by Iain Ryan
Sammy98
Peter99
Sonya97
Billy00
Computer passwords. Romano could never remember hers, either. She fired up the PC and waited. Tapped in the last word and it loaded.
She searched for spreadsheets and documents. She copied everything she could find onto a directory on Frith’s desktop. He had a spindle of writable discs on the desk and she set one up to burn. It was going to take eight minutes.
While she waited, she checked his email. She searched for Bronze. She searched for banking transactions. She filtered by attachments. She scanned and sorted. It took two minutes. There was a string of receipts from something called bronze72 with banking details attached. Romano printed off the last five receipts and paced as the printer’s shrill clicks and whirrs echoed down the hallway outside. When it was done, she shut down the computer, grabbed the money and evidence and ran for it.
A side door took her out of the chapel and down between the buildings, to an open field between the Mission and the scrub. She was a few yards out into the field when a voice screamed:
“Don’t move!”
A spotlight came on behind her.
Romano turned her head slowly.
Pauline and another woman Romano didn’t recognise. They both stood by the chapel steps. The other woman held a pump-action shotgun.
“Pauline, it’s me, Laura. Constable Romano. We met back in December. I’m going to turn round now.”
She turned.
“Don’t take another step, so help me,” said the woman. “We’ll come over to you.”
“What have you got with you there?” said Pauline. She stepped closer, dressed in the same tracksuit as last time, but still in her slippers. The other woman wore a dressing gown. They both walked slowly towards her.
“Nothing,” said Romano. She opened her jacket up. She felt woozy. As they came within reach, she let herself stagger back. The barrel of the shotgun was close.
“I’m a little loaded, if I’m honest,” said Romano, looking at Pauline.
“Get down on your knees,” said the other woman. She was shaking.
Romano swept the barrel of shotgun away with her right arm, twisting it around, taking the woman’s fingers with it. The woman shrieked and Romano kicked her in the stomach, then drew her own gun. Pauline swivelled to run, but Romano reached fast and pulled her back by hair. She pressed the gun into Pauline’s cheek.
The other woman wheezed on the ground. She still had the shotgun.
“Don’t point that thing at me,” screamed Romano.
“There’s no need for this nonsense.” A man’s voice.
“Fuck me,” said Romano, under her breath, searching around. Pauline whimpered and struggled. “Steady now,” said Romano, wheeling Pauline around. Pauline’s body shook in Romano’s arms, on the edge of some sort of convulsion. “Steady on, I said.” Romano had to pull Pauline’s hair tight just to keep the gun from going off.
Pastor Frith walked out into the light. He had a rifle with him, and he had the thing braced properly. He was steady. The pastor had definitely fired a gun before. Amateur hour was over.
“Let her go,” he said.
“Don’t be silly,” said Romano. “You’re an old man. Put that fucking gun down before you accidentally blow your wife’s brains out.”
He didn’t buy it. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Pauline, come away from her.”
“Don’t move, Pauline, or I’m definitely going to shoot you. You too, bitch,” she added, for the woman on the ground. “I’ll tell you what. I’m just visiting from Drainland. Maybe you’ve heard the rumours. I’ve had a bit of a bad Christmas. I needed money. Figured you might have some.”
“Is that right?” said Frith.
Romano pointed the gun at him but kept hold of Pauline. “Pauline, you just go on and reach into my jacket pocket for me,” she said.
Pauline did, then threw the money in the dirt.
“See. That’s that,” said Romano.
“What do you want?” Frith asked.
“Don’t do it, Pastor. I’m probably a much better shot than you.”
“You don’t look so steady.”
“I may not be,” she said, and started to slowly walk backward, keeping her grip on Pauline, placing her between them.
“What I am going to do is take Pauline here for a walk. Once I’m back in the scrub, I’ll let her go and you can all go about your business.”
“Is that right?” said Frith.
“Please, Joe,” said Pauline.
“Won’t take two minutes. Stop moving,” said Romano. “You follow me all the way over there, we’re going to get ourselves into trouble. Okay? Okay Pauline, just stay with me, nice and easy, one step at a time, back you come.”
The priest kept coming.
“I said stop fucking moving!” said Romano.
The priest bristled. He clenched the gun tighter.
“You need to calm down,” said Romano. “Or someone is going to get hurt.”
“You come into my church,” said Frith. “And point a gun at me and my wife, you take my money, walk around and—”
“Let’s not lose our heads, here,” said Romano.
“Do you want to deal with all this? Do the police? Answer me,” said Frith. “You think you want to pay for it? You shut this place down and you’ll all be dead inside of a week. The camp will overrun the whole island. They’ll find you and they’ll—”
Romano fired her gun into the air.
“Shut up,” she said.
Frith let off a shot. It missed. Deliberately wide and at the ground.
Pauline stopped walking. She was done.
“Fine. You just stand there, Pauline. You just stay nice and still for me, now.”
Romano backed up, keeping the woman as cover. It took seconds that felt like minutes. When she was halfway back to the scrub, the other woman on the ground stood up and went to Pauline. Frith lowered his rifle. He said something to his wife and went back to the house.
