by Iain Ryan
Taradale.
Drainland.
The pit never ended.
And then the text message came through.
Two words:
Call me.
It was late and Romano had been drinking. She took her cigarettes and headed for the ocean. There was a pay phone down near the boat club, right by the start of the jetty, a lonely-looking thing under a single white streetlight. Romano closed an eye and punched the number.
It rang.
Matt Dyer answered.
“It’s me,” she said.
“I thought we had a deal.”
He sounded tired. She barely remembered him but at the sound of his voice, it all came back. The lockup in Melbourne. The wiretap of her apartment. Will Holding. Better the devil you don’t know in this shit you’re in. Romano imagined Dyer at the other end of this line, sitting in the same suit, at some desk up in a government building overlooking the city.
“You there?” he said.
“You said to call, so I’m calling.”
“I thought we had a deal,” he said a second time.
“Fuck you and fuck your deal. Our deal’s off. If I’d known what this place was like, I’d have tried my luck with Ray Herbert and prison.”
"Then let me remind you that those two options are still on the table.”
Romano dragged on her cigarette and waited. “Uh-huh,” she said after a time.
“You were supposed to keep in touch.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“So I noticed. You know what I’ve got in front of me? I’ll tell you. I’ve got an official police report with a ribbon tied on it, sent to Senator Ron Bachelard, who, despite the death of his son, has absolutely no jurisdiction in this at all. I take it this was a play to win favour.”
“Sorry,” said Romano. “That pertains to an ongoing investigation and I’m not really at liberty to discuss it. So go fuck yourself.” She went to put the phone down, but heard Dyer holler for her to stop.
“—just wait! Just wait a minute! I can get you out of there, but not right now and not because of this. It’s a move in the right direction, but it’s not enough. You need to give me more. I need to know how it works. And…”
“And…”
“You need to get me Harris.”
“Right. Shit, of course. So that’s what all this is about?”
“Have you seen him?”
“Seen him? I’ve been working with him,” she said. “Why?”
“Good. I need you find out how he fits into everything.”
“Nothing fits into anything else over here. Half the island’s a resort, the other half is…I don’t know, it’s like fucking Haiti over here. It’s sickening. It’s dangerous as shit, too. You threatening me with jail time, that’s a walk in the park compared to some of what I’ve seen here. I got myself into all sorts of trouble just trying to work that homicide report you’ve got sitting in your lap—”
“I guess you could call it work. This file’s a bloody joke, Romano. It’s enough to drag any one of you in front of an inquiry, so let’s be frank with one another. You listen—”
“No, you listen. What do you know about this place?”
“Enough to sink the whole bloody thing,” he said.
“Bullshit. Don’t think for a second you’re going to fence me in on this and then tell me I fucked up. I’m clean now and I see you coming, and I’ve run this game enough times myself to know it inside out, remember? You tell me how I get out of here—you lay it out now—or you get nothing. And do it fast. That’s the new deal.”
“You know, Romano, I might just close the book on you. I could do that, if I wanted. This thing with Senator Bachelard. That’s done. There’s no gold star for you in this. I have his ear and you don’t. So have a good time over there. When you’re ready to talk about a transfer, we’ll talk…after you start telling me what I need to know.”
Romano lit another smoke off the ember of the last and puffed out a cloud. “We’ll see,” she said.
“I guess we will.”
Neither of them spoke.
After a time, Romano said, “So, Harris huh?”
“Harris first,” said Dyer.
“What do you want on him?”
“Everything,” he said. "The lot.”
“You should have told me this from the beginning.”
“He would have smelled it on you. He’s smarter than he looks. And a lot more dangerous, too.”
The rest of September passed in an alcoholic blur. Romano knew she was beat. There was no getting off Tunnel anytime soon. She had no leverage. Giving Dyer what he wanted would take years, not months, and he knew it. The more she thought on it—always in the yard, with a smoke and a drink—the more she felt that Dyer hadn’t even started working her. She was a cog in this and he was turning the wheel.
By October that frustration subsided into a type of quiet acceptance and then slid further down into apathy. She fucked off work wherever possible. Denny and Chandler didn’t seem to mind. They seemed relieved, if anything. They enjoyed ribbing her. (One afternoon she found a hand-drawn note reading, Displaced Romano Unit, posted above her desk.) She started to see Chandler more often outside the station than in. Denny kept to his family, and the gym, but every so often Chandler appeared at the Point Hallahan pub and after a few instances of politely ignoring each other, they both gave in and drowned their sorrows together. He wasn’t such bad company in the end. Chandler had his own problems; he didn’t care about hers. He didn’t ask questions. He never talked about work. “You didn’t miss much,” was his rote response to almost every question.
She started back with the gear on November 11th.
The anniversary of Taradale.
Six years to the day.
