The Inheritance

by Gabriel Bergmoser

  ‘Wait,’ Aaron said, sitting up. ‘Jack . . . Jack Carlin. I know who he is.’

  ‘Congratu-fucking-lations,’ Townsend growled. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Aaron was fumbling at his pocket. ‘I have something he wants.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Maggie said.

  But Aaron was ignoring her. He lifted the hard drive. ‘This is what he’s been looking for.’

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Townsend asked.

  ‘Aaron,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Evidence,’ Aaron said. ‘On the Scorpions. Carlin’s been after it for years. Rook told me. It’s l-leverage.’

  Townsend looked from Aaron to the drive. He nodded to one of his men, who crawled over to Aaron and took the drive. Aaron didn’t resist; he just shrank back, staring bug-eyed at Townsend, waiting.

  Townsend lifted the radio again and pressed the button. ‘Carlin?’

  ‘At your service.’

  ‘We can make a deal.’

  ‘I highly doubt that.’

  ‘A hard drive. We’ve got a hard drive. Something about the Scorpions. Mean anything to you?’

  Silence on the other end.

  Townsend’s smile was one of savage relief. ‘You let us walk clear. You let us—’

  ‘Jack, don’t!’ Maggie yelled.

  ‘Shut up!’ Townsend spat. ‘You hear that, Carlin? Let us walk, let us take the girl, and we’ll leave the drive right here. All yours to do whatever you want with.’

  Still nothing from the other end.

  Maggie looked up towards the vague outlines of the hills surrounding the lake. Carlin was out there somewhere. Hearing Townsend’s offer, thinking it through. The thrill she’d felt just moments ago had given way to something sour and sinking. Whatever she had come to feel about Carlin during those days at his house, he had always been clear about his intentions. He wanted the drive. He wanted to destroy the Scorpions. Everything else was secondary.

  ‘Answer me!’ Townsend’s voice had turned high-pitched, scared.

  ‘Proof,’ Carlin said.

  ‘Then hold your fucking fire.’ A look from Townsend to the man with the drive. Apprehensive, he stood. No shots. He lifted the drive up, high, where Carlin could see it through his scope.

  For a long moment, silence. Maggie’s fingernails were digging into her palm.

  Townsend was sweating now. ‘Well?’ He croaked into the radio.

  The man holding the drive screamed as a bullet tore through his wrist with an eruption of blood and bone. The hard drive hit the ground, still clasped in his severed hand. Clutching his stump, the man fell. The other guards were up, firing into the dark.

  Townsend looked to Maggie. His grasp tightened around his gun—

  Just as she swung the pipe hard into his jaw.

  A terrible, loud crack. Townsend’s jaw jerked sideways. He let out a strangled, pained cry as he went down.

  Then Aaron was on his feet, snatching up the hand with the drive and bolting past the firing guards, past the cars, into the night.

  Another burst of blood and another of Townsend’s men dropped. The gangster was still writhing in the dirt.

  Maggie ran after Aaron.

  She was half-prepared to be taken out by a bullet, but none came. Suddenly the glaring headlights were gone and she was plunged into a darkness her eyes were unadjusted to. There were only shapes in the shadow, shapes that could have been anything, but only one of them was moving.

  The pain had dissipated but she could feel the wetness of the bandages as they slipped down her blood-slick face. She knew that if she slowed now, she would drop. She was hurt badly and could barely fight. But she had to get to Aaron. Had to get the drive.

  And she was gaining on him. Already he was faltering, hunched and unsteady, then he was right in front of her and she collided with him. They hit the dirt together. She grabbed for the drive, tried to wrest it from his grip. Aaron kicked and writhed. They rolled through the dirt. Maggie felt the impact of fists and knees but she had gone past the point where any more pain would matter.

  Then Aaron grabbed her face.

  His fingers dug into her gashes and under her skin. Maggie convulsed, her grip released, then Aaron was pulling away from her and on to his feet. Maggie saw blinding white. Her head was spinning and she wasn’t sure where she was.

  But still she stood.