All the lights came on.
Romano ran into the bush.
37
Thursday, January 6, 2005
It was well after two when one of Zane’s man invited himself in. Harris had not met this one, before but he knew the drill. An advance party. The man patted him down, checked all the rooms of Harris’s house. To finish, he had Harris sit on the couch. No one from upper management walked into a room sight unseen. That was probably why they were all still alive.
Heels sounded on the timber outside.
A woman stepped in through the open door.
Rita Bellino, Zane’s second-in-charge. She was a prim woman, thin across the shoulders, with cropped blonde hair. She took a long look around the space and came to the couch. Rita had gnarled little white hands, and as she sat down, she brought them together in her lap.
“This better be good,” she said.
“The boss busy?”
“That’s right. What is it?”
“I’ve got word that Jeff Bruno is pimping children out of the Gold Point. It’s mixed up in one of his poker rooms.”
“And you’re bringing this to us?”
“He’s in your hotel. I need Dev to open up his accounts for me, to be sure it goes all the way up to him. There’s money in it. It’s not…recreation.”
“I thought you’d retired. O’Shea told us you were done.”
“I was.”
Rita took another glance around the room. “You still on the wagon, Jim?”
He nodded.
“Good.” She stood. “Okay, we’ll open it up. I figure you wouldn’t ask if you weren’t halfway sure. Zane wouldn’t like that…you not being sure, not trusting our guy over here. But if it pans out, you know what to do. Everybody knows the rules.”
“No children,” said Harris.
“Same as it ever was,” she said. “It’s gotten a bit sloppy over here, I think. That’s what I’m hearing. I don’t like sl
oppy, and Zane really, really doesn’t like it. Remember that. You work for us, retired or otherwise. And we don’t ever change the rules. So if our people need reminding, you go and remind them, Jim. Remind everyone, and make sure it sticks.” She walked back to the door. On the way, she stopped and stared at a photograph on the wall: Harris’s sister in a police uniform. “How’s the new girl working out?” she asked.
“She’s a handful.”
"Take this as an opportunity to show her how things work. That’s an order. Because I’m hearing my own things and…Is she going to be okay?”
This was a big question. People had ended up in parts for less.
“We’ll see,” said Harris.
Rita let it rest. She waved to her driver.
“Good night, Jim.”
The driver opened the door.
Two hours later, the phone chimed. It was Romano. She sounded bad. Talking fast, cursing as she tried to hold the phone and work her Land Cruiser’s manual transmission. “And I think things are, I don’t know where to start, I just need to, I need you to—”
“Slow down. Where are you?”
“What do you mean? What? I’m driving, I’m on my way back up to…I’m in The Strip. We need to meet up. Where can I meet you?”
“Now?”
“Yeah. I think I’m in a bit of strife. I can’t go home. I don’t know. I don’t know how much reach they have, I could be in a bit of trouble, is there somewhere I can lay low because I really need to—Oh fuck come on!”
The horn sounded.
“Where are you exactly?”
She described what she could see. It took some doing but Harris managed to steer her up the hill to his house. He went outside and waited, the phone pressed to his ear. When she arrived, she nearly ran him down, ramming the cruiser to a halt on the sidewalk and falling out of it, the engine still running.
She said, “I brought this.”
She held a disc out to him.
“You keep that.”
He hoisted her up and put her on the couch inside. She was even worse than she’d sounded on the phone. Her clothes were torn. Her hands were bleeding. She had a bad graze over her right eye, and she stank of sweat and vomit. “I was in the bush,” she said, lazy-eyed, head lolling. “Running…through the bush.” She was high, sleep-deprived, adrenalised. On the edge.
When Harris returned from the bathroom with a damp towel, he found she had tried to chalk out some sort of drug on the coffee table, dropped the bundle on the carpet and had passed out. He wiped her face clean and checked her pockets.
She had an empty short bottle of vodka.
A pile of folded papers.
A gun.
Harris read through the paper.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
Harris opened his phone.
“Dev. Sorry, mate. You better come round. Bring your computer. I’ve just had my meet and greet with the boss and I want you to look something up.”
He went back to Romano and lifted her feet off the ground, getting her laid out properly. She murmured something unintelligible as he placed a pillow under her head. She was greased with sweat. He fetched a small fan from the office and put it on the coffee table beside her. Then he took her drugs and flushed them down the toilet.
38
Thursday, January 6, 2005
Romano’s eyes opened on the Indian. Dev. Harris’s hippie mate. He sat on the floor of a room she didn’t recognise, legs crossed, eyes closed. Romano watched him breath in and out for a minute before—as if sensing her—he opened his eyes and looked across. Bright sunlight shone in through the windows.
Her hands stung. She looked at them. They were cut and bruised from the hours spent running and falling through the scrub.
“What time is it?”
Dev ignored her.
She went to sit up and felt the full weight of the come-down. Even the idea of moving felt unlearned and difficult.
