‘What if Kippax is up there?’ he said.
‘He’s not,’ said the concierge. ‘He drove out over half an hour ago.’
Astrid pointed at the bin. ‘You’re the gentleman, Jack.’
‘Only on Tuesday nights.’ But he leaned into the thing and began to push.
A car came up from the ramp below and swung past, tyres giving a low-profile squeal into the corner; a black Lexus with the guy on the phone and his sunglasses already on, ever prepared for the bright future ahead. He glanced at them through the window. Jack looked, too — and frowned as he recognised who it was.
‘Florez,’ he said.
Two seconds later, the guy slammed his brakes on.
‘Be cool,’ said Astrid, standing up straighter. ‘Leave this to me.’
Roberto Florez came out of the car and walked around the back, buttoning up his slick suit with one hand. He took his sunglasses off as he grinned his way towards them and held out his arms as though he had bumped into old friends. Jack could see the welt from Francine’s Glock still red and shiny across his cheek.
‘Hey, look who’s here!’ he said and took another few steps. Then his eyes went down to the bin. Mick’s arms were sticking out a little over the top. The smile slipped off Florez’s face like wet sand from a shovel. When he looked back up, Astrid had him covered with a .38.
‘Hands, Florez. On top of your head.’
The guy smirked. ‘Who’s in there?’
‘Your buddy, Mick. Want to join him?’
A moment’s shock, then cool again. ‘Oh boy, but you people are in the shit.’
‘You need an interpreter? Hands on your fucking head or you get a hole in it.’
‘What, here in the car park? You’re not going to shoot me.’
Jack watched Florez, his bravado show playing because he thought he was safe. Astrid cocked the .38.
‘You know who was on the phone to me today?’ he said, hamming it up like a New York Mafioso. ‘Go on, have a guess.’
‘I’m not going to count to three.’ Astrid was holding the wrist of her gun hand, eye down the sight. ‘You’ll just be dead.’
‘Claudia! Can you believe it? Ringing me to see if I could help.’ Florez looked at Jack now. ‘I was just on my way to meet her. You know, see what I could do.’
‘She called you,’ said Jack, knowing that Claudia had spoken to him but still not quite believing it. Then again, she had been strange back at Susko Books. What had Florez said to her?
‘Or … hang on, wait. Did she call me or did I call her? Geez, I can’t even remember now.’
‘You’re a good friend,’ said Astrid, voice firm but calm. ‘So that’s why you’re going to come over here nice and slow and push your dead buddy into the elevator over there.’ She paused. ‘And Roberto? I never say things twice.’
‘He was never my buddy, dyke. So why don’t you push the fucker, huh?’
Jack waited for the crack of the gun but nothing happened. Astrid stood, not moving a muscle.
Florez smiled. ‘Yeah, I’m just going out to Glebe, Claudia told me she’s at some bookshop out there. You know it, Jack? The Bookstalk or something?’ He took a small step to the left. ‘Beaumont’s with her, too.’
Astrid frowned, a quick glance at Jack.
‘Yeah,’ said Florez. ‘I was just telling her what a no-good fucking loser Beaumont was, you know? How he was taking her for a ride.’
‘What kind of ride?’ said Jack.
‘The Gee-Whizzer, man! He tried to fuck everybody over, you know what I’m saying? But nobody more than her. And maybe you.’
Astrid turned to Jack. ‘Does he really know where Beaumont is?’ She took her eyes off Florez for only a second, but it was enough. Before Jack could say anything, the guy had come out with a gun.
‘Nothing like a party, hey people?’ Florez shifted the cannon in his hand over a little and made sure it pointed straight at Jack’s head. ‘How you feeling now?’
Jack did not say anything. He was in an excellent mood, too happy to speak. He had gone from mind-your-own-business second-hand-bookshop owner to the cheesy burrito in the middle of a Mexican standoff in three easy steps.
‘Put the gun down,’ said Astrid. ‘Think of your health, Roberto.’