  Metres from her, Aaron had dropped the hard drive. He had Nipper’s gun in his hand, pointed directly at it.

  ‘Enough,’ he wheezed. ‘Okay? Enough. No more.’

  Maggie didn’t move.

  ‘Please.’ His voice was cracking. ‘Please just walk away. Just leave me alone. Otherwise I’ll shoot it.’

  ‘And then what?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Then you,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll kill you.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  Aaron’s breathing was a pained struggle. ‘You don’t know . . . you don’t know anything. Just stop, okay? Please. Please. Let me go home.’

  ‘Give me the hard drive,’ Maggie said. ‘And you can walk away.’

  A shape moved in the dark behind Aaron. Tall, slow-moving, holding something long that glinted in the moonlight. Carlin lifted the rifle, aiming it at Aaron’s head. His vantage point must have been closer than Maggie realised.

  She tried to keep her focus on Cooper’s son. ‘Aaron, please. Just give me the drive. Give me the drive and we can all walk away from this.’

  Aaron was shaking his head. ‘No. I’m a Scorpion.’ The words sounded desperate and pathetic.

  ‘If you could kill me, you would have,’ Maggie said. ‘You’re not a murderer, Aaron. You need help.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ he cried.

  ‘Leave it,’ Maggie said. ‘Please.’

  She could see his finger tightening on the trigger now. His slack, scared face hardening. Carlin was getting closer; Maggie could almost make out his features in the dark.

  Then movement behind Carlin, fast and sudden. One of the SUVs, the lights off, gunning for him.

  Aaron’s finger tighter still, ready to fire at a flinch.

  In that moment Maggie saw it all. The terrified boy in over his head. The old rogue cop. The vicious gangster bearing down on them. That small metal rectangle that could hold all the answers Maggie had given up everything for.

  And her. In the middle of it all. Daughter of a broken monster. Forged by hate and fury. Standing here on the precipice of what had long since been laid out for her.

  Or.

  ‘Jack!’ Maggie roared.

  Aaron pulled the trigger. The hard drive burst into jagged pieces.

  Carlin turned, saw the car bearing down on him and dived out of its way.

  For just a second, Maggie held Aaron’s gaze. She saw the churning guilt and panic and confusion that had led him here. The final understanding of just how deeply he had fucked up.

  Then the car slammed into him.

  Aaron spun into the air. Maggie scurried back. The SUV screeched to a halt.

  Aaron hit the ground.

  Her vision shook. The night was fracturing. All she could see was the still, smoking car.

  Maggie ran for it. Pulled the driver’s side door open.

  Jaw hanging bloody and loose, Len Townsend looked at her.

  Maggie grabbed him by the jaw and dragged him from the car.

  He squealed as he hit the ground. Maggie didn’t let go. She could feel the shattered bones, feel them pulling loose, feel the skin tearing. She didn’t care. Maggie smashed the pipe into his face.

  The squealing stopped. Maggie brought it down again and again. Felt bone cave in. Saw Townsend twitch and squirm and stop, and still she hit him until his face was a red pulp spreading blood into the long-dry dirt, and still Maggie brought the pipe down until strong hands took it from her. She struggled but then Jack Carlin was holding her close, hugging her to him and saying, ‘It’s over, girl. It’s over.’

  She tried to break free. Tried to get back to Townsend
. But Carlin didn’t let go and finally she gave in and stopped and sank into his arms as the pain and tiredness swept over her and the weight of it all tried to drag her down, but Carlin never let go.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The sky above the thick trees was heavily overcast and darkening by the second with the threat of rain. Alone on the porch of Carlin’s house, nursing a beer, Maggie watched the clouds. She sipped and tried to ignore the aching itch from her face. The painkillers were doing their job, but wounds like this were hard to ignore.

  She had been here several days now, but soon she’d have to be gone. Where, she wasn’t yet sure. She got the sense that Carlin liked the company. Besides which, she didn’t want to leave. Her time here had given her the chance to finally breathe and try to sort through everything that had happened. Not that she was getting very far with any of that. Every time she managed to reach some kind of internal accord with one part of the puzzle, there was another that kept her awake.

