by Clare Kauter
When we had safely made it out of the street, Tim asked me what had happened. I told him and he started laughing.
“I meant a small distraction, not a full-building evacuation,” he said. “Still, it was effective. And you’re sure you didn’t get caught on camera?”
I nodded. “We sat on a couch that the camera couldn’t see in the waiting room and there weren’t any cameras on the stairs. I was pretty careful not to get caught pulling the extinguisher off the wall.”
Tim shook his head, still grinning. “You’re one of a kind, honey. So, how’d you go with Panther this morning?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Hasn’t he told you already?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “He said you weren’t in the least scared of him. He also told me about how you two met in the men’s showers yesterday.” He laughed at the thought of it. “Not much that can embarrass Panther. Not too many people who can get away with ripping him off, either. You continue to amaze me, honey. You’re not scared of him, you’re not that scared of Spider…”
“Did he say anything else about me?” I asked, with fake indifference.
Tim thought for a second. “Yeah. He said that he liked you. You annoyed him like hell, but he liked you.”
Well, that’s nice to know. I wouldn’t want to be disliked by him. OK, I know I may have said he didn’t scare me, but I lied. You would have to be an idiot not to be scared of a guy that buff.
Tim pulled into Elm Avenue and we both took in the sight. It was like we’d ended up on a planet entirely populated by SUVs. There was every kind of 4WD you could imagine. Jeep Cherokee, Porsche Cayenne, Prado, Nissan, Toyota, Range Rover – it was the meeting of the Book Club. I wondered who had ‘read the most books’ (read: won the drag race) this week.
The meeting wasn’t supposed to start for another half hour, but everyone always turned up early so that they could drink more wine, eat more nibblies and share all the gossip before the discussion of books, cars and cross-country driving expeditions began.
It was insane.
Tim double-parked out the front of my house and I jumped out of the car. We said goodbye and he drove off. I walked up towards the front door and went to open it, but it was reefed open before I had the chance. It was Violet.
“Getting dropped off by Tim again?” she was saying. “There’s definitely something going on between you two. And what happened to you? You’re soaked.” I looked down. I was wet. Sprinklers tend to do that.
“We just work together, Vi,” I said, not answering her question about the water. Best not to worry her. I walked into the lounge room and saw everyone crowding around the TV, enthralled. “What’s up?” I asked.
“There was a fire Larry Jones’s office building. Apparently the police think there’s someone after him. Probably has something to do with Frank McKenzie. They’re trying to put Larry’s office out now. Apparently no other offices were damaged.”
“Anyone hurt?” I asked.
“No, everyone got out in time.”
What exactly was going on? Larry’s office had actually caught fire? It seemed like Larry was being a bit of an opportunist. I guess someone had told him the police were on the way up. When I set the fire alarm off, I gave him the idea to set fire to his office and destroy the evidence against him. Or at least delay its retrieval. Plus, if it looked like he’d been targeted, maybe the cops wouldn’t suspect him so much. His face appeared on the television.
“I was very lucky to have been downstairs when the fire was started,” he said. Liar, liar, pants on fire. “I’m very grateful to the person who noticed my office was alight and raised the alarm. I’m just glad no one was hurt.”
I walked out into the kitchen and grabbed a glass of wine. I don’t drink much (as I’ve mentioned) but this seemed like a good time to start. I’d set the alarm off and given Larry the opportunity to get himself out of trouble. Great. I took a swig of the wine. And then another.
When I finished the glass, the telephone rang.
It was Tim. “Hey, honey. I guess you’ve seen the news?”
“Yes. I just finished a glass of wine and I’m not feeling any better.”
“I didn’t think you drank.”
“I don’t. It just seemed fitting to have a drink considering what I’d done.”
“Hey, it’s not that bad. I made copies of all that stuff in his office before it burned down, plus most of it’s online anyway, and now the police can’t get the evidence until we want them to. Things have worked out pretty well.”
When you thought of it that way, it didn’t seem so bad.
“So,” I said when I walked back into the lounge room. “What’s the latest gossip about the McKenzie case?”
No one cared about discussing the murder in front of Violet. She wasn’t close to Frank, and nobody thought James had done it after seeing him on telly last night. No reason it would upset her.
“Everyone is saying it’s connected to Larry Jones,” Mum’s friend, Siobhan Letterman, answered. Siobhan was like the Gerongate Bulletin. She was good to have around because she knew what was going on in town, but you didn’t tell her anything you didn’t want to be made public.
“That’s it? No one is saying anything other than that?” I found it hard to believe that no one knew anything more. This is Gerongate we’re talking about. Someone had to know something.
“Well,” Siobhan continued. “There are rumours that Larry Jones hired an assassin to kill Frank, but that hardly seems plausible.”
“OK. Let me know if you hear anything else interesting.” Great. No one knew anything. It was a dead end.
That was disappointing.
I didn’t hang around for the whole book club. I went to bed early, absolutely exhausted and dreading another day’s exercise.
Chapter Twelve
I was growing to hate my alarm clock. It seemed to rejoice in my misery, beeping cheerily at me when all I wanted to do was sleep. I turned it off and rolled over, listening to the rain pounding the roof. Isn’t it funny the calming effect rain has on you when you’re in bed?