‘Maybe you should think about Susko’s.’
Astrid grinned. ‘And why would I worry about that?’
Her tone was believable: even Jack frowned with concern. He thought about the Luger in his pocket but his Nostradamus powers could only see a bullet-ridden death if he tried to reach for it.
‘Okay then,’ said Florez. ‘We’ll have to do it the hard way.’
Jack heard a soft metallic click and a car suddenly roared up the nearest ramp. The reptile in the basement of his brain flicked its tail and he dived to his left, without thinking or willing it. A shot cracked and decimated the cold air of the underground car park. It filled his head with a powerful ringing that turned into a high-pitched drone. A second shot followed almost instantly, barely distinct from the first, then somebody shouted.
Florez or Astrid or the concierge?
Jack rolled towards the Porsche and pressed himself hard against the ground. He reached for the Luger, but his coat was twisted up around him and he could not get his hand into the pocket. He turned and saw Florez running for his car. Three more shots rang out, rapid-fire. He looked over to where Astrid had been standing and saw her slumped on the ground, the concierge kneeling over her, the .38 smoking in her hands. He scrambled to his feet.
There was a graze across Astrid’s temple, a scorched furrow that looked hot and raw, the edges singed black. But she was breathing. Jack searched her body: that was it, no other damage that he could see.
He got back up. ‘Can you take care of her?’
‘Yeah, I’ll get her upstairs.’
‘What about him?’ Jack pointed at Mick’s body in the bin.
She nodded. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
‘Sure?’
‘Go. Take her car, get it out of here.’ She searched Astrid’s pockets and tossed Jack the keys to the Porsche. ‘The cops won’t be long.’
‘All right.’ He smiled, unsure what else to say. ‘Thanks.’
‘Good luck.’
Jack almost said Never heard of it, but rushed to the car and climbed in. No point in being negative now. He was already soaking in it.
27
The rain continued to fall. Traffic was slow and tense all the way out to Glebe: Jack had no chance to punch the Porsche into anything past third gear. The city had turned gothic beneath dark clouds and the dim light like mist, and everywhere the water reflected the gloom. It might have been a nice cosy day at Susko Books, if not for murder and guns going off.
Jack hit the stereo and soul funk boomed out of the speakers. He knew the record: Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. He remembered buying it for Claudia and sending it to her in the mail, a final frisbee of love, in the hope she might catch it and throw some back again. Track 8, he had written on the front cover. ‘Make It Good to Me’. No name or dedication needed; she would have known who it was from. Jack reached over and pressed the forward cue button seven times. Turned it up, loud. The electric organ went straight to his battered heart.
Don’t want to know
Where you been all night
Ain’t no words you can tell me, baby
To make me feel all right
But if you hold me, in your arms,
We can forget all our worries and all our harms
If you make it good to me, baby
The way it used to be …
She never threw the frisbee back. Jack hoped that at least Astrid was enjoying it.
He struggled down a choked Broadway,
then waited at a red light for the right-hander into Glebe Point Road. The bus next to him tried to crowd through on the turn and Jack accelerated angrily past. Blew the horn. The bus replied with its own blast and Jack gave the driver the one-finger salute. It felt good. He was upset. Irritated and hurt, because the song had shown how vulnerable he had been — and Claudia had heard it and left it there, like swept-up leaves on the ground, ready for the wind to blow them away again. Listening to the song now, he did not want to think about how, after all this, not much had changed.
He parked just down from Chester’s bookshop. Jack glanced into the back of the car just as he was about to slam the door and saw the bag containing the bloodied clothes, there on the floor. A chill went through him. Already the morning’s events had started receding into a dusty drawer in his brain, but the sight of the green plastic bag brought everything back, sharp and pointy. It had happened, and even if Jack did not literally have the blood on his hands, he had been standing in it while it flowed. It was not a bad dream that was going to evaporate by the time he had breakfast. His anger recharged and focused: it was all Duncan Beaumont’s goddamn fault. It was an excuse, he knew, but it would do for now.