  But if any evidence connecting Carlin to the lakebed massacre led the police here, then Maggie’s presence would cause even more trouble for the man who had, once again, come through for her.

  Leaving Townsend’s body, Maggie had gone after Aaron, Carlin close behind. Not that there was any point. Not that Maggie knew what she would have done had he still been alive.

  Harrison Cooper’s son, for whom he had given up everything, lay twisted and broken near the SUV. His eyes were closed. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth. He would have looked almost peaceful if it wasn’t for the rest of him.

  Maggie had stood there for what felt like a long time, looking at the boy she had come here to save, continuing what Cooper had so desperately tried to do.

  She didn’t know what to feel about Aaron now. If she should feel anything. Her thoughts returned to when she was a kid, to asking his father endless questions about him, to the times she had imagined having a brother, imagined growing up with him. Had that happened, had Cooper taken her in, would she have ended up any different?

  Yes, because unlike Aaron, she had the context of something far worse than a strict, hypocritical parent. But that didn’t change the fact that the old fantasy of Cooper the saviour had gone.

  Maybe Aaron had been right to hate his father. Maybe his scattershot plan did have a vein of righteousness. Maggie would never truly understand what had gone through his head. But from where she was standing, he looked only like a confused, angry, weak kid in desperate need of guidance, who had found it in the worst place possible.

  Behind her, Carlin had rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘We need to go.’ His voice wasn’t quite gentle, but as close to as it got.

  ‘Should we . . .’ Maggie wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence.

  ‘Wanna go digging graves in your condition?’ Cooper said. ‘You need stitches and a sleep. Besides which, some local will have heard something. Police will be on the scene very fucking soon, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be here when that happens.’

  Maybe she was imagining it, but it was almost as though there was a question in that.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t either.’

  Carlin had filled her in on what happened after she’d escaped his house. As he’d told Townsend on the radio, he had been wearing a vest, something he’d ‘always done after some fucker dragged a knife down me’. Like Maggie, the would-be assassin had assumed he was dead and returned to the house to check if anyone else had survived Maggie’s improvised traps. Carlin, momentarily stunned, had been on the shooter moments later.

  ‘After which,’ Carlin had explained, ‘I was more than a little pissed off. I mean, for one, you stole my car.’

  ‘Thought you were dead,’ Maggie had said. It wasn’t as though she’d had time to check.

  ‘Ah well, I got my own back there.’ It turned out Carlin had made his way to Maggie’s own car where she’d left it near her father’s place. From there, he had set to work tracking down Len Townsend.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I was keeping an ear out for you,’ he had said. ‘But I had no fucking idea where you’d gone. And given Townsend knew my address, and therefore that I’d been sheltering you, he knew way too much for comfort. He had to go. So I twisted a few arms and made a few threats until I found out he’d come to Melbourne after his hit squad got royally fucked on. Typically, he wasn’t much for secrecy, so it didn’t take long to work out where he was headed and follow him until I got a clear shot. Would have liked to kill him myself, but you looked like you had some feelings to get off your chest there, so I figured I’d let you have it.’

  Most of the drive back, Maggie had slipped in and out of consciousness. Carlin had given her fresh bandages, but the bleeding was bad and soon they were soaked red as well. They had returned in Maggie’s car, with Carlin promising he had a ‘local mate who can swing the van back to me’. She wasn’t sure if that was true or if there was any benefit to Carlin taking them both in a car that wasn’t his, but she was grateful to him. Once she was relatively healed, she’d be able to leave again.

  Julie had arrived first thing the next morning, and Argos had hurried over for a scratch.

  ‘We need to stop meeting like this,’ Julie had growled as she inspected the cuts.

  She had worked steadily to stitch them all up, but her grim expression told Maggie that she didn’t like what she saw.