“Don’t get up,” said Dev.
“Where’s Harris?”
“Out.”
“Is this your place?”
“His.”
She laid back and stared at the ceiling.
After a time, Dev snapped out of his trance and stood up, shaking his muscles loose.
“You hungry?”
“I need a cigarette.”
“You need a shower. You smell like something died in you.”
“I need to get back to the station.”
“Not today. Jim wants you to stay put. Plus you and I have a few things we need to go over. I want to talk about this stuff you brought with you.”
"The disc? Where is it?”
“It’s here,” said Dev. “Shower first, then we talk.”
Dev got her up. Harris’s house wasn’t what she’d expected. The place had a sparse quality to it. Little in the way of furniture, nothing on the walls, neat as a pin but far from cold or clinical. Each room caught the sun, lots of wicker and timber. He’d left a robe out for her in the bathroom, alongside instructions for the washer.
The shower worked. It straightened her out. Dev made strong coffee and that helped, too. When she was ready, they stood side by side at the dining room table and looked down at it all. Piles of paperwork sat in neat piles stretching from one end of the table to other.
“Quite the haul,” he said. “I take it you’ve been visiting with the Holy Beach Mission. I don’t know how you got this, but it’s pretty interesting. Jim…Jim was very interested.”
“Did it make sense?”
“Do you know what I do over here?”
Romano shook her head. “Yoga instructor? Pot dealer?”
“I audit the books. Not just for the hotels and casinos and such. I do the island’s books.”
“What do you mean? For the council?”
“In a sense. You ever wondered how this place works?”
“Does it work?” she said.
“Work is all it does. That’s why everyone’s here. That’s why you’ve got the mob, the triad, bikers, big business, state governance, all these people who would normally be cutting each other’s throats. Over here they’re living together in the one confined space, making money. This place,” he said, “is the big compromise.”
“And you…”
“I’m one of the people who keeps an eye on the golden goose.”
“And all this?”
“This…hurts us.”
“I figure Frith’s supplying the kids, picking them out of Drainland from his hospice and then selling them on to Bruno for his fucked up poker room.”
“That’s what it looks like. The bank records you found on Frith’s computer seem to show it. And it’s all carefully avoided in Bruno’s paperwork. It’s no secret that the Gold Point has turned record profits under Bruno’s management. He really built it up. It’s pretty sickening to think all that’s mixed up with this. Jim’s out there now, running down the rest of it.”
“I think Frith’s been a pedo from day dot,” said Romano. “I spoke to a schoolteacher down in Arthurton, and he told me that a bunch of kids were yanked out of school the same year the locals burned down Frith’s church house up here. And guess who’s in that year and in Frith’s parish and mixed up in all this?”
“Who?”
“Silvia Marr, Sophie’s big sister. And the other one, the hotel guy.”
“Bruno?” said Dev.
“Yeah, him.”
“Bloody hell.”
“They’re both victims, at a guess. Who knows what happened to them? Nothing good, I suspect. I’d bet my life that the sisters knew about Bruno, and then with Sophie hanging around the casino all these years, she eventually stumbles across something that feels familiar and puts two and two together. Sophie’s probably been shaking him down for years. Why else would he let her live there?”
“Makes sense. What about Bachelard?”
“I don’t know about him. Maybe she blurts it all out one night when she’s loaded. Ch
rist, maybe he’s heard about this somewhere else, and that’s the reason he’s here in the first place. She’s his source and they hook up. What does Harris reckon?”
“He’s got Bruno figured into it, from some other angle. You know, there’s always been something off about Jeff.”
“What now?” said Romano.
Dev stared at the table. “Well, say this all comes together and we knew someone—a financial auditor of some sort—who could make a list of most of the people involved in this? Follow the money real quick. And, say, someone could get at the records and the like, the other records. It would be easy enough to do on a place like Tunnel. We have one currency exchange. So, say all we need are a few details, like transaction accounts, dates, just a start really. What would you do with the people who ended up on that list when you found them? And before you answer that, factor in that you could do anything with them. What would you do?”
“Call it in,” she said.
“Would you?”
Romano hobbled back to the couch to lay down.
“Really?” said Dev. “Over here?”
Romano rubbed her eyes. No one gave a fuck about Tunnel. The whole island was just another iteration of Drainland. It was all the same deal. Too wild for anyone outside it to get involved in.
“Who would you call?” said Dev, his voice gentle.
The mainland police didn’t lift a finger for the rest of it.
No cooperation.
No forensics.
No support.
Even with a senator’s kid in the mix. It was cover-your-arse policing all the way. Top to bottom.
Dev’s voice again. “Would you call the people who sent you here? Could you even? What would they do?”
All Dyer seemed to care about was Harris.
“I could go to the media,” she said.
“And if you did? Think about five years from now.”
She recounted that list in her head:
The mob.
The triad.
The Doomriders.
Corrupt policemen.
No one crossed any one of those people and lived too long. Getting on the wrong side of one of those was trouble, a life in hiding. Two or three was an instant burial.