Jack longed for Faye’s harbour-side idyll and resisted the truth of just how far away from it he was. He reached in for the plastic bag and locked the Porsche.
Further up there was a dingy-looking café. Down a side lane stood a loose row of raggedy, food-stained bins, and he ducked down the lane and dumped the clothing into one of them. Fat drops of rain fell on him from a broad-leafed tree that leaned over a sagging wooden fence. He got back out onto the road and headed for Chester’s bookshop. Would Florez already have been there? Taken Beaumont for a little drive somewhere? He did not even want to think about Claudia.
The front doors were locked. He knuckled the wire mesh that covered the cloudy glass panels and waited. No response. Tried again, a little harder this time so that it shook, the sound flimsy and loose, but again nothing. He swore, cupped his hands and blew into them and looked around. He put his ear to the door but the traffic noise made it impossible to hear anything. He checked his watch: nearly 11.00 a.m. Where the hell would Chester have gone? The guy practically lived here.
Jack pulled out his mobile phone and tried Sinclair: the call rang through to his message bank. So did Claudia’s when he tried hers. Hearing her voice caused a couple of goosebumps to pop up on his arms. Christ.
Thinking now, hard. So maybe she had called Florez, wanting to find Duncan. Why not, especially after Jack told her no? And maybe Florez had said something with that greasy grin spread over his face. He had been gloating back at the Lumiere car park, driving Claudia into Jack’s heart like a stake. Loving it. But that was not what Jack had on his mind now. Claudia had told Florez where Beaumont was: she must have rung him after leaving Susko Books. She wanted him to know. Why? Shit. Whatever the reason, things were not looking good for the fiancé.
Jack walked out from under the awning. Maybe he could get in the rear somewhere, or at least see inside through a window. The thought that something might have happened was flapping its wings in his head, and getting hard to ignore.
He turned right into a cross street, then right again for the rear lane: rough puddled asphalt and scattered bins and boxes. Got to Chester’s dilapidated warehouse and saw a car parked right there, a black Alfa Romeo 159, gleaming even under the low dark sky. Jack looked through the tinted windows: a pair of fashion sunglasses resting in the centre console, a mini-pack of tissues and a tin of mints. There was a jacket across the back seat, half covering a Vogue magazine. Claudia’s ride.
He tried a door made of corrugated roofing that swung open stiffly, rusty hinges creaking. It revealed a narrow space of cracked concrete and weeds, leading to a garage roller door open about two or three feet off the ground. Jack crouched down and looked, then quickly slipped under, out of the rain.
Sinclair’s storeroom: books and crap everywhere. Piles of magazines and newspapers, milk crates overflowing with old VHS and music tapes, even some ancient computer components stacked on metal shelves in a corner, bulbous monitors and hard drives and keyboards, mouse cords hanging dead, everything covered in a dark dust that looked toxic. The sight of so much hoarded disorder caused Jack pain. He moved quietly, like a thief, frowning at the sound of his shoes sandpapering the coarse concrete floor.
A set of double doors up ahead. Jack splayed his fingertips against the worn wood and leaned his ear in. Was that somebody talking? Voices, but nothing clear, and as though they were coming from the other side of the shop floor. He pressed against the right-side door and felt it give. Got it eye-wide and looked through the gap — nothing but shelves and books.
‘No you fucking DIDN’T!’
It was Claudia’s voice, sudden and loud and angry. Jack froze with shock: then three seconds later, felt it immediately thaw and run through him like a string of long pulses down a wire. He waited for his heart to drop a few beats, from heart attack to pretty fast, then lowered himself into a crouch. Pushed the door open a little further, leaned forward and balanced himself on his free hand and stuck his head out in the bookshop. Nothing to see. He made a guess as to where the voice had come from and knew he was going to sneak in there but was rooted to the spot for the moment. He listened to the rain thrumming the saw-edged roof, grateful now for the traffic noise outside. Then he crouch-ran for the bookshelf to his left, keeping himself low and quiet, the whole move unconscious. Jack was surprised at how agile he felt.
‘Don’t tell me that!’
The floor was piled with loose stacks of books, plenty to hide behind. Jack stopped at the end of the first row of shelves, looked down the aisle and hid inside a slightly curved barrier of nature books, slopped together like stormwater debris: on top, Dangerous Australians by Steve Parish, the front cover a crocodile with its mouth gaping, chipped ivory teeth rimming the jaw, eyes bored, its wrinkled gullet pale pink but soft-looking, like a pillow had been shoved down there. Next to it, The World of Birds by Malcolm Ellis, a pink flamingo under the title staring straight at Jack with its disconcerting electric eye. Also a Reader’s Digest hardback, two smiling dolphins on the torn dust jacket with their heads out of the water, 1960s blue like a faded memory: Marvels and Mysteries of Our Animal World. A round orange sticker only half-stuck in the top right corner, $25 written in black pen. Chester Sinclair, entrepreneur extraordinaire.
‘What do you want me to say?’
That was Beaumont. Somewhere past the counter, straight ahead and to the left, probably in the little alcove where Sinclair displayed his ‘picks of the week’. Jack stopped at a narrow break in the bookshelf and ducked into the next aisle, shelves choked with clumps of books melted onto the floor like wax from a candle. He moved up, hunched over like some kind of semi-professional commando, and headed for the next break in the solid-backed shelves, trying to approach the voices in a kind of zigzag manoeuvre. The Luger was still in his coat pocket but he did not pull it out. Remembering the gun, he swore silently, wondering how the hell he had managed to forget about it for the last hour and cruise around the city in a Porsche that was not his, first delivering a body and now sneaking around Sinclair’s bookshop. Jack thought he had used up all his luck at Kippax’s card table, but maybe there were still some fumes left in the tank.
The voices were clear now. He stopped and crouched again, unable to see anything but content to listen for the moment.
Claudia, tearful: ‘You made your choice.’
Beaumont, panicky: ‘No, it wasn’t like that! I had no fucking choice!’
‘But I know, Duncan. I know it all.’
‘Know what?’
High-heeled footsteps over concrete. Claudia, not so teary: ‘Do you remember where we met?’
‘What?’
‘That stupid party, that fucking launch. For a new mobile phone?’
&nb
sp; ‘What are you talking about? What?’
‘My father introduced us.’
‘Yeah. So what?’
‘Sit down!’
‘All right, all right!’
‘Don’t fucking move.’
Moaning from somewhere, muffled. Was somebody else there?
‘My father introduced us. Why?’
‘I don’t fucking know. Maybe he thought we’d get on. Jesus, Claudia, listen —’
‘I remember. He said, Claudia, I want you to meet Duncan. He’d like to put me in jail for tax evasion. Can you sort him out? Hand on my elbow, turning me to you. Big smile, joking ha-ha. I thought he was being sweet.’
‘He was. I remember, you were wearing —’
‘Shut up. Do you want me to shoot you now?’ More footsteps. Jack felt them click-clack cold down his back. Claudia, again, in a hiss: ‘I know what I was fucking wearing.’
‘I don’t know what you’re … what you’re trying to say?’
‘Dad set you up. Got you in close. Through me.’
‘I’ve got no idea what the hell you’re talking about! Put the gun away!’
‘You think I don’t know my father?’
‘Your father’s a prick.’
‘So what was the deal with the devil, huh? What did he offer you to get Kippax off his back? Come on, Duncan, all that preparation? Fake shooting, bullshit backstory about your old man? Was I part of the deal or just incidental? A lucky bonus?’
Silence. A chair creaked.
‘Well?’
Jack listened. There were pieces missing but he was starting to get the picture. Christ. Did she really have a gun pointed at her fiancé? At Chester’s bookshop? Where the hell was he?
Beaumont: ‘I hate your father. I wanted to kill him. I couldn’t because of you. It’s no fucking backstory.’
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