scene report. I know it was you three who were sent to cover the upstairs and I know the money disappeared. Now, to put your minds at rest, I’m not about to report on anyone. There’s no blackmail or any of that awful shit going on here. And I’m not after getting the money back. It was a gift, and in the interests of good faith, I’d like you to keep it even if you tell me to go fuck myself after my proposition.’
Fear was giving way to a dull, simmering unease that was somehow worse.
‘You’re young, but you’re not stupid,’ Rook said. ‘Case in point, you know not to throw away good cash. This tells me you also know that sometimes situations aren’t as straightforward as our Sunday School teachers would have had us believe. Take my boys, for example. That the Scorpions exist on the wrong side of the law is true. But there are plenty of players in this scene who are far, far worse than us. And we don’t go near those players. The opposite: we actively work against them. In the meantime, we make our money running protection for some carefully chosen operators, moving some firearms around the place. I mean, we’re essentially couriers and bodyguards. Fairly harmless, really.’
‘Unless you get shot with one of those illegal firearms,’ Eric said.
‘Because nobody’s ever been killed by a legal one,’ Rook replied. ‘The point is we’re connected but not culpable for the worst you go up against. But in our position, there will always be those on the force who want to take us down, fairly or not. What I need are some friends among the boys in blue. Friends on the ground, not in admin. Friends who can let me know when the tide turns against my men.’
Eric went to speak, but Rook raised a hand.
‘In return,’ he said, ‘I can feed you information nobody else can. The movements of the biggest syndicates. Where to look to find the evidence that can put them away. I can give you a direct line to th
e criminal underworld. And I can pay. A lot. It’s an arrangement of mutual benefit, although to be frank the benefit is weighted far more towards you than me.’
‘You’re asking us to work for a criminal organisation,’ Eric said.
‘I’m asking you to work with a criminal organisation,’ Rook said. ‘No obligations, no strings. The moment you want out, you are out, no questions asked. The very fact that you worked with me provides a pretty solid insurance policy against you turning informant. But listen, I don’t believe in forcing anyone into anything. You stop working, you stop getting paid and you stop getting information. We part ways and that’s that.’
The music, if that’s what anyone could have called it, was louder now. Jack lifted his glass but didn’t drink. Harrison poured another vodka. Eric was watching Rook.
The bikie smiled. ‘Any questions?’
They’d argued, of course. Each taking turns as devil’s advocate, going back and forth on where they stood. Jack was surprised to find that even with the anxiety of the days before the meeting, he wasn’t completely certain that telling Rook to get fucked was the right move. The money was one thing, but the chance for a line of information nobody else had, that was a career-maker.
‘It goes without saying,’ Eric had said, leaning against the wall at Jack’s cramped, peeling apartment, ‘but I’ll put it out there anyway. This is an all or none deal. It’s the only way to protect ourselves. If one of us refuses, we all do.’
‘Is it really that bad?’ Harrison asked. ‘I mean, I know on paper it is, but it’s a compromise that could save lives.’
And turn your wallet fatter than you’d ever imagined, Jack thought, but didn’t say. He couldn’t judge Harrison when the same temptation was weighing on him. Badly. The idea of getting out of this shithole, living somewhere nice, maybe somewhere with a yard and trees. He didn’t believe Rook’s claims that it would be a simple or clean arrangement, but that was a given. There would be challenges to this, but in the end Harrison was right. They could save lives.
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