It was somehow worse on Tunnel. Taradale was still there inside her, and she knew it shouldn’t be. Everything on Tunnel was different, from the policing to the people to the long stretch of white beaches, and yet the anniversary of Taradale still found her. It had that much reach. The state of her house and the routines she kept and the sleepless nights in-between all started to feel like a clean transplant from Melbourne. Romano got to thinking there was no escaping it. She’d made a mess of things permanently. That realisation drove her to a whole other level of anxious ferment. Not even a year clean of narcotics, she tumbled back into the same old crutches: weed (lasting only a week), then coke, then the real deal: the opiate pills, the eternal luxury. They had them all on Tunnel. Vics, Oxys, something called Lorcet. On Tunnel, these things were easier and cheaper than she’d ever dreamed possible and, to her horror, Romano felt herself properly relocated for the first time.
She kept it civil at first, spacing out the doses. She knew enough about opes to know that alcohol could be a dangerous side-dish, and she couldn’t lose that. For the most part, drinking was the only thing that got her out of the house. So she coasted along on alternate days of calm highs and dull nights of drunk lows and, curiously enough, by the first week of December she felt like she needed a project. She had a lot of time on her hands, felt up to something challenging. She craved distraction. It was something that had always gone well with pills. She did some of her best policing like this.
As the warm humid nights flitted away, Romano entertained questions about the Gold Point murders. Fuck Dyer and his dog work. She wanted to punch her own way out. With a steady medicated gaze, she stared right back into the Gold Point thing, into the way it unfolded, into the island politics, the collective shrug of the community, and right down there into the belly of Drainland, to that horrific hanging forest where—now free from recoil—she admitted to herself that they’d witnessed something she shouldn’t ignore. Not a second time. They had all seen evidence of mass murder that day, occurring without explanation or consequence. The state she was in, that hanging grove in the gravel basin looked ripe for consideration, for churning thought. In a strange way, it made perfect sense. Throughout her life, Romano had alwa
ys concocted elaborate ways to self-destruct. And she had always used props, the more horrific the better. So it was, against all her better judgement, that she brought the files back out.
26
Sunday, December 6 to Wednesday, December 8, 2004
“Laura Romano, back from the dead,” said Denny. He sat at reception. The television was on.
“What did I miss?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you working on?”
“My calves,” he said. “Leg day.” Denny began to massage his ankles. “My trainer’s a real prick.”
“Chandler?”
“Nothing. He hasn’t been coming in either.”
She stood there in the reception area for a few seconds.
Denny yawned. “Do you need something?”
"That day in Drainland, you—”
“Just try and forget about it.”
“No, you said the Riders had let it go, that it wasn’t always that bad.”
“Did I? Look, that place is…I don’t know, self-cleaning. Up here, you don’t even know it’s down there, right? Haven’t you noticed? Not a peep, around here. Nada.”
“Yeah. But the Riders are in there, right?”
Denny bit his lip and shrugged. “That’s the talk. Those junkies don’t grow their own poppies. Why? What’s this about?”
“Just curious.”
Denny turned back to the TV.
“You need to get yourself together,” he said.
She went through to her office. Romano figured she had one solid lead. It went right to the heart of things.
Ray Herbert picked up the phone in his house in Melbourne.
“It’s Laura Romano. Remember me?”
She could hear voices and music in the background.
“Hold on,” he said. Footsteps. A door pulled shut. “I’ve got my daughter’s kids around. Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. I take it, from the fact that you’re even talking to me, that someone filled you in on my deal with Vic Police.”
He laughed. “I heard,” he said. “I’m glad you found a way out of all that.”
She knew what that meant. “How’s Will?”
“Never heard of him,” said Herbert.
“Right. Well, I need a favour. You have some friends up here. They don’t like me much, but I’d like to meet some of them, just for a chat. Can you do the introductions?”
“Sure,” he said. “Nothing big, I hope.”
“Nothing big.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’s it.”
“Okay, then. You look after yourself, kid.”
The line went dead.
Romano swivelled in her chair and wondered out loud: “Will Holding?”
She dialled a friend from Melbourne, a girl they used to party with. “Hey, Maree, it’s Laura. Yeah, Laura Romano.”
Then:
“—Yeah, yeah, it’s me, Laura.”
Then:
“—Oh you know. Hey, I guess you heard about Will and me. Have you heard from him?”
Marlee hadn’t heard a thing. No one had seen Will Holding in months. The rumour was he left town quickly. The subtext was witness protection or dead in a ditch. Romano couldn’t decide which one she preferred.
Chandler was good and drunk when she got to the pub that night. He was standing under a bank of televisions watching a dog race. He held a pot of beer in one hand and a full jug in the other. As Romano came up on him, she felt the warm glow of the TVs wash over her, a little tremor from last night’s dose.
“You got money in this?” she said.
"Ten each way. Miranda Monday.”
“Again?” He had a thing about this particular dog.
Chandler winced as they crossed the line. “I hate the dogs,” he said, turning away from the screens. “Too quick. With the nags, at least it takes a couple of minutes to lose my money.” He took a fresh glass from the bar and poured Romano a beer from his jug. They dragged stools over and sat down. Romano had a smoke. Chandler took one from her pack and lit up, strictly a social habit. After a while he said, “I’ll tell you something that’s never said enough.”
“Yeah?”
“Never fall in love.”