The next time I opened my eyes I was being wrenched into consciousness by Adam. He didn’t look happy.
“You should be ready to run. Hurry up and get dressed,” he ordered.
“But it’s raining,” I whined.
“OK then,” he said. “Get up or get fired. You’ve got two minutes until we’re leaving.”
I pulled on my saggy, misshapen tracksuit and my worn-out joggers. I looked ready for life in the gutter. My muscles were sore, my eyes were puffy and red-rimmed and I had a hangover from last night’s wine. My head was aching along with the rest of my body, plus I was feeling kind of queasy, and I was expected to do exercise.
I found myself wondering, not for the first time, why me? Then I told myself that no matter how bad the exercise was, I did actually like the rest of the job. Well, I liked some of it, and even the bad parts beat the shit out of being a checkout chick. Plus I got paid. A lot.
“What the hell is that?” asked Adam when I reached the kitchen.
“What?” I demanded.
“That tracksuit. You look like an advertisement for Jenny Craig wearing that,” he said. Oh, wonderful. Now it wasn’t just my arse, it was my whole body. Brilliant. Baxter & Co. was doing so much for my self-esteem.
I groaned as we walked out the door. My head was throbbing and my body was protesting, and to top it off, it was raining. Lovely.
“You shouldn’t drink during the week,” he told me. “It doesn’t feel great running while you’re hung over.”
Guess I wasn’t looking too crash hot.
“Are you speaking from experience?” I asked. I was testing him, to see just how cheeky I could be without making him angry.
He ignored the question. “You’re not going to feel too good after a shot of wheat grass.”
Just the thought made me shudder. “Do I still have to take the wheat grass?”
“Yes. It’ll t
each you to get drunk when you have to work the next day.”
When we hit the pavement, I was feeling seedy and my head hurt, but I could handle it. By the end of the block, my stomach was churning. We’d made it about a kilometre (with breaks) when I spewed in the gutter.
“Hurry up,” said Adam. “I’ve already told you, a hangover won’t save you.”
I only vomited twice more on the run. I’d thought that the exercise would get easier over time. That morning changed my mind.
When we got to the gym, Adam picked up the clipboard from the front desk and wrote down the time we got in. 6:59 a.m. A minute later and I would have been running on the treadmill. Lucky – I wouldn’t have been up to that at the best of times, and this certainly wasn’t the best of times.
Adam flicked through the papers on the clipboard.
“OK,” he said. “We’ll do some stretches first. I know you did that yesterday, but apparently you didn’t go too well, so we’re going to do it again and hopefully you’ll improve.”
Adam was the kind of guy who could probably drive you to slitting your wrists. Maybe I should pull the Grandma act on him again.
He made me stretch so much that it hurt. By the end of our 20-minute stretch-sesh I was just about ready to kill him.
At the weights section, he spent about five minutes re-checking whether or not I could do sit ups, push ups, chin ups and all the other things that I’d been tested on by Tim. Two days ago. Did he actually think I’d improve that quickly?
I did rounds with weights until my arms collapsed. Then he put me on a gym machine circuit where I had to stay on each one for a minute and then take my heart rate. He wrote down comments (probably all negative). By the time we got to self-defence, I was definitely ready to kill him. And throw up. Again.
“OK, you did punches yesterday, so we’ll work on kicks today,” said Adam.
He took me over to the boxing bags and showed me a few different types of kicks. “When I call out a certain type of kick, I want you to do that and repeat until I call out another. Got it?”
“Yes,” I growled, giving him the Evil Eye.
“Good,” he responded. “Right-leg round-house.”
When I limped into the cafeteria (kicking for an hour makes it quite painful to walk), I went straight up to the counter and looked at what was available. This wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a big, fatty fry-up for breakfast, not health food.
I ended up getting scrambled tofu, mushrooms, rye bread, and the usual supplements. I did the thing where I downed the juice and nearly spewed. Again.
By the time I got to the office, I was starting to feel a bit more human. I sat down and got to work. By lunchtime, nothing interesting had happened. No threatening telephone calls. No visits from Tim. McKenzie hadn’t even turned up yet, and things were starting to get so boring that I was beginning to wish he would. But then I remembered that I was hung over and having no visitors was probably a good thing. No one to rip me off about how I looked, or say things to make me feel even sicker than I already did.
I skipped lunch that day, because the scrambled tofu just wasn’t sitting right and I didn’t want to provoke my stomach any more. One glass of wine! I was never going to drink again. For a while. Not tonight, anyway. Well, maybe. But not until late.
At five o’clock, I stood up to leave. At the same time, Adam came through the door.
“Come with me,” he said. Not an offer. A command.
I followed him back down the corridor, through a door, down some stairs and then realised where we were going. The car park. My car was here!
When we got there, he led me over to a spot near where he’d attacked me on my first day. Ah, the happy memories. We stopped in front an empty lot.
“This is your parking spot,” he told me as he pulled a pair of keys out of his jeans pocket. I looked at his shoes. Converse – again. “You probably won’t have to drive to work for a long time – at least until you’re fit enough to cut back on days of exercise – but you’re welcome to drive it around town for non work-related things.” He handed me the key – it was on a chain with a horse on it. A mustang.
He walked me out to a little cargo-bay looking thing. There was a silver car sitting there. A convertible Mustang.
“Is – is that – ” I tried to say.
“Your car? Yes, it is. You can go now, if you want.” And with that, he left.
I beeped the car unlocked and got in. Wow. If Baxter & Co. bought their employees Mustangs and Porsches, they weren’t exactly hard-up for cash. I didn’t realise security and investigations were such big industries.
The seats in the Mustang were covered in a nice dark fabric, the kind that would be good in summer because I wouldn’t stick to it if I got sweaty (was that a bit gross? Oh well). I sunk into the chair, put on my seatbelt, and then pressed a button and the convertible top folded down. I squealed. I couldn’t help it. This was one cool car.
I followed the arrows out of the car park and pulled onto the road. I set out without a destination in mind, just enjoying cruising around in a car that didn’t seem to hate me. Somehow, I ended up parked out the front of Will McKenzie’s apartment building. What the hell, I thought. I don’t have anything better to do. Maybe he knows something. Unlikely, since he didn’t know Uncle Frank and hadn’t spoken to James for five years, but hey. YOLO. (Is that the appropriate use of YOLO? Yeah, I’m down with the kids.)
I walked through the foyer and took the stairs. I figured it might help to get rid of my fat arse. I got to the sixth floor, puffing only slightly. (OK, I was puffing heaps. Rub it in, why don’t you?) I waited until I caught my breath and then I walked up to Will’s door and knocked.
About ten seconds later he opened the door. “Hey, Charlie!” he said with a smile. “What’s up? I heard you quit work and there was a contract out your head so you got a job at a security company.”
That was surprisingly accurate. “I don’t know about the contract,” I said, and then thought of what Larry had said yesterday on the phone and decided it was entirely possible. But Will didn’t need to know that. “But I am working at a security company.”
“Cool. Going well?”
“Oh, yeah. I got a company car today. A Mustang.”
He raised his eyebrows and his jaw dropped. “How bad’s your job that you deserve a Mustang?”
I laughed. “I’m secretary.”
He sighed. “And all I get is a nurse’s salary and a name tag with a typing error.” I laughed again. Will worked at a clinic – the same one he’d attended after his near-death – and he certainly wasn’t in it for the money or the glamour. He’d told me in the past that the reason he did it was because he reckoned that he could probably understand the patients better than the other nurses and doctors, seeing as he’d been through the same thing in the past. He helped people with everything from addictions to depression, and he was the perfect person for the job. He cared a lot about people. “While we’re on the topic of expensive cars, have you seen my brother lately?”
As nonchalantly as he asked, I knew it was more than a casual question. Will respected James’s wish to not try to contact him, but I knew he missed him a lot.
“Only nearly every day this week,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Something going on between the two of you?” I gave him a foul look and he grinned back. “Do I hear wedding bells?”
I poked my tongue out at him. I’d hardly even thought about our wedding at all. “He’s got someone from my company looking into your uncle’s murder – that’s confidential, by the way.”
“How is he? He and Frank were pretty close.”
“He’s fine. No different from normal. Maybe a bit upset, but that didn’t stop him from being just as charming as always.”
He smiled. “You do bring out the best in him.”
“By the way, Will, I need an honest opinion.”
“Oh shit.”
“My bum.”
“If you’ve
got some sort of rash, I don’t want to know.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I was just wondering what you think of it.”
“I don’t think of it.”
“Looking at it now, though.” I turned so he could see it and looked back at him over my shoulder.
“What is happening?”
“Look at it!”
“I don’t want to!”
“I don’t care what you want! Look at it and tell me what you think.”
He looked at it and said, “I think you’re a psycho.”
“Will!”
“Fine. It’s like, a solid six.”
“A six?’
“I was joking, Charlie. It’s lovely. Now can I please stop looking at it? Because I feel like I’m perving on my little sister.”
“Fine.” I turned back around. He looked relieved. “I don’t suppose you can tell me anything new about Frank or James or the murder or anything?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Well,” I said. “I kind of made this bet with James…”
I explained the story to him.
“You set off the fire alarm, but he torched his own office?” he asked. I nodded. “You’re not getting back into the arson thing? You promise?”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Do you think James is in danger?” he asked.
I thought for a while. “I doubt it. With him dead, there’s no one to take the fall for the real murderer. I don’t think they’d risk killing him.”
“So,” said Will. “You don’t think he’s a killer.”
“Just because I don’t like someone doesn’t make them a murderer,” I answered.
“You’ve gone sweet on him, haven’t you?”
“No!”
“Have too.”
“Have not.’
“Have too.”
“Have not.”
“Have too.”
“Grow up. Unlike the rest of the world, I don’t idolise your brother. I don’t worship him and I have definitely not gone sweet on him!”
“You used to be in love with him,” he retorted.
“Not since I was four years old! That hardly counts.”