  For her part, Maggie hadn’t known what to feel when she finally looked in a mirror. The stitching likely made them look worse, but even healed they’d be obvious, long and knotted, one over her eye, two under it. She thought back to the boy in Port Douglas, whose name she’d clean forgotten now. She’d been so worried that the scars she hid would be a marker that would make her forever memorable. She’d never have to think twice about that again. Her days of slipping easily into a crowd were gone. Not only were the scars obvious, they were unique. They said she had been through some shit.

  She’d been told over the course of her life that she was pretty. No stunning beauty, but pretty. It wasn’t something she had thought a lot about or had any time for, really. Just an accepted fact of her being. But whatever those people had meant when they said pretty, it wasn’t what Maggie was now. In isolation, she didn’t mind the scars. She’d never cared too much how she looked. But from a practical standpoint, they were a danger she’d have to factor into her future forever.

  ‘Not gonna ask how you’re feeling,’ Julie had said a couple of days later, when she returned to check up on Maggie. ‘Those would hurt like a motherfucker. And I can’t imagine you’re much thrilled about the location. But they’re not your first, and the way you’re going, they won’t be the last.’

  ‘You don’t sound approving of that,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Not my job to approve,’ Julie replied. ‘My job to fix. Unless shit gets broken, I don’t have a job. Still, seeing as nobody else seems to be telling you this, I’d suggest staying away from machetes and broken bottles.’

  ‘They seem to have a way of finding me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Julie said. ‘But maybe that finding is mutual. And maybe it’s worth asking yourself why that is.’

  Maggie had thought losing the hard drive would hurt more. After everything she had gone through to get her hands on it, she would have at least thought she’d be angry. And while there was a dull sense of frustration, the whole ordeal had left her burnt-out. Still, when she considered the hard drive, she didn’t think she’d feel much worse when she finally came back to herself.

  It took her a while to work out why that was. Part of it, she thought, was Aaron. He had positioned himself so starkly in opposition to his father that it had destroyed him. Maggie, for her part, had long felt caught between what her father had done and what her mother had failed to do. Between an aggressive presence and an absence that retained the potential to be filled by anything. That potential, in Maggie’s mind, had grown into something towering and unrealistic
, the belief that she could be solved if she could only meet her mother. That the woman who had left her in a cage with a beast could provide her with a semblance of peace, with answers to questions Maggie wasn’t even entirely sure of anymore.

  But her mother was alive, or at least had been around a year ago. The briefly glimpsed image in that photo had burned itself into her thoughts. While she didn’t yet know what her next move was, she found it hard to believe that she could forget what she knew. Or ignore another opportunity to find her mother, should it arise.

  Maggie wasn’t the only one to whom the hard drive had mattered. Carlin kept her updated with whatever information he managed to get through his various contacts. Unsurprisingly, Olivia Dean hadn’t told anyone about their deal; she had, however, been behind the library raids, claiming she was responding to an anonymous tip. Carlin, who seemed less bothered by the loss of the hard drive than Maggie might have expected, suggested that Dean would privately be furious about the seeming double-cross, but Maggie didn’t see a huge amount of point in trying to get in touch and explain, given she’d fully intended to double-cross Dean anyway.

  The Scorpions, meanwhile, were keeping quiet. The discovery of Cooper’s body had been linked to Nipper and with that came a whole new investigation into whether a bikie had murdered a policeman, so however annoyed she might be, Dean had her hands full for the time being. Carlin, for his part, didn’t seem especially optimistic. Nipper’s missing gun, found in Bonnie Doon, had created questions about whether it had in fact been Aaron who had killed Harrison Cooper – still a Scorpion, but one acting on his own out of some violent grudge rather than anything the gang had directed him to do. Not nothing, but not as much of a slam dunk as proof that the gang had been covering for a murderer operating in their midst, a murderer who lacked provable motive and therefore could more easily be presented to a judge as cause for the kind of warrant Dean needed.

  ‘The hard drive was always a bit of a long shot,’ Carlin had told Maggie. ‘I doubt anything on there would really have been enough to bring the gang down. But that’s the thing about ideas. Hang on to one long enough, it can grow into something big and false and dangerous. Lot of people did a lot of hanging and figured they were on the hunt for a game-changer. Either way, we’ll never know now.’