“Okay,” she said.
They both drank to it.
The call came the following afternoon.
“Hiya, lil girl. How you doing?” The voice had a familiar croak to it. American. An older man. “We have a mutual friend, it seems. Mr Raymond Herbert, Melbourne fella. He told me to give you a call sometime. So here I am, calling you.”
“I need to talk to someone in the Riders about Drainland,” she said. “Off the record.”
“Okey dokey. You wanna bring yourself down to the club again this arvo, say five-thirty-ish. Don’t bring any of yaw pig friends neither, or you’ll get yourself into trouble now.”
He sounded like he was about to sign off.
“Wait, what club?”
“Angels, lil girl. And don’t go making no asshole of yourself this time. Dem boys down there are still laughin ’bout yer last visit.”
Romano necked a Valium and changed out of her uniform. The police cruiser would draw attention, so she called a cab. The sun was setting as the cab slowly turned through the streets of Domino. The Riders were all camped out in front of their houses. Dirt-stained kids roamed the streets on push-bikes. Everyone watched her come. In front of the club, she took down the driver’s number and tipped him. He seemed to know her but she couldn’t place his face.
“I want you to come back and get me in an hour,” she said.
The driver nodded. “I’ll wait for five minutes when I come back, but that’s it.”
“Deal.”
Inside Angel City, the Riders didn’t have much of an afternoon trade going. The same pudgy woman as before heaved her ass around for the old-timers. Romano stood in the darkness and waited a beat. Like a summoned demon, the old man in the grey suit appeared, the same man from her last visit. She figured him for the caller and as soon as he opened his mouth he confirmed it. “Welcome back,” he said. “And lucky for you, lil girl, we wave that there cover charge for all y’all womenfolk.”
Romano looked around for the other men: the bartender she’d threatened, the tweaker on door.
“Where are your friends?”
“They around,” said the man. “Come on out back.”
He started off. As he passed the stage, he yelled, “Shayleen, you go on take your ass off and get Franny up there on that fuckin’ stage now.” The dancer crouched down and gathered her tips. “Shit, girl, come on now. Move! These boys ain’t here to look at you clean up none.” He turned back to Romano and said, “Sorry. We’re going out the back so I don’t get distracted none.”
Romano followed him down a short flight of concrete stairs into a dark hallway space under the club. The old man turned lights on. He opened a timber hatch, then walked through a corridor, taking her around to what looked like a garage of some sort. It was a tall room lined on one side with a roller door, the orange sun peeking through the seals. The place smelled like dust and salt.
The Valium was working. Romano felt level.
“Drink?” he asked, opening a bait fridge. “I got beer and beer. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
He took two bottles out for himself then passed a third to her. “Let’s sit out back,” he said, pushing a button on the wall. The door rolled up and there, behind the club, sat the ocean lapping at the edge of a long, sandy bank. Between the door and the water was a yard filled with hard rubbish, a mess of construction waste, motorcycle parts and busted furniture. Half a couch sat pushed up by the door and the old man lowered himself down into it. It was a regular spot by the look of it. The cushioning moulded to him. Romano noticed that both he and the suit he wore had seen better days. He needed a shave. His face was weathered and hung from his skull, dotted by wild eyes.
Romano pulled a milk c
rate out of the rubbish and placed it down beside him. She sat and offered him a smoke. He took it.
“So what the hell do you want with Drainland?” he said.
“I went down there a couple of weeks back. Saw some things. Heard talk that the Riders are involved, and gave Ray a call. I want to get it square with you so I don’t put my foot in it again. I used to be around the Riders in Melbourne.”
“Is that right? Maybe you ain’t as dumb as I thought?”
“Maybe,” said Romano.
“Well, we do our business down there, sure. Ain’t no shame in it. Give dem people what they need, supplies and the like. Ain’t no harm. Those people are damn near dead anyhow.”
“I heard things are worse than usual?”
“Naw,” said the man.
“So that was business as usual?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“When I was down there, I was looking for these two,” she said. She showed him a picture. “Petey and Drags. You know them?”
“I know ’em. Heard you found ’em too. Heard dey topped themselves.” He smiled a little.
“We found them hanging from the trees. You and your boys know anything about that?”
“Not officially.”
“And unofficially?”
The man took a final pull on his first beer and tossed the empty out into the junk pile. He opened the next.
“Petey and Drags broke the rules,” he said. “They were moving their own shit down there, stepped on nasty shit, cut lousy with something. Killed a bunch of dem junkies. Awful stuff. Same shit that killed dat Marr girl from what I hear too.”
“You know Sophie?”
“I did. Good kid. Great ass. Never any trouble, not for me, not for any of us or nothing. But you go ask Frith about Petey and Drags though, he’ll tell you. Him and Pauline had to put a dozen people in the pit just from that shit Petey was slinging around down dere, some of ’em not even out of their teens. Real shame. And bad for business too. Can’t have no ent-trey-pro-neurs stepping on our shit, killing people, even down dere. That’s not how it works, not how it works at all. And Petey and Drags knew that. Knew it all too well. Know it